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

Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 1001 posts

Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

#361

Post by pinopinopino »

WaxProlix wrote: post #296
pinopinopino wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Idiocracy Or how they call it on the right side: Clown World. Guess nobody is happy with the current affairs.

From what I've seen, "clown world" can refer to perceived injustices like white women choosing black men as partners more than the incompetence or silliness of our president (or other world leadership).

Of course, it is colored by the viewpoints of the other side. But there are also connections, like the idiotic emphasis on consuming. And they laugh about the incompetence of Bernie Sanders (getting cucked all the time!) or "Creepy" Joey. Same abstraction, other implementation.

Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

#362

Post by pbhjpbhj »

nkkollaw wrote: post #332
exabrial wrote: post #205

I once got a strike on social media for posting an article about a German doctor that recommended whiskey to cure covid19. It was a joke, and any reasonable adult would know this is false. 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…

Well, I don't think it can be see as a positive even if human beings are the ones to fact-check. Who is someone working for Facebook or anyone else to flag my messages because they think they're not factual? This is crazy.

If you think the fact checker is wrong, you're welcome to provide your view -- fact checking is better than censorship and absolutely needed on social media to hinder its use for control at the population level (Cambridge Analytica style control).

Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

#363

Post by FireBeyond »

tinco wrote: post #270

Of all the things Trump has said, why add a fact check on this point that includes all kinds of vagueness? 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 w…

> Just that there's no evidence to support it doesn't mean it can't be true (however unlikely).

That's the thing. If there is no evidence to support it, it cannot be asserted as an unequivocally true statement. Trump doesn't claim that it "might" be true, or he "believes" it to be true, he says, effectively, "this is the unarguable truth". And Twitter says "not so fast".

Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

#365

Post by dathinab »

itchyjunk wrote: post #151

Hm, is fact checking solved problem? I remember someone here had their game flagged just because it referenced SARS-CoV-2. I hear almost daily horror stories of youtube algo's screwing up content creator. As a human, I still struggle a lot to read a paper and figure out what I just read. On top of that, things like the GPT2 from OpenAI might generate very human like comment. Is there no way to consider social media a…

There is a huge difference between a algorithm which detect potential fake news and adds a banner like "find information about here", "this is likely faktual wrong", etc. And a algorithm which removes the content outright.

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.)

Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

#366

Post by Communitivity »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #235

I feel like we are slowly reaching the state the movie “Idiocracy” describes. I feel very torn about this. On the one hand I don’t think we should leave it up to companies like Twitter to censor things. On the other hand I find it hard to believe that the president is constantly claiming things without any evidence backing up. It started with the claims of millions of illegal voters in 2016 and the commission they st…

Trivia bit: The writer behind Idiocracy feels the same way, saying he never expected it to become a documentary.

Details in https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/270642-idi...

Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

#367

Post by neuland »

hunter2_ wrote: post #323
neuland wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although it's impossible to put the genie back in the bottle, social media has had a net negative effect on a LOT of people. There's people that have had a big positive effect to. So, it's not obvious where it ends up on net if that even matters. 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…

> unless you consider HN social Why wouldn't we? Pseudonyms? Reddit is considered social, I think, and that tends to be even more difficult to map to IRL identity. Edit: just barely not inb4!

Yeah, that's why I only somewhat included it. It's tougher to follow specific people. But it is possible if you keep a list yourself of interesting accounts and check in later on what they've posted.

But the dynamic is definitely different and seems a lot more anonymous unless you are a really high profile account like antirez, patio11, drewdevault, or a CEO of some well known company or startup.

Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

#369

Post by user982 »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #235

I feel like we are slowly reaching the state the movie “Idiocracy” describes. I feel very torn about this. On the one hand I don’t think we should leave it up to companies like Twitter to censor things. On the other hand I find it hard to believe that the president is constantly claiming things without any evidence backing up. It started with the claims of millions of illegal voters in 2016 and the commission they st…

Compared to our present reality Idiocracy was actually utopic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmZOZjHjT5E

Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

#370

Post by noelsusman »

username90 wrote: post #259
gjulianm wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there no way to consider social media as unreliable overall and not bother fact checking anything there? 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.

The message isn't clearly false. See this article for example: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-... > Yet votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show. Election officials reject almost 2 percent of ballots cast by mail, double the rate for in-person voting. You could say tha…

That's not what he said. He claimed the election will be rigged and also claimed California is sending ballots to non-voters.
Post reply on HN