The problem with that line of thinking is that when you silence people for their speech it doesn't really solve the fake news problem, it just reinforces amongst the conspiratorial that there's something that you don't want them to hear. Only now they can't get the mainstream version of it so they descend into the "dark news web" and find even worse crap like InfoWars or One America News.
It can very easily shut down a big part of fake news : https://www.counterhate.com/_files/ugd/f4d9b9_b7cedc05536047...
We know we just have to turn off a few faucets to clean a vast majority of the oceans. It can actually solve a significant part of the fake news problem because an insanely small amount of people/entities are responsible for this mess.
Concerning Inforwars :
People using facebook/twitter/youtube alternatives are a very small minority. Infowars is the past, they've been banned from almost everywhere.
I think the last only one infowars door to mainstream is their scam pills store on amazon...
They use a lot of alternative platforms, but does it really matter ? ... They used to have youtube videos with dozens of millions of viewers, now check the selfhosted/bitchute/etc IW channels, they're a few videos hitting 1 million, at best.
I think the last only one IW powerful tool is Telegram. I just checked the IW "social" page, the two IW Telegram only have 30k followers... Pretty much everything else are shady twitter alternatives filled with bots.
Alex Jones problably still earn a significant amount of money, no doubt about it. But his massive influence started to fade since the 2018 bans.
His income has gone down these last years and there's a good possiblity that the Sandy Hook lawsuits are going to shut him down. Can't wait.
BTW, I don't think we should shut down Joe Rogan. I don't care if people wants to listen to the biggest moron on earth having a conversation with a dumbass psychologist about hard sciences, but Spotify should definitely set public serious rules and factcheck their content as much as possible.
The situation is pathetic. Daniel Ek act like everything's ok with his libertarian bs statements, but we know Spotify is currently removing dozens of Joe Rogan's episodes. The last sources talks about 100 removed episodes... I guess the users/subscribers stats and the -20% drop stock are starting to bring Daniel Ek back to earth. Eh.
Being honest, COHERENT, and rules/warning intros/factchecking/etc could be a good start.
(there's probably a lot of broken english, sorry about that, I'm french)
True, but there's nothing we can do about it other than telling platforms we don't want to listen to him. Unless of course we decide to go full authoritarian government and take a page from the CCP's playbook.
It's never black and white. The interview most often cited was an interview with Dr. Robert Malone:
"Malone contributed to important early research. A pair of papers he coauthored with two other researchers in 1989 and six other researchers in 1990 showed that mRNA could be delivered into cells using lipids, and that doing so with mice could trigger the production of new proteins. The two papers were the first reference in a 2019 history of the mRNA vaccine technology."
I'm less upset about this guy saying something wrong after doing some faulty research (I don't think he has any bad intent) than I am when a journalist interviews another journalist about corona (as far away from a researcher as you can get, or even worse, journalists babbling on which scientists are good or not amongst themselves, the blind leading the blind).
I never understood how journalists (or comedians for that matter) can have any authority, at all. This is not an issue about fake news, but a trust issue that is not Joe Rogans fault. Trust will not magically spring up after censoring North Korea-style.
PS. I'm already vaccinated, because I do not trust the likes of the anti-vaxxer Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter and I do trust the government.
