The best disinfectant is sunlight. I'm similarly appalled by some of the behaviour after a certain political activist was murdered, but I don't want them to get banned or deplatformed. I'm hoping what we're seeing here is a restoration of the ability to disagree with each other

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tzs 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The best disinfectant is sunlight

Have you actually tried to shine sunlight on online misinformation? If you do you will quickly find it doesn't really work.

The problem is simple. It is slower to produce factually correct content. A lot slower. And when you do produce something the people producing the misinformation can quickly change their arguments.

Also, by the time you get your argument out many of the people who saw the piece you are refuting and believed it won't even see your argument. They've moved on to other topics and aren't going to revisit that old one unless it is a topic they are particularly interested in. A large number will have noted the original misinformation, such as some totally unsafe quack cure for some illness that they don't currently have, accepted it as true, and then if they ever find themselves with that illness apply the quack cure without any further thought.

The debunkers used to have a chance. The scammers and bullshitters always had the speed advantage when it came to producing content but widespread distribution used to be slow and expensive. If say a quack medical cure was spreading the mainstream press could ask the CDC or FDA about it, talk to researchers, and talk to doctors dealing with people showing up in emergency rooms from trying the quack cure, and they had the distribution networks to spread this information out much faster than the scammers and bullshitters.

Now everyone has fast and cheap distribution through social media, and a large number of people only get their information from social media and so the bullshitters and scammers now have all the advantages.

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LeafItAlone 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>The best disinfectant is sunlight.

Is it? How does that work at scale?

Speech generally hasn’t been restricted broadly. The same concepts and ideas removed from YouTube still were available on many places (including here).

Yet we still have so many people believing falsehoods and outright lies. Even on this very topic of COVID, both sides present their “evidence” and and truly believe they are right, no matter what the other person says.

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TeeMassive 11 hours ago | parent [-]

What's your alternative? The opposite is state dictated censorship and secrecy and those have turned very wrong every single time.

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LeafItAlone 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I honestly don’t know. My libertarian foundation want me to believe that any and all ideas should be able to be spread. But with the technological and societal changes in the past 10-15 years, we’ve seen how much of a danger this can be too. A lie or mistrust can be spread faster than ever to a wider audience than previously ever possible. I don’t have solution, but what we have not is clearly not working.

	▲	api 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The root problem is that people don’t trust authorities. Why? Because they burned that trust. People don’t believe the scientific consensus on vaccines because there were no WMDs in Iraq, to give one of many huge examples. “But those were different experts!” No they weren’t. Not to the average person. They were “the authorities,” and “the authorities” lied us into a trillion dollar war. Why should anyone trust “the authorities” now? Tangentially… as bad as I think Trump is, he’s still not as bad as George W Bush in terms of lasting damage done. Bush II was easily the worst president of the last 100 years, or maybe longer. He is why we have a president Trump.

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DangitBobby 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And not letting the disease spread to begin with is better than any disinfectant.

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slater- 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>> The best disinfectant is sunlight.

Trump thought so too.

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thrance 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How's that working out? The worst ideas of the 20th century are resurfacing in plain sunlight because the dem's couldn't pluck their heads out of the sand and actually fight them.

Now vaccines are getting banned and the GOP is gerrymandering the hell out of the country to ensure the end of the democratic process. Sure, let's do nothing and see where that brings us. Maybe people will magically come to their senses.

	▲	andrewmcwatters 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, people literally died. So, I think we all know how it played out. The same thing since time eternal will continue to occur: the educated and able will physically move themselves from risk and others will suffer either by their own volition, or by association, or by lot.