The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

The irony here (ha) is while people are more polarized, actual ideology has almost completely gone away, replaced with vague slogans (MAGA) that don't actually mean anything and are designed to weaponize nostalgia in a way that is useful for particularly amoral politicians. Keep in mind, the GOP literally had no formal platform for 2020, just "we're with Trump" (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/party-no-c...)

This is what any honest exchange of ideas requires, and these conditions are almost never met online (social media, forums, etc.)

Id also add that source validation is required (as you point out an 'overlapping set of facts.') If you can't agree that a major news media organization with full time fact checking (no matter their political bent) is objectively better than a shiftless blog or single social media personality with a dodgy history of accuracy, then there is no hope for exchange. It's just a boxing match.

The problem comes down to "you don't trust the sources that I trust." Why people tend to trust sources that clearly aren't worthy of anyone's trust largely depends on their own confirmation bias.

By "reason" I mean, we need to have open debate about where the appropriate line today is in various domains between competing goods and aims.

The conflict is often as here, between collective interest, and individual liberty.

Not the time or place reopen/rehash well-trod arguments,

but I will observe that from the perspective of someone who believes in gun control, and to my point about the analogy,

our collective problem actually is precisely that humans are regardless of good faith intentions, defined by predictably acting out of accord with those intentions,

and hence we as society have reason to seek to regulate and mitigate the impact of force multipliers.

In the US, guns are the most well-known force multiplier in the domain of interpersonal conflict.

But today the force multiplier which arguably has orders of magnitude more impact, is "speech."

The distinction between "people" and their tools is IMO specious. Humans have agency; what is at issue is that given that agency, what do we agree about tool use?

Reasoning about "free speech" does not === censorship. It means, we need to educate people to have a better mental model of what our industry (here on HN) is capable of doing and is doing, in the feedback system which marries surveillance and the construction of personalized information streams.

The short-hand way for describing this is a good start: it amounts to stochastic mind control. No individual may be "programmed," but our industry and its clients put billions of dollars and literal and political fortunes among other resources, into the presumption that our current tooling is capable of producing discernible changes in collective behavior.

We argue here and elsewhere regularly as professionals about the ethics and consequences of using this system to e.g. provoke consumption.

When I say we need to reason about speech, I am myself most interested in us coming to terms with, and finding a way to survive as a society which e.g. values individual agency (call it liberty if you prefer), when that same tooling over the last decade especially has increasingly been used and with exponentially increasing power, to drive social and political behavior.

In the US this is most evident and most clearly a present danger wrt the fomentation of tribalism, in specific tribes which are largely defined by their anti-democratic, anti-communitarian, authoratarianism, married by convenience and inclination to racism, homophobia, misogyny, and the exhausting catalog of other permanent social horrors.

Twitter, or the online ad market, are no more "free speech" in an Originalist sense than a contemporary semi-automatic weapon is a musket.

In bother cases, we need to understand and apply Constitutional law to find the appropriate balance between collective and individual interests,

and what I saying is, we need to do so with an honest discussion of evolving power dynamics given that individuals now have at least hypothetical access to force multipliers.

To make this concrete: the 2016 and 2020 elections were subject to asymmetrical information warfare. Asymmetry in the terrorist sense: a small but motivated group, such as the GRU, is capable of provoking catastrophic disruption.

I do not posit any particular answers.

But we need to have the hard discussion, the sooner the better.

Thinking that mushes together a clear view of the situation and what we should do about it has a poor chance of success in my experience.

> Also "Mostly False" sounds right, as it was just the pipe detail that is in dispute, no?

In fact this passage articulates why "mostly false" is accurate, the framing done by right wing media was purposefully and misleading (and leaning on emotionally/racially charged language like "crack pipe"):

> Collectively, these articles gave readers a grossly misleading and reductive presentation of what was a real substance abuse harm reduction grant overseen by the Biden administration in early 2022. We are issuing a rating of “Mostly False.”

> It’s true that the grant description required the provision of smoking kits — an established component of harm reduction strategy — but in reality, those kits constituted just one of several sub-components of an even longer list of requirements for grant recipients. In other words, while outraged media coverage focused almost exclusively on “crack pipes,” this was actually only a very small part of the program.

I asked you for a solid example of something objectively wrong that hasn't been corrected, you gave me something that is at best nuanced and deserving of more clarification.

> Snopes and Politifact have outright lied and no one cares.

Not here they didn't.

I'd ask for another example, but if this is the best you have to prove that "fake news" is out to get you, I think we've dispelled that thoroughly.