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White House deletes tweet after Twitter adds 'context' note

416 points by rmason 4y ago

rmason 4y ago
Though some may dislike it, I actually am glad that Twitter under Elon Musk is fact checking both sides.
- kaesar14 4y ago
  Elon has made no content moderation changes to Twitter yet. This feature has existed for 8 months and is community driven: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2022/building-a-better-birdwatch https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2022/building-.... The worst part of this acquisition is the groan-worthy expansion of Elon worship in public discourse.
  - Ambolia 4y ago
    As far as I know the Biden administration never got one of those "fact check" warning before Elon Musk. But Trump did, so the feature would be old, but how it gets applied would be new.
    - mikkergp 4y ago
      That certainly is one interpretation of the facts.
      - Ambolia 4y ago
        I wouldn't call it an interpretation. Either they were fact checked before and a link can be shown, or they weren't. Politicians lying certainly wasn't invented in November 2022
        majormajor 4y ago
        Seems like it would be also possible that they were fact checked before and deleted it before and it happened quickly enough that it wasn't picked up on by media. This thread was started by an "As far as I know," and I'm not sure it's one of those things that could be definitely proven either way.
        BoorishBears 4y ago
        The tweet wasn't lying, it was actually missing context for once. You're just so used to the former white house account holder lying that you now assume fact check == lie... But I guess ignoring that and implying that some shadow cabal at Twitter turned off the fact checking for Biden, then Elon turned it back on, but claimed to not have not turned it on, despite things like that literally being his motivation to buy the site... is more exciting?
    - kaesar14 4y ago
      One possibility is that the Biden White House probably outright lies less than the Trump White House did. The other possibility being the feature as it was applied to the Biden tweet did not exist during the Trump administration, which I posted in the original comment.
      - osrec 4y ago
        whateveracct 4y ago
        HN is full of contrarians. They aren't Trumpers but they like arguing with people who hate him.
      - readthenotes1 4y ago
        Biden's original tweet was not an outright lie. It was even a half-lie. It was the solid truth. That's why the fact-check was to "provide context".
        deathanatos 4y ago
        Unless you're interpreting the tweet like [1], a lie, > A statement intended to deceive, even if literally true. … the tweet is factual only to the extent required to deceive the reader. As the increase is a CPI adjustment, by definition real benefits aren't moving. Then there's the entirety of the problems that are being caused by the worst inflation of my life … that's to be chalked up to the Biden admin's "leadership"? The context changes the entire tone of the tweet, because it was a lie. The White House deleted it because they got caught in a lie. The Biden administration should be holding itself to higher standards than this. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33473072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33473072
        readthenotes1 4y ago
        "The White House deleted it because they got caught in a lie." Worse, they got caught in a truth
    - nullc 4y ago
      It would be helpful if someone would go find some older whitehouse tweets that were similarly misleading and ought to have been contextualized in the same manner. Otherwise it's just speculation. Besides, if the handling were really equivalent to the trump whitehouse people would be alleging that the tweet's removal violated the law because it removed the 1A protected 'fact check' text and/or violated records retention laws (both of which were argued WRT Trump). :)
    - jdminhbg 4y ago
      > But Trump did, so the feature would be old, The Trump fact checks were a different feature that had somewhat similar results. Those were applied by the centralized Twitter team, this one is crowdsourced, and applies to lots of different accounts, not just this highly-visible one.
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    Worship of Elon? In what bubble? The German Reddit sphere (somewhat diverse) and HN both seem to think of him as a joke at best.
    - Semaphor 4y ago
      Because it seems my usage of bubble is not universal, just as clarification, I see every group as a bubble, there are smaller and bigger bubbles. I did not mean to imply that worshipping Elon is some kind of rarity.
    - kaesar14 4y ago
      How am I supposed to counter-fact this? Elon's tweets are among the most favorited tweets of all time regularly topping out over 1M. The average person likely has quite a positive view of him - the right-wing of American politics definitely does.
      - ianai 4y ago
        I’ve noticed a trend on YT. If someone’s going to criticize Tesla or Elon they don’t outright say the name. They say “that other big EV company” or similar. That’s about as good a demonstration of censoring dissent as can get.
      - Semaphor 4y ago
        You did it right, this was pretty much the information I was looking for. I know neither much about the American public, nor their right-wingers, nor Twitter.
      - wilg 4y ago
        https://www.statista.com/statistics/1304563/us-adults-impression-of-elon-musk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1304563/us-adults-impres...
      - hersko 4y ago
        I view him favorably for a variety of reasons. I have yet to see any reason to hate him with the obsessive fervor commonly displayed on reddit. I honestly just feel like his right-wing leaning/anti narrative tweets drove the left insane.
  - cal85 4y ago
    Huh? I have seen the opposite, a huge outpouring of vitriol towards him on every platform I’ve seen.
    - kaesar14 4y ago
      Try loading an Elon tweet and just reading the replies.
      - cal85 4y ago
        By “in public discourse” you meant specifically within the direct replies to Musk’s own tweets?
        kaesar14 4y ago
        Yes, that's how Twitter works? People reply to Tweets.
        cal85 4y ago
        You’ve got me there.
    - yehCuz 4y ago
      Free market of ideas. Don’t focus on the meaning of any given statement but the volume of attempts at contrarian statement. What Elon’s businesses are trying to accomplish is not essential to the species. The species is not essential. The masses are tired of being squeezed to produce as the output and comfort is squandered and monopolized. That said, the public has to accept as well the planet is finite. Society does not just have a crony capitalism problem. The public, rich or poor, politician or citizen, has a consumption syndrome and conviction to fuck the future in service of our demand for novel experiences. Applying the awareness of infinitely big small numbers to the economy has lifted people up materially for sure. But the literal resources are not there for everyone to have the buying power of a CEO. At the same time, no theory of science I know of says Musk and co specifically must be enabled.
- mmazing 4y ago
  It's interesting that you agree with the assessment that a leader of a country isn't responsible for the windfalls from previous administrations, but ... Then you're associating the new leader of a corporation with windfalls from previous administrations. See the problem there?
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    COLA isn't a windfall. It is literally meant to restore recipients to the same position they were in last year.
- ahallock 4y ago
  They claim this new system is independent of Musk taking over Twitter, but the timing is interesting.
  - jaybaxter 4y ago
    It started rolling out to everyone in the US in early October, and first version launched at smaller scale back in January 2021 https://twitter.com/birdwatch/status/1578004575990202370?s=46&t=8oWyQ0YABDu8yLtwUbFWiQ https://twitter.com/birdwatch/status/1578004575990202370?s=4...
    - epakai 4y ago
      Timing feels really poor. In the middle of an election while Twitter was about to undergo a change in ownership. I wonder if it would have seen the light of day if they waited until after the acquisition though.
Waterluvian 4y ago
BothSides™ does this and it annoys me: taking credit for some previously legislated action, or gas price drop or whatever. It's disingenuous, distracting, and makes me think the government thinks I'm a moron.
- nullc 4y ago
  > or gas price drop There is at least some nuance on that one-- e.g. taking credit for lowering gas prices when it's a result of distributing our strategic reserve. In that case the administration is responsible, but it's potentially at a significant future cost. (since once the reserve is gone we'll be at even greater mercy to externally set prices).
- kube-system 4y ago
  Voters are morons. The president has vanishingly little ability to control the economy. Even the fed, who have significant power to affect economic policy, have little power to bend it to their will. The economy we experience today is the result of the sum of decisions around the world being made today, and for the past dozen years. Even the most powerful people on earth are just a breeze against the runaway semi truck that is the economy.
  - readthenotes1 4y ago
    Are you a voter? Just asking...
    - andrewflnr 4y ago
      A good-faith reading of a statement like "voters are morons" almost always takes it as an approximation, sufficient to describe the bulk behavior, not an absolute universal quantifier.
      - lesuorac 4y ago
        Only like 25% of the US votes so it's a decent chance the poster isn't a voter.
dstola 4y ago
- okdood64 4y ago
  You think just a few days into Elon's lordship of Twitter he was able to "turn-on" fact checking for the current administration? (Assuming it wasn't being applied being equally before.) I'd imagine it would take more time.
  - ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
    Given what's going on there I don't doubt it, incentives have changed. Like that time the republicans saw themselves getting tens of thousands of additional followers upon the announcement of the acquisition.
- rideontime 4y ago
  This is a community-provided note. Elon had nothing to do with it, but confirmation bias is in full effect.
  - dstola 4y ago
    Have you ever seen White House getting fact-checked with democrats in power before the acquisition? If there is any bias going on its from people that have a bone to pick with Elon and his choices The fact that my comment got flagged for some odd reason highlights the fact that people (including on HN) dont want to hear that Elon is making twitter better and less biased
    - bena 4y ago
      You do know Twitter hasn't existed for that long, right. It was founded in 2006. The @POTUS account wasn't created until 2015. Twitter in the political space is still relatively new. You're getting flagged for naked partisanship.
      - 4y ago
throwthere 4y ago
Hard to discuss this without getting political and violating all sorts of decorum but, I guess, the system worked here? The original White House tweet: > “Seniors are getting the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in 10 years through President Biden’s leadership The reality: Inflation triggered an automatic increase in social security benefits because of a 1972 law that indexes social security checks to cost of living. I guess it's odd claiming you did good thing X, when in reality it was bad thing Y that automatically caused good thing X. But even that's not right, because in inflation-adjusted terms, good thing X actually wasn't good at all, it was just neutral.
- snarf21 4y ago
  I agree this is weird. I guess it is meant to highlight the other party wants to get rid of social security. It is strange though to take credit for not doing something that someone else says they will do in the future.
  - nullc 4y ago
    > is meant to highlight the other party wants to get rid of social security I didn't know if eliminating social security was actually a part of the republican platform, though it seemed very unlikely. I googled and found: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/27/false-claim-that-senate-republicans-plan-end-social-security-medicare/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/27/false-cla...
    - RunningDroid 4y ago
      Counterpoint from a quick DDG search: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/yes-some-republican-senators-are-talking-openly-about-social-security-cuts-11667576391 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/yes-some-republican-senato... Tl;Dr: cuts, not elimination
      - partiallypro 4y ago
        "Some Republicans" doesn't mean it's the party platform. Some Democrats have advocated nationalization of some social media platforms, that doesn't make it the party platform.
TimTheTinker 4y ago
Each US presidential administration I've been under has always cited cherry-picked, sound-bite US statistics -- and has the gall to take credit for them. It's like someone's constantly watching the metrics, and every positive blip becomes a candidate for being a talking point. They take cruel advantage of how opaque the connections are between the macroeconomic, political, and social inputs, and the outputs as experienced by individuals. Even worse, talking points like that prime people to expect the government to be constantly manipulating variables in the economy, which causes inefficiency and necessarily leads to more unelected officials running more of the country -- since constant manipulation is inaccessible to legislators.
- nullc 4y ago
  This one was essentially choice since, with the relevant context, the tweet essentially was attributing near record inflation to Biden's leadership.
  - TimTheTinker 4y ago
    Yeah, it's ironic that their claiming responsibility for "inflation-based increase" in social security is correct -- because of their loose monetary policy that caused massive inflation.
    - hackyhacky 4y ago
      Not really: inflation is happening all over the world, not just in the US. In fact, the US has some of the lowest inflation among western nations. The cause of inflation is the economic hit from Covid and our response to it. So my original point stands: the world is complicated, and it's naive to say "Biden caused inflation."
      - makomk 4y ago
        From what I can tell, the US had the highest inflation in the G7 until the Fed started hiking interest rates more aggressively than the rest of the world to get it under control. This was particularly noticable to me since once they did the UK became the G7 member with the highest inflation and our media started pointing at that as proof of our government's economic incompetence in a way that the US media very obviously had not.
h43z 4y ago
Have there been these "context notes" before?
- r00fus 4y ago
  Definitely not for Trump - it's a recent twitter feature (pre-Musk). But it's usage recently has spiked and is more like a pinned reply.
  - hersko 4y ago
    By Trump they directly "fact" checked the tweets.
    - r00fus 4y ago
      There are thousands of Trump's tweets that were bald-faced lies that did not get fact checked. Instead people replied in the comments. That one or two of his tweets may have gotten a "<!> may be inaccurate" advisory is completely different from this kind of "community".
      - bpodgursky 4y ago
        Yeah but the tooling has evolved over time. If those got tweeted today, there would be "context" added on many of them.
        roflyear 4y ago
        Let's see if that is true! We should find out, right?
        bpodgursky 4y ago
        If you have a 80 million follow account, go for it. Not sure what you're suggesting.
Hamcha 4y ago
Whoever read XKCD #1085[1] and decided it needed to be a real thing is my hero. Now the problem is how much it will be politicized and cherry-picked [1]: https://xkcd.com/1085/ https://xkcd.com/1085/
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  It already has. Emerald boy has deleted context applied to his own tweets, and some of the context being applied to Dem posts is right-wing bullshit.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    Can you reference specific examples of the latter?
  - SauciestGNU 4y ago
    I have little doubt that Musk will have this feature used capriciously, but I also think crowd sourcing fact checking/context giving is bound to have weird edgecases caused by ideological cranks.
mym1990 4y ago
A lot of people here are annoyed by this behavior(rightly so), but the reality is that a lot of supporters take these bites of info and run for miles with it. This isn't just governments either, you'll see 20 minute trash videos on YouTube that extrapolate upon one data point into a "this is why the world is collapsing" thing just to get a few million views.
SilverBirch 4y ago
I think there’s a massive difference between correcting something that is untrue, and just deciding you want to have your own say because the truth isn’t representative of what you feel is the broader issue. Sure, we can say it’s due to an old law passed by republicans. But then the dems can argue that the modern GOP no longer support that… so really this just turns into a mess. Was the fact true? Yes. Was it representative of the broader argument? Depends who to you ask. I think there are prices of fact check you could’ve put in there - for example nominal vs real terms, but this wasn’t that.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  If truthful context makes you retract your claim.. you may be a bit less than truthful.
  - SilverBirch 4y ago
    I think if the White House knows that in the days leading up to the mid terms anything they post on Twitter will get a right wing talking point attached to it they’ll quite rightly stop posting at all whether the “context” is true or not.
    - keneda7 4y ago
      I'm confused how this was a right wing talking point? In this case it is an actual fact. Are you suggesting we ignore facts if they make the left look bad? I also want to point out the white house straight up lied and said biden was responsible when he was not (hence the deletion) and you are upset this lie was called out? Also just an fyi the feature is not something musk added. It was being worked on long before he took over.
      - SilverBirch 4y ago
        Talking points can be facts. In fact they mostly are. I’m saying that Twitter, intervening in the conversation to post a technically true (republican law from decades ago) but misleading context (policy not actually supported by the modern GOP) is bad. Here’s a question: if Trump had been president, would this have happened, given the GOP want to cut social security? Debatable, probably not. So is Biden as president due credit for this rise? Sure. I think you can make a credible case for that. My point is what you can’t credibly do is present this as a debate between Biden, and Twitter the official arbiter of facts. Also, the problem with saying this isn’t to do with Musk… Musk owns Twitter. So he owns it. It really doesn’t matter what happened in the past. Today, we’re coming up to the mid terms and Elon Musks company is intervening to push right wing talking points.
jmull 4y ago
I wonder if the supposed free speech absolutists will excoriate Twitter for this, as they have in similar situations in the past? (How you could believe Twitter adding their own message to something is against free speech I have no idea, but it was often argued before. I suspected at the time many people were claiming to be for free speech, but were actually only interested in defending speech they agreed with. Now we get a chance to see if that's true.)
- goatcode 4y ago
  Fact Check: Not all free speech "absolutists" "excoriate" such things. Some of them have nearly always considered the context in which they're given to decide whether these kind of annotations indicate an actual fact-check, or, alternatively, a big flag that the post, podcast, or video might be something that contains genuinely interesting and informative content. Others enjoy seeing their oppressive opponents foisted upon their own petards, after the same tool did little to harm themselves to begin with, and then also seeing their opponents squeal in rage at how the turntables.
- guywithahat 4y ago
  Remember by the end of his presidency, every tweet Trump tweeted was fact checked/had context added? It's funny watching the left now claim it's somehow a violation of something, especially considering this was an automated system Elon almost certainly hasn't had time to get to yet
  - DangitBobby 4y ago
    Who on the left is claiming that?
- stale2002 4y ago
  Fact checking is way better than just banning people. The free speech supporters would vastly prefer that.
  - NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
mensetmanusman 4y ago
My favorite DC sound bite: "In the fall of 1972, President Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing. This was the first time a sitting president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection." - Hugo Rossi
- realgeniushere 4y ago
  Biden said a similar thing recently, bragging that the (high) rate of inflation was holding steady.
  - calgarymicro 4y ago
    When? He bragged in July when the MoM rate was zero and the YoY rate fell by half a percent. I can't find him bragging anywhere that the rate is holding steady though.
    - hailwren 4y ago
      Not the one gp was referencing, but here’s the Reagan quote pretty much verbatim from Biden: “we are making progress in slowing the rate of price increases.” https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/12/biden-says-cpi-inflation-report-shows-progress-in-slowing-down-high-prices.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/12/biden-says-cpi-inflation-rep...
      - calgarymicro 4y ago
        >0.9% in October, 0.8% in November and 0.5% in December, according to the Labor Department. Definitely similarly tone deaf, but in this case he was bragging about the second derivative, not the third - prices continued to increase, but the rate of increase (inflation) was indeed falling.
        hailwren 4y ago
        Errmm? He says “we are making progress in slowing the rate of price increases”. (making progress in (slowing the (rate of price increases))) 3 ————————— 2 ————— 1 ——————————— The question is what you think “progress” is doing in that sentence. Slowing the rate => 2nd deriv is decreasing but progress, to me, implies that third deriv is what is being pointed at. 2nd deriv would be “we are slowing” to me. I’m not sure what inflation number you’re looking at, but CPI for Oct/Nov/Dec of 2021 was: 6.2%, 6.8%, 7%
aaron695 4y ago
btilly 4y ago
The "context" note is based on a program named birdwatch. According to rumor, virtually the entire team responsible for birdwatch just got laid off. I'm curious what the future of this kind of context will be.
- NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
  I'm way more in favor a of a system that employs the userbase to "fact check" than whatever busybody connected to a partisan "fact checker" at twitter doing it manually and adding their own particular bias.
  - nicce 4y ago
    The problem is that special knowledge is also prone to bias. Some correct, but unpopular expert opinion can be also voted to be wrong, when the level of required knowledge is substantially high.
    - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      I think the point at which "popular but wrong" starts winning out is way lower than you think are implying it is when you're talking about internet cesspools that have a cross section of the general public (Twitter, Reddit, 4Chan, etc). If you're talking about a forum or somewhere that the casually interested internet riff raff won't dominate the bar moves higher. That said, I'd rather have internet idiots do group fact checking than have established institutions be in charge of it.
  - Forgeties79 4y ago
    Why do you think the userbase would be superior? Twitter, like most social media platforms, prioritizes controversy. Pot-stirrers are the ones who get amplified. Why should we trust an incredibly polarized userbase to somehow lack bias?
    - nomel 4y ago
      If you're trying to find faults with a claim, then using one of those extremes seems completely appropriate. They will be the only ones motivated to do so.
supernova87a 4y ago
I wonder how deep the economic analysis will go to decide that a tweet needs "context"? For example, if an administration (cough) touts that this year's economic growth has been among the highest in a decade and that an increase in spending is "paid for", but that's just because a last year's index point was in the toilet because of a pandemic and we're getting back to where we were before... Who decides whether that's context-worthy?
- kreetx 4y ago
  > According to a description under the annotation, “Context is written > by people who use Twitter, and appears when rated helpful by others.”
  - nomel 4y ago
    > appears when rated helpful by others. Here's someone with possible details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33474196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33474196
- akomtu 4y ago
  Twitter could take the same approach that TV took, and has abandoned, long ago: each side gets equal air time to present their opinion. If a twit comes from a blue politician, the red team gets to respond, and vice versa.
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    That assumes that every issue has only two sides, and that both sides are equally valid, and that blue and red politicians fall neatly on either side.
    - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
      > and that blue and red politicians fall neatly on either side. With hyper polarization, I don’t think this is much of a concern. It was stunning to me how few people realized that if I saw you in a mask at the grocery store last year, I could also with high accuracy determine your thoughts on Kyle Rittenhouse or abortion.
dotnet00 4y ago
A bit of extra context to this is in a similar note on https://twitter.com/RealSpikeCohen/status/1587873137269637120 https://twitter.com/RealSpikeCohen/status/158787313726963712... which clarifies that the feature had been in beta since January 2021 and was not related to Musk's purchase.
robomartin 4y ago
One of my favorite things to hate in politics is when politicians --at all levels and all political parties-- lie and take credit for things they did not do and, in most instances, had nothing to do with. One of those are claims of creating jobs, which is absolute horseshit. I have to stress, everyone does it. This is not about any one political party. The current administration is claiming to have created ten million jobs. This is nothing less than preposterous. And yet, they keep repeating it daily. Because, you know, if you repeat something enough times it magically becomes true. What really bugs me about these things is that the press never questions any of these claims. Politicians are never asked to "show the work". I mean, if you say you created one or ten million jobs, surely you are able to present a document with data at a sufficient level of granularity to confirm this. A list of programs enacted by the regime in charge matched with the precise number of jobs created ONLY because that program was enacted. This never happens. They all lie about this stuff. Do the masses truly believe this? If not, do politicians actually think everyone is stupid? Maybe we are. The evidence on that front is clear: The people who rise up to the top of each party and are elected into office rarely represent the best and the brightest we have to offer. In fact, in most cases these people would be ambulance chasers and bad used car salespeople if they didn't get into politics. And yet we elect them and hand over the reigns. I just don't get it. As a simple example of things that are incomprehensible: Why is it that we don't have a law that imposes severe penalties for politicians who lie to the public? Imagine hiring an accountant, doctor or lawyer with the proviso that they are protected from the consequences of lying. You accountant can lie to you about your finances and there's nothing you can do about it. Anyone can see this is not a good idea. And yet, this is exactly what we have in politics. They can lie publicly, on national media and elsewhere and the consequences are exactly zero. Some might say: Well in cases of national security and other circumstances it might be necessary to not present facts as they might exist. I suppose I can see that argument at some levels, not all. It would have been a great idea to have a requirement for truth in what preceded the Iraq war. I think everyone can agree on that. However, I can concede circumstances might exist where telling us the truth could be detrimental. Don't know what those might be, let's just stipulate this could be the case. OK, well, let's treat that the same way we treat search warrants and other matters: The politician has to go to a judge, present evidence in justification for having to promote a lie and obtain approval. The lie is documented and so is the decision-making process. Maybe that's a way to get around it. Imagine a world where politicians would not be able to lie about national or international issues as well as attack their opposition with lies. I don't know about you, but would think that would qualify as progress. Oh, yeah, maybe we can apply similar rules to the media as well.
joemazerino 4y ago
Does Twitter do this for other governments or just the White House?
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  Birdwatch isn't specific to any tweet so far as I'm aware, so long as enough twitter posters identify a post as misleading whatever note written about the tweet becomes most popular will be appended to it. This is about as non-partisan as implementation as anybody is doing.
  - M2Ys4U 4y ago
    AFAIK it's geographically limited... I think that only US users have input to Birdwatch. It's certainly not in the UK.
jaybaxter 4y ago
Hi! Birdwatch ML Engineer here-- these context notes are from Birdwatch. They are written and rated by users, and the notes are only added as context to Tweets if they are rated highly enough by multiple raters who have tended to disagree in the past. The core algorithm is open source as well as all of the data, and there is lots of public documentation about it too: https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/ https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/ https://twitter.com/birdwatch/status/1585794012052611076?s=20&t=OgnNrax87nd1h-de7F7qOg https://twitter.com/birdwatch/status/1585794012052611076?s=2... https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.15723.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.15723.pdf
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
  This is one of the coolest things I've seen out of twitter. Now if only if the feed would stop disappearing tweets in the middle of reading them, that would be great.
  - still_grokking 4y ago
    Disappearing tweets without site reloads? I guess this can't happen with the Nitter front-end. Just use LibRedirect. https://libredirect.github.io/ https://libredirect.github.io/
    - NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
      Yes. As in I'm looking at the screen reading a tweet, and it vanishes in some animated fashion with me not doing anything. It's not gone, but I have to know how to find it to see it again.
      - r721 4y ago
        Isn't that one of peculiarities of algorithmic timeline? At least chronological one is the same after reloading.
purpleblue 4y ago
That feature is really awesome and game changing I think, as long as it can't be gamed or brigaded, etc.
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  Oh it can be gamed and brigaded SO HARD and it's totally inevitable it will happen. The question really is if things can be kept to a dull roar.
- bombcar 4y ago
  It's really hard to develop something that can't be gamed or brigaded, given enough desire.
nickpinkston 4y ago
Imagine if an AI system could actually generate annotations like this... Probably too much to ask and fraught with issues, but I'd love to see what it'd do to misinfo behavior
codefreeordie 4y ago
I recall a time a few years ago when it was deemed illegal for the president to delete Twitter content
jedberg 4y ago
I thought during the last admin someone decided it was illegal for the President to delete tweets or block users because they become Presidential records as soon as they are created.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  If we’re thinking about the same situation, it was whether the President can block people, thus excluding them from civic discourse. They can mute people but not block them.
- akomtu 4y ago
  Hypothetical scenario: if the Ministry of Truth erases all the records of an inconvenient event in the past, would it be "misinfornation" to mention that fact?
  - berenza 4y ago
    Technically, if it was a fact it would be malinformation. https://www.cisa.gov/mdm https://www.cisa.gov/mdm https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/ https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat... (paragraph 2)
    - akomtu 4y ago
      "Malinformation is based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate." - looks like revealing inconvenient truth falls under this umbrella.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Yeah, that aside I'm more interested in the White House deleting a tweet than the response to it. Seems a bit weird all around.
faeriechangling 4y ago
Since this editorialisation was done by Birdwatch and not editorial journalists that call themselves "fact checkers", I'm okay with this.
gilded-lilly 4y ago
The thing that is, macroeconomic policy is already basically solved. It’s been understood for hundreds of years. But the lobbyists have succeeded in pumping misinformation and poisoning minds for so long that many factual untruths are blindly accepted by a large chunk of the population.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
carrotcarrot 4y ago
I'm liking Elon's twitter so far.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  I don’t have specific love for the guy, but I do like how mad he is making people that were fine with the old system. When it was a public company: “they’re a private company they can do what they want!” Now that they are actually a private company: “they can’t do that!”
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
insanitybit 4y ago
Cool, that's nice that: a) The context was helpful b) They deleted it I hate when someone on Twitter gets something wrong and then instead of deleting it they reply with "sorry I was wrong". Due to the way Twitter works very few people will see the reply, deleting is the only way to really make things right.
- skissane 4y ago
  They should have a “retraction” feature. Go to the Tweet, it shows the original Tweet, but with a “This tweet has been retracted by its author” notice on it. Deleting it could be interpreted as covering up one’s mistake. “Retraction” would be owning it, and in a more immediately visible way than doing so in a reply
twerhoi324324 4y ago
The current US administration is a joke. After Trump, who'd have thunk that the Americans would elect a senile mannequin as their public leader, while dim-witted self-flattering idiot "elites" run their country (and continental Europe) to the ground. LOL. China et. al must be enjoying their popcorn.
Ziggy_Zaggy 4y ago
$10 says this makes the history books
stevenalowe 4y ago
Had not encountered this until today. Not a fan. If I want your opinion, I'll follow you. If your opinions are whack, I'll mute/block you. I can't do that to this overwatcher birdwatcher whatever. Kudos for noble intentions et al, but it seems rude/wrong to insert an unsolicited opinion into conversations, especially in such a graphically highlighted/authoritative manner. I don't care if it's crowdsourced, outsourced, right, left, wrong, wise, whatever; it's uninvited and unwelcome. simple solution: make the overwatcher a regular twitter account instead of a blue-bolt-from-god intrusion. I'd probably follow it.
gcanyon 4y ago
Back when Trump first started deleting tweets, I saw the question raised about whether that violated the presidential records act. I don't know if that was ever resolved.
- puffoflogic 4y ago
  I see election denial is strong on HN. Of course it was resolved, Biden is the legitimate president! He's got the (D).
dehrmann 4y ago
> Seniors are getting the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in 10 years through President Biden’s leadership The further bit of context is this is because inflation is at its highest level in 40 years. Not sure it was wise to tee that up as a comment on "President Biden’s leadership."

416 points by rmason 4y ago

rmason 4y ago

Though some may dislike it, I actually am glad that Twitter under Elon Musk is fact checking both sides.

kaesar14 4y ago
Elon has made no content moderation changes to Twitter yet. This feature has existed for 8 months and is community driven: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2022/building-a-better-birdwatch https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2022/building-.... The worst part of this acquisition is the groan-worthy expansion of Elon worship in public discourse.
- Ambolia 4y ago
  As far as I know the Biden administration never got one of those "fact check" warning before Elon Musk. But Trump did, so the feature would be old, but how it gets applied would be new.
  - mikkergp 4y ago
    That certainly is one interpretation of the facts.
    - Ambolia 4y ago
      I wouldn't call it an interpretation. Either they were fact checked before and a link can be shown, or they weren't. Politicians lying certainly wasn't invented in November 2022
      - majormajor 4y ago
        Seems like it would be also possible that they were fact checked before and deleted it before and it happened quickly enough that it wasn't picked up on by media. This thread was started by an "As far as I know," and I'm not sure it's one of those things that could be definitely proven either way.
      - BoorishBears 4y ago
        The tweet wasn't lying, it was actually missing context for once. You're just so used to the former white house account holder lying that you now assume fact check == lie... But I guess ignoring that and implying that some shadow cabal at Twitter turned off the fact checking for Biden, then Elon turned it back on, but claimed to not have not turned it on, despite things like that literally being his motivation to buy the site... is more exciting?
  - kaesar14 4y ago
    One possibility is that the Biden White House probably outright lies less than the Trump White House did. The other possibility being the feature as it was applied to the Biden tweet did not exist during the Trump administration, which I posted in the original comment.
    - osrec 4y ago
      - whateveracct 4y ago
        HN is full of contrarians. They aren't Trumpers but they like arguing with people who hate him.
    - readthenotes1 4y ago
      Biden's original tweet was not an outright lie. It was even a half-lie. It was the solid truth. That's why the fact-check was to "provide context".
      - deathanatos 4y ago
        Unless you're interpreting the tweet like [1], a lie, > A statement intended to deceive, even if literally true. … the tweet is factual only to the extent required to deceive the reader. As the increase is a CPI adjustment, by definition real benefits aren't moving. Then there's the entirety of the problems that are being caused by the worst inflation of my life … that's to be chalked up to the Biden admin's "leadership"? The context changes the entire tone of the tweet, because it was a lie. The White House deleted it because they got caught in a lie. The Biden administration should be holding itself to higher standards than this. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33473072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33473072
        readthenotes1 4y ago
        "The White House deleted it because they got caught in a lie." Worse, they got caught in a truth
  - nullc 4y ago
    It would be helpful if someone would go find some older whitehouse tweets that were similarly misleading and ought to have been contextualized in the same manner. Otherwise it's just speculation. Besides, if the handling were really equivalent to the trump whitehouse people would be alleging that the tweet's removal violated the law because it removed the 1A protected 'fact check' text and/or violated records retention laws (both of which were argued WRT Trump). :)
  - jdminhbg 4y ago
    > But Trump did, so the feature would be old, The Trump fact checks were a different feature that had somewhat similar results. Those were applied by the centralized Twitter team, this one is crowdsourced, and applies to lots of different accounts, not just this highly-visible one.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  Worship of Elon? In what bubble? The German Reddit sphere (somewhat diverse) and HN both seem to think of him as a joke at best.
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    Because it seems my usage of bubble is not universal, just as clarification, I see every group as a bubble, there are smaller and bigger bubbles. I did not mean to imply that worshipping Elon is some kind of rarity.
  - kaesar14 4y ago
    How am I supposed to counter-fact this? Elon's tweets are among the most favorited tweets of all time regularly topping out over 1M. The average person likely has quite a positive view of him - the right-wing of American politics definitely does.
    - ianai 4y ago
      I’ve noticed a trend on YT. If someone’s going to criticize Tesla or Elon they don’t outright say the name. They say “that other big EV company” or similar. That’s about as good a demonstration of censoring dissent as can get.
    - Semaphor 4y ago
      You did it right, this was pretty much the information I was looking for. I know neither much about the American public, nor their right-wingers, nor Twitter.
    - wilg 4y ago
      https://www.statista.com/statistics/1304563/us-adults-impression-of-elon-musk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1304563/us-adults-impres...
    - hersko 4y ago
      I view him favorably for a variety of reasons. I have yet to see any reason to hate him with the obsessive fervor commonly displayed on reddit. I honestly just feel like his right-wing leaning/anti narrative tweets drove the left insane.
- cal85 4y ago
  Huh? I have seen the opposite, a huge outpouring of vitriol towards him on every platform I’ve seen.
  - kaesar14 4y ago
    Try loading an Elon tweet and just reading the replies.
    - cal85 4y ago
      By “in public discourse” you meant specifically within the direct replies to Musk’s own tweets?
      - kaesar14 4y ago
        Yes, that's how Twitter works? People reply to Tweets.
        cal85 4y ago
        You’ve got me there.
  - yehCuz 4y ago
    Free market of ideas. Don’t focus on the meaning of any given statement but the volume of attempts at contrarian statement. What Elon’s businesses are trying to accomplish is not essential to the species. The species is not essential. The masses are tired of being squeezed to produce as the output and comfort is squandered and monopolized. That said, the public has to accept as well the planet is finite. Society does not just have a crony capitalism problem. The public, rich or poor, politician or citizen, has a consumption syndrome and conviction to fuck the future in service of our demand for novel experiences. Applying the awareness of infinitely big small numbers to the economy has lifted people up materially for sure. But the literal resources are not there for everyone to have the buying power of a CEO. At the same time, no theory of science I know of says Musk and co specifically must be enabled.
mmazing 4y ago
It's interesting that you agree with the assessment that a leader of a country isn't responsible for the windfalls from previous administrations, but ... Then you're associating the new leader of a corporation with windfalls from previous administrations. See the problem there?
- pessimizer 4y ago
  COLA isn't a windfall. It is literally meant to restore recipients to the same position they were in last year.
ahallock 4y ago
They claim this new system is independent of Musk taking over Twitter, but the timing is interesting.
- jaybaxter 4y ago
  It started rolling out to everyone in the US in early October, and first version launched at smaller scale back in January 2021 https://twitter.com/birdwatch/status/1578004575990202370?s=46&t=8oWyQ0YABDu8yLtwUbFWiQ https://twitter.com/birdwatch/status/1578004575990202370?s=4...
  - epakai 4y ago
    Timing feels really poor. In the middle of an election while Twitter was about to undergo a change in ownership. I wonder if it would have seen the light of day if they waited until after the acquisition though.

Waterluvian 4y ago

BothSides™ does this and it annoys me: taking credit for some previously legislated action, or gas price drop or whatever. It's disingenuous, distracting, and makes me think the government thinks I'm a moron.

nullc 4y ago
> or gas price drop There is at least some nuance on that one-- e.g. taking credit for lowering gas prices when it's a result of distributing our strategic reserve. In that case the administration is responsible, but it's potentially at a significant future cost. (since once the reserve is gone we'll be at even greater mercy to externally set prices).
kube-system 4y ago
Voters are morons. The president has vanishingly little ability to control the economy. Even the fed, who have significant power to affect economic policy, have little power to bend it to their will. The economy we experience today is the result of the sum of decisions around the world being made today, and for the past dozen years. Even the most powerful people on earth are just a breeze against the runaway semi truck that is the economy.
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  Are you a voter? Just asking...
  - andrewflnr 4y ago
    A good-faith reading of a statement like "voters are morons" almost always takes it as an approximation, sufficient to describe the bulk behavior, not an absolute universal quantifier.
    - lesuorac 4y ago
      Only like 25% of the US votes so it's a decent chance the poster isn't a voter.

dstola 4y ago

okdood64 4y ago
You think just a few days into Elon's lordship of Twitter he was able to "turn-on" fact checking for the current administration? (Assuming it wasn't being applied being equally before.) I'd imagine it would take more time.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
  Given what's going on there I don't doubt it, incentives have changed. Like that time the republicans saw themselves getting tens of thousands of additional followers upon the announcement of the acquisition.
rideontime 4y ago
This is a community-provided note. Elon had nothing to do with it, but confirmation bias is in full effect.
- dstola 4y ago
  Have you ever seen White House getting fact-checked with democrats in power before the acquisition? If there is any bias going on its from people that have a bone to pick with Elon and his choices The fact that my comment got flagged for some odd reason highlights the fact that people (including on HN) dont want to hear that Elon is making twitter better and less biased
  - bena 4y ago
    You do know Twitter hasn't existed for that long, right. It was founded in 2006. The @POTUS account wasn't created until 2015. Twitter in the political space is still relatively new. You're getting flagged for naked partisanship.
    - 4y ago

throwthere 4y ago

Hard to discuss this without getting political and violating all sorts of decorum but, I guess, the system worked here? The original White House tweet: > “Seniors are getting the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in 10 years through President Biden’s leadership The reality: Inflation triggered an automatic increase in social security benefits because of a 1972 law that indexes social security checks to cost of living. I guess it's odd claiming you did good thing X, when in reality it was bad thing Y that automatically caused good thing X. But even that's not right, because in inflation-adjusted terms, good thing X actually wasn't good at all, it was just neutral.

snarf21 4y ago
I agree this is weird. I guess it is meant to highlight the other party wants to get rid of social security. It is strange though to take credit for not doing something that someone else says they will do in the future.
- nullc 4y ago
  > is meant to highlight the other party wants to get rid of social security I didn't know if eliminating social security was actually a part of the republican platform, though it seemed very unlikely. I googled and found: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/27/false-claim-that-senate-republicans-plan-end-social-security-medicare/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/27/false-cla...
  - RunningDroid 4y ago
    Counterpoint from a quick DDG search: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/yes-some-republican-senators-are-talking-openly-about-social-security-cuts-11667576391 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/yes-some-republican-senato... Tl;Dr: cuts, not elimination
    - partiallypro 4y ago
      "Some Republicans" doesn't mean it's the party platform. Some Democrats have advocated nationalization of some social media platforms, that doesn't make it the party platform.

TimTheTinker 4y ago

Each US presidential administration I've been under has always cited cherry-picked, sound-bite US statistics -- and has the gall to take credit for them. It's like someone's constantly watching the metrics, and every positive blip becomes a candidate for being a talking point. They take cruel advantage of how opaque the connections are between the macroeconomic, political, and social inputs, and the outputs as experienced by individuals. Even worse, talking points like that prime people to expect the government to be constantly manipulating variables in the economy, which causes inefficiency and necessarily leads to more unelected officials running more of the country -- since constant manipulation is inaccessible to legislators.

nullc 4y ago
This one was essentially choice since, with the relevant context, the tweet essentially was attributing near record inflation to Biden's leadership.
- TimTheTinker 4y ago
  Yeah, it's ironic that their claiming responsibility for "inflation-based increase" in social security is correct -- because of their loose monetary policy that caused massive inflation.
  - hackyhacky 4y ago
    Not really: inflation is happening all over the world, not just in the US. In fact, the US has some of the lowest inflation among western nations. The cause of inflation is the economic hit from Covid and our response to it. So my original point stands: the world is complicated, and it's naive to say "Biden caused inflation."
    - makomk 4y ago
      From what I can tell, the US had the highest inflation in the G7 until the Fed started hiking interest rates more aggressively than the rest of the world to get it under control. This was particularly noticable to me since once they did the UK became the G7 member with the highest inflation and our media started pointing at that as proof of our government's economic incompetence in a way that the US media very obviously had not.

h43z 4y ago

Have there been these "context notes" before?

r00fus 4y ago
Definitely not for Trump - it's a recent twitter feature (pre-Musk). But it's usage recently has spiked and is more like a pinned reply.
- hersko 4y ago
  By Trump they directly "fact" checked the tweets.
  - r00fus 4y ago
    There are thousands of Trump's tweets that were bald-faced lies that did not get fact checked. Instead people replied in the comments. That one or two of his tweets may have gotten a "<!> may be inaccurate" advisory is completely different from this kind of "community".
    - bpodgursky 4y ago
      Yeah but the tooling has evolved over time. If those got tweeted today, there would be "context" added on many of them.
      - roflyear 4y ago
        Let's see if that is true! We should find out, right?
        bpodgursky 4y ago
        If you have a 80 million follow account, go for it. Not sure what you're suggesting.

Hamcha 4y ago

Whoever read XKCD #1085[1] and decided it needed to be a real thing is my hero. Now the problem is how much it will be politicized and cherry-picked [1]: https://xkcd.com/1085/ https://xkcd.com/1085/

KerrAvon 4y ago
It already has. Emerald boy has deleted context applied to his own tweets, and some of the context being applied to Dem posts is right-wing bullshit.
- int_19h 4y ago
  Can you reference specific examples of the latter?
- SauciestGNU 4y ago
  I have little doubt that Musk will have this feature used capriciously, but I also think crowd sourcing fact checking/context giving is bound to have weird edgecases caused by ideological cranks.

mym1990 4y ago

A lot of people here are annoyed by this behavior(rightly so), but the reality is that a lot of supporters take these bites of info and run for miles with it. This isn't just governments either, you'll see 20 minute trash videos on YouTube that extrapolate upon one data point into a "this is why the world is collapsing" thing just to get a few million views.

SilverBirch 4y ago

I think there’s a massive difference between correcting something that is untrue, and just deciding you want to have your own say because the truth isn’t representative of what you feel is the broader issue. Sure, we can say it’s due to an old law passed by republicans. But then the dems can argue that the modern GOP no longer support that… so really this just turns into a mess. Was the fact true? Yes. Was it representative of the broader argument? Depends who to you ask. I think there are prices of fact check you could’ve put in there - for example nominal vs real terms, but this wasn’t that.

vorpalhex 4y ago
If truthful context makes you retract your claim.. you may be a bit less than truthful.
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  I think if the White House knows that in the days leading up to the mid terms anything they post on Twitter will get a right wing talking point attached to it they’ll quite rightly stop posting at all whether the “context” is true or not.
  - keneda7 4y ago
    I'm confused how this was a right wing talking point? In this case it is an actual fact. Are you suggesting we ignore facts if they make the left look bad? I also want to point out the white house straight up lied and said biden was responsible when he was not (hence the deletion) and you are upset this lie was called out? Also just an fyi the feature is not something musk added. It was being worked on long before he took over.
    - SilverBirch 4y ago
      Talking points can be facts. In fact they mostly are. I’m saying that Twitter, intervening in the conversation to post a technically true (republican law from decades ago) but misleading context (policy not actually supported by the modern GOP) is bad. Here’s a question: if Trump had been president, would this have happened, given the GOP want to cut social security? Debatable, probably not. So is Biden as president due credit for this rise? Sure. I think you can make a credible case for that. My point is what you can’t credibly do is present this as a debate between Biden, and Twitter the official arbiter of facts. Also, the problem with saying this isn’t to do with Musk… Musk owns Twitter. So he owns it. It really doesn’t matter what happened in the past. Today, we’re coming up to the mid terms and Elon Musks company is intervening to push right wing talking points.

jmull 4y ago

I wonder if the supposed free speech absolutists will excoriate Twitter for this, as they have in similar situations in the past? (How you could believe Twitter adding their own message to something is against free speech I have no idea, but it was often argued before. I suspected at the time many people were claiming to be for free speech, but were actually only interested in defending speech they agreed with. Now we get a chance to see if that's true.)

goatcode 4y ago
Fact Check: Not all free speech "absolutists" "excoriate" such things. Some of them have nearly always considered the context in which they're given to decide whether these kind of annotations indicate an actual fact-check, or, alternatively, a big flag that the post, podcast, or video might be something that contains genuinely interesting and informative content. Others enjoy seeing their oppressive opponents foisted upon their own petards, after the same tool did little to harm themselves to begin with, and then also seeing their opponents squeal in rage at how the turntables.
guywithahat 4y ago
Remember by the end of his presidency, every tweet Trump tweeted was fact checked/had context added? It's funny watching the left now claim it's somehow a violation of something, especially considering this was an automated system Elon almost certainly hasn't had time to get to yet
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  Who on the left is claiming that?
stale2002 4y ago
Fact checking is way better than just banning people. The free speech supporters would vastly prefer that.
- NaturalPhallacy 4y ago

mensetmanusman 4y ago

My favorite DC sound bite: "In the fall of 1972, President Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing. This was the first time a sitting president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection." - Hugo Rossi

realgeniushere 4y ago
Biden said a similar thing recently, bragging that the (high) rate of inflation was holding steady.
- calgarymicro 4y ago
  When? He bragged in July when the MoM rate was zero and the YoY rate fell by half a percent. I can't find him bragging anywhere that the rate is holding steady though.
  - hailwren 4y ago
    Not the one gp was referencing, but here’s the Reagan quote pretty much verbatim from Biden: “we are making progress in slowing the rate of price increases.” https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/12/biden-says-cpi-inflation-report-shows-progress-in-slowing-down-high-prices.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/12/biden-says-cpi-inflation-rep...
    - calgarymicro 4y ago
      >0.9% in October, 0.8% in November and 0.5% in December, according to the Labor Department. Definitely similarly tone deaf, but in this case he was bragging about the second derivative, not the third - prices continued to increase, but the rate of increase (inflation) was indeed falling.
      - hailwren 4y ago
        Errmm? He says “we are making progress in slowing the rate of price increases”. (making progress in (slowing the (rate of price increases))) 3 ————————— 2 ————— 1 ——————————— The question is what you think “progress” is doing in that sentence. Slowing the rate => 2nd deriv is decreasing but progress, to me, implies that third deriv is what is being pointed at. 2nd deriv would be “we are slowing” to me. I’m not sure what inflation number you’re looking at, but CPI for Oct/Nov/Dec of 2021 was: 6.2%, 6.8%, 7%

aaron695 4y ago

btilly 4y ago

The "context" note is based on a program named birdwatch. According to rumor, virtually the entire team responsible for birdwatch just got laid off. I'm curious what the future of this kind of context will be.

NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
I'm way more in favor a of a system that employs the userbase to "fact check" than whatever busybody connected to a partisan "fact checker" at twitter doing it manually and adding their own particular bias.
- nicce 4y ago
  The problem is that special knowledge is also prone to bias. Some correct, but unpopular expert opinion can be also voted to be wrong, when the level of required knowledge is substantially high.
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    I think the point at which "popular but wrong" starts winning out is way lower than you think are implying it is when you're talking about internet cesspools that have a cross section of the general public (Twitter, Reddit, 4Chan, etc). If you're talking about a forum or somewhere that the casually interested internet riff raff won't dominate the bar moves higher. That said, I'd rather have internet idiots do group fact checking than have established institutions be in charge of it.
- Forgeties79 4y ago
  Why do you think the userbase would be superior? Twitter, like most social media platforms, prioritizes controversy. Pot-stirrers are the ones who get amplified. Why should we trust an incredibly polarized userbase to somehow lack bias?
  - nomel 4y ago
    If you're trying to find faults with a claim, then using one of those extremes seems completely appropriate. They will be the only ones motivated to do so.

supernova87a 4y ago

I wonder how deep the economic analysis will go to decide that a tweet needs "context"? For example, if an administration (cough) touts that this year's economic growth has been among the highest in a decade and that an increase in spending is "paid for", but that's just because a last year's index point was in the toilet because of a pandemic and we're getting back to where we were before... Who decides whether that's context-worthy?

kreetx 4y ago
> According to a description under the annotation, “Context is written > by people who use Twitter, and appears when rated helpful by others.”
- nomel 4y ago
  > appears when rated helpful by others. Here's someone with possible details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33474196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33474196
akomtu 4y ago
Twitter could take the same approach that TV took, and has abandoned, long ago: each side gets equal air time to present their opinion. If a twit comes from a blue politician, the red team gets to respond, and vice versa.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  That assumes that every issue has only two sides, and that both sides are equally valid, and that blue and red politicians fall neatly on either side.
  - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    > and that blue and red politicians fall neatly on either side. With hyper polarization, I don’t think this is much of a concern. It was stunning to me how few people realized that if I saw you in a mask at the grocery store last year, I could also with high accuracy determine your thoughts on Kyle Rittenhouse or abortion.

dotnet00 4y ago

A bit of extra context to this is in a similar note on https://twitter.com/RealSpikeCohen/status/1587873137269637120 https://twitter.com/RealSpikeCohen/status/158787313726963712... which clarifies that the feature had been in beta since January 2021 and was not related to Musk's purchase.

robomartin 4y ago

One of my favorite things to hate in politics is when politicians --at all levels and all political parties-- lie and take credit for things they did not do and, in most instances, had nothing to do with. One of those are claims of creating jobs, which is absolute horseshit. I have to stress, everyone does it. This is not about any one political party. The current administration is claiming to have created ten million jobs. This is nothing less than preposterous. And yet, they keep repeating it daily. Because, you know, if you repeat something enough times it magically becomes true. What really bugs me about these things is that the press never questions any of these claims. Politicians are never asked to "show the work". I mean, if you say you created one or ten million jobs, surely you are able to present a document with data at a sufficient level of granularity to confirm this. A list of programs enacted by the regime in charge matched with the precise number of jobs created ONLY because that program was enacted. This never happens. They all lie about this stuff. Do the masses truly believe this? If not, do politicians actually think everyone is stupid? Maybe we are. The evidence on that front is clear: The people who rise up to the top of each party and are elected into office rarely represent the best and the brightest we have to offer. In fact, in most cases these people would be ambulance chasers and bad used car salespeople if they didn't get into politics. And yet we elect them and hand over the reigns. I just don't get it. As a simple example of things that are incomprehensible: Why is it that we don't have a law that imposes severe penalties for politicians who lie to the public? Imagine hiring an accountant, doctor or lawyer with the proviso that they are protected from the consequences of lying. You accountant can lie to you about your finances and there's nothing you can do about it. Anyone can see this is not a good idea. And yet, this is exactly what we have in politics. They can lie publicly, on national media and elsewhere and the consequences are exactly zero. Some might say: Well in cases of national security and other circumstances it might be necessary to not present facts as they might exist. I suppose I can see that argument at some levels, not all. It would have been a great idea to have a requirement for truth in what preceded the Iraq war. I think everyone can agree on that. However, I can concede circumstances might exist where telling us the truth could be detrimental. Don't know what those might be, let's just stipulate this could be the case. OK, well, let's treat that the same way we treat search warrants and other matters: The politician has to go to a judge, present evidence in justification for having to promote a lie and obtain approval. The lie is documented and so is the decision-making process. Maybe that's a way to get around it. Imagine a world where politicians would not be able to lie about national or international issues as well as attack their opposition with lies. I don't know about you, but would think that would qualify as progress. Oh, yeah, maybe we can apply similar rules to the media as well.

joemazerino 4y ago

Does Twitter do this for other governments or just the White House?

faeriechangling 4y ago
Birdwatch isn't specific to any tweet so far as I'm aware, so long as enough twitter posters identify a post as misleading whatever note written about the tweet becomes most popular will be appended to it. This is about as non-partisan as implementation as anybody is doing.
- M2Ys4U 4y ago
  AFAIK it's geographically limited... I think that only US users have input to Birdwatch. It's certainly not in the UK.

jaybaxter 4y ago

Hi! Birdwatch ML Engineer here-- these context notes are from Birdwatch. They are written and rated by users, and the notes are only added as context to Tweets if they are rated highly enough by multiple raters who have tended to disagree in the past. The core algorithm is open source as well as all of the data, and there is lots of public documentation about it too: https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/ https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/ https://twitter.com/birdwatch/status/1585794012052611076?s=20&t=OgnNrax87nd1h-de7F7qOg https://twitter.com/birdwatch/status/1585794012052611076?s=2... https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.15723.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.15723.pdf

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NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
This is one of the coolest things I've seen out of twitter. Now if only if the feed would stop disappearing tweets in the middle of reading them, that would be great.
- still_grokking 4y ago
  Disappearing tweets without site reloads? I guess this can't happen with the Nitter front-end. Just use LibRedirect. https://libredirect.github.io/ https://libredirect.github.io/
  - NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
    Yes. As in I'm looking at the screen reading a tweet, and it vanishes in some animated fashion with me not doing anything. It's not gone, but I have to know how to find it to see it again.
    - r721 4y ago
      Isn't that one of peculiarities of algorithmic timeline? At least chronological one is the same after reloading.

purpleblue 4y ago

That feature is really awesome and game changing I think, as long as it can't be gamed or brigaded, etc.

faeriechangling 4y ago
Oh it can be gamed and brigaded SO HARD and it's totally inevitable it will happen. The question really is if things can be kept to a dull roar.
bombcar 4y ago
It's really hard to develop something that can't be gamed or brigaded, given enough desire.

nickpinkston 4y ago

Imagine if an AI system could actually generate annotations like this... Probably too much to ask and fraught with issues, but I'd love to see what it'd do to misinfo behavior

codefreeordie 4y ago

I recall a time a few years ago when it was deemed illegal for the president to delete Twitter content

jedberg 4y ago

I thought during the last admin someone decided it was illegal for the President to delete tweets or block users because they become Presidential records as soon as they are created.

Waterluvian 4y ago
If we’re thinking about the same situation, it was whether the President can block people, thus excluding them from civic discourse. They can mute people but not block them.
akomtu 4y ago
Hypothetical scenario: if the Ministry of Truth erases all the records of an inconvenient event in the past, would it be "misinfornation" to mention that fact?
- berenza 4y ago
  Technically, if it was a fact it would be malinformation. https://www.cisa.gov/mdm https://www.cisa.gov/mdm https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/ https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat... (paragraph 2)
  - akomtu 4y ago
    "Malinformation is based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate." - looks like revealing inconvenient truth falls under this umbrella.
bombcar 4y ago
Yeah, that aside I'm more interested in the White House deleting a tweet than the response to it. Seems a bit weird all around.

faeriechangling 4y ago

Since this editorialisation was done by Birdwatch and not editorial journalists that call themselves "fact checkers", I'm okay with this.

gilded-lilly 4y ago

The thing that is, macroeconomic policy is already basically solved. It’s been understood for hundreds of years. But the lobbyists have succeeded in pumping misinformation and poisoning minds for so long that many factual untruths are blindly accepted by a large chunk of the population.

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carrotcarrot 4y ago

I'm liking Elon's twitter so far.

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
I don’t have specific love for the guy, but I do like how mad he is making people that were fine with the old system. When it was a public company: “they’re a private company they can do what they want!” Now that they are actually a private company: “they can’t do that!”

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insanitybit 4y ago

Cool, that's nice that: a) The context was helpful b) They deleted it I hate when someone on Twitter gets something wrong and then instead of deleting it they reply with "sorry I was wrong". Due to the way Twitter works very few people will see the reply, deleting is the only way to really make things right.

skissane 4y ago
They should have a “retraction” feature. Go to the Tweet, it shows the original Tweet, but with a “This tweet has been retracted by its author” notice on it. Deleting it could be interpreted as covering up one’s mistake. “Retraction” would be owning it, and in a more immediately visible way than doing so in a reply

twerhoi324324 4y ago

The current US administration is a joke. After Trump, who'd have thunk that the Americans would elect a senile mannequin as their public leader, while dim-witted self-flattering idiot "elites" run their country (and continental Europe) to the ground. LOL. China et. al must be enjoying their popcorn.

Ziggy_Zaggy 4y ago

$10 says this makes the history books

stevenalowe 4y ago

Had not encountered this until today. Not a fan. If I want your opinion, I'll follow you. If your opinions are whack, I'll mute/block you. I can't do that to this overwatcher birdwatcher whatever. Kudos for noble intentions et al, but it seems rude/wrong to insert an unsolicited opinion into conversations, especially in such a graphically highlighted/authoritative manner. I don't care if it's crowdsourced, outsourced, right, left, wrong, wise, whatever; it's uninvited and unwelcome. simple solution: make the overwatcher a regular twitter account instead of a blue-bolt-from-god intrusion. I'd probably follow it.

gcanyon 4y ago

Back when Trump first started deleting tweets, I saw the question raised about whether that violated the presidential records act. I don't know if that was ever resolved.

puffoflogic 4y ago
I see election denial is strong on HN. Of course it was resolved, Biden is the legitimate president! He's got the (D).

dehrmann 4y ago

> Seniors are getting the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in 10 years through President Biden’s leadership The further bit of context is this is because inflation is at its highest level in 40 years. Not sure it was wise to tee that up as a comment on "President Biden’s leadership."