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

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

#491

Post by ProAm » Wed, May 27, 2020, 3:29 PM UTC

bearjaws wrote: post #480

ProAm wrote: 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 shutdo…

I agree but I really think Trump saved Twitter. The company was for sale and couldn't find a buyer remotely interested. They couldnt find anyone willing to take the CEO seat so they asked Jack Dorsey to come back. They were in the dumps as a company until Trump started to tweet like a madman. I really do believe that Trump saved Twitter. I dont remember people thinking Reddit would fail if they lost the_donald subreddit?

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

#492

Post by jasonwatkinspdx » Wed, May 27, 2020, 3:30 PM UTC

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…

It's a bunch of nonsense. Oregon has been using vote by mail since like 1981. The kind of fraud the president is fear mongering about doesn't happen there.

If other states see higher problem rates in their vote by mail, it's likely a selection effect due to vote by mail being not the main method.

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

#493

Post by C1sc0cat » Wed, May 27, 2020, 3:32 PM UTC

catalogia wrote: post #433

C1sc0cat wrote: post #233

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..

Yep full he's full Tankie - more interested in turning Labour into a niche party and dreaming of a revolution.

The sort who sell papers calling on the UK to help Assad crush the counter revolutionary's under the tracks of tanks.

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

#494

Post by polytely » Wed, May 27, 2020, 3:35 PM UTC

bt1a wrote: post #100

rlyshw wrote: post #72

Honestly just more proof that we need decentralization of the Internet. Handing over control of our digital platforms and identities to 3rd party for-profit companies is not the way the internet should work.

Aye but with no one in charge, how can the masses protect themselves against ever-increasing disinformation campaigns?

Well in the case of mastodon, I found an instance with an owner whose judgement I trust.

I think the main problem with twitter is scale: Because the network allows you to reach the whole world it also is a big target for disinformation networks and the sheer volume of posts makes it uneconomical to moderate.

If you look at mastodon, the instance I'm on has about 600 monthly active users. That's pretty easy for an admin to handle. If a bunch of users show up orchestrating a disinfo campaign the admin would notice, and if an instance is a source of disinfo it can be blocked.

Instance will stop federating with other instances if they are too much to deal with, so admins are incentivized not to grow beyond what they could moderate, to maintain access to the fediverse.

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

#495

Post by devtul » Wed, May 27, 2020, 3:37 PM UTC

josefresco wrote: post #142

djohnston wrote: post #79

The head of integrity has unabashedly showcased his strong political bias on Twitter, and I suspect things will begin going poorly for either him or Twitter shortly.

Turns out, people with important jobs that require impartiality (like judges) have real, personal, opinions and feelings.

The amount of leeway given to one side of the political spectrum is what causes this whole heated political climate.

Whenever some known person from the "right side of history" says something clearly bad, there are always comments like yours "but but but", whereas when the source is on the "wrong side of history" it is taken as final and irrefutable proof of their evilness and no amount of perspective or depth is allowed.

Things will get better when we can give a level headed non-partisan response to statements like

>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.'

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

#496

Post by snowwrestler » Wed, May 27, 2020, 3:38 PM UTC

dvtrn wrote: post #146

tuna-piano wrote: post #133

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?

Absolutely.

It's always surprising to me to see tech folks disparage humanities studies, then seem flabbergasted at how to fight problems like disinformation/misinformation. IMO, studying language, literature, and criticism are critical skills for operating in a culture that is flooded with information.

In terms of what we can do right now... I've been following Mike Caulfield on Twitter (@holden) and he is doing some interesting work on developing mental tools that school kids can use to evaluate the information that comes to them in social feeds.

https://twitter.com/holden

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

#497

Post by chlodwig » Wed, May 27, 2020, 3:41 PM UTC

mgoetzke wrote: post #468

gadders wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly not a solved problem when the "Head of Site Integrity" has a history of anti-Trump tweets and called the President a Nazi. 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...

pro-Antifa means Pro Anti-Fascist which means to organise some movement against fascism. Would we really want people to be the inverse ? Meaning would we like them to be more fascist or accepting of fascism ? What exactly happened that AntiFa has become a group that people don't support ? Maybe I missed something there.

And the Berlin Wall was the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart." Who could be against a wall to protect against incursions of fascism? What are you a fascist yourself?

I'm going to form a group called the "anti-baddies alliance." Who could be for "baddies"? And we are going to combat "baddies" "by any means necessary", including taking over the streets, punching people we decide are real bad baddies, agitating to get baddies de-platformed. Who could be against this? Would we want the inverse? Do we want people to be more bad or more accepting of baddies? (Also, while we say we are just "anti-baddies", we will also unofficially have a set of positive beliefs about how society should be radically restructured that almost all of us share to some degree, and that we continually agitate for. But if we get called out on this, we will deny it and just say, "hey, we're just anti-baddies, who is against being anti-baddie"?

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

#498

Post by yesplorer » Wed, May 27, 2020, 3:43 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?

you can talk to hundred people at at time. You just can't forward the same message to more than 5 people at the time. What's the problem with that?

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

#499

Post by clairity » Wed, May 27, 2020, 3:45 PM UTC

IanCal wrote: post #411

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…

Unfortunately the idea that alcohol can kill the virus (if you drink it) is taken seriously by some, and has resulted in more than 700 deaths in Iran https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/iran-700-dead-drinkin...

alcohol does kill viruses, so it should be taken seriously. the falsehood is that drinking alcohol will kill viruses in your body without doing other harm. the missing intuition is the deleterious effects on the body and the lack of targeting once therein.

our biological systems are infinitely complex and shouldn't be arbitrarily subject to whims of fashion or fear. the panic and frenzy whipped up by media and politicians, rather than information and intuition-building, are principally at fault here.

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

#500

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, May 27, 2020, 3:54 PM UTC

mgoetzke wrote: post #468

gadders wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly not a solved problem when the "Head of Site Integrity" has a history of anti-Trump tweets and called the President a Nazi. 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...

pro-Antifa means Pro Anti-Fascist which means to organise some movement against fascism. Would we really want people to be the inverse ? Meaning would we like them to be more fascist or accepting of fascism ? What exactly happened that AntiFa has become a group that people don't support ? Maybe I missed something there.

> What exactly happened that AntiFa has become a group that people don't support ?

The rise of right-wing, racist, nationalist, jingoist, corporatist strong-man authoritarianism.

I think there's a shorter term for that...