My argument is that the principle of election non-interference applied to this specific situation can reasonably yield “we should suppress sharing while we figure out what’s going on.”

It was absolutely reasonable to suspect (in the early hours) that a salacious, bombshell story involving stolen documents published on NYPost without a listed author could potentially have been an actual disinformation attack.

Under that set of facts, the “we should try to limit interference in the election” can reasonably yield the behavior that it did yield.

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howunfortunate an hour ago | parent [-]

That's an absurd and frankly offensive standard, and I fear that you already know that.

The same standard could be used to trivially censor literally any information from any outlet. Conservatives could censor all NYTimes articles because they have compelling evidence the NYTimes newsroom is taking money from foreign sources (they are), has a history of releasing false information (they do, all news outlets eventually do), and being biased against conservatives.

In fact, your standard would censor precisely the MOST important stories, because these are the most likely to influence elections.

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estearum an hour ago | parent [-]

I didn’t propose a standard. I proposed a principle. The goal of a responsible platform should be to not put its thumb (as a platform) on the scales of an election.

But since you apparently have a better one, how about you propose a standard?

Is it that anyone can post anything?

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howunfortunate an hour ago | parent [-]

Sorry, I'm getting distracted by this:

> The goal of a responsible platform should be to not put its thumb (as a platform) on the scales of an election.

You earnestly believe censoring the laptop story was congruent with this principle?

I'm sorry but I just cannot believe that you are a real person. *Obviously* putting their thumb on the scale was the entire point of the censorship! I'm in serious disbelief that you wrote this and posted it.

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estearum an hour ago | parent [-]

I've just articulated the logic by which that principle can produce the outcome.

If you disagree with the logic, then identify which part you disagree with. Here are your options:

1. Content moderation teams should not have been suspicious of an unsourced, anonymous story on NYPost based on allegedly stolen material

2. Content moderation teams should not impede content that they suspect are election interference attempts

Which is it?

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howunfortunate 20 minutes ago | parent [-]

The part I disagree with is that ""misinformation"" is ever a valid reason for censorship, period.

Even if some speech is known to be false (insofar as your epistemology allows), it should be criticized and proven to be false by more speech, not silenced through censorship.

In any case, I'm still baffled by how you think you've articulated logic that can supports that they "didn't put their finger on the scale". Obviously they did, obviously they knew they did. What other reason could they have for doing it? If your principle were instead "they should put their finger on the scale when opposing actors intentionally spreading false information" at least you'd be consistent.

Though then the irony of this whole thing is that the story was true the whole time.

	▲	cowlevel 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's a good principle but it's been empirically proven that it doesn't work out that way in reality. Misinformation does not get effectively countered by spreading true information after the misinformation has spread. Even spreading it alongside (like with community notes) gives mixed results.