Thread by @AriCohn

I am personally excited for the option I can select to make sure I see posts from Shirley Phelps-Roper that provide an opposing point of view and make sure that I am not stuck in an echo chamber and failing to properly think about whether or not God does, in fact, hate fags.

Thanks, Martha Minow.

I'm terribly sure that QAnon folks will love the "show me things that contradict the irrational beliefs I have adopted contrary to observable reality and facts" option, or that Israel supporters will be wanting to make sure they see the "Israel is murderous apartheid" takes.

Stop trying to use government regulation to fix peoples' beliefs, or thinking that giving people the option to view things contrary to their deeply held convictions is going to change a damn thing.

It makes you look like you don't know how human beings work.

"We'll all be better off if the MSNBC viewers are prompted to watch Tucker Carlson for the other side" is such a mindless cop-out of a proposition.

And who decides what is an alternate point of view, or what is credible enough to be used as one? There's no practicality here.

Also, to be clear: if we were at a point where people voluntarily selected an algorithm that showed them opposing points of view, that algorithm would be wholly unnecessary.

Opposing points of view are out there, and the people who want them can already find them with ease.

I guess to synthesize this a bit, I believe that exposure to opposing views can change hearts and minds. That's why free speech is important to me. But a prerequisite is that someone actually wants to hear opposing views. And if they do, they're probably already seeking them out.

That's why this proposal strikes me as so sophomoric. It's an ivory tower approach that ignores the reality of human behavior in favor of a feel-good proposal that is unlikely to have any significant or meaningful effect relative to its goals.