Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/27/after-twitter-fact-check-trump-threatens-to-regulate-or-close-down-social-media-platforms/

by patd • 6 years ago

707 1499 6 years ago

techcrunch.com

onion2k• 6 years ago

He won't though, obviously.

sp3327• 6 years ago

Complaining loudly that social media platforms are "biased" is a way to get special treatment without any official enforcement action.

disgruntledphd2• 6 years ago

Indeed, hence why Facebook fired their reviewers for public content during the 2016 campaign.

But given that that worked out so well, I'm sure there's no problem :P

bardonadam2• 6 years ago

He tweeted his threat to shutdown Twitter, gotta love this.

sp3327• 6 years ago

Twitter has refused to enforce their terms of service on accounts from various heads of state. They pretty much earned this. ("I didn't think leopards would eat my face," sobbed the woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.)

shadowgovt39• 6 years ago

He has to. He doesn't have another media outlet where he's as directly visible to his primary constituency as he is on Twitter.

bardonadam2• 6 years ago

Ironic, isn't it?

czzr3• 6 years ago

Fox News?

swebs2• 6 years ago

Good, I hope this forces them to decide whether to be neutral platforms or publishers. They've been having their cake and eating it too for far too long.

shadowgovt39• 6 years ago

I hope they take Trump head-on, and declare an affirmative right to freedom of the press that does not violate safe-harbor policy.

anewdirection10• 6 years ago

Why? Thats the whole problem.

tzs3• 6 years ago

If that's a reference to the protections under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, it doesn't work that way. The whole point of section 230 was to say that being non-neutral does not subject a platform to liability for content supplied to that platform by users.

I'm not sure why, but a lot of people seem to think it is the opposite: you have to be neutral to be protected. There was a court case that ruled that way before section 230. Congress wrote 230 specifically to reverse that.

casefields• 6 years ago

"The Trump administration’s proposal seeks to significantly narrow the protections afforded to companies under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Under the current law, internet companies are not liable for most of the content that their users or other third parties post on their platforms. Tech platforms also qualify for broad legal immunity when they take down objectionable content, at least when they are acting “in good faith.”

haunter• 6 years ago

Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices

Not wrong tho especially if you just look at the mainstream media

throwaway_pdp09• 6 years ago

Kind of baffling to read this. Do you actually believe that because you want to feel hard done by, or do you have any facts?

Also do you feel it is wrong for media to report that something is incorrect if it verifiably is?

sp3327• 6 years ago

Andrew Bosworth, a top corporate executive considered a confidant of Zuckerberg, said in a post in December that Facebook was “responsible for Donald Trump getting elected” in 2016 through his effective advertising campaign

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/20/faceboo...

frockington15• 6 years ago

I'm sure they would have taken credit regardless who won. Have to keep the ad money flowing

ianleeclark6• 6 years ago

Last I checked, Fox news had higher ratings than the other mainstream channels.

jwalgenbach• 6 years ago

What a maroon.

qubex8• 6 years ago

Moron?

overlordalex• 6 years ago

Likely a reference to a Bugs Bunny catch-phrase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NYFq7ZJg4c

2019-nCoV10• 6 years ago

Twitter brought this upon themselves. It's going to be 2016 all over again.

qubex8• 6 years ago

I’m an outsider (not American, don’t live in America) so I’m almost not entitled to have an opinion on the matter, but it always strikes me as fairly odd when people of one persuasion or another rail against the ‘bias’ that they perceive against them in one circumstance or another (including media coverage).

Of course people see bias against them. It’s classical confirmation bias: every time something goes their way, it’s unremarkable, but as soon as something doesn’t, it’s noticeable.

Isn’t it equally possible —nay, probable even, especially in this case— that the perceived bias is only the prevailing opinion of the majority against whom one is in a minority?

happytoexplain3• 6 years ago

This is basically true. Liberal or conservative, everybody I talk to who can communicate ideas without injecting vitriol into every word agrees that 90% of "censorship" of conservatives is just censorship of standard low-value hateful garbage, and that genre of speech, while committed on all sides, is highly overrepresented by conservatives, which makes life hard for the majority of conservatives who are rational.

barbacoa• 6 years ago

PragerU has their content taken down and/or restricted on a regular basis from big tech platforms. Their videos express generic and cliche conservative ideas and values. While many people may not agree with what they say it is a far stretch to call it "low-value hateful garbage".

brodouevencode4• 6 years ago

This is a great perspective.

Americans get too bogged down in the muck to look up to realize what's actually going on around them or be aware of just how hypocritical they are.

TrackerFF2• 6 years ago

so I’m almost not entitled to have an opinion on the matter

I'm gonna go ahead and disagree with you here. The US is such a prominent nation, that can make or break the economies other countries, depending on their political actions.

I've seen a lot of this "It's US politics, so none of your business" writing when criticizing Trump - but fact is that most countries are not perfectly de-coupled from each others. The US relies on some countries, while other countries relies on the US.

Sure, you do not have any right to vote for him, but you sure as hell are entitled to voice your opinion on him.

qubex8• 6 years ago

I most definitely do have an opinion on him, and a very negative one at that. However, I try to keep that as reserved as possible for a number of reasons, including:

- Manifesting my like or dislike of the man immediately places one side or the other of tribal warfare, and that is precisely what I’d like to see less of;

- In my experience Americans are extremely testy and sometimes downright hostile when foreigners express opinions about their governance (the whole foundational process, at least as it is taught today, was of a rejection of ties to the Old Wolrd and its old, flawed ways)... I’ve even had people berate me online for being a condescending neo-imperialistic foreigner meddling in their affairs ‘proving’ that the Democrats are traitors who sell out America’s interests to foreigners (because if foreigners prefer Democrats, it must be because they get something in return);

- I sometimes get somewhat annoyed at others when they bring up “pizza, pasta, mafia” caricatures of my own home country (Italy) so I always wonder how much of what I think I ‘know’ is simply stereotype.

For all these reasons, I prefer to be as impartial as I possibly can.

collegecamp293• 6 years ago

Twitter has opened a whole can of worms. There are several official state agencies with their propaganda PR arms on Twitter. Will they fact check them too and risk being banned in those countries?

qubex8• 6 years ago

That’s probably why they’ve delayed taking this stance for so long. They have, after all, typically refrained from “fact-checking” leaders or politicians in other countries too. I assume it’s just got to a point where they’re no longer to (in their good conscience) offset readership/users with the promulgation of highly questionable statements.

And to be perfectly honest, I’m all for it, especially if they’ve done this (and will do this more broadly, as you suggest) despite expecting to take a substantial ‘hit’ to their bottom line.

Cthulhu_4• 6 years ago

It's a moral question that Twitter has to answer for themselves; are they willing to risk getting banned in those countries? Are they willing to risk having the government of the country they operate from shut them down?

I mean I want to say they should let that happen, but the US is toothless in that the population wouldn't revolt if it happened. Twitter would end but nothing would change.

But it's not going to go there, Twitter will sit with the government, they'll make a deal, some palms will be greased and they will bow to their government overlords.

Companies are fucky like that; on the one hand they influence public discourse and voting behaviour, on the other they're morally flexible and will grovel for their government masters if they get to earn money there (see also Google and China, Hollywood films and China, etc).

shadowgovt39• 6 years ago

The easiest way for them to answer it is not to answer it.

They're an American company and can choose to justify fact-checking only the US President if they want. It's not like hypocrisy has bothered them in the past; it clearly didn't bother them when the US elected a troll and they fixed the glitch of their own TOS suggesting he be banned from their service by modifying the TOS to have a carve-out for "newsworthiness."

cryptonector9• 6 years ago

Spoiler alert: no.

ausbah• 6 years ago

As usual he is just playing the victim when people call him out on his lies. What makes it different and worth watching is when the platform instead of a user does it.

thebouv5• 6 years ago

So he just admitted that fact checking is suppressing conservative voices?

That's awesome.

krapp5• 6 years ago

He's also admitted that voter suppression is the main reason Republicans even get elected[0].

God help us if we ever get a competent authoritarian into office who's cunning enough not to say the corrupt part out loud.

[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/30/trump-vot...

thebouv5• 6 years ago

The corrupt part out loud is a distraction from the hidden corruption.

mark_l_watson2• 6 years ago

To your point, Trump being out in the open with his BS is probably what his base likes. I have family members who think that he is a great president, go figure.

BTW, I view most politicians from both parties, DNC, and RNC to be corrupt, controlled by special interests.

Not to go to far afield here, but I will vote for either a democrat or republican based on public records of who their donors are. Turns out that based on this criteria I usually vote for Democrats but not always.

cheeseomlit2• 6 years ago

You call it voter suppression, other people call it election integrity. If ballot harvesting is allowed and you don't need an ID to vote then fraud becomes much easier.

loceng2• 6 years ago

It seems to not matter though as his supporters either 1) don't watch the sources sharing the truth, 2) don't have critical thinking mechanisms for integrity, and/or 3) decide it's "fake news" without critical thinking trying to determine if Trump is the propagandist or whomever Trump claims is the "fake news."

frockington15• 6 years ago

Biased fact checking would be and would be par for the course for many "news" organizations on both sides

jameskilton• 6 years ago

Is no-one going to talk about how this is explicitly what "freedom of speech" means? That Trump is one of the few people that "freedom of speech" doesn't apply, because it's protection FROM HIM doing exactly this kind of thing.

Twitter has every protected right to criticize the president (which they should have been doing a whole lot more of but that's a different discussion). That's the whole point of "freedom of speech" in our Bill of Rights. Our government literally cannot do what Trump wants to do, and to try to say that he can is to explicitly say that the Constitution is meaningless and void.

happytoexplain3• 6 years ago

(I've moved my comment to the intended parent comment): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322672

zozbot2345• 6 years ago

Except that leftists and libs have their own sort of low-value hateful garbage. Which usually doesn't get censored or "fact-checked" on Twitter.

commandlinefan2• 6 years ago

Trump is one of the few people that "freedom of speech" doesn't apply

No, Trump is one of the few people that the first amendment of the constitution of the United States doesn't apply. Free speech is broader than any specific law, whether you think people deserve it or not.

akhilcacharya4• 6 years ago

You mean the first amendment being trampled on by a president threatening legal action against a private company?

shadowgovt39• 6 years ago

There's an extremist viewpoint on free speech that it is a categorical good, divorced from any societal utility or harm, which elevates it almost to a point of religion.

It's always interesting to me when I observe it in action, because not even the US legal system---a system that, among the systems of the world, enshrines free speech as more untouchable than most nations---agrees with this absolutist premise.

jjuel• 6 years ago

It is crazy to see how well he knows his base and how to get them to rally close to an election. Making them think everything is a liberal bias against them, and if they don't vote for his big government agenda they will receive a big government agenda. This is just one more way for him to get his base to believe everything he says versus people who actually prove what he says is a lie. He wants state run media and social media just like China. As much as he talks about hating China he would love to be China.

sp3327• 6 years ago

And this is specifically on a tweet calling the validity of the election into question. It's blatantly wrong, but he needs his base to believe him when he says the election is rigged.

cheeseomlit2• 6 years ago

Mail-in ballots make it much easier to commit voter fraud, I don't see how anyone could possibly argue to the contrary.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...

RandomTisk8• 6 years ago

What was blatantly wrong about it?

frockington15• 6 years ago

Hasn't the other side been #NotMyPresient and throwing a tantrum about the validity of the last election? Trump is not a trailblazer in this regard

brodouevencode4• 6 years ago

Welcome to politics, where the rhetoric is made up and truth doesn't matter.

gameswithgo2• 6 years ago

It isn't that he has a special insight into his base, he is just willing to abandon any sense of truth or decency to flame it. That is what is remarkable about him.

TrackerFF2• 6 years ago

One can hate or like Biden, but he put it perfectly: This is a prostitution of the presidency. Nothing more, nothing less.

Republicans are willing to look away, and let Trump run rampant, if it means that they'll get their part in return (judges, etc.)

Trump, in turn, will say anything. He has no restrains, and knows this - he can say absolutely anything, and no-one within will do or say anything.

Right now, the presidency (for Trump) is a case of survival. He needs to remain in power, in order to escape whatever civil charges he'll face.

For his own sake, Trump should have never ran for Presidency. He hates his job, and got lost in his own ego.

busymom022• 6 years ago

any sense of truth

The very "fact check" twitter claims to have done is wrong. I have provided sources in my previous comments.

ghostbrainalpha• 6 years ago

I disagree with everything Trump says, does, and stands for. ' But this is literally the only thing I won't short change him on.

He really does understand the base, the media and pollsters, and other the other candidates never really got that in the last election.

A LOT of politicians are willing to lie and fan those flames, but he has been more successful at knowing what lies to tell and really breaking new ground with his bullshit.

Does anyone think that a conspiracy theory invented by Rick Perry or Mitch McConnell would go viral or catch the public eye like one of Trumps half assed tweets?

wsatb2• 6 years ago

The comments here are surprising, to say the least. I just ask that some of you actually take a step back and realize what you're defending here.

thebouv5• 6 years ago

The comments defending the fact checking?

Or the comments defending it is okay for big government to step in and threaten to close a private company over fact checking?

wsatb2• 6 years ago

The latter.

koolhead17• 6 years ago

Trump exists because of social media.

orwin2• 6 years ago

I'm really not outraged by that fact that twitter burst the Donald Trump info bubble, but the fact that they don't do the same thing when a member of an opposite party is also partial with the truth is a bad sign. Tbh they should have started with a controversial anti-trump statement before enforcing this in trump.

Also they should not have called that "fact checking" or "debunking".

sp3327• 6 years ago

What's a better word?

swebs2• 6 years ago

"Rebuttal" would work better. Calling it a fact check implies "I'm right, you're wrong. The debate is over."

hobs• 6 years ago

Why? Trump's absolutely the reason for the need here - politicians have always lied, but it would probably be more useful if twitter or anyone marked when he was telling the truth; you'd have a much smaller dataset to manage.

Traster3• 6 years ago

I think this is going to be a discussion thread that is almost inevitably going to be a shitshow, but anyway:

There are people who advocate the idea that private companies should be compelled to distribute hate speech, dangerously factually incorrect information and harassment under the concept that free speech is should be applied universally rather than just to government. I don't agree, I think it's a vast over-reach and almost unachievable to have both perfect free speech on these platforms and actually run them as a viable business.

But let's lay that aside, those people who make the argument claim to be adhering to an even stronger dedication to free speech. Surely, it's clear here that having the actual head of the US government threatening to shut down private companies for how they choose to manage their platforms is a far more disturbing and direct threat against free speech even in the narrowest sense.

thebouv5• 6 years ago

They will never understand your point.

throwanem• 6 years ago

Why should that be clear? Judging them by their actions rather than their words, it's quite plain that "free speech extremists" are no such thing, except inasmuch as it applies to them. They demand to be free to say whatever they like, and they demand everyone else be required to listen while they do it.

Cthulhu_4• 6 years ago

They ARE free to say whatever they like; their problem is that they then have to face the consequences.

I mean I can say whatever I want on this platform as well, but if I cross a line my posts will be hidden and eventually my account blocked. And that is fair, it's what I agreed to, and not only that but it's morally just.

The free speech extremists confuse freedom of speech with protection from consequences.

Interestingly, Trump and some other celebrities on Twitter have had special protection from said consequences.

0x5002• 6 years ago

I have struggled with both points of the argument for a while now. In general, I'm inclined to agree with your assessment that this would be a glaring overreach on the side of the feds. It's also apparent that social networks have a tendency to cater massively to one side of the increasingly divided political spectrum, as proven with experiments like Gab. I've always liked the idea of having a Twitter clone that bases their philosophy on the 1st amendment, but in reality, all it did was to attract the polar opposite of the /r/politics subreddit (to put it lightly), rather than to facilitate free and open discourse.

On the other hand, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube et al are undoubtedly massively influential on the public opinion and their corporate position on political topics - Yoel Roth's recent tweets serve as a decent example, showing clearly that this person cannot be an objective "fact checker" - essentially create a public forum where I am not able to exercise my first amendment rights (and, legally speaking, rightfully so). I cannot help but to find this very concerning.

YouTube (despite numerous issues with their interpretation of free speech), for instance, starting linking Wiki articles under videos that cover certain topics or are uploaded by certain channels. Videos by the BBC show a notice that the BBC is a British public broadcast service, simply informing the viewer about the fact that any bias they might encounter can be easily identified (feel free to switch "BBC" with "RT"). I've found that to be a decent middle ground between outright suppressing views by a corporation pretending to be the authority on certain topics and broadcasting everything without any context.

thebouv5• 6 years ago

essentially create a public(1) forum where I am not able to exercise my first amendment rights(2) (and, legally speaking, rightfully so(3)). I cannot help but to find this very concerning.

(1) Private forum, displayed in the public. (2) Those rights protect your speech from being suppressed BY THE GOVERNMENT. (3) Correct if you meant legally as a private company running a private forum, they can manage the content as they see fit, including fact checking the POTUS. Or incorrect if you meant you have a legal right to exercise your speech on their platform free of their rules.

koheripbal4• 6 years ago

The obvious way around both of these arguments is to offer consumers more choices. If someone is censored from a particular platform, there needs to be another that they can use.

There are a tiiiiny number of companies that are controlling global communications, and that should make us all uncomfortable.

Being banned from one restaurant in town, should not mean you're banned from all restaurants in the world.

kitd3• 6 years ago

FWIW, the BBC World Service podcast "The Compass" [1] has an excellent series on free speech by the veteran BBC journalist Robin Lustig. I highly recommend it. He covers tech companies, universities, blasphemy laws, etc.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p035w97h/episodes/downloads

For me, free speech is fundamentally about trying to rectify the injustice of an imbalance of power between those in authority and the ordinary citizen. During the Enlightenment, the authorities were monarchs, but even before that, the origins of free speech can be seen in the Reformation, the authorities being the established Church and the battles being eg the right to a Bible in your own language or the right to worship without priests.

In modern times, authorities can be just straightforward, well, authoritarian. Global leaders & business people who tweet or post on FB carry an authority ex officio that make their proclamations much more acceptable to the neutral reader. That in itself is a dangerous situation and Twitter or FB absolutely need to take control. If these companies want us to take them seriously as champions of free speech, they have to play their role to help restore that balance of power, by being far more stringent about fact-checking the tweets of those global leaders than they would be for ordinary posters.

Those right-wingers who love to proclaim themselves champions of free speech are really objecting to the Tyranny of the Majority. That is not an authority that requires a rebalance of power. It is just an established opinion.

tootie5• 6 years ago

Even if you take the most libertarian view of free speech, the proper recourse would be to sue and let the courts decide and/or work with Congress on explicit legislation on the responsibilities of content hosters. Declaring that he would use his executive authority to punish a private company for personal injury is dangerously authoritarian in my view.

arminiusreturns2• 6 years ago

What bugs me is that so many people always jump straight to the most base and rudimentary catch phrase arguments on the topic. It's always "private companies != free speech for others, just for them" or the opposite "we should be able to say whatever whenever", inevitably followed up by a "but you don't have a right to consequence/response free speech"... it's tiring and shallow thinking on the subject.

I just ctrl+f'd for "public forum" and yours was the first hit. One thing in particular I would like to comment on is that post-Trump's election I started listening to some of my SO's legal field podcasts because I wanted less sensational analysis. I very distinctly remember a series on the Opening Arguments one where they went into some depth about why Twitter should be legally considered a limited public-forum (this was in response to some other Trump-Twitter hubbub at the time).

So, just granting that, how does potentially being a "limited public forum" change it's rights and responsibilities to it's users? What about the heavy US government involvement in these companies, how could that change the analysis? What about the fact that dominate platforms are able to control the narrative due to that domination? Doesn't that completely fuck up the free speech concept? "Everyone uses X, but you can't because we don't like you, so you can have your free speech over there in that corner where nobody is." What kind of dangers in the long run does this present? Why do these companies so easily fall into models of censorship, and what kind of future would that mean for the public? (not looking to actually get into the convo necessarily, I'm commenting on the meta of the discussion and wish these kinds of questions were being asked more)

I personally hate youtubes banner for controversial shit. It always links to some shitty ass Wikipedia thats been heavily controlled/edited. Wikipedia is just not a good source of info on controversial topics, (though looking through revision history certainly can add context of what is "missing").

ip26• 6 years ago

On the other hand, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube et al are undoubtedly massively influential on the public opinion

You could have said the same thing about the press fifty or sixty years ago.

bosswipe• 6 years ago

Yoel Roth who? Oh, after some googling it looks like Fox News has picked the target for the latest Two Minutes Hate.

SkyBelow4• 6 years ago

I've always liked the idea of having a Twitter clone that bases their philosophy on the 1st amendment, but in reality, all it did was to attract the polar opposite of the /r/politics subreddit (to put it lightly)

Well, a few other crowds did move to it but were quickly banned under the argument that their speech did not count as speech and thus wasn't protected. I remember it being quite a humorous (ironic?) twist for a company claiming to champion free speech.

sparkie4• 6 years ago

dangerously factually incorrect information

Here's the problem. Who is doing the fact checking? Who fact checks the fact checkers?

The world isn't black and white. State press releases are not facts. There is no authority that is the arbitrator of truth.

raziel2p6• 6 years ago

As long as the sources can be checked, challenged, and counter-opinions can be voiced, I personally don't think it matters that much. It's the blind acceptance of statements and accusations that match our existing world view that we need to combat, I think.

ibejoeb2• 6 years ago

Moreover, twitter has demonstrated its inability to do this already. From their repudiation of the claims made about mail-in ballots:

Trump falsely claimed that mail-in ballots would lead to "a Rigged Election.

We don't know if the claim is false; it hasn't happened yet. It could have said unlikely, improbable, whatever. Making this statement, however, is just as charged as the one it opposes.

seerbetter2• 6 years ago

There’s tons of fraud and bad acts in mail in voting but I 100% support allowing it and fixing the systems.

threatofrain• 6 years ago

I feel that because web tech advanced more quickly than much of society, a vacuum of power developed and Google was forced to step in. If Google had its way, it wouldn't police any content and it would illegally host HBO shows like Game of Thrones -- when you try to hold them responsible, Google would pass off all burden to the offending individual. That's how YouTube used to run.

Other industries have things like the FCC or the FDA where companies can say, "Look, we did our due diligence, the FDA approved our drug."

dynamite-ready• 6 years ago

Do you think digital media needs a state run mediator? I think it's probably time.

We've become quite protective of the data that's collected by digital products for fear of a concentration of power.

But then we all see the internet as a great 'leveller', and we don't want to disturb that balance.

The likes of the FDA (or your local equivalent) work at a certain scale... Perhaps civilly agreed constraints can be applied to companies who have managed to cultivate a userbase of a certain size.

Like a 'tax' of a kind on the amount of 'trash' you're allowed to ignore, before the police physically ensure you and your users can't abuse state infrastructure for whatever your nefarious purpose is.

nsgi2• 6 years ago

Didn't Google develop Content ID voluntarily, though? It's not like anyone forced them to. Though I guess it may have been to avoid the threat of regulation

craftinator• 6 years ago

I really appreciate your approach to this argument. You really cut through any strawman fallacies by pointing out that there's a debate along a spectrum about what protecting free speech entails, but that the President needs to have limitations in his power over private companies. I think this final point is not debatable in a legal context; he does not legally have that power.

AnimalMuppet8• 6 years ago

Darn right he does not have the power.

Either the president does not know the constitutional limits on his power, or he knows them but still thinks it's a good idea to claim power that he does not have. I'm not sure which is worse.

cma• 6 years ago

There are people who advocate the idea that private companies should be compelled to distribute hate speech, dangerously factually incorrect information and harassment under the concept that free speech is should be applied universally rather than just to government.

The companies would also presumably have to allow commercial spam.

giancarlostoro3• 6 years ago

I wasn't going to post anything because of the direction HN seems to lean and because they get enraged about these sort of discussions. Hear me out and feel free to respond instead of shunning me out.

The bigger issue is these platforms only get those free speech protections because they're platforms. The moment they start editing content like this, they become editors to a publishing platform, and they should be held liable for all that they've published. You can't just have your cake and eat it too, today they make you happy to censor the evil orange man, tomorrow they may censor those you support.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

We're seeing with YouTube that they're deleting posts against Communist China:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324695

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23317570

Worse what happens when you cross Facebook imposing Chinese censorship on the whole world?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13018770

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12479990

What happens when Google is used to push liberal bias?

Vimeo deletes videos claiming such bias from Google despite clear evidence in video:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20302010

"If we break things up, we can't stop Trump" replace Trump with any political candidate you've ever supported by the way to understand why this sort of thing is dangerous:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20265502

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20697780

I am sure I will get into fire for this comment, considering my citations were flagged to death because people don't agree with others. But mark my words, if the tables were flipped and they were censoring all your favorite candidates, you'd be outraged and against anything that would hinder free speech.

If you take away anything from this post be sure to be this:

Twitter, Google, Facebook etc are considered "platforms" the moment they editorialize content, they become publishers. Platforms are protected for obvious reasons, they cannot reliably contain every single thing a user posts, but a publisher dictates what is published, and is definitely liable for what they publish. These platforms want to be hybrids, but that gives them dangerous power to push agendas as they claim they are trying to stop.

root_axis20• 6 years ago

The bigger issue is these platforms only get those free speech protections because they're platforms. The moment they start editing content like this, they become editors to a publishing platform, and they should be held liable for all that they've published. You can't just have your cake and eat it too, today they make you happy to censor the evil orange man, tomorrow they may censor those you support.

No, this is totally incorrect.

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (47 U.S.C. § 230)

acomjean• 6 years ago

You can say whatever you want, however theses companies don't have to provide you a platform to do so.

Especially if they determine its not in their financial interest.

carapace4• 6 years ago

editing content

Twitter are not editing they are editorializing.

Gollapalli2• 6 years ago

100%

dqpb• 6 years ago

Where does speech about religion fall? There are people on all sides who would consider the others to be spreading "dangerously factually incorrect information".

chlodwig9• 6 years ago

Free speech for all political factions on major public forums is the cooperate-cooperate quadrant of the prisoner's dilemma. If forums controlled by the blue faction defect and start censoring the red faction, the red faction needs to threaten to retaliate in order to scare the blue faction into cooperating again. It's simple tit-for-tat. This is game theory 101.

Surely, it's clear here that having the actual head of the US government threatening to shut down private companies

The United States President has neither the authority nor power to start censoring Twitter on his own. Right now, Jack Dorsey has far more power over allowed public speech in America than Donald Trump.

perl4ever• 6 years ago

A lot of people have been wrong about what the current President could or would do. Ann Coulter comes to mind.

It's not really clear why other people enable the President, which is the underlying reason why you can't reassure people that he's ineffectual.

likeclockwork• 6 years ago

Why does the "red faction" control no forums? Doesn't that seem odd to you? There's no reason they couldn't. Why don't forums aligned with their values attract broad participation?

whateveracct4• 6 years ago

The United States President has neither the authority nor power to start censoring Twitter on his own. Right now, Jack Dorsey has far more power over allowed public speech in America than Donald Trump.

Exactly! This is American Civics 101. When you become President, you lose things because you have power. You and I have more legal authority to restrict speech than the President.

kgin2• 6 years ago

I think it's even more concerning than that.

Threatening to shut down private companies -- not for limiting speech, not for refusing to distribute speech -- but for exercising their own right to free speech alongside the free speech of others (in this case the president).

There is no right to unchallenged or un-responded-to speech, regardless of how you interpret the right to free speech.

mc326• 6 years ago

Attaching a disclaimer to the speech of another though is not straightforward. Will they get into the business of fact checking everyone over certain number of followers? Will they do it impartially world-wide? How can they even be impartial world wide given the different contradictory points of view, valid from both sides? Cyprus? What’s the take there?

Florin_Andrei2• 6 years ago

There is no right to unchallenged or un-responded-to speech

There are forms of government where certain forms of speech cannot be challenged. Well, not safely anyway.

I should know, I lived for 20 years in that sort of place (Eastern Bloc kid).

Khaine2• 6 years ago

I'm sorry that Rubicon was crossed a long time ago. When you told businesses who they must serve. Hilariously, many people want it both ways, they want it illegal for a bakery to not make gay wedding cakes, but also want twitter et all to stop people from saying bad things.

I am not a free speech extremist, and recognise you need to balance the competing demands as these platforms are defacto digital town squares. There are several problems that currently exist. They are:

1) Who decides what is and isn't on the platform Now that the web has effectively been centralised into a handful of organisations, being locked out of a platform can be seriously harmful. There are no appeals, or arbitration on decisions made. No courts to provide an independent check.

2) Asymmetry of rule application The biggest issue is rules are not applied fairly. Certain types of people seem free to repeatedly break the rules on platforms without recourse.

hadtodoit5• 6 years ago

If companies are going to self-moderate their platforms then they should not receive any kind of legal protection from user-generated content. I wholly believe companies have every right to dictate what is on their platform but they cannot have it both ways. If you can afford to moderate content you disagree with, you can do so for illegal content as well.

If I own a store and someone injures themselves on the premises I am held liable for that. I did not force that person to enter the store but the benefits of having a store outweighed the risks. Why should internet companies receive special treatment? They should be 100% liable for what happens on their "premises" if they are going to take the risk of allowing user-generated content.

tootie5• 6 years ago

Do they have protection right now? Platforms are already held responsible for illegal activities and are subject to requests by law enforcement and copyright holders. They're generally given a chance to respond to a request, challenge requests through channels and listen to appeals. But they would eventually be culpable if they weren't compliant.

azinman2• 6 years ago

Because the scale makes this nearly impossible. Or rather, extremely expensive to the point where only the biggest of companies can do so, and at the cost of real-time information.

bredren3• 6 years ago

This presumes equal weight of all content. Some content gets far more attention and thus must face a higher degree of scrutiny. This is the only way to curate at scale.

Apple does this with the App Store, where it is possible to get away with breaking app store rules if the app is not downloaded very often. It is not worth the time and energy for Apple to challenge apps that no one is downloading in the first place.

On twitter, with regard to illegal content it also has to matter the degree. How illegal / and reprehensible is it? How often is this tweet being requested?

RubberSoul• 6 years ago

Store owners, at least in the US, are not 100% liable for injuries on their property. Their liability depends on several factors, which include the reasonableness of their behavior and the behavior of the visitor.

beart4• 6 years ago

If you take that to the extreme, then someone running a forum for young kids would not be allowed to remove pornographic material, lest they be held liable for all other inappropriate content that gets posted.

tzs3• 6 years ago

If companies are going to self-moderate their platforms then they should not receive any kind of legal protection from user-generated content. I wholly believe companies have every right to dictate what is on their platform but they cannot have it both ways. If you can afford to moderate content you disagree with, you can do so for illegal content as well.

So if I run a chess forum and disallow posts that are not related to chess, your belief is that if one of my users posts a libelous statement about another user's alleged conduct during a chess game at a tournament in their city, I should be on the hook for the first user's post?

If I can afford to spend maybe 20 minutes a day reviewing all posts that keyword-based scanning suggest might not be about chess, I should have been able to fly to the city that tournament was in and conduct an investigation to determine if what the user said was true before allowing the post to stay up on my forum?

centimeter6• 6 years ago

I think the actual conservative pain point is that they (correctly) observe that freedom of association (i.e. businesses get to choose their customers) only seems to apply when it benefits progressives - contrast Google evicting milquetoast conservatives from Youtube with no legal repercussions versus that baker in Colorado getting sued a bunch of times for not wanting to bake gay, satanist, etc. themed cakes. There are plenty of examples along these lines.

In general, the last 50-60 years have seen private individuals and businesses stripped of their rights to turn away customers, in the US mostly under the guise of the CRA, FHA, etc. YouTube finds itself remarkably (and unsurprisingly) unrestrained by these kind of (progressive) laws.

tootie5• 6 years ago

There's ample for why it's illegal to discriminate against classes of people. Imagine business in the 20s with signs saying "Irish need not apply" or "No dogs or Jews". The recent case with the baker was extending the protection of human rights to gay couples.

Any "conservative" content that has been kicked off of platforms like YouTube has been specifically targeted not for political reasons but because they were spreading hate speech and/or dangerous disinformation. Things like racism, sexism, religious intolerance, specific accusations (ie Joe Scarborough is a murderer) or dangerous disinformation (ie 5G causes Coronavirus) are not intrinsic to any group of people. There's still plenty of content around mainstream conservatism that can be viewed freely.

I think any attempt to argue a slippery slope isn't valid. People aren't computers and just because you can't apply a mathematically rigorous distinction between these kinds of speech doesn't mean that a reasonable person can't easily distinguish them.

kube-system2• 6 years ago

they (correctly) observe that freedom of association (i.e. businesses get to choose their customers) only seems to apply when it benefits progressives

This can be mostly likely summed up as self-selection bias. Discrimination laws are not being applied unequally to people of differing political opinions. It is much more common that people's political identities are self-chosen based on their own personal identity and experiences.

scythe• 6 years ago

private companies [...] free speech

One thing that seems relevant in the discussion about speech restrictions on social media is the fact that most if not all of the major websites are deliberately set up to maximize user engagement. The site is designed, measured and iterated on in order to induce users to comment as much as possible.

That practice seems to be incompatible with unrestricted speech. Eventually people run out of nice things to say. Facebook's policy is very obviously "if you don't have anything nice to say, say something anyway, we want money". Free speech has been sustainable historically because it's natural for people to think before they say something controversial, but now we have websites that actively undermine that built-in filter.

Mikeb852• 6 years ago

And on the flipside, these companies have grown to the point they could be considered a public utility or even monopoly. There certainly is precedent for governments compelling utility providers to not restrict their services arbitrarily.

learc834• 6 years ago

There are companies that come close to that point (Google comes to mind), but Twitter certainly isn't at that level.

thephyber6• 6 years ago

You are playing word salad with lots of different concepts and it looks like you are making hypotheticals with what we could make companies do.

Companies growing does not make them into utilities. Utilities are providers of very specific commodity services which are specifically defined by statutory law.

Monopolies (as in anti-trust law) are companies which abuse their power to hurt the consumer. Traditional anti-trust law doesn't work against social media companies because consumers pay no cash for the transactions. We could change anti-trust law, but since there is no analog, it's not clear what we would change it to.

There certainly is precedent for governments compelling utility providers to not restrict their services arbitrarily.

There is also precedent for governments to uphold a concept of "decency" (the same government that defines it as "I know it when I see it") which communities can judge for themselves, without a written definition. I, personally, don't see the judgements that social media companies make as "arbitrary" (they do have written ToS and they attempt to give their content moderators guidelines/baselines for judging decisions).

Consultant324526• 6 years ago

Of all the crazy shit Presidents say on the path to literally murdering hundreds of thousands of people in other countries, it amazes me that the thing that upsets people is Trump bloviating about doing something to a big evil capitalist mega-corp which he is clearly not going to do.

ibejoeb2• 6 years ago

This is clearly incredibly complicated and hinges on all kinds of nuanced definitions that are not yet universally accepted, such as "what is twitter?" As a thought experiment, though, if Twitter is not a publisher, then I think it would be acceptable for the government to sanction it for failing to provide "equal time." That is not the same as the government sanctioning it for airing or failing to air the type of content that the government wants. The latter is clearly an overstep, but the former is currently accepted doctrine.

throwaway4715• 6 years ago

All these people who bought iphones for the curated app store talking about how Twitter shouldn't be allowed to curate their product. Perhaps Twitter is big _because_ it curates its product. That's what people want.

The threat to force private entities to toe the line is the only speech issue here. If you think people want unedited speech then I believe Gab could use some of your money.

mandelbrotwurst• 6 years ago

Twitter has been increasing the amount of curation / censorship as they have grown.

Arguing that Twitter users must prefer said curation / censorship because Gab exists doesn't hold up because Twitter has other obvious advantages, like a massive network effect.

ClumsyPilot6• 6 years ago

Thats like comparing a car dealership to a debating club.

bilekas• 6 years ago

This is not to point fingers and be an ass but people in the US need to realize the difference between a right and a privilege when it comes to free speech.

You have the right to free speech. That's not disputed. You are entitled to it. However you don't have the right to distribute that free speech on a private companies platform, that's a privilege offered by the owners not a entitlement.

It's very simple. Like it or not, that's your constitution.

Lets just play this out.. The president of the US (a supposed conservative) closes down one of the largest private companies in the US.. Not for doing something illegal as with `SilkRoad` for example.. But for practicing their own business policies.

Does that sound right to anyone ?

clairity4• 6 years ago

it's clearly impossible for trump to shut down twitter. he doesn't know how his own government works and doesn't care to know, because his goal is entirely self-promotion and personal profit. he's not a hard person to figure out.

it's more concerning that people are taking it seriously enough to create so much chatter. it's not even a free speech issue, insofar as twitter is not a government entity. there's literally no 'there' there.

wmeredith• 6 years ago

This. He's selling to his base, not Twitter.

RealityVoid3• 6 years ago

I think it's not as impossible as you make it out to be. He might not understand how to do it, but if he were to leverage the tools at his disposal, he definitely could do it.

I initially thought that he could not gut the American administration _too_ much because of institutional inertia and the systems put in place that still had you country functioning pretty well once he took power. But now here we are, him having placed stoodges at the head most most institutions and gutted them of power.

If he could do that, he most obviously could lead to Twitter falling apart. Another poster outlined here how that could work:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23330463

SkyBelow4• 6 years ago

There are people who advocate the idea...

One thing that I hope people remain aware of is that there are a number of different arguments in play and while sometimes they have similar outcomes in specific situations, they often wildly differ.

For example, there is the argument that Twitter is not to be considered just a private company, as decided by a court when Trump was not allowed to block other accounts. The argument would be that twitter blocking a user entirely would be restricting their right to interact with their government officials through an official channel. Now, if Twitter blocked such a user from interacting with everyone except government officials, then that would be acceptable because the person is still allowed to interact with government officials through official channels. Also Twitter would be able to stop acting as an official government channel by ending any accounts that count as such and free to fully block a user thereafter.

This is not the same argument that you are talking about, but I do commonly see people treating it as the same.

yibg3• 6 years ago

Also, in this case no one is being censored. It's not like the president isn't allowed to post and is having his "freedom of speech" taken away. This is more like his speech is being responded to, and he doesn't like that others can challenge what he's saying. The very antithesis of free speech.

isoskeles3• 6 years ago

Applied unequally. Reminds me of these old fact checks during the election:

https://www.factcheck.org/2016/09/trump-pence-acid-wash-fact...

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump falsely claimed Clinton “acid washed” 33,000 personal emails to delete them, calling it “an expensive process.” The FBI said Clinton’s tech team used BleachBit, which is a free software program. It does not use chemicals.

These sorts of "fact checks" are blatant horse shit that always go in one direction. Some "challenge", the very antithesis of any sort of good faith discussion on the facts.

rmtech9• 6 years ago

A private company that has a monopoly on speech is no longer a private company, it's essentially an unelected and unaccountable part of the permanent government.

You need to think about entities based on their properties, not the labels that are attached to them. That ought to be obvious to people who program for a living; think of a private company with a speech monopoly as the good old .txt.exe scam.

You're attaching the label "not government" to Google, but in terms of properties it is like the government. YouTube has openly admitted to manipulating video results despite it costing them money to do so. Their monopoly position is so strong that the YouTube leadership rules us like a dictatorship.

I would prefer it if these tech monopolies were simply broken up. But failing that, they need to obey the first amendment or be shut down in the US.

Europe is a different beast, but I think the UK at least should adopt the US first amendment.

bananabreakfast4• 6 years ago

No company has a monopoly on speech. Especially not twitter of all places...

effable2• 6 years ago

So what's the criteria for ascertaining that a company, like Twitter, has a monopoly on speech and why does that make it like a government? Unless you are claiming that the US government has a monopoly on speech - meaning that anything the US government does not want said, cannot be said in public which is certainly not true in this case since the head of the US government is threatening to shut down Twitter over something they "said".

root_axis20• 6 years ago

I am so tired of this disingenuous line of argumentation. Twitter is not at all like a government, it is a private business that offers a free service which you are under no obligation to use, it has no army or legal authority over your life, stop acting like what gets posted or removed from twitter is anything other than a bullshit triviality.

Wistar3• 6 years ago

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals disagrees:

"Despite YouTube's ubiquity and its role as a public-facing platform, it remains a private forum, not a public forum subject to judicial scrutiny under the First Amendment," the court said."

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/youtu...

rhizome2• 6 years ago

Why do the opinions of hypothetical groups of people carry any weight? Make your arguments in concrete terms, like: Trump is full of shit whether people agree with him or not, and if Trump does try anything it is going to have so much splash damage against other websites that he would run the risk of being sent with a SpaceX capsule into the sun...by everybody.

ck2• 6 years ago

wait, how does this work, someone in power does something tyrannical and authoritarian and so we just step back and argue the finer points of why it may be okay to have certain regulations or not, thereby ignoring the whole point it's their tyranny dodging democracy?

to be fair this has been going on for three years now, something insane is done, instead of focusing on the insanity, people pivot to the policy

this is not how democracy works

Rapzid2• 6 years ago

Yeah it's pretty interesting we are sitting here arguing about free speech nuance(with people who lack a basic understanding of it as would have been taught in high school civics TBH) and weak-man arguing if the POTUS tweet was really inaccurate based on the purposeful vagaries of the first sentence while rest contained straight up factual errors(lies?).

While we are doing this the most astonishing thing happening is actually the extent to which the POTUS is constantly lying and spreading miss/disinformation. Every day. For more than three years now as you point out.

I wouldn't be surprised if Trump is the single greatest source of lies and otherwise false and purposefully misleading information in most peoples lives. Perhaps even greater than all other sources combined! That and the amount of effort spent discussing this for years is incredible.

randyrand3• 6 years ago

The fundamental question is, do people have a right to free speech on the web?

The web is nearly entirely privately owned, which makes answering this question difficult.

On one hand, the web is where we do 90% of our communication these days and losing that right seems like losing most of the first amendment.

I’m convinceable either way. Did telephone companies have a right to censor land line speech? Should they? Should ISPs be able to censor? Should cloudflair? AWS? It seems like industries like ISPs should be regulated to be “dumb pipes”. But where social networks fall is less clear.

triceratops3• 6 years ago

ISPs and telco networks are on a different layer (physical, and transport layers) of the stack than social media (application layer). ISPs and telco networks can and do perform traffic routing shaping, and throttle or cut off abusive users who consume too much bandwidth, or run a high-traffic web server from their home network. Because these actions affect other users of their networks. But if someone uses Comcast to post a sweary rant on the interwebs - it makes no difference to other Comcast customers. So they don't (at present, though the repealing of net neutrality now allows it) and shouldn't moderate actions at the application layer.

Social media is the opposite. Abusive users of those networks operate at the application layer, and can spoil the experience of other users at the application layer but (likely) not at the network layer. So they moderate user activity at the application layer.

In each case it's about trying to ensure bad actors don't ruin other customers'/users' experience. It's just done in different ways depending on what part of the network stack the bad actors do their work in.

cmendel• 6 years ago

A broader question would, I suppose, be do we have rights at all on the internet?

We've already lost the right to privacy, we don't have the right to not self incriminate, we don't have the right to be free of arbitrary punishment, we aren't presumed Innocent until proven guilty, and we don't have unlimited free speech.

Do I think this as it should be? No. We exist, as humans, on the internet and therefore should have human rights.

api• 6 years ago

One thing that gets me about the people who use "free speech" in this way is the sense of entitlement.

20-30 years ago mass media was only accessible to people with large amounts of money to purchase advertising or run their own media platform such as a TV or radio station or a newspaper. It was closed to everyone else unless you could pull off some stunt to get five minutes of fame and somehow leverage that to deliver a message.

Now you have these vast platforms enabling anyone with a few bucks and cheap computer to potential address millions upon millions of people in near real time. It's completely unprecedented. In many cases these platforms are free as long as you comply with some minimal platform rules and regulations around what you can and cannot say. For most platforms the rules really are pretty minimal. Twitter is one of the least restrictive. You have to be a real obnoxious ass to get kicked off Twitter.

Somehow people have become so accustomed to this free and ubiquitous open access mass media that what was just a few decades ago impossible is now seen as an entitlement. Refuse to let your platform be used to deliver my message? You're censoring me!

Censorship refers to the use of force to prevent someone from speaking. The government has a legal monopoly on force, so generally this requires a law to be passed or perhaps an abuse of the civil court system to leverage the government to shut down someone's speech.

I can't speak for every country but in the USA that is extremely rare. We take the first amendment very seriously around here. You've got to go pretty far to get actually censored. You can buy books on how to make illegal drugs for example, or slander public figures on social media with baseless accusations, or publish software designed to directly facilitate illegal activity, and rarely will anything happen to you.

Being denied access to speak via someone else's privately owned and operated platform is not censorship. Nobody is preventing you from speaking. They're just refusing to assist you in delivering that speech.

Imagine someone walking into a newspaper office 40 years ago and demanding to have their op-ed printed (for free!) and then shouting "censorship!" when the newspaper refused? It's ridiculous.

I thought conservatives were skeptical of entitlements, especially when they involve other peoples' property.

ClumsyPilot6• 6 years ago

Entitlement? First of all please credit the right people, reaching millions of people for free is not Twitter's\Facebook's accomplishment.

You can host a webpage on a raspberri pi and reach millions of people.

Secondly, media platforms affect the reat of society amd its perfectly reasomable that some standards be set for how they operate. Thats usually some form of fair treatment, and you should not be denied a platfork for fictitious or discriminatory reasons

dntbnmpls4• 6 years ago

There are people who advocate the idea that private companies should be compelled to distribute hate speech, dangerously factually incorrect information and harassment under the concept that free speech is should be applied universally rather than just to government.

Firstly, stop qualifying it with "hate", "factually incorrect", etc. It's a cheap tactic by authoritarian types to justify censorship. The religious zealots, authoritarian governments, etc all use the same argument you do to censor. Free speech is free speech whether you like it or disagree with it or whether it is factually incorrect.

Secondly, the question is whether a private company has a monopoly position. For example, we wouldn't allow power, water, telephone, etc companies from denying service based on what these companies feel are hateful or not. A christian ceo of these companies can't deny service to lgbt homes/companies/etc just because he doesn't like them or their speech. You get the idea?

Thirdly, if a social media platform is a vehicle for communication by elected officials, should that platform be allowed to limit citizen's access to said politician. I believe the courts already ruled twitter cannot deny people access to trump's twitter. But I'm not sure.

Surely, it's clear here that having the actual head of the US government threatening to shut down private companies for how they choose to manage their platforms is a far more disturbing and direct threat against free speech even in the narrowest sense.

Yes. It is a concern worthy of discussion. But so are the other aspects of this issue which you naively dismiss as "hate"/etc.

RonaldRaygun2• 6 years ago

Thirdly, if a social media platform is a vehicle for communication by elected officials, should that platform be allowed to limit citizen's access to said politician. I believe the courts already ruled twitter cannot deny people access to trump's twitter. But I'm not sure.

How does this square with the fact that Donald Trump regularly blocks people from viewing his Twitter account for disagreeing with him or refusing to acknowledge his (apparent) infallibility? Is that not a much more egregious violation, and by an actual government official to boot?

sizzle• 6 years ago

Open source a transparent, government sponsored free-speech communication platform that clones Facebook functionality for organizing information in an intuitive way for the most tech unsaavy person.

Outright ban all user tracking and profiling transparently with annual code audits and watchdog groups that can punish those in charge for not adhering to this, no advertisements, no selling data, and put 18f on the job of designing/developing it based off sound human principles, no army of behavioral researchers and Psychologists A/B testing bait-and-click engagement dark pattern metrics that penetrate deeply into the reward system of our neuroplastic brains and yanks on that lever of addiction formation with ease. Cut the bullshit and I'm on board. I'll even work for free on this if you promise to make it a reality, hell consider it a public utility if you have to so it stays funded and maintained.

The Advertising industry needs to be lobotomized and severely scaled back to more traditional forms of reaching people where they are, not vacuuming up every ounce of data their movement, click, search, and vitals generate unbeknownst to them. Good riddance.

yibg3• 6 years ago

While the general idea might be ok, and there are certainly concerns with the ad driven business model of the current popular “free” platforms, I don’t see how this solve this particular problem.

Fundamentally you still have the choice of curating some content or not. On the extreme ends are things like hate speech and exploitive content. Then there are “false” or incorrect information. You either allow them unchecked or you don’t. This isn’t a technological problem.

ashtonkem13• 6 years ago

It's actually pretty hard to run an online platform that sets the bar at "free speech" and not have it kind of suck.

Trolling is free speech, being a jerk is free speech, hate speech is free speech, pornography is free speech. Any forum that sets the bar at "free speech" is going to be filled with the dregs with depressing speed. There's a reason why Gab never really gained serious traction.

2019-nCoV10• 6 years ago

Who fact checks the fact checkers?

Andrew_Quentin2• 6 years ago

Twitter is not a private company, it's a publicly tradable company that can technically even fully be owned by the Chinese government itself through perfectly legally buying their shares on the open market.

You don't see a problem here?

ClumsyPilot6• 6 years ago

Are you saying public company is worse? At least they are reporting their ownership.

judge2020• 6 years ago

Shares of a company being traded on different company's stock exchange (which is only regulated by the government, not operated by them) has nothing to do with whether free speech is enforced on their platform.

Thorentis11• 6 years ago

Entirely, 100% disagree. The Internet is now our primary form of communication. It is the information highway. Sticking to the whole "free speech only applies to the government" is adhering to the letter of the law and not the spirit of the law. Posting on Twitter is now the equivalent of standing in a public square and yelling your protest. Allowing private companies to shut this down because we made the terrible mistake of handing over our primary means of communication to private companies, doesn't mean it has to always be that way.

EDIT: Imagine if we allowed phone companies to listen to all calls and then censor the ones they didn't like. People would be outraged. This is what is happening on the Internet.

ryanlol• 6 years ago

Posting on Twitter is now the equivalent of standing in a public square and yelling your protest

Don’t you think it’s more akin to standing in a privately owned square and yelling your protest?

SllX2• 6 years ago

This whole hokey spirit of the law BS is really irritating. Here’s the real spirit of the First Amendment: it is an explicit limitation on the authority of Congress over certain freedoms spelled out within the First Amendment.

Go read the First Amendment, just the first five words. Here, I’ll spell them out for you:

“Congress shall make no law...”

Now here’s the thing about the Constitution: it means what it says. There’s no spirit in there that you need a law degree and 10 years on the Federal bar to really draw out and interpret at some courtroom seance. It’s words with the force of law, and we are a nation of laws.

Now if you read the rest of the Amendment, you’ll note that it says nothing about the President, it says nothing about the Courts, and it says nothing about any kind of exceptions, like if the speech is exceptionally hurtful. It also says nothing about the States, that came later post-14th Amendment, but not in the manner that the drafters of the 14th Amendment who had nothing on Madison intended. Rather than the Privileges or Immunities clause, not to be confused with the Privileges and Immunities clause, it came about by the due process clause through a process called incorporation, wherein individual rights in the Bill of Rights began to apply to the States.

Oh, and most importantly, it says nothing about the Internet! Now there is a way to get the result that you intended, and it is really rather simple. It turns out that if you want to make changes to the law, you pass a law. You build a consensus, and a coalition around that consensus, and you use the powers vested in lawmakers to get your result.

So what about the President? Well he doesn’t really have any power to regulate speech either, other than the powers that Congress gives him, which it can’t grant because it doesn’t have the lawful authority to make those laws. That happened once, at least once, with the Alien and Seditions Act not long after the ink on the Bill of Rights dried. This would later come to be understood as “unconstitutional”. My point is the President has no more power than that which is listed in Article II and which the Congress in its lawful capacity vested in him, that is to say statutory powers, some of which only exist in specific circumstances. It’s still a lot of power, more so than it should be in my opinion since Congress has abdicated much of its responsibility, but it isn’t enough to do anything more than his Article II powers plus whatever Congress has granted under its Article I authority plus amendments.

So where do private companies fall in here? Welp, they’re still private companies, not public. They’re not governed by the First Amendment. If they were nationalized, they would effectively fall under the First Amendment because Congress is the supreme branch of the government no matter how much they sell themselves short with that coequal horseshit. You don’t have to agree with the decisions that private companies engage in, just like I don’t agree with you, a private citizen, invoking the “spirit of the law” rather than deferring to the actual text. If the law can mean whatever you want it to mean, then it effectively means nothing and our entire conception of the Rule of Law falls apart. It’s not perfect, it is not always just, but it is the basis for the form and authority of the Federal Government. Lasting changes to the law come about by passing more laws and anything below that standard is ephemeral. As for Twitter? It can do whatever it wants. They have been undermining their credibility as a useful platform for communication for 10 years and I see no reason why they would stop now, but either way the First Amendment exists to protect Twitter from the Government, not for the Government to be protected from Twitter. The President has a level of speech that goes beyond free speech because his speech has the force of a government order to his subordinates no matter how stupid or asinine and regardless of the medium. I don’t like it, but that’s the world we live in.

missosoup5• 6 years ago

distribute hate speech, dangerously factually incorrect information and harassment

Until everyone can agree on a universal arbiter for what those things mean in a concrete way, there will always be demographics who strongly disagree.

The reason free speech exists as a concept is because of a historic understanding that there fundamentally cannot be an unbiased arbiter for 'good' or 'bad' speech.

On the other side of this, the internet is increasingly controlled by a particular demographic with a particular definition of what things like 'hate speech' mean. Which suppresses and censors a wide range of topics that the other demographics do want to discuss. When the entire internet makes it impossible to express certain views, we can't claim to have free speech anymore. It's not good enough to say 'well if you don't like it then you can go and shout your views out on the street instead'.

The weapon against 'incorrect information' is education, not censorship. Censorship has never worked to actually quash 'wrongthink', it only marginalises and energises demographics who are censored, and drives them to eventually revolt. See: trump winning presidency.

spankalee• 6 years ago

Moderation of non-state-managed platforms is not censorship. In fact, it would be a violation of free speech to limit private parties ability to moderate.

vharuck• 6 years ago

The reason free speech exists as a concept is because of a historic understanding that there fundamentally cannot be an unbiased arbiter for 'good' or 'bad' speech.

I thought it was to protect citizens' rights to hold their governments accountable.

On the other side of this, the internet is increasingly controlled by a particular demographic with a particular definition of what things like 'hate speech' mean.

Hilariously, I agree with the wording but am willing to bet we disagree on who the controlling demographic is. Everyone remembers the stronger emotional reactions.

darepublic• 6 years ago

Yeah I hate social media platforms but Trump shutting them down would be crossing the Rubicon

fortran77• 6 years ago

Twitter distributes a lot of dangerous information unchecked. For example, today, thousands of people were tweeting fake or improperly captioned photos related to the horrible events in Minnesota this week.

Just two examples: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/make-whites-great-again-ha...

and https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/police-minnesota-trump-ral...

There were others; blaming people and nations that had nothing to do with this brutal horrible act for aiding and abetting.

Twitter will do nothing about this very harmful behavior. I reported some of the most egregious fake information being tweeted or retweeted and nothing happens.

no-s• 6 years ago

This is about Twitter trying to pick winners and losers in the marketplace of attention. I don't think the Feds will have to dig very deep to find a cause for action. Twitter has conceivably already crossed the line to become a publisher. If they collude with other publishers they're running into the territory of anti-competitive agreements. Anti-trust action may be viable. Picking winners and losers and colluding with competitors is in the scope of illegal business. Double down with lobbying violations if the "fact-checkers" are unregistered foreign agents.

lliamander2• 6 years ago

Social media companies are of course not obligated to distribute any content in particular, and in fact they are obligated to remove content which is illegal.

They are however only protected from civil liability for good faith restriction of otherwise legal content on their platform. To the extent to which that moderation is done on content that is compliant with the TOS, or without prior notice and indication of what terms were violated, or only selectively with an agenda to influence the broader social discourse, they may not necessarily benefit from an assumption of good faith, and therefore may be subject to civil liability.

And honestly, who wouldn't want social media companies to have a more fair and transparent TOS and moderation policy?

qubex8• 6 years ago

Wasn’t it Voltaire who said “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”?

Nonetheless, this is pretty much par for the course for what the world has come to expect.

Edit: It turns out that though phrase is often attributed to Voltaire, it was actually Evelyn Beatrice Hall, as noted by the poster below, to whom I am grateful for the correction.

krapp5• 6 years ago

Actually, no, turns out it was Evelyn Beatrice Hall[0].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Beatrice_Hall

qubex8• 6 years ago

Thanks, I stand corrected.

ceejayoz7• 6 years ago

Would he defend your right to say it in his living room, though?

(Let's also not lose sight of the fact that Trump hasn't even had his tweets deleted or censored in any fashion. Just a note added underneath.)

qubex8• 6 years ago

Clearly broadcast and social media are a new occurrence that needs to be factored into the discussion somehow, and if you were to argue that applying Enlightenment political theory to the current situation is an anachronism, I would tend to agree.

I’d also like to see social media and search engines legislated as utilities... but I’m in the EU so my opinion scarcely matters, to be perfectly honest.

buzzkillington2• 6 years ago

Would he defend your right to say it in his living room, though?

Twitter is not a living room.

Arguing from bad faith does no one good.

tootie5• 6 years ago

When Voltaire was alive the French government was a monarchy that employed official censors that had the authority to prevent criticism of the church or state from being published by anyone. That kind of censorship is explicitly illegal under the first amendment. There is really no precedent for the mass publication of free-flowing content from anyone in the world prior the 1980s that would be relevant.

buzzkillington2• 6 years ago

Censorship by the church is not illegal under the first amendment.

doublesCs• 6 years ago

Cue republicans outraged at the president's attack on the first amendment.

Lol joking, they love it.

sixstringtheory4• 6 years ago

Not like there’s any real impact here. Now if Twitter were in the cake business, it’d be a national security imperative to defend their rights as a private entity.

falcolas5• 6 years ago

Free speech is not just an American constitutional right; many countries throughout the world consider free speech to be a human right.

So, yeah, many of us get a bit worked up when people are kicked off platforms, because they are being silenced, sometimes to the point of being shut out of the modern internet entirely (when their rights to a DNS address are comprehensively removed).

Hate speech and lies are terrible, but they’re not the only thing being silenced.

ianleeclark6• 6 years ago

So, yeah, many of us get a bit worked up when people are kicked off platforms, because they are being silenced, sometimes to the point of being shut out of the modern internet entirely (when their rights to a DNS address are comprehensively removed).

Why is it bad that were refusing to let something like stormfront operate in polite society? Your free speech absolutism is dangerous.

You can't debate an inherently bad-faith interlocutor, so dealing with Nazis points "out in the open," "in the marketplace of ideas," will not work. It will only legitimize their viewpoint as one worthy of consideration, thus debate. It's cool and good what happened to them.

kortex2• 6 years ago

Such a tough subject.

The problem is this tactic is consistently agaisnt many dissident publications, often on pro-democratic ones by autocratic countries. So what/where do you draw the line for "this speech is unacceptable so we won't propagate DNS entries for it", and who draws it? USA? ICANN? The host country? Each DNS gets to pick and choose?

Going in the other direction, if this speech is so bad, why don't ISP's just ban the IP? We could do like Youtube automated takedowns, only it's a packet blackhole.

At the expense of pushing the satire, what we really need is Deep Packet Free Speech Inspection (tm). All packets are inspected by a blockchain-powered AI in the cloud for acceptibility and lack of Nazi content. All servers which respond to HTTPS must escrow TLS keys to enable Freedom Audits.

If allowing an operator to have DNS records or an IP address "legitimizes" them, then we need some full-blown worldwide consortium which determines the (il)legitimacy of each and every domain. Who has votes in this consortium? What if China wants to put the kabash on some Uyghurs because of "Terrorism" but Netherlands want to keep it up. Sounds like a beaurocratic nightmare.

AnimalMuppet8• 6 years ago

You debate an inherently bad-faith interlocutor, not to win the debate with them, but to win the audience. The thing is, something like stormfront is out there, whether twitter or whoever carries them or not. I'd like their drivel to be clearly exposed as drivel, and clearly understood to be drivel by everyone, so that when they get exposed to it in some unexpected way (they follow an innocent-looking link or whatever), then they take one look, think "Oh yeah, that garbage. Yeah, they make it sound good, but it's still trash." That happens when the stuff is publicly challenged and refuted, not when it's hidden away.

VeninVidiaVicii• 6 years ago

Correct. Twitter may be silenced altogether for exercising journalistic integrity.

Traster3• 6 years ago

Okay, so I think there's some nuance there, I think there's a pragmatic line to draw - I don't think someone has a right to say anything on twitter, I just don't think that's twitters role is to be neutral. But I think there's a line where we go from a product that's curated and moderated - something like twitter, to something that is truly infrastructure. The DNS example is great, I don't think a DNS company should be able to refuse to service based on the content that's being served because the role of the DNS is simply to resolve a name to an address. What's served on that address is immaterial. I think we draw a bright line between those two types of things, although I'm sure it's more difficult than that when we're trying to design a law.

RandomTisk8• 6 years ago

Then Twitter has to lose their protections as a 'carrier' and become a publisher with all the regulation that goes along with being a publisher.

falcolas5• 6 years ago

If Twitter wants control over what's published on their site, then they give up their rights (their 'free harbor'-alike protections) to not be held responsible for the content they censor and let through.

Twitter et al. are where modern speech happens. They pushed themselves into this position, and thus upholding the human right to free speech also falls upon them.

So long as Twitter is not shut down, then perhaps some government oversight (to the limit of holding Twitter responsible for what and who they censor) is appropriate.

Free speech, in this case, trumps my intense dislike of our current administration.

originalvichy• 6 years ago

Even in the case of DNS, you can still use a local hosts file to use a human-readable name.

Stranger432• 6 years ago

But at what point does an service cross from being an platform in an competitive market to an crucial part of the infrastructure used by an society for communication?

If twitter/facebook is allowed to serve as a primary means for an government organisation/department to serve as the primary way which it communicate it's not to hard to argue that that line have been crossed where it have to act as an "open access" common carirer, from an pragmatic real world stand point.

Putting an purely technical definition as the core of this debate is arguing over how many angels can fit on an pin needle, and not of any real value for deciding what kind of society we want.

Barrin922• 6 years ago

Free speech is not just an American constitutional right; many countries throughout the world consider free speech to be a human right.

Although virtually none do so in unrestricted fashion. Hate speech, racism, genocide denial and so on aren't protected by free-speech in the overwhelming amount of legislations even in countries with a liberal tradition, and just like any other right free speech is subject to limitations.

ethanbond• 6 years ago

Just to be absolutely clear, the United States is one (yes, unique) case that does protect all of the types of speech you listed here.

dang3• 6 years ago

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322571)

ThinkBeat• 6 years ago

I hope he does.

These gigantic centralized silo monopolies that recreate the experience of AOL online.

They have way more power than any American (or any other country) company should have in the world. Their reach is global, what they do, impacts millions of people who have no say whatsoever.

I long for a much more distributed system. (Doesn't have to be some fancy federated system.

I would be happy with real competition by a few hundred companies distributed around the world.

Closing down, or neutering the behemoths would be the most useful thing Trump will ever do.

He will soon realize that he cannot, or maybe he just forgets about it, or maybe he tries and the supreme court strikes it down. I cannot imagine how much money is flowing from the silos to lobbyists in Washington right now.

shadowgovt39• 6 years ago

He's extremely unlikely to take real action because Twitter is his primary channel for reaching his political base. It's not guaranteed they'd migrate to where else he may choose to go (ever helped a relative figure out how to install a Zoom-alike videoconferencing app on their phone? Like that, but multiplied by millions of people. The science of engagement and stickiness tells us about half wouldn't bother to follow if they had to install one more app to hear the President's words).

A4ET8a8uTh02• 6 years ago

Obviously, based on his history, it is just a reaction, but not necessarily an idle threat. I am both hesitant and interested at the same time. It is a little like his stance on FISA. It it clear any changes are just to benefit, but some of the power held by FISA and social media should be curbed.

shadowgovt39• 6 years ago

Not every day a sitting President threatens a media outlet for exercising their freedom of the press, but it's not the first time it's happened.

Of course, most Presidents have been constrained by some modicum of understanding that their oath to uphold the Constitution applies to the whole thing.

frockington15• 6 years ago

Is Twitter a media outlet? If they want to be classified as such it might make them susceptible to slander lawsuits

shadowgovt39• 6 years ago

If the Trump election campaign wants to sue Twitter for libel, they're welcome to try. The President has already tried suing the New York Times for libel for publishing an op-ed he didn't like.

elicash• 6 years ago

Please read this article: https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/21/18700605/section-230-inte...

askl562• 6 years ago

The problem inevitably has flared up: Twitter's head of integrity leading this push has previously tweeted that Trump is a Nazi and accused the flyover states of being racist.

https://twitter.com/Liz_Wheeler/status/1265463081997484032

This isn't going to end well, and unless Twitter is going to exercise this impartially (which is impossible given a human is involved), they are going to lose their platform status, and justifiably so.

ChrisLTD2• 6 years ago

What’s “platform status”?

dvtrn10• 6 years ago

Blue Check mark.

colejohnson6615• 6 years ago

I’m assuming Section 230?

jonfw3• 6 years ago

You can either be a 'platform' for other people to speak, where you aren't held responsible for the content you host, or you can be a 'curator' where you control the content and are responsible or what you host.

The trouble with Twitter (in some people's view) is that they play both sides- they're just a public platform when there is something illegal that they're hosting, but they're a curator when they don't like what you've posted.

whatever1• 6 years ago

What is the justification?

javagram9• 6 years ago

This isn't going to end well, and unless Twitter is going to exercise this impartially (which is impossible given a human is involved), they are going to lose their platform status, and justifiably so.

This isn’t how the law works, and Trump’s enemies, the Democrats, control the House of Representatives.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects the ability of online services to moderate content, this has been repeatedly upheld by the courts. The only way it could change is if the Senate, House, and President agree on a new law and pass it.

If you want to learn more, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

josefresco2• 6 years ago

To clarify, he didn't call Trump a Nazi. He said there are "actual Nazis in the White House" which could be a reference to staff or appointees.

askl562• 6 years ago

Regardless, that would need to be fact checked?

A4ET8a8uTh02• 6 years ago

Repost from duplicate post:

Obviously, based on his history, it is just a reaction, but not necessarily an idle threat. I am both hesitant and interested at the same time. It is a little like his stance on FISA. It it clear any changes are just to benefit the president with other benefits being an afterthought, but some of the power held by FISA and social media should be curbed

laumars• 6 years ago

Direct link to Tweet (TC doesn't really add any detail and people have moaned about their cookie-consent dark patterns before):

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12656016113107394...

0-_-0• 6 years ago

Nitter link (for anyone who doesn't like opening Twitter links): https://nitter.net/realDonaldTrump/status/126560161131073945...

c0wardthr0waway• 6 years ago

"Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices"

Reddit is the best example of that. I don't want to defend him but look at every single news and politics related sub from /r/news, /r/worldnews, /r/politics etc.

But that happens here too. Honestly I blame the upvote downvote system more. Reddit and HN are both really wrong with it

zozbot2345• 6 years ago

Reddit literally censors the actual Donald Trump campaign subreddit: it's hidden behind a scary warning screen and demonetized https://old.reddit.com/r/The_Donald . Hilarious. They don't even pretend to be unbiased or to care about their userbase that's equally on both sides of the political spectrum.

ceejayoz7• 6 years ago

Reddit resisted doing that for years, until the violations of Reddit's site-wide rules became too blatant and widespread to continue ignoring.

standardUser4• 6 years ago

This is because it is littered with personal attacks, lies and defamation. When the president pushes unsubstantiated conspiracy theories and makes constant attacks against private citizens, that crosses the line regardless of party. Being unbiased does not mean promoting/supporting vile personal attacks.

jaybeeayyy2• 6 years ago

I don't believe the Donald Trump campaign has officially recognized that subreddit as being a part of their campaign...

but they also did the same quarantine to r/Chapo_Traphouse, a leftist podcast subreddit, so I'm not sure why you think it's not equal. Did you not know about Chapo being quarantined?

ianleeclark6• 6 years ago

They had to quarantine that sub because of a tidal wave of pro-shooting-cops posts whenever a bunch of Oregonian Republicans skipped town to hide in the woods with paramilitaries.

jaybeeayyy2• 6 years ago

How is reddit silencing conservative voices? Downvotes don't count. There's plenty of conservative and right leaning subreddits with a lot of activity.

Just because there's not as much traction or acceptance among the users of reddit for conservative or right-wing ideas, comments etc. doesn't mean Reddit itself is actively silencing voices. You can't force people to not downvote things they don't like or agree with.

standardUser4• 6 years ago

There is trend in American conservatism to take increasingly hostile and indefensible positions, and that trend has been met with counter trend that increasingly marginalizes those voices. Arguing for limited government is not likely to get a huge reaction from any given public platform. But arguing in favor of debunked conspiracy theories that make false allegations or defending the president's frequent personal attacks on individuals can and probably should be met with downvotes. Just like any personal attack should be.

frockington15• 6 years ago

Case and point being the valid point you raised being down voted into the gray. Upvote/Downvote systems just encourage the side with the most free time to be the only opinion seen. I think this may be part of the reason so many people on Reddit and Hacker News are routinely surprised by election results. Echo chambers do not represent the real world

wincy• 6 years ago

I posted a few random comments to the_donald right after the election and it took years before I didn’t have a good chance of getting a really nasty message about how I was a Nazi when leaving comments anywhere else.

raziel2p6• 6 years ago

The very same Reddit where criticism frequently gets you banned or censored in subreddits like /r/conservative ?

Just because the majority in a particular community disagrees with you doesn't make you censored or silenced.

rlyshw• 6 years ago

Honestly just more proof that we need decentralization of the Internet. Handing over control of our digital platforms and identities to 3rd party for-profit companies is not the way the internet should work.

bt1a• 6 years ago

Aye but with no one in charge, how can the masses protect themselves against ever-increasing disinformation campaigns?

caseysoftware7• 6 years ago

This is only a problem if you believe the public education system isn't doing its job to create thoughtful, educated people with an understanding of the world around them.

ccsnags• 6 years ago

If there is control over information, how do the masses protect themselves against disinformation campaigns coming from official sources?

Conspiracy theories and baseless nonsense is the price you pay to be able to criticize those in power. It is a price worth paying.

sparkie4• 6 years ago

Idea: put a monetary cost on publishing information. Receiving spam should be profitable. Disinformation campaigns will be costly.

If the information is useful and worth reading, the viewer will pay back the publisher, an amount which covers the initial publishing cost and additional revenue for the publisher.

Conversely, if the information is garbage or incorrect, the viewer will not pay the fee and it will be a loss for the publisher.

The payments can be small, cheap and fast via Bitcoin's Lightning Network.

ForHackernews• 6 years ago

Mass disinformation campaigns become more expensive and difficult to orchestrate if you have to target them at zillions of decentralized forums, each with their own moderation policies and local cultures.

polytely• 6 years ago

Well in the case of mastodon, I found an instance with an owner whose judgement I trust.

I think the main problem with twitter is scale: Because the network allows you to reach the whole world it also is a big target for disinformation networks and the sheer volume of posts makes it uneconomical to moderate.

If you look at mastodon, the instance I'm on has about 600 monthly active users. That's pretty easy for an admin to handle. If a bunch of users show up orchestrating a disinfo campaign the admin would notice, and if an instance is a source of disinfo it can be blocked.

Instance will stop federating with other instances if they are too much to deal with, so admins are incentivized not to grow beyond what they could moderate, to maintain access to the fediverse.

thomk• 6 years ago

The same way we do it with email.

javagram9• 6 years ago

Trump could start his own Mastodon or Gab server for his legions to follow him on. His campaign certainly has the resources.

djohnston3• 6 years ago

The head of integrity has unabashedly showcased his strong political bias on Twitter, and I suspect things will begin going poorly for either him or Twitter shortly.

adwww2• 6 years ago

lol what, he is biased for pointing out misinformation from a prominent public figure, after years of Twitter being criticised for allowing false information to proliferate?

djohnston3• 6 years ago

No no, he is biased from his own Twitter history. It is clear he despises Trump and conservatives more generally. I don't have a dog in this fight, but I would certainly pause to consider the ramifications of this individual being the source of truthiness for Twitter b

plehoux• 6 years ago

I think he is referencing those tweets: https://twitter.com/LevineJonathan/status/126545757821512499...

gonzo412• 6 years ago

Everyone hates change. Twitter wants to live in the future so it has to change and show behaviors more like the news and information service it currently is, And trump and others don't want twitter to change because currently they can communicate with bubbles isolated from reality.

I really don't like twitter for all the crap and bots that's on there. I think it's a terrible format. But I think we are in a middle time, were new publishers and formats are rising at the same time as traditional media is falling. Hopefully larger publisher's and media organizations such as Facebook, Google and Twitter take the power and responsibility they have seriously.

noworriesnate• 6 years ago

It is not misinformation to be concerned about mail-in ballots. There have been screw ups with mail in ballots in the past. For example: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=964371...

For more stories just google "Military main-in ballots lost"

nojito3• 6 years ago

twitter is a private organization. Regulating the speech of private organizations is a dangerous slope to be on.

akhilcacharya4• 6 years ago

As a hill to die on though, it's certainly revealing!

alharith5• 6 years ago

Private organization that enjoys the legal protections of a platform. Reclassify them as a publisher. Can't have it both ways.

fantastisch2• 6 years ago

When private organizations are regulating the speech of the population? It's a necessary slope.

Because doing it without centralized government control is bad. But regulation of speech can be good. Take a look at https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1189120.shtml for an interesting discussion.

epistasis2• 6 years ago

Sorry, what "bias" is that?

josefresco2• 6 years ago

Turns out, people with important jobs that require impartiality (like judges) have real, personal, opinions and feelings.

palsir2• 6 years ago

but judges are publicly accountable, while corporations (and their agents) can do what they want. Comes back down to the publisher/curator debate.

seerbetter2• 6 years ago

He dismissed the entire Midwest as lunatics to be ignored. There’s a lot of hackers and engineers and amazing companies in the Midwest.

He’s mindless in his opinions. He’s not against a policy or a politician. He’s separating society.

devtul2• 6 years ago

The amount of leeway given to one side of the political spectrum is what causes this whole heated political climate.

Whenever some known person from the "right side of history" says something clearly bad, there are always comments like yours "but but but", whereas when the source is on the "wrong side of history" it is taken as final and irrefutable proof of their evilness and no amount of perspective or depth is allowed.

Things will get better when we can give a level headed non-partisan response to statements like

Today on Meet The Press, we're speaking with Joseph Goebbels about the first 100 days...' - What I hear whenever Kellyanne is on a news show.'

jmull3• 6 years ago

the real shame is that integrity is a politically biased position now.

anewdirection10• 6 years ago

Which neither Twitter nor Trump posess in great margin.

shadowgovt39• 6 years ago

If fact-checking the President when he says untrue things is "strong political bias," there are larger problems than the fate of one employee at Twitter.

djohnston3• 6 years ago

That isn't the bias, check his Twitter history there are links all over this thread

wegs3• 6 years ago

For the most part, I support platform neutrality. I don't agree with all the Google censorship of misinformation and "misinformation" on their platforms. I think Facebook should have less evil algorithms (it seems designed to encourage polarization), but I wouldn't want censorship or commentary their either.

This case is an exception. Twitter drew a line in the sand. It is in exactly the right place.

The PoTUS is threatening to shut down elections in November: he seems to be doing everything in his power to have a national emergency then when people can't vote, to shut down post offices, and to ban voting by mail. Any other problems with the PoTUS, we should address in the ballot box and through citizen activism (not through corporate activism). But when the PoTUS tries to shut down the ballot box or shut down citizen activism, that's different.

I don't think he's likely to be successful, but I didn't think coronavirus would hit us this hard either. In January, it was a manageable billion-dollar problem. We did nothing. Now, it's a multi-trillion dollar problem. Right now, Trump trying to cancel the election is a manageable problem too; by his personality, if he doesn't get traction, we're done. He'll move on. But if he does get traction, we'll have a completely different scale of problem on our hands.

commandlinefan2• 6 years ago

It is in exactly the right place

If they start fact-checking everybody, it is. Otherwise, they're just campaigning for the other side.

aabhay2• 6 years ago

They have been fact checking other people. It was precisely that they weren’t fact checking trump.

loceng2• 6 years ago

The internet itself needs to be the platform that is neutral, and then allowing the freedom of people to have private corporations - "digital land" they own - and can therefore moderate how they choose to govern, thereby giving individuals the freedom to decide who they use, give their attention to, and support financially.

There are separate issues like economies of scale that don't allow a completely level playing field - however a monthly UBI where part of it is required to be allocated to be used for digital services (e.g. pay for Facebook vs. being bombarded by manipulative ads) would allow everyone to afford costs of bandwidth-CPU usage etc to take that burden off of private companies and would level the playing field.

Similarly these massive platforms like Facebook wouldn't have grown to their scale if people's data and networks were completely mobile with no friction, therefore it would be a competitive battle based on governance and not merely difficulty, laziness, leading to strong defensible network effects.

50ckpuppet• 6 years ago

"The PoTUS is threatening to shut down elections in November:"

linkage ??

wegs3• 6 years ago

If there's a public health crisis, and people can't safely leave homes and can't vote by mail, there is no meaningful election.

Right now, he's:

* Doing everything in his power to have a public health crisis (which means people can't go out to vote)

* Working to bankrupt the USPS so people can't vote by mail

* Threatening to go after states which support vote-by-mail (that's the tweet and similar statements -- withholding federal funding to states which vote by mail)

That's a concerning set of signals.

That's not a verbal threat like a declaration of war, if that's the link you're looking for. It's a threat like when a country conducts military drills on your border, or like when there's a new virus outbreak on the other side of the world. Problems might or might not materialize, but you should take actions to be ready both to minimize the odds of problems, and in case they do.

Our current PoTUS is an opportunist. He hedges and hangs out ideas to see if they'll get traction. If he gets any traction on an idea, he exploits it very effectively. If he doesn't get traction, he moves on. That has upsides and downsides, but in this case, it's to everyone's advantage that he doesn't get traction.

And the response should be very similar. If a country appears to be preparing to invade, you prepare to defend yourself. That doesn't mean you need to be obnoxious about it or try to provoke a war (politeness pays), but you do want to respond to the threat.

I apologize if I was imprecise in my wording. The word 'threat' has multiple meanings. I don't want to vilify the PoTUS, but I do want to make sure the checks-and-balances stay in place. That take vigilance against threats, both real and potential.

jki2752• 6 years ago

There isn't one. It's just fearmongery.

pseingatl• 6 years ago

Don't forget that the largest shareholders of Twitter, after its own founders are the government of Saudi Arabia acting though Walid bin Talal. Censorship is not unknown in Saudi Arabia.

ojbyrne• 6 years ago

Oh? https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s...

akhilcacharya4• 6 years ago

I'm old enough to remember when conservatives accused the left of being against "free speech".

anewdirection10• 6 years ago

It switches sides every 15-25 years, as youd notice, surely.

Parties have little in common with what they were even 20 years ago.

VBprogrammer• 6 years ago

Can this even be considered a free speech issue? They aren't deleting his tweet, only displaying it alongside a fact check. Of course you can try to call into question the impartiality of the fact check but that is a long way from not deciding not to show the content.

danShumway6• 6 years ago

Not only does it not seem to be a free speech issue to me, from my point of view this is basically the best-case scenario for avoiding censorship of contentious issues on dominant platforms like Facebook/Twitter. It's the obvious conclusion to arguments like, "the way to deal with bad speech is with more good speech."

Twitter saw speech they disagreed with, and they fixed it with more speech. They haven't censored any of Trump's arguments, they didn't delete his tweets. They just added their own commentary on top of them. That's what Republicans have always claimed they wanted. Argue that people are wrong, don't censor them. Don't throw people off the platform, add a fact-check.

I grew up listening to Republicans rail against the Fairness Doctrine, and I basically agreed with them on that point. Forcing private broadcasters to act like they were neutral on every issue was problematic. But now apparently that's flipped and free speech means forcing a private company not to take sides on any issue, even when taking a side doesn't require censoring or restricting anyone else's speech.

Any Republican that was genuinely anti-censorship would be cheering Twitter's move, even if they disagreed with the content of this particular fact-check.

cheaprentalyeti2• 6 years ago

And twitter doesn't do this with leftist speech that's wrong/inaccurate propaganda for the sake of propaganda, like (oh, for instance) today someone was posting a photoshopped picture of one of the recent reportedly abusive cops in a "Make America White Again" red hat.

So wave the bloody shirt, that's AOK, but say that vote by mail facilitates fraud, and you get a personalized "We Don't Think So!" message from twitter.

Twitter hosts outrage mobs that have the stated goals of getting people fired, and it has caused people I was following to quit the platform.

They simultaneously want to exercise editorial discresion while not being liable for for all the outrageous or outright wrong speech they do host.

__s• 6 years ago

If Trump can levy something vs Twitter then soon enough he'll be using the same mechanism to say fake news is censoring him when they report on what he's saying

mathdev• 6 years ago

A fact check would be fine if it led to objective analyses of some sort, or even Wikipedia. But when I clicked it, it displayed some highly partisan sources, including a CNN article with its usual "Trump bad" vitriol. Maybe it was an algorithm's fault, but it didn't work at all.

paulryanrogers• 6 years ago

Would an AP article similarly critical of the president's remarks been more acceptable?

gameswithgo2• 6 years ago

How do you objectively report on trump without it painting him in a bad light?

m-p-3• 6 years ago

And if he decided to "close" Twitter, it would actually be a clear case of censorship from the government and a violation of free speech.

Twitter is merely labelling a tweet as being factually incorrect, it's not hiding the content.

rsynnott3• 6 years ago

Well, it wouldn't be, because he _couldn't do it_. He's not a dictator, despite apparent aspirations.

kgin2• 6 years ago

It would actually be the first action in this whole story that would truly fall under the definition of "prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech"

tathougies2• 6 years ago

Twitter is merely labelling a tweet as being factually incorrect, it's not hiding the content.

I think it really depends on what you view twitter as. If it's a communications platform, like your phone, then yes 'merely labelling a tweet' is as troubling as your phone company deciding to shut your call off when you mention to a friend that you're going to vote for Biden. If Twitter is a publishing platform, then it certainly can expose its editorial bias, but one must really consider whether or not it should have to pay its writers.

Bombthecat3• 6 years ago

But isn't that what all the tweets under the tweet from president probably do? They correct him? What would be the difference?

The difference would be one is a company, the other a real person. No need for the company to get involved.

People who ignore the correctios and other tweets will ignore the company anyway.

dang3• 6 years ago

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322571)

paultopia• 6 years ago

constitutional law professor with a phd in political theory slowly raises hand

No, it cannot even be considered a free speech issue (except insofar as Trump proposes to censor Twitter). Those of us in the con law/democratic theory community, and everyone else in the universe who is even semi-rational, use them term "counterspeech" to describe what Twitter did.

Traditionally, counterspeech is seen as the virtuous alternative to censorship---as the thing that us snotty free speech people tell those who call for their opponents to be censored to do instead. John Stuart Mill would jump up and down and pop champagne in celebration of what Twitter did.

OliverJones• 6 years ago

A "conservative" government threatens to shut down private businesses. Wait, what?

Maybe the billionaire hotel magnate from New York should arrange a leveraged buyout of the business he doesn't like, and shut it down when he owns it.

C1sc0cat2• 6 years ago

Its not real "conservative" views that get censored is it its entryist far right views.

Its like in the UK when Corbyn's crank supporters claim ultra far left positions are main steam labour views when they are not.

catalogia4• 6 years ago

Corbyn is ultra far left? The way he was getting slandered as some sort of neonazi, I assumed he was considered too rightwing or something.

British politics can be confusing to outside observers..

bilbo0s2• 6 years ago

Just to distance myself from the current "conservative" establishment, I would argue that their views are not conservative so much as they are a relatively newer form of fascism. Typically with fascism there is nationalism that prioritizes the citizens of the nation above all else, but with this new "conservatism" in the US, the nationalism is a bit more race-based. But other than that it's much more close to fascism than what we in the US typically considered "conservatism".

Maybe we need a new word for it altogether?

SauciestGNU• 6 years ago

the nationalism is a bit more race-based

You could almost say it's a white nationalism. But really I think it's less about race and more about capital and political fealty. Loyalty to the seats of power above all else, and your value to the party and its "society" determined relative to your capital holdings.

krapp5• 6 years ago

Maybe we need a new word for it altogether?

It's called the "alt-right[0]."

And at the fringe of the fringe, right-wing accelerationism[1].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right

[1]https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/11/11/20882005/accele...

yc-kraln• 6 years ago

Ethnofascism or Ethnopluralism...

shmageggy• 6 years ago

Seems nonsensical like most of what Trump does, until you accept that he operates on the third axis of the political compass: how flattering or critical something is to Trump.

shadowgovt39• 6 years ago

I notice this post is flagged.

HN will do what it do, but I can't escape the feeling that in an era where a President uses Twitter, HN will become less relevant as a technological discourse destination if it lacks the will to touch the ramifications of technology and politics combined.

majewsky2• 6 years ago

We have enough forums that allow or encourage political discussions and then inevitably devolve into hyper-partisan shitshows (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc.). It's nice to have a refuge that's mostly free from this dynamic.

shadowgovt39• 6 years ago

Good point. I respect the right of people to have a safe space. I hope HN can continue to be one.

These are interesting times we live in, with a President leveraging modern communications technology in a way that hasn't really been seen since the fireside chat era of the Roosevelt administration.

myspy• 6 years ago

Well, Facebook and Twitter are currently used in cyberwarfare to destabilise western democracies and the result is pretty impressive, because it works.

Give people their Facebook but remove the algorithms from the timeline and close all groups to make it harder for people to spread misinformation and group together to celebrate it. Or close it all together, social media doesn't have that many upsides. My observation from more than ten years with those tools.

No idea where the problem lies in Twitter but marking tweets with lies and conspiracy stuff is a step in a good direction.

cryptonector9• 6 years ago

Social media can't not have algorithms for limiting what you get to see, otherwise you'd be swamped with items on your timeline and you'd stop using them. Oh, I see what you're doing. Yes, they should get rid of the algorithms!

adrianN• 6 years ago

When Trump closes down social media we can finally go back to the version of the Internet were people just had personal blogs and you curated your "feed" yourself by subscribing to their RSS.

systematical• 6 years ago

Uh huh...

jdhn2• 6 years ago

Putting aside concerns about overreach government powers, would ending social media as we know it really be a bad thing?

raziel2p6• 6 years ago

How? Forbid all of it? Forbid what, exactly - any app that allows communication between more than 1 person?

Even if Twitter were to go bankrupt tomorrow, something else would come to replace it.

jdhn2• 6 years ago

If Trump actually closed it (not going to happen), then something may come along to replace Twitter, but it certainly wouldn't act like Twitter.

ImprobableTruth5• 6 years ago

Social media can only survive because of safe harbor provisions. If sites become responsible for the content they host, social media as we know would instantly die out.

eloc49• 6 years ago

Get rid of section 230

teknopaul• 6 years ago

That would be a USA Great Firewall. It would require some re-branding to get the US population to accept it

michaelt2• 6 years ago

We're gonna build a wall, and make Cyberspace pay for it.

Mindwipe• 6 years ago

Trump would have no intention of ending social media. He just wants to end social media that doesn't do what he wants.

And yes, that would be an overwhelmingly bad thing.

ecmascript• 6 years ago

I think it would be great and I pretty much long for it. It's so obvious that even if it may be an overreach, there is such malpractice going on from all major social media players.

Youtube: Censors youtubers, documented in so many cases. It also gives "authoritarian news" a heavier weight in the algorithm. Removes comments with "communist bandits" in Chinese.

Twitter: Seriously bans people if they say the wrong pronoun

Reddit: A few people controls the majority of big subreddits, bans people with conservative views outright. Bans people that upvote stuff that they don't like. The have removed, banned hundreds of subreddits and users in the last few months. While they have chinese owners.

Facebook: Surprisingly the best of the bunch when it comes to serving every viewpoint imo. But they have had huge privacy implications just so many times.

But even so, I am very torn on the subject. The best thing would probably to force these companies not to censor/ban/remove people based on opinions. But the best thing for the world would most likely for these social media sites to not exist in the first place.

Personally I think social media sucks but I think most people are not ready to live without it either.

neuland3• 6 years ago

Although it's impossible to put the genie back in the bottle, social media has had a net negative effect on a LOT of people. There's people that have had a big positive effect to. So, it's not obvious where it ends up on net if that even matters.

But, yeah. There's a lot of people that would be better off not on social media. But it's so addictive that they can't help themselves.

I, for one, have stopped using social media (unless you consider HN social). And I've had a lot less friends because of it. But it's been a huge improvement in my mood and outlook on life.

Loughla3• 6 years ago

(unless you consider HN social)

Yes, yes it is. What else would it be? What's the difference between sites like HN and reddit, and facebook?

hunter2_3• 6 years ago

unless you consider HN social

Why wouldn't we? Pseudonyms? Reddit is considered social, I think, and that tends to be even more difficult to map to IRL identity.

Edit: just barely not inb4!

Wowfunhappy• 6 years ago

I could do without Facebook and Twitter, but what counts as social media? Does Stack Exchange count? Hacker News? Email?

drewmate• 6 years ago

We probably need a more detailed vocabulary for describing various types of social media. In my opinion, the most insidious forms of social media share three attributes:

* Broad reach - they are accessible to and used by a population broadly for public communication rather than a specific subset of the population or private communication.

* Optimized for engagement - Content is personalized and optimized for individual engagement. Compare this to a stream of content organized by time (email inbox) or basically time with minimal voting/decaying (HN)

* Feedback is quantifiable and visible - Likes, retweets, upvotes (ie, engagement metrics) are countable and displayed to users. I think this gets at something deep in the human psyche and encourages users to chase those metrics.

It turns out that in systems with all three (FB, Twitter), you create enormous echo chambers that only occasionally flare up into outrage when they inevitably leak to a broader audience. This is great for engagement but pretty self evidently bad for society.

Lots of sites fit somewhere on this spectrum (including HN and Stack Exchange) but have basic safeguards to prevent the worst types of behavior. But this is usually because they aren't profit motivated to slide all the way to one side on the three factors above.

Someone1234• 6 years ago

Just so we're clear: Hacker News is social media.

hunter2_3• 6 years ago

Are message boards / BBS / forums?

rcurry• 6 years ago

But you can - just don't use it.

boomboomsubban• 6 years ago

From a free speech/free press standpoint, private company Twitter absolutely has the right to editorialize Trump's tweets, while Trump trying to silence Twitter would be the government infringing on the right to free speech/press.

sabertoothed2• 6 years ago

Exactly. It is just another lie that Twitter would be "stifling free speech". Free speech was not stifled: Trump could even say what he wanted even though it is a private platform.

rodiger• 6 years ago

When referring to free speech, it is common to refer to the moral backbone of freedom of speech (strong entity shouldn't be able to silence the masses) instead of just the legal/constitutional definition.

nautilus126• 6 years ago

But if that were true then they would be personally liable in a court of law for tweets that break the law. Seems like they want to be treated as both an "editor" with the right to change user content and "just a distribution platform". They can't have it both ways.

nautilus126• 6 years ago

This comment aged well...

TechBro86153• 6 years ago

What about from an FEC regulations standpoint? Does Twitter have the right to insert DNC messaging into Trump tweets without the DNC disclosing the donation?

FireBeyond5• 6 years ago

That would be in violation of electoral law, and the moment Twitter does that, I'm sure there will be a repercussion. It's also quite the leap, even from here.

tibbydudeza2• 6 years ago

About bloody time twitter.

tuna-piano• 6 years ago

There's an unsolved conundrum I haven't heard mentioned yet.

After the 2016 election, there was a thought that too much false information is spreading on social media. This happens in every country and across every form of communication - but social media platforms seem particularly worrysome (and is particularly bad with Whatsapp forwards in some Asian countries).

So what should the social media companies do? Censor people? Disallow certain messages (like they do with terrorism related posts)?

They settled on just putting in fact check links with certain posts. Trust in the fact deciding institution will of course be difficult to settle. No one wants a ministry of truth (or the private alternative).

So the question remains - do you, or how do you lessen the spread of misinformation?

dvtrn10• 6 years ago

Media literacy and criticism classes in middle school?

mcculley2• 6 years ago

I have been wondering how one would teach enough evolutionary psychology and neuroscience to children to make them less susceptible to memetic engineering. Now that we have gone from human marketers to automated systems working to influence purchases and votes, traditional media criticism seems insufficient.

nerdkid93• 6 years ago

1,000 times yes! In elementary and middle school, I had weekly learning from our school librarian on seeking the truth through a consensus of multiple sources. She taught us how to properly use Wikipedia as a source for finding other sources.

Crash Course (the YouTube channel) published a short series last year on Navigating Digital Information (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtN07XYqqWSK...). I really appreciated its pointers for how to deal with social media.

ascagnel_2• 6 years ago

I'd agree, with one caveat: there have been plenty of cases where groups push political or other controversial causes via the schools systems (see: the "teach the controversy" and "intelligent design" cases of trying to classify a deistic creation story as backed by science). I can easily see a world where media literacy classes are hijacked to teach the opposite of what ideally should be taught, in order to serve the needs of a few politicians rather than society as a whole.

cryoshon• 6 years ago

critical thinking classes from kindergarten through the end of college.

i have developed a loose curriculum for the latter half of that pipeline, but getting the education uniformly distributed throughout the public mind market is the hard part.

snowwrestler• 6 years ago

Absolutely.

It's always surprising to me to see tech folks disparage humanities studies, then seem flabbergasted at how to fight problems like disinformation/misinformation. IMO, studying language, literature, and criticism are critical skills for operating in a culture that is flooded with information.

In terms of what we can do right now... I've been following Mike Caulfield on Twitter (@holden) and he is doing some interesting work on developing mental tools that school kids can use to evaluate the information that comes to them in social feeds.

https://twitter.com/holden

bobbytherobot• 6 years ago

Sure, I'm all for teaching it. It would still face the same issues as other education topics. Use science as an example. It is taught in schools. And yet, we still have a strong anti-science culture in the U.S.

staycoolboy4• 6 years ago

I used to think this was the answer.

I now think the problem with this is a lack of standards. It is documented that textbook manufacturers publish different history and science texts based on the region of the country regarding the civil war or evolution.

Not to be a nihilist, but what makes you think underfunded schools that struggle to teach basic reading will teach media literacy and criticism with any success? and will be supported by publishers that feel the same way?

I also think critical thinking is VERY hard. Harder than people imagine. It is hard to teach, hard to deploy, hard to practice. I'm not sure even 20% of the population could muster the brain power required to sift through today's onslaught of zone-flooding garbage.

nitwit005• 6 years ago

I took a critical thinking class in university, which covered deceptive messaging from advertisements fairly heavily. I'd like to think they all came out of that class no longer able to be fooled by this sort of thing, but I know it isn't the case.

It's easy to get people to question advertising, because they aren't emotionally invested. Once you stray into religion and politics, people often stop caring that they're hearing plainly untrue, or even self-contradictory, ideas.

brighton36• 6 years ago

There's nothing we can do. We should stop pretending otherwise.

This it it. We did it. There is nothing for us to do, but celebrate.

cwhiz3• 6 years ago

So the question remains - do you, or how do you lessen the spread of misinformation?

The easiest is to get rid of bots and control who can tweet. Anyone can create an account but to tweet you need to prove your identity. Bots are the real issue. Trump lying on social media is a problem but it's not fundamentally dissimilar to him lying on TV or at a campaign rally. He is a liar and whatever platform he is on he will use it to lie. The problem is all the bots masquerading as humans making people think and believe that the lies are mainstream facts.

jobigoud2• 6 years ago

Misinformation spreads a lot human-to-human too. Like on Whatsapp or Facebook for example.

metrokoi5• 6 years ago

What would be required to prove your identity? Would you be able to tweet anonymously, or must you tweet under that identity? There are some issues with that, for example people without government identification would not be allowed to tweet. Perhaps you could use unique fingerprints, but that turns into a huge privacy concern and I can never see that being accepted. Maybe there are some unique bio-markers that could be used which people feel would be irrelevant or otherwise useless enough to not be an invasion of privacy.

asdkhadsj• 6 years ago

As a straw man for discussion; I'm not too familiar with what Twitter is doing, but in an ideal world I think the solution would look something like what Twitter sounds like. Notably, posts containing objectively false information would be flagged, but not necessarily censored.

With that straw man though, it's fairly easy to poke holes. How do we ever even implement that? Even if we ignore the sheer volume of posts, a single post is often difficult to fact check. The lie can be subtle, but even worse is the human language and how much room there can be for misdirection, dishonesty, etc.

In my spare time I work on a project (not even close to release lol) with the goal of easing information sharing, retention, etc - as I figure part of the problem to the current age is a lack of information. Wikipedia is great, but it's quite large form discussion and I think we need better tools to help us document our own conclusions. BUT, even in all the effort I've put towards this tool I haven't dreamed of quantifying the truthiness.

I just don't see how we're going to cope with these sort of truth problems. It concerns me. It feels like information is a tool of war these days, and I am concerned we're losing.

jobigoud2• 6 years ago

One avenue that has been taken by Youtube for example with the Coronavirus news is to not try to detect lies/truths but just detect the controversial topic and add a banner under the video with a link to official sources. It's much simpler to implement. A disadvantage is that it becomes so ubiquitous that people probably don't care about the link.

zarkov992• 6 years ago

Its a big problem. On the one hand social media companies are utterly unsuitable for the role of arbitrers of truth. All they do is enforce the fashionable, safe truths, which might end up not being safe or true. On the other hand there is definitely disinformation out there, carefully crafted to achieve specific goals. We need a sort of peer review for social media, some sort of trust network that you can use to assess the reliability of information. The fact check is one such mechanism, though who checks the checkers is still a issue..

mhucka2• 6 years ago

In the case of Facebook at least, there is evidence they knowingly allow their algorithms to promote divisive content: https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-di...

snarf21• 6 years ago

To be fair, this isn't a new problem. Historically, newspapers had a similar control. It is interesting because most people want to be in an echo chamber. We as humans long to belong. We don't want to be completely wrong. Newspapers mitigated this by having multiple layers of editorial control and attempting to only put people in control who value truth, although that isn't absolute. The difference with Twitter is that anyone can spew anything and to large audiences and the network effect is huge. Back in the day, a newspaper printing garbage in Tulsa probably had no influence in Seattle. That is no longer the case.

The interesting thing that I think Jack Dorsey should respond directly to Trump's tweet about regulation is "I'm sorry you no longer find Twitter useful. Feel free to use a competitor's product." The main reason that the social networks haven't clamped down is that they need the eyeballs and controversial figures generate a lot on both sides (hate/love).

yesplorer2• 6 years ago

Whatsapp forwards is largely a solved problem. Now you can't forward whatsapp messages to more than 5 people at a go. And if you try doing 5 people at a time consecutively, your account is automatically deleted even before you reach 30 total forwards.

Some people adopted a strategy of adding users to a group and dropping whatever message they have but that too is solved by allowing only known contacts to add you to groups.

stickfigure2• 6 years ago

Your solution is to ban humans from talking to more than 5 others at once?

pfraze2• 6 years ago

I think we're trapped in a structural innovation problem. Social media, no matter how it started, is now the pipeline for information. The internet is displacing old media forms but stalling out on that development.

The system is stuck in two local maximums: news publishers which use their own web properties as some kind of newspaper/television hybrid, and social media platforms which conceive of media as only posts, votes, & comments. They're both "monolithic architectures" (so to speak) which lack the kind of modularity or extensibility that would enable innovation.

On the Internet, we should be looking at information within the context of general computation. There are data sources (reporters, individuals, orgs) which get mixed with signals (votes, fact-checks, annotations) and then ranked, filtered, and rendered. An open market would maximize the modularity and extensibility of each of these components so that better media products can be created.

The social platforms are in a difficult position because they have total control over what's carried on their platforms, and so they want to assert a position of neutrality -- which is why they're adamant they're not media companies. But if they're controlling any part of the pipeline other than compute and hosting, they're not a neutral platform. They're a part of the media.

The way we've historically walked the tight-rope of misinformation vs censorship is to create an open market for journalism so that there's accountability through the system. I don't think we'll have an open market until we componentize social media and stop seeing journalism and the design of social media as two distinct things.

asdff2• 6 years ago

It's as simple as toning down the virulance and addiction potential that has been baked into social media over the years. Revert to chronological feeds based on timestamp alone, and not sorting based on how many inflammatory comments and shares they have. Ban more pages that produce and share these misinformed posts. These are problems that these engagement algorithms themselves created, and social media companies are too timid to actually solve for fear of affecting stock price.

redisman• 6 years ago

Right, the actual fix is to change their core business model which they'll never do.

koheripbal4• 6 years ago

I don't think reverting to chrono content makes sense. If popularity doesn't influence what's top-of-feed, then we'll just be flooded with un-interesting content.

Imagine if HN or Reddit didn't sort by popularity? Everyone would need to sort through /new. ...that's not scalable.

What would be better would be to reward controversial content. If lots of people downvote something, and also lots of people upvote, then maybe it needs more attention, not less?

So that rather than creating ever-more-extremist bubbles, people are more likely to see opinions that make them force them to appreciate other points of view.

cabalamat2• 6 years ago

toning down the [...] addiction potential that has been baked into social media over the years

That hurts the bottom line so the social media companies won't do it unless they are forced to.

Revert to chronological feeds based on timestamp alone

At the very least this should be an option (and not one that is automatically reset every time you view a page -- I'm looking at you facebook).

giarc• 6 years ago

Social media companies don't necessarily need to take a stand. Label any tweet with the word 'vaccine/vaccination' with a link to the WHO (or insert users country health ministry) info on vaccines. There is obiviously a lot of topics to cover (voting rights, flat earth, conspiracy theories etc) but isn't the thing tech companies can do well is things at scale?

nmz• 6 years ago

You can also go backwards, The problem with social media is that anyone can comment on it. and that's not a desirable trait for complex discussions. I can't tell how many times I've seen a news article and the top post in a forum like here or reddit be some expert explaining the article and indicate the failures of it. This is solvable, a social media for experts, every single link given a rating on its truthfulness. by actual non-anonymous experts. or hell, you can scrape for the link on twitter, have a database of professionals who have commented on twitter on the article and indicate what they said about it. Anyway, I'm just spitballing now so I'll stop.

three_seagrass12• 6 years ago

The NYT is doing a special podcast on this topic right now.

In one of their episodes, they interview the CEO of YouTube about what they're doing to stop the spread of misinformation on web content platforms like their own.

Her response is that they're no longer tailoring their recommendation models or carousels based purely on engagement alone, but also based on potential harm or impact, because the common misinformation preys on being highly engaging. The biggest example of this is how YouTube is dealing with Covid-19 misinformation, that the "COVID-19 news" carousel on the home page doesn't get much engagement but is important for people to stay informed.

It's a good listen if you have the time: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/podcasts/rabbit-hole-yout...

legolas24124• 6 years ago

I would be fine with a public ministry of truth. Atleast we will have the free speech rights.

Wo have given too much power to these private companies.

mightybyte• 6 years ago

I imagine I'll get downvoted for this, but I think it needs to be said. Perhaps one way to lessen the spread of misinformation is to not operate services that limit messages to 280 characters. The world is not black and white. Meaningful topics are almost always nuanced and do not lend themselves to pithy sound bites. Let me demonstrate my point in a provocative way:

===== The world would be a better place if Twitter did not exist. =====

Note the lack of caveat, nuance, or elaboration here. It's not conducive to making the argument in a compelling and convincing way, especially not in the ways espoused by Hacker News. People who agree with that statement are going to agree. People who don't are going to be outraged.

If you do agree with the above the real question is what to do about it. Does the problem lie with the people at Twitter? With capitalism? With democracy? With the particular implementation that is the United States? Is this just something inherent to human nature? Or is the internet to blame? There are no simple answers to these questions. But perhaps the mediums that we use to have the discussions have a substantial impact on the conversation.

Buttons840• 6 years ago

how do you lessen the spread of misinformation?

It's a problem that we cannot actually engage in any debate or correction. President Trump is a perfect example of this, he drops his Tweet and then, poof, he's gone. He will not respond to difficult question about freedom of speech, etc.

Trump drops his talking point and runs away, then Twitter drops their "fact check" and runs away. I don't think anyone is the better for it. Nobody's minds have been changed. Nobody has been educated or given serious thought to difficult issues. Nobody has had empathy for others. Having the "fact check" is better than not, but not much, and "fact checks" are not always correct.

If we could somehow social engineer our way to meaningful debates on these difficult topics, we would be much better off. I know the President can't respond to millions of people, but if we could, somehow, systematically choose just a few of the best counterpoints and force some dialogue, then a lot of the "bullshit" would immediately evaporate.

ken2• 6 years ago

Twitter created a special rule [1] for public officials who violate their Terms of Service. They feel there's a genuine "public interest" in being able to see (and respond to) these communications, even though they would not normally be allowed on the platform.

Are people aware that there are two classes of users on Twitter, subject to different sets of rules? Twitter hides this fact, for some reason, but it's something that ought to be glaringly obvious to anyone viewing any of a user's tweets.

[1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/publicint...

metta2uall• 6 years ago

They could easily start by prominently linking to high-quality easy-to-read information on critical thinking skills. They have a multitude of ways to develop and optimise this sort of information.

mabbo• 6 years ago

Public Service Announcement: The Right to Free Speech means the government can't arrest you for what you say. It doesn't mean that anyone else has to listen to your bullshit or host you while you share it.
The 1st Amendment doesn't shield you from criticism or consequences.
If you're yelled at, boycotted, have your show cancelled, or get banned from an internet community, your free speech rights aren't being violated. It's just that the people listening to you think you're an asshole, and they're showing you the door.

https://xkcd.com/1357/

gtCameron2• 6 years ago

https://stratechery.com/2019/tech-and-liberty/

devurand• 6 years ago

I think the position of this article requires a poor assumption with regards to the "marketplace of ideas." It assumes a majority of rational, fact-checking, good-faith actors which is just not the case in the real world. And without that particular check in place, falsehoods gain an undeserved advantage in the "marketplace of ideas."

dx87• 6 years ago

That's such a stupid comic. The 1st Amendment doesn't give you a right to free speech, it says they won't take away your right.

KineticLensman2• 6 years ago

The comic correctly spells out some of the implications and limitations of the first amendment.

tibbydudeza2• 6 years ago

Somewhere in a another universe there exists alternative facts.

avsteele• 6 years ago

The problem Twitter is going to face has nothing to do with Trump.

By doing 'fact checking' like this they they open themselves up to the charge that anything that doesn't have the little (!) meets some standard. Expect 10x more people @jack, @twittersupport etc... every time they see something they find misleading.

This is a bad move.

SV_BubbleTime3• 6 years ago

Written above “utterly unsustainable”. I can see no long term win here, esp when the arbiter they chose clearly has his own issues.

heurist8• 6 years ago

I could see partnering with independent journalist corps to investigate flagged tweets. Guessing They'd only do it for verified accounts. They'd have control over the corp quality and bias, so could offer a reasonably neutral fact checking service if they choose to.

Interesting to see public information warefare playing out in real time.

itchyjunk• 6 years ago

Hm, is fact checking solved problem? I remember someone here had their game flagged just because it referenced SARS-CoV-2. I hear almost daily horror stories of youtube algo's screwing up content creator. As a human, I still struggle a lot to read a paper and figure out what I just read. On top of that, things like the GPT2 from OpenAI might generate very human like comment.

Is there no way to consider social media as unreliable overall and not bother fact checking anything there? All this tech is relatively new but maybe we should think in longer time scale. Wikipedia is still not used as a source in school work because that's the direction educational institution moved. If we could give a status that nothing on social media is too be taken seriously, maybe it's a better approach.

Let me end this on a muddier concept. I thought masks was a good idea from the get go but there was an opposing view that existed at some point about this even from "authoritative" sources. In that case, do we just appeal to authority? Ask some oracle what "fact" is and shun every other point of view?

Beltiras5• 6 years ago

There's a big murky middle where you can't really tell but in the case of what Trump is complaining about an informed observer would come to a conclusion really quickly.

zaroth3• 6 years ago

Voter registration rolls are pretty notorious for being out of date and unreliable.

Personally I don’t have a problem with anyone who wants to vote by mail being able to request a ballot. Most states already allow no-excuse absentee ballets.

I think the problem arises when the State automatically mails ballots to every registered voter at an address.

If too many ballots show up at a house because someone requested it, there’s a paper trail. If too many ballots show up at a house automatically, there’s zero paper trail to be able to tell if they were all filled out and mailed back, besides the overall voter participation rate going up, which surely it will do.

gjulianm3• 6 years ago

Is there no way to consider social media as unreliable overall and not bother fact checking anything there?

The issue is that this is not just a random social media post, it's coming from the President of the US, and most people expect that someone in that position will not post clearly false messages, specially when those messages affect something as fundamental as the election process.

jcroll• 6 years ago

Democratic elections are supposed to be the failsafe for that no?

username903• 6 years ago

The message isn't clearly false. See this article for example:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...

Yet votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show. Election officials reject almost 2 percent of ballots cast by mail, double the rate for in-person voting.

You could say that 1% increase in problems is small, but in close elections that could easily be considered huge.

giardini• 6 years ago

Under a doctrine of free speech, politics has no "clearly false messages". There are only "messages". You are, however, allowed to state that a message is "clearly false".

Thus if you wish to say that the world is flat, then you are allowed to say so, and others are allowed to state their supporting or opposing arguments on the same topic on the same forum, and everyone is allowed to listen.

supportlocal4h2• 6 years ago

Imagine if a U.S. president were to flagrantly make up a claim that some other country was developing weapons of mass destruction. Imagine that there was no way to verify this claim. Imagine that the president insisted on invading said country on the basis of the unsupported claim.

Do most people still expect that someone in that position will not post clearly false messages, specially when those messages affect something as fundamental as the death of thousands of people and the overthrow of a government?

Iran contra, Watergate, Vietnam, ...

Is there any trust left?

It's bewildering that the answer is, "Yes". It's discouraging that so many presidents have so often deceived the people so horribly. It's much much more discouraging that the people don't learn.

Consultant324526• 6 years ago

I feel like the only people who think Twitter is a credible fact checker of the President are not the people who would believe anything the President says anyways.

BurningFrog3• 6 years ago

most people expect that someone in that position will not post clearly false messages

Who the hell actually expects that from any elected politician, let alone Trump?

Is the idea that all politicians constantly controversial among other adults? I thought we all knew this?

palsir2• 6 years ago

Fact checking is far from a solved problem. The can of worms that Trump opened when he started the "fake news" conversation is still very much open.

newacct5835• 6 years ago

Trump didn't start that "conversation". "Fake News" was a term originally intended to reflect the false "news-like" advertisements that were being purchased on social media (primarily Facebook, and primarily targetting conservative users). Trump appropriated it as a way to label unflattering news coverage from mainstream sources.

newacct5835• 6 years ago

If we could give a status that nothing on social media is too be taken seriously

The subject at hand are public statements from the president of the United States. How exactly does one not "take that seriously"? Given the gravity of the situation: if it's wrong, and you know it's wrong, surely you have a responsibility to tell people it's wrong. Right?

Ask some oracle what "fact" is and shun every other point of view?

How is Trump being "shunned" here? Twitter put a correction link at the bottom of his tweet.

KineticLensman2• 6 years ago

Ask some oracle what "fact" is and shun every other point of view

Because the 'correct answer' to many questions is 'it depends...'. You enumerate the advantages and disadvantages of various options and pick an option that satisfies some sort of evaluation function (which may depend on your point of view). Some of the advantages and disadvantages are facts while others are probabilities.

This of course doesn't work well in short form media or for people who like things simple.

Loughla3• 6 years ago

Ask some oracle what "fact" is and shun every other point of view?

This statement concerns me, greatly. Its implication is that facts are merely point of view statements. That is just, well, it's just wrong.

Facts are facts. The truth is the truth. They don't care what your beliefs are. If it is empirically true, then it is true.

Why and when did it become okay to hand-wave and dismiss anything you didn't believe in, personally, just because you don't believe in it? What is this world?

crysin• 6 years ago

It's the human world and this has always been the case. Humans as a whole have never been 100% rational.

2019-nCoV10• 6 years ago

How can a statement about the future be empirically wrong?

every• 6 years ago

Facts can be inconvenient and falsehoods comforting. We are dealing with people after all...

donw3• 6 years ago

Oh, I would disagree with that.

It is amazingly easy to lie with statistical "facts", through careful sampling, use of technical language, and overly broad or narrow definitions: https://medium.com/@hollymathnerd/how-to-defend-yourself-fro...

I could write a "factual" article claiming hundreds of mass shootings in 2020 (obviously false). I just need to define a "mass shooting" as an incident where four or more people are injured (no deaths required).

Or an equally "factual" article claiming that zero mass shootings in 2020 (also obviously false). I just need to define a "mass shooting" as an incident where twenty or more people are killed.

Exact same dataset, two different and mutually exclusive "facts".

im3w1l• 6 years ago

The truth is out there but you don't know it, I don't know it, Trump doesn't know it and Biden doesn't know it. We will all have strong beliefs and they will be rooted in our different ideologies.

pdonis• 6 years ago

Its implication is that facts are merely point of view statements.

No, its implication is that claiming that something is a "fact" does not mean it actually is a fact. Which is perfectly true.

NewEntryHN• 6 years ago

You are talking about the conceptual notion of a "fact", which is out of human reach. Outside of mathematics, labelling anything as a fact is an opinion, and the label is considered okay as long as everyone involved has a high confidence about this opinion.

For example, if you let an apple fall down to the ground and you say "The apple fell to the ground", then you can't really know whether it's a fact or not, because you don't have access to the official logs of the Universe where it would be recorded that "An apple fell to the ground". So you have to trust your senses (and for example the fact that you're not under hallucination or visualizing an illusion) to put some confidence into this belief. If you know you're not under drug usage and if there are other witnesses of the event, then you'll have a very high degree of confidence into the idea that the apple indeed fell on the ground, so much confidence that you would consider it a fact.

When it comes to complex questions about society and everything that we can read on the news, such degree of confidence is very rare. In the end, the threshold at which you consider something to be "a fact" is subjective and for this reason I think all this "facts aren't opinions" thing is dangerous, because it gives the illusion that what we call "facts" are absolute and binary, whereas it's often things we just have a high confidence about, and so it opens the door to slide our standard of what a fact is.

What matters is that our view of the world shouldn't be shaped by what we hope or believe the world _should_ be, but by what it really _seems_ to be. And that is sufficient enough without having to get on one's high horse with "facts".

I don't question the casual usefulness of the word "fact" in appropriate contexts, but when the discussion at hand precisely handles the very nature of what is a fact and what isn't, we need to dig down the true implications of the word.

Gollapalli2• 6 years ago

Facts are facts. The truth is the truth.

My immediate reaction to such sentiments is that the ones who hold them would have imprisoned Galileo and poisoned Socrates. We can comfortably say that the truth exists. We cannot so comfortably say that we know what it is.

throawy1234• 6 years ago

I was in the social media support for one of the candidates during the Democratic primaries. Because of that we had direct access to twitter and the DNC social medial group.

We noticed David Rothkop who had a decent size following and contributed to MSNBC and the DailyBeast was a registered foreign agent of the United Arab Emirates [1]

David Rothkopf had made some wild accusations against two presidential candidates who were most critical of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

We asked Twitter multiple times that if anyone is a registered foreign agent and is constantly commenting on the US primaries and elections, that twitter should flag that account with some indicator or icon.

All Twitter's government public relation person did was to give us some lip service and didn't do anything about it.

[1] https://efile.fara.gov/docs/6596-Exhibit-AB-20180927-1.pdf

dathinab5• 6 years ago

There is a huge difference between a algorithm which detect potential fake news and adds a banner like "find information about <topik> here", "this is likely faktual wrong", etc. And a algorithm which removes the content outright.

With other words:

- fact check => removal == bad especially if automatised, basically censorship

- fact check => warning + link to some source + maybe slightly less visibility in search (but still visible and potentially still even first result) == ok, people still can make their own opinion there is basically no censorship.

(Side note, yes I'm aware that even "non" censoring methods can have a minimal censoring effect due to peoples laziness, but it's quite limited and IMHO acceptable especially if linked sources are objective.)

gadders3• 6 years ago

It's certainly not a solved problem when the "Head of Site Integrity" has a history of anti-Trump tweets and called the President a Nazi.

And that's just the head of the team. You can see the hard-left and pro-Antifa affiliations of the team outlined here: https://nickmonroe.blog/2019/11/28/dear-jack-twitter-is-poli...

mgoetzke• 6 years ago

pro-Antifa means Pro Anti-Fascist which means to organise some movement against fascism.

Would we really want people to be the inverse ? Meaning would we like them to be more fascist or accepting of fascism ?

What exactly happened that AntiFa has become a group that people don't support ? Maybe I missed something there.

chlodwig9• 6 years ago

It is not at all a solved problem. Fact-checking has the ancient "who watches the watchers" problem. Who facts checks the fact-checkers? And more broadly, censoring harassing tweets has the problem that a lot of activism looks a lot like harassment, and censoring "conspiracy theories" looks a lot like powerful people censoring those speaking truth to power.

For anyone who believes that Twitter should be in the business of fact-checking, or censoring harassing or disinformation, tell me which of these should be fact-checked or censored:

1. "Don't wear masks. They don't work and take away masks from healthcare workers."

2. "The government is lying about whether masks work or not because we don't have enough masks for everyone."

3. "Masks help. Everyone should be wearing masks, wear a home-made mask if we don't have enough store bought ones."

4. "Fact: coronavirus is not airborne"

5. "Coronavirus is airborne."

6. "Scientists think Hydroxychloroquine might be effective in treating coronavirus, link here: "

7. "Scientists think treating men with estrogen might be effective in treating coronavirus, link here: "

8. "Look at this video of this Karen calling the police and lying because a black man who just told her to leash his dog. Do better white women."

9. "Look at this article about this Shylock who scammed thousands of seniors out of their retirement money. Do better Jews.

10. "Look at this Laquisha and her five kids taking over the bus and screaming and disturbing all the other riders. Do better black women."

11. Look, another tech-bro mansplaining and whitesplaining why racism isn't really a thing. I can only stomach so much of this ignorance.

12. "Under the Trump administration, there are actual Nazi's in the White House."

13. "Trump is a traitor against his country, he criminally colluded with Russia to rig the election."

14. "Representative Scarborough killed his intern."

15. "There is a paedophilia blackmail network that is pulling the strings behind the Democratic party."

16. "There is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free"

17. "The United States is the highest taxed nation in the world -- that will change."

18. "Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri."

19. "If Democrats were truly serious about eradicating voter fraud, they would severely restrict absentee voting, permitting it only when voters have a good excuse, like illness."

20. "Absentee voting is to voting in person as as a take-home exam is to a proctored one. And just as teachers have reported a massive cheating as a result of moving to take-home tests during coronavirus, we can expect massive fraud as we move to mail-in ballots."

Here are my answers if I was running Twitter: I would not fact-check any of these statements. I would censor the one's using derogatory racial language that is 8, 9, 10, and 11. Also 8, 9 and 11 should be banned for harassing a private citizen. For the potentially defamatory statements -- 12, 13, 14 and 15 -- if made by a real-name account they should be let stand and the offended person or organization can sue in court for defamation if they think it is false. If made by an anon account, the statement should be removed if reported.

wccrawford• 6 years ago

I fail to see how 8, 9 and 11 harass a particular person but 10 doesn't?

Can 15 really sue the person for defamation? Regardless, IMO, the DNC is part of the government and therefore open to public criticism, especially anonymously. This goes for all the other statements here about government bodies and officials.

I'm having trouble processing "tech-bro" as something worth censoring, but I have to admit it's derogatory and aimed at a particular stereotype, and so it's in the same category as the other statements. But it leads me to wonder: Don't all descriptions of a certain group of people end up falling into that category? Where does the line stop? People will (and have, historically) just start using the non-derogatory descriptions as derogatory ones if you censor the ones they currently use.

colinmhayes2• 6 years ago

I would fact check 4 only if it was posted by Trump or someone with a similar level of authority and following. As far as I can tell that's the only one that is provably false.

staycoolboy4• 6 years ago

As a human, I still struggle a lot to read a paper and figure out what I just read

Has this always been the case for you? or just in the past few years?

I didn't care about news until the first gulf war. Then something flipped a switch in my brain and I could not get enough news. When news broadcasters started adopting websites in the 90's, I was like a junkie.

I don't recall significant partisan division over Gulf War I, but I do recall a hard left/right split with the house takeover by Gingrich in 1994, and then the Clinton impeachment. Late 1990's is where things started to become bifurcated (remember, I wasn't paying attention in the 70's and 80's so it could have been as bad).

Fast forward to mid 2010's and suddenly there are too many websites with "news" combined with SEO and recommendation algorithms spouting demonstrable nonsense that I can't help but hear Steve Bannon's "Flood the zone with shit" argument.

Because it is working on me. I am over-educated (an engineering patent attorney for a top silicon company), I get paid to be a critical thinker. Facts and news just are clearly under assault from the zone-flooding angle to the point where being critical wears me to the bone.

Was this intentional, or is this a consequence?

Has the zone been successfully flooded as Bannon commanded?

heurist8• 6 years ago

I think it's a natural effect of internet expansion. Stick 7B humans in a room together and you'll get a lot of noise because the world is a big place and events are literally happening everywhere all at once. Some find opportunity in that because the real world power is still trapped in spatially localized social networks and the internet can't reliably pierce that realm. Secrets are valuable.

The noise we interact with is the intersection of waves created half a world away and the waves we create or come into contact with locally. The best perspective to maintain, in my opinion, is that local is the most important. If you were under immediate threat of death (eg a stranger with a knife in your home), you probably wouldn't care what's happening in DC, you'd be 100% focused on the danger in front of you. I measure that as "more important". The problem is in distant or murky danger, where you don't want to be caught off-guard. You have to be able to gauge your ability to adapt and achieve safety in comparison to the magnitude of danger, then limit your anxieties. Do what you can to be prepared and accept the rest. (This is what I have learned from a lifelong anxiety disorder).

There is also no general mechanism for making sense of the massive amount of information being produced, so it's overwhelming. Google attacks the problem as an indexing tool (I'm sure they're attempting to become a generally intelligent agent). Wikipedia is a curated collection of humanity's abstract knowledge. Neither describes causality of arbitrary macroeconomic events though. If there was one broadly accepted source of truth then we'd all cling to it like a life raft.

tmaly• 6 years ago

On masks as a good idea, I am still a little concerned with touch transmission. I see people without gloves touching their mask. This is totally contaminating the mask.

I would really like a settled question on whether mail and groceries are safe to touch. There was a study that came out saying the virus could exist on different surfaces for different periods of time. News reported last week that CDC update the website that indicated that the study was flawed. Soon after the CDC added clarification which still leaves the conclusion open. https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/s0522-cdc-updates-co...

anewguy9000• 6 years ago

there is no such thing as truth as such; instead there are only theories and their predictive power (you could be in the matrix). so the best thing we have is the scientific method -- as individuals, we can all apply scientific thinking.

ChrisLomont3• 6 years ago

Hm, is fact checking solved problem?

It doesn't need to be a solved problem to provide value by flagging highly questionable content. And many statements are known to be false or misleading, and providing info to people who don't know better is a step in a positive direction.

bananabreakfast4• 6 years ago

Yes, fact checking a single vocal and influential individual on everything they say is indeed a solved problem!

We've been doing it for years, on every president and congressman in America.

There are such things as indisputable falsehoods. And when important people relay them as the truth there are dozens of fact checking organizations that exist only to call these individuals out and hold them accountable to their word.

The fact that Twitter has started doing this with one specific individual is neither new nor innovative.

null0pointer• 6 years ago

One nuance about facts is that they change over time as we learn more about whatever the fact is about. Take SARS-CoV-2 for example, our best scientific knowledge about it has changed significantly since the start of the year. Some _facts_ from January would be considered _misinformation_ now. You might say that the actual facts are the underlying truth, but even that doesn't help. Our current view on the underlying truth are what is widely considered to be factual. The underlying truth can also change, for instance as the virus evolves and takes on different characteristics. Fact checking is most definitely not solved and I would posit that it's fundamentally intractable.

peterkos• 6 years ago

youtube algo's screwing up content creator

A slightly different problem, but Tom Scott did an excellent video on the automation of the copyright system on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU

In summary, auto copyright checking solves Most copyright issues, to a degree that no other solution can really provide. And while there are a small (yet very unfair) number of false positives, the benefit that the system as a whole allows far outpaces that downtrend: for YouTube to exist!

With regards to fact checking, I'd be more interested to hear how many people who read those kind of "fact flags" actually change their opinion in an easy case (flat earth, climate change, etc.). Honestly, the problem of "true truth" might never be solved, but so will the cause of incompetence never disappear.

Cthulhu_4• 6 years ago

I hope he goes through with it, then gets dragged for abuse of power. But that's not likely to happen; the president has too much power, and there are no checks and balances in place. He is only still in power because his party voted to keep him in a sham 'trial', and they only voted in favor because else their party would look divided.

akhilcacharya4• 6 years ago

It's remarkable that Trump has consistently been against free-speech but still has the support of a non-trivial number of self-described "libertarians" like Thiel. This is in the 1st amendment sense as saying he wants to open up libel laws in 2016 [0] to his comments on video games [1] and flag burning [2] to in the broader sense in his anger at the kneeling protesters [3].

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/26/do...

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fact-check-tru...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/15/no-braine...

[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-nfl...

luckydata• 6 years ago

It’s surprising only if you take them at face value. I don’t and I’m never surprised, it’s all quite predictable actually.

IgorPartola2• 6 years ago

Thiel seems to want to use Trump to break the US system of government because he thinks that’s the only way to move forward. He’s disrupting.

nautilus126• 6 years ago

In this instance is he really against free speech though? Seems like the struggle seems to be between his freedom of speech and twitter's. It all comes down to the question of whether twitter is a "publisher" with the freedom to edit/change content users post on its site. Seems like they want to be treated as both when its convenient for them.

dashundchen• 6 years ago

Or the guns rights activists barely flinching at "Take the guns first, go through due process second". Just trying to imagine their reaction if the previous officeholder had said that.

The anger at the kneeling protestors is especially revealing considering the debate centered around whether the private NFL could interfere with the expression of the players.

holtalanm• 6 years ago

our two party system is a national disgrace.

nxpnsv2• 6 years ago

Why not just kick him off for tos violation and be done with it. That would be an article worth reading...

node-bayarea• 6 years ago

He is the President of the United States! And 50% of the people like his policies (if not his personal behavior)

ascagnel_2• 6 years ago

Only a little under 25% of the US affirmatively voted for him in the 2016 election (a little over 25% voted for his opponent, and roughly 50% chose to not vote at all). Included in that 25% would be people who either voted against his opponent, or voted on a single issue that overrode all other considerations (in the US, blocking legal abortions is the single biggest driver of these voters).

pbhjpbhj5• 6 years ago

"his policies"?

This is something I don't understand about current politics, a leader uses their people to create greatness. If it's "Trump's policies" wth is everyone else in the political system doing? In the UK we get "Boris says" but it's quite clear all policy decisions are being made under Cummings, and he gets them presumably from liaison with Tory donors.

Trump/Boris clearly know nothing about medicine, epidemiology, public health care so if ideas actually there's they should probably be rejected.

Why this focus on individuals, as if one person should be holding power in a democratic government. That's clearly wrong.

dragonwriter11• 6 years ago

Because Twitter changed its TOS specifically to legitimize Trump's violations of the earlier version.

Trump is working the refs even though they are already very much in his favor.

yedpodtrzitko• 6 years ago

I can imagine a lot of people would start boycotting Twitter after that. Fewer users and their activity means fewer ads displays means fewer $$$ for Twitter.

nxpnsv2• 6 years ago

Hmmm If they also launched some paid model at the same time, I’d consider paying...

kauffj• 6 years ago

However you feel about this, Twitter did it in pretty much the worst way possible.

1. They had someone with a clear history of strong anti-Trump and anti-Republican sentiment take the action (https://twitter.com/LevineJonathan/status/126545757821512499...)

2. Twitter chose a prediction rather than a factual statement to fact check ("Mail-In Ballots will be..."). Why not start with a truly factually wrong statement about the past?

3. They picked something that is actually debatable! A bipartisan committee concluded it carried some risks in 2005: https://www.wsj.com/articles/heed-jimmy-carter-on-the-danger...

The notion that a company can ever be trusted to "fact check" (aka determine objective truth) is just completely laughable. The closest we can come is labeling agent beliefs about truth ("X says Y is false").

Doing nothing would be better than doing this. Even better would be building solutions that allow community-based (and ideally personalized) derivations of consensus (this is what we're doing at LBRY).

fantastisch2• 6 years ago

Agreed. Pretty much asking for an intervention. Practically begging for a crackdown. Larger plan?

nautilus126• 6 years ago

Wow a comment that isn't just calling trump a racist and is calmly laying out the facts....

SV_BubbleTime3• 6 years ago

I don’t understand why this is downvoted. You laid out good reasons to explain twitter did this in the worst possible way.

Do people here just not want to see it regardless of its factual nature? That seems like the eventual issue with “fact checking” social media posts.

artur_makly• 6 years ago

If this happens, we can always make better Trump tweets: http://TrumpTweets.io

matwood• 6 years ago

The oddest part of of this whole thing is that Trump supporters are typically the personal freedoms above all else crowd. Yet Trump openly talks about having/wanting authoritative, dictator level power.

IgorPartola2• 6 years ago

They really aren’t for personal freedom. That group is basically hoping he stays on as a dictator because they believe he is the only one who can save the nation. I wish I was kidding.

FireBeyond5• 6 years ago

Because what they don't say (at least always; some will) - "they are for personal freedoms _they_ believe in, not necessarily _all_ or _yours_".

christiansakai• 6 years ago

I actually don’t mind if this happens. Just close social media already.

exabrial3• 6 years ago

I once got a strike on social media for posting an article about a German doctor that recommended whiskey to cure covid19. It was a joke, and any reasonable adult would know this is false.

It's hard for me to feel sorry for companies that go down the fact checking route with algorithms; It always ends up causing more damage than value.

12 years ago we didn't have this problem, and I think that's mostly related to the fact there was some UX resistance to hitting the "reahare" button.

nkkollaw7• 6 years ago

Well, I don't think it can be see as a positive even if human beings are the ones to fact-check.

Who is someone working for Facebook or anyone else to flag my messages because they think they're not factual?

This is crazy.

pbhjpbhj5• 6 years ago

If you think the fact checker is wrong, you're welcome to provide your view -- fact checking is better than censorship and absolutely needed on social media to hinder its use for control at the population level (Cambridge Analytica style control).

donw3• 6 years ago

I once got a strike on social media for posting an article about a German doctor that recommended whiskey to cure covid19.

You mean I've been taking all this medication for nothing?

IanCal• 6 years ago

Unfortunately the idea that alcohol can kill the virus (if you drink it) is taken seriously by some, and has resulted in more than 700 deaths in Iran https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/iran-700-dead-drinkin...

clairity4• 6 years ago

alcohol does kill viruses, so it should be taken seriously. the falsehood is that drinking alcohol will kill viruses in your body without doing other harm. the missing intuition is the deleterious effects on the body and the lack of targeting once therein.

our biological systems are infinitely complex and shouldn't be arbitrarily subject to whims of fashion or fear. the panic and frenzy whipped up by media and politicians, rather than information and intuition-building, are principally at fault here.

ojnabieoot3• 6 years ago

Literally hundreds of people, including children, have died drinking bootleg alcohol being hawked as a COVID-19 cure. It is simply not the case that “any reasonable adult” knows your joke is a joke - that may be the case in developed countries where people have reliable access to actual doctors. But in developing countries this has been a serious problem.

Misinformation kills innocent people. A harsh no-tolerance policy is acceptable given this is the worst global health crisis in 100 years.

devtul2• 6 years ago

We could fine/punish people if they post misinformation, even implement a kind of points system where the person has some societal rights given or taken, like being banned from sharing, commenting, doing any type of publishing on the internet.

Would that be too harsh? For sure it would prevent needless deaths.

exabrial3• 6 years ago

Completely disagree.

My audience, my friends and family, are all educated reasonable adults.

neonate• 6 years ago

People are now seriously arguing that jokes should be censored, and by algorithms no less? This is an extreme position.

Why not put them in jail as well, at least until the danger is passed? I mean, they're killing innocent people with their misinformation and this is the worst global health crisis in 100 years.

thamer• 6 years ago

Wow. I was going to ask for a source since your mention of hundreds of deaths sounded so unbelievable, but it was very easy to find: > Iran: Over 700 dead after drinking alcohol to cure coronavirus https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/iran-700-dead-drinkin...

Crazy what people will do due to misinformation.

There were some news reports after Trump's suggestions to use disinfectant as a COVID-19 cure that hundreds of people had called health services to ask if it was indeed a legitimate way to get rid of coronavirus. Now I'm wondering how many didn't call and just went ahead with the "treatment".

tzs3• 6 years ago

I once got a strike on social media for posting an article about a German doctor that recommended whiskey to cure covid19. It was a joke, and any reasonable adult would know this is false.

There are a heck of a lot of non-reasonable adults on social media.

Unless something is very explicitly and prominently labeled as a joke or satire, in a way that won't get separated from it when it is re-shared by your downstream viewers, there's a good chance quite a few people will not catch on that it is not intended to be true.

Social media can be particularly bad in this regard because it often encourages only spending a short time reading each individual post. It pushes breadth over depth.

12 years ago we didn't have this problem, and I think that's mostly related to the fact there was some UX resistance to hitting the "reahare" button.

I'm not sure that is most of it, but it contributes to increasing volume in people's feeds, pushing the breadth vs. depth balance toward breadth so makes things worse.

jmull3• 6 years ago

Not sure algorithms are the problem in this case. I haven't seen your post of course, but as you describe it I'd have flagged it as covid19 misinformation.

I'd probably understand that you posted it as a joke, but I'd also know that regardless of your intentions, many people would not understand the joke.

I think you probably earned your strike.

gouggoug• 6 years ago

I guess the issue is "getting a strike". Sure, if your posts are misinformation, why not add a label that says so.

But giving a strike? That's going too far and your case highlights why: you can't make a joke anymore.

A strike is stifling free speech whereas a label is just informative. It might be biased, it might not be, but it doesn't prevent you from expressing yourself, be it by making a joke or spreading accurate information or spreading ridiculous conspiracy theories.

Arubis2• 6 years ago

For those missing the context, Twitter didn’t actually remove or censor anything; they added a small call-out next to a politically motivated tweet.

Trump responded in an aggressive manner that can be perceived as threatening. That’s one discussion, and one I’m not currently capable of engaging in rationally.

The other discussion is whether Twitter did right in this case. Rather than tell Twitter they’re out of place, I actually think they did the right thing, provided they’re willing to do it _more_, to shift towards having this performed by a group with some transparency around it, and to reference sources when they do so.

Seeing politicians I can’t stand called out in public for lying is deeply satisfying, but won’t change my mind about anything. I’d be interested in seeing what happens when fact checks on all politicians are considered expected & there’s a purported neutral party doing so. Can that be done without the process itself being eaten alive by political agendas? Would I personally be open to fact checks on politicians that I myself favor, and would it change my perspective on them? It feels worth trying to find out.

Ultimately, even if we end up deciding that an approach is unworkable, I applaud anyone willing to at least try to clean up our discourse right now. It’s ugly enough to have created a divide that will eventually threaten violence at scale if not addressed.

Edit: curious why the downvotes; this was deliberately civil.

JMTQp8lwXL5• 6 years ago

It is deeply satisfying to watch politicians get fact checked, especially when this reaffirms our world view. It's simply another tool in the toolkit for social media platforms to get us involved. To wield this more effectively to maximize engagement --which is an unsurprising move for social media companies, given their profit incentive to maximize ads-- the companies could choose to show individual fact-checks from a user's opposing political party only. I agree that fact checks don't change people's opinions, because people do not care if their world view is based in lies or reality, all that's important to the average social media consumer is the affirmation.

whatshisface5• 6 years ago

I feel like if Twitter fact-checked one tweet from a high-profile Democrat for every one they did of a high-profile Republican, there would be a lot less outcry over the situation. I know the president happens to be a high-profile Republican, and as a result he's a more salient target for fact-checking, but lying and being wrong are both bipartisan strategies. The accusation is that Twitter is almost completely staffed by Dem voters and that they're biased as a result. Everyone knows the premise of that accusation is true, so a little formal knod to dispel the conclusion would be welcome.

Arubis2• 6 years ago

My emotion-driven reaction here (“ha! They’d run out of lies from side A before scratching the surface with side B!”) is _exactly_ why trying something like this would be a good move.

ProAm2• 6 years ago

Twitter will kowtow to the President here. He is the reason alone Twitter survived the last 6 years and they have shown publicly that politicians and celebrities play by different rules on their platform.

bearjaws• 6 years ago

In the last 15+ years we have heard this same story, "X platform wouldn't exist without Y user". This has never turned out to be true for any large scale social media platform. For the platforms that have failed, it was always a better platform that took their place, not one single user causing a mass migration.

Look at the_donald, which had a mass migration off of Reddit, and everyone said Reddit was going to shutdown without their ad revenue. Still waiting...

ProAm2• 6 years ago

I agree but I really think Trump saved Twitter. The company was for sale and couldn't find a buyer remotely interested. They couldnt find anyone willing to take the CEO seat so they asked Jack Dorsey to come back. They were in the dumps as a company until Trump started to tweet like a madman. I really do believe that Trump saved Twitter. I dont remember people thinking Reddit would fail if they lost the_donald subreddit?

TechBro86153• 6 years ago

Forget about the free speech albatross. To me, what Twitter is doing looks like a clear case of election interference. They are basically giving free ads to the opposition of Trump. He tweets something, they annotate it with a link to media sources that are heavily biased toward the democrats.

Will they be giving the same treatment to @joebiden? He has been known to lie and plagiarize throughout his political career.

Who qualifies as a reliable source for fact checking? I see links to sources like CBS and CNN, neither of which are known as bastions of truth, and both of which have failed many fact checks themselves, in recent memory.

myvoiceismypass• 6 years ago

If Biden lies in a tweet, they should flag it!

I suspect, however, that he does not have the time to sit tweeting trash all day long while “leading” this country.

TechBro86153• 6 years ago

Just looking at Biden's twitter timeline, I see plenty of tweets that could be "fact checked," if we're using Trump's voter fraud claim as an example of what needs to be checked. Yet somehow, I doubt any of them will.

Examples:

- "36,000 Americans could be alive today if President Trump had acted sooner." [This is entirely speculative and impossible to prove, similar to Trump's mail-in voting claim]

- "The hard truth is Donald Trump ignored the warnings of health experts and intelligence agencies, downplayed the threat COVID-19 posed, and failed to take the action needed to combat the outbreak." [This is false, and certainly not a "hard truth". He took early action including closing the borders to China, which Joe Biden deemed xenophobic at the time.]

- "I've said it before, and I'll say it again: No company pulling in billions of dollars in profits should pay a lower tax rate than firefighters and teachers." [This is highly misleading, and could benefit from context, e.g. https://www.wsj.com/articles/does-amazon-really-pay-no-taxes...]

- "In the middle of this crisis, President Trump is trying to cut food assistance. It’s morally bankrupt." [This is misleading. He's not cutting food assistance; the USDA is attempting to add a work requirement to SNAP benefits.]

- "In the middle of the worst public health crisis in our lifetime, President Trump is actively trying to terminate health insurance for millions of Americans. It's unthinkable." [Highly misleading if not outright false.]

Are any of these black-and-white false? No. But neither is what Twitter is fact checking Trump for. If they were to apply fair standards, they would "fact check" Biden too. But they won't. And we all know why. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the person in charge of this new policy has called Trump a "nazi" and a "racist tangerine."

iso1631• 6 years ago

They give free ads to Trump by providing him a platform in the first place! He doesn't have to use that platform.

FireBeyond5• 6 years ago

To me, what Twitter is doing looks like a clear case of election interference.

I'll be sure to look for the DNC ads on Fox, if they're not told they're unwelcome.

Or pro-choice messaged ads in conservative religious publications.

Hey, Fox could even agree to run Trump ads for free.

None of those things are election interference.

scarface742• 6 years ago

And this is the government that the HN crowd is screaming to “regulate tech”?

freen• 6 years ago

Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/1357/

shiado• 6 years ago

How can the "private platform so they can do whatever they want" crowd reconcile their views on election interference using social media in 2016 with this latest move by Twitter? If they can do what they want with their platform why did it matter in 2016 and why does it not matter now?

beart4• 6 years ago

I can't directly answer the question. However, I think what complicates this issue is the political actors involved. Twitter may be a private platform, but when the President posts a Tweet, that is very much a public, political, government message.

For example, a federal judge barred Trump from blocking followers, despite Twitter being a private platform.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/23/trump-cant-block-twitter-fol...

rtkwe4• 6 years ago

The big difference here is the judge was restricting Trump as a government actor from doing something while the Twitter side of things is Twitter doing something on their own platform. Trump very much was using Twitter as the official place for announcements for a while and if it's the official place to learn government policy you can't block people from seeing it.

all-fakes2• 6 years ago

What views are you insinuating that I have on "election interference using social media in 2016"?

bad_bats• 6 years ago

That's a false equivalence.

Arguing that a platform shouldn't have to host arbitrary content isn't the same as saying that a platform should get to host arbitrary content. If you run a website I'd argue that you shouldn't have to post other peoples' content on it - that doesn't mean I think you should get a free pass to post any illegal content you like - which was the issue with election interference.

Ididntdothis8• 6 years ago

I feel like we are slowly reaching the state the movie “Idiocracy” describes. I feel very torn about this. On the one hand I don’t think we should leave it up to companies like Twitter to censor things. On the other hand I find it hard to believe that the president is constantly claiming things without any evidence backing up. It started with the claims of millions of illegal voters in 2016 and the commission they started disbanding quietly after finding nothing. And now publicly spreading rumors about killing somebody.

It’s insane how little respect the US has for the integrity of its political system. As long as it may hurt the “other” side everything is ok without regard to the damage they are constantly doing the health of the system.

thatwasunusual2• 6 years ago

On the one hand I don’t think we should leave it up to companies like Twitter to censor things.

Is it really _censorship_ to fact check tweets? I mean, Twitter hasn't _removed_ (i.e. censored) any tweets from Trump, just added an annotation.

Ididntdothis8• 6 years ago

“Fact checking” is a nice exercise and somewhat helpful but a lot of people say half baked or stupid things all the time, including myself. Part of a healthy discourse is the ability to say questionable things and having a discussion.

Once you start fact checking where does it end? A lot of people have different views on different things and there is no clear right or wrong.

What I would like to see is that the US political system starts fact checking itself and stop spreading misinformation. This should be done out of self respect.

nkkollaw7• 6 years ago

Yes, of course it is. Most people will all of a sudden ignore someone's message.

I have no idea why anyone would argue in favor of Twitter. When has it become required to be an expert in the field to be granted the privilege of leaving a comment on a forum? When has it become unacceptable to lie? People lie all the time. Advertisements lie to you, politicians lie to you, your mom lies to you.

It's really annoying that the truth police is going to go and check your tweets or comment—even if you ignore the fact that the line between facts and opinions isn't always easy to see. Even facts like Taiwan being its own country or part of China or the Armenian genocide can be denied, and people should be able to say that—and perhaps rightfully get shit for that, but still be able to say it.

We're going back to the Middle Ages, where if you say Earth isn't flat or God doesn't exist (replace with global warming isn't caused by humans, Covid-19 is man-made), you're executed.

Sad.

DavidVoid• 6 years ago

Use * text * (but without spaces) to italicize text btw.

dspillett5• 6 years ago

Is it really _censorship_ to fact check tweets?

Not at all. Free speech in both cases. He is free to say what he thinks, we (us as individuals, Twitter as a company, everyone) are free to say we think he is talking complete and utter balderdash if that is what we think.

A president trying to silence Twitter's statement about what he has said by intimidating them is an attempt at censorship though.

NicoJuicy2• 6 years ago

Reaching Idiocracy is a pretty big understatement.

To be honest, it feels that the president should have a babysitter, if you look at his constant tweet tirades.

chartpath• 6 years ago

What kind of oversight could even work though? We have the Queen in my neck of the woods but that is not exactly accountable and never does anything to check poor governance and only rips off taxpayers. We also have non-confidence votes which can bring down a Prime Minister, and it seems to work (in minority governments at least).

How can a separation of powers approach still check itself? Like different term limits, VP powers, congressional army? Banning factions or breaking up parties that get too big, banning private donors? Rooting for the American experiment to get sorted!

JeremyNT• 6 years ago

It only feels different now because this President's image is based on such bluster. He's speaking to his people in the way that they like.

A lot of past US Presidents were likely no more competent, but their images demanded that they appear such. Reagan was probably suffering from dementia. JFK was high most of the time. It's just that the PR strategy for those guys was different because their public personae were groomed for different expectations.

Well that, and neither had Twitter.

Idiocracy is an easy pull and rings true because of outward appearances, but the reality is (and probably always has been) closer to Vonnegut's Player Piano or Kubrik's Doctor Strangelove.

pinopinopino3• 6 years ago

Idiocracy

Or how they call it on the right side: Clown World. Guess nobody is happy with the current affairs.

WaxProlix• 6 years ago

From what I've seen, "clown world" can refer to perceived injustices like white women choosing black men as partners more than the incompetence or silliness of our president (or other world leadership).

bilbo0s2• 6 years ago

What's sad is that the movie was meant as a joke. (I think?)

And here we are? How did this happen?

Ididntdothis8• 6 years ago

This is not the first time that what was thought of as satire was actually an astute observation. This happened a lot under communism. A lot of jokes were just plain facts.

pinopinopino3• 6 years ago

The rabbit hole goes deeper.

If the movie describes reality then it does it pretty well and then apparently reality can be described as a joke.

If the movie satires reality and we cannot discern the satire from reality then reality was already a joke to begin with, we just didn't know.

The question is not how did we get here or how did this happen? But how do we get out of here? :)

dathinab5• 6 years ago

On the one hand I don’t think we should leave it up to companies like Twitter to censor things.

True, but the think is Twitter did not censor his post. They added a "fact-check" hint that just pointed out that he was speaking made up thinks containing a link to an informative article.

This is very different to censorship. People can still freely decided to believe him, or read the facts and don't or read the facts and still believe him.

It's comparable with threaten to shutdown or control printed press when a specific new letter complained that what he says is complete makeup and wrong.

nautilus126• 6 years ago

For people that treat a "Fact Check" as an automatic "filter out this information" (I think there is a huge subset of the population that does, people don't thoughtfully take into account Fact Checks, they just treat them as a rebuke), it has the net effect of censorship. The move by twitter is kind of dumb in that sense because the population has already polarized into groups that think anything trump says is false, and those who do not. They are just basically putting an official seal on which side of that argument they land.

aiwowp2• 6 years ago

Trump's claim was that there _will be_ fraud if we have mail in ballots.

Unless Jack Dorsey knows the future, I'm not sure you can fact check something that hasn't happened yet.

crispyambulance• 6 years ago

Twitter made a pragmatic choice.

They realize that simply deleting the posts in question and banning the user (Stable Genius) would have a serious backlash from the hard-right. They did what they feel was the next best thing, which is to call out the garbage for what it is by slapping an unremovable label on it. It sort-of seems like a "win", they get to smack-down the asshole, yet not "censor" him.

Unfortunately Stable Genius is playing a different game.

It's a game where outrage, even when directed at him, actually HELPS him. It gives him yet another grievance to trot around, yet another distraction for the public, more leverage for his base, more grist for his vitriol. Meanwhile other republicans will use this cover to continue to cram through unpopular and self-serving greedy agendas, in "shock doctrine" style.

The thing is Twitter is not news, it has no loyalty to the public or the truth. It is a purely money making enterprise, like any other corporation. Jack Dorsey and the board can do whatever the F they want.

1014043• 6 years ago

I think that's just symptoms of the real problem: the extremely profit oriented media industry.

Senselessly creating and reporting on "conflicts" and "scandals" makes them the most money. Trump is just playing their game.

zentiggr4• 6 years ago

Trump plays no game but his own. There is no world to him except what he perceives, even more so than 99.9% of people his own self-supporting delusions drive his entire existence. No one can puncture that bubble, at least not that I've seen.

nojito3• 6 years ago

On the one hand I don’t think we should leave it up to companies like Twitter to censor things.

Education != censorship. The tweets were never deleted.

This is exactly what we need today when everyone blindly trusts what they read online because they like the person who says it and tell their audience that anyone saying differently is lying

zentiggr4• 6 years ago

I find it incredibly easy to believe that the president is constantly claiming things without any evidence backing him up.

It started decades before the 2016 illegal voter claims, and has been a flagrant, constant, malignant part of his personality since childhood.

Research the constant streams of lawsuits and other allegations against him, his companies, and many of his closer associates.

And then wonder how someone can screw up so badly that they run a casino into bankruptcy. A money printing factory, and it was so badly managed that it folded.

And this is who the "disaffected" voted in.

I only hope that this little episode is the shock to the system that wakes up enough people. But there's too many Trumpers for me to think that's happened.

whatshisface5• 6 years ago

Has there ever been a time in history where politicians weren't slimy lying weasels? I feel like a lot of people came of age during the Obama era, which had a friendly media, and never realized the truth about how presidents usually are until we got to the Trump era and the media started doing its job again. Does anyone remember how we got in to Iraq?

nkingsy• 6 years ago

I've been watching Mrs. America, and it does a great job of showing an earlier, developing version of wedge politics leading up to the Reagan revolution. Where we are now feels like the inevitable conclusion to the process of eschewing norms for political gain.

Ididntdothis8• 6 years ago

“Where we are now feels like the inevitable conclusion to the process of eschewing norms for political gain.“

Agreed. Congress should be ashamed of themselves.

zozbot2345• 6 years ago

I couldn't disagree more-- with the "slowly" part, that is. As some people might say, "there are no brakes on the Trump train". Enjoy the show!

asabjorn4• 6 years ago

the president is constantly claiming things without any evidence backing up

[to those voting down: these are convicted cases of voter fraud. If you are in favor of fact-checking these cases demonstrate the core question: who deserve this power?]

Let's fact check these fact checkers.

Here are some cases convicted in court of election fraud, a lot of them involve fraudulent use of absentee ballots https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...

And there is also a problem with the chain of trust, since 28 million mail-in ballots went missing in the last four elections: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/24/28_mil...

Or what about the mail carrier recently charged with meddling with the ballot requests in his chain of trust? https://www.whsv.com/content/news/Pendleton-County-mail-carr...

And if you think politicians would never cheat, a Pennsylvania election official just plead guilty to stuffing the ballot box. He was paid by candidates that I believe won: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/05/21/doj-democrats-...

mgkimsal3• 6 years ago

"Although there is no evidence that the millions of missing ballots were used fraudulently, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which compiled the public data provided from the Election Assistance Commission, says that the sheer volume of them raises serious doubts about election security."

So... no evidence of fraudulent use.

28 million out of how many? "almost 1 in 5". so roughly 150 million ballots mailed out over multiple years and elections, and < 20% are not returned. Or something else?

What does "unaccounted for" mean? They knew they were mailed out. All I can divine from that is 'not returned'.

"There’s little doubt that as the number of mail-in ballots increases, so does fraud."

Yet, right above that in the article, it says of the 28 million - "no evidence of fraud". How many more mail-in ballots do you need to get evidence of fraud? 200 million? 300 million?

What is the insinuation? People are mailing their ballots back, but they're getting "lost"?

It seems that when there's evidence found - as in, criminal investigations turn up fraud and people are charged and prosecuted - "there's evidence of fraud!". When no evidence is found... that's also evidence that it's going on, but not discovered yet. That's how I read this hysteria over 'mail in ballots'.

asabjorn4• 6 years ago

I find it absolutely ridiculous that this is being voted down. news.ycombinator.com is not what it used to be, or maybe I've changed.

I guess this demonstrates the tactics that is highly unfavorable to help people make up their own mind:

1) mislead by ignoring evidence, pushing a narrative using "authoritative sources" that fall far short of objectivity standards

2) if #1 fail vote down (shadowbanning, downvotes, etc etc)

3) if #2 fail censor and ban.

4) if #3 fail tell people to ignore those showing contrary evidence, by without evidence claiming they belong to bad group X or because they can't possibly understand due to having identity characteristic Y

This is so boring and trite. It should be clear to everyone at this point that enough people are awake to these tactics to force a discussion on equal terms. With all truths on the table.

JMTQp8lwXL5• 6 years ago

The most actionable decision one can make is to vote for candidates who don't make us test these questions. Academically, it's somewhat intriguing, but in terms of actual leadership, there are more pressing issues. (Unless your wedge issue is testing political free speech by government officials on private platforms. Then, by all means, have at it).

caseysoftware7• 6 years ago

Idiocracy is premised on the idea that dumb people have more kids than smart people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA

Based on the positive reaction to the "birthrates are at all time low!" article last week, it looks like most of the HN crowd is happy about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23246734

Communitivity3• 6 years ago

Trivia bit: The writer behind Idiocracy feels the same way, saying he never expected it to become a documentary.

Details in https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/270642-idi...

user982• 6 years ago

Compared to our present reality Idiocracy was actually utopic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmZOZjHjT5E

smt882• 6 years ago

It started with the claims of millions of illegal voters in 2016

No, it started long before that. Trump's political profile came about from being the most famous advocate of Birtherism[1] -- promoting the idea that Barack Obama is not American and demanding his birth certificate.

He later reached a plurality of Republican primary polls by saying that undocumented Mexican immigrants are rapists and murderers[2].

Trump has been a conspiracy theorist for years now.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_consp...

2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/...

mistermann3• 6 years ago

He later reached a plurality of Republican primary polls by saying that undocumented Mexican immigrants are rapists and murderers[2].

He later reached a plurality of Republican primary polls while saying...

If you use "by" it implies causation, something no one is able to know, whereas "while" accurately points out that the two events only occurred simultaneously.

Now I'm not sure if you were just writing casually, and I fully expect that now that I've pointed out this "minor" technical shortcoming in your statement you will see my point, and I'm in no way implying that you had a strong intent to imply a cause and effect relationship between these two events...but please don't underestimate the potential significance the aggregate effect millions of seemingly minor slip-ups like this (this is only one example, and only one form) can have on the collective consciousness (aggregate of the internal mental models of all people) of the members of national and global societies when individual members of those societies are subjected to it over a long period of time. If you now think about it, it may seem like you "know" how large of an effect it has, but you actually have literally no way of knowing with certainty and accuracy what the actual effect is.

The world is incredibly complex, filled with all sorts of randomness and incredibly counter-intuitive events, but this is not how we perceive it. We perceive the world as extremely structured and organized, as if mostly everything "adds up", but only because our brain evolved to provide this illusion to our consciousness. This "good enough" illusion rose to the top over all other evolutionary paths that were tried, under the set of conditions in existence at the time they evolved. If conditions (variables) changed significantly, would we be shocked if a formerly highly trustworthy ML/AI model started producing less accurate predictions? I don't think so. Then why should we be surprised if the biological AI in our minds exhibits similar behavior when the inputs undergo a fundamental change? To me, this would be the equivalent of believing in magic of some sort.

People's (that includes you and me) perception of the world is formed based on the information they consume - all of it. It may seem (clear as day, and in full UHD+ resolution) that your personal worldview is based solely on strict evidence and logic, but the fact of the matter is, this is not how the human mind works. Sure, some minds are better at it than others, but the exact degree to which that is true is also unknowable, and making judgements on relative capability are subject to the very same phenomenon I point out.

I will wrap this up with a challenge: for the next month, read not just the news, but also all the general conversations and individual comments in social media forums from your normal perspective, and then also from this perspective. Carefully consider(!) when people are discussing a complicated, massively multivariate issue, whether the discreet observations and assertions that people make are actually knowably true, "first-principle" facts, or if they are actually predictions produced by an amazingly sophisticated AI model. This will not be easy, at all...it will be very difficult and require extreme discipline (you are literally fighting against nature), but the results may be incredibly interesting (perhaps one of the most interesting things you have encountered in years), if you are willing(!) to give it a serious try.

tstrimple• 6 years ago

No, it started long before that. Trump's political profile came about from being the most famous advocate of Birtherism[1] -- promoting the idea that Barack Obama is not American and demanding his birth certificate.

Go back farther and read about his actions regarding The Central Park Five. His history is full of complete bs like this.

pipingdog• 6 years ago

Except that President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho had the capacity to realize there was someone smarter than he was and appointed him to solve the problem at hand.

simias• 6 years ago

I understand what you mean but I'm always frustrated when I see Idiocracy brought up in these discussions. Idiocracy is fine if you view it as a light satirical comedy but if you take it seriously to talk about politics it has very sinister undertones.

For one thing it's extremely classist, throughout the movie popular culture is seen as fodder for dumb people while high culture if for clever people. Beyond that it also says that, effectively, dumb people and poor people are the same thing (as exemplified by the "white trash" segment at the start of the movie) and that dumb, poor people are bound to breed dump, poor people (and apparently they do that a lot) while clever people would breed other clever people (but they don't do it because... reasons). So social determinism taken to the limit.

I mean just look at this intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZ0ZUy7P3E

What are examples of clever people? Darwin, Beethoven and Da Vince.

Examples of "degeneracy"? A girl in skimpy clothes, wrestling and a... woman with boxing gloves? Because clearly "panem et circenses" is a novel concept.

Then we go to say "with no natural predators to thin the herd, we began to simply began to reward those who reproduced the most and left the intelligent to become an endangered species". So we're now talking full-on eugenics. Also Beethoven was well known for fending packs of wolves in his youth, proving his evolutionary superiority.

And I'm this point I'm literally one minute into the movie and I could go on and on and on. At best it's elitist, at worst it's much darker than that.

If you like the movie as a funny comedy then be my guest, but please stop bringing it up in political discussions. If anything it's a symptom of the very thing you're decrying: a dumbed down, unnuanced caricature of political discourse.

dec0dedab0de• 6 years ago

I mostly agree, and I for one would welcome the rock as president, so maybe I'm part of the problem. However, any time I catch myself thinking that the idiots have taken over[1] I am reminded of this XKCD[2] from over 10 years ago, and I try to knock myself down a peg

[1] NOFX reference, I normally wouldnt refer to anyone as an idiot, especially on HN which is where I come to feel dumb by comparison.

[2] https://xkcd.com/603/

foobar_• 6 years ago

This should have happened a long time ago. Flag people / tweets but don't taken them down. Ignore flagged tweets. Create public black lists of spammers/trolls.

People are still waiting for twitter to clear up all the bots. From what I am aware the challenge is not bots but people masquerading 1000s of accounts manually, so it's actually a misnomer to call them bots.

cwperkins2• 6 years ago

Its evident to me that our strategy to combat misinformation is not going great at the moment. I've been on Reddit for over 13 years and the site has gone through many changes.

What if we changed our thinking from removing/flagging bad content to fostering rich discourse?

I'll use r/politics for example, I currently do not think there is productive or rich discourse being had there. If you have had a different experience please let me know.

I think for the political arena it would do us good to try to emulate the US House of Representatives where representatives are given equal time to address the floor. In this way you will be exposed to other perspectives. The ways we can achieve this are similar to the approach NYT has taken to comments. You can still sort comments by most recommended, but there are also "Featured Comments". Featured Comments are chosen by a team at NYT, presumably from ideologically diverse perspectives, and they choose comments that are insightful and rich in information without toxicity. Does anyone else think that would be a good idea?

I think its important because I truly believe Americans are far more alike then different and just about everyone feels like they are under attack or have been violated. Its time to heal and listen and understand that we are in it together and the people that we really should be castigating are the people filled with prejudice to the point where they have shut themselves off from hearing other perspectives. I believe there is a vast middle in the USA, but its currently getting drowned out and it should have a louder voice.

adjkant• 6 years ago

What if we changed our thinking from removing/flagging bad content to fostering rich discourse?

So swapping a hard problem for an even harder one?

Do4oolu5• 6 years ago

Is it really a technical problem, though?

If the majority of people _want_ to fight and is more willing to act in bad faith to hurt the opponent / win the argument rather than willing to correct their opinion by discovering facts, I don't think any technical solution could, nor should, try to correct that ("nor should", because it could quickly turn into some sort of oppression).

That being said, I commend you for looking for such solution, if only because masses' mood swings faster than technical solutions are implemented, and your features will be there when people are fed up with constant conflicts.

cwperkins2• 6 years ago

I think it is to some extent. The "Tyranny of the Majority" on internet forums pushes people to finding safe spaces for them. It's great that you can find subreddits for your interest and I even think they should exist for political ideologies, but I think it would do us a big service to see the main political arena to be more like the US House of Representatives.

For me, I see the main problem is that we need to create demand for fair and balanced news sources. I really don't like when you only hear about perceptions of other perspectives from pundits/activists, instead of hearing the opinion from its source. I think this is breeding prejudice. I think there is a vast amount of misrepresentation and the backlash we see is from people who often don't feel like they have the proper avenues to express themselves.

I try to be part of the solution, by paying for subscriptions for Bloomberg and WSJ. Its a hard problem, that's for sure.

jbeam• 6 years ago

I'll use r/politics for example, I currently do not think there is productive or rich discourse being had there. If you have had a different experience please let me know.

The top post on r/politics on Super Tuesday was about Sanders winning Vermont. There was no discussion to be had about Biden absolutely cleaning up.

_never_k2• 6 years ago

I think for the political arena it would do us good to try to emulate the US House of Representatives where representatives are given equal time to address the floor.

This is a weird example. Representatives don't listen to each other. The speeches are for their constituents.

Featured Comments are chosen by a team at NYT, presumably from ideologically diverse perspectives, and they choose comments that are insightful and rich in information without toxicity.

Agreed, the solution to the problems caused by getting rid of gatekeepers is to bring back gatekeepers. How do you do it with something like twitter though, where there were no gatekeepers to begin with?

cryptonector9• 6 years ago

What if we changed our thinking from removing/flagging bad content to fostering rich discourse?

"The answer to bad speech is more speech."

Brilliant people who have said this or some trivial variation thereof:

  - U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis:
    https://prospect.org/culture/remedy-speech/
  - U.S. President Barack Obama
    https://www.answers.com/Q/Who_said_answer_bad_speech_with_more_speech
  - Penn Jillette
    https://bigthink.com/in-their-own-words/why-the-solution-to-bad-speech-is-always-more-speech
  - Google CEO (then) Eric Schmidt
    https://www.news18.com/news/india/the-answer-to-bad-speech-is-more-speech-googles-eric-schmidt-598251.html

Lots of people who want to suppress speech they don't like then respond that this is not enough. E.g., https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/9sel59/cmv_th...

fzeroracer2• 6 years ago

What if we changed our thinking from removing/flagging bad content to fostering rich discourse?

You can't foster rich discourse without removing/flagging bad content. That's like trying to clean a litterbox by adding more litter rather than removing the shit. Eventually the whole thing is just going to stink.

tinco2• 6 years ago

Of all the things Trump has said, why add a fact check on this point that includes all kinds of vagueness?

How is it a fact that mail-in ballots will not lead to rigged elections? Just that there's no evidence to support it doesn't mean it can't be true (however unlikely). If we're really to police politicians, surely it should be only on absolutely logically false points?

The point about that only registered votes will receive ballots and not just anyone might be a real correction, but it sort of depends on who can be a registered voter, I don't know the details of that. It also seems like a relatively minor point.

And the third correction is just horrendous. Trump targeted California, and they add a "get the facts" that other states also exist. How is that categorically relevant? Obviously Trump is concerned with leftwing influence, so he's singling California out, it's most certainly valid.

So Twitter releases what's possibly the most culturally significant feature they've released in 10 years, and they fuck up 2 out of 3, and the only one they might have gotten right has not enough information and seems to be minor?

To me it seems there's only 2 rational explanations: whoever made the check the facts did so without oversight or involvement of a committee, and will be fired, or Twitter simply does not want to actually do this, and tries to get out of the public pressure to do so by making a weak attempt and then giving up. I hate to be cynical, but the first one option just doesn't seem very likely given the gravity of the situation.

edit: if I was the CEO of Twitter and I would have given the final 'go' on the "what you need to know" it would have looked like this:

- In the state of California only registered voters receive ballots.

So: no hear-say about evidence that is missing, no accusing a politician of lies and definitely not naming that politician in every line. Just the facts, and let the reader figure out how that reflects on the tweet the politician made.

FireBeyond5• 6 years ago

Just that there's no evidence to support it doesn't mean it can't be true (however unlikely).

That's the thing. If there is no evidence to support it, it cannot be asserted as an unequivocally true statement. Trump doesn't claim that it "might" be true, or he "believes" it to be true, he says, effectively, "this is the unarguable truth". And Twitter says "not so fast".

tinco2• 6 years ago

But the whole idea of democracy is that we elect politicians based on their beliefs and ideals. We pick either conservative or progressive, not based on any evidence of their efficacy but on our feelings about those views. And the idea is then that the aggregate of those feelings (especially over time) leads to a prosperous and stable nation.

Maybe I have to yield this point, and say that Twitter should also call out politicians on making baseless statements. (Which will be all of the time because twitter doesn't have a very neat way of including footnotes, and politicians are not known to publish tweets as academic papers) but even then the commentary should be something like:

- the trump administration has not published evidence to support the statement that mail-in ballots lead to rigged elections.

Which is very different from just saying it's a false claim in my opinion.

phkahler2• 6 years ago

If Twitter wants to fact check, fine. But posting links to pieces by anti-Trump news outlets is not fact checking.

whateveracct4• 6 years ago

Calling normal news outlets "anti-Trump" is just falling for his crybully antics.

phkahler2• 6 years ago

Not really. They do have a bias. Regardless of that it's still not fact checking.

nraynaud2• 6 years ago

In a lot of European countries nazi speech is forbidden, and I would posit that it works: the police murders less minorities, the difference in earnings and life expectancy are narrower, and generally violent deaths are lower.

Maybe it's time for the US to become a member of the international community, by adopting common codes.

anewdirection10• 6 years ago

So censoring hitler online means less police violence?

Please do show me the data.

Baseless nationalism is just as unwelcome from any country as it is fron the USA. Stop it.

nraynaud2• 6 years ago

"Europe" is not a nation, this word is like garlic for the nationalists.

cryptonector9• 6 years ago

Police shootings in the U.S. do not happen because Nazis get to speak in the U.S.

markvdb• 6 years ago

How do you even fact check a powerful cognitive dissonance generator? Because that's what Trump is.

Trying to fact check that kind of person makes no sense. The man himself makes no sense, and he knows. He's a troll and also the US president.

ceilingcorner• 6 years ago

1. Is Twitter going to fact-check every political figure? Every public figure with more than a million followers?

2. Who decides what is a viable source? As a part of their "fact check", Twitter linked to CNN, which is almost as bad as Fox News these days. This really isn't helping their case for supposed neutrality.

3. I don't like Trump, didn't vote for him, and find his tweets embarrassing. But I don't need Twitter to tell me what to think.

remarkEon2• 6 years ago

But I don't need Twitter to tell me what to think.

I think what this discussion is revealing is that a lot of people, and a lot of people that work it tech it seems, actually do want someone to tell them what to think. Which may be part of the baseline or mean human condition. Thinking and deciding for yourself is hard, and when other people think and decide for themselves in a different way than you it seems to generate an immune response and a reaction that calls for intervention from above.

krn2• 6 years ago

I wonder, at point is Twitter supposed to block the user for constant spread of disinformation on its platform? Or would that violate the user's right to "free speech"? Could the user protect himself by claiming, that he is simply expressing "his own opinion"?

WhyNotHugo2• 6 years ago

Public figures have it harder when it comes to using the "it's just my opinion" argument.

YOU can claim vaccines are a fake, and that's bad, but won't have harder consequences on you.

A medical doctor can't claim the same thing without losing their position as a medical doctor; they kinda lose a bit of that "it's just my opinion" card as part of the responsibilities they have with society.

chadlavi• 6 years ago

Free speech means the government can't come after you for statements. Anyone claiming a company is infringing on their free speech is at best ignorant of, and at worst purposefully misconstruing, the bill of rights. You have no right to post whatever you want on a private company's platform, they can ban you whenever and for whatever reason they want.

krn2• 6 years ago

In other words, the only reasons for Twitter not ban such a user are 1) business (that he might be driving a substantial amount of traffic); and 2) PR (that banning him would bring much more negative than positive coverage for the company)?

_aleph2c_• 6 years ago

This could be an extinction level event for the right. They have managed to circumvent the conventional media by going directly to the masses. If social media is mediated by the highly educated, and typically left leaning staff; there will be no way for the right to send out there message. The left leaning staff think they are doing the right thing, but what they are doing will extinguish the oxygen to the other side.

WhyNotHugo2• 6 years ago

What amazes me about the US, is that there's no accountability for any actions.

If I start lying to me team at work, I'll have a very uncomfortable meeting with my boss.

If our sales people start lying to clients, the company may get dragged into courts.

If head of state lies when publicly addressing the country in many other countries, they'll be held accountable before congress.

But US seems to be about absolute freedom, and not about following ANY rules, no matter how basic. I never get why people accept such a system.

Communitivity3• 6 years ago

Good luck with that (not). Today we have decentralized social networks specifically designed to combat that kind of censorship, and other problems with centralized control.

For videos, see https://joinpeertube.org or https://libry.tv

For micro-blogging, see https://joinmastodon.org

For photos, see https://pixelfed.org

For others, see https://fediverse.party/

modwest• 6 years ago

it's not censorship. not even close. good grief.

jmull3• 6 years ago

Adding a link to a factual counter-argument is not censorship. Even adding a link to a non-factual, non-sensical rant is not censorship.

You're actually suggesting that posting dissenting information is censorship?!?

Black is white! Good is bad!

Communitivity3• 6 years ago

No, I am suggesting that closing down Twitter because they ban content that is harassing, that is censorship.

frays• 6 years ago

I wonder what percentage of people in the tech community voted this guy in...

And I wonder how many of these people will vote him in once again... How can there be so many smart people in the US yet this guy ends up as their leader?

Finnucane• 6 years ago

It's pretty obvious that DT is not going to shut down the very platforms he relies on for his political survival. Even he's not that stupid. Nor does he have any real regulatory authority that could be employed that wouldn't also bite him back. So this is just him trying to bully the platforms into letting him say whatever without being exposed to any criticism or being called out for bullshit.

ojnabieoot3• 6 years ago

The salient comparison is Bezos and WaPo. Even if Trump can’t attack a newspaper directly, he can (and has) attacked other business ventures to try to force censorship - hit AWS hard enough that Bezos interfere with his newspaper to get Trump off his back. Given yesterday’s WSJ story about Facebook, it seems to be working.

One tactic I think is likely to come from Barr and the DOJ is a corrupt selective enforcement of anti-trust laws - decide Twitter and AWS are monopolies but Facebook and Microsoft are not.

dathinab5• 6 years ago

Twitter being a monopoly but Facebook not would be totally ridiculous in more than one way.

EDIT: Just to be clear I'm not saying your post is ridiculous, but Trump is. And yes the following is somewhat sarcasm END EDIT.

Let me guess next Mercedes and BMW have a oligopol on cars and china will be classified as a company with an monopol on cheap products.

The crazy/scary think is that I believe Trump would totally cable of doing it if he get's the legal power and time to do so...

dathinab5• 6 years ago

Sure, but such bullying is rather dangerous.

Normally such threads come from people which are somewhat in the process or trying to de-mantel a democracy. So a US president saying something like that is quite worrying even if his intentions are not to undermine the US democracy.

techntoke• 6 years ago

That is exactly his intentions. He is an idiot for using Twitter in the first place. He should have been advocating for a decentralized Internet where his followers could live in a bubble catered to them.

cryptonector9• 6 years ago

There's bullying and there's bullying. Some Presidents have used the IRS against their opponents. If this President uses only rhetoric, then I'm fine with that. Also, pushing rule-making authority at the FCC or FTC is not over the line the way using the IRS is.

root_axis20• 6 years ago

DT doesn't "rely on twitter for his political survival", any platform he goes to all his supporters would happily follow while gleefully trashing twitter on their way out the door.

Nor does he have any real regulatory authority that could be employed that wouldn't also bite him back

I'm not convinced of that. Trump has repeatedly shown he is willing to exercise executive authority to the fullest extent possible and the courts have repeatedly affirmed his ability to do so. I'm not sure what kind of "bite back" you expect, but that kind of thing has never been an obstacle for Trump. At the end of the day I think you're right that he's bullying them, but I think it's wrong to believe that he won't actually go after them if they do not comply with his demands or at the very least retract the fact-check and praise him

astronautjones2• 6 years ago

DT doesn't "rely on twitter for his political survival", any platform he goes to all his supporters would happily follow while gleefully trashing twitter on their way out the door.

they wouldn't, and even if they did it would be a helpful change. society's legitimization of twitter (a brand whose logo is on so many unrelated products, billboards, flyers, advertisements etc) is what makes his disinformation on that platform dangerous.

if he's siloed to somewhere that is obviously just for his supporters, it will have far less of a dangerous effect. people made the same threat about alex jones, and deplatforming him was absolutely a positive for society.

5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV• 6 years ago

Offtopic: The difference of reading newssites with and without JavaScript enabled is so insane, it's crazy how my flagship phone on a 200k WiFi connection grinds to an halt on the first few seconds (apart from the jarring experience of jumping content)

rchaud2• 6 years ago

The powers that be in Beijing and China must be pinching themselves; none of their predecessors had gotten this fortunate, for this long. Every day the US leadership appears committed to demolishing its outward image of a prosperous and stable democratic order. Meanwhile, they can continue running roughshod over political opposition and bullying their neighbours, totally unopposed.

Russia has used the past 15 years to take South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Crimea and cement Putin's now-lifetime grip on domestic institutions.

China, free of US pressure has refined its global logistics and supply chains, increased its military buildup and has becomes the world's go to vendor for 5G solutions. While also keeping Taiwan, HK, Xinjiang and South China Sea firmly under its thumb.

Meanwhile, the US stumbles from crisis to crisis, with a good chunk of its 99% literate population now thinking that mail-in ballots, a cornerstone of its voting system are rife with fraud, and that wearing masks is a political stance.

Oh, and Hacker News, in response to the country's chief executive's blustering about closing down social media, ponders if fact-checking is a 'solved problem'.

heurist8• 6 years ago

American dominance was pure luck after escaping from WWII unscathed and in a relatively strong financial position. The major economically prodictive technologies we rely on today came of age in the first half of last century and we used them to build an inefficient glass castle without considering the deleterious effects of rapid population growth or hyperconnectedness of human minds.

The political order the US created under those circumstances is unraveling. Americans across the US should be focused on making the communities they live in food-secure and energy-independent. It's time to plan for environmental and economic resilience. The next century will be rocky and the US is unprepared. The US will not be the largest producer in the world, but if we can revitalize local production then we can at least be the hardest to kill. The revolution we need it localism.

rchaud2• 6 years ago

The revolution we need is localism.

Agreed. All politics is local after all. The problem is that the economic incentives are pointed in the polar opposite direction. Startups can't get funding if their ambitions are limited to their city, or even within the borders of their country.

As was mentioned in an article I can't locate, a lot of the world's top technical talent is stuck working at well paid jobs, on products that simply don't matter relative to the challenges humanity is facing.

metrokoi5• 6 years ago

Almost no one is ever happy with fact-checking, it often just leads to more disputes about whether or not the fact-checking is correct or warranted. To me it seems much more efficient to simply teach people not to take anything posted on social media seriously and to better think for themselves. One may say that the president should be an exception because of the number of people he reaches, but what about a famous actor with millions of followers? Or Elon Musk? What would the line of acceptable influence be in order to make someone fact-checkable? The set of fact-checkable people could be very large, and the manpower required to fact check all of them formidable.

One may also argue that the president harms our country's image but again, senators and congressmen represent us as well and can also influence large amounts of people.

That does not mean he must go uncontested; people can still dispute everything he says by responding (the original form of fact-checking). The discussion should instead be about whether or not political figures should be able to block people. I remember that was an issue a while ago, and I'm not sure where it is now.

jdashg3• 6 years ago

We have tried teaching people not to believe everything they read on the internet already. We need solutions that actually work.

It's wishful thinking at best to believe that Twitter replies can effectively refute arguments. They don't establish public dialog unless the OP retweets the responses. You can't call it a dialogue if, effectively, there's only one person talking. Even simple refutations fail on Twitter.

"We can't fact check one person because it'd be hard to do the same for a large number of people" is classic perfect-as-enemy-of-good. We get huge bang-for-buck by handling some obvious outliers and known bad actors, and that's worth doing.

anewdirection10• 6 years ago

So when 'fact checkers' end up with a right-wing bias will that still seem prudent? History is full of people in power, expanding their powers only to see their opposition use them more effectively against them.

umvi3• 6 years ago

What western democracies really need is an entire government segment dedicated to fact-checking. We could call it the "Department of Truth" (or "Ministry of Truth" in UK) and it would be responsible for labeling things on social media as true or false using little fact checker badges.

sixstringtheory4• 6 years ago

simply teach people not to take anything posted on social media seriously and to better think for themselves

clearly there is nothing simple about this

holler• 6 years ago

teach people not to take anything posted on social media seriously and to better think for themselves.

Most underrated comment in this thread...

ngngngng• 6 years ago

It took all of 5 minutes for fact checking to become just as broken as the fake news it was trying to correct. Trump will clearly say something, and then I'll see people share directly conflicting fact checkers, one that says he said it, and one that says the words never left his mouth.

And just like before the fact checkers, people believe what they want to believe, nothing more, nothing less.

russellbeattie• 6 years ago

Twitter's leadership is a bunch of cowards who are only now taking the smallest steps to do something about Trump's lies and demagoguery. They should have banned him years ago.

I stopped using Twitter on January 20th, 2017. I had been a user since they started, but I went through and programatically deleted every tweet, like, follower, etc. I now just have my name and I never use the site. I wish more people would do the same. Don't delete your account, just stop using it.

If Twitter had just held everyone on their platform to the same standards, I would be somewhat accepting of them as a neutral platform for free speech. But they decided to ignore the threats, lies, bullying, name calling, racism, sexism and more coming from not just Trump, but all of his followers. So they can go to hell for all I care now.

2019-nCoV10• 6 years ago

Twitter has now shown that everything we have been saying about them (and their other compatriots) is correct. Big action to follow!

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12656495454107443...

$TWTR already down 5%.

dakna• 6 years ago

Brilliant move by Trump's team forcing Twitter into this. He can now visibly blame another media outlet and continue building the narrative that the election results need to be challenged in case he lost. While also making sure voter turnout is high enough because his base thinks they need to "fight" this because it's deemed unfair.

gotoeleven• 6 years ago

Fact Check: Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

brodouevencode4• 6 years ago

Readers beware: it's basically useless to argue either side of this position because the level of nuance, complexity, and convolution involved in such a discussion is beyond the limits of what a threaded comment board can accomplish.

cryptonector9• 6 years ago

And yet the argument must be had.

brodouevencode4• 6 years ago

I agree. Here is not the proper place.

mrlonglong• 6 years ago

I'm getting extremely tired of his Twitter tantrums. I suspect many feels the same way. I shan't shed not one tear if he get voted out in the November elections.

GordonS• 6 years ago

I'd be fed up if he wasn't the president of the USA. The fact that he is, and constantly spouts stuff like this, and gets away with it, is... terrifying.

socrates1998• 6 years ago

I mean, social media should be more regulated and laws should definitely be enacted to hold those companies more liable for the content that is published on their platforms. The problem is that I definitely do not want Trump deciding on how to do it.

Right now, social media is a pretty bad cesspool. No one takes the blame for allowing sociopaths to dominate those platforms.

etaioinshrdlu• 6 years ago

If major platforms become regulated to legally ban censorship, this could actually be a good thing... These platforms could become more like public utilities.

Although it also sounds like it would be great for entrenched incumbents and cause barriers to entry.

dang3• 6 years ago

We changed the URL from https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-threatens-close-social... to one that doesn't contain an auto-playing video. (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322719, but the comments have been moved thence hither).

tom-thistime• 6 years ago

I don't always see eye-to-eye with the President, but closing down social media platforms sounds like a win for the country. Tough, bitter medicine but exactly what we need in the long term.

dekhn• 6 years ago

This isn't really news because Trump doesn't have the power to do this, and none of the people with the power want to do it. I think people really need to learn to tune out (and not amplify) Trump's ravings.

unexaminedlife3• 6 years ago

Somehow technology needs to help bridge the divide here. Literally the ONLY argument that needs to be had is "what are facts and logic". Unfortunately not enough people know what these are, which is severely hampering our country's ability to function as a democracy.

cryptonector9• 6 years ago

Complete objectivity is impossible. This is why Ayn Rand's Objectivism philosophy was so broken. It's not just that humans can't be completely objective -- any AI can't be either, and you can't write have a human write an algorithm that yields 100% objectivity. It can't be done. There is no short-cut. The arguments have to be had. Consensus/democracy/institutions is all we've got, and we have to and will make that work.

unexaminedlife3• 6 years ago

Not sure we're disagreeing here. But, an important point would be that we should be striving for objectivity. In Trump's world objectivity is not a goal. To him it's an obstacle.

Animats3• 6 years ago

Twitter must have automation for this, since they do it for tweets generally. How do they do that? Anybody know?

mancerayder• 6 years ago

First, some government authorities (such as at airports) ask for social media information. Employers can, as well, when doing background checks.

Next, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have become de-facto presence for political figures, companies and individuals. Erased from here, they cease to exist. Almost like scrubbing a Google search result.

The above points COMPEL the U.S. government and any other government to consider the possibility that they are now a public utility (like electrical companies) and an essential service. The argument that they are private companies and therefore should forever be removed from the jurisdiction of the 1st Amendment (in the case of the U.S.), since this only applies to government, is extremely antiquated. Did smartphones and Presidential tweets exist in 1776?

If electrical companies and railroads can be regulated and for-profit, then why would "my company, I do what I want" magically apply forever to Faceook, Twitter and Instagram?

I am NOT defending what Trump was quoted saying here. I AM making a case that we need to update our legal framework to account for modernity. And to account for a heretofore unpredictable and unfathomable technological achievement of an instant network of human ideas and presence that is controlled by a few California companies. I'd bet money that the question will be considered in the coming few years by the high courts, and there's a non-zero chance they'll agree with what I've just said.

methehack• 6 years ago

I don't have to let trump stand on my front porch and scream lies at top volume, and twitter doesn't either. Twitter is protected by the first amendment here, not trump.

Twitter's platform is private, not public. Twitter should waste no more time in making that crystal clear.

If you own the printing press, you get to decide what you print. If it were otherwise -- if the government, or anyone else, could control what we said and didn't say with our private resources -- well, that's not anywhere any of us really wants to live.

beepboopbeep• 6 years ago

Ok. Do it.

As with all things trump, the man spends his days flailing about from one tantrum to the next with no actual focus or initiative. Bluster all day, every day.

iron0013• 6 years ago

I’m seeing a couple of red herrings dominate these comments, which really have no relevancy to the issue at hand.

1. The veracity of twitter’s fact checking. This absolutely does not matter, since Twitter may host or refuse to host whatever they want on their own website, including incorrect fact checks if that’s how they get their jollies (not that there’s any evidence that their fact checks have been incorrect so far, because there isn’t). On the other hand, Trump doesn’t have the same right, because he doesn’t own Twitter.com

2. Hate speech, and whether it is ever justified. Again, this doesn’t matter. Twitter has the right to remove (or visibly flag as the case may be) any post they want on their website, for any reason they want. They might do so because a post is hate speech, but they’d be just as firmly within their rights to do so for any other reason.

I think all of the confusion in these comments exists because the law is very simple, but many folks here don’t like the conclusion:

1. Twitter may fact check, flag, or remove the posts of Trump or any other user completely at their discretion, even if their fact checking turns out to be incorrect. Nothing about this violates Trump’s first amendment rights in any way.

2. I had hoped this was obvious, but in case it’s unclear to you, Trump and the US government absolutely do not have the power to shut down or punish Twitter in any way just because they don’t like the way that Twitter has fact checked Trump’s posts. This would in fact (obviously) violate Twitter’s first amendment rights.

Finally, there is no legal distinction between a “platform” and a “publisher” that in any way restricts the control that a business has over their own website. Anyone who claims otherwise is simply incorrect, and not worth listening to.

philipkglass• 6 years ago

I think that "fighting terrorist propaganda" is actually the origin of social media building tools for moderating politics. Most people seem to date it to the 2016 US presidential election, presumably because they weren't following Middle East politics as closely as US politics.

I really saw a chilling effect in r/SyrianCivilWar after the rise of ISIS. Media showing graphic violence would remain on the site for several more years -- r/WatchPeopleDie was removed only last year -- but videos considered to be "supporting" ISIS (even if only because they showcased recent advances by ISIS or allies) started being removed from Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, and other places. I think that even LiveLeak eventually started removing some of these videos. Reddit itself started banning pro-ISIS posters.

There was plenty of all-sides hand-wringing before 2016 that social media wasn't doing enough to suppress terrorist propaganda.

"After the recent spate of terrorist attacks inspired by the so-called Islamic State, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called for greater cooperation from social media companies like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in combating hate propaganda."

https://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/08/how-social-media-cos-try-to-...

The social networks banned a lot of content that would be legal to publish in the United States. They went well above and beyond removing only the "imminent lawless action" speech that falls outside of First Amendment protections. And with good reason. Plenty of lawmakers were ready to make their lives miserable if they didn't take an aggressive anti-terrorist stance.

It's fun to daydream about big American social media companies removing only such speech as would be unprotected by the First Amendment. But sites like YouTube have never offered that much latitude. Even in the pre-Google days YouTube didn't allow porn -- not even perfectly legal, mainstream porn. And of course it's perfectly legal to advertise locksmith and dental services but I don't want platforms overrun with high volume advertising for those businesses either. Finally, both Republican and Democratic legislators were talking less than 5 years ago about how social media had a responsibility to curb terrorists' propaganda, regardless of the stronger protections enshrined in the First Amendment.

I don't really like where we are with social media, but I wish that the discussions we had around these issues on HN were more historically grounded instead of centering on partisan polarization around the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath.

programmarchy• 6 years ago

He won't do any such thing. This is just red meat for his base to distract them from the fact he hasn't done anything for them.

standardUser4• 6 years ago

There seem to be some upside down priorities here. Many folks seem to be arguing that its an unacceptable form of censorship for a private platform to annotate content it allows others to post. Meanwhile, I'm seeing barely a mention of the fact that the President of the United States has threatened to use government power to shut down an entire sector of the economy devoted to communication. The latter is almost certainly a violation of the Constitution. The former, almost certainly not.

tossAfterUsing• 6 years ago

Mhm.

Also missing from the parts of the discussion i've yet read, is the question of what sort of software we're using.

At the risk of using a buzzword, decentralized comms could reduce the risks of constitutional shutdown. And maybe even be better.

fixmycode• 6 years ago

I hope they name it mastodon.gov

meragrin_2• 6 years ago

Perhaps they see it as targeting a political figure because of political differences rather than trying to prevent the spread of misinformation. I'm not seeing any annotations on a number prominent members of Congress spreading misinformation.

Where in the US Constitution does it say presidents cannot threaten companies? Obama had his share of threats. I'm sure they could find a suitable legal issue with Twitter targeting Trump while ignoring members of Congress.

standardUser4• 6 years ago

"Obama had his share of threats."

Cite two.

RandomTisk8• 6 years ago

That is exactly how I see it. I see it as silicon valley employees taking it upon themselves to try to get the last word in with Trump's message. Linking to CNN and WP was just beyond the pale.

thephyber6• 6 years ago

Where in the US Constitution does it say presidents cannot threaten companies?

The Articles of the US Constitution aren't an enumerated list of illegal actions. It's the wrong place to look for limitations of presidential power.

I love that our expectations of the current president are so low that we will use excuse them because "the previous presidents did it too!" You aren't actually saying what he's doing is legal; you are simply increasing the importance of precedent over the statutory restraints of power -- it's a very dangerous argument to make.

thewileyone• 6 years ago

Also not in the Constitution that you can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, but decent human beings understand that that's not to be done.

fzeroracer2• 6 years ago

Because that's how far we've gone from reality. The word censorship has lost almost all meaning in online arguments when people are trying to argue that what Twitter did constitutes censorship while Trump publicly threatening them with shutdown somehow does not.

It's become increasingly obvious that the argument around censorship has never been actually about censorship but rather as another political bludgeon you can use to beat your opponent over the head with by scoring some easy points since censorship = bad. They ignore the power dynamics at play which is what makes censorship possible.

Thorentis11• 6 years ago

its an unacceptable form of censorship for a private platform to annotate content it allows others to post

It is an unacceptable form of censorship to hand over our modern day equivalent of the public square to private companies, and then allow them to police what people say in it.

Freedom of speech was always intended to be protected in public. The Internet is now our equivalent of the public space. It is time this problem is solved once and for all, and the Internet is now reclassified as both a public utility and a public space.

Yes, those of us with technical know-how can argue that personal websites are that equivalent. But this is depriving those that see Twitter, Facebook, et. al. as a public platform, of the right to have their voice heard. A tweet is now the equivalent of a placard on the street. Do we really want to censor that because we messed up in how we allowed the Internet to be run?

javagram9• 6 years ago

Yes, those of us with technical know-how can argue that personal websites are that equivalent. But this is depriving those that see Twitter, Facebook, et. al. as a public platform, of the right to have their voice heard. A tweet is now the equivalent of a placard on the street. Do we really want to censor that because we messed up in how we allowed the Internet to be run?

Disagree, because street space is limited, whereas there are a multiplicity of websites you can go to. It isn’t just a matter of personal websites. There’s a Twitter-like, Gab, which can be used. The president and his multi-million dollar campaign apparatus could easily strike a deal with Gab to host some more Gab servers and get their message out via Gab to anyone of their twitter followers who wants to sign up.

Never mind that Trump is not actually being censored on twitter in any way - his message still went out to all his followers, simply with an appended notice that Twitter itself considers the message to be factually wrong.

EDIT: this is like saying that the President has the right to publish whatever content he wants in a specific newspaper. Back in the day, a city might have a dozen newspapers - they could each print what they liked and if they decided not to print a person’s letter to the editor, that was no violation of free speech. Or if they print the letter to the editor with a note explaining they disagree with it, that certainly doesn’t violate free speech either.

BurningFrog3• 6 years ago

One factor is that Trump says a lot of dumb things, and almost none of them are true.

Instead he seems to say whatever outrageous thing that can get attention so he's the center of the news cycle. Once again, it worked.

When he actually does something to silence twitter, I'll be upset too. But I'm not falling for the "big crazy talk ploy" again.

themacguffinman3• 6 years ago

Hot off the press:

President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order aimed at social media companies on Thursday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters Wednesday evening, a move that comes as the president and his allies have escalated their allegations that companies like Twitter and Facebook stifle GOP voices.

https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2020/05/27/trump-executive...

INTPenis• 6 years ago

I'm not saying this is related in any way but in the last few days I've seen a lot of toots from new users introducing themselves to the fediverse. And a lot of them are mentioning twitter.

I hope this means we finally get some big profile names in the fediverse. A lot of celebrities are talking about the issue but I have yet to see anyone mention valid alternatives.

AzzieElbab• 6 years ago

It really isn't about fact checking. No social media company is in position to do so, especially when dealing with unknown. It is about blocking the message, which IMHO is the same thing as tired old deplatforming. I am not taking sides here, but would it not be fair to have every journalist and politician who keeps tweeting about the Russian collision marked for fact checking or banned now that "official" sources disagree?

thepangolino• 6 years ago

That would be hilarious to watch. Unfortunately we all know that’s not happening.

hadtodoit5• 6 years ago

If companies want to allow user generated content they should be liable for moderating it. The legal protections that these companies have thrived on should be repealed. They don't seem to have trouble removing content they disagree with so illegal content shouldn't be any more difficult.

baq• 6 years ago

nobody is in a position to declare any fact truth. it's impossible almost by definition.

that doesn't mean that it isn't possible for some facts. in fact, i believe social media are among the best positioned to do so for surprisingly many facts.

Kephael• 6 years ago

Why doesn't Twitter "fact check" the fake photo of the MN Cop in discriminatory clothing that's been trending on Twitter all day?

https://twitter.com/search?q=%22Make%20Whites%20Great%20Agai...

They are working as editors which does not provide them FCC section 230 protection.

padseeker• 6 years ago

Am I the only one that sees the irony that

A) Twitter, a private company, was merely adding a warning to his tweet which doesn't restrict his speech at all, and has long been defended by conservatives that private companies restricting speech is not a violation of the first amendment

AND

B) Trump threatened to use the powers of government to stop someone from violating his speech that is not protected by the first amendment is ACTUALLY VIOLATING THE FIRST AMENDMENT?

carapace4• 6 years ago

(I think we need a semantic refactoring tool for threads like this one to extract the minimal graph of argument-and-counter-argument; DRY for discussions.)

hn2017• 6 years ago

A new controvery for Trump so people ignore his previous Controversy of the Week. More airtime for Trump, it's a repeat of 2016. Unfortunately.

A-Train• 6 years ago

Believe it or not but Sasha Baron Cohen made a great argument to everyone who thinks that Twitter should not interfere with freedom of speech.

Basically quoting Sasha's argument "freedom of speech is not the freedom of reach". Spreading lies, hate and false information is everyone's right if they do it in their home alone but they shouldn't be allowed to reach bigger audiences.

Video here: https://youtu.be/PVWt0qUc0CE

legolas24124• 6 years ago

Very much disagree. If I cut your reach to 0, I denied you the freedom of speech. If cut your reach in half, I still affected your freedom of speech.

The question is whether fb/Twitter should be subjected to freedom of speech restrictions or not

darkwizard42• 6 years ago

Your reach on Twitter being cut to 0 is absolutely constitutionally allowed.

cyberowl• 6 years ago

Gonna play some devil's advocate

Freedom of speech is a concept, and a legal definition in the US. It's true that Twitter has no _legal_ obligation to uphold free speech since it's not a government entity.

But if you support the _concept_ of free speech, Twitter is stiffing conversation by playing a moral judge on what is considered truth and what's considered lies.

The Constitution was written 200 years ago without any of the today's technology. Back then, all "speech" happens either live in person, or by individual printing presses. Government back then was the biggest threat to the concept of free speech, so it's indoctrinated in the constitution as a legal concept.

Today, public discussion space has moved onto social media platforms. Government is no longer the biggest threat to speech (because of the Constitution), but private companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc who can just ban anyone at will and cause them to lose the ability to reach their followers. If you want to protect free speech as a concept, then we need to update our legal concept to include any platform or service that's identified as critical to public discussion.

Similar to how electricity companies are regulated as utilities companies because they're so crucial to people's daily lives, social media platforms should be regulated as speech platforms because they're so crucial to today's conversations happening in society.

This is the hard truth. You won't like it because you hate the man. But it's the truth / end devil's advocate

rlewkov• 6 years ago

A private company is not obliged to publish anyone's Tweets, blog posts, opinions, etc and it is not a violation of free speech.

squarefoot• 6 years ago

How curious. I don't recall him reacting the same way when he was on the receiving side before the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

pwdisswordfish22• 6 years ago

One alternative is to ban politicians from using these private websites as "official pulpits". As private websites they are under no legal obligation to allow anyone to use them. If politicians want to communicate with constituents, then let them do so through government websites. Why does the US government not create its own "Twitter" service? Government websites are subject to laws and regulations that private websites are not. Unlike private websites they would be required to honour free speech protections under existing US law.

As we know, the private websites have incentives to allow politicians to use them as pulpits because it drives "engagement" and, in some cases, because they want to sell political ads or ad services.

pwdisswordfish22• 6 years ago

The term "private websites" might be ambiguous. What I mean is "privately-owned websites".

Consultant324526• 6 years ago

Trump stated an opinion about what he personally believes will happen if mail-in ballot use is expanded. He might be incorrect, but Twitter singling this out to promote opposing opinions is by no means "fact checking."

This is a campaign contribution with a real economic value that should be calculable. So let's just let the FEC figure out the value of this contribution and all of the existing regulations will apply.

fareesh• 6 years ago

The existence of such a diversity of views on whether or not the statement was factual or not factual is enough of a good reason to see why this feature is not a good idea.

The discussion being had between diverse perspectives is not helped when the platform starts flagging things with its own hand-picked opinion.

dionian• 6 years ago

I'll believe Twitter's new actions are pure once it starts fact-checking politicians of all stripes.

aty268• 6 years ago

Twitter banning Conservatives from the platform for fair talking points is far more concerning than the government threatening to punish companies for silencing their users.

Clearly competition is not solving this problem. So should the federal government do something about it? Maybe.

zachware• 6 years ago

This gets to the issue of property rights. It's not unlike the tribal debate over mask requirements in private businesses.

If you are a conservative you believe in property rights. Thus, private companies can make whatever rules they want...with their property...and if I don't agree with them, I go elsewhere.

The same is true with Twitter. So it makes this whole fiasco so hypocritical. If you claim to be a conservative but you don't respect a business' right to set its own rules, you're a charlatan.

nullc• 6 years ago

If anyone else used twitter the way Trump does, twitter would have removed them from the platform long ago.

I thin that their transparently profit motivated move in treating him so differently-- by not banning him-- weakens their moral case against regulation.

Twitter's relationship with Trump isn't about anyone's right to free speech, it's about twitter's income stream.

RyanGoosling• 6 years ago

Good.

jkingsbery• 6 years ago

As a Republican and as an American, it pains me to have that man as the standard barer. Even when he makes a point that I think main-stream circa 2006-2014 Republicans would have agreed with, he does it in such a bad, ham fisted, way that nothing changes. Even though Trump spent almost his entire adult life as not conservative, he's now what people associate with the term. But he's not "conservative" in any sense of the word: he's not conservative in temperament, he's not conservative in his use (or threat to use) of government power, he's not seeking to conserve any precedents. It makes it impossible to make any sort of debate on the actual point, because everything becomes about him.

czzr3• 6 years ago

Will you still vote Republican? Just curious, please ignore this question if you think it too personal or impertinent.

ycombonator• 6 years ago

Let’s face it Silicon Valley is run by leftists. Nothing to see here move on.

classified• 6 years ago

Who would have thought that being a massive a-hole can be such a successful brand? Trump misses no opportunity to demonstrate his unwavering commitment to despotism. He will make a great dictator once his presidency runs out.

zestyping• 6 years ago

Call his bluff. Suspend his account.

11thEarlOfMar• 6 years ago

Any media source that earns its revenue via advertising must be considered entertainment.

Fact checking entertainment is nonsense.

busymom022• 6 years ago

It seems like any remotely political post on HN gets flooded and upvoted with provable incorrect comments. Twitter team which is doing "fact checks" is severely biased and factually wrong.

Twitter's "Head of Site Integrity" Yoel Roth boasts on his LinkedIn that he is in charge of "developing and enforcing Twitter’s rules".

“He leads the teams responsible for developing and enforcing Twitter’s rules”

Here's a few of his tweets:

Massive anti-Trump protest headed up Valencia St. San Francisco.
I’m just saying, we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.
The “you are not the right kind of feminist” backlash to yesterday’s marches has begun. Did we learn nothing from this election?
Yes, that person in the pink hat is clearly a bigger threat to your brand of feminism than ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE
How does a personality-free bag of farts like Mitch McConnell actually win elections?
“Today on Meet The Press, we’re speaking with Joseph Goebbels about the first 100 days…” —What I hear whenever Kellyanne is on a news show

This same person doesn't stand up to his own purity tests:

It wouldn't be a trip to New York without at least one big scary tranny.
"Trans is a category worth being linguistically destabilized in the same way we did gay with 'fag,'" he wrote. "Sorry, but I don’t subscribe to PC passing the buck. Identity politics is for everyone."

Twitter's "fact check" is literally wrong. Until few years ago, every one agreed that mail-in ballot has massive fraud:

“votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised & more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...

Just 1 week ago: Close Results In Paterson Vote Plagued By Fraud Claims; Over 3K Ballots Seemingly Set Aside - A county spokesman said 16,747 vote-by-mail ballots were received, but the county's official results page shows 13,557 votes were counted — with uncounted ballots representing 19%

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/close-results-in-pater...

California Secretary of State confirmed double-voting in one case and suspected double-voting by a number of other registered voters on Super Tuesday:

https://www.scribd.com/document/456618983/CA-SOS-Duplicate-V...

Yesterday, WEST VIRGINIA – Thomas Cooper, a USPS mail carrier in Pendleton County, was charged today in a criminal complaint with attempted election fraud, U.S. Attorney Bill Powell announced.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndwv/pr/pendleton-county-mail-c...

In 2004, Jerry Nadler (Democrat) asserts that paper ballots, particularly in the absence of machines, are extremely susceptible to fraud:

https://streamable.com/tbzu47

Future head of the Democrat Party Debbie Wasserman Schultz opposing mail-in ballots due to the risk of election fraud in 2008:

https://streamable.com/2tyqp1

West Virginia Mail Carrier Charged With Altering Absentee Ballot Requests:

https://time.com/5843088/west-virginia-mail-carrier-fraud-ab...

Also Twitter’s Trump ‘Fact Check’ Does Not Disclose Company Partnered with Groups Pushing Mail-In Ballots.

-----------

https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/822654925217873921

https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/823312544425132033

https://twitter.com/catfashionshow/status/298477704666300416

https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/890812999874691073

https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/823260235796094978

colejohnson6615• 6 years ago

So he’s biased. Does that mean him fact checking is wrong? Sure, we should demand accountability on both sides, but it’s hard to be completely neutral.

busymom022• 6 years ago

Did you read my comment in full? I provided 5 different sources (all liberal too) that Twitter's "fact checking" is 100% wrong.

tehwebguy6• 6 years ago

Sorry, do these data points prove that votes cast by mail are not "less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised & more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth"?

busymom022• 6 years ago

Did you read my full comment?

shadowgovt39• 6 years ago

This is great signal. It's a shame instead of saying any of this, the President makes wild accusations without any citations.

busymom022• 6 years ago

He has made citations. It’s literally on the White house website for anyone to see. He has also tweeted it out several times.

sabujp• 6 years ago

"Close" doesn't refer to the social media platform as close , the social media platform itself is a closely-integrated platform rather than a closed one.

quantum_state• 6 years ago

clear sign of stupidity ... nothing else needs to be said ...

jliptzin• 6 years ago

If he doesn't like it, he could easily have one of his supplicants build a twitter clone for his rage tweeting. There is nothing hard about building a twitter clone, the only hard part is getting the users in the door, but that'd be easy for him with 40% of the country treating him like he's a god.

saym• 6 years ago

I was surprised to see Gab as a top reply to one of his tweets. Gab has a verified Twitter account, and it was offering itself as an alternative to the 'censorship'.

I don't find it surprising, but do find it sad. Few people understand how the internet works, and that there's probably an alternative to every platform, utility, or library out there.

randyrand3• 6 years ago

The fundamental question is, do people have a right to free speech on the web?

The web is nearly entirely privately owned, which makes answering this question difficult.

On one hand, the web is where we do 90% of our communication these days.

On the other hand, the web is privately owned not public.

I’m convinceable either way. Did telephone companies have a right to censor land line speech? Should ISPs be able to censor? Should Cloudflare? AWS? If telephone companies would have run afoul of the 1st amendment to regulate phone speech, It seems like other “foundational” industries like ISPs and Cloudflare should be regulated to be “dumb pipes”.

Where social networks fall is less clear.

dangoljames4• 6 years ago

Can you say 'Dumbass'? I knew ya could :D

goatherders• 6 years ago

His account should have been closed long ago. The only reason it wasnt is eyeballs and dollars. This is a late but welcome development.

awakeasleep• 6 years ago

It's really hard for people to put aside their personal political views and look at things from a legal point of view.

The issue here is whether these private companies are actually making rules within their own private domain, or if they control a public space.

If you feel like you intuitively know the answer to that question, take that as an indication that you haven't loaded enough of the prerequisites in your mind to actually understand what is at stake.

There are simple arguments for both sides of the equation, but the details become maddening before you even get to the complications of how it's all subservient to advertising, personal data tracking, and in a realm that is testing our current definition of monopoly.

ghostpepper• 6 years ago

If you have any resources you can point me toward, I would love to read the best arguments for each side.

The best I've found so far is a supreme court case called Marsh v Alabama which has nothing to do with the internet but does touch on the application of the first amendment to a private physical space.

Animats3• 6 years ago

"Trump to sign executive order on social media Thursday." - White House press secretary.[1]

[1] https://thehill.com/policy/technology/499847-trump-to-sign-e...

thephyber6• 6 years ago

There seem to be a lot of different threads of argument here and lots of the discussion seems to meander between them.

The way I see it:

  - The "town square" concept (and whether individual social media apps/websites constitute what is historically called that in the legal realm). Can a person say something which should get them banned from a town square? What if multiple town squares coordinate their actions against a single user/content?
  - Private party "censorship". Is what social media companies do "censoring"?
  - The role of 1st Amendment in "protecting speech" of private individuals against private companies (which historically is not covered by the 1st Amendment, but is covered by the principle of Free Speech)
  - The role of 1st Amendment in "protecting speech" of private companies against the president (which might be covered under the 1st Amendment, depending on other factors)
  - Whether the 1st Amendment protects from threats from government officials, as opposed to actions of officials
  - Private sector companies using their own moderation rules+workforce (including vague rule definitions and no ability to get a judgement about where "the line" is)
  - Brigades of political activists using the moderation systems against their adversaries
  - Whether the political tendencies of employees at the relevant social media companies have any significant bias for/against specific users/content
  - Whether a private sector company is allowed to curate content on its property (and the sub-arguments which revolve around ToS/EULA/contracts)
  - Legal responsibilities+liability of social media "platforms" under "Section 230" (and some people misunderstand this industry to be under Common Carrier laws, which regulates more commoditized telco systems)
  - Second-order effects of account bans, including loss of access and content under shared accounts (eg. getting banned from your Facebook account also leaves you locked out of any account you connected with Facebook Connect / OAuth)

megablast• 6 years ago

Is it even possible for the president to shut them down? Does he have the authority?

dboreham3• 6 years ago

Finally a policy I can get behind.

hedora2• 6 years ago

I really hope they he makes demands they’re unwilling to agree to, and they simply suspend his account instead.

aabhay2• 6 years ago

I want to see an actual statistical analysis of how many of Trump's "threats" on social media/Twitter have resulted in genuine legislative action. I remember a few years back now my alma mater (UC Berkeley) getting extremely upset of Trump threatening to withhold "federal funding" for the perceived anti-conservative action of canceling some trashy public speaker shill whose name now escapes me.

olivermarks• 6 years ago

Rising have a good discussion of the ramifications IMO https://youtu.be/pY8xnMXXlqI

sjg007• 6 years ago

Twitter should just ban Trump.. seems straightforward. He breaks all their rules.

scarface742• 6 years ago

Y’all wanted government regulation over tech - here you go. Be careful what you ask for.

lordvon15• 6 years ago

This ‘fact check’ makes unfair biases way too easy. It is not a soulless algorithm or natural law that chooses the target and contents of these ‘fact checks’, but unaccountable individuals. Like communism, good in theory, but hard to implement. I hold my vote to be extremely precious, and would like to protect its value, and we should be vigilant about ways to do that. Mail-in voting seems too easily hackable, especially considering almost half of Americans don’t even vote (e.g. lots of opportunity for illegitimate mail-in voting).

ALittleLight• 6 years ago

I think a better solution for Trump, since he obviously doesn't have the power to 'close' social media, would be to create a competitor. There should be a public social media company, tied to real identity, that would support something like Twitter. You could post your thoughts or essays there, follow people, comment, etc. Put out a request for design proposals, the emphasis should be on sharing thoughts attributed to your real identity, keeping your account safe, recovering passwords, and things like that.

Having a national social media would have the side benefit of allowing a better identity system than social security numbers which are a travesty. I have to share my social security number with many people, but also somehow keep it safe? Instead, I should have a public and private key pair, and this could be associated with my National Social Media account for a single identity, and sign messages with my private key if I need to apply for a loan, or a lease, or whatever.

The National Social Media account could enshrine the same protections afforded by the US constitution - free speech, you cannot be censored top down, only by people blocking you. The government cannot spy on your usage patterns or edit your messages, and so on.

If Trump were to get such a thing created, and it worked reasonably well, and he started using it exclusively instead of Twitter, I think it would gain a lot of traction. I know I would try it out.

jedieaston• 6 years ago

It seems like this could be achieved with login.gov, if anyone wanted. It requires MFA (password + U2F/TOTP) which should be sufficient to prove who you are and that you are signing something. There’s integration docs for government services.

RandomTisk8• 6 years ago

I'm not opposed to it, but I imagine you would have a lot of people very hesitant to put their opinions on record with a system that is controlled by the government. The big benefit with Twitter is it's co-mingled with citizen and government employees alike and I'm not sure how you'd promote a government run system. Governments needs a subpoena to access records from a private company (theoretically) but if that layer of protection isn't there because the system is owned by a government, then I doubt anyone would want to use it for more than press releases, wedding announcements, births, obituaries and things like that.

pmarreck• 6 years ago

Considering the fact that every fact checker in existence has consistently rated Trump the least accurate candidate (or president), unless you believe in an evidenceless conspiracy that there is mass manipulation of the broadly accepted truth going on, this should not be the least bit surprising

JSavageOne• 6 years ago

The hypocrisy of the Pro-Business Republican party is really astounding. One one hand they fight for deregulation and small government so that coal and oil companies can pollute the environment (because you know, according to Trump global warming is a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese. Yes he really believes that), and now they want to censor and shut down social media platforms? Trump was impeached and should have been kicked out of office, but thanks to the Republican party, he is still in office. I can't even tell what the Republican party even stands for anymore. Low taxes and reduced safety net? Climate denialism? Christian values?

I honestly think you could pick a random 16 year old kid off the street and they'd make a better president than Trump. That's the sad and embarrassing state of affairs that is U.S. politics. I tend to err on the free speech side when it comes to social media platforms, but when you're the U.S. president and spreading baseless conspiracy theories and blatant lies with real consequences, then you damn well should get fact checked and called out on your nonsense.

Never been a more embarrassing time to be an American.

spicyramen• 6 years ago

I have worked in one of those so called social networks. Yes Google, Facebook,Twitter in the heard of Silicon Valley the majority are liberal companies. Hard to talk about religion, 2A, traditional family values without being treated as a racist or a Trump supporter... There is a case against Google (YouTube division) from PragerU which claims yes you can't be a public forum and restrict people's opinions, you can't have it both ways. In a nutshell, private companies are that and should be regulated if they control the narrative (politics)

lordvon15• 6 years ago

It seems like most people here believe there is no evidence of mail-in voter fraud (for some reason...). Here’s a huge list of convictions for ‘fraudulent use of absentee ballots’: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...

Edit: some might think this list is comprehensive, but the first page says it is a ‘sampling’, a 400-page sampling.

ForrestN2• 6 years ago

This list proves the total irrelevance of voter fraud. Going back 30 years there are only 1000 such cases in a country of 300M+!

To justify severely hampering the public’s right to vote you would need to demonstrate a pattern of recent fraud efforts that swung elections to the side committing the fraud. as far as I know there are exactly zero of those at the federal level, and probably near zero at any level of government.

There is no legitimate independent body studying this who believes voter fraud in the United States justifies the widespread disenfranchisement strategy the GOP is applying in so many elections across the country. Full stop.

lordvon15• 6 years ago

Hmm. It is a rather arbitrary condition that we should be able to prove that voter fraud swung an election before we should be worried about it. There are a lot of recent convictions, which should not happen at all. And I don’t see how a ‘small‘ amount of evidence can prove the point against the evidence.

It should be worrying that this is happening at all. Our vote is one of our most precious forms of expression. This list of convictions is just the ones the author knew of, the ones that just got caught.

Oh and I would love see any evidence on the disenfranchisement you mentioned to update my worldview with. Don’t worry, if you give me a little bit of evidence, I won’t take it as proof that you are ‘wrong’.

miguelmota• 6 years ago

Twitter tweeted this out recently:

We added a label to two @realDonaldTrump Tweets about California’s vote-by-mail plans as part of our efforts to enforce our civic integrity policy. We believe those Tweets could confuse voters about what they need to do to receive a ballot and participate in the election process.

https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1265838823663075341

stubish• 6 years ago

Twitter and other media platforms will be terribly upset if it becomes illegal regulate content published on their site.

I await with popcorn. It is going to be hilarious if tweets from 4chan become constitutionally protected.

amadeuspagel3• 6 years ago

Imagine a future where billionaires buy stakes in twitter to influence their "fact-checking", corporations use their ad-spend as a lever to get twitter to "fact-check" stories critical of them while various levels of government try to use everything from privacy law to building permits to pressure them to "fact-check" their opponents more and themselves less.

dmode• 6 years ago

I wish we could just all tune Trump out. In this 75 years of existence his contribution to humanity is a big fat zero. His tweets are useless, only exist to peddle conspiracy theory, to deflect, to self congratulate and to rile up his base. I don't know why we pay attention to him and forget about the vast kindness that exist is our day to day life.

jamisteven• 6 years ago

Headline is a bit taking things out of context. He is basically saying they can either allow all free speech or cease to exist, I would tend to agree.

sixstringtheory4• 6 years ago

It's literally using a word he used, hence the quotes.

No speech was disallowed, so this would be much ado about nothing.

thoughtstheseus• 6 years ago

Remove the monopoly that large tech companies have by regulating open access to user generated and uploaded content so others can compete with different service offerings. I know it’s an unpopular opinion but geez, if there are hundreds of millions of user generated content pieces each day that are only accessible through one platform it’s a monopoly.

ezoe• 6 years ago

Considering purely on the freedom of expression.

It's Twitter's web server, which is a private property of the for-profit company. They don't have a contract with the Trump that they distribute the expression of Trump without modification. So it's their right to express their idea on their web server.

If the Trump want to distribute a true unmodified expression to the public, he can easily do so by setting up his own web server.

frankzen• 6 years ago

After listening to the conference it just boils down to whether these social media companies are public forums protected from liability or publishers. Once they made the move to edit content, they became publishers. It's actually pretty clear. All that is happening is that they're losing their public forum status, rightfully so.

Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

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