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.

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.

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.

one of the largest tragedies of knowledge sharing imo. at least in the past, on web forums, we could rely on archive.org to preserve them. now everything is in the "darknet" of facebook groups and discord servers.

Hint: Find out what kind of government Henry Kissinger considered to be a greater threat than communism.

The federal government has always (for at least several decades) used the threat of removing federal funding to force states to do things that they don't want to do. This is nothing new, and is not, as this summary implies, setting a dangerous precedent.

The difference is that normally, this is used to do things that add standards intended to make things better/safer for the general public or serve some legitimate public need.

This is being done to remove standards intended to protect the general public. As a general rule, states have always been allowed to have stricter laws than the federal government, just not more lax laws. Using the threat of removing federal funding to take away laws intended to protect the public's rights, reduce competition among content providers, and push the Internet more and more towards a content monopoly is doing the opposite of that.

It's not the federal government using the threat of withdrawing funding to push its agenda that is bad. It is the agenda itself that is bad. It is fundamentally antithetical to the rule of law, fundamentally contrary to the regulatory powers required to maintain a functioning capitalist system, and fundamentally contrary to the public interest. It is putting greedy corporations ahead of the American people.

Additionally, the executive branch taking such an action without authorization from Congress is also bad. The long history of doing this has, to my knowledge, been limited to the executive branch acting on laws passed by Congress that give them the authority to withhold funds for specific non-compliance reasons. Doing so in the absence of such laws is likely a violation of the separation of powers.

But unfortunately, the current administration has a long history of violating that separation of powers, doing various illegal acts, knowing full well that it will take months for the courts to strike down those acts, and that the damage will have been done by then, and using the threat of such illegal executive orders as a way to extort concessions out of states, government agencies, corporations, nonprofits, and individuals. And that right there — the repeated willful commission of unconstitutional acts for borderline felonious purposes — is a fundamental abrogation of their oath of office.

So the way I see it, there are only three ways to fix the problem:

A. Pass laws clarifying that Congress has exclusive power of the purse, and that the executive branch shall not retract funding to any state, any agency, or any individual for any reason unless the right to retract funding for that specific reason is explicitly codified in the relevant law as an executive power, and that this rule shall apply to all government agencies, without exception, superseding all previously assumed authority, and providing criminal liability for anyone acting in contravention of this law, with no statute of limitations. That way, federal agency heads who act on such executive orders will no longer be protected by any assumption of legality or constitutionality, and will risk future criminal charges if they act on an executive order that violates the separation of powers in this way.

B. Remove the people who are pushing this agenda, whether through the ballot box, through impeachment, or both.

C. Do both A and B.

I think that this is really a data center spending ceasefire to delay the bubble popping rather than these companies suddenly growing a sense of responsibility.

Not a joke. I'm aware of that feature, and that's why I said it. No idea about false positives.

No, it does not. Maybe you're thinking of Pixel Watch?

Let me know when all this heart rate monitoring can do loss-of-pulse detection and call emergency services if I have a heart attack. That's worth paying for. Having slightly more frequent heart rate monitoring? Don't care. Not even a little.

Here's the flaw in your logic. The vast majority of their customers WANT to turn this s**t off. But they put up with it up to a point or they don't. Either way, it doesn't matter as long as there are enough people who are engagement junkies who eat it up and therefore drive up ad impressions. They could lose 90% of their users, and if the other 10% increase their usage 10x, they're still ahead...

... but while the company may be ahead in that situation, society is still harmed by the other 90% not having access to a usable service. And of course, not all of those 90% will jump ship. Many will suffer silently while being harassed relentlessly by garbage posts by creators that they think you'll "enjoy".

I wholeheartedly agree that while algorithmic feeds are fine, there MUST be an opt out, and it cannot be like Facebook's "Most Recent" sort that disappears on its own every week or so. No matter how many times you tell them what they want, they shovel whatever s**t they want. It has reached the point where I almost never go on there anymore, because instead of being able to interact with the contents from my friends and groups that I follow, I'm constantly getting bombarded with mostly garbage posts and ads, with less than a 1:10 signal-to-noise ratio.

Please force them to do this, and to all the other governments of the world, please do likewise.

Patents. And AI can't be the inventor for patents, so by doing this, they're potentially dropping a huge land mine on patentability of genetics research. It's kind of awesome, at least from an "our genes are not for sale" perspective. :-D

Induced demand is plainly a theory with lots of holes. It sees no utility in moving any greater number of people the same distance in the same amount of time, according to induced demand theory that's a complete waste. If induced demand were true, Japan's Wangan should be clogged with traffic instead of empty enough for ultra-high-speed street racing, and China's highways to newly-built empty towns should probably be full of traffic for some reason too.

The best debunking of the idea I've run across comes from a libertarian blog, which is a strong hint that the argument likely has holes, but it appears far more airtight than the idea it's debunking: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cato.org%2Fblog%2Fdebu...

Came here to see if any medical experts had any opinions on how snake-oily this sounds. My limited biology education says "extremely."