8 ms·

There is no reason to give elected officials a free pass. It biases elections by giving them an even bigger microphone than the other people running. Apply the

by babesh 6y ago

There is no reason to give elected officials a free pass. It biases elections by giving them an even bigger microphone than the other people running. Apply the same standards to all.

TechBro8615 6y ago
A free pass on what exactly? This has gotten so crazy, I can’t believe people are protesting Facebook for not censoring a politician. Here’s an idea... if you don’t like what somebody writes online, don’t read it. Do people really think that censoring, or even annotating, the President’s words will change how people feel about them? Like someone is going to read Trump’s message, think “oh right, mail-in ballots could lead to voter fraud,” then read an annotation from CNN and conclude “oh never mind, Trump lied.” On the contrary, it will lead to further entrenchment of division as they retreat to the comfort of their pre-existing views. Are people serious about this?? It seems obvious that the most likely outcome of censorship or editorializing is more entrenchment of views and pre-existing beliefs, not less. Nobody who is already listening to Trump is going to suddenly stop because Twitter or Facebook shows them a CNN article next to a “fact check” label. It’s just so ridiculous, I can’t believe we are actually having this conversation. What happened to teaching people critical thinking and not to believe everything they read on the internet? And what the heck is “violent speech?” Just close the page if you don’t like it. My goodness.
- gilbetron 6y ago
  I think the person you're responding to is talking about an asymmetry of rules - current politicians can say anything, everyone else has to follow rules. In that situation, current politicians can lie about their opponents, but opponents cannot lie back.
  - s_y_n_t_a_x 6y ago
    Actually it seems like social media companies are choosing who can't lie and who can. Normal users and even most politicians lie on social media everyday, who cares. The problem I see is social media companies targeting specific leaders and what they see as "lies" while ignoring others. And most importantly, who decides what is a lie? Either take 230 away from the company and no-one can lie on the platform, or stop censoring/altering users and allow everyone to say what's in their legal right to say. There's a meme about nothing being true on the internet, why do we need a Ministry of Truth now?
    - pavlov 6y ago
      If Section 230 is revoked, social media and content platforms become liable for all user-created content that they host. Surely that will lead to much more content deleted to avoid lawsuits? Why is that a desirable outcome?
      - Avicebron 6y ago
        Because it will allow for some form of competition because they will be forced to make decisions leaving space for other players to make different decisions.
        pavlov 6y ago
        IMO revoking Section 230 would benefit incumbents like FB and Twitter who have already made billion-dollar investments into content moderation, and hurt the small guys who suddenly become liable for every user comment they publish. Can’t you imagine Mark and Jack telling Republican senators: “We wanted to enable free speech, we told you so, but you took away the protections around that so we had no choice but to turn the moderation dial to 11.”
        Avicebron 6y ago
        You seem to work at FB so you might have some more insight than I do, if so please share. On the other side, I see new players arriving and proving to be competitive because FB will be forced to take a position, if people don't like that position they won't interact with the platform. Suddenly there's a market for a different platform.
        pavlov 6y ago
        I’m just a video rendering code monkey, I have no particular insight into this issue. (FWIW I believe Zuckerberg is genuine in his position, but I also think he’d change it rapidly if the legal environment tilted the other way and it became a genuine business threat.) I wonder about those different platforms. They already exist — Gab simply isn’t that popular. Revoking Section 230 would expose Gab to a “Thiel vs Gawker” situation: a billionaire could sue them into extinction. That doesn’t seem desirable at all.
- bpyne 6y ago
  I think it's a good thing to hold public figures accountable. Politicians, in particular, need to be held accountable due to the large amount of influence they have on our society. When Twitter, for example, places a warning on a Tweet to warn readers that it contains provably false statements, it holds the Tweeter accountable and that is enough reason to do it regardless of the changing minds argument. As far as changing minds goes, I think there's a swath of voters who sit in the political middle and they don't fact check. The swath is large enough that they can influence elections. It's critical to make sure they don't get influenced by politicians who make up facts on the spot. A friend of mine and I commiserated last week about the difficulty of debating with people on political issues. We noticed that people can make up "facts" quicker than we can fact check. You would think that the onus would be on the person making an argument to provide proof. But that standard of argument is long gone. The proof seems to always be on the person who says, "No, I don't think that's right."
  - TechBro8615 6y ago
    > provably false statements Herein lies the rub. It’s extremely rare that a politician is tweeting about something so black-and-white that the tweet can be provably true or false. There is almost always a gray area between fact and opinion. In fact, people tend to vote for politicians because they agree with their interpretation and prioritization of a set of facts. So I think you’ll find the vast majority of political tweets reside in this gray area, because otherwise they wouldn’t be political in the first place. And if “provably false” is the standard for editorializing, then Twitter picked a terrible example to set as the precedent. The tweet they “fact checked” was Trump making a prediction about the future. Namely, he was suggesting that mail-in ballots could lead to increased voter fraud. Not only is this an opinion, but it’s a projection about something that has not happened yet. By definition, it cannot be provably false.
    - jdhendrickson 6y ago
      Weird, I can think of at least one politician who constantly tweets, and most of it's easily proven false with the smallest modicum of research. It's almost like what you are saying has no basis in reality.
- wldlyinaccurate 6y ago
  > Here’s an idea... if you don’t like what somebody writes online, don’t read it. The problem isn't that people "don't like" what elected officials say. It's that people often take what elected officials say as truth without even considering that it might be false (they must be Smart and Good if they're in office, right?) Fact checking and censoring prominent figures isn't going to affect people who already have strongly held beliefs. But it will make a difference to people who are impressionable or vulnerable or don't know any better.
  - raarts 6y ago
    > is that people often take what elected officials say as truth Well educate them on that instead of trying to control the information flow. History taught us that will always backfire.
    - dguaraglia 6y ago
      There's a catch: the people doing most of the lying are the same that have worked for decades to destroy public education.
      - ggreer 6y ago
        Is it true that public education is being destroyed? I'm having trouble finding metrics by which it has declined. In terms of budget, 4.1% of US GDP is government expenditure on education. For comparison: Japan is 2.9%, Canada 4.3%, UK 4.3%. This number hasn't changed much. Over the past 20 years it has fluctuated between 4.1% and 4.7% of GDP.[1] There might be a slight downward trend, but if there is it has followed most of the other developed countries. The US is a rich country. If anything, using percentage of GDP understates just how much we spend on education. For primary & secondary education (everything before college), there are only four countries in the world that spend more per student than the US: Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, and Norway. For post-secondary education (college and grad school), the US spends more per student than any other country.[2] If you look at other metrics such as the percentage of adults with college degrees, or the percentage of adults who graduate high school, the US has never done better.[3][4] If you look at PISA scores, we're very close to the OECD average and that number hasn't changed much over time.[5] (Like most developed countries, absolute scores have slowly decreased over time. It's not clear why this is happening.) If people have been working for decades to destroy public education, they're doing a very bad job of it. 1. https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/public-spending-on-education.htm https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/public-spending-on-educati... 2. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp 3. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2017/cb17-51.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2017/cb17-51.... 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_... 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment#Rankings_comparison_2003_-_2015 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...
- stellar678 6y ago
  Facebook/Twitter/et al created the systems which focus people's attention and incentivize the production of divisive poor quality information in the first place - why shouldn't they take responsibility for fixing their mistakes?
- zarkov99 6y ago
  Annotating is fine as long as the user can choose what annotations they see and how those influence filtering. This idea that the stupid little people need the protection of the enlightened ones doing the censoring is profoundly un-american and must die.
- Lutger 6y ago
  Cambridge Analytica and meddling in the elections by Russian trolls is what happened. Also: a quite effective assault at climate action using misinformation, violent riots, a movement campaigning for civil war, ridiculous medical advise by the US president leading to deaths during a pandemic, etc. This all happened and permanently changed the debate. Free speech is poisoned these days and we can't simply ignore that.
  - whatthesmack 6y ago
    > This all happened and permanently changed the debate. Free speech is poisoned these days and we can't simply ignore that. Even if that is the case, it shouldn’t mean we give up on free speech and allow it to be effectively eliminated “so it can be saved”. Free speech with some censorship is just censorship. A robust public debate is how ideas are fairly brought out and given an opportunity to thrive or die. Having Twitter or a government or “fact checker” or any other person/organization in the middle adding their outsized influence to the picture brings the whole debate out of balance. Why is Jack’s voice worth 1000x more than yours? Because he’s more “enlightened”?
SamReidHughes 6y ago
Why don't you just plainly state what your goal is: Top down control of the political discourse by the left.
- stefantalpalaru 6y ago
  > the left What left? https://politicalcompass.org/uselection2020 https://politicalcompass.org/uselection2020
NE2z2T9qi 6y ago
> "Apply the same standards to all." Do you honestly not realize that this is the exact issue being debated? Whether the "standards" are being applied fairly and consistently irrespective of political affiliations? And whether the "standard" itself is loaded to censor certain relatively mainstream but not Silicon Valley viewpoints? What you're saying reminds me of an anti-gay marriage argument I heard: "Hey, I'm straight and I don't have the right to marry a man. A gay guy doesn't have the right to marry a man either. Look at that: the same standard applies to all. Everything is fair!" I'm not particularly aligned to either democrats or republicans, but I've looked at "fact-checks" by supposedly neutral parties and they're often absolute garbage. Not only is the "research" superficial, what is chosen to be fact-checked vs. what isn't fact-checked is transparently biased. The "same standard" does not appear to be applied to all. Given the debatable nature of these questions, I think common sense would say it's better to let voters and the marketplace of idea arbitrate rather than social media companies. And, as a general matter, I'm shocked people are still so into censoring in 2020. Isn't censoring books/ideas/speech something we laugh at given how consistently wrong it tends to be? I'd say censoring is silly at best and evil at worst.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  > And whether the "standard" itself is loaded to censor certain relatively mainstream but not Silicon Valley viewpoints? The views expressed in this case were "When the shooting starts, the looting starts"[0]. Which, while perhaps not Trump's intent, can reasonably read as encouragement (or incitement, or glorification) of violence toward people. > the marketplace of idea Twitter is a part of the marketplace of ideas, is it not? Their actions are simply an action taken as part of the marketplace of ideas. > What you're saying reminds me of an anti-gay marriage argument I heard. To the unoppressed, equality looks like oppression. That's true whether the unoppressed is a straight man or a person who can threaten others with violence without consequence. So yes, the two situations are very similar. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_looting_starts,_the_shooting_starts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_looting_starts,_the_s...
  - NE2z2T9qi 6y ago
Supermancho 6y ago
> There is no reason to give elected officials a free pass. > Apply the same standards to all. I find these statements at odds. People can say what they want and it may or may not be inaccurate or misleading or accurate or truthful. Giving elected officials "a free pass" to do just that _is_ applying the same standard to all. Elected officials have a microphone because of the political system and the endemic elevation of these regular, flawed, people to a status above the common man (same with police and a number of other power hierarchies in the USA).

by babesh 6y ago

There is no reason to give elected officials a free pass. It biases elections by giving them an even bigger microphone than the other people running. Apply the same standards to all.

TechBro8615 6y ago

A free pass on what exactly? This has gotten so crazy, I can’t believe people are protesting Facebook for not censoring a politician. Here’s an idea... if you don’t like what somebody writes online, don’t read it. Do people really think that censoring, or even annotating, the President’s words will change how people feel about them? Like someone is going to read Trump’s message, think “oh right, mail-in ballots could lead to voter fraud,” then read an annotation from CNN and conclude “oh never mind, Trump lied.” On the contrary, it will lead to further entrenchment of division as they retreat to the comfort of their pre-existing views. Are people serious about this?? It seems obvious that the most likely outcome of censorship or editorializing is more entrenchment of views and pre-existing beliefs, not less. Nobody who is already listening to Trump is going to suddenly stop because Twitter or Facebook shows them a CNN article next to a “fact check” label. It’s just so ridiculous, I can’t believe we are actually having this conversation. What happened to teaching people critical thinking and not to believe everything they read on the internet? And what the heck is “violent speech?” Just close the page if you don’t like it. My goodness.

gilbetron 6y ago
I think the person you're responding to is talking about an asymmetry of rules - current politicians can say anything, everyone else has to follow rules. In that situation, current politicians can lie about their opponents, but opponents cannot lie back.
- s_y_n_t_a_x 6y ago
  Actually it seems like social media companies are choosing who can't lie and who can. Normal users and even most politicians lie on social media everyday, who cares. The problem I see is social media companies targeting specific leaders and what they see as "lies" while ignoring others. And most importantly, who decides what is a lie? Either take 230 away from the company and no-one can lie on the platform, or stop censoring/altering users and allow everyone to say what's in their legal right to say. There's a meme about nothing being true on the internet, why do we need a Ministry of Truth now?
  - pavlov 6y ago
    If Section 230 is revoked, social media and content platforms become liable for all user-created content that they host. Surely that will lead to much more content deleted to avoid lawsuits? Why is that a desirable outcome?
    - Avicebron 6y ago
      Because it will allow for some form of competition because they will be forced to make decisions leaving space for other players to make different decisions.
      - pavlov 6y ago
        IMO revoking Section 230 would benefit incumbents like FB and Twitter who have already made billion-dollar investments into content moderation, and hurt the small guys who suddenly become liable for every user comment they publish. Can’t you imagine Mark and Jack telling Republican senators: “We wanted to enable free speech, we told you so, but you took away the protections around that so we had no choice but to turn the moderation dial to 11.”
        Avicebron 6y ago
        You seem to work at FB so you might have some more insight than I do, if so please share. On the other side, I see new players arriving and proving to be competitive because FB will be forced to take a position, if people don't like that position they won't interact with the platform. Suddenly there's a market for a different platform.
        pavlov 6y ago
        I’m just a video rendering code monkey, I have no particular insight into this issue. (FWIW I believe Zuckerberg is genuine in his position, but I also think he’d change it rapidly if the legal environment tilted the other way and it became a genuine business threat.) I wonder about those different platforms. They already exist — Gab simply isn’t that popular. Revoking Section 230 would expose Gab to a “Thiel vs Gawker” situation: a billionaire could sue them into extinction. That doesn’t seem desirable at all.
bpyne 6y ago
I think it's a good thing to hold public figures accountable. Politicians, in particular, need to be held accountable due to the large amount of influence they have on our society. When Twitter, for example, places a warning on a Tweet to warn readers that it contains provably false statements, it holds the Tweeter accountable and that is enough reason to do it regardless of the changing minds argument. As far as changing minds goes, I think there's a swath of voters who sit in the political middle and they don't fact check. The swath is large enough that they can influence elections. It's critical to make sure they don't get influenced by politicians who make up facts on the spot. A friend of mine and I commiserated last week about the difficulty of debating with people on political issues. We noticed that people can make up "facts" quicker than we can fact check. You would think that the onus would be on the person making an argument to provide proof. But that standard of argument is long gone. The proof seems to always be on the person who says, "No, I don't think that's right."
- TechBro8615 6y ago
  > provably false statements Herein lies the rub. It’s extremely rare that a politician is tweeting about something so black-and-white that the tweet can be provably true or false. There is almost always a gray area between fact and opinion. In fact, people tend to vote for politicians because they agree with their interpretation and prioritization of a set of facts. So I think you’ll find the vast majority of political tweets reside in this gray area, because otherwise they wouldn’t be political in the first place. And if “provably false” is the standard for editorializing, then Twitter picked a terrible example to set as the precedent. The tweet they “fact checked” was Trump making a prediction about the future. Namely, he was suggesting that mail-in ballots could lead to increased voter fraud. Not only is this an opinion, but it’s a projection about something that has not happened yet. By definition, it cannot be provably false.
  - jdhendrickson 6y ago
    Weird, I can think of at least one politician who constantly tweets, and most of it's easily proven false with the smallest modicum of research. It's almost like what you are saying has no basis in reality.
wldlyinaccurate 6y ago
> Here’s an idea... if you don’t like what somebody writes online, don’t read it. The problem isn't that people "don't like" what elected officials say. It's that people often take what elected officials say as truth without even considering that it might be false (they must be Smart and Good if they're in office, right?) Fact checking and censoring prominent figures isn't going to affect people who already have strongly held beliefs. But it will make a difference to people who are impressionable or vulnerable or don't know any better.
- raarts 6y ago
  > is that people often take what elected officials say as truth Well educate them on that instead of trying to control the information flow. History taught us that will always backfire.
  - dguaraglia 6y ago
    There's a catch: the people doing most of the lying are the same that have worked for decades to destroy public education.
    - ggreer 6y ago
      Is it true that public education is being destroyed? I'm having trouble finding metrics by which it has declined. In terms of budget, 4.1% of US GDP is government expenditure on education. For comparison: Japan is 2.9%, Canada 4.3%, UK 4.3%. This number hasn't changed much. Over the past 20 years it has fluctuated between 4.1% and 4.7% of GDP.[1] There might be a slight downward trend, but if there is it has followed most of the other developed countries. The US is a rich country. If anything, using percentage of GDP understates just how much we spend on education. For primary & secondary education (everything before college), there are only four countries in the world that spend more per student than the US: Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, and Norway. For post-secondary education (college and grad school), the US spends more per student than any other country.[2] If you look at other metrics such as the percentage of adults with college degrees, or the percentage of adults who graduate high school, the US has never done better.[3][4] If you look at PISA scores, we're very close to the OECD average and that number hasn't changed much over time.[5] (Like most developed countries, absolute scores have slowly decreased over time. It's not clear why this is happening.) If people have been working for decades to destroy public education, they're doing a very bad job of it. 1. https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/public-spending-on-education.htm https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/public-spending-on-educati... 2. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp 3. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2017/cb17-51.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2017/cb17-51.... 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_... 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment#Rankings_comparison_2003_-_2015 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...
stellar678 6y ago
Facebook/Twitter/et al created the systems which focus people's attention and incentivize the production of divisive poor quality information in the first place - why shouldn't they take responsibility for fixing their mistakes?
zarkov99 6y ago
Annotating is fine as long as the user can choose what annotations they see and how those influence filtering. This idea that the stupid little people need the protection of the enlightened ones doing the censoring is profoundly un-american and must die.
Lutger 6y ago
Cambridge Analytica and meddling in the elections by Russian trolls is what happened. Also: a quite effective assault at climate action using misinformation, violent riots, a movement campaigning for civil war, ridiculous medical advise by the US president leading to deaths during a pandemic, etc. This all happened and permanently changed the debate. Free speech is poisoned these days and we can't simply ignore that.
- whatthesmack 6y ago
  > This all happened and permanently changed the debate. Free speech is poisoned these days and we can't simply ignore that. Even if that is the case, it shouldn’t mean we give up on free speech and allow it to be effectively eliminated “so it can be saved”. Free speech with some censorship is just censorship. A robust public debate is how ideas are fairly brought out and given an opportunity to thrive or die. Having Twitter or a government or “fact checker” or any other person/organization in the middle adding their outsized influence to the picture brings the whole debate out of balance. Why is Jack’s voice worth 1000x more than yours? Because he’s more “enlightened”?

SamReidHughes 6y ago

Why don't you just plainly state what your goal is: Top down control of the political discourse by the left.

stefantalpalaru 6y ago
> the left What left? https://politicalcompass.org/uselection2020 https://politicalcompass.org/uselection2020

NE2z2T9qi 6y ago

> "Apply the same standards to all." Do you honestly not realize that this is the exact issue being debated? Whether the "standards" are being applied fairly and consistently irrespective of political affiliations? And whether the "standard" itself is loaded to censor certain relatively mainstream but not Silicon Valley viewpoints? What you're saying reminds me of an anti-gay marriage argument I heard: "Hey, I'm straight and I don't have the right to marry a man. A gay guy doesn't have the right to marry a man either. Look at that: the same standard applies to all. Everything is fair!" I'm not particularly aligned to either democrats or republicans, but I've looked at "fact-checks" by supposedly neutral parties and they're often absolute garbage. Not only is the "research" superficial, what is chosen to be fact-checked vs. what isn't fact-checked is transparently biased. The "same standard" does not appear to be applied to all. Given the debatable nature of these questions, I think common sense would say it's better to let voters and the marketplace of idea arbitrate rather than social media companies. And, as a general matter, I'm shocked people are still so into censoring in 2020. Isn't censoring books/ideas/speech something we laugh at given how consistently wrong it tends to be? I'd say censoring is silly at best and evil at worst.

joshuamorton 6y ago
> And whether the "standard" itself is loaded to censor certain relatively mainstream but not Silicon Valley viewpoints? The views expressed in this case were "When the shooting starts, the looting starts"[0]. Which, while perhaps not Trump's intent, can reasonably read as encouragement (or incitement, or glorification) of violence toward people. > the marketplace of idea Twitter is a part of the marketplace of ideas, is it not? Their actions are simply an action taken as part of the marketplace of ideas. > What you're saying reminds me of an anti-gay marriage argument I heard. To the unoppressed, equality looks like oppression. That's true whether the unoppressed is a straight man or a person who can threaten others with violence without consequence. So yes, the two situations are very similar. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_looting_starts,_the_shooting_starts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_looting_starts,_the_s...
- NE2z2T9qi 6y ago

Supermancho 6y ago

> There is no reason to give elected officials a free pass. > Apply the same standards to all. I find these statements at odds. People can say what they want and it may or may not be inaccurate or misleading or accurate or truthful. Giving elected officials "a free pass" to do just that _is_ applying the same standard to all. Elected officials have a microphone because of the political system and the endemic elevation of these regular, flawed, people to a status above the common man (same with police and a number of other power hierarchies in the USA).