It is sometimes easy to say in retrospect we shouldn’t have demoted the story. But they did and they trusted the US Administration. Facebook is international. Do they allow all speech even that which could be viewed as propaganda in the US? Who makes the ultimate call on whether it be Russian disinformation or COVID-19? We have tried many different moderation models and not all of them work. If we try the Reddit rout…
I'm not sure if I see what you mean with the Stack Overflow idea. SO is purely a technical site, it's very easy to identify what's ontopic and everything else is offtopic. That doesn't apply to general discussion, never mind stuff like news or politics. How do you imagine that would work?
I was thinking like crowdsourced flagging and a reputation based system where users via reputation could be granted increasingly higher responsibilities as they use the site. People who post negative content would be subjected to negative feedback loops where their content would be progressively demoted, reduced visibility or encounter contribution limits. Moderation logs would become public for transparency purposes. Data could be anonymized and provided via API for research purposes.