Jack Dorsey explains why Twitter fact-checked Trump’s false voting claims

https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/27/twitter-vs-trump-fact-checking-dorsey/

by maskedinvader • 6 years ago

65 76 6 years ago

techcrunch.com

notadog• 6 years ago

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23333504

gsibble• 6 years ago

"incorrect or disputed information"

"This does not make us an “arbiter of truth.” "

Deciding what constitutes incorrect or disputed information in a political climate absolutely does.

dagnabbit3• 6 years ago

It's deeply sad that one party is now so devoted to disinformation and the destruction of democracy that they whine when somebody provides a small-print link to third party fact checkers.

Such pathetic little snowflakes.

dang6• 6 years ago

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar like this. It's against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Note these, for example:

"Don't be snarky."

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

You may not owe pathetic snowflakes better, but you owe this community better if you're posting here, because we're hoping not to explode: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

javagram2• 6 years ago

As they have left trump’s false claim up, just with a note below it, doesn’t that still leave the reader/viewer as the ultimate arbiter of truth?

The reader can decide for themselves whether Trump or the other linked sources are more trustworthy.

eanzenberg• 6 years ago

Right but then they omit links which verify his comments.

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

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/close-results-in-pater...

tracer4201• 6 years ago

They have a civic integrity policy, per that article. That gives the leeway to decide something like misleading voters requires adding a link to the tweet but not fact checking everything every person says.

What I’m saying is it’s not binary. There’s a spectrum.

Supermancho2• 6 years ago

Deciding what constitutes incorrect or disputed information in a political climate absolutely does.

Absolutely not. Absolute means something and you're being hyperbolic, at best. It's the human condition to make selective decisions, including meta-decisions. It does not make you or I an arbiter of truth because we do it, nor does it make Twitter or youtube arbiters of truth. This is "equality of outcome", territory which is nonsense.

dang6• 6 years ago

you're being obtuse

No name-calling on HN, please. It's specifically against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The more polarized things become, the more all of us here need to breathe and treat each other well.

neonate• 6 years ago

You're reacting to just the word "absolute" and misinterpreting what he meant. In that sentence it just means "very much". You could delete it without changing the argument.

ecf• 6 years ago

But giving Trump a platform to lie to hundreds of millions of people is?

slg• 6 years ago

Per our Civic Integrity policy, the tweets yesterday may mislead people into thinking they don’t need to register to get a ballot (only registered voters receive ballots). We’re updating the link on @realDonaldTrump’s tweet to make this more clear.

That might be the worst possible answer. That isn't what people on the left found objectionable with that Tweet and specifically signalling that out isn't going to assuage the complaints coming from the right.

wahern2• 6 years ago

We live in such strange times. The party that for decades bemoaned moral relativism has, because of its skepticism of global warming and other supposedly liberal narratives, convinced a large swath of Americans, conservative and liberal, that the truth itself is relative, or at least to pretend to believe so. That's why people are so quick to disavow being "arbiters of truth" despite that once upon a time it was assumed everyone acted as an arbiter of the truth--who would dare give their voice to non-truths?

I keep returning to the notion that conservatives have become the standard bearers of radical leftist philosophies, such as poststructuralism's arguments about the non-existence of objective "truth". Republicans seem hellbent on proving this out. I've been arguing this for the better part of 20 years, though only recently did I stumble upon similar opinions, such as the satire piece, "Foreword to Newt Gingrich's Post-structuralism for Republicans: TrumpTruth and How to Make It, by Betsy DeVos, US secretary of education".

young_unixer• 6 years ago

I, for one, haven't heard conservatives use the relativist argument to oppose censorship but rather the bias with which the rules are defined and applied by Twitter et al, or similar arguments.

millstone5• 6 years ago

It's not that the truth has become relative - nobody is saying "you have your beliefs, I have mine." We are at each others' throats because there's vanishingly few shared facts.

There's hardly any mechanisms left to bring about shared truth. Even a life-threatening pandemic falls short.

pas3• 6 years ago

Because the world is very big and we're really well insulated from most parts of it. Yeah there are hospitals full of patients in Wuhan, who cares. Yeah I can't go to Rome this year, because those frightened Italians closed shop, even though the plague is only in Northern Italy. Hah, those New Yorkers are losers, they don't even have enough morgues, probably because the constant crime! Damn these irresponsible city dwellers brought death to our doorsteps! Uh, well, Joe the neighbor got well after two day, so fuck these mask-donning gun-fearing science-suckers, don't tell me what to wear, and I won't cover my face, I'm not a Muslim woman!

And so on, and so on. The cognitive dissonance is palpable at every turn, but that doesn't help those who are in its grip. 100+ years ago people blamed that new thing, electricity, for the Russian flu, now people blame 5G. Just as sometimes lovely religious folks blame gays, rock and roll, and video games for everything.

There are very few clear cut things in our world that our brain accepts as such. (The Earth is round? Well, it seems flat to me. An anvil falls down faster than a pillow, so that must be because it's heavier.)

cheweh• 6 years ago

As for similar opinions, see Stephen Colbert on "truthiness".

wahern2• 6 years ago

But it's more than that, though. If you closely read the works of some modern-day conservative intellectuals, such as Gingrich or Scalia, you can trace their arguments to, e.g., radical continental (esp. French) philosophy, both 19th and 20th century. A couple of years ago I read an interview where Gingrich basically admits to being a nihilist, albeit driven by his disgust with liberal politics. Truth and facts literally don't matter to Gingrich; his goal is the destruction of the modern liberal state as he sees it; yet, as an intellectual (he's at least well read, if anything), he's naturally driven to rationalize things, so it's unsurprising he effectively ends up in much the same place as, e.g, radical, Marxist leftists driven to develop ideological models in their attempts to undermine the capitalist state and its institutions. In a famous speech Scalia admits he believes American constitutional jurisprudence should reflect French Civil Law jurisprudence, which principally emerged after the writing and adoption of the U.S. Constitution. (Therefore, Scalia's jurisprudence is fundamentally in opposition to originalism, even though it emphasizes textualism and contemporaneous dictionary definitions. It's continental radicalism disguised as American conservatism.)

It all stands out because since its founding American intellectuals, especially mainstream and conservative political intellectuals, have leaned far more heavily toward Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, literally and aesthetically. Americans tended to be more pragmatic, less abstract, and, frankly, generally conservative compared to any of their continental counterparts. Everything about American political philosophy and popular political sentiment has historically been relatively muted; that is, until the modern era that has seen the Republican party ascendent. This has been true even at the liberal extreme--compare Abolitionism, Progressivism, and the American labor movements to their contemporaneous continental European counterparts. (We largely inherited this culture from Britain, of course.)

Likewise, haven't you ever noticed the rather conspicuous conversions of many conservative intellectuals to Catholicism? Or the fact that all the conservatives on SCOTUS are Catholic? (Gorsuch attends an Episcopal church, though.) Even as a Catholic myself, it sort of makes me wonder if the fears of the anti-papists are coming to pass. Of course, Catholicism is very conservative, but it's conservative in a continental European sense, has been shaped by radical continental intellectual dynamics, and culturally continues to have a far larger surface area exposed to radical intellectualism. The Jesuits are great examples of how zealous conservatism can morph into a radical--and even leftist radical--ideological culture. I believe Catholics have risen to the intellectual ranks of conservative factions precisely because they're more familiar with and adept at developing and weaponizing radical ideology. (Relatedly, most of the liberals on SCOTUS are now Jewish, and not coincidentally it was early and mid 20th century European Jewish immigrants who injected radical continental thought into American intellectual circles, greatly influencing the course of American liberalism. There's an obvious stereotyping and prejudice in the types of people the Senate is comfortable confirming, both on the right and the left.)

So it's not just about the adoption and display of "truthiness", it's the deliberate development of ideological arguments and models that undergird "truthiness", in the same manner that conservatives once accused radical mid-century leftists (i.e. Marxists, some extreme feminists, etc) of shaping liberal politics. Nationalist, populist political waves have traveled across the world, but arguably its in America where that wave has a distinctively sophisticated intellectual underpinning, and one might even argue that the global phenomenon originated in the U.S. because of that. Modern American conservatism emerged to oppose mid-century liberalism, but seems to have adopted and recontextualized many of its arguments--moral relativism, identity politics, etc.

corporateslave5• 6 years ago

The whole fight behind voting really is political. It helps the left and it hurts the right. It’s like gerrymandering. Sure, people have the right to vote and should be able to, but that’s an intellectually dishonest way of representing changes in voting.

Okkef• 6 years ago

Of course the fight behind voting is political!

But that does not mean anything is allowed in politics. It's about time Trump was seriously challenged on his lies.

pas3• 6 years ago

As long as the plurality of voters are buying shit someone is going to sell it. The GOP primary had every kinds of people and Trump won because he was the most blatant. So there's that.

kmonsen2• 6 years ago

This is specifically true in the US at this moment, but it does not need to be so. The reason for this is that the GOP has less popular support (all polling on policy issues they are doing badly), but the voters they have are very dedicated and will go to much greater lengths to vote.

Also votes are suppressed in specific areas which does not good in a democracy. People should be able to choose their leaders, it should not be leaders are able to choose their voters.

What I mean to say is that having good voting access should not be a political issue in a democracy.

dmurray• 6 years ago

This is true about voting rights (enfranchising more voters is almost always good for the left), but gerrymandering in the US is a cross-party issue. There are plenty of examples of what the Supreme Court called "affirmative racial gerrymandering" that carve out districts to ensure more Democratic candidates get elected. Examples start at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering_in_the_United_S...

sagichmal• 6 years ago

gerrymandering in the US is a cross-party issue.

Not in the last ca. 20-30 years, it certainly isn't.

aspenmayer• 6 years ago

It’s a cross-party issue in the sense that Democrat Eric Holder, former US Attorney General, has been raising money for candidates who support citizen redistributing through the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. You don’t have to be a Democratic Party candidate to be a part.

I know there are also Republicans who care about this issue, but I don’t know of a better plan to fix it than this one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democratic_Redistrict...

https://democraticredistricting.com/chairman/

millstone5• 6 years ago

This is the worst kind of both-side-ism. Compare the redistricting procedures of blue states like CA or NY, to red states like TX.

If anything Democrats have been way too timid about gerrymandering and have lost votes because of it.

LordFast• 6 years ago

How does it help the left and hurt the right? Serious question.

zaroth• 6 years ago

I’ll get downvoting for attempting to answer but,... why would someone think this helps the left and hurts the right?

Ballot harvesting is generally agreed (by both political parties) to have been a major factor in the last congressional elections in CA for example.

Personally I think it is a very strange dynamic to have 200-300 political operatives canvassing specific addresses in a district to deliver provisional ballots, assist a very targeted set of people in helping to fill out those ballets, and then driving those filled out ballots to the polling station on Election Day.

Ada Briceño, chair of the Democratic Party of Orange County, said her staff and volunteers have collected mail-in ballots for GOP candidates and turned them in along with Democratic and independent ballots.
Briceño said her favorite story about ballot collection came in 2018, after she knocked on the door of a Latino man in his 70s. Her told her he’d never voted because he’d been intimidated by the ballot and process. Briceño said she spent time walking him through how it worked and discussing the candidates with him. By the end of their talk, she said the man was crying because he’d just finished voting for the first time in his life. [1]

We don’t allow campaigning within a certain distance of a polling place. But the chair of the Democratic Party can knock on a man’s door with a provisional ballot, discuss the candidates, and help him vote?

Republican campaigns take the position that their voters would never hand over a completed ballot or accept “help” in filling one out.

Fred Whitaker, chair of the Republican Party of Orange County, said they spent money on a ballot harvesting program in 2018 but saw almost no results. He said, “Republicans will basically tell you, ‘You’re not prying my ballot from my hand.’”

The SF Chronicle wrote a piece on the last CA election where Democrats gained more seats then they’ve ever won before in CA;

California Democrats took advantage of seemingly minor changes in a 2016 law to score their stunningly successful midterm election results, providing a target for GOP unhappiness that is tinged with a bit of admiration. [2]
...They felt the hit on Nov. 6 — and in the days after, as late-arriving Democratic votes were tabulated and one Republican candidate after another saw leads shrink and then evaporate. This week, a seventh GOP-held congressional seat flipped to the Democrats, leaving Republicans controlling a mere seven of California’s 53 House districts.

In Orange County alone, where every House seat went Democratic, “the number of Election Day vote-by-mail dropoffs was unprecedented — over 250,000,” Fred Whitaker, chairman of the county Republican Party, said in a note to supporters. “This is a direct result of ballot harvesting allowed under California law for the first time. That directly caused the switch from being ahead on election night to losing two weeks later.”

[1] https://www.ocregister.com/what-is-ballot-harvesting-and-how...

[2] https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/California-s-la...

zhoujianfu• 6 years ago

I think because what is the right and the left constantly rebalance around 50% popularity. So, because currently it’s harder for certain people to vote, typically liberal people, if they were able to more easily vote, they would tile things to the democrats. But then the republicans would readjust to the new realities (or never get elected again!), and soon things would be right back to around 50/50... but a 50/50 that more accurately reflects the now higher % of people who vote.

millstone5• 6 years ago

Adding friction to voting disproportionately hurts marginalized voters, who typically vote left. A clear example is requiring a drivers license or passport for voting. It makes voting easier for the rich than the poor.

twalla• 6 years ago

I'd argue that if increasing turnout to be more representative of the population as a whole hurts your party then there's something fundamentally flawed with what your party is offering to the populace.

basementcat• 6 years ago

Not necessarily. There are many historical examples of political parties founded on the principle that members of the opposition were of unsound mind or perhaps weren't even considered to be people. If one accepts these premises as sound then it is quite reasonable to restrict voting rights only to those who support the party.

xwdv• 6 years ago

For some people, it’s all about the money: Low taxes, more benefits, cheaper stuff, free stuff. Whichever candidate will give them the most, that’s what they want. Lazy people will fall into this category by default because they can’t be bothered to do any more rigorous analysis and don’t really have any strong values one way or another. Plus it’s hard to beat free stuff.

And then there’s other people, who don’t care so much about money, but rather the values. They will vote for a candidate that will actually make them worse off as long as they feel that candidate represents their values. And they will do it over and over again.

dehrmann3• 6 years ago

Something to think about: the electoral college is halfway more representative of people who can't vote (minors, non-citizens) because, in a sense, the elector represents them, and their neighbors who did vote probably have similar political views.

chrischen• 6 years ago

Well currently the GOP is overrepresented due in part to states' rights (states have more weight than people do, so less populous states have overrepresentation in the form of the Senate).

Same goes for popular elections vs electoral college. This is skewed towards the GOP which is why Trump won despite losing the popular election.

Call it what you want (balance of power, "minority rights", or whatever), but some people's votes were just counted as less of a vote.

I mean you could apply your argument to defend dictators or monarchs. Democracy of course will of course be hurtful to Maduro (of Venezuela) but helpful to his opponents. That's an odd way to frame something that simply shouldn't necessarily have been in the first place. It's not as if God made the world evenly divided between Left and Right. It's a constantly shifting line between how Left and how Right and sometimes one side is simply more wrong than the other.

I mean if we decided that somehow Left and Right should always be evenly power balanced we wouldn't have such Leftist policies such as universal suffrage or the abolition of slavery.

mattnewton2• 6 years ago

Are we a democracy or is this some kind of team sport calvinball?

The purpose of government is to serve the citizenry. If increased voting among the citizenry hurts your party there is something wrong with your party’s message or governing performance.

ykevinator2• 6 years ago

so what? All policies hurt and help groups, more voting is good, less voting is bad

pas3• 6 years ago

It is, but it seems that it's a strange made up polarization: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-is-no-evidence-th...

shibeouya• 6 years ago

I like Twitter, I really do. But Jack's statement make no sense.

If Twitter wants to step over its bounds as a platform, then it will absolutely be scrutinized as such.

What I find incredibly dishonest is that Twitter's head of "integrity" is a well-known troll who has on multiple occasions called Trump a nazi and more. How can we take their "integrity" seriously when it is led by someone with such an extreme political bias that there is no doubt this will impact what gets censored or not.

IMO this is not Twitter's role and a very slippery slope.

goatinaboat• 6 years ago

who has on multiple occasions called Trump a nazi and more

Regardless of what you might think about Trump it's a bad look for Twitter to have put someone so obviously partisan in that position https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/head-of-twitter-site...

They have definitely stepped over the line of "we're just a platform" and into "we are taking editorial stances on things now".

Kathy Griffin, who recently called for Trump to be injected with a syringe of air, still has her account and still has her blue checkmark.

m0zg2• 6 years ago

Here's Debbie Wasserman-Schulz in 2008 saying mail-in voting leads to fraud: https://twitter.com/M2Madness/status/1265698785813987328

Why does the entire liberal establishment (and its "free" press) insist on the non-sensical notion that mail-in voting is _less_ prone to fraud than in-person voting? The DNC doth protest too much, methinks.

_fizz_buzz_• 6 years ago

She didn't say that you don't need to register to vote though. Also, finding a politician who says one thing today and another thing 12 years before is hardly an art. There is a whole subreddit about Trump: https://www.reddit.com/r/TrumpCriticizesTrump/

082349872349872• 6 years ago

Almost all voting is mail-in here. But then again, we basically have a one-person one-vote system; from the outside, it seems your "electoral college" is voter fraud on a far grander (and far more institutionalised) scale than either gerrymandering or individual bad actors.

Then again, the US is strange: we can all agree that single-party states are bad, yet the US insists their two party state is somehow better than a multi-party state?

(mOzg, would you mind terribly answering my question about convertible rubles in "Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23311253 спс!)

millstone5• 6 years ago

The "mail-in voting is fraud" idea is a transparent attempt to disenfranchise voters who happen to live in cities and don't have 2+ hours to wait in line.

Is in-person voting better? Republicans have been working to close in-person urban poll sites for years. They want to make it as hard as possible for city dwellers to vote, full stop. [1].

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/11/us-polling-s...

m0zg2• 6 years ago

Was it also a "transparent attempt" in 2008 as well? Or should Debbie be "fact checked" here? I'm getting all confused.

knaik942• 6 years ago

From a business standpoint, being proactive about misinformation being spread is going to make them stand out as a seemingly more moral company. More people will read and engage. The perception of the feature is slightly muddied right now because the fact check is being painted as politically biased. But the bigger picture is that helping people vote and be more informed helps people of every political background. If a tweet had the wrong date for election day and twitter had fact checked that, would correcting that be wrong as well?

scaredtobeme2• 6 years ago

It's exactly the opposite. People are going to cringe at their hamfisted and obviously partisan interventions and their transparently hypocritical justifications for them. I don't agree with the opposing side politically but this is a losing move. The fact that their "head of site integrity" is an extreme partisan is icing on the cake. I'm surprised to say this, as someone who despises Facebook, but Zuckerberg seems to be playing this smarter, trying desperately to appease both sides. It reminds me of a guy standing with a foot on each of two diverging trains, but at least he isn't shooting himself in the foot.

ben_w• 6 years ago

I have to disagree with you about Facebook/Twitter comparison. To me it looks like Facebook is obliviously annoying everyone at the same time. Twitter doesn’t look great but does at least seem to be aware of this and trying to improve.

knaik942• 6 years ago

I'm sorry, I fail to see how having a more informed electorate is a partisan issue or a "losing move". That concept implies that the party this is "against" is only successful when the voters aren't well informed. The only side twitter is against is an intentionally misinformed userbase.

Twitter had already been fact-checking misinformation about covid-19 for harm reduction: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/11/21254733/twitter-covid-19...

The political leaning of the head of site integrity is irrelevant, his job is a branch off of infosec and can be simplified to combating spam. If one person was using 10 accounts to hype up a fake cryptocurrency, the head of site integrity would be in charge of taking action to fight that. This case happens to be harm reduction in politics and not finance or health. Unfortunately there has been somewhat of a harassment campaign against the head of site integrity because people continue to misunderstand his role.

Facebook is currently synonymous with fake news. I think that in the long term, people will stop trust it completely, similar to how they've learn to avoid clickbait titles on articles.

oliwarner• 6 years ago

Why is disagreeing with a politician a partisan?

The US has no hope of recovering from this circus show if you can't mentally separate people from parties. Trump being a dangerous idiot does not mean all Republicans are, nor does it mean all Dems are great. There are good people on all sides but this reductionism makes it impossible to see that.

happytoexplain2• 6 years ago

It sounds like you're defining anybody who is explicitly liberal or conservative as partisan, which is deeply ironic.

zpeti• 6 years ago

The trouble is the very first time this happens, they already manage to mess it up. The fact checked article contained errors too. I also think it's truly stupid to use a partisan news organisation as a fact checker. You really can't claim any impartiality. In that case you aren't a fact checker, just showing the other side of the argument. But then don't call it facts.

ykevinator2• 6 years ago

But he didn't kill her

dhhwrongagain• 6 years ago

What a mess. We should just return to catholic monarchy or at very least restrict voting to a trusted nobility. Democracy is really just a euphemism for rule by the media, and the media just serves private corporate interests. it’s unrealistic to trust the average layperson to make decisions on matters of state. I wouldn’t trust my cook to cut my hair.

occasionopinion• 6 years ago

The initial warning label should have been simple and kept to objectively defensible claims.

"Donald Trump said people in California do not need to register to receive a ballot. This is false. See $governmentSite for further information".

It was a mistake to use media organizations with partisan opinion sections as fact-checkers. The most important people to reach with that warning label are the most likely to dismiss any information from those media organizations. A warning label is useless without trust.

But, I am optimistic about Twitter's use of fact-checking. I've watched both sides of the political spectrum slip deeper and deeper into delusion, and this is one of the few glimmers of hope. Twitter has the platform, the reach, and the power to effect legitimate positive change. I feel increasingly every day that the truth is slipping between our fingers. This feels like one of our few chances to realistically combat misinformation.

I meet people from both sides of the political aisle who have incredible blind spots. People who actively follow politics and yet often have never encountered basic counter-arguments to their narratives. The modern media landscape allows people to live ensconced in an information bubble. Twitter is the most bipartisan platform that exists, and thus in the prime position to pop those bubbles.

I appreciate that Twitter is attempting this step. This has almost no likelihood of increasing users and a strong likelihood of decreasing users. They have chosen to do something that will likely hurt their bottom line out of conscience.

_y5hn• 6 years ago

Social media platforms have been working to minimize effects of false news for several years now, and such measures are expected by politicians and the public.

RickJWagner• 6 years ago

It's a dangerous precedent.

When a Democrat is in office, will Twitter appoint a rabid conservative to make the fact checks? Because it seems the current "Head of Site Integrity" has a long history of making incendiary opinionated posts against Republicans, rural states, etc.

Fairness should matter in the media. Without it, we're on a bad path.

Jack Dorsey explains why Twitter fact-checked Trump’s false voting claims

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