Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms • Hacker News Board

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

#421

Post by danShumway » Wed, May 27, 2020, 2:28 PM UTC

hunter2_ wrote: post #338

Someone1234 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so we're clear: Hacker News is social media.

Are message boards / BBS / forums?

Yes.

I don't want to be dismissive, if you have some kind of distinction you're trying to get at, I'm open to hearing it. But I personally don't see a big conceptual difference between Reddit and a forum, other than that one of them happened to get bigger. And I'm pretty skeptical of using size as a criteria here, because it would force us to say that Google+ and MySpace stopped being social media at some point when they dipped in popularity.

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

#422

Post by UncleMeat » Wed, May 27, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

giardini wrote: post #337

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.

Under a doctrine of free speech, politics has no "clearly false messages". There are only "messages". You are, however, allowed to state that a message is "clearly false". Thus if you wish to say that the world is flat, then you are allowed to say so, and others are allowed to state their supporting or opposing arguments on the same topic on the same forum, and everyone is allowed to listen.

And he wasn’t prevented from saying anything. We got more speech here, not less.

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

#423

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 27, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

stickfigure wrote: post #340

yesplorer wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatsapp forwards is largely a solved problem. Now you can't forward whatsapp messages to more than 5 people at a go. And if you try doing 5 people at a time consecutively, your account is automatically deleted even before you reach 30 total forwards. 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 g…

Your solution is to ban humans from talking to more than 5 others at once?

[deleted]

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

#424

Post by cwhiz » Wed, May 27, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

jobigoud wrote: post #348

cwhiz wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So the question remains - do you, or how do you lessen the spread of misinformation? 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…

Misinformation spreads a lot human-to-human too. Like on Whatsapp or Facebook for example.

It does but that also happens in real life outside of digital spaces. It’s not something you can control.

How much did this “reopen America” botnet influence national discussion? People don’t innately expect a Twitter or Facebook user to be a bot. We have to remove these bot accounts.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/nearly-half-twitter-accounts-dis...

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

#425

Post by metrokoi » Wed, May 27, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

Almost no one is ever happy with fact-checking, it often just leads to more disputes about whether or not the fact-checking is correct or warranted. To me it seems much more efficient to simply teach people not to take anything posted on social media seriously and to better think for themselves. One may say that the president should be an exception because of the number of people he reaches, but what about a famous actor with millions of followers? Or Elon Musk? What would the line of acceptable influence be in order to make someone fact-checkable? The set of fact-checkable people could be very large, and the manpower required to fact check all of them formidable.

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.

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

#426

Post by modwest » Wed, May 27, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

Communitivity wrote: post #352

Good luck with that (not). Today we have decentralized social networks specifically designed to combat that kind of censorship, and other problems with centralized control. 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/

it's not censorship. not even close. good grief.

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

#427

Post by simias » Wed, May 27, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

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…

I understand what you mean but I'm always frustrated when I see Idiocracy brought up in these discussions. Idiocracy is fine if you view it as a light satirical comedy but if you take it seriously to talk about politics it has very sinister undertones.

For one thing it's extremely classist, throughout the movie popular culture is seen as fodder for dumb people while high culture if for clever people. Beyond that it also says that, effectively, dumb people and poor people are the same thing (as exemplified by the "white trash" segment at the start of the movie) and that dumb, poor people are bound to breed dump, poor people (and apparently they do that a lot) while clever people would breed other clever people (but they don't do it because... reasons). So social determinism taken to the limit.

I mean just look at this intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZ0ZUy7P3E

What are examples of clever people? Darwin, Beethoven and Da Vince.

Examples of "degeneracy"? A girl in skimpy clothes, wrestling and a... woman with boxing gloves? Because clearly "panem et circenses" is a novel concept.

Then we go to say "with no natural predators to thin the herd, we began to simply began to reward those who reproduced the most and left the intelligent to become an endangered species". So we're now talking full-on eugenics. Also Beethoven was well known for fending packs of wolves in his youth, proving his evolutionary superiority.

And I'm this point I'm literally one minute into the movie and I could go on and on and on. At best it's elitist, at worst it's much darker than that.

If you like the movie as a funny comedy then be my guest, but please stop bringing it up in political discussions. If anything it's a symptom of the very thing you're decrying: a dumbed down, unnuanced caricature of political discourse.

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

#428

Post by michaelt » Wed, May 27, 2020, 2:31 PM UTC

zaroth wrote: post #267

Beltiras wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big murky middle where you can't really tell but in the case of what Trump is complaining about an informed observer would come to a conclusion really quickly.

Voter registration rolls are pretty notorious for being out of date and unreliable. Personally I don’t have a problem with anyone who wants to vote by mail being able to request a ballot. Most states already allow no-excuse absentee ballets. I think the problem arises when the State automatically mails ballots to every registered voter at an address. If too many ballots show up at a house because someone requested it…

Seems to me the solution there is to fix the voter registration rolls, rather than to make voting harder for people who are already on the rolls.

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

#429

Post by danbruc » Wed, May 27, 2020, 2:31 PM UTC

giardini wrote: post #337

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.

Under a doctrine of free speech, politics has no "clearly false messages". There are only "messages". You are, however, allowed to state that a message is "clearly false". Thus if you wish to say that the world is flat, then you are allowed to say so, and others are allowed to state their supporting or opposing arguments on the same topic on the same forum, and everyone is allowed to listen.

Under a doctrine of free speech, politics has no "clearly false messages".

Free speech and the correctness of a message are orthogonal concerns - the Earth is flat is a false claim no matter whether there is free speech or not and neither supporting nor opposing arguments have any bearing on that fact, they may however influence other people accepting or rejecting it.

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

#430

Post by ojnabieoot » Wed, May 27, 2020, 2:31 PM UTC

Finnucane wrote: post #391

It's pretty obvious that DT is not going to shut down the very platforms he relies on for his political survival. Even he's not that stupid. Nor does he have any real regulatory authority that could be employed that wouldn't also bite him back. So this is just him trying to bully the platforms into letting him say whatever without being exposed to any criticism or being called out for bullshit.

The salient comparison is Bezos and WaPo. Even if Trump can’t attack a newspaper directly, he can (and has) attacked other business ventures to try to force censorship - hit AWS hard enough that Bezos interfere with his newspaper to get Trump off his back. Given yesterday’s WSJ story about Facebook, it seems to be working.

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.