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

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

#531

Post by rtkwe » Wed, May 27, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

beart wrote: post #490

shiado wrote: post #227

How can the "private platform so they can do whatever they want" crowd reconcile their views on election interference using social media in 2016 with this latest move by Twitter? If they can do what they want with their platform why did it matter in 2016 and why does it not matter now?

I can't directly answer the question. However, I think what complicates this issue is the political actors involved. Twitter may be a private platform, but when the President posts a Tweet, that is very much a public, political, government message. For example, a federal judge barred Trump from blocking followers, despite Twitter being a private platform. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/23/trump-cant-block-twitter-fol..…

The big difference here is the judge was restricting Trump as a government actor from doing something while the Twitter side of things is Twitter doing something on their own platform. Trump very much was using Twitter as the official place for announcements for a while and if it's the official place to learn government policy you can't block people from seeing it.

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

#532

Post by redisman » Wed, May 27, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

asdff wrote: post #528

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…

It's as simple as toning down the virulance and addiction potential that has been baked into social media over the years. Revert to chronological feeds based on timestamp alone, and not sorting based on how many inflammatory comments and shares they have. Ban more pages that produce and share these misinformed posts. These are problems that these engagement algorithms themselves created, and social media companies ar…

Right, the actual fix is to change their core business model which they'll never do.

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

#533

Post by seph-reed » Wed, May 27, 2020, 5:31 PM UTC

techntoke wrote: post #514

dathinab wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but such bullying is rather dangerous. Normally such threads come from people which are somewhat in the process or trying to de-mantel a democracy. So a US president saying something like that is quite worrying even if his intentions are not to undermine the US democracy.

That is exactly his intentions. He is an idiot for using Twitter in the first place. He should have been advocating for a decentralized Internet where his followers could live in a bubble catered to them.

Holy fuck A+!

Almost every time I hear people call Trump stupid, I cringe a bit expecting them to follow it up with examples of their inability to deal with trolls and "why can't everyone get along."

I really wish everyone could get along, but life isn't so sweet yet.

What you suggested was a better way to troll, thereby proving you understand the shit bag, and his game. You are legitimately smarter than Trump at his own game, and that is something I've seen pretty much nowhere.

Thank you so much for existing.

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

#534

Post by fetbaffe » Wed, May 27, 2020, 5:33 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.

Pro-Life means Pro-Humans which means to organize some movement against death.

Would we really want people to be the inverse? Meaning would we like them to accept more of death?

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

#535

Post by staycoolboy » Wed, May 27, 2020, 5:35 PM UTC

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…

> As a human, I still struggle a lot to read a paper and figure out what I just read

Has this always been the case for you? or just in the past few years?

I didn't care about news until the first gulf war. Then something flipped a switch in my brain and I could not get enough news. When news broadcasters started adopting websites in the 90's, I was like a junkie.

I don't recall significant partisan division over Gulf War I, but I do recall a hard left/right split with the house takeover by Gingrich in 1994, and then the Clinton impeachment. Late 1990's is where things started to become bifurcated (remember, I wasn't paying attention in the 70's and 80's so it could have been as bad).

Fast forward to mid 2010's and suddenly there are too many websites with "news" combined with SEO and recommendation algorithms spouting demonstrable nonsense that I can't help but hear Steve Bannon's "Flood the zone with shit" argument.

Because it is working on me. I am over-educated (an engineering patent attorney for a top silicon company), I get paid to be a critical thinker. Facts and news just are clearly under assault from the zone-flooding angle to the point where being critical wears me to the bone.

Was this intentional, or is this a consequence?

Has the zone been successfully flooded as Bannon commanded?

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

#536

Post by mcintyre1994 » Wed, May 27, 2020, 5:39 PM UTC

jobigoud wrote: post #330

asdkhadsj wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a straw man for discussion; I'm not too familiar with what Twitter is doing, but in an ideal world I think the solution would look something like what Twitter sounds like. Notably, posts containing objectively false information would be flagged, but not necessarily censored. With that straw man though, it's fairly easy to poke holes. How do we ever even implement that? Even if we ignore the sheer volume of posts,…

One avenue that has been taken by Youtube for example with the Coronavirus news is to not try to detect lies/truths but just detect the controversial topic and add a banner under the video with a link to official sources. It's much simpler to implement. A disadvantage is that it becomes so ubiquitous that people probably don't care about the link.

At least they try to detect the topic. Reddit's app has for some time been permanently showing a "look at /r/coronavirus" banner at the top of the default Home tab. I'm not exactly sure how they're moderating that or whatever, but the fact it's there all the time doesn't seem to reduce conspiracies flying around the rest of their site and they don't make any effort to attach it to them posts.

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

#537

Post by LordDragonfang » Wed, May 27, 2020, 5:40 PM UTC

Consultant32452 wrote: post #487

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.

I feel like the only people who think Twitter is a credible fact checker of the President are not the people who would believe anything the President says anyways.

While this feels like it's true in the broad strokes, and it is certainly a good quip, it's important to remember that there are always going to be people on the border between one and the other, who can easily be influenced to fall a certain way if they believe a certain exclamation or falsehood.

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

#538

Post by mrlonglong » Wed, May 27, 2020, 5:40 PM UTC

I'm getting extremely tired of his Twitter tantrums. I suspect many feels the same way. I shan't shed not one tear if he get voted out in the November elections.

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

#539

Post by giarc » Wed, May 27, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

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…

Social media companies don't necessarily need to take a stand. Label any tweet with the word 'vaccine/vaccination' with a link to the WHO (or insert users country health ministry) info on vaccines. There is obiviously a lot of topics to cover (voting rights, flat earth, conspiracy theories etc) but isn't the thing tech companies can do well is things at scale?

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

#540

Post by koheripbal » Wed, May 27, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

asdff wrote: post #528

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…

It's as simple as toning down the virulance and addiction potential that has been baked into social media over the years. Revert to chronological feeds based on timestamp alone, and not sorting based on how many inflammatory comments and shares they have. Ban more pages that produce and share these misinformed posts. These are problems that these engagement algorithms themselves created, and social media companies ar…

I don't think reverting to chrono content makes sense. If popularity doesn't influence what's top-of-feed, then we'll just be flooded with un-interesting content.

Imagine if HN or Reddit didn't sort by popularity? Everyone would need to sort through /new. ...that's not scalable.

What would be better would be to reward controversial content. If lots of people downvote something, and also lots of people upvote, then maybe it needs more attention, not less?

So that rather than creating ever-more-extremist bubbles, people are more likely to see opinions that make them force them to appreciate other points of view.