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1061 points danso | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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illuminated ◴[] No.23349385[source]
I know it is "never too late" for things like this to happen, but it's definitely late.

One of the main reasons for bad things to happen is the lack of education (which, in turn, leads to resist to change) and, therefore makes people prone to believe to unbelievable things.

Social platforms like Twitter should have long had things like "fact checking" ANY statements and should have restricting not only violence glorifying posts, but also the ones with racial or sexual discrimination and all the others .

It is late, but I like seeing it happen at least for the person with the most "glorifying" record in dividing a society.

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wpietri ◴[] No.23349435[source]
Yeah, the whole reason we have public education is that democracy requires a knowledgeable voter base. When social media companies were just starting out, I get why they weren't fretting about societal effects. But even if we go by business metrics, a collapse of democracy would probably be bad for their businesses. It's past time for social media companies to take responsibility for their negative externalities. And that definitely includes all sort of "negative information value" content.
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illuminated ◴[] No.23349543[source]
Yeah, there's a difference between educated and knowledgeable. But I don;t agree on the reason of existence of the public education system - its not about the voter base, it's about improving not only yourself, but the society as well (as improving society secures in a way improvement of you and your offspring).

I don't find social media companies responsible for the user generated content, but I do find them responsible for making it damn too easy to spread fear and then doing nothing about it. Or, as in case of some, promoting the division.

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1. wpietri ◴[] No.23360872[source]
That's a good reason to have public education, of course. But it's a nice-to-have. Democracy cannot function without educated voters.

Agreed for sure on the second point. They turned everybody into publishers with global reach and still haven't really thought about what previous publishers did to make sure that power was used responsibly.