Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

811–820 of 1001 posts

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

#811

Post by root_axis »

rmtech wrote: post #781
Traster wrote: post #36

I think this is going to be a discussion thread that is almost inevitably going to be a shitshow, but anyway: There are people who advocate the idea that private companies should be compelled to distribute hate speech, dangerously factually incorrect information and harassment under the concept that free speech is should be applied universally rather than just to government. I don't agree, I think it's a vast over-re…

A private company that has a monopoly on speech is no longer a private company, it's essentially an unelected and unaccountable part of the permanent government. You need to think about entities based on their properties, not the labels that are attached to them. That ought to be obvious to people who program for a living; think of a private company with a speech monopoly as the good old .txt.exe scam. You're attachi…

I am so tired of this disingenuous line of argumentation. Twitter is not at all like a government, it is a private business that offers a free service which you are under no obligation to use, it has no army or legal authority over your life, stop acting like what gets posted or removed from twitter is anything other than a bullshit triviality.

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

#812

Post by null0pointer »

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…

One nuance about facts is that they change over time as we learn more about whatever the fact is about. Take SARS-CoV-2 for example, our best scientific knowledge about it has changed significantly since the start of the year. Some _facts_ from January would be considered _misinformation_ now. You might say that the actual facts are the underlying truth, but even that doesn't help. Our current view on the underlying truth are what is widely considered to be factual. The underlying truth can also change, for instance as the virus evolves and takes on different characteristics. Fact checking is most definitely not solved and I would posit that it's fundamentally intractable.

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

#813

Post by umvi »

jdashg wrote: post #552
metrokoi wrote: post #425

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 a…

We have tried teaching people not to believe everything they read on the internet already. We need solutions that actually work. It's wishful thinking at best to believe that Twitter replies can effectively refute arguments. They don't establish public dialog unless the OP retweets the responses. You can't call it a dialogue if, effectively, there's only one person talking. Even simple refutations fail on Twitter. "W…

What western democracies really need is an entire government segment dedicated to fact-checking. We could call it the "Department of Truth" (or "Ministry of Truth" in UK) and it would be responsible for labeling things on social media as true or false using little fact checker badges.

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

#814

Post by Avicebron »

effable wrote: post #805
rmtech wrote: post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A private company that has a monopoly on speech is no longer a private company, it's essentially an unelected and unaccountable part of the permanent government. You need to think about entities based on their properties, not the labels that are attached to them. That ought to be obvious to people who program for a living; think of a private company with a speech monopoly as the good old .txt.exe scam. You're attachi…

So what's the criteria for ascertaining that a company, like Twitter, has a monopoly on speech and why does that make it like a government? Unless you are claiming that the US government has a monopoly on speech - meaning that anything the US government does not want said, cannot be said in public which is certainly not true in this case since the head of the US government is threatening to shut down Twitter over som…

Sheer size is a form of monopoly and government. If a company can't be tipped out of your position by a scrappy startup like Youtube, arguably Twitter, then the people have to step in to start making decisions about what it gets to do.

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

#816

Post by umvi »

qubex wrote: post #677
TrackerFF wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I most definitely do have an opinion on him, and a very negative one at that. However, I try to keep that as reserved as possible for a number of reasons, including: - Manifesting my like or dislike of the man immediately places one side or the other of tribal warfare, and that is precisely what I’d like to see less of; - In my experience Americans are extremely testy and sometimes downright hostile when foreigners e…

I have Italian friends on FB constantly voicing their criticisms of US government. It just strikes me as massively hypocritical when Italy's government is a complete train wreck. It's easy to criticize, it's harder to lead by example.

My instinct is to reply "Then show us how it's done with your own government. It isn't easy, is it?"

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

#817

Post by mightybyte »

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…

I imagine I'll get downvoted for this, but I think it needs to be said. Perhaps one way to lessen the spread of misinformation is to not operate services that limit messages to 280 characters. The world is not black and white. Meaningful topics are almost always nuanced and do not lend themselves to pithy sound bites. Let me demonstrate my point in a provocative way:

===== The world would be a better place if Twitter did not exist. =====

Note the lack of caveat, nuance, or elaboration here. It's not conducive to making the argument in a compelling and convincing way, especially not in the ways espoused by Hacker News. People who agree with that statement are going to agree. People who don't are going to be outraged.

If you do agree with the above the real question is what to do about it. Does the problem lie with the people at Twitter? With capitalism? With democracy? With the particular implementation that is the United States? Is this just something inherent to human nature? Or is the internet to blame? There are no simple answers to these questions. But perhaps the mediums that we use to have the discussions have a substantial impact on the conversation.

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

#818

Post by banads »

Gollapalli wrote: post #795
Loughla wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ask some oracle what "fact" is and shun every other point of view? This statement concerns me, greatly. Its implication is that facts are merely point of view statements. That is just, well, it's just wrong. Facts are facts. The truth is the truth. They don't care what your beliefs are. If it is empirically true, then it is true. Why and when did it become okay to hand-wave and dismiss anything you didn't believe i…

>Facts are facts. The truth is the truth. My immediate reaction to such sentiments is that the ones who hold them would have imprisoned Galileo and poisoned Socrates. We can comfortably say that the truth exists. We cannot so comfortably say that we know what it is.

"To know that you do not know is the best. To think you know when you do not is a disease. Recognizing this disease as a disease is to be free of it."

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

#819

Post by danShumway »

cheaprentalyeti wrote: post #671
danShumway wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only does it not seem to be a free speech issue to me, from my point of view this is basically the best-case scenario for avoiding censorship of contentious issues on dominant platforms like Facebook/Twitter. It's the obvious conclusion to arguments like, "the way to deal with bad speech is with more good speech." Twitter saw speech they disagreed with, and they fixed it with more speech. They haven't censored an…

And twitter doesn't do this with leftist speech that's wrong/inaccurate propaganda for the sake of propaganda, like (oh, for instance) today someone was posting a photoshopped picture of one of the recent reportedly abusive cops in a "Make America White Again" red hat. So wave the bloody shirt, that's AOK, but say that vote by mail facilitates fraud, and you get a personalized "We Don't Think So!" message from twitte…

> exercise editorial discresion

Adding a fact-check link to a Tweet is not censorship. Nobody took Trump's link down. And Twitter has a 1st Amendment right both to comment on what it wants to comment on, and to avoid commenting on what it doesn't want to comment on -- regardless of what their reasoning behind those decisions is.

Again, Republicans should be applauding this. Open dialog is what you wanted, right? You wanted no censorship, just open debate. Well that's what you got. Twitter didn't censor the post, they debated it. And they have every right to do so.

If your argument is that Twitter needs to be 100% politically neutral every time it makes a comment on anything, and that its editorial staff shouldn't have the ability to form opinions or choose what they comment on, then that's the Fairness Doctrine, regardless of what you want to call it.

It is of course also legal for Twitter to choose how they outright censor content because of Section 230, but I give Republicans a little bit more slack over objecting to that protection, since at least Section 230 isn't literally a Constitutional right. But anyone who wants to complain that companies should be required to be "fair" when adding political annotations is not someone who supports the 1st Amendment.

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

#820

Post by m0zg »

arrrg wrote: post #784
m0zg wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This right here gentleman is in charge of what Twitter deems "factually correct" and "safe" for you: https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/796186371408789505 Just wonderful, absolutely unbiased human being, 100% "site integrity" guaranteed: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8361349/Head-Twitte... So no, let's not "lay that aside".

It’s factually irrelevant since no facts are expressed. That’s just opinion. I guess the racist part could be arguable, but that’s more opinion than fact.

That's factually very relevant, in fact, because you know which "facts" will be picked and chosen by this "executive", in spite of the pretense of impartiality.
Post reply on HN