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Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
- onion2k 6y agoHe won't though, obviously.
- sp332 6y agoComplaining loudly that social media platforms are "biased" is a way to get special treatment without any official enforcement action.
- disgruntledphd2 6y agoIndeed, 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
- nocitrek 6y agoIf you cannot see major bias of media and tech giants towards liberal agenda, you have missed what ~ 60M americans noticed before casting their vote for Trump. It is an effort to influnce US elections (which failed in 2016). I see nothing wrong with Trumps post.
- swebs 6y agoAlso, put giant quotes around "liberal". These people are anti-gun and anti-free speech.
- andybak 6y agoI've always been worried that the inevitable drift to the right that accompanies getting older would force me to acknowledge that I was now a conservative. Fortunately conservatives have hurtled to the right faster than decrepitude could propel me in the same direction.
- Hokusai 6y ago+1 Thank you for expressing that deep and insightful though in such a nonchalant and funny way.
- sp332 6y ago"These people" meaning... the majority of American voters?
- swebs 6y agoNo. >major bias of media and tech giants
- bardonadam 6y agoHe tweeted his threat to shutdown Twitter, gotta love this.
- sp332 6y agoTwitter 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.)
- shadowgovt 6y agoHe has to. He doesn't have another media outlet where he's as directly visible to his primary constituency as he is on Twitter.
- bardonadam 6y agoIronic, isn't it?
- czzr 6y agoFox News?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- swebs 6y agoGood, 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.
- shadowgovt 6y agoI hope they take Trump head-on, and declare an affirmative right to freedom of the press that does not violate safe-harbor policy.
- anewdirection 6y agoWhy? Thats the whole problem.
- shadowgovt 6y agoThe problem is that sites (that users can choose to use or refrain from using) have a right to freedom of the press and protection against libel / slander lawsuits for also re-hosting information that third parties post through them? I don't think that's a problem. Sounds like working-as-intended. https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/21/18700605/section-230-internet-law-twenty-six-words-that-created-the-internet-jeff-kosseff-interview https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/21/18700605/section-230-inte...
- tzs 6y agoIf 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y agoKind 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?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sp332 6y agoAndrew 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/facebook-republican-shift/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/20/faceboo...
- frockington1 6y agoI'm sure they would have taken credit regardless who won. Have to keep the ad money flowing
- sp332 6y agoPossibly, yeah. But given that they ran millions of dollars worth of his ads, claiming that he was "totally silenced" is a bit silly.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ianleeclark 6y ago
- jwalgenbach 6y agoWhat a maroon.
- qubex 6y agoMoron?
- overlordalex 6y agoLikely a reference to a Bugs Bunny catch-phrase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NYFq7ZJg4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NYFq7ZJg4c
- Eldandan 6y agoI always thought maroon was actual slang for "idiot", when in fact it was just a cartoon rabbit ironically mispronouncing the word moron.
- krapp 6y agoBugs Bunny is also the reason "nimrod" has become slang for an inept person. Nimrod in the Bible is a powerful warrior and capable hunter, but Bugs used it ironically against Elmer Fudd.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 2019-nCoV 6y agoTwitter brought this upon themselves. It's going to be 2016 all over again.
- qubex 6y agoI’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?
- 2019-nCoV 6y agoHe's the only one being fact checked. And they chose CNN (most antithetical news source) to "debunk" his claims. https://twitter.com/i/events/1265330601034256384 https://twitter.com/i/events/1265330601034256384
- thebouv 6y agoYou may want to look up your word choices. They don't mean what you think they mean. What are they antithetical to? I mean .. what are you even trying to say here?
- jjuel 6y agoDoes the source matter when what he says is provably false? BTW I am all for them fact checking ALL of the politicians.
- qubex 6y agoYou mean ‘unethical’? ‘Antithetical’ means “opposed to”.
- thebouv 6y agoIt was a bigly word choice.
- 6y ago
- collegecamp293 6y agoTwitter 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?
- qubex 6y agoThat’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_ 6y agoIt'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).
- shadowgovt 6y agoThe 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."
- 6y ago
- ausbah 6y agoAs 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.
- thebouv 6y agoSo he just admitted that fact checking is suppressing conservative voices? That's awesome.
- krapp 6y agoHe'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-voting-republicans/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/30/trump-vot...
- thebouv 6y agoThe corrupt part out loud is a distraction from the hidden corruption.
- mark_l_watson 6y agoTo 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.
- shadowgovt 6y ago"Controlled by special interests" is half the story. The other half is to realize that in the US representative democracy, the people who change policy are the ones who are dedicated enough to the task to make a career out of it, at the expense of other things they could be doing. Because the system isn't managed by the will of the people; it's managed by the will of the subset of the people who put the (quite large amount of) effort in to be known and heard. Most Americans don't even do the base work of showing up to vote in every election (and the turnout numbers are too low to explain that effect by voter suppression alone). Those with other things to do and not enough time to be devoted full-time to policy-craft label those who do "special interests." The NRA is a special interest, but so is the ACLU. And the NAACP. And the AFL-CIO. And the EFF.
- jameskilton 6y agoIs 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.
- happytoexplain 6y ago(I've moved my comment to the intended parent comment): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322672
- zozbot234 6y agoExcept that leftists and libs have their own sort of low-value hateful garbage. Which usually doesn't get censored or "fact-checked" on Twitter.
- happytoexplain 6y agoTrue, but Twitter's hypocrisy doesn't relate to my point. But you're totally justified in that confusion, because my comment that you're replying to somehow ended up on the wrong parent. Here it is in the correct location: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322672 Edit: To clarify, I'm saying it doesn't relate because my point is that deleting hateful garbage off a private platform isn't censorship, and Twitter should fix their hypocrisy by deleting all hateful garbage with equal veracity, rather than the alternate fix, which would be to allow it all.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- shadowgovt 6y ago
- jjuel 6y agoIt 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.
- sp332 6y agoAnd 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.
- cheeseomlit 6y agoMail-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/pacei-voterfraudcases.pdf https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...
- shadowgovt 6y ago[citation needed; editor rejected source as unreliable]
- freshpots 6y agoA Heritage Foundation paper from the White House website. What a reputable source.... https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/26/review-trumps-many-unsubstantiated-allegations-voter-fraud/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/26/review-tr... Many states already do mail-in ballots and they're much more secure than the sketchy voting machines currently in use: https://qz.com/1783766/these-voting-machine-security-flaws-threaten-election-2020/ https://qz.com/1783766/these-voting-machine-security-flaws-t...
- 6y ago
- wsatb 6y agoThe 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.
- thebouv 6y agoThe 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?
- wsatb 6y agoThe latter.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hn_check 6y agoAre they surprising? HN is an absolute cesspool of alt-right "Conservatives" [1]. If you want AGW denial, unfettered capitalism, and as of late COVID denial, this is your place. These people have fully committed to the cult of Trump. dang is wonderfully enabling by never censuring their speech, but immediately banning/hiding/shadowbanning anyone who counters them. 1 - There is nothing conservative about Trump, beyond that he occasionally throws a bone to his enablers in the Senate and congress, and some hilariously transparent appeals to his evangelical base. I am historically a conservative, but Trumpism, and his brainless followers, has completely destroyed the title and it's something that now we have to hold almost in shame, just as Trump's cult calls the foundation of the Republican party -- the people who made it -- "RINOs". Trump appeals to contrarian bottom-feeders who think they're owning the libs or some other nonsense.
- koolhead17 6y agoTrump exists because of social media.
- orwin 6y agoI'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".
- sp332 6y agoWhat's a better word?
- swebs 6y ago"Rebuttal" would work better. Calling it a fact check implies "I'm right, you're wrong. The debate is over."
- dbbk 6y agoCalling it a fact check implies that there are facts. Facts are real things, they are not up for debate.
- robertlagrant 6y agoThis is silly. Everyone knows there are facts. What you're replying to assumes this already.
- shadowgovt 6y ago> Everyone knows there are facts. The notion of "post-truth politics" is one of the major issues of the day. "Everyone knows there are facts" is not actually a given in modern discourse.
- raziel2p 6y agoAs it should be, with a fact check (at least if the fact is demonstrably false). "Debates" (insofar as that concept even exists on a platform like Twitter) started on false grounds should not be allowed to continue. If I make a claim "A, therefore B, therefore C", and A is demonstrably false, I'm not going to insist we keep discussing B and C for the sake of not "ending the debate". I should be forced to either concede or find a new line of reasoning.
- Traster 6y agoI 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.
- thebouv 6y agoThey will never understand your point.
- latedecember 6y agoThey will never understand the pain of having red hair either.
- throwanem 6y agoWhy 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_ 6y agoThey 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.
- adrianN 6y agoWhen 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.
- qubex 6y agoWasn’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.
- krapp 6y agoActually, no, turns out it was Evelyn Beatrice Hall[0]. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Beatrice_Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Beatrice_Hall
- qubex 6y agoThanks, I stand corrected.
- ceejayoz 6y agoWould 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.)
- qubex 6y agoClearly 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.
- Reelin 6y ago> I’m in the EU so my opinion scarcely matters, to be perfectly honest That's not really true (I say this as an American). Sure, the US government is highly unlikely to change their policies based on what people living in the EU think. That doesn't mean the EU can't legislate such things within their own borders though. There's no technological reason a search engine or social media platform couldn't be based in the EU; for example, Qwant exists (https://www.qwant.com https://www.qwant.com).
- doublesCs 6y agoCue republicans outraged at the president's attack on the first amendment. .. Lol joking, they love it.
- sixstringtheory 6y agoNot 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.
- falcolas 6y agoFree 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.
- ianleeclark 6y 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.
- kortex 6y agoSuch 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.
- ThinkBeat 6y agoI 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.
- shadowgovt 6y agoHe'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).
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y agoObviously, 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.
- shadowgovt 6y agoNot 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.
- frockington1 6y agoIs Twitter a media outlet? If they want to be classified as such it might make them susceptible to slander lawsuits
- shadowgovt 6y agoIf 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 6y agoPlease read this article: https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/21/18700605/section-230-internet-law-twenty-six-words-that-created-the-internet-jeff-kosseff-interview https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/21/18700605/section-230-inte...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- askl56 6y agoThe 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 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.
- ChrisLTD 6y agoWhat’s “platform status”?
- dvtrn 6y agoBlue Check mark.
- colejohnson66 6y agoI’m assuming Section 230?
- rtkwe 6y agoPeople have read a lot into section 230 that they want to see there to imply there's some distinction between unmoderated (AKA 'platform status') and moderated platforms. In fact the only thing it really does is provide that 1) providers or users can't be held liable things users say and 2) if you voluntarily moderate your service you aren't incurring a civil liability. Check the text yourself [0] there's nothing in there about having to either be a complete free zone or even to moderate neutrally to get protection from civil liabilities. Personally I wish they'd take a tougher stance but legally they don't have to and I /really/ don't think it's a good idea to legally require them to because the definition of what is and isn't moderation worthy will change on a dime. [1] [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 [1] Especially under the 'unitary executive' theory which is used a lot to try to undermine any congressional restrictions or accountability on the executive branch. That means the interpretation and enforcement can and will switch overnight every 4-8 years.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y agoRepost 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 6y agoDirect 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/1265601611310739456 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12656016113107394...
- 0-_-0 6y agoNitter link (for anyone who doesn't like opening Twitter links): https://nitter.net/realDonaldTrump/status/1265601611310739456 https://nitter.net/realDonaldTrump/status/126560161131073945...
- c0wardthr0waway 6y 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
- standardUser 6y agoThere 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.
- zozbot234 6y agoReddit 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 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.
- ceejayoz 6y agoReddit resisted doing that for years, until the violations of Reddit's site-wide rules became too blatant and widespread to continue ignoring.
- zozbot234 6y agoWhere the "violations" of Reddit site-wide rules involved having lots of users and being able to push stuff up to the frontpage merely by upvoting it, like any other subreddit would. Of course when /r/politics does it, they don't call it "violating site-wide rules".
- rlyshw 6y agoHonestly 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 6y agoAye but with no one in charge, how can the masses protect themselves against ever-increasing disinformation campaigns?
- caseysoftware 6y agoThis 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ccsnags 6y agoIf 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.
- AgentME 6y agoIndependent fact checkers not associated with government authorities (like what Twitter is doing in this case) seems like one solution. I'm really bugged by the leap of logic that fact checkers will supposedly always parrot the government line, when even this specific thread itself is about a fact checker existing that's going against the president's line.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sparkie 6y ago
- baggachipz 6y agoCrybaby cries, news at 11.
- djohnston 6y agoThe 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.
- adwww 6y agolol 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?
- djohnston 6y agoNo 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
- shadowgovt 6y agoWe'll see how it goes. It certainly wouldn't be the first time someone with strong personal biases was put in a position to editorialize on someone else's signal.
- plehoux 6y agoI think he is referencing those tweets: https://twitter.com/LevineJonathan/status/1265457578215124995 https://twitter.com/LevineJonathan/status/126545757821512499...
- radiator 6y agoWow! I would say, unless Twitter has double standards, it should fact-check the tweets of its own "head of integrity".
- shadowgovt 6y ago
- wegs 6y agoFor 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.
- commandlinefan 6y 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.
- aabhay 6y agoThey have been fact checking other people. It was precisely that they weren’t fact checking trump.
- loceng 6y agoThe 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.
- pseingatl 6y agoDon'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 6y agoOh? https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?symb=TWTR&subView=institutional https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s...
- akhilcacharya 6y agoI'm old enough to remember when conservatives accused the left of being against "free speech".
- anewdirection 6y agoIt switches sides every 15-25 years, as youd notice, surely. Parties have little in common with what they were even 20 years ago.
- VBprogrammer 6y agoCan 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.
- danShumway 6y agoNot 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.
- FriendlyNormie 6y agoYou belong in a ditch somewhere.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cheaprentalyeti 6y agoAnd 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.
- OliverJones 6y agoA "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.
- C1sc0cat 6y agoIts 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.
- catalogia 6y agoCorbyn 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..
- tehwebguy 6y agoThere was a concerted effort to smear him from within his own party, it’s not surprising that you got that impression. Edit: There is even a sister reply to this comment repeating the same nonsense, from a Google employee. Misinformation winning again.
- endtime 6y agoHe's the Islamic terrorist sympathizer type of anti-Semite, not the neo-Nazi type. We get it from both sides.
- C1sc0cat 6y agoYep full he's full Tankie - more interested in turning Labour into a niche party and dreaming of a revolution. The sort who sell papers calling on the UK to help Assad crush the counter revolutionary's under the tracks of tanks.
- bilbo0s 6y ago
- systematical 6y agoUh huh...
- shadowgovt 6y agoI 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.
- majewsky 6y agoWe 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.
- shadowgovt 6y agoGood 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 6y agoWell, 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.
- cryptonector 6y agoSocial 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!
- jdhn 6y agoPutting aside concerns about overreach government powers, would ending social media as we know it really be a bad thing?
- raziel2p 6y agoHow? 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.
- jdhn 6y agoIf Trump actually closed it (not going to happen), then something may come along to replace Twitter, but it certainly wouldn't act like Twitter.
- ImprobableTruth 6y agoSocial 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.
- shultays 6y agoYou are not forced to follow or interact poeple you disagree with.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoFrom 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.
- sabertoothed 6y agoExactly. 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 6y agoWhen 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.
- sabertoothed 6y agoBut no message was suppressed. There was no silencing.
- nautilus12 6y agoBut 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.
- nautilus12 6y agoThis comment aged well...
- TechBro8615 6y agoWhat about from an FEC regulations standpoint? Does Twitter have the right to insert DNC messaging into Trump tweets without the DNC disclosing the donation?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tibbydudeza 6y agoAbout bloody time twitter.
- tuna-piano 6y agoThere'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?
- metta2uall 6y agoThey 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.
- dvtrn 6y agoMedia literacy and criticism classes in middle school?
- gonzo41 6y agoThis worked in the scandi countries but i feel like in the places where Fox news exists it'll be hard to get on the curriculum.
- mabbo 6y 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/ https://xkcd.com/1357/
- gtCameron 6y agohttps://stratechery.com/2019/tech-and-liberty/ https://stratechery.com/2019/tech-and-liberty/
- devurand 6y agoI 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."
- gtCameron 6y agoSo in this view, who gets to determine who is a "rational, fact-checking, good-faith actor" who should enjoy the privilege of free speech, and conversely, who should not have those same rights?
- dx87 6y agoThat'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.
- KineticLensman 6y agoThe comic correctly spells out some of the implications and limitations of the first amendment.
- tibbydudeza 6y agoSomewhere in a another universe there exists alternative facts.
- avsteele 6y agoThe 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_BubbleTime 6y agoWritten above “utterly unsustainable”. I can see no long term win here, esp when the arbiter they chose clearly has his own issues.
- heurist 6y agoI 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.
- SV_BubbleTime 6y agoI absolutely want to agree with you, but we’ve already seen controversial fact checkers ranging from, politifact, Snopes, mediamatters, Hillary Clinton‘s campaign, and in this instance Twitter’s own employee with his own colorful statements. The issue becomes with what fact checkers omit, who’s statements are scrutinized and whose are the ignored as “jokes”, what part of a statement they choose to focus on, or any sort of perspective at all. If you’re an adult you know that life is shades of gray. Was Biden being racist when he said “you ain’t black” if Blacks don’t vote for him? How would a fact checker properly handle this? “Fact checking“ even with the best intentions, is it game I don’t think we want to play. > Interesting to see public information warefare playing out in real time. Agreed
- heurist 6y agoIt's not easy, that's for sure. But this is also not a new problem. The field of journalism exists to address these complicated issues, which emerge from basic human communication rather than any recent technological advancement. In a real sense, truth is whatever society wants it to be and every attempt to fact check will be a political battle shrouding/suppressing potential physical violence. I'm not sure what the solution is other than our society finding a baseline of common truth first before addressing points where we differ. Also, the US previously had the fairness doctrine which seems to have worked well in comparison with this era without it (though I have not done much research into it, and I can see how an administration like the one we have today would abuse it).
- itchyjunk 6y agoHm, 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?
- Beltiras 6y agoThere'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.
- zaroth 6y agoVoter 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoI 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.
- akhilcacharya 6y agoIt'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/donald-trump-vows-to-open-up-libel-laws-to-make-suing-the-media-easier-heres-how-he-could-do-it/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/26/do... [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fact-check-trump-suggests-video-games-blame-mass-shootings-n1039411 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fact-check-tru... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/15/no-brainer-trump-tweets-support-amendment-banning-flag-burning/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/15/no-braine... [3] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-nfl-players-who-kneel-during-national-anthem-maybe-n876996 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-nfl...
- luckydata 6y agoIt’s surprising only if you take them at face value. I don’t and I’m never surprised, it’s all quite predictable actually.
- IgorPartola 6y agoThiel 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.
- Ididntdothis 6y ago
- nxpnsv 6y agoWhy not just kick him off for tos violation and be done with it. That would be an article worth reading...
- node-bayarea 6y agoHe is the President of the United States! And 50% of the people like his policies (if not his personal behavior)
- ascagnel_ 6y agoOnly 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).
- metrokoi 6y agoIf people chose not to vote, I don't think their opinion matters too much. Excluding people ineligible to vote and people who didn't vote out of protest, although a better choice would have been to write in a vote.
- pbhjpbhj 6y 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.
- 6y ago
- kauffj 6y agoHowever 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/1265457578215124995 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-of-mail-in-voting-11586557667 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).
- fantastisch 6y agoAgreed. Pretty much asking for an intervention. Practically begging for a crackdown. Larger plan?
- nautilus12 6y agoWow a comment that isn't just calling trump a racist and is calmly laying out the facts....
- SV_BubbleTime 6y agoI 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 6y agoIf this happens, we can always make better Trump tweets: http://TrumpTweets.io http://TrumpTweets.io
- matwood 6y agoThe 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.
- luckydata 6y agoA very long winded way to write “racists”
- IgorPartola 6y agoThey 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.
- FireBeyond 6y agoBecause what they don't say (at least always; some will) - "they are for personal freedoms _they_ believe in, not necessarily _all_ or _yours_".
- christiansakai 6y agoI actually don’t mind if this happens. Just close social media already.
- exabrial 6y agoI 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.
- SuperFerret 6y agoI'm sure Trump was just joking!
- nkkollaw 6y agoWell, 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.
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoIf 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).
- nkkollaw 6y agoThanks for your permission to provide my view.
- rootusrootus 6y agoIf every participant were acting in good faith, it wouldn't be a problem.
- donw 6y 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?
- SuperFerret 6y agoIf Trump stops lying he won't have a problem.
- Arubis 6y agoFor 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.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y agoIt 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.
- whatshisface 6y agoI 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.
- ProAm 6y agoTwitter 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 6y agoIn 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...
- ProAm 6y agoI 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?
- TechBro8615 6y agoForget 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 6y agoIf 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.
- TechBro8615 6y agoJust 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-heres-the-complicated-answer-11560504602 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."
- scarface74 6y agoAnd this is the government that the HN crowd is screaming to “regulate tech”?
- freen 6y agoObligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/
- shiado 6y agoHow 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?
- beart 6y agoI 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-followers-federal-judge-says.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/23/trump-cant-block-twitter-fol...
- rtkwe 6y agoThe 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-fakes 6y agoWhat views are you insinuating that I have on "election interference using social media in 2016"?
- bad_bats 6y agoThat'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.
- Ididntdothis 6y agoI 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.
- thatwasunusual 6y 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ecmascript 6y agoNo but it's literally censorship to remove people from Twitter because they use the correct gender pronoun for a biological sex. Where are the fact-checking in all those cases, I wonder?
- nkkollaw 6y agoGood point. Leftists think you're misgendering someone who thinks he's a woman if you call her a biological man, normal people see it the opposite way (that doesn't mean you need to not be nice and call her "she", but actually thinking one can change biological sex is insane). That's why everyone should be able to say whatever they want, and people can discuss the merits of what's been said.
- 6y ago
- foobar_ 6y agoThis 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.
- cwperkins 6y agoIts 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 6y 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 6y agoIs 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.
- tinco 6y agoOf 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.
- FireBeyond 6y 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".
- tinco 6y ago
- phkahler 6y agoIf Twitter wants to fact check, fine. But posting links to pieces by anti-Trump news outlets is not fact checking.
- whateveracct 6y agoCalling normal news outlets "anti-Trump" is just falling for his crybully antics.
- phkahler 6y agoNot really. They do have a bias. Regardless of that it's still not fact checking.
- whateveracct 6y agoIt's not black and white. Framing them as "anti-Trump" makes it seem like they are extremist against Trump. If anything they are "anti-Trump" because 1) Trump is anti-them and 2) they report on his plain daylight criminality.
- nraynaud 6y agoIn 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.
- anewdirection 6y agoSo 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.
- nraynaud 6y ago"Europe" is not a nation, this word is like garlic for the nationalists.
- cryptonector 6y agoPolice shootings in the U.S. do not happen because Nazis get to speak in the U.S.
- markvdb 6y agoHow 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 6y ago1. 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.
- remarkEon 6y 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.
- krn 6y agoI 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"?
- WhyNotHugo 6y agoPublic 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 6y agoFree 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.
- krn 6y agoIn 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_ 6y agoThis 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.
- WhyNotHugo 6y agoWhat 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.
- Communitivity 6y agoGood 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 https://joinpeertube.org or https://libry.tv https://libry.tv For micro-blogging, see https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org For photos, see https://pixelfed.org https://pixelfed.org For others, see https://fediverse.party/ https://fediverse.party/
- modwest 6y agoit's not censorship. not even close. good grief.
- jmull 6y agoAdding 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!
- Communitivity 6y agoNo, I am suggesting that closing down Twitter because they ban content that is harassing, that is censorship.
- asabjorn 6y ago> the president is constantly claiming things without any evidence backing up [reposting here, since someone keeps voting down me providing facts on convicted cases of voter fraud. Isn't this against the philosophy of this site?] Let's fact check these fact checkers in this case. 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/pacei-voterfraudcases.pdf 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_million_mail-in_ballots_went_missing_in_last_four_elections_143033.html 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-carrier-charged-with-altering-absentee-ballot-requests-570777221.html 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-paid-pennsylvania-election-officials-to-stuff-ballot-box/ https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/05/21/doj-democrats-...
- frays 6y agoI 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 6y agoIt'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.
- ojnabieoot 6y agoThe 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.
- dathinab 6y agoTwitter 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...
- dathinab 6y agoSure, 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 6y agoThat 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.
- 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV 6y agoOfftopic: 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)
- rchaud 6y agoThe 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'.
- heurist 6y agoAmerican 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.
- rchaud 6y 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.
- metrokoi 6y agoAlmost 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.
- jdashg 6y agoWe 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.
- anewdirection 6y agoSo 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.
- umvi 6y agoWhat 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.
- russellbeattie 6y agoTwitter'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-nCoV 6y 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/1265649545410744321 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12656495454107443... $TWTR already down 5%.
- dakna 6y agoBrilliant 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 6y agoFact Check: Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- brodouevencode 6y agoReaders 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.
- cryptonector 6y agoAnd yet the argument must be had.
- brodouevencode 6y agoI agree. Here is not the proper place.
- mrlonglong 6y agoI'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 6y agoI'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 6y agoI 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 6y agoIf 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.
- dang 6y agoWe changed the URL from https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-threatens-close-social-media-platforms-twitter-fact/story?id=70899912 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322719, but the comments have been moved thence hither).
- tom-thistime 6y agoI 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dekhn 6y agoThis 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.
- unexaminedlife 6y agoSomehow 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.
- cryptonector 6y agoComplete 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.
- unexaminedlife 6y agoNot 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.
- cryptonector 6y agoCertainly we should be striving for objectivity. But our political divisions run deep, and many people have a hard time seeing the other side's point of view. Your assertion that "[i]n Trump's world objectivity is not a goal" is indicative that you aren't open to the possibility that he's being more objective than you think, therefore, if your view is less objective than you think, then clearly you're part of the problem. Of course, maybe you're right, but you don't seem open to the possibility that you're wrong. And that simply illustrates my point about the difficulty of arriving at objective truth in matters where we're so deeply divided.
- unexaminedlife 6y agoI may seem "closed" to the possibility that Trump is being more objective than me. Then again we all have over 3 years of observations on which to base our conclusions. I will be interested, and open-minded, when reading your treatise explaining how one could conclude that Trump has been an objective reasonable President.
- Animats 6y agoTwitter must have automation for this, since they do it for tweets generally. How do they do that? Anybody know?
- vmchale 6y agoWhat a petty weeniehead. Acts like a child, he's the President of the United States.
- mancerayder 6y agoFirst, 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 6y agoI 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 6y agoOk. 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 6y agoI’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 6y agoI 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-keep-terrorists-out.html 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 6y agoHe 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.
- standardUser 6y agoThere 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 6y agoMhm. 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 6y agoI hope they name it mastodon.gov
- meragrin_ 6y agoPerhaps 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.
- standardUser 6y ago"Obama had his share of threats." Cite two.
- austingulati 6y agoA quick Google found two: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/07/obama-tax-inversion-walgreens-avoid-executive-powers https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/07/obama-tax-inve... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-obama-financials/obama-threatens-fight-with-banks-on-new-risk-rules-idUSTRE60K0RW20100121 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-obama-financials/obama-th... Not sure this will support the original commenters point, as these "threats" have a basis in reality and appear to be good causes unlike Trump's, but these are "threats" by Obama at least according to the journalists involved. Edit: why the downvotes? I am showing that the Trump supporter above is full of shit, Obama's "threats" were for good causes
- INTPenis 6y agoI'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 6y agoIt 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 6y agoThat would be hilarious to watch. Unfortunately we all know that’s not happening.
- hadtodoit 6y agoIf 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 6y agonobody 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 6y agoWhy 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%20Again%22&src=trend_click https://twitter.com/search?q=%22Make%20Whites%20Great%20Agai... They are working as editors which does not provide them FCC section 230 protection.
- padseeker 6y agoAm 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?
- NicoJuicy 6y agoFree speech includes adding labels for fact checking. But yeah, what would you expect from such an bully. It's the only thing he has proven to be good at, being rude and attack fast. Lol What a president, I would be deeply ashamed.
- carapace 6y 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 6y agoA 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 6y agoBelieve 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 https://youtu.be/PVWt0qUc0CE
- legolas2412 6y agoVery 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 6y agoYour reach on Twitter being cut to 0 is absolutely constitutionally allowed.
- legolas2412 6y agoSure, I'm not contesting that. It is a different question if freedom of speech regulations apply to Twitter or not. But freedom of reach is a part of freedom of speech.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cyberowl 6y agoGonna 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 6y agoA private company is not obliged to publish anyone's Tweets, blog posts, opinions, etc and it is not a violation of free speech.
- squarefoot 6y agoHow curious. I don't recall him reacting the same way when he was on the receiving side before the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
- pwdisswordfish2 6y agoOne 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.
- pwdisswordfish2 6y agoThe term "private websites" might be ambiguous. What I mean is "privately-owned websites".
- Consultant32452 6y agoTrump 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 6y agoThe 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 6y agoI'll believe Twitter's new actions are pure once it starts fact-checking politicians of all stripes.
- aty268 6y agoTwitter 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 6y agoThis 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- nullc 6y agoIf 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 6y agoGood.
- fuckSocialMedia 6y agoGood. Fuck social media. Probably way more beneficial to humanity to destroy social media than lay waste to the economy with these dubious COVID-19 lockdowns.
- jkingsbery 6y agoAs 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.
- czzr 6y agoWill you still vote Republican? Just curious, please ignore this question if you think it too personal or impertinent.
- ycombonator 6y agoLet’s face it Silicon Valley is run by leftists. Nothing to see here move on.
- classified 6y agoWho 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 6y agoCall his bluff. Suspend his account.
- 11thEarlOfMar 6y agoAny media source that earns its revenue via advertising must be considered entertainment. Fact checking entertainment is nonsense.
- busymom0 6y agoIt 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-by-mail-faulty-ballots-could-impact-elections.html 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-paterson-vote-plagued-by-fraud-claims-over-3k-ballots-seemingly-set-aside/2425813/ 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-Voting-Response-to-EIPC 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-carrier-charged-attempted-election-fraud 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 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 https://streamable.com/2tyqp1 West Virginia Mail Carrier Charged With Altering Absentee Ballot Requests: https://time.com/5843088/west-virginia-mail-carrier-fraud-absentee-ballots/ 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/822654925217873921 https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/823312544425132033 https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/823312544425132033 https://twitter.com/catfashionshow/status/298477704666300416 https://twitter.com/catfashionshow/status/298477704666300416 https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/890812999874691073 https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/890812999874691073 https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/823260235796094978 https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/823260235796094978
- sabujp 6y 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 6y agoclear sign of stupidity ... nothing else needs to be said ...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jliptzin 6y agoIf 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 6y agoI 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.
- randyrand 6y agoThe 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.
- dangoljames 6y agoCan you say 'Dumbass'? I knew ya could :D
- sunkenvicar 6y agoTrump sees what social media companies did: they murdered democracy and inserted themselves as a surrogate.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- goatherders 6y agoHis account should have been closed long ago. The only reason it wasnt is eyeballs and dollars. This is a late but welcome development.
- awakeasleep 6y agoIt'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 6y agoIf 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.
- Animats 6y 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-executive-order-on-social-media-thursday https://thehill.com/policy/technology/499847-trump-to-sign-e...
- thephyber 6y agoThere 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 6y agoIs it even possible for the president to shut them down? Does he have the authority?
- dboreham 6y agoFinally a policy I can get behind.
- hedora 6y agoI really hope they he makes demands they’re unwilling to agree to, and they simply suspend his account instead.
- Simulacra 6y agoSocial media platforms should be considered publications. A company cannot say they have an open platform and call Themselves immune if they’re going to editorialize and punish views you disagree with. Section 230 needs to destroyed.
- aabhay 6y agoI 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 6y agoRising have a good discussion of the ramifications IMO https://youtu.be/pY8xnMXXlqI https://youtu.be/pY8xnMXXlqI
- sjg007 6y agoTwitter should just ban Trump.. seems straightforward. He breaks all their rules.
- scarface74 6y agoY’all wanted government regulation over tech - here you go. Be careful what you ask for.
- lordvon 6y agoThis ‘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 6y agoI 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 6y agoIt 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.
- RandomTisk 6y agoI'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 6y agoConsidering 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
- heromal 6y agoIdiot.
- JSavageOne 6y agoThe 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 6y agoI 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)
- lordvon 6y agoIt 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/pacei-voterfraudcases.pdf 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.
- ForrestN 6y agoThis 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.
- lordvon 6y agoHmm. 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’.
- ForrestN 6y agoOn the contrary, these random, isolated incidents, many in tiny local elections, should give us great confidence in our electoral system. Such a tiny rate of problems means our democracy is incredibly strong with respect to fraud. From an article by Ian Millhiser: ‘ Voter fraud is a fake problem Despite Trump’s claims that enhanced access to mailed-in ballots will increase voter fraud, such fraud barely exists. The state of Oregon, for example, has provided more than 100 million mail-in ballots to voters since 2000 but has only documented about 12 cases of fraud. Similarly, according to the Brennan Center for Justice’s Wendy Weiser and Harold Ekeh, “an exhaustive investigative journalism analysis of all known voter fraud cases identified only 491 cases of absentee ballot fraud from 2000 to 2012” — and billions of votes were cast during that period. Thus, Weiser and Ekeh write, “it is still more likely for an American to be struck by lightning than to commit mail voting fraud.” These negligible examples of voter fraud, moreover, need to be weighed against the potential impact of a pandemic. If voters are either unable to leave their homes to cast a vote or unwilling to do so due to fears of becoming infected, hundreds of thousands or even millions of voters could be disenfranchised if they are unable to vote by mail. So even if Trump’s warnings of voter fraud are offered in good faith — and not merely as an excuse to reject voting rights policies that, in his own words, do not “work out well for Republicans” — the president is proposing that we disenfranchise thousands or even millions of voters in order to prevent a small handful of fraudulent ballots from potentially being cast in 2020.“ This is in the context of systematic efforts by the current administration in concert with right-leaning local governments to suppress voting in ways they think will help them win the election. https://www.vox.com/2020/5/20/21264821/trump-michigan-nevada-funding-cares-act-unconstitutional https://www.vox.com/2020/5/20/21264821/trump-michigan-nevada...
- miguelmota 6y agoTwitter 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 https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1265838823663075341
- stubish 6y agoTwitter 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.
- amadeuspagel 6y agoImagine 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 6y agoI 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.
- charliebrownau 6y agoTrump in May 2019 - "censorship meeting" at last minute , remove guests that have called out Zionists Jews Trump in May 2020 - we should do something Trump this week - end of may 2020 Trump gets FINALLY effected by censorship OMFG Im going to close down jewish tech firms that have been censoring people for the last 6-10 years Goes to show they only do action when it effects VOTES or them personally
- charliebrownau 6y agoAlso trump - Take guns first, due process later Also trump pass's a law you cant talk about Holohoax, jews, zionism or isreal at tax payer funded Western "American" unis that have been already taken over by Global white commies and Zionist Jews
- jamisteven 6y agoHeadline 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.
- sixstringtheory 6y agoIt's literally using a word he used, hence the quotes. No speech was disallowed, so this would be much ado about nothing.
- thoughtstheseus 6y agoRemove 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 6y agoConsidering 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.
- JohnClark1337 6y agoOnly a Democrat president will be able to get away with that. For the good of the people
- frankzen 6y agoAfter 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.