I was thinking "Democrats and Republicans" not Flat earthers vs ... umm everyone else.

The problem is not the obvious cases. Child porn is a crime in every country, it can be hunted down online. Society generally agrees on that. Similarly for flat earthers. 99% of people in a pub or street will roll their eyes at this shit. It's only because it's all over youtube and so are we that we think it's big. Problems where most societies mostly agree are not the issue.

We could build some kind of rebuttal system - a distributed URL based downvoting system. This would help with the labelling / tagging of dubious posts - at the prominence level of the original post. (ie some W3C tagging for fact checking)

But this is also not about agreeing the same set of facts - people rarely disagree over facts unless facts lead to different political positions. And that's the real issue.

Climate change is probably too huge to cover but let me try - Climate change does not have a solution - the bomb has dropped we are just waiting for the shockwave to hit. Now we can stop pouring fuel on the fire (metaphor breaking sound) by moving off fossil fuel, but also we need to handle the massive changes involving water rights (hello India China) immigration as people get displaced by flooding (hello everywhere).

Denial of this is a human response - because otherwise you have to welcome massive change and people who are not confident their needs will be looked after by the establishment.

This is the real reason for the disparity in numbers of deniers in US and canada / europe - if US built a welfare state tomorrow it would see a massive drop off in climate change denial.

So I think I lost my thread - but fact checking is only part of the politics problem - rapid rebuttal for every stupid online statement is a fine thing to aim
for - something good recommendation algorithms could really help with !

But it stops there. Yes it is fine to mandate Ford and GM build cars with airbags and seatbelts - but it is crazy to ask them to build more parking spaces or solve rush hour.

Same goes for online political discussions - YouTube must "fix" (god knows what how) recommendations and facebook must fix the newsfeed and twitter must something. But it has to stop somewhere around the point that someone reading a post is informed - that it is clear and obvious there is debate around what is being said.

After that it is about human biases and cognitive failures - ie politics.

We should work to ensure everyone has the same set of facts. Yes.

But the same set of facts when run through different mental models come up with different actions.

And I don't think it is right to have FAANG ensure everyone has the same mental model. That's what politics is about - and the fact that two people can have the same facts but use different mental models is basically the difference between every political party ever - and is why everyone thinks they are being censored - because if they weren't censored then obviously everyone would vote their way.

On a side note this is something software gives us hope for - I can conceive of building a politics observatory - a sort of version of that UK economy coloured water experiment - where you can view the economy globally - the shows made in China shipped to Fermany and sold - and see how immigration or welfare changes the model.

I think it's possible to have people build up a real software model - to try and reflect in software what their own biases are. I think if this was an app everyone had it would have interesting repercussions- would everyone tend towards a common model? Could you ask for explanations why your model on (prejudice dunjoir) was wrong?

Hang on - I just described a university education.