Remember the accusations of racism that were used to shut down the lab leak theory? Or the demands to censor scientists with any dissenting viewpoints over Covid? The cover up of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal that resulted in journalists from the Post being banned?
The "war on disinformation" their obsessed with is not any different from a "war on fake news". Censorship is a tool of cowards and there are plenty of cowards in both parties that will use it to shut down any dissenting view points.
Letting them scape-goat and demonize unchecked doesn't help anything either.
For instance - I disagree with you on the lab leak theory and laptop comments. I understand you feel about them strongly, but I think you are smart and should reconsider the source material for those claims. Further, I feel the way you expressed it was regrettable: "blood on their hands" is unnecessary and inaccurate. You could have phrased that in ways that were more accurate, more effective, and less inflammatory.
Everyone is literally less intelligent, less capable of rational decision making, and more susceptible to manipulation when they are angry. I have certainly been guilty of this before, and I am just trying to share some of what I have learned.
One final comment: one thing that all social media including HN could do is remove user-visible up and downvotes. It engages the brain in a similar way to gambling (https://www.brainfacts.org/diseases-and-disorders/addiction/...) and creates self-reinforcing conflict that can be exploited.
Notice what you're doing though. The information content of this is effectively the polite version of "stop being mad and wrong, go read a book."
It contains no actual rebuttal of anything. You present no new facts or reasoning, only an assertion that you disagree which was already implied.
I don't see how pointing how both parties are guilty of engaging in censorship is wrong. I am advocating for the position that censorship is a tool used unfairly by both parties when they are given the chance, I don't like conservatives or republicans either for how they treated Edward Snowden and Juliane Assange.
Hunter Biden has gone on record saying that laptop might have been his.
Don't presume a persons sources without asking first. You strike me as a smart person as well and should check these sources out with an open mind before dismissing them.
Social media already has a big problem with filter bubbles. If you go to a place where 99% of people there are one party's partisans and try to rebut their misinformation, you get dogpiled. People insult you and sling baseless accusations of racism, which deters people from attempting to debate when they're highly outnumbered. So any place which has any partisan bias gets an even bigger one until everything is totally polarized.
Platform censorship makes it even worse because the platform's censors will be in one bubble or the other, their censorship decisions will be biased in that direction and push anyone on the other team onto other platforms and we end up with entirely partisan platforms that never talk to each other, and are thereby both highly misinformed about different sets of things.
