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Gee, I sure hope Twitter continues to compile a huge list of all the things you're not allowed to talk about on their platform. Now that the precedent is well a

Gee, I sure hope Twitter continues to compile a huge list of all the things you're not allowed to talk about on their platform. Now that the precedent is well and truly set with elections and vaccines having Official Truths, what's the next thing on the docket? It's not that I even think they're necessarily incorrect about their take - it's that they're putting themselves in place as being the gatekeepers of reality on certain topics. What is this supposed to mean for the average person? Are we supposed to able to "believe everything we see on Twitter" a little bit more now, because a tiny bite has been taken out of the pool of all possible misinformation and propaganda on the platform? Only a fool would do that; and said fool is still going to be plenty busy with all the other abjectly incorrect things that people both well-meaning and malicious spew onto it day in and day out. Are we supposed to be able to believe at least the things we read about vaccines and American elections on Twitter? I don't think they've actually managed to take a big enough bite to accomplish that. The only thing they have done is further cement their position as being arbitrarily and inconsistently able to remove or flag posts that don't actually violate any law or constitute any threat the way such things were traditionally interpreted.

rualca 6y ago
> Now that the precedent is well and truly set with elections and vaccines having Official Truths, (...) What's your opinion on the massive wave of disinformation and blatant lies regarding elections and vaccines? Should some people be allowed to blatantly lie and deceive and manipulate the public without even having the faintest fact-check or verification?
- totony 6y ago
  >Should some people be allowed to blatantly lie and deceive and manipulate the public without even having the faintest fact-check or verification? You can verify their claim/rebute them with the reply button or an aptly written article. Making this a fact-check stamp is akin to a big corporation telling you how to think vs people arguing over things (which is constructive)
- core-questions 6y ago
  > What's your opinion on the massive wave of disinformation and blatant lies regarding elections and vaccines? My opinion is a very sarcastic "oh no, someone's wrong on the internet!!" followed by moving on with my life. Guess what: when I want reliable factual information, I don't go to Twitter. I can't imagine doing that. If someone is getting their information from their, their process is broken; if they drifted into doing that, they probably _never_ had a process of getting valid information. They probably believed the National Enquirer and the Weekly World News. Perhaps it shouldn't actually matter what they think; when something is important enough, it becomes an order, no? Really, under the current liberal world order, there's no strict requirement that anybody has to know anything, or that anyone is united in belief about anything. I don't know if it matters to me personally any more if people are "wrong". Maybe this is because I see intelligent, otherwise-well-informed people being wrong about plenty of things on a regular basis? I can't go around correcting everyone, especially since it really doesn't even work anyway. You must have noticed this yourself by now; perhaps 0.01% of the time an online discussion actually results in someone else changing their mind. Either way I can't imagine these twitter precautions helping anyone to change their opinion; it's just extremely patronizing, at the very least, and has the very real risk of damaging free speech online, which is already suffering slings and arrows enough. > Should some people be allowed to blatantly lie and deceive and manipulate the public Look, there's information about COVID that is absolutely true and absolutely false, and there's information that is up in the air; we have to be able to question things in order to advance; and people in general deserve the right to discuss their fears and frustrations with their peer group. If you think a little nanny-state advisory button is going to really stop that need, or do _anything_ to bring people back into the fold who have gone seeking alternative explanations, you'd kidding yourself. It's absolutely a valid thing to ask whether the cure is worse than the disease, in this case and in the case of many other societal problems, and if we deny people the opportunity to have honest conversations about this, we are curtailing one of their most important freedoms. Like I said, when it becomes important, it becomes orders. It doesn't matter what you think about masks, you put one on or you can't ride the bus.... As far as your election is concerned, as a Canadian, I just endured four years of your media (the trusted sources! not randos on twitter!) complaining the 2016 Trump election was rigged and hacked, only for it to eventually come out that no, nothing Cambridge Analytica did mattered at all - https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/08/ico_cambridge_seo/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/08/ico_cambridge_seo/ , no, it wasn't hacked by the Russians, it was all just a big bunch of crap. Whether this was to distract Democrats from the fact that the real steal that year was Bernie's chance at the primary, or for some other end, we'll never be sure.... Four years of it, bleeding over the border, removed a lot of the legitimacy your media used to have to put itself in any kind of position as an arbiter of facts. Now, the Republicans have lost their election, and are doing their damndnest to try to find examples of voter fraud etc. as well, can you not suck up a couple months of that? Can Twitter not just deal with it for a little bit until at least say, after the inauguration, when any chance in hell that these annoying Stop the Steal people are still grifting their fanbase on is finally gone? > without even having the faintest fact-check or verification? It doesn't take a genius to see that implementing a Ministry of Truth is not going to bode well for a free society. (I have some vague ideas about blockchain-powered distributed reputation metrics, free-floating on an exchange, so that I can choose my weighting of truthiness relative to the authorities I respect, which might be different from yours... but that's not on the table here, only entirely-corporate profit-motivated schemes of control are.)
eyelidlessness 6y ago
What are you gonna do? Not voluntarily use Twitter?
- totony 6y ago
  I'm surprised people even use twitter. It's not all that well established (vs eg. facebook which you have to use) and is barely useful as an alternative to RSS or 4chan or reddit.
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    Cool, so no big deal if they moderate it then
    - totony 6y ago
      That doesn't mean that it's a good thing; the mentality behind this is troubling.
- core-questions 6y ago
  Well, that's easy to say, but when it's the social network that all the verified celebrities, politicians, etc. use to post whatever they're going on about today, it has ascended above the level of "social network" and up to the level of "integral national service".
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    So are you advocating nationalizing Twitter and regulating it under 1A?

rualca 6y ago

> Now that the precedent is well and truly set with elections and vaccines having Official Truths, (...) What's your opinion on the massive wave of disinformation and blatant lies regarding elections and vaccines? Should some people be allowed to blatantly lie and deceive and manipulate the public without even having the faintest fact-check or verification?

totony 6y ago
>Should some people be allowed to blatantly lie and deceive and manipulate the public without even having the faintest fact-check or verification? You can verify their claim/rebute them with the reply button or an aptly written article. Making this a fact-check stamp is akin to a big corporation telling you how to think vs people arguing over things (which is constructive)
core-questions 6y ago
> What's your opinion on the massive wave of disinformation and blatant lies regarding elections and vaccines? My opinion is a very sarcastic "oh no, someone's wrong on the internet!!" followed by moving on with my life. Guess what: when I want reliable factual information, I don't go to Twitter. I can't imagine doing that. If someone is getting their information from their, their process is broken; if they drifted into doing that, they probably _never_ had a process of getting valid information. They probably believed the National Enquirer and the Weekly World News. Perhaps it shouldn't actually matter what they think; when something is important enough, it becomes an order, no? Really, under the current liberal world order, there's no strict requirement that anybody has to know anything, or that anyone is united in belief about anything. I don't know if it matters to me personally any more if people are "wrong". Maybe this is because I see intelligent, otherwise-well-informed people being wrong about plenty of things on a regular basis? I can't go around correcting everyone, especially since it really doesn't even work anyway. You must have noticed this yourself by now; perhaps 0.01% of the time an online discussion actually results in someone else changing their mind. Either way I can't imagine these twitter precautions helping anyone to change their opinion; it's just extremely patronizing, at the very least, and has the very real risk of damaging free speech online, which is already suffering slings and arrows enough. > Should some people be allowed to blatantly lie and deceive and manipulate the public Look, there's information about COVID that is absolutely true and absolutely false, and there's information that is up in the air; we have to be able to question things in order to advance; and people in general deserve the right to discuss their fears and frustrations with their peer group. If you think a little nanny-state advisory button is going to really stop that need, or do _anything_ to bring people back into the fold who have gone seeking alternative explanations, you'd kidding yourself. It's absolutely a valid thing to ask whether the cure is worse than the disease, in this case and in the case of many other societal problems, and if we deny people the opportunity to have honest conversations about this, we are curtailing one of their most important freedoms. Like I said, when it becomes important, it becomes orders. It doesn't matter what you think about masks, you put one on or you can't ride the bus.... As far as your election is concerned, as a Canadian, I just endured four years of your media (the trusted sources! not randos on twitter!) complaining the 2016 Trump election was rigged and hacked, only for it to eventually come out that no, nothing Cambridge Analytica did mattered at all - https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/08/ico_cambridge_seo/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/08/ico_cambridge_seo/ , no, it wasn't hacked by the Russians, it was all just a big bunch of crap. Whether this was to distract Democrats from the fact that the real steal that year was Bernie's chance at the primary, or for some other end, we'll never be sure.... Four years of it, bleeding over the border, removed a lot of the legitimacy your media used to have to put itself in any kind of position as an arbiter of facts. Now, the Republicans have lost their election, and are doing their damndnest to try to find examples of voter fraud etc. as well, can you not suck up a couple months of that? Can Twitter not just deal with it for a little bit until at least say, after the inauguration, when any chance in hell that these annoying Stop the Steal people are still grifting their fanbase on is finally gone? > without even having the faintest fact-check or verification? It doesn't take a genius to see that implementing a Ministry of Truth is not going to bode well for a free society. (I have some vague ideas about blockchain-powered distributed reputation metrics, free-floating on an exchange, so that I can choose my weighting of truthiness relative to the authorities I respect, which might be different from yours... but that's not on the table here, only entirely-corporate profit-motivated schemes of control are.)

eyelidlessness 6y ago

What are you gonna do? Not voluntarily use Twitter?

totony 6y ago
I'm surprised people even use twitter. It's not all that well established (vs eg. facebook which you have to use) and is barely useful as an alternative to RSS or 4chan or reddit.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  Cool, so no big deal if they moderate it then
  - totony 6y ago
    That doesn't mean that it's a good thing; the mentality behind this is troubling.
core-questions 6y ago
Well, that's easy to say, but when it's the social network that all the verified celebrities, politicians, etc. use to post whatever they're going on about today, it has ascended above the level of "social network" and up to the level of "integral national service".
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  So are you advocating nationalizing Twitter and regulating it under 1A?