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Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

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

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, so I think there's some nuance there, I think there's a pragmatic line to draw - I don't think someone has a right to say anything on twitter, I just don't think that's twitters role is to be neutral. But I think there's a line where we go from a product that's curated and moderated - something like twitter, to something that is truly infrastructure. The DNS example is great, I don't think a DNS company should…

Then Twitter has to lose their protections as a 'carrier' and become a publisher with all the regulation that goes along with being a publisher.

No they don't. People seem to have this idea that either you should be liable for nothing and control nothing or liable for everything control everything. The point of these platforms is that whilst they're allowing users to post under limited conditions, they don't have any pre-publication editorial control. That is a material difference from a publisher. They also aren't totally agnostic to content (like a DNS service). This attempt to hold user-generated content to the same standard as news organisations is clearly ridiculous and I don't know why people keep trying to apply it. It's a great way of ensuring that no level of regulation will ever be applied - since the suggested level of regulation completely destroys the business model of several hundred billion dollar businesses.

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

#472
post #208

There's an unsolved conundrum I haven't heard mentioned yet. 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…

>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…

What would be required to prove your identity? Would you be able to tweet anonymously, or must you tweet under that identity? There are some issues with that, for example people without government identification would not be allowed to tweet. Perhaps you could use unique fingerprints, but that turns into a huge privacy concern and I can never see that being accepted. Maybe there are some unique bio-markers that could be used which people feel would be irrelevant or otherwise useless enough to not be an invasion of privacy.

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

#473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not real "conservative" views that get censored is it its entryist far right views. Its like in the UK when Corbyn's crank supporters claim ultra far left positions are main steam labour views when they are not.

Corbyn is ultra far left? The way he was getting slandered as some sort of neonazi, I assumed he was considered too rightwing or something. British politics can be confusing to outside observers..

He's the Islamic terrorist sympathizer type of anti-Semite, not the neo-Nazi type. We get it from both sides.

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

#474
post #146

There's an unsolved conundrum I haven't heard mentioned yet. 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…

Media literacy and criticism classes in middle school?

critical thinking classes from kindergarten through the end of college.

i have developed a loose curriculum for the latter half of that pipeline, but getting the education uniformly distributed throughout the public mind market is the hard part.

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

#475

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/

Adding a link to a factual counter-argument is not censorship. Even adding a link to a non-factual, non-sensical rant is not censorship.

You're actually suggesting that posting dissenting information is censorship?!?

Black is white! Good is bad!

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

#476

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…

It is not at all a solved problem. Fact-checking has the ancient "who watches the watchers" problem. Who facts checks the fact-checkers? And more broadly, censoring harassing tweets has the problem that a lot of activism looks a lot like harassment, and censoring "conspiracy theories" looks a lot like powerful people censoring those speaking truth to power.

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.

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

#477
post #417

The powers that be in Beijing and China must be pinching themselves; none of their predecessors had gotten this fortunate, for this long. Every day the US leadership appears committed to demolishing its outward image of a prosperous and stable democratic order. Meanwhile, they can continue running roughshod over political opposition and bullying their neighbours, totally unopposed. Russia has used the past 15 years t…

American dominance was pure luck after escaping from WWII unscathed and in a relatively strong financial position. The major economically prodictive technologies we rely on today came of age in the first half of last century and we used them to build an inefficient glass castle without considering the deleterious effects of rapid population growth or hyperconnectedness of human minds. The political order the US creat…

> The revolution we need is localism.

Agreed. All politics is local after all. The problem is that the economic incentives are pointed in the polar opposite direction. Startups can't get funding if their ambitions are limited to their city, or even within the borders of their country.

As was mentioned in an article I can't locate, a lot of the world's top technical talent is stuck working at well paid jobs, on products that simply don't matter relative to the challenges humanity is facing.

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

#478

Free speech is not just an American constitutional right; many countries throughout the world consider free speech to be a human right. 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…

Okay, so I think there's some nuance there, I think there's a pragmatic line to draw - I don't think someone has a right to say anything on twitter, I just don't think that's twitters role is to be neutral. But I think there's a line where we go from a product that's curated and moderated - something like twitter, to something that is truly infrastructure. The DNS example is great, I don't think a DNS company should…

If Twitter wants control over what's published on their site, then they give up their rights (their 'free harbor'-alike protections) to not be held responsible for the content they censor and let through.

Twitter et al. are where modern speech happens. They pushed themselves into this position, and thus upholding the human right to free speech also falls upon them.

So long as Twitter is not shut down, then perhaps some government oversight (to the limit of holding Twitter responsible for what and who they censor) is appropriate.

Free speech, in this case, trumps my intense dislike of our current administration.

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

#480
post #214

Twitter will kowtow to the President here. He is the reason alone Twitter survived the last 6 years and they have shown publicly that politicians and celebrities play by different rules on their platform.

In the last 15+ years we have heard this same story, "X platform wouldn't exist without Y user". This has never turned out to be true for any large scale social media platform. For the platforms that have failed, it was always a better platform that took their place, not one single user causing a mass migration.

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...

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