Technology

58092 readers

2941 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

264

It's not just about facts: Democrats and Republicans have sharply different attitudes about removing misinformation from social media (theconversation.com)

submitted 10 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

98 comments fedilink hide all child comments

It's not just about facts: Democrats and Republicans have sharply different attitudes about removing misinformation from social media::One person’s content moderation is another’s censorship when it comes to Democrats’ and Republicans’ views on handling misinformation.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Pxtl@lemmy.ca 3 points 10 months ago

No person or organization is really suitable to be the arbiter of truth

Courtrooms are arbiters of truth literally all the time. There are plenty of laws for which truth is a defence, and dishonesty is punished.

When battling misinformation, the problem is not that lying on the internet is legal - it is still actionable. Fraud is still illegal. False or misleading advertisements are still illegal. Defamation is still illegal. Perjury is illegal in the criminal law sense, not just torts. Ask Martha Stewart who the "arbiter of truth" is.

The problem is that it's functionally impossible to enforce on the scale of social media. If 50,000 people call you a pedophile because it became a meme even though it was completely untrue, and this costs you your job and you start getting death threats, what are you going to do about that? Sue them all?

So we throw up our hands and let corporations handle it through abuse policies, because the actual law is unworkable - it's "this is illegal but enforcing it is so impractical that it's legal". Twitter and Facebook don't have to deal with that crap so we let them do a vague implementation of the law but without the whole "due process" thing and all the justice they can mete out is bans.

If you disagree, then I've got a Nigerian prince who'd like to get your banking info, and also you're all cannibals.