The fact that this article is flagged is alarming. This is a relevant news story directly related to how technology companies influence public perception.
Like it or not, the New York Post is a widely distributed newspaper in the US.
Once the precedent for censoring a newspaper has been established there is nothing stopping facebook for censoring more "upscale" conservative newspapers like the WaLl Street Journal or the Financial Times.
I can't comment on their system, and as a long-time HN user overall I find it a great place to have discussion on varied topics. That said, I'm working on a new alternative site and welcome you to check it out. It's called sqwok.im and it's a sort of hybrid between Twitter & Slack/Discord, where each post has a chatroom instead of a comment thread. In beta mode and welcome feedback.
When one side says it's raining and the other says it's sunny, it's not 'losing the ability to consider multiple sides of an issue' when you look outside and report to the public that one side is lying.
If only every case of lying were so simple for the public to understand.
The NY Post story pushes the repeatedly-debunked claim that Biden pushed for the Ukraine prosecutor to be fired in order to protect his son. It has been fact-checked to death and found to be a lie. One side (the Trump campaign) continues to push this lie. The NY Post, owned by Trump henchman Rupert Murdoch, is pushing that lie in the article.
I don't see why Twitter and Facebook have to be neutral on their platforms when it comes to spreading lies in the run-up to a major election. The NY Post is a tabloid and this story has not been verified by any reputable news site. Banning this story is on par with banning a tabloid story that Biden is conspiring with Martians. It's a net good.
> If only every case of lying were so simple for the public to understand.
> Banning this story is on par with banning a tabloid story that Biden is conspiring with Martians.
This is the contradiction that I'm trying to get at: To justify censorship by claiming at the same time that something is obviously wrong (like the claim that Biden is conspiring with Martians) and that the public can't understand that it's wrong (though it presumably could understand that Biden isn't conspiring with Martians).
Ok, let's try something easier to understand: Let's say that rather than conspiring with aliens, the Post was ginning up a story that Biden conspired with bin Laden and was secretly behind 9/11, and they produced some highly suspect documents to back this up. No reputable news outlets verify the story. The Biden campaign produced evidence contradicting the story. And let's say the Post did this not just any random time, but as millions of people are actively voting in an election.
That's what this is - a pretty blatantly false tabloid story being pushed by Rupert Murdoch, the closest thing the world has to a cartoon villain, during the voting process in a major election. In the time it would take to conclusively debunk the story to the public, the damage would already be done. This is straight out of the 2016 election playbook, where disinformation was pushed as voting was happening.
I'm sorry, but I can't bring myself to clutch pearls over a disreputable tabloid being treated like a disreputable tabloid. If anything it would be good for journalism if they banned the Post from the site forever.
The inescapable premise here is that there's something that's obviously wrong to "us" (some enlightened circle of censors), so obviously wrong that we don't to discuss it further, but not obviously wrong to the masses who might fall for it. And that might well be true in any specific case, but the historical record of people with this attitude isn't great.
No platform has banned discussion of the story or the reasons for deplatforming it, so that's a moot point. The story is freely available on the internet and anyone who wishes can go read it right now.
They did the right thing in this specific case, seems a little alarmist to launch right into slippery slope prognostications about deplatforming. We're on the slippery slope right now when it comes to electioneering disinformation.
>We are losing the ability to consider multiple sides of an issue
Seems to be long gone, to be honest. We're now at a point where people are de-humanizing those on a different side of an issue to themselves. We unfortunately know what the next step is.
Like it or not, the New York Post is a widely distributed newspaper in the US.
Once the precedent for censoring a newspaper has been established there is nothing stopping facebook for censoring more "upscale" conservative newspapers like the WaLl Street Journal or the Financial Times.