21 ms·
Twitter limits users interacting with Trump's tweets about 'stolen' election
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago"> Update: Twitter has now changed course and is allowing people to comment on and like Trump’s false election tweets after reading a short warning about them. They seem to have partially backed down here from the earlier policy of no liking and no commenting." https://twitter.com/arlenparsa/status/1337775151849627648 https://twitter.com/arlenparsa/status/1337775151849627648
- blargmaster42_8 6y agoCommunist gonna communist
- gitweb 6y agoGood, can't wait until he gets banned. He is trying to instigate a civil war.
- laurent92 6y ago20 states are disputing this election, with scores for Biden as high as 781% in some counties (City of North Muskegon, MI). Apparently Biden would have had more votes than Obama at its highest, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln TOGETHER?
- cyberlurker 6y agoSource please and maybe population increase would explain that.
- fortran77 6y agoThat's a fantastic claim! What county has a score for Biden at "781%"? I'd love to read more about that. Was there a lawsuit filed where I can read about this claim in some official form?
- tt433 6y agoIf someone on here said the moon was made of cheese, would you take them seriously?
- recursive 6y agoIf there was a chance they really believed it, and that very belief had a chance to destabilize the country, I'd take it very seriously.
- RedShift1 6y agoWait the moon is not made of cheese? Where does cheese come from? Why did we go to the moon then?
- fortran77 6y agoNo, but I'd be polite to them and ask them how they know that. Like I just did. Maybe you can learn something from that.
- tt433 6y agoDonald Trump himself wasn't a politically viable candidate until people took his transparently bad faith, virulently racist birther lies in good faith. Have we learned nothing?
- paustint 6y agoSources?
- ineedasername 6y agoThe 781% claim is another of those easily refuted that falls apart on scrutiny: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.detroitnews.com/amp/3824210001 https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.detroitnews.com/amp/3824210...
- kaszanka 6y agoPlease don't AMP. Canonical link: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2020/12/04/why-8-claims-rudy-giulianis-michigan-witnesses-dont-add-up/3824210001/ https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2020/12/04/w...
- malnourish 6y agoIs there an easy way to de-AMP?
- kaszanka 6y agoI just curl -vvvvv'd it and checked where the 302 redirect went.
- fortran77 6y agoWhat’s incredible is that people presented themselves as “witnesses” and stated, under oath, stories that they just read on some random blog and not events they witnessed personally. You would have thought the lawyers who prepped them would have stopped them from wasting the courts' time.
- dafoex 6y agoThis is part of the reason that in some countries it is illegal report anything significant about an active investigation. You don't want to pollute the witness pool - even if what is reported is 100% categorically true, the fact that someone might know something they otherwise wouldn't have known is bad for an accurate and just investigation.
- kpmah 6y agoIf it is so obvious, why are all the legal challenges, even the ones involving Trump-appointed judges, failing? Why can't the challengers come up with a scrap of evidence?
- gameswithgo 6y agodon't know why post above is being downvoted, trump absolutely has been acting in a way to instigate civil war.
- edgyquant 6y agoThere are quite a few pro-Trump users here and a lot of users that dislike politics. The former seem to only come out to defend him and the latter downvote all political discussions. At least in my experience.
- baggy_trough 6y agoI find your comment to be harmful. I have therefore petitioned several large tech quasi-monopolies to ensure no-one can interact with you on the Internet.
- bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y agoNot quite. War is politics by other means. When you depoliticize what is essentially political, you set the stage for war. It's not Trump who has been doing that for decades.
- barbacoa 6y agoI'm not trying to start a flame war here. Please don't decline into partisan bickering. What I took away from reading the texas lawsuit is that what you had happen was states were making changes to their election practices due to covid without actually changing the laws. Think how divisive things like voter ID laws are and it's not hard to imagine no election rule changes are going to get passed in a hurry. Specific examples are pennsylvania allowing absentee ballot 3 days after the election even though by law any ballots arriving by mail after election day are void. Poll watchers who monitor votes being counted were not given meaningful access to monitor even though by law they must be given access. Due to the huge number of absentee ballots election counters did not verify ballot signatures as required. The reason all these lawsuits failed is because there is no real injunctive relief you can seek. And no court is going to nullify an election. None of these things are evidence of voter fraud but the fact that election officials were allowed to deviate from the legal requirements dictated by law is something I find controversial and is something we should be allowed to talk about.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoThat’s a reasonable analysis. It’s very different from Trump’s claims on social media - he says that these facts are evidence of voter fraud, that any honest court would nullify the election, and that he still hopes to find a way to overturn the election result. If the discussion were just about improving the system for future elections I’d be all in favor of allowing it.
- NearAP 6y agoA) >>>Specific examples are pennsylvania allowing absentee ballot 3 days after the election even though by law any ballots arriving by mail after election day are void.<<<< That is incorrect. PA Supreme Court ruled that there is no specific law against that ...Pennsylvania Republicans had sought to block the counting of late-arriving ballots, which the state's Supreme Court had approved last month..... [1] B) >>>poll watchers who monitor votes being counted were not given meaningful access to monitor even though by law they must be given access.<<< That is also incorrect. The dispute was about how far away they should be. Both Democratic and Republican observers were at the same distance which was at least 6 feet because of COVID. One of the Judges allowed for the distance to be narrowed for everybody C) >>>Due to the huge number of absentee ballots election counters did not verify ballot signatures as required.<<< That is also incorrect. Where state law mandated it, this was done. D) >>>The reason all these lawsuits failed is because there is no real injunctive relief you can seek. <<<< This is incorrect. The lawsuits failed because a) the lawyers actually stated in court that they were not alleging fraud but were 'concerned' b) the lawyers said in court that there were some irregularities but not enough to change the outcome 1. https://www.npr.org/2020/10/19/922411176/supreme-court-rules-pennsylvania-can-count-ballots-received-after-election-day https://www.npr.org/2020/10/19/922411176/supreme-court-rules...
- twitcom 6y agoFUCK JACK DORSEY! ARREST HIS ASS NOW! ARREST SUSAN WOJCIKI NOW!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jMyles 6y agoIt's easy to imagine this happening the opposite of what I presume is the intended effect. I can easily visualize a future in which these sorts of tactics inflame and divide, and cause some people to give the claims more weight, not less. Less easy, at least for me, is to imagine a future where this strategy results in a more civil and evidence-based dialogue. If the surface on which claims can be compared and evaluated, absent restrictions placed by the platform itself, continually narrows, it seems to me that the civic dialogue necessarily narrows with it. A desirable future for the information age is one in which quackish claims are endemic but ineffective.
- pfortuny 6y agoThis is beyond ridiculous.
- rantwasp 6y agoyou know, people like to talk about facts and about how this is true and that is false. usually there is some nuance to every “fact” (ie you should not take things as absolute truths). this is not one of these times. it’s as clearcut as it gets when it comes to facts and still we see this alternate world. all generated by one guy. it’s the type of thing where reality is definitely stranger than fiction
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoIt has been fascinating to watch the pendulum swing back and forth between headlines that social media platforms aren’t doing enough to curb misinformation and headlines that social media platforms are overstepping their bounds by trying to intervene when their platforms are used for misinformation. Obviously everyone has different opinions on the matter, but I’m beginning to suspect that the Venn diagram of the two sides of this debate has a lot of overlap in the middle. It seems we’ve entered an era where it’s trendy to despise social media platforms regardless of what they do or don’t do. Cynicism reigns supreme in the public discourse about social media platforms. Everyone seems to carve out an exception for their preferred platform, though. Twitter users mock Facebook and brag about deleting their FB accounts. Redditors mock Twitter users. Hacker News comments are frequently self-congratulatory for “quitting” other social media platforms and so on. Ironically, the more we hear about social media platforms, the more people seem to forget that these are really driven by concerning underlying social issues. Why are so many people willingly subscribing to the people peddling misinformation in the first place? It’s hardly limited to one platform. The prevailing narrative that a handful of engineers are shaping the thoughts of the nation by manipulating “the algorithm” to emphasize divisive content ignores the fact that people seem more eager than ever to engage with it. Some times I suspect that what the social media cynics really want is for us to return to a time when the communicating on the internet was only accessible to the few of us who were willing and able to figure it out. Now that the genie is out of the bottle and everyone can access global communication with ease, we need to accept that these are societal problems, not just the side effects of a few engineers tweaking algorithms. It’s also time that we start expecting people to take some responsibility for their own social media usage. We’ve spent so much time blaming “the algorithm” that people now treat social media as an uncontrollable black box or even an addictive drug. It’s time we normalized things like muting the friends you don’t want to see in your feed, unfollowing people who rile you up, and otherwise curating the content we all consume. Contrary to what I read online, it’s trivially easy to tune my Facebook feed and use social media responsibly. However, we never hear about responsible use. It’s always just “delete your Facebook account” or other extreme measures that don’t work for grandma who really just doesn’t want to miss out on photos from family. It’s time we start educating people on responsible use instead of preaching social media abstinence as the only solution.
- 6y ago
- mmastrac 6y agoGood. He needs to finally shut up and get the hell out. The losing tantrum has continued long enough. Time to leave before he cracks the country in two irrevocably. To those who are downvoting: he lost pretty much every legal case he threw at this problem. He lost the election. It wasn't stolen. Give it up. There's no Kraken, just a bunch of grifters trying to take your money (including Trump himself). Time to move on.
- fwn 6y agoI downvoted you. I'm a German who, like most Germans, does not like Trump. The article is about Twitter exploring new ways to shape interactions with the content from Trump, a retreating politician, on their platform. This development is far more relevant to me than the largely US american pro/contra Trump debate, as my own societies discourse is dependent on those very same platforms. I therefore believe that it is completely wrong to justify Twitter's continuing trials on discoursive influence over the notion that it's alright since Trump might be a particularly bad actor. I think that's off topic and misses the point. I just thought I'll explain since the thread appears to be very heated right now. People might attribute up & downvotes to a far smaller set of reasons than they should on a platform as global as HN.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoIs there a reason to think they intend to use these strategies more generally?
- j16sdiz 6y agoBecause any power would corrupts eventually?
- UncleMeat 6y agoSo? That isn't the only input to the system. The conclusion here obviously cannot be "then grant no power to anybody" unless you are the most extreme left-anarchist. Power has the capacity to harm but also aid. We must balance the risk of harm against the potential for aid. The ability to run a standing army can be used for ill. Yet we have an army. The ability to regulate corporate pollution can be used for ill. Yet we have pollution regulations. The ability to throw people in prison via the justice system can be used for ill. Yet we have laws and courts and prisons.
- cmdshiftf4 6y agoGood. Let's keep the foot on the accelerator and get to where we all know this is going.
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoWhere is it going? Social media telling us what’s true or not? Last time I checked we didn’t really like social media companies around here.
- mmastrac 6y agoHe's trying to be clever and say "civil war" without saying "civil war". The LARPers on the right seem to be enjoying this a great deal. I'm sure the FBI will be very interested in their calls for violence.
- AnonDataSci 6y agoYou can't deny half of the electorate a platform to speak out and expect none of them to get angry.
- malnourish 6y agoScience curricula does not platform flat-earthers and gravity deniers
- AnonDataSci 6y agoYou're equating fringe groups with a mainstream political movement. Those kinds of caricatures are only possible because half of US voters have been totally deplatformed and are unable to speak for themselves. I am very worried that is a recipe for violence.
- philjohn 6y agoa) They aren't denied a platform b) They have Parler and MeWe - Parler has been banning certain hashtags, as well as users
- cblconfederate 6y agoI see it as a last attempt of twitter employees to signal something / remain relevant
- Covzire 6y agoSilicon valley is lost. They are in the same league with Chinese communists who murder innocent people and take away their voices.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI really don’t understand the perspective that this is about information control. The guy is engaged in a plot to overthrow democracy in the United States, and summoning social media pressure is one of his core strategies for how to make it happen, so Twitter is taking action to limit the amount he can summon on their platform. If it were about censorship they’d just ban him.
- psyc 6y agoWhat percentage of Americans do you estimate genuinely believe that Trump is literally seeking to overthrow democracy, even indirectly? And I'm not asking your reasons for believing it.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago30% or so, rising to well over 50% among people with high political engagement. Nearly every political commentator I personally follow, left or right, has expressed this view. (And to answer the implicit question, yes, I would have to severely reevaluate my stance here if I learned that I’m in a filter bubble and this estimate is way off.)
- aokiji 6y agoSaul Alinsky tactics are beautifully executed in this comment section. Accusing Trump supporters of doing what the Democrat/Antifa brown shirts do. "No citizen, we have deleted this person because they were deemed a threat. But don't worry about it. You are safe."
- pearjuice 6y agoBefore election: Hunter Biden case is a "Russian conspiracy" and labeled as fake news. Only news outlet posting about it gets discredited and shadow banned on social networks. After election: Feds are on Hunter Biden case (before the election even!) and it is real. Coverage on news networks now. All of this editorializing and censoring is setting a dangerous precedence. It's obvious there's some sort of agenda, just not sure what it is. Could it be that they (who is they even?) want Biden elected and then make him step down due to his son affairs so Harris becomes the first female president with a migration background?
- Helloworldboy 6y agoYou’re being downvoted for inconvenient facts
- dafoex 6y agoJust to make the point: wasn't Washington the first president with a migrant background? You know, because of the whole non native colonists thing.
- lucb1e 6y agoI'm sad to see HN can't seem to have a normal conversation about anything related to USA politics. Can we try to maintain some sort of reasonableness?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI mean, there’s an attempted coup going on. It strikes me as unreasonable to expect a normal, dispassionate conversation on the topic of “the outgoing government says they might refuse to leave”.
- lucb1e 6y agoDo you think there are many people here that would support a breakdown of the democratic process, a coup? I'd hope that those people are in the vast minority. You can be passionate about a topic but that's different than extremist. I'm passionate about privacy but it's not like I think that people using Facebook are retarded and write about it in full caps.
- NearAP 6y ago>>> Do you think there are many people here that would support a breakdown of the democratic process, a coup?<<< 1) Have you taken a look at Parler? 2) The Chair of Texas state GOP has called for the state to secede in the wake of the supreme court ruling 3) Diamond and Silk (and they are famous in the US in some areas) have called for a coup. 4) General Flynn who was once the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency endorsed a call for Trump to declare martial law and redo the election
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoWhile I don't entirely disagree with what you're saying, I think you have to be pretty cautious about looking at social media. You could (and many people I'm familiar with did!) scan Twitter around the time of the Seattle autonomous zone and see lots of people calling for the rule of law to end.
- 6y ago
- lumost 6y agoAt this point, we have to come to terms with the republicans shift to the far right and all that entails. Amongst the republicans I know they are happy to believe anything Mr Trump says and denounce any party dissenters as Rino’s. When their trusted media sources such as fox and tucker Carlson didn’t confirm the party line - they jumped to newsmax and OAN. They’re shocked and dismayed when courts and institutions don’t embrace what they view as reality. I doubt that restricting misinformation on major platforms will do more than move the audience to Parler and other friendlier mediums. This is a demand problem and not a supply problem. And I’m not sure how to fix the demand problem.
- hassanahmad 6y agoWhat's the point of still shouting about it. He has lost the election and he should admit it like a man.
- yuvalr1 6y agoThere are ways to educate people to develop critical reading and identify when they are being lied to on the internet. Censorship and sanctions are less preferred because: 1. They create even more distrust and encourage conspiracy theories 2. More importantly, just like journalists (who have agendas), fact checkers also have agendas. The journalism problem is solved by pluralism: having many different media platforms with different agendas allows for balance and exposure to various facts. However, due to the monopolistic nature of the social platforms, we can't have that here. What happens is that a very small number of people controls what we know and what we don't. Just imagine if Fox News was the only news platform - devastating, isn't it? For these reasons, social media should not be allowed to decide on they're own what is fact and what is not.
- bg24 6y ago“There are ways to educate people to develop critical reading and identify when they are being lied to on the internet.” Are there simple ways to learn the above?
- yuvalr1 6y agoI personally believe the following principles: 1. While reading, remember every writer has an agenda, and that you read a specific point of view, and there may be others 2. Differentiate between facts and opinions while reading 3. Actively expose yourself to an opposite opinion about the subject Number 3 is the most important.
- lucb1e 6y agoI'm not sure that every writer has an agenda. When talking about vaccines or other things that generally benefit everyone, I certainly don't have an agenda, and I expect that genuine researchers (probably most of them, just that we don't necessarily know which) are the same. Well, unless you consider decreasing worldsuck to be an agenda. Actively exposing yourself is also not something I expect to be helpful. I dove into the 5G conspiracy theory and it's not like the statements or the people are retarded. They will bring reasonable-sounding arguments and respond to you in proper language. I needed to dig rather deep and have a really decent understanding of radio-related topics to know that there isn't a grain of truth to it. For example, digging into sources of sources of sources, you discover that the trail runs cold. Does that mean a statement was made up, or that you just can't find it? It's rather hard to prove that a certain paper does not exist (some of the court-submitted documents referenced papers published by reputable organisations and I figured "surely they don't lie to the court, this has to be somewhere?!" It's a huge time sink and I even got help from one of the believers in digging up the reference, but I never found it and they never got back to me). And even if you find the source, how can you tell if it's real if you don't have a basic understanding of the topic yourself? Exposing yourself to the other side mainly helps when you currently believe the conspiracy theory, which is exactly what you're trying to prevent in the first place. If you're susceptible to this sort of thing, I'd not be surprised if this advice gets more people sucked into the wrong things.
- DyslexicAtheist 6y agolooking at the division in society (not just US but all across the West and on the world-stage even), it's absolutely hard to remain neutral. not hard because I'm a "crazy commie" Democrat thinking Trump needs to go, nor because I'm a "dumb" Conservative thinking the election was stolen (not my language but the way these camps view another). This is sadly pretty standard political discourse even in other countries. The thing that really scares me in all this is how each side is 100% certain about all the bad the other side is and how a single comment can land people as labelled as "the other". I know for myself and in my bubble that Trump and his cohorts are terrible and playing dirty, and responsible for thousands of corona casualties. But I take a look at the other side and see how absolutely hardened they are in their view that they got conned. They are equally convinced as I am about them backing the correct side. It's no longer only about who got conned but by how discourse in this climate is impossible. It's easy to just hope things are going to settle if only the right kind of leadership steps in. But the amount of work that camp has cut out reuniting this division is almost impossible. Impossible because the division has been instigated from the top so we automatically trust that it gets mended by the top. But the real work is in bringing those families back together that no longer talk, or those friends people lost due to "politics". the only reason I still tune into my own biased news bubble is to scour it for signs of rhethoric, or ideas in how to mend this mess. and what scares me is I haven't seen anything yet that addresses some of the root causes here. class divide, racial divide, and the richest of this world (those leaders HN often celebrates, Bezos, Musk etc) having become richer even during the pandemic. Maybe we wouldn't have all this discussion if a human life was valued differently than just in terms of the revenues they generate for society. It also shows me that the place to find peace isn't a "democracy", or certain pocket of society, but within myself.
- solaceb 6y agoFWIW, I believe seriously in the potential for drugs like MDMA and psilocybin to help those with closed minds — on left and right — to approach tired political divides from novel perspectives. And that this is necessary moving forward. I am an extreme pessimist. I think our perspective is so warped, and our cognitive biases so deeply baked that meaningful collective healing and growth will take place if and only if it’s partially energized by psychological healing & opening on the individual level through psychedelic therapy. I am routinely laughed out of serious discussion for this view.
- xyzelement 6y agoI am disappointed that anyone thinks this is a good idea, regardless of your political view. The principles behind the United States are that we prefer a mess to tyranny and noise to suppression. It's not about Trump. It's about whether we trust anyone to make decisions about what is right and not right for someone to say, because whoever has that power will inevitably abuse it. If you feel fine about this now because you disagree with the person being silenced, then just try to imagine being on the other side of that - calling out what you perceive to be a great injustice only for someone to have the power to take away your voice completely. This is not a constitutional argument, as Twitter isn't government and not bound by first amendment, it's a principles argument. If you support suppression of speech that's "obviously wrong" to you, you're gonna be in a lot of pain down the road when someone finds YOU obviously wrong. Having been born and lived in the USSR, this is very real. A lot of folks who were on the "right side of history" in 1917 when it came to suppressing/killing "the obvious enemies of the people", found themselves against the wall in the 20s and 30s. Once you create a system that's more powerful than people, it's just a matter of time before it decides that you're not good enough either.
- freedomben 6y agoGood God people, we are above this ridiculousness. Can we please just talk about the philosophy and principles here? If you mention the name of a politician you've already lost. I tend to be more on the left but I still value free speech and I'm anti-censorship. Can we talk about that? 1. Is what Twitter is doing censorship? 2. If so is it ok? 3. Are we setting dangerous precedents? 4. Should big tech companies be trusted with this power? These are important questions and this community is well positioned to discuss these.
- tetrometal 6y ago1. I don't think so. Not in the "free speech" sense. Twitter owns itself and should be permitted to do as it pleases with its property. 2. I don't think it's okay, but I think a proper response to it lies in the social sphere, not at the end of the government gun. 3. I think this is probably an inevitable outcome for humanity's first swing at social media. It's centralized and so will come under the control of some partisan group or another. I think the behavior will push us inevitably towards more decentralized platforms. 4. I'm not convinced they have power - not power that can't be removed from them by society, anyway. If they misbehave or underperform enough, society will move on. See MySpace.
- gitweb 6y ago1. No 3. No 4. Yes, because the future is decentralization. They are just helping accelerate it.
- freedomben 6y agoYou really think the future is decentralization? I sure hope you're right but it seems to me like everything is getting more centralized. Maybe Parler sticks for a while, IDK. Two is better than one. But that network effect is a pretty tough nut to crack.
- gitweb 6y agoHave you even tried Parler? The interface and UE is garbage.
- zaroth 6y agoMy personal opinion is that every single Presidential election should always be followed up by a well-funded third party integrity analysis and postmortem. I’m not talking about canvassing and re-counts, because those only look at the very last step in the process of tabulation. We should always be looking into voter rolls of who voted versus things like change-of-address filings and death certificates. We should always be checking the math on percentage of registered voters and looking at outliers. We should always be investigating provisional ballots, for example people who came to vote in person and were told they already voted. And probably many other things along these lines. I think the other side of this is that the Constitution puts States firmly in control of their own voting process and procedures, which means there are 50 different sets of rules for how these elections can be held, and then in the months and weeks leading up to elections there’s a flurry of lawsuits that try to change all the rules one way or another, sometimes with changes being made up until the final moments of the election. This hugely erodes public trust in the entire process. Now, I think Twitter has made some objectively very bad calls in the name of censorship the last few months. Freezing the NY Post’s account after the Hunter Biden story in particular. I think the “this tweet is disputed” flags are ultimately another failure on their part. Aside from being objectively the wrong thing to do in some cases, mostly I just doubt that these actions will have remotely the intended effect.
- bg24 6y agoAmerica’s free speech is taken to the extreme. It cannot be possible in another country. - Fix the law. Punish the lawyers, officials who violate the law.There should be some fucking fear for misusing the common people. - Regulate social media and popular sites. For example: prevent actions (post, repost, likes etc) on social and political posts by unverified accounts.
- tetrometal 6y agoNo human has the right to threaten or use violence against another human for communicating data. American free speech isn't extreme, it's simply ethical.
- anigbrowl 6y agoA threat is itself just a kind of datum, describing a future intention of variable specificity. When you start to explore that boundary, it turns out to be rather fuzzy and fractal.
- Dylan16807 6y agoAnd so is fraud. Just communicating data, not legal.
- tamaharbor 6y agoBiden will never be a legitimate President for at least 70 million Americans. That can’t be good.
- bengrunfeld 6y agoIf this was done to a left-wing politician, there would be blood in the streets. The double standards (media, big tech, judiciary) are enough to lead the country to civil war. Even TX GOP is suggesting succession. “Protecting people from the wrong ideas” is something the communists did. We can emulate that at our own peril.
- tallgiraffe 6y agoIt is shocking to me that some people actually prefer to rely on "fact checkers," as if those people are somehow more intelligent, and less biased than the readers themselves. In fact, the idea that someone could check these facts for you, almost explicitly stipulates that you, the reader, are somehow less capable. But we are not talking about changing oil in the car, or doing brain surgery, we are talking about maybe the only thing that each individual can do on their own, unsupervised, to the beset of their ability - use their brain. This is not going to end well.
- anigbrowl 6y agoIf I have to investigate and validate or debunk every claim by myself, I'd never have time for anything else. I do a great deal of this already but it's sort of naive and egotistical to think one's capacities in this area are unlimited. And to the extent that people do, it subjects them to manipulation - a strategy crudely referred to as 'flooding the zone with shit' in order to waste the time of the most discriminating and thoughtful on studying bullshit claims which take far less time to produce than to evaluate.
- eternalban 6y agoThe end: a pseudo theocracy in technocratic garb for infantalized adults.
- eternalban 6y agoqed: not a single attempt to articulate a rebuttal by the downvote sock puppets.
- UncleMeat 6y ago> It is shocking to me that some people actually prefer to rely on "fact checkers," as if those people are somehow more intelligent, and less biased than the readers themselves. In the large majority of topics, there exist huge numbers of people who are far more expert than I am. I don't just prefer expert "fact checkers" in fields like medicine, law, science, plumbing, wiring, etc., I depend on them. Similarly, there are certainly journalists who have much more time and experience when it comes to these topics than I have.
- daenz 6y ago>The road to hell is paved with good intentions. People need to stop and consider the meaning of that phrase and how it applies in the modern day. People don't seem to care that we're making "lies" a justifiable basis for censorship. Whether you believe Trump is lying or not, we are accepting and normalizing the existence of a third party that censors things deemed to be "lies" for the greater good. What's more, is that it being defended under the guise of "well, they're a private corporation, etc etc." Yes, and they do have the right, but that is orthogonal to the fact that we are normalizing and welcoming it. Twitter having the right to do it and we as a society supporting their actions are separate from each other. But people like to muddy the waters by claiming that it isn't "censorship" because it's a private corporation. But it is censorship on their platform, and again, the support for the censorship in general is the disturbing part. It's not as if the people supporting Twitter's actions are saying "we should only censor people on Twitter"...they want it everywhere that there is a platform. There's also voices that say "well, it's Trump, and he is the President, so there should be an exception because he can influence a lot of people." Taylor Swift has as many followers (~88M) on Twitter. Do you think if she started saying similar things as Trump, people wouldn't be calling for her censorship too? Can Taylor Swift start a civil war as easy as Trump can? Probably not, but who makes the determination of "you are censored because we believe people will listen to you" ? Controversial speech only seem to be acceptable so long as nobody listens to you. Is that what we want?
- aazaa 6y ago> Instead, when users attempted to react to or share the tweet, a message popped up from the platform reading, “we try to prevent a Tweet like this that otherwise breaks the Twitter Rules from reaching more people, so we have disabled most of the ways to engage with it.” The policy on claims about elections appears to be outlined here: > We will label or remove false or misleading information intended to undermine public confidence in an election or other civic process. This includes but is not limited to: > disputed claims that could undermine faith in the process itself, such as unverified information about election rigging, ballot tampering, vote tallying, or certification of election results; and > misleading claims about the results or outcome of a civic process which calls for or could lead to interference with the implementation of the results of the process, e.g. claiming victory before election results have been certified, inciting unlawful conduct to prevent the procedural or practical implementation of election results (note that our violent threats policy may also be relevant for threats not covered by this policy). https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/election-integrity-policy https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/election-inte... Twitter is really building a quagmire for itself here. It's trivial to "dispute" a claim. Who "verifies" a claim? What Twitter really seems to be saying is that they'll remove content they don't like. There's veneer of process and impartiality, but it crumbles even on superficial examination. Why not just come out and say that Twitter owns the platform and will delete or manipulate anything at any time for any reason?
- amadeuspagel 6y agohttps://twitter.com/search?q=russians+stole+the+election https://twitter.com/search?q=russians+stole+the+election
- andrewljohnson 6y agoCould they have implemented a voting ring detector instead, and not based it on what the content is? I wonder if toxic content on Twitter could be dealt with more by limiting content that only gets engaged in an extremely polarizing way, with lots of brainless replies, or maybe content that is way more interesting to a person's followers than the rest of Twitter should be voting-ring-censored.
- seanwilson 6y agoI'm fine with private platforms (including HN) getting to decide what is and isn't harmful to the community. Should HN allow low effort comments and memes in the name of free speech? When online communities have no moderation, they inevitably get hijacked and become awful. It's actually nice that instead of Twitter just hiding/deleting the offending posts, the posts are still there for you to see (in a less convenient way) so you can decide yourself that you're happy with the standards Twitter is trying to set. If you're not happy, you're free to go find or create another community online that has moderation you're happy with. I don't understand how anyone can feel they should be allowed to inject themselves into a community and act however they want with no repercussions, and everyone else just has to put up with it.
- psyc 6y agoFacebook and Twitter are not communities in any meaningful sense, because they are global, and generally speaking meant for "anybody" to talk about "anything" (of course the limits of this generality are exactly what's under discussion). More like a telephone. The proper analogy to HN's moderation would be the owner of a FB Group kicking someone, which I believe is fine and good. What Facebook and Twitter are doing, and especially as they move beyond the less-controversial "hate speech" to the more controversial "disinformation", is the whole global platform moderating everything, and is veering dangerously close to being... I'm struggling with the word, but something like partisan but less one-dimensional. It's not hard to see this path leading to these global platforms simply causing the speech that occurs on them to match the politics of the people in charge at Facebook and Twitter. And nobody needs to hear for the billionth time about the rights of private companies and the law - we know, so save your keystrokes, please.
- seanwilson 6y ago> Facebook and Twitter are not communities in any meaningful sense, because they are global, and generally speaking meant for "anybody" to talk about "anything" Why do Facebook and Twitter not have an "I hate this" reaction (I'm aware Facebook added "angry" but this was fairly recent)? Or a way to mark people as enemies as well as friends? Why do they prevent you posting certain kinds of graphic videos or images? Why don't Twitter let you post messages of any length? These are all limits to your freedom to express yourself. They let you create your own groups/communities, but Twitter and Facebook clearly have their own idea of what they believe to be healthy discourse and what kind of interactions they want to nurture, and they encourage that through their UI features and moderation. Same with HN with upvotes/downvotes, who gets to vote and dedicated site moderators. > is the whole global platform moderating everything, It's not as simple as you're making out. I'd be against my ISP moderating what I post online, but there's more to the internet than just Facebook and Twitter. They might be popular but they don't have absolute control and aren't a prerequisite to other forms of communication or self-organisation (unlike your ISP or mobile provider).
- rboyd 6y agoAll I know is my wife and her family who all immigrated from Cuba are very alarmed about the way this is heading.
- every 6y agoI'm rather looking forward to being bored for the next four years. Unremarkable displays of mere competence. The yawn-inducing functioning of a 'by the book' administrative organization. The dull business of sensible policies and reasonable proposals. Reporters nodding off during pressers. No longer cringing at the thought of checking the news. Not having to check the news anyway. Droning monotones explaining in far too much detail and precision things of little general interest. Sheer bliss...
- hintymad 6y agoBoth FB and Twitter censored the news about criminal investigation of Hunter Biden before the election, citing "misinformation", "disinformation", or simply "conspiracy theory". And now MSMs are reporting the same investigation, even citing emails from Hunter's laptop. If this is not censorship, I don't know what it is. Or, per the left here, censor is totally justified if we label a piece of information as hate speech, disinformation, or whatever amoral in the left's eyes? As for facts or discourse, who cares, right?
- nbzso 6y agoI don't have a tendency to believe in misinformation, I have a strong rational way of assessing information. I read recent changes in global politics like this: Lets control the Internet, let us use it only for Digital ID,contact tracing, face recognition,IOT software and corporate approved messages, lets DRM every bit of entertainment a put an order in this chaos. If you don't agree with this, sorry you have no choice, we are the owners you are the slaves. This is the future. This is the big reset. You are polluting the Earth, here listen to this autistic kid, she is our mascot, because of the children. Don't ask about pedophilia in high levels of society, don't ask about covert operations and psyops, this is conspiracy, there are no such things, the powers that be always have your interest in heart. This is the beginning of a very dark moment in human history, freedom of speech is not a relative idea. Factually freedom of speech is the reason for us to advance. Debating with clear intent to objective analysis is the way forward. This shit reminds me of dark ages of Inquisition, and actually is fascism and big corporatism in action. Do not expect people to applaud or comply. People will revolt. Just saying:)
- nbzso 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiqDZlAZygU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiqDZlAZygU
- nojvek 6y agoI do think Twitter is making an effort but they need more rigor. How do they classify what is misinformation. What is the guidelines? How do they identify information from misinformation? Fighting misinformation needs a lot more structure. Otherwise it’s a slippery slope of censorship. I hope they keep on tweaking it until the majority of public can trust it.