You slow the initial spread of posts for long enough to throw AI at the problem and analyze the factual accuracy of every post, or at least every post that any user flags as misinformation or factually incorrect.

For posts that are obvious satire (e.g. from known satire sites, etc.), flag them with a clear "This post is satire" warning at the beginning of the post.

For posts that are just flat-out lies, mass cancel the post automatically:

1. Prevent it from appearing in anyone else's feed or spreading.
2. Fan out the ban scan to recognize similar posts from people who saw the original post, recursively cancel those.
3. Backtrack to see if any posts that the original poster might have seen posted similar information from which the false post was derived, and recursively cancel those, including fan-out and backtracking from there, etc. until you have a complete graph of every post that appears to be derived from the lie.
4. Bulk distribute a post to everyone who saw the original post, explaining what was untruthful and why the bot believes that it was untruthful, providing factual citations to refute the original post. You do this in bulk to everyone who saw the original post all at once, not through organic spread, making it faster to refute a lie than to spread it originally.

In your fact checking ban post, you make it possible for anyone who believes that the cancellation was unjustified to submit external citations as evidence of its accuracy. After 72 hours, all citations submitted by anyone who saw the fact checking ban post are deduplicated, consolidated, and sent to a hundred human reviewers. These reviewers vote to either: A. reinstate the original post, B. reinstate the original post with clarification at the beginning (this post is mostly correct except XXX, this post is satire and is not intended to be taken as truth, this post is an opinion piece that disagrees with broadly held scientific consensus and the evidence presented herein should be treated with skepticism unless proven correct by larger/stronger/more robust studies, etc.), or C. uphold the ban.

If a post is reinstated, every post flagged as a consequence of the original flagging is also reinstated in a similar fashion, with clarification if applicable.

In other words, make it easy for users to report that something is a lie, make the resulting fact checking be aggressive at immediately halting the spread of things that are clearly untruthful, and make corrections spread faster than the lies did originally.

The last critical piece is the ability for an individual user to choose whether to see posts that have been flagged as being lies. If they choose to repost something that is already flagged, it will be seen only by other people who have chosen to opt out of hiding factually erroneous posts, so the spread will be mostly limited to those who have already bought into one or more conspiracy theories, but that's still moderation rather than outright banning of the content. And people would be free to write new posts that point out that a post on a subject has been banned and telling people why they think it should not be banned. Of course, in most cases, that will paint the person as a nutter, but at least you'll know. :-)

Unfortunately, at some point, in the U.S., certain political groups decided that things that are contrary to established facts are "opinions" that cannot be questioned, rather than lies, so demanding factual accuracy will be seen by many as political bias, which is why this will probably never happen.

You are not going to change hearts and minds with that kind of talk. Only if you and their peers surround them and do an intervention would this attitude work. Like a dog, you have to begin with a positive tone like "good dog" while saying hard truths mixed in with complements... since they are not much smarter than a dog; possibly more anti-social. Sad thing is you end up having to be their understanding therapist to get them out of their cult - reason and/or negative emotions only have a chance from a "safe space" or an extremely forceful one (bordering on illegal) both with tons of repetition. Since they are functionally brainwashed the only counter is similar stuff the other way. Just get them triggered out of their safe space and they get more entrenched each time unless you can knock them off balance long enough and only make lasting progress if they are prevented from recovering.

We are at the point where we probably just need everybody to stop wimping out and beat all these people down to the point they have to go back into hiding like they had to with being racists until Trump made that almost acceptable again. Forcing them into hiding didn't solve the problem but they did shrink while underground - and they weren't in much power which is most important.

True. It's never just one bigotry.

Any time I get a political ad, I assume that their position is questionable enough to require spamming me with ads, and therefore that I should probably do the opposite of what they're advertising.

Moderation is censorship by definition. So no, there cannot be ways to moderate those things without censorship.

What you mean is that governments requiring companies to censor things is bad. And in general, I agree.

Corporate-driven censorship is also generally bad, where corporations censor things to protect their interests or boost their revenue without a legitimate public interest in mind.

The real problem is that social media does not give the public control over what they consume, and subjects us to increasingly low-quality garbage from increasingly distant voices in a desperate attempt to drive interaction in spite of a declining user base. And that effectively becomes corporate censorship, as the garbage drowns out the organic content from our friends that we actually went to the site to see. Yet it is by design. Sites like Facebook appear to completely ignore our "I don't want to see this" signals and continue to shovel this garbage. As a result, I go to Facebook an order of magnitude less often than I did ten years ago, but at the same time, I know that other people find the algorithmically driven shovelware to be compelling, and they're the ones being manipulated by this stuff.

With that said, I don't want government censorship. I want government to require social media to give control to users, to publicly disclose how their algorithms shape what users see, to allow independent audits to ensure that their algorithms are working for the public good rather than just for the corporate good, etc. We need more access to information, not less, but we also need to be able to filter what we see. Because if news media, etc. is not serving as a filter to show us the most important information and filter out unverified information and clear misinformation, then we need tools to help us moderate what we see, and maybe by sending those signals, also influence what our friends see and reduce the garbage a bit.

Doesn't matter if DNA matched Trump to a child born to a 14 year old girl. As a powerful Republican, he is immune from it getting reported credibly; let alone consequences. That is if he doesn't stall the whole DNA thing in court for 3 years like he did with his actual Rape case where he refused a DNA test and ultimately they gave up but still got him convicted of lying about the assault (which means he did it but they didn't want to go 100% on the rape itself.)

Reasonably, he was guilty because nobody would resist DNA that hard unless they were paranoid about it getting leaked out and connecting him to other legal problems. I have wished somebody got samples off him or his kids and made some connections already; outside what can be done in court but then we'd at least have proof and a list of people...who'd likely be unsafe for life... I'd like to know why he is so afraid of DNA tests.

The problem is that there are propagandists in the first place. Here's the way I see it:

• Early 1980s: The 24-hour news cycle made people demand immediate access to news.
• Mid-1980s through today: Low pay, media consolidation, newspaper closures, and mass layoffs made journalism an increasingly unattractive career, causing most of the best and brightest to leave the field or not enter it, resulting in a gradual decline in the news media's ability to lead interviews, call politicians on outright lies, etc.
• 1987: Fairness doctrine eliminated, allowing the rise of biased talking head infotainment shows.
• 1996: Fox News started broadcasting with the explicit intent to create a right-biased news source.
• 2003: MSNBC took a leftward shift to counter Fox News.
• 2009: Social media reached peak users, where gaining more eyes was impractical, so the only way to increase ad revenue was to increase screen time or increase ad count or both, and increasing ad count would reduce screen time in the absence of a mitigating factor, so sites began shifting from most recent posts from your friends to most clicked/viewed, resulting in the rise of clickbait.
• 2013: The Russian government formed the Internet Research Agency, a.k.a. Glavset, a Russian company tasked with online propaganda, including disinformation and trolling campaigns on social media.
• 2016 through 2022 or so: Social media began showing more and more content from people who are not your friends or friends of friends and groups that you have never joined in a desperate attempt to get more screen time out of a plateauing (and later declining) daily active user base.
• 2022: A far-right-wing propagandist buys Twitter.
• 2023: Glavset shut down, though it is generally assumed that other groups took up its mission.

The social media dates are based on Facebook. Other social media behaved similarly at around the same time, plus or minus a couple of years.

But ultimately, it's all about companies focusing on profit above all else, without the slightest bit of concern over the negative impact of their choices. And as long as social media companies — and media and news sources in general — are predominantly for-profit entities instead of nonprofit corporations, they will be at best marginally harmful to society, and at worst, massively so. The profit gained from using hype and propaganda and clickbait and massive amounts of slant to drive viewers/readers is simply too strong a motivation to overcome as long as the focus of an organization is making profit, rather than breaking even.

And yeah, social media is part of the problem, but the mainstream media abdicated their responsibility to inform the public at least a decade earlier, and arguably three decades earlier, creating the information vacuum that social media filled. And the fact that it's a lot harder to refute a lie than to publish the truth in the first place made social media's increasingly extreme amplification of troll campaigns incredibly harmful, but the public's tendency to repost whatever garbage they see and the ease with which people can repost things they see to broader and broader audience made that problem much, much worse.

So yes, traditional social media is a large net harm to the public as a whole. Instead of helping bring us together, it has largely driven us apart. We would be much better off if Facebook groups ceased to exist and became separate discussion forums like we had before. We would be much better off if public Facebook posts were banned going forward, requiring people to actually copy and paste before sharing other people's posts beyond the friends or followers of the original person, or at most, one hop away. We would be much better off if sites like Facebook were forced to allow us to disable algorithmic spam in our feeds, including all posts suggested from people that our friends follow, groups distantly related to groups that we're in, etc. And so on.

We put completely incompetent pedophiles in charge of the military. We all knew it was a bad idea but 77 million of us did it anyway and about 7 million of us were denied the right to vote so we couldn't overrule the 77 million who thought it was a good idea to have a pedophile in the White House.

The guy running the US military was literally chosen because he was the only candidate who would not rule out ordering US troops to fire on American citizens on American soil.

Republicans know this is bad news but they don't care because the identity is worth everything to them. They gave up their families and their friends and their significant others for the Republican party so they're in way too deep to turn around now.

How about Stupor-Intelligence? I think it rolls off the tongue more easily. But it could end well if it somehow persuaded the YOB to read Bostrum's book? At least he might know who the bad machine is...

Other parts of the discussion were more focused on the story as one of bad military leadership. So the joke along those lines would involve a certain infamous corporal who became commander-in-chief of a big military. But these days the Americans couldn't even reach a consensus on whether that ended badly... "If only he'd waited another year before attacking Stupid Joe..."

I can't tell if you're going for funny or you don't know much about how good young children are at seeking their own destruction. It's really hard to keep 'em alive and it takes a whole lot of love. Even for the kids that turn out badly, perhaps because of unlucky genetic draws.

Doesn't seem like you want to discuss genetic counseling and reproductive rights in the context of possible solutions. And it's not like Slashdot is the most suitable venue for such discussions. I strongly suspect this crowd is below average for the numbers of children produced.

Worse the Idiocracy. The retards of that movie were HONEST and looking for real solutions. People now are corrupt and dishonest even if they are smarter. You show them water is what plants crave with video proof and they will scream, "fake news!" and kill you with a giant dildo because the narrative of their tribe matters more than starvation. I'm not exaggerating either, we literally had people in the hospital dying saying their COVID was a hoax!

Nice FP, though yet to be modded Funny and I wish you'd had the leisure to add some more humorous examples beyond the vague "this". However in the context the reference is clear enough to establish the recursive humor. Yet it was basically an obvious and low-hanging joke.

The other one would be the anti-social media thing, but it's still early in the discussion and perhaps someone will do a good version. Getting harder and harder to remember the "good old days" when Slashdot was some sort of social media...

However I still persist in asking such silly questions as "Why?" and "Isn't there anything we can do to make the situation better?"

So for the why part, my basic answer is "bad economic models". I can't decide whether to blame free radio and TV broadcasts that led to an illusory Golden Age of idealistic public-service journalism without worrying about profits or the fools who created the weak and uncompetitive profit-driven versions of journalism. That's mostly "60 Minutes" and CNN, but there are so many flavors, none of which can compete.

Making the situation better? I used to think solution-oriented journalism might be an angle. Basically a charity approach, trying to dodge the pressure of the big money. However my expectations have been reduced, mostly by time. Apparently my last residual purpose in life is to do my tiny bit to boost the life expectancy statistics? So have a nice day.

I argue WW3 happened already. To save time, I don't bother often.
The cold war was a global war with many proxy wars with a death toll of just the hot wars higher than WW1. If you count the cold policy games and exploitation of the war I'd expect the death toll estimates to get near WW2; although, this is not a fair comparison because if you expand WW2 in similar ways it's numbers get much higher.

WW2 didn't get fought like WW1, technology shift. WW3 had nuclear technology and so they fought unlike other wars; also they shifted to an empire of political influence by any means short of nuclear. So today we have it being restarted in an idiotic way by old men; one using subversive spying and conventional war and the other by idiotic hubris: economic and militarily... oddly with both working together to compete for territory to restore past empire. With a successful conclusion leading to confrontation again - hopefully just another cold war; not that it is likely either will succeed before they die.

You must be Gen X. No, the 90s were in decline! You just didn't know better. This is when middle aged boomers were being laid off and having trouble finding better jobs; when we got some weak laws on age discrimination (only 40+ year olds...boomers.) Not that it did much, because corporate take over already happened in the 80s which also is when just about every middle class family had BOTH parents working to maintain what people in the 50s-70s had. Like smoking, women working was sold as freedom and they fell for it again (cigarettes began as freedom stix then because they were for girls and more profitable; cowboys had to sucker men into using a woman's product. I'm frankly surprised male makeup hasn't taken off already.)

This is why we must have AI and robot guards! Seriously, these guys are big on a techno-apocalypse and many others are into prepping and keeping their wealthy lifestyle at the same time. There was a whole book on it - they hired experts to help plan which ruined their ideas simply because of the problem of servants turning on them. This is their end game; a solution appears to be around the corner now.