Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter to ban political advertising

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

851–860 of 1001 posts

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#851

Post by carlallison »

chr1 wrote: post #771
akie wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In America, we understand that there is absolutely nothing more dangerous than an entity that feels entitled to control what is true. It might make things easier, and it might actually produce better results so long as the entity doing so is competent and benevolent, but nearly every structure in America is meant to serve as a bulwark for the cases in which the entity in power is precisely the sort that you do not…

Why do you think the centralized body would say that to fox and not to cnn? After all if there are about 50% people thinking that fox spreads lies and 50% people thinking cnn spreads lies the decision of centralized body could go any way. It is better to let everyone speak and everyone to make their own decisions

> It is better to let everyone speak and everyone to make their own decisions

Majority of the people simply trust the media they like or get used to. They usually assume news from these channels have been fact-checked or are trustworthy but we all know messages can be crafted in different ways.

In other words, the media can potentially/likely manipulate how people think and make decisions.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#852

Post by throwaway2048 »

ralusek wrote: post #763
Sander_Marechal wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a strawman argument. You don't have to define truth absolutely to ban news from spouting outright lies. The US seems to have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And to be frank, the US should probably be more wary of that.

It's not a strawman for multiple reasons. For one, you have suggested that pointing out outright lies does not suffer from many of the same issues as asserting truth. "American jobs are being taken by illegal immigrants from Mexico." Is this a lie? No. But is this disingenuous and misrepresenting much more significant contributors to job loss? Yes. Is it a lie then? "Transgender women are women." Is this a lie? Depen…

You don't have to capture every biased statement and bending of the truth to counter outright lies like "Obama was born in kenya" or "Trump was endorsed by the pope"

Both of which are believed by huge amounts of Americans.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#853

Post by mkr-hn »

This will fail the same way "real name" policies fail. Someone has to draw a line on what politics (or a real name) is for the purpose of the policy, and that's going to cut off a lot of useful ads.

For example: An ad for free HIV screening services is political by certain perspectives.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#854

Post by sjy »

kaolti wrote: post #798
moksly wrote: post #666

In Denmark we have laws in place that hold news paper editors responsible for printing truth. They don’t always succeed, but they try to, and when they do fail they admit it and apologise. This is what has kept our society well informed and critical thinking for a hundred years. It’s also allowed for different sides of things, because you can interpret things like socioeconomic statistics and facts differently and wr…

The idea that we can mandate people telling the truth is laughable. The reason it seems to work in Denmark is probably because honesty is a social norm there. Secondly, there is no absolute, objective truth and there never will be. The best we can do is to individually strive for telling the truth and hope for the best.

You accept that honesty could plausibly be a social norm in some countries, yet you think it's laughable that the law might play a role in establishing and upholding that norm?

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#855

Post by TeMPOraL »

madaxe_again wrote: post #769
akie wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In America, we understand that there is absolutely nothing more dangerous than an entity that feels entitled to control what is true. It might make things easier, and it might actually produce better results so long as the entity doing so is competent and benevolent, but nearly every structure in America is meant to serve as a bulwark for the cases in which the entity in power is precisely the sort that you do not…

> Wouldn't it be great if you would have a powerful centralized body No. It wouldn’t. When that kind of power (arbiter of truth) is placed in a single point, that point will become the highly contested point of control. Eventually, inevitably, the body would end up turned to some ruthless power of the day, and would serve as the most phenomenal propaganda machine. “The Ministry of Truth is pleased to announce that bo…

Ok, so a centralized system is as smart as the people working in the Ministry of Truth, but also creates a highly contested point of control. It's not guaranteed that it'll be smart, but ideally it can get as smart as possible for human beings.

A decentralized system is not controllable directly, but can only be as smart as the mean of the population[0]. Also, it also has a mechanism of control - propaganda. It's not all that effective, because you can have competing groups countering one another, but the side effects of that are relevant here: people take sides and reason by soundbites, while facts and critical thought get crowded out. Which means the more competing propagandists you have, the dumber the system becomes, even if all propaganda attempts cancel each other out.

So, on one hand you have a system with a very good quality ceiling but easy to manipulate; on the other hand, you have a system more resistant to direct manipulation, but consequently with a much lower ceiling that that also goes monotonically down as attempts to manipulate the system increase. Or, in other words: good results with high risk of bad results, vs. consistently shitty results.

Can't we do better? Are we doomed to choose between only those two?

--

[0] - Assuming a normal distribution, by the central limit theorem. If that doesn't hold, things could get even worse.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#856

Post by buboard »

moksly wrote: post #666

In Denmark we have laws in place that hold news paper editors responsible for printing truth. They don’t always succeed, but they try to, and when they do fail they admit it and apologise. This is what has kept our society well informed and critical thinking for a hundred years. It’s also allowed for different sides of things, because you can interpret things like socioeconomic statistics and facts differently and wr…

A bit too dramatic. Most places have libel laws, denmark is no exception. Twitter is not a newspaper but a platform. Most news are commentary on tweets anyway. After banning political paid ads (the burden of truth of which falls on twitter, since they are the ones doing the publishing), twitter is even less a publisher and more a platform.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#857

Post by dhimes »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #850
jlg23 wrote: post #843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most basic kind of truths are facts. Except for that for a lot of "facts", according to Rousseau, we already have 4 truths: what you say, what I say, what we agree upon and what really happened. So, while the pursuit of truth is important, I'd argue that respect towards each other even when we cannot agree is the most important thing.

Maybe we need to start teaching people to habitually attach provenance and confidence information to every fact (really: belief) they report, at least as much as practically possible? "Iraq had WMDs in 2000s" != "I strongly believe Iraq had WMDs in 2000s" != "I find it plausible that Iraq might have had WMDs in 2000s" != "According to that UN report, Iraq had WMDs in 2000s" != "According to NYT, which quotes that UN…

Yes- intellectual dishonesty is at the root of this. When I was raised, the integrity of a "man's" word was a measure of the "goodness" of the person. Now, we hear things like "he said what he had to say" and a basic acceptance of lies if the person is on our side of the debate.

It's depressing.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#858

Post by buboard »

jaimeyap wrote: post #827
yoavm wrote: post #784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But these really aren't the type of lies that people consider fake news. Yeah, all the things you've written are facts, and their interpretations are what we call opinions. I agree with you that all of these statements, since they're true, should be allowed without a question. People still need to think and be critical. I just took a look at a long list of lies by your current President. It has nothing to do with fac…

This. The march to authoritarianism accelerates when people accept the meme that the truth is unknowable. So they simply accept the reality put forth by the autocrat. The most basic kind of truths are facts. We at least need to agree on those as best we can first. And then apply critical thinking on the the squishier stuff on top.

The world s autocratic countries (russia china turkey etc) don’t rely on fabricated news, they rely on hiding the truth and placing a biased spin on it. They know that outright lies will actually harm their image.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#859

Post by hartator »

ralusek wrote: post #685
moksly wrote: post #666

In Denmark we have laws in place that hold news paper editors responsible for printing truth. They don’t always succeed, but they try to, and when they do fail they admit it and apologise. This is what has kept our society well informed and critical thinking for a hundred years. It’s also allowed for different sides of things, because you can interpret things like socioeconomic statistics and facts differently and wr…

The lowest level of truth telling is stating facts, but even stating facts can be extremely manipulative. If I were to say: "2x as many white Americans were killed by police as black Americans in 2018." This a true fact. If I take note of the fact that black Americans only constitute 13% of the population, then I can say "A black American is 2.3x as likely as a white American to be killed by police." This is also a t…

And all of this is unfortunately actually hate speech in Denmark because you can’t have stats on races.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#860

Post by mkr-hn »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #850
jlg23 wrote: post #843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most basic kind of truths are facts. Except for that for a lot of "facts", according to Rousseau, we already have 4 truths: what you say, what I say, what we agree upon and what really happened. So, while the pursuit of truth is important, I'd argue that respect towards each other even when we cannot agree is the most important thing.

Maybe we need to start teaching people to habitually attach provenance and confidence information to every fact (really: belief) they report, at least as much as practically possible? "Iraq had WMDs in 2000s" != "I strongly believe Iraq had WMDs in 2000s" != "I find it plausible that Iraq might have had WMDs in 2000s" != "According to that UN report, Iraq had WMDs in 2000s" != "According to NYT, which quotes that UN…

I've tried to get into this habit. Qualifications are great too because when someone comes back to say "you said X! You lied!" you can remind them of how carefully you qualified your statement.

This is Circle of Competence applied[0]. It's admitting what you know you don't know so you don't make mistakes by being overconfident.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_competence

Post reply on HN