There are people who advocate the idea that private companies should be compelled to distribute hate speech, dangerously factually incorrect information and harassment under the concept that free speech is should be applied universally rather than just to government. I don't agree, I think it's a vast over-reach and almost unachievable to have both perfect free speech on these platforms and actually run them as a viable business.
But let's lay that aside, those people who make the argument claim to be adhering to an even stronger dedication to free speech. Surely, it's clear here that having the actual head of the US government threatening to shut down private companies for how they choose to manage their platforms is a far more disturbing and direct threat against free speech even in the narrowest sense.
Threatening to shut down private companies -- not for limiting speech, not for refusing to distribute speech -- but for exercising their own right to free speech alongside the free speech of others (in this case the president).
There is no right to unchallenged or un-responded-to speech, regardless of how you interpret the right to free speech.
On the other hand, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube et al are undoubtedly massively influential on the public opinion and their corporate position on political topics - Yoel Roth's recent tweets serve as a decent example, showing clearly that this person cannot be an objective "fact checker" - essentially create a public forum where I am not able to exercise my first amendment rights (and, legally speaking, rightfully so). I cannot help but to find this very concerning.
YouTube (despite numerous issues with their interpretation of free speech), for instance, starting linking Wiki articles under videos that cover certain topics or are uploaded by certain channels. Videos by the BBC show a notice that the BBC is a British public broadcast service, simply informing the viewer about the fact that any bias they might encounter can be easily identified (feel free to switch "BBC" with "RT"). I've found that to be a decent middle ground between outright suppressing views by a corporation pretending to be the authority on certain topics and broadcasting everything without any context.
Until everyone can agree on a universal arbiter for what those things mean in a concrete way, there will always be demographics who strongly disagree.
The reason free speech exists as a concept is because of a historic understanding that there fundamentally cannot be an unbiased arbiter for 'good' or 'bad' speech.
On the other side of this, the internet is increasingly controlled by a particular demographic with a particular definition of what things like 'hate speech' mean. Which suppresses and censors a wide range of topics that the other demographics do want to discuss. When the entire internet makes it impossible to express certain views, we can't claim to have free speech anymore. It's not good enough to say 'well if you don't like it then you can go and shout your views out on the street instead'.
The weapon against 'incorrect information' is education, not censorship. Censorship has never worked to actually quash 'wrongthink', it only marginalises and energises demographics who are censored, and drives them to eventually revolt. See: trump winning presidency.
Other industries have things like the FCC or the FDA where companies can say, "Look, we did our due diligence, the FDA approved our drug."
it's more concerning that people are taking it seriously enough to create so much chatter. it's not even a free speech issue, insofar as twitter is not a government entity. there's literally no 'there' there.
One thing that seems relevant in the discussion about speech restrictions on social media is the fact that most if not all of the major websites are deliberately set up to maximize user engagement. The site is designed, measured and iterated on in order to induce users to comment as much as possible.
That practice seems to be incompatible with unrestricted speech. Eventually people run out of nice things to say. Facebook's policy is very obviously "if you don't have anything nice to say, say something anyway, we want money". Free speech has been sustainable historically because it's natural for people to think before they say something controversial, but now we have websites that actively undermine that built-in filter.
20-30 years ago mass media was only accessible to people with large amounts of money to purchase advertising or run their own media platform such as a TV or radio station or a newspaper. It was closed to everyone else unless you could pull off some stunt to get five minutes of fame and somehow leverage that to deliver a message.
Now you have these vast platforms enabling anyone with a few bucks and cheap computer to potential address millions upon millions of people in near real time. It's completely unprecedented. In many cases these platforms are free as long as you comply with some minimal platform rules and regulations around what you can and cannot say. For most platforms the rules really are pretty minimal. Twitter is one of the least restrictive. You have to be a real obnoxious ass to get kicked off Twitter.
Somehow people have become so accustomed to this free and ubiquitous open access mass media that what was just a few decades ago impossible is now seen as an entitlement. Refuse to let your platform be used to deliver my message? You're censoring me!
Censorship refers to the use of force to prevent someone from speaking. The government has a legal monopoly on force, so generally this requires a law to be passed or perhaps an abuse of the civil court system to leverage the government to shut down someone's speech.
I can't speak for every country but in the USA that is extremely rare. We take the first amendment very seriously around here. You've got to go pretty far to get actually censored. You can buy books on how to make illegal drugs for example, or slander public figures on social media with baseless accusations, or publish software designed to directly facilitate illegal activity, and rarely will anything happen to you.
Being denied access to speak via someone else's privately owned and operated platform is not censorship. Nobody is preventing you from speaking. They're just refusing to assist you in delivering that speech.
Imagine someone walking into a newspaper office 40 years ago and demanding to have their op-ed printed (for free!) and then shouting "censorship!" when the newspaper refused? It's ridiculous.
I thought conservatives were skeptical of entitlements, especially when they involve other peoples' property.
The companies would also presumably have to allow commercial spam.
You have the right to free speech. That's not disputed. You are entitled to it. However you don't have the right to distribute that free speech on a private companies platform, that's a privilege offered by the owners not a entitlement.
It's very simple. Like it or not, that's your constitution.
Lets just play this out.. The president of the US (a supposed conservative) closes down one of the largest private companies in the US.. Not for doing something illegal as with `SilkRoad` for example.. But for practicing their own business policies.
Does that sound right to anyone ?
The threat to force private entities to toe the line is the only speech issue here. If you think people want unedited speech then I believe Gab could use some of your money.
Outright ban all user tracking and profiling transparently with annual code audits and watchdog groups that can punish those in charge for not adhering to this, no advertisements, no selling data, and put 18f on the job of designing/developing it based off sound human principles, no army of behavioral researchers and Psychologists A/B testing bait-and-click engagement dark pattern metrics that penetrate deeply into the reward system of our neuroplastic brains and yanks on that lever of addiction formation with ease. Cut the bullshit and I'm on board. I'll even work for free on this if you promise to make it a reality, hell consider it a public utility if you have to so it stays funded and maintained.
The Advertising industry needs to be lobotomized and severely scaled back to more traditional forms of reaching people where they are, not vacuuming up every ounce of data their movement, click, search, and vitals generate unbeknownst to them. Good riddance.
The web is nearly entirely privately owned, which makes answering this question difficult.
On one hand, the web is where we do 90% of our communication these days and losing that right seems like losing most of the first amendment.
I’m convinceable either way. Did telephone companies have a right to censor land line speech? Should they? Should ISPs be able to censor? Should cloudflair? AWS? It seems like industries like ISPs should be regulated to be “dumb pipes”. But where social networks fall is less clear.
They are however only protected from civil liability for good faith restriction of otherwise legal content on their platform. To the extent to which that moderation is done on content that is compliant with the TOS, or without prior notice and indication of what terms were violated, or only selectively with an agenda to influence the broader social discourse, they may not necessarily benefit from an assumption of good faith, and therefore may be subject to civil liability.
And honestly, who wouldn't want social media companies to have a more fair and transparent TOS and moderation policy?
Just two examples: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/make-whites-great-again-ha...
and https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/police-minnesota-trump-ral...
There were others; blaming people and nations that had nothing to do with this brutal horrible act for aiding and abetting.
Twitter will do nothing about this very harmful behavior. I reported some of the most egregious fake information being tweeted or retweeted and nothing happens.
to be fair this has been going on for three years now, something insane is done, instead of focusing on the insanity, people pivot to the policy
this is not how democracy works
You don't see a problem here?
Firstly, stop qualifying it with "hate", "factually incorrect", etc. It's a cheap tactic by authoritarian types to justify censorship. The religious zealots, authoritarian governments, etc all use the same argument you do to censor. Free speech is free speech whether you like it or disagree with it or whether it is factually incorrect.
Secondly, the question is whether a private company has a monopoly position. For example, we wouldn't allow power, water, telephone, etc companies from denying service based on what these companies feel are hateful or not. A christian ceo of these companies can't deny service to lgbt homes/companies/etc just because he doesn't like them or their speech. You get the idea?
Thirdly, if a social media platform is a vehicle for communication by elected officials, should that platform be allowed to limit citizen's access to said politician. I believe the courts already ruled twitter cannot deny people access to trump's twitter. But I'm not sure.
> Surely, it's clear here that having the actual head of the US government threatening to shut down private companies for how they choose to manage their platforms is a far more disturbing and direct threat against free speech even in the narrowest sense.
Yes. It is a concern worthy of discussion. But so are the other aspects of this issue which you naively dismiss as "hate"/etc.
The bigger issue is these platforms only get those free speech protections because they're platforms. The moment they start editing content like this, they become editors to a publishing platform, and they should be held liable for all that they've published. You can't just have your cake and eat it too, today they make you happy to censor the evil orange man, tomorrow they may censor those you support.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
We're seeing with YouTube that they're deleting posts against Communist China:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324695
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23317570
Worse what happens when you cross Facebook imposing Chinese censorship on the whole world?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13018770
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12479990
What happens when Google is used to push liberal bias?
Vimeo deletes videos claiming such bias from Google despite clear evidence in video:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20302010
"If we break things up, we can't stop Trump" replace Trump with any political candidate you've ever supported by the way to understand why this sort of thing is dangerous:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20265502
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20697780
I am sure I will get into fire for this comment, considering my citations were flagged to death because people don't agree with others. But mark my words, if the tables were flipped and they were censoring all your favorite candidates, you'd be outraged and against anything that would hinder free speech.
If you take away anything from this post be sure to be this:
Twitter, Google, Facebook etc are considered "platforms" the moment they editorialize content, they become publishers. Platforms are protected for obvious reasons, they cannot reliably contain every single thing a user posts, but a publisher dictates what is published, and is definitely liable for what they publish. These platforms want to be hybrids, but that gives them dangerous power to push agendas as they claim they are trying to stop.
In general, the last 50-60 years have seen private individuals and businesses stripped of their rights to turn away customers, in the US mostly under the guise of the CRA, FHA, etc. YouTube finds itself remarkably (and unsurprisingly) unrestrained by these kind of (progressive) laws.
Surely, it's clear here that having the actual head of the US government threatening to shut down private companies
The United States President has neither the authority nor power to start censoring Twitter on his own. Right now, Jack Dorsey has far more power over allowed public speech in America than Donald Trump.
One thing that I hope people remain aware of is that there are a number of different arguments in play and while sometimes they have similar outcomes in specific situations, they often wildly differ.
For example, there is the argument that Twitter is not to be considered just a private company, as decided by a court when Trump was not allowed to block other accounts. The argument would be that twitter blocking a user entirely would be restricting their right to interact with their government officials through an official channel. Now, if Twitter blocked such a user from interacting with everyone except government officials, then that would be acceptable because the person is still allowed to interact with government officials through official channels. Also Twitter would be able to stop acting as an official government channel by ending any accounts that count as such and free to fully block a user thereafter.
This is not the same argument that you are talking about, but I do commonly see people treating it as the same.
Here's the problem. Who is doing the fact checking? Who fact checks the fact checkers?
The world isn't black and white. State press releases are not facts. There is no authority that is the arbitrator of truth.
If I own a store and someone injures themselves on the premises I am held liable for that. I did not force that person to enter the store but the benefits of having a store outweighed the risks. Why should internet companies receive special treatment? They should be 100% liable for what happens on their "premises" if they are going to take the risk of allowing user-generated content.
EDIT: Imagine if we allowed phone companies to listen to all calls and then censor the ones they didn't like. People would be outraged. This is what is happening on the Internet.
You need to think about entities based on their properties, not the labels that are attached to them. That ought to be obvious to people who program for a living; think of a private company with a speech monopoly as the good old .txt.exe scam.
You're attaching the label "not government" to Google, but in terms of properties it is like the government. YouTube has openly admitted to manipulating video results despite it costing them money to do so. Their monopoly position is so strong that the YouTube leadership rules us like a dictatorship.
I would prefer it if these tech monopolies were simply broken up. But failing that, they need to obey the first amendment or be shut down in the US.
Europe is a different beast, but I think the UK at least should adopt the US first amendment.
Is there no way to consider social media as unreliable overall and not bother fact checking anything there? All this tech is relatively new but maybe we should think in longer time scale. Wikipedia is still not used as a source in school work because that's the direction educational institution moved. If we could give a status that nothing on social media is too be taken seriously, maybe it's a better approach.
Let me end this on a muddier concept. I thought masks was a good idea from the get go but there was an opposing view that existed at some point about this even from "authoritative" sources. In that case, do we just appeal to authority? Ask some oracle what "fact" is and shun every other point of view?
The issue is that this is not just a random social media post, it's coming from the President of the US, and most people expect that someone in that position will not post clearly false messages, specially when those messages affect something as fundamental as the election process.
We noticed David Rothkop who had a decent size following and contributed to MSNBC and the DailyBeast was a registered foreign agent of the United Arab Emirates [1]
David Rothkopf had made some wild accusations against two presidential candidates who were most critical of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
We asked Twitter multiple times that if anyone is a registered foreign agent and is constantly commenting on the US primaries and elections, that twitter should flag that account with some indicator or icon.
All Twitter's government public relation person did was to give us some lip service and didn't do anything about it.
[1] https://efile.fara.gov/docs/6596-Exhibit-AB-20180927-1.pdf
Has this always been the case for you? or just in the past few years?
I didn't care about news until the first gulf war. Then something flipped a switch in my brain and I could not get enough news. When news broadcasters started adopting websites in the 90's, I was like a junkie.
I don't recall significant partisan division over Gulf War I, but I do recall a hard left/right split with the house takeover by Gingrich in 1994, and then the Clinton impeachment. Late 1990's is where things started to become bifurcated (remember, I wasn't paying attention in the 70's and 80's so it could have been as bad).
Fast forward to mid 2010's and suddenly there are too many websites with "news" combined with SEO and recommendation algorithms spouting demonstrable nonsense that I can't help but hear Steve Bannon's "Flood the zone with shit" argument.
Because it is working on me. I am over-educated (an engineering patent attorney for a top silicon company), I get paid to be a critical thinker. Facts and news just are clearly under assault from the zone-flooding angle to the point where being critical wears me to the bone.
Was this intentional, or is this a consequence?
Has the zone been successfully flooded as Bannon commanded?
This statement concerns me, greatly. Its implication is that facts are merely point of view statements. That is just, well, it's just wrong.
Facts are facts. The truth is the truth. They don't care what your beliefs are. If it is empirically true, then it is true.
Why and when did it become okay to hand-wave and dismiss anything you didn't believe in, personally, just because you don't believe in it? What is this world?
Because the 'correct answer' to many questions is 'it depends...'. You enumerate the advantages and disadvantages of various options and pick an option that satisfies some sort of evaluation function (which may depend on your point of view). Some of the advantages and disadvantages are facts while others are probabilities.
This of course doesn't work well in short form media or for people who like things simple.
We've been doing it for years, on every president and congressman in America.
There are such things as indisputable falsehoods. And when important people relay them as the truth there are dozens of fact checking organizations that exist only to call these individuals out and hold them accountable to their word.
The fact that Twitter has started doing this with one specific individual is neither new nor innovative.
With other words:
- fact check => removal == bad especially if automatised, basically censorship
- fact check => warning + link to some source + maybe slightly less visibility in search (but still visible and potentially still even first result) == ok, people still can make their own opinion there is basically no censorship.
(Side note, yes I'm aware that even "non" censoring methods can have a minimal censoring effect due to peoples laziness, but it's quite limited and IMHO acceptable especially if linked sources are objective.)
For anyone who believes that Twitter should be in the business of fact-checking, or censoring harassing or disinformation, tell me which of these should be fact-checked or censored:
1. "Don't wear masks. They don't work and take away masks from healthcare workers."
2. "The government is lying about whether masks work or not because we don't have enough masks for everyone."
3. "Masks help. Everyone should be wearing masks, wear a home-made mask if we don't have enough store bought ones."
4. "Fact: coronavirus is not airborne"
5. "Coronavirus is airborne."
6. "Scientists think Hydroxychloroquine might be effective in treating coronavirus, link here: "
7. "Scientists think treating men with estrogen might be effective in treating coronavirus, link here: "
8. "Look at this video of this Karen calling the police and lying because a black man who just told her to leash his dog. Do better white women."
9. "Look at this article about this Shylock who scammed thousands of seniors out of their retirement money. Do better Jews.
10. "Look at this Laquisha and her five kids taking over the bus and screaming and disturbing all the other riders. Do better black women."
11. Look, another tech-bro mansplaining and whitesplaining why racism isn't really a thing. I can only stomach so much of this ignorance.
12. "Under the Trump administration, there are actual Nazi's in the White House."
13. "Trump is a traitor against his country, he criminally colluded with Russia to rig the election."
14. "Representative Scarborough killed his intern."
15. "There is a paedophilia blackmail network that is pulling the strings behind the Democratic party."
16. "There is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free"
17. "The United States is the highest taxed nation in the world -- that will change."
18. "Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri."
19. "If Democrats were truly serious about eradicating voter fraud, they would severely restrict absentee voting, permitting it only when voters have a good excuse, like illness."
20. "Absentee voting is to voting in person as as a take-home exam is to a proctored one. And just as teachers have reported a massive cheating as a result of moving to take-home tests during coronavirus, we can expect massive fraud as we move to mail-in ballots."
Here are my answers if I was running Twitter: I would not fact-check any of these statements. I would censor the one's using derogatory racial language that is 8, 9, 10, and 11. Also 8, 9 and 11 should be banned for harassing a private citizen. For the potentially defamatory statements -- 12, 13, 14 and 15 -- if made by a real-name account they should be let stand and the offended person or organization can sue in court for defamation if they think it is false. If made by an anon account, the statement should be removed if reported.
A slightly different problem, but Tom Scott did an excellent video on the automation of the copyright system on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU
In summary, auto copyright checking solves Most copyright issues, to a degree that no other solution can really provide. And while there are a small (yet very unfair) number of false positives, the benefit that the system as a whole allows far outpaces that downtrend: for YouTube to exist!
With regards to fact checking, I'd be more interested to hear how many people who read those kind of "fact flags" actually change their opinion in an easy case (flat earth, climate change, etc.). Honestly, the problem of "true truth" might never be solved, but so will the cause of incompetence never disappear.
It doesn't need to be a solved problem to provide value by flagging highly questionable content. And many statements are known to be false or misleading, and providing info to people who don't know better is a step in a positive direction.
I would really like a settled question on whether mail and groceries are safe to touch. There was a study that came out saying the virus could exist on different surfaces for different periods of time. News reported last week that CDC update the website that indicated that the study was flawed. Soon after the CDC added clarification which still leaves the conclusion open. https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/s0522-cdc-updates-co...
The subject at hand are public statements from the president of the United States. How exactly does one not "take that seriously"? Given the gravity of the situation: if it's wrong, and you know it's wrong, surely you have a responsibility to tell people it's wrong. Right?
> Ask some oracle what "fact" is and shun every other point of view?
How is Trump being "shunned" here? Twitter put a correction link at the bottom of his tweet.
And that's just the head of the team. You can see the hard-left and pro-Antifa affiliations of the team outlined here: https://nickmonroe.blog/2019/11/28/dear-jack-twitter-is-poli...
After the 2016 election, there was a thought that too much false information is spreading on social media. This happens in every country and across every form of communication - but social media platforms seem particularly worrysome (and is particularly bad with Whatsapp forwards in some Asian countries).
So what should the social media companies do? Censor people? Disallow certain messages (like they do with terrorism related posts)?
They settled on just putting in fact check links with certain posts. Trust in the fact deciding institution will of course be difficult to settle. No one wants a ministry of truth (or the private alternative).
So the question remains - do you, or how do you lessen the spread of misinformation?
The system is stuck in two local maximums: news publishers which use their own web properties as some kind of newspaper/television hybrid, and social media platforms which conceive of media as only posts, votes, & comments. They're both "monolithic architectures" (so to speak) which lack the kind of modularity or extensibility that would enable innovation.
On the Internet, we should be looking at information within the context of general computation. There are data sources (reporters, individuals, orgs) which get mixed with signals (votes, fact-checks, annotations) and then ranked, filtered, and rendered. An open market would maximize the modularity and extensibility of each of these components so that better media products can be created.
The social platforms are in a difficult position because they have total control over what's carried on their platforms, and so they want to assert a position of neutrality -- which is why they're adamant they're not media companies. But if they're controlling any part of the pipeline other than compute and hosting, they're not a neutral platform. They're a part of the media.
The way we've historically walked the tight-rope of misinformation vs censorship is to create an open market for journalism so that there's accountability through the system. I don't think we'll have an open market until we componentize social media and stop seeing journalism and the design of social media as two distinct things.
Some people adopted a strategy of adding users to a group and dropping whatever message they have but that too is solved by allowing only known contacts to add you to groups.
With that straw man though, it's fairly easy to poke holes. How do we ever even implement that? Even if we ignore the sheer volume of posts, a single post is often difficult to fact check. The lie can be subtle, but even worse is the human language and how much room there can be for misdirection, dishonesty, etc.
In my spare time I work on a project (not even close to release lol) with the goal of easing information sharing, retention, etc - as I figure part of the problem to the current age is a lack of information. Wikipedia is great, but it's quite large form discussion and I think we need better tools to help us document our own conclusions. BUT, even in all the effort I've put towards this tool I haven't dreamed of quantifying the truthiness.
I just don't see how we're going to cope with these sort of truth problems. It concerns me. It feels like information is a tool of war these days, and I am concerned we're losing.
In one of their episodes, they interview the CEO of YouTube about what they're doing to stop the spread of misinformation on web content platforms like their own.
Her response is that they're no longer tailoring their recommendation models or carousels based purely on engagement alone, but also based on potential harm or impact, because the common misinformation preys on being highly engaging. The biggest example of this is how YouTube is dealing with Covid-19 misinformation, that the "COVID-19 news" carousel on the home page doesn't get much engagement but is important for people to stay informed.
It's a good listen if you have the time: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/podcasts/rabbit-hole-yout...
Are people aware that there are two classes of users on Twitter, subject to different sets of rules? Twitter hides this fact, for some reason, but it's something that ought to be glaringly obvious to anyone viewing any of a user's tweets.
[1]: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/publicint...
===== The world would be a better place if Twitter did not exist. =====
Note the lack of caveat, nuance, or elaboration here. It's not conducive to making the argument in a compelling and convincing way, especially not in the ways espoused by Hacker News. People who agree with that statement are going to agree. People who don't are going to be outraged.
If you do agree with the above the real question is what to do about it. Does the problem lie with the people at Twitter? With capitalism? With democracy? With the particular implementation that is the United States? Is this just something inherent to human nature? Or is the internet to blame? There are no simple answers to these questions. But perhaps the mediums that we use to have the discussions have a substantial impact on the conversation.
The interesting thing that I think Jack Dorsey should respond directly to Trump's tweet about regulation is "I'm sorry you no longer find Twitter useful. Feel free to use a competitor's product." The main reason that the social networks haven't clamped down is that they need the eyeballs and controversial figures generate a lot on both sides (hate/love).
It's a problem that we cannot actually engage in any debate or correction. President Trump is a perfect example of this, he drops his Tweet and then, poof, he's gone. He will not respond to difficult question about freedom of speech, etc.
Trump drops his talking point and runs away, then Twitter drops their "fact check" and runs away. I don't think anyone is the better for it. Nobody's minds have been changed. Nobody has been educated or given serious thought to difficult issues. Nobody has had empathy for others. Having the "fact check" is better than not, but not much, and "fact checks" are not always correct.
If we could somehow social engineer our way to meaningful debates on these difficult topics, we would be much better off. I know the President can't respond to millions of people, but if we could, somehow, systematically choose just a few of the best counterpoints and force some dialogue, then a lot of the "bullshit" would immediately evaporate.
The easiest is to get rid of bots and control who can tweet. Anyone can create an account but to tweet you need to prove your identity. Bots are the real issue. Trump lying on social media is a problem but it's not fundamentally dissimilar to him lying on TV or at a campaign rally. He is a liar and whatever platform he is on he will use it to lie. The problem is all the bots masquerading as humans making people think and believe that the lies are mainstream facts.
Wo have given too much power to these private companies.
This it it. We did it. There is nothing for us to do, but celebrate.
Even if Twitter were to go bankrupt tomorrow, something else would come to replace it.
But, yeah. There's a lot of people that would be better off not on social media. But it's so addictive that they can't help themselves.
I, for one, have stopped using social media (unless you consider HN social). And I've had a lot less friends because of it. But it's been a huge improvement in my mood and outlook on life.
And yes, that would be an overwhelmingly bad thing.
Youtube: Censors youtubers, documented in so many cases. It also gives "authoritarian news" a heavier weight in the algorithm. Removes comments with "communist bandits" in Chinese.
Twitter: Seriously bans people if they say the wrong pronoun
Reddit: A few people controls the majority of big subreddits, bans people with conservative views outright. Bans people that upvote stuff that they don't like. The have removed, banned hundreds of subreddits and users in the last few months. While they have chinese owners.
Facebook: Surprisingly the best of the bunch when it comes to serving every viewpoint imo. But they have had huge privacy implications just so many times.
But even so, I am very torn on the subject. The best thing would probably to force these companies not to censor/ban/remove people based on opinions. But the best thing for the world would most likely for these social media sites to not exist in the first place.
Personally I think social media sucks but I think most people are not ready to live without it either.
It's hard for me to feel sorry for companies that go down the fact checking route with algorithms; It always ends up causing more damage than value.
12 years ago we didn't have this problem, and I think that's mostly related to the fact there was some UX resistance to hitting the "reahare" button.
I'd probably understand that you posted it as a joke, but I'd also know that regardless of your intentions, many people would not understand the joke.
I think you probably earned your strike.
You mean I've been taking all this medication for nothing?
There are a heck of a lot of non-reasonable adults on social media.
Unless something is very explicitly and prominently labeled as a joke or satire, in a way that won't get separated from it when it is re-shared by your downstream viewers, there's a good chance quite a few people will not catch on that it is not intended to be true.
Social media can be particularly bad in this regard because it often encourages only spending a short time reading each individual post. It pushes breadth over depth.
> 12 years ago we didn't have this problem, and I think that's mostly related to the fact there was some UX resistance to hitting the "reahare" button.
I'm not sure that is most of it, but it contributes to increasing volume in people's feeds, pushing the breadth vs. depth balance toward breadth so makes things worse.
Misinformation kills innocent people. A harsh no-tolerance policy is acceptable given this is the worst global health crisis in 100 years.
Who is someone working for Facebook or anyone else to flag my messages because they think they're not factual?
This is crazy.
But giving a strike? That's going too far and your case highlights why: you can't make a joke anymore.
A strike is stifling free speech whereas a label is just informative. It might be biased, it might not be, but it doesn't prevent you from expressing yourself, be it by making a joke or spreading accurate information or spreading ridiculous conspiracy theories.
What if we changed our thinking from removing/flagging bad content to fostering rich discourse?
I'll use r/politics for example, I currently do not think there is productive or rich discourse being had there. If you have had a different experience please let me know.
I think for the political arena it would do us good to try to emulate the US House of Representatives where representatives are given equal time to address the floor. In this way you will be exposed to other perspectives. The ways we can achieve this are similar to the approach NYT has taken to comments. You can still sort comments by most recommended, but there are also "Featured Comments". Featured Comments are chosen by a team at NYT, presumably from ideologically diverse perspectives, and they choose comments that are insightful and rich in information without toxicity. Does anyone else think that would be a good idea?
I think its important because I truly believe Americans are far more alike then different and just about everyone feels like they are under attack or have been violated. Its time to heal and listen and understand that we are in it together and the people that we really should be castigating are the people filled with prejudice to the point where they have shut themselves off from hearing other perspectives. I believe there is a vast middle in the USA, but its currently getting drowned out and it should have a louder voice.
This is a weird example. Representatives don't listen to each other. The speeches are for their constituents.
>Featured Comments are chosen by a team at NYT, presumably from ideologically diverse perspectives, and they choose comments that are insightful and rich in information without toxicity.
Agreed, the solution to the problems caused by getting rid of gatekeepers is to bring back gatekeepers. How do you do it with something like twitter though, where there were no gatekeepers to begin with?
If the majority of people _want_ to fight and is more willing to act in bad faith to hurt the opponent / win the argument rather than willing to correct their opinion by discovering facts, I don't think any technical solution could, nor should, try to correct that ("nor should", because it could quickly turn into some sort of oppression).
That being said, I commend you for looking for such solution, if only because masses' mood swings faster than technical solutions are implemented, and your features will be there when people are fed up with constant conflicts.
"The answer to bad speech is more speech."
Brilliant people who have said this or some trivial variation thereof:
- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis:
https://prospect.org/culture/remedy-speech/
- U.S. President Barack Obama
https://www.answers.com/Q/Who_said_answer_bad_speech_with_more_speech
- Penn Jillette
https://bigthink.com/in-their-own-words/why-the-solution-to-bad-speech-is-always-more-speech
- Google CEO (then) Eric Schmidt
https://www.news18.com/news/india/the-answer-to-bad-speech-is-more-speech-googles-eric-schmidt-598251.html
So swapping a hard problem for an even harder one?
You can't foster rich discourse without removing/flagging bad content. That's like trying to clean a litterbox by adding more litter rather than removing the shit. Eventually the whole thing is just going to stink.
The top post on r/politics on Super Tuesday was about Sanders winning Vermont. There was no discussion to be had about Biden absolutely cleaning up.
Also missing from the parts of the discussion i've yet read, is the question of what sort of software we're using.
At the risk of using a buzzword, decentralized comms could reduce the risks of constitutional shutdown. And maybe even be better.
It's become increasingly obvious that the argument around censorship has never been actually about censorship but rather as another political bludgeon you can use to beat your opponent over the head with by scoring some easy points since censorship = bad. They ignore the power dynamics at play which is what makes censorship possible.
Instead he seems to say whatever outrageous thing that can get attention so he's the center of the news cycle. Once again, it worked.
When he actually does something to silence twitter, I'll be upset too. But I'm not falling for the "big crazy talk ploy" again.
Where in the US Constitution does it say presidents cannot threaten companies? Obama had his share of threats. I'm sure they could find a suitable legal issue with Twitter targeting Trump while ignoring members of Congress.
It is an unacceptable form of censorship to hand over our modern day equivalent of the public square to private companies, and then allow them to police what people say in it.
Freedom of speech was always intended to be protected in public. The Internet is now our equivalent of the public space. It is time this problem is solved once and for all, and the Internet is now reclassified as both a public utility and a public space.
Yes, those of us with technical know-how can argue that personal websites are that equivalent. But this is depriving those that see Twitter, Facebook, et. al. as a public platform, of the right to have their voice heard. A tweet is now the equivalent of a placard on the street. Do we really want to censor that because we messed up in how we allowed the Internet to be run?
One may also argue that the president harms our country's image but again, senators and congressmen represent us as well and can also influence large amounts of people.
That does not mean he must go uncontested; people can still dispute everything he says by responding (the original form of fact-checking). The discussion should instead be about whether or not political figures should be able to block people. I remember that was an issue a while ago, and I'm not sure where it is now.
It's wishful thinking at best to believe that Twitter replies can effectively refute arguments. They don't establish public dialog unless the OP retweets the responses. You can't call it a dialogue if, effectively, there's only one person talking. Even simple refutations fail on Twitter.
"We can't fact check one person because it'd be hard to do the same for a large number of people" is classic perfect-as-enemy-of-good. We get huge bang-for-buck by handling some obvious outliers and known bad actors, and that's worth doing.
clearly there is nothing simple about this
Most underrated comment in this thread...
And just like before the fact checkers, people believe what they want to believe, nothing more, nothing less.
I mean I want to say they should let that happen, but the US is toothless in that the population wouldn't revolt if it happened. Twitter would end but nothing would change.
But it's not going to go there, Twitter will sit with the government, they'll make a deal, some palms will be greased and they will bow to their government overlords.
Companies are fucky like that; on the one hand they influence public discourse and voting behaviour, on the other they're morally flexible and will grovel for their government masters if they get to earn money there (see also Google and China, Hollywood films and China, etc).
And to be perfectly honest, I’m all for it, especially if they’ve done this (and will do this more broadly, as you suggest) despite expecting to take a substantial ‘hit’ to their bottom line.
They're an American company and can choose to justify fact-checking only the US President if they want. It's not like hypocrisy has bothered them in the past; it clearly didn't bother them when the US elected a troll and they fixed the glitch of their own TOS suggesting he be banned from their service by modifying the TOS to have a carve-out for "newsworthiness."
Of course people see bias against them. It’s classical confirmation bias: every time something goes their way, it’s unremarkable, but as soon as something doesn’t, it’s noticeable.
Isn’t it equally possible —nay, probable even, especially in this case— that the perceived bias is only the prevailing opinion of the majority against whom one is in a minority?
I'm gonna go ahead and disagree with you here. The US is such a prominent nation, that can make or break the economies other countries, depending on their political actions.
I've seen a lot of this "It's US politics, so none of your business" writing when criticizing Trump - but fact is that most countries are not perfectly de-coupled from each others. The US relies on some countries, while other countries relies on the US.
Sure, you do not have any right to vote for him, but you sure as hell are entitled to voice your opinion on him.
Americans get too bogged down in the muck to look up to realize what's actually going on around them or be aware of just how hypocritical they are.
Normally such threads come from people which are somewhat in the process or trying to de-mantel a democracy. So a US president saying something like that is quite worrying even if his intentions are not to undermine the US democracy.
> Nor does he have any real regulatory authority that could be employed that wouldn't also bite him back
I'm not convinced of that. Trump has repeatedly shown he is willing to exercise executive authority to the fullest extent possible and the courts have repeatedly affirmed his ability to do so. I'm not sure what kind of "bite back" you expect, but that kind of thing has never been an obstacle for Trump. At the end of the day I think you're right that he's bullying them, but I think it's wrong to believe that he won't actually go after them if they do not comply with his demands or at the very least retract the fact-check and praise him
One tactic I think is likely to come from Barr and the DOJ is a corrupt selective enforcement of anti-trust laws - decide Twitter and AWS are monopolies but Facebook and Microsoft are not.
For example, a federal judge barred Trump from blocking followers, despite Twitter being a private platform.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/23/trump-cant-block-twitter-fol...
Arguing that a platform shouldn't have to host arbitrary content isn't the same as saying that a platform should get to host arbitrary content. If you run a website I'd argue that you shouldn't have to post other peoples' content on it - that doesn't mean I think you should get a free pass to post any illegal content you like - which was the issue with election interference.
Nonetheless, this is pretty much par for the course for what the world has come to expect.
Edit: It turns out that though phrase is often attributed to Voltaire, it was actually Evelyn Beatrice Hall, as noted by the poster below, to whom I am grateful for the correction.
(Let's also not lose sight of the fact that Trump hasn't even had his tweets deleted or censored in any fashion. Just a note added underneath.)
1. They had someone with a clear history of strong anti-Trump and anti-Republican sentiment take the action (https://twitter.com/LevineJonathan/status/126545757821512499...)
2. Twitter chose a prediction rather than a factual statement to fact check ("Mail-In Ballots will be..."). Why not start with a truly factually wrong statement about the past?
3. They picked something that is actually debatable! A bipartisan committee concluded it carried some risks in 2005: https://www.wsj.com/articles/heed-jimmy-carter-on-the-danger...
The notion that a company can ever be trusted to "fact check" (aka determine objective truth) is just completely laughable. The closest we can come is labeling agent beliefs about truth ("X says Y is false").
Doing nothing would be better than doing this. Even better would be building solutions that allow community-based (and ideally personalized) derivations of consensus (this is what we're doing at LBRY).
Do people here just not want to see it regardless of its factual nature? That seems like the eventual issue with “fact checking” social media posts.
Trump is working the refs even though they are already very much in his favor.
YOU can claim vaccines are a fake, and that's bad, but won't have harder consequences on you.
A medical doctor can't claim the same thing without losing their position as a medical doctor; they kinda lose a bit of that "it's just my opinion" card as part of the responsibilities they have with society.
Maybe it's time for the US to become a member of the international community, by adopting common codes.
Please do show me the data.
Baseless nationalism is just as unwelcome from any country as it is fron the USA. Stop it.
Of course, most Presidents have been constrained by some modicum of understanding that their oath to uphold the Constitution applies to the whole thing.
Give people their Facebook but remove the algorithms from the timeline and close all groups to make it harder for people to spread misinformation and group together to celebrate it. Or close it all together, social media doesn't have that many upsides. My observation from more than ten years with those tools.
No idea where the problem lies in Twitter but marking tweets with lies and conspiracy stuff is a step in a good direction.
As we know, the private websites have incentives to allow politicians to use them as pulpits because it drives "engagement" and, in some cases, because they want to sell political ads or ad services.
HN will do what it do, but I can't escape the feeling that in an era where a President uses Twitter, HN will become less relevant as a technological discourse destination if it lacks the will to touch the ramifications of technology and politics combined.
..
Lol joking, they love it.
The issue here is whether these private companies are actually making rules within their own private domain, or if they control a public space.
If you feel like you intuitively know the answer to that question, take that as an indication that you haven't loaded enough of the prerequisites in your mind to actually understand what is at stake.
There are simple arguments for both sides of the equation, but the details become maddening before you even get to the complications of how it's all subservient to advertising, personal data tracking, and in a realm that is testing our current definition of monopoly.
The best I've found so far is a supreme court case called Marsh v Alabama which has nothing to do with the internet but does touch on the application of the first amendment to a private physical space.
Look at the_donald, which had a mass migration off of Reddit, and everyone said Reddit was going to shutdown without their ad revenue. Still waiting...
If you are a conservative you believe in property rights. Thus, private companies can make whatever rules they want...with their property...and if I don't agree with them, I go elsewhere.
The same is true with Twitter. So it makes this whole fiasco so hypocritical. If you claim to be a conservative but you don't respect a business' right to set its own rules, you're a charlatan.
People are still waiting for twitter to clear up all the bots. From what I am aware the challenge is not bots but people masquerading 1000s of accounts manually, so it's actually a misnomer to call them bots.
Twitter's platform is private, not public. Twitter should waste no more time in making that crystal clear.
If you own the printing press, you get to decide what you print. If it were otherwise -- if the government, or anyone else, could control what we said and didn't say with our private resources -- well, that's not anywhere any of us really wants to live.
The discussion being had between diverse perspectives is not helped when the platform starts flagging things with its own hand-picked opinion.
The way I see it:
- The "town square" concept (and whether individual social media apps/websites constitute what is historically called that in the legal realm). Can a person say something which should get them banned from a town square? What if multiple town squares coordinate their actions against a single user/content?
- Private party "censorship". Is what social media companies do "censoring"?
- The role of 1st Amendment in "protecting speech" of private individuals against private companies (which historically is not covered by the 1st Amendment, but is covered by the principle of Free Speech)
- The role of 1st Amendment in "protecting speech" of private companies against the president (which might be covered under the 1st Amendment, depending on other factors)
- Whether the 1st Amendment protects from threats from government officials, as opposed to actions of officials
- Private sector companies using their own moderation rules+workforce (including vague rule definitions and no ability to get a judgement about where "the line" is)
- Brigades of political activists using the moderation systems against their adversaries
- Whether the political tendencies of employees at the relevant social media companies have any significant bias for/against specific users/content
- Whether a private sector company is allowed to curate content on its property (and the sub-arguments which revolve around ToS/EULA/contracts)
- Legal responsibilities+liability of social media "platforms" under "Section 230" (and some people misunderstand this industry to be under Common Carrier laws, which regulates more commoditized telco systems)
- Second-order effects of account bans, including loss of access and content under shared accounts (eg. getting banned from your Facebook account also leaves you locked out of any account you connected with Facebook Connect / OAuth)That's awesome.
The web is nearly entirely privately owned, which makes answering this question difficult.
On one hand, the web is where we do 90% of our communication these days.
On the other hand, the web is privately owned not public.
I’m convinceable either way. Did telephone companies have a right to censor land line speech? Should ISPs be able to censor? Should Cloudflare? AWS? If telephone companies would have run afoul of the 1st amendment to regulate phone speech, It seems like other “foundational” industries like ISPs and Cloudflare should be regulated to be “dumb pipes”.
Where social networks fall is less clear.
It’s insane how little respect the US has for the integrity of its political system. As long as it may hurt the “other” side everything is ok without regard to the damage they are constantly doing the health of the system.
Basically quoting Sasha's argument "freedom of speech is not the freedom of reach". Spreading lies, hate and false information is everyone's right if they do it in their home alone but they shouldn't be allowed to reach bigger audiences.
Video here: https://youtu.be/PVWt0qUc0CE
https://twitter.com/search?q=%22Make%20Whites%20Great%20Agai...
They are working as editors which does not provide them FCC section 230 protection.
I hope this means we finally get some big profile names in the fediverse. A lot of celebrities are talking about the issue but I have yet to see anyone mention valid alternatives.
Obviously, based on his history, it is just a reaction, but not necessarily an idle threat. I am both hesitant and interested at the same time. It is a little like his stance on FISA. It it clear any changes are just to benefit the president with other benefits being an afterthought, but some of the power held by FISA and social media should be curbed
By doing 'fact checking' like this they they open themselves up to the charge that anything that doesn't have the little (!) meets some standard. Expect 10x more people @jack, @twittersupport etc... every time they see something they find misleading.
This is a bad move.
Having a national social media would have the side benefit of allowing a better identity system than social security numbers which are a travesty. I have to share my social security number with many people, but also somehow keep it safe? Instead, I should have a public and private key pair, and this could be associated with my National Social Media account for a single identity, and sign messages with my private key if I need to apply for a loan, or a lease, or whatever.
The National Social Media account could enshrine the same protections afforded by the US constitution - free speech, you cannot be censored top down, only by people blocking you. The government cannot spy on your usage patterns or edit your messages, and so on.
If Trump were to get such a thing created, and it worked reasonably well, and he started using it exclusively instead of Twitter, I think it would gain a lot of traction. I know I would try it out.
2. Who decides what is a viable source? As a part of their "fact check", Twitter linked to CNN, which is almost as bad as Fox News these days. This really isn't helping their case for supposed neutrality.
3. I don't like Trump, didn't vote for him, and find his tweets embarrassing. But I don't need Twitter to tell me what to think.
I await with popcorn. It is going to be hilarious if tweets from 4chan become constitutionally protected.
For videos, see https://joinpeertube.org or https://libry.tv
For micro-blogging, see https://joinmastodon.org
For photos, see https://pixelfed.org
For others, see https://fediverse.party/
If I start lying to me team at work, I'll have a very uncomfortable meeting with my boss.
If our sales people start lying to clients, the company may get dragged into courts.
If head of state lies when publicly addressing the country in many other countries, they'll be held accountable before congress.
But US seems to be about absolute freedom, and not about following ANY rules, no matter how basic. I never get why people accept such a system.
Trump responded in an aggressive manner that can be perceived as threatening. That’s one discussion, and one I’m not currently capable of engaging in rationally.
The other discussion is whether Twitter did right in this case. Rather than tell Twitter they’re out of place, I actually think they did the right thing, provided they’re willing to do it _more_, to shift towards having this performed by a group with some transparency around it, and to reference sources when they do so.
Seeing politicians I can’t stand called out in public for lying is deeply satisfying, but won’t change my mind about anything. I’d be interested in seeing what happens when fact checks on all politicians are considered expected & there’s a purported neutral party doing so. Can that be done without the process itself being eaten alive by political agendas? Would I personally be open to fact checks on politicians that I myself favor, and would it change my perspective on them? It feels worth trying to find out.
Ultimately, even if we end up deciding that an approach is unworkable, I applaud anyone willing to at least try to clean up our discourse right now. It’s ugly enough to have created a divide that will eventually threaten violence at scale if not addressed.
Edit: curious why the downvotes; this was deliberately civil.
1. The veracity of twitter’s fact checking. This absolutely does not matter, since Twitter may host or refuse to host whatever they want on their own website, including incorrect fact checks if that’s how they get their jollies (not that there’s any evidence that their fact checks have been incorrect so far, because there isn’t). On the other hand, Trump doesn’t have the same right, because he doesn’t own Twitter.com
2. Hate speech, and whether it is ever justified. Again, this doesn’t matter. Twitter has the right to remove (or visibly flag as the case may be) any post they want on their website, for any reason they want. They might do so because a post is hate speech, but they’d be just as firmly within their rights to do so for any other reason.
I think all of the confusion in these comments exists because the law is very simple, but many folks here don’t like the conclusion:
1. Twitter may fact check, flag, or remove the posts of Trump or any other user completely at their discretion, even if their fact checking turns out to be incorrect. Nothing about this violates Trump’s first amendment rights in any way.
2. I had hoped this was obvious, but in case it’s unclear to you, Trump and the US government absolutely do not have the power to shut down or punish Twitter in any way just because they don’t like the way that Twitter has fact checked Trump’s posts. This would in fact (obviously) violate Twitter’s first amendment rights.
Finally, there is no legal distinction between a “platform” and a “publisher” that in any way restricts the control that a business has over their own website. Anyone who claims otherwise is simply incorrect, and not worth listening to.
Although it also sounds like it would be great for entrenched incumbents and cause barriers to entry.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12656016113107394...
As with all things trump, the man spends his days flailing about from one tantrum to the next with no actual focus or initiative. Bluster all day, every day.
> We added a label to two @realDonaldTrump Tweets about California’s vote-by-mail plans as part of our efforts to enforce our civic integrity policy. We believe those Tweets could confuse voters about what they need to do to receive a ballot and participate in the election process.
https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1265838823663075341
It's Twitter's web server, which is a private property of the for-profit company. They don't have a contract with the Trump that they distribute the expression of Trump without modification. So it's their right to express their idea on their web server.
If the Trump want to distribute a true unmodified expression to the public, he can easily do so by setting up his own web server.
A) Twitter, a private company, was merely adding a warning to his tweet which doesn't restrict his speech at all, and has long been defended by conservatives that private companies restricting speech is not a violation of the first amendment
AND
B) Trump threatened to use the powers of government to stop someone from violating his speech that is not protected by the first amendment is ACTUALLY VIOLATING THE FIRST AMENDMENT?
This is a campaign contribution with a real economic value that should be calculable. So let's just let the FEC figure out the value of this contribution and all of the existing regulations will apply.
Fact checking entertainment is nonsense.
Next, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have become de-facto presence for political figures, companies and individuals. Erased from here, they cease to exist. Almost like scrubbing a Google search result.
The above points COMPEL the U.S. government and any other government to consider the possibility that they are now a public utility (like electrical companies) and an essential service. The argument that they are private companies and therefore should forever be removed from the jurisdiction of the 1st Amendment (in the case of the U.S.), since this only applies to government, is extremely antiquated. Did smartphones and Presidential tweets exist in 1776?
If electrical companies and railroads can be regulated and for-profit, then why would "my company, I do what I want" magically apply forever to Faceook, Twitter and Instagram?
I am NOT defending what Trump was quoted saying here. I AM making a case that we need to update our legal framework to account for modernity. And to account for a heretofore unpredictable and unfathomable technological achievement of an instant network of human ideas and presence that is controlled by a few California companies. I'd bet money that the question will be considered in the coming few years by the high courts, and there's a non-zero chance they'll agree with what I've just said.
I thin that their transparently profit motivated move in treating him so differently-- by not banning him-- weakens their moral case against regulation.
Twitter's relationship with Trump isn't about anyone's right to free speech, it's about twitter's income stream.
[1] https://thehill.com/policy/technology/499847-trump-to-sign-e...
I stopped using Twitter on January 20th, 2017. I had been a user since they started, but I went through and programatically deleted every tweet, like, follower, etc. I now just have my name and I never use the site. I wish more people would do the same. Don't delete your account, just stop using it.
If Twitter had just held everyone on their platform to the same standards, I would be somewhat accepting of them as a neutral platform for free speech. But they decided to ignore the threats, lies, bullying, name calling, racism, sexism and more coming from not just Trump, but all of his followers. So they can go to hell for all I care now.
Maybe the billionaire hotel magnate from New York should arrange a leveraged buyout of the business he doesn't like, and shut it down when he owns it.
I really saw a chilling effect in r/SyrianCivilWar after the rise of ISIS. Media showing graphic violence would remain on the site for several more years -- r/WatchPeopleDie was removed only last year -- but videos considered to be "supporting" ISIS (even if only because they showcased recent advances by ISIS or allies) started being removed from Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, and other places. I think that even LiveLeak eventually started removing some of these videos. Reddit itself started banning pro-ISIS posters.
There was plenty of all-sides hand-wringing before 2016 that social media wasn't doing enough to suppress terrorist propaganda.
"After the recent spate of terrorist attacks inspired by the so-called Islamic State, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called for greater cooperation from social media companies like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in combating hate propaganda."
https://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/08/how-social-media-cos-try-to-...
The social networks banned a lot of content that would be legal to publish in the United States. They went well above and beyond removing only the "imminent lawless action" speech that falls outside of First Amendment protections. And with good reason. Plenty of lawmakers were ready to make their lives miserable if they didn't take an aggressive anti-terrorist stance.
It's fun to daydream about big American social media companies removing only such speech as would be unprotected by the First Amendment. But sites like YouTube have never offered that much latitude. Even in the pre-Google days YouTube didn't allow porn -- not even perfectly legal, mainstream porn. And of course it's perfectly legal to advertise locksmith and dental services but I don't want platforms overrun with high volume advertising for those businesses either. Finally, both Republican and Democratic legislators were talking less than 5 years ago about how social media had a responsibility to curb terrorists' propaganda, regardless of the stronger protections enshrined in the First Amendment.
I don't really like where we are with social media, but I wish that the discussions we had around these issues on HN were more historically grounded instead of centering on partisan polarization around the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath.
Trying to fact check that kind of person makes no sense. The man himself makes no sense, and he knows. He's a troll and also the US president.
So, yeah, many of us get a bit worked up when people are kicked off platforms, because they are being silenced, sometimes to the point of being shut out of the modern internet entirely (when their rights to a DNS address are comprehensively removed).
Hate speech and lies are terrible, but they’re not the only thing being silenced.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12656495454107443...
$TWTR already down 5%.
Twitter's "Head of Site Integrity" Yoel Roth boasts on his LinkedIn that he is in charge of "developing and enforcing Twitter’s rules".
> “He leads the teams responsible for developing and enforcing Twitter’s rules”
Here's a few of his tweets:
> Massive anti-Trump protest headed up Valencia St. San Francisco.
> I’m just saying, we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.
> The “you are not the right kind of feminist” backlash to yesterday’s marches has begun. Did we learn nothing from this election?
> Yes, that person in the pink hat is clearly a bigger threat to your brand of feminism than ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE
> How does a personality-free bag of farts like Mitch McConnell actually win elections?
> “Today on Meet The Press, we’re speaking with Joseph Goebbels about the first 100 days…” —What I hear whenever Kellyanne is on a news show
This same person doesn't stand up to his own purity tests:
> It wouldn't be a trip to New York without at least one big scary tranny.
> "Trans is a category worth being linguistically destabilized in the same way we did gay with 'fag,'" he wrote. "Sorry, but I don’t subscribe to PC passing the buck. Identity politics is for everyone."
Twitter's "fact check" is literally wrong. Until few years ago, every one agreed that mail-in ballot has massive fraud:
> “votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised & more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...
Just 1 week ago: Close Results In Paterson Vote Plagued By Fraud Claims; Over 3K Ballots Seemingly Set Aside - A county spokesman said 16,747 vote-by-mail ballots were received, but the county's official results page shows 13,557 votes were counted — with uncounted ballots representing 19%
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/close-results-in-pater...
> California Secretary of State confirmed double-voting in one case and suspected double-voting by a number of other registered voters on Super Tuesday:
https://www.scribd.com/document/456618983/CA-SOS-Duplicate-V...
Yesterday, WEST VIRGINIA – Thomas Cooper, a USPS mail carrier in Pendleton County, was charged today in a criminal complaint with attempted election fraud, U.S. Attorney Bill Powell announced.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndwv/pr/pendleton-county-mail-c...
In 2004, Jerry Nadler (Democrat) asserts that paper ballots, particularly in the absence of machines, are extremely susceptible to fraud:
Future head of the Democrat Party Debbie Wasserman Schultz opposing mail-in ballots due to the risk of election fraud in 2008:
West Virginia Mail Carrier Charged With Altering Absentee Ballot Requests:
https://time.com/5843088/west-virginia-mail-carrier-fraud-ab...
Also Twitter’s Trump ‘Fact Check’ Does Not Disclose Company Partnered with Groups Pushing Mail-In Ballots.
-----------
https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/822654925217873921
https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/823312544425132033
https://twitter.com/catfashionshow/status/298477704666300416
Reddit is the best example of that. I don't want to defend him but look at every single news and politics related sub from /r/news, /r/worldnews, /r/politics etc.
But that happens here too. Honestly I blame the upvote downvote system more. Reddit and HN are both really wrong with it
Clearly competition is not solving this problem. So should the federal government do something about it? Maybe.
Right now, social media is a pretty bad cesspool. No one takes the blame for allowing sociopaths to dominate those platforms.
Twitter has every protected right to criticize the president (which they should have been doing a whole lot more of but that's a different discussion). That's the whole point of "freedom of speech" in our Bill of Rights. Our government literally cannot do what Trump wants to do, and to try to say that he can is to explicitly say that the Constitution is meaningless and void.
Also they should not have called that "fact checking" or "debunking".
Russia has used the past 15 years to take South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Crimea and cement Putin's now-lifetime grip on domestic institutions.
China, free of US pressure has refined its global logistics and supply chains, increased its military buildup and has becomes the world's go to vendor for 5G solutions. While also keeping Taiwan, HK, Xinjiang and South China Sea firmly under its thumb.
Meanwhile, the US stumbles from crisis to crisis, with a good chunk of its 99% literate population now thinking that mail-in ballots, a cornerstone of its voting system are rife with fraud, and that wearing masks is a political stance.
Oh, and Hacker News, in response to the country's chief executive's blustering about closing down social media, ponders if fact-checking is a 'solved problem'.
I honestly think you could pick a random 16 year old kid off the street and they'd make a better president than Trump. That's the sad and embarrassing state of affairs that is U.S. politics. I tend to err on the free speech side when it comes to social media platforms, but when you're the U.S. president and spreading baseless conspiracy theories and blatant lies with real consequences, then you damn well should get fact checked and called out on your nonsense.
Never been a more embarrassing time to be an American.
These gigantic centralized silo monopolies that recreate the experience of AOL online.
They have way more power than any American (or any other country) company should have in the world. Their reach is global, what they do, impacts millions of people who have no say whatsoever.
I long for a much more distributed system. (Doesn't have to be some fancy federated system.
I would be happy with real competition by a few hundred companies distributed around the world.
Closing down, or neutering the behemoths would be the most useful thing Trump will ever do.
He will soon realize that he cannot, or maybe he just forgets about it, or maybe he tries and the supreme court strikes it down. I cannot imagine how much money is flowing from the silos to lobbyists in Washington right now.
How is it a fact that mail-in ballots will not lead to rigged elections? Just that there's no evidence to support it doesn't mean it can't be true (however unlikely). If we're really to police politicians, surely it should be only on absolutely logically false points?
The point about that only registered votes will receive ballots and not just anyone might be a real correction, but it sort of depends on who can be a registered voter, I don't know the details of that. It also seems like a relatively minor point.
And the third correction is just horrendous. Trump targeted California, and they add a "get the facts" that other states also exist. How is that categorically relevant? Obviously Trump is concerned with leftwing influence, so he's singling California out, it's most certainly valid.
So Twitter releases what's possibly the most culturally significant feature they've released in 10 years, and they fuck up 2 out of 3, and the only one they might have gotten right has not enough information and seems to be minor?
To me it seems there's only 2 rational explanations: whoever made the check the facts did so without oversight or involvement of a committee, and will be fired, or Twitter simply does not want to actually do this, and tries to get out of the public pressure to do so by making a weak attempt and then giving up. I hate to be cynical, but the first one option just doesn't seem very likely given the gravity of the situation.
edit: if I was the CEO of Twitter and I would have given the final 'go' on the "what you need to know" it would have looked like this:
- In the state of California only registered voters receive ballots.
So: no hear-say about evidence that is missing, no accusing a politician of lies and definitely not naming that politician in every line. Just the facts, and let the reader figure out how that reflects on the tweet the politician made.
This case is an exception. Twitter drew a line in the sand. It is in exactly the right place.
The PoTUS is threatening to shut down elections in November: he seems to be doing everything in his power to have a national emergency then when people can't vote, to shut down post offices, and to ban voting by mail. Any other problems with the PoTUS, we should address in the ballot box and through citizen activism (not through corporate activism). But when the PoTUS tries to shut down the ballot box or shut down citizen activism, that's different.
I don't think he's likely to be successful, but I didn't think coronavirus would hit us this hard either. In January, it was a manageable billion-dollar problem. We did nothing. Now, it's a multi-trillion dollar problem. Right now, Trump trying to cancel the election is a manageable problem too; by his personality, if he doesn't get traction, we're done. He'll move on. But if he does get traction, we'll have a completely different scale of problem on our hands.
Not wrong tho especially if you just look at the mainstream media
Will they be giving the same treatment to @joebiden? He has been known to lie and plagiarize throughout his political career.
Who qualifies as a reliable source for fact checking? I see links to sources like CBS and CNN, neither of which are known as bastions of truth, and both of which have failed many fact checks themselves, in recent memory.
> The 1st Amendment doesn't shield you from criticism or consequences.
> If you're yelled at, boycotted, have your show cancelled, or get banned from an internet community, your free speech rights aren't being violated. It's just that the people listening to you think you're an asshole, and they're showing you the door.
https://twitter.com/Liz_Wheeler/status/1265463081997484032
This isn't going to end well, and unless Twitter is going to exercise this impartially (which is impossible given a human is involved), they are going to lose their platform status, and justifiably so.
And I wonder how many of these people will vote him in once again... How can there be so many smart people in the US yet this guy ends up as their leader?
Edit: some might think this list is comprehensive, but the first page says it is a ‘sampling’, a 400-page sampling.
Freedom of speech is a concept, and a legal definition in the US. It's true that Twitter has no _legal_ obligation to uphold free speech since it's not a government entity.
But if you support the _concept_ of free speech, Twitter is stiffing conversation by playing a moral judge on what is considered truth and what's considered lies.
The Constitution was written 200 years ago without any of the today's technology. Back then, all "speech" happens either live in person, or by individual printing presses. Government back then was the biggest threat to the concept of free speech, so it's indoctrinated in the constitution as a legal concept.
Today, public discussion space has moved onto social media platforms. Government is no longer the biggest threat to speech (because of the Constitution), but private companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc who can just ban anyone at will and cause them to lose the ability to reach their followers. If you want to protect free speech as a concept, then we need to update our legal concept to include any platform or service that's identified as critical to public discussion.
Similar to how electricity companies are regulated as utilities companies because they're so crucial to people's daily lives, social media platforms should be regulated as speech platforms because they're so crucial to today's conversations happening in society.
This is the hard truth. You won't like it because you hate the man. But it's the truth / end devil's advocate