Social Media Suggestion

 Here is a suggestion for social media platforms:

There is certainly an argument that the "moderation," "fact-checking," suspensions, shadow bans that are par to f the experience on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. are net negatives for a free society. They may, perhaps do more harm than good, and it is inevitable that they will eventually produce more corruption than they inhibit. The issue is that, at the heart of every moderation, ban , suspension, etc. decision is a biased opinion. These are the opinions of the social media platforms: biased, uninformed, and risk averse.

Proposals to address this undesirable state of affairs, and to counteract the damage that social media causes with its short-sighted and unprincipled practices involve tinkering with section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, regulating the ability of social media to de-platform certain view-points, etc. These all involve the subjective judgments of a different set of people about what is and is not part of public discourse. Here is a suggestion for minimizing social media bias without additional government intervention:

Allow people to post whatever they want, but when they post they have to declare whether the content of the post is represented as fact or opinion. This should be trivial to implement; just have a check box on the post submission form. If the post is represented as fact, then there should be a mechanism to include a link to supporting information, so people can assess for themselves the validity of the claim. This will do two things. It will immediately put readers on notice that the content of the post is just an opinion. Imagine for example the claim that Trump colluded with the Russians during the 2016 election, or that hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment for COVID. If the person posting such claims indicates that these are only his opinions, then the reader is apprised of the fact that the poster considers the claims to be opinions. If on the other hand, the poster indicates that the claim is fact, the reader can then assess the credibility of the supporting source. If something false is represented as fact, the poster would be subject to libel and slander actions, just as they were previously under common law. The great benefit to this proposal is that readers would bear the responsibility of deciding for themselves that something represented as opinion is worth believing, or that something represented as fact is true. The poster would in effect be producing his own content warning.