Twitter must have automation for this, since they do it for tweets generally. How do they do that? Anybody know?
Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
621–630 of 1001 posts
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#622I 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…
Literally hundreds of people, including children, have died drinking bootleg alcohol being hawked as a COVID-19 cure. It is simply not the case that “any reasonable adult” knows your joke is a joke - that may be the case in developed countries where people have reliable access to actual doctors. But in developing countries this has been a serious problem. Misinformation kills innocent people. A harsh no-tolerance pol…
Wow. I was going to ask for a source since your mention of hundreds of deaths sounded so unbelievable, but it was very easy to find:
> Iran: Over 700 dead after drinking alcohol to cure coronavirus
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/iran-700-dead-drinkin...
Crazy what people will do due to misinformation.
There were some news reports after Trump's suggestions to use disinfectant as a COVID-19 cure that hundreds of people had called health services to ask if it was indeed a legitimate way to get rid of coronavirus. Now I'm wondering how many didn't call and just went ahead with the "treatment".
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#623Almost 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 a…
> simply teach people not to take anything posted on social media seriously and to better think for themselves
clearly there is nothing simple about this
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#624Almost 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 a…
> teach people not to take anything posted on social media seriously and to better think for themselves.
Most underrated comment in this thread...
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#625What a petty weeniehead. Acts like a child, he's the President of the United States.
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#626I’m an outsider (not American, don’t live in America) so I’m almost not entitled to have an opinion on the matter, but it always strikes me as fairly odd when people of one persuasion or another rail against the ‘bias’ that they perceive against them in one circumstance or another (including media coverage). Of course people see bias against them. It’s classical confirmation bias: every time something goes their way,…
> so I’m almost not entitled to have an opinion on the matter
I'm gonna go ahead and disagree with you here. The US is such a prominent nation, that can make or break the economies other countries, depending on their political actions.
I've seen a lot of this "It's US politics, so none of your business" writing when criticizing Trump - but fact is that most countries are not perfectly de-coupled from each others. The US relies on some countries, while other countries relies on the US.
Sure, you do not have any right to vote for him, but you sure as hell are entitled to voice your opinion on him.
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#627First, some government authorities (such as at airports) ask for social media information. Employers can, as well, when doing background checks.
Next, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have become de-facto presence for political figures, companies and individuals. Erased from here, they cease to exist. Almost like scrubbing a Google search result.
The above points COMPEL the U.S. government and any other government to consider the possibility that they are now a public utility (like electrical companies) and an essential service. The argument that they are private companies and therefore should forever be removed from the jurisdiction of the 1st Amendment (in the case of the U.S.), since this only applies to government, is extremely antiquated. Did smartphones and Presidential tweets exist in 1776?
If electrical companies and railroads can be regulated and for-profit, then why would "my company, I do what I want" magically apply forever to Faceook, Twitter and Instagram?
I am NOT defending what Trump was quoted saying here. I AM making a case that we need to update our legal framework to account for modernity. And to account for a heretofore unpredictable and unfathomable technological achievement of an instant network of human ideas and presence that is controlled by a few California companies. I'd bet money that the question will be considered in the coming few years by the high courts, and there's a non-zero chance they'll agree with what I've just said.
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#628Earlier quoted context omitted.
And if he decided to "close" Twitter, it would actually be a clear case of censorship from the government and a violation of free speech. Twitter is merely labelling a tweet as being factually incorrect, it's not hiding the content.
Well, it wouldn't be, because he _couldn't do it_. He's not a dictator, despite apparent aspirations.
Real question: As the head of the Federal executive branch, who would stop him?
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#629Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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). Why is it bad that were refusing to let something like stormfront operate in polite society? Your free speech absolutism is dangerous. You can't debate an inherently b…
You debate an inherently bad-faith interlocutor, not to win the debate with them, but to win the audience . The thing is, something like stormfront is out there, whether twitter or whoever carries them or not. I'd like their drivel to be clearly exposed as drivel, and clearly understood to be drivel by everyone, so that when they get exposed to it in some unexpected way (they follow an innocent-looking link or whatev…
Yeah, that's not how it works at all. People who start watching the Qanon videos in their Youtube reccomendations aren't going to then get swayed by your eloquent speech, they are going to get sucked into a whole alternate world where your arguments are just dismissed as part of the conspiracy.
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#630Earlier quoted context omitted.
Media literacy and criticism classes in middle school?
I used to think this was the answer. I now think the problem with this is a lack of standards. It is documented that textbook manufacturers publish different history and science texts based on the region of the country regarding the civil war or evolution. Not to be a nihilist, but what makes you think underfunded schools that struggle to teach basic reading will teach media literacy and criticism with any success? a…
To properly think critically you'd have to even question what school teaches you. The framework of school as an institution, it's purposes, it's origins. If you're lucky, your parents teach you how the real world relates to school, how teachers are just normal people, and aren't experts, that schools are operated under a certain ideological agenda, either governmental or from the owners of the private institution. That even experts aren't truth-oracles and have disagreements. That in complicated questions, like history, different countries may teach very different stories in school. And that your school's version is also not unbiased.
I don't see how you can teach the essence of critical thinking when it's in itself a fiercely individualistic don't-just-trust-the-authority idea.
If you teach it as such, you will get people to believe in any and all crackpottery because "I learned not to trust school and experts, I now found the actual truth that my school has repressed in this creationist UFO book on how aliens built the pyramids".
The other option is to teach them not to trust anything that comes from "unapproved" sources, only believe your government institutions, UN orgs etc. This may seem like a good baseline for the average person but it's just appeal to authority and not critical thinking.
I think there is just no such thing as "critical thinking" that could be taught as such, in itself. You have to go to the object level. If you want to dispel creationism, you have to teach biology and talk about how we know what we know about evolution and make sure people deeply understand it in their bones and they don't just regurgitate what they think you expect of them. It's the same in every subject. If you want people not to believe in magic healing crystal energy vibrations and parapsychology and homeopathy, you have to get them to understand some principles of real medicine and real physics (with equations and exercises all that). Only someone who has firm foundations on the object level, can successfully apply critical thinking.
One thing that could be taught though is propaganda techniques, marketing psychology, how it relates to the brain's reward systems, how ads are designed and monitored, A/B testing and tracking in cell phones, addiction. How cults form, the human biases that cult leaders use, a lot of stuff about human behavior, social psychology, trust, different personality types. Fallacies, pitfalls of thinking. But all these are very meta and again, to have a good grasp of these, you need a good actual base on the object level.
Most of actual critical thinking in the real world looks like "wait a minute, that doesn't feel right according to my model of how the world works". It's not really by matching things against a shortlist of logical fallacies that you had to memorize for some test.