Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election • Hacker News Board

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#91

Post by themacguffinman » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 7:31 PM UTC

iamdbtoo wrote: post #13

joshfraser wrote: post #3

Free speech has taken quite a beating in recent days. It's weird watching many of my friends and people I respect cheering while it happens. I honestly don't know what we do to fix our current situation where lies so easily go viral, but making Twitter arbiters of truth doesn't seem like the best solution.

Twitter is a community and all communities require some level of moderation. There's never a situation where you let people say whatever they want, whenever they want without any moderation at all and everything goes well. You have to set some of sort of standard. We already do this as a society, so why shouldn't that extend to Twitter?

Good moderation sets standards for how we communicate that everyone is honestly able to meet regardless of their worldview. Taking this site as an example, the guidelines focus on the tone, relevancy, and novelty of your responses. It encourages civility and curiosity, it does not try to calculate the truth value of what I'm saying.

I see many "it's just moderation" takes on what Twitter is doing, but what Twitter and other platforms are now doing goes beyond what most platforms have traditionally enforced in their moderation. Hiding user content that the platform unilaterally perceives to be untruthful is really a new milestone.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#92

Post by core-questions » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 7:33 PM UTC

blhack wrote: post #61

Twitter keeps running themselves into a trap, and it is unbelievable to me that they don't see it: they cannot be the arbiters of truth. It will not work, because inevitably they'll miss something, and then people will assume that that missed thing is true. The solution is NOT to do censorship based on truth. The entire system needs to be unreliable, because it is unreliable. People need to read things on twitter (an…

This is a good take. Skepticism is one of the most important aspects of thinking critically, and building a library of skeptical techniques so as to be able to sniff out things that aren't true is crucial to being able to navigate through a sea of information.

It's sort of like the Godel incompleteness theorem of social networking: you can either be incomplete or inconsistent; any system which tries to be perfectly consistent will find itself excluding massive amounts of potential dialogue. This in turn will result in a user exodus.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#93

Post by wyoh » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 7:33 PM UTC

cmckn wrote: post #54

joshfraser wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do that effectively on a platform with hundreds of millions of people with wildly differing world views?

I think the “how” is pretty simple: the company is made up of people, the people define a set of principles, and adhere to them. They don’t have to accommodate everyone (and in my opinion, shouldn’t). I think the hard part is doing this in the face of money. We have all seen how platforms allow awful things to exist because of the economic incentives to do so.

Not elected people, not respecting the most basic of constitutional principles. Not only that, but you can't enforce your "set of principles" on billion of tweets each hour of the day, not by people at least, so you defer to bots, which are incapable of discerning what is free speech. They can't apply your principles with the discernment of a human, they can't enforce what's legal or illegal, like they can't recognize copyrighted music from public domains ones.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#94

Post by gautamnarula » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 7:35 PM UTC

yamrzou wrote: post #58

notatoad wrote: post #8

>Second, we will prevent “liked by” and “followed by” recommendations from people you don’t follow from showing up in your timeline and won’t send notifications for these Tweets. These recommendations can be a helpful way for people to see relevant conversations from outside of their network, but we are removing them because we don’t believe the “Like” button provides sufficient, thoughtful consideration prior to amp…

Their recommendation engine is not harmful in all cases. I used to use Twitter to follow some machine learning/programming profiles and remember the recommendations being quite good.

Any recommendations on whom to follow on that front?

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#95

Post by tpmx » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 7:35 PM UTC

googthrowaway42 wrote: post #78

tpmx wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what the outsized tolerance for internal political activism inside SV companies has resulted in. (European observer)

I completely agree with you and I used to work at Google and see this kind of activism first hand. It's not just activism though, the C-suites of these companies believe in this kind of thing.

How far up? All the way?

Edit: I mean, Sundar must be an opportunist rather than an ideologist, right?

Larry and Sergey: I assume very few people know what they actually think about the big issues.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#96

Post by Fellshard » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 7:36 PM UTC

dbbk wrote: post #33

pdenton wrote: post #5

How long before the "misleading" label is used on anything that doesn't match their own political views?

Twitter does not have a political view.

A cursory examination of their leadership's own statements makes it clear this is untrue.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#97

Post by rdw » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 7:36 PM UTC

scubbo wrote: post #66

_qulr wrote: post #2

I'm not sure why Twitter thinks that quote tweets are better than retweets. Propaganda exists to be spread, and it's long been obvious that "This is wrong/bad [quote]" just serves to further spread the propaganda and raise the propaganda artist's profile. Also, you can disable retweets on accounts you follow but not quote tweets.

> it's long been obvious that "This is wrong/bad [quote]" just serves to further spread the propaganda and raise the propaganda artist's profile. This has never been obvious to me, and I continue to be confused by it as a position. It seems similar to "don't respond to anyone making blatantly false/harmful claims on discussion forums, because engaging with them just encourages them and spreads their message". In fact…

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf

> Results indicate that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the targeted ideological group. We also document several instances of a “backfire effect” in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#98

Post by TigeriusKirk » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 7:36 PM UTC

_qulr wrote: post #67

tpmx wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what the outsized tolerance for internal political activism inside SV companies has resulted in. (European observer)

Why do you think the pressure is coming from inside? There are billions of people watching these platforms. Even governments scrutinizing them. Unruly employees are fairly easy to handle, as long as there's not outside pressure too, but in this case the outside pressures are immense.

The changes give Twitter employees a vast amount of power over determining what's allowed to be said and what isn't.

That fact alone makes me believe this is a result of internal pressure.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#99

Post by JPKab » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 7:39 PM UTC

ogre_codes wrote: post #75

JPKab wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"predominate source of trending information is well-meaning individuals and not motivated state-level actors intent on disrupting an election." What evidence do you have that the predominant source of trending information is motivated state-level actors? That is an incredibly bold statement, and the framing you chose is such that there needs to evidence to the contrary, rather than evidence to support such a claim. E…

> What evidence do you have that the predominant source of trending information is motivated state-level actors? I didn't make that post. But the fact that state level actors have manipulated Twitter topics with bots, astroturfing, and other artificial means is pretty well established. I'm not sure I'd agree it's the "Predominant" source of trending information, that there has been state-level influence from foreign…

I didn't argue that. I was arguing with the "predominant" part he stated. I'm not a blind moron. I'm fully aware of bot manipulation. Who isn't?

Yet I was downvoted for simply trying to reign in the completely overblown nature of these statements. These assertions since 2016 have been repeatedly made with partial and/or zero evidence.

There is still zero evidence that the manipulation of social media by Russian assets in 2016 actually affected the votes of the American public. As far as I can tell, the blue collar whites in the Rust Belt don't exactly have a large presence on social media, let alone any record of statements saying they are changing their vote because of an advertisement. This is all just playing into the hands of the DNC, who for two successive elections have manipulated the Democratic primary to kill Bernie Sanders, and immediately resort to "the lesser of two evils" mode to bamboozle his supporters into supporting their oppressors.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#100

Post by Fellshard » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 7:40 PM UTC

1. 'Misleading Information' is a targeted category, specified only by manual intervention, leaving the door wide open for selective enforcement and biased enforcement.

2. The 'context' they put in the 'Trending' section is often highly editorialized and skewed. An example from yesterday:

> Celebrities · Trending

> Mel Gibson

> People are expressing disappointment that Mel Gibson has been cast in a new film.

> 18.2K Tweets

Mountain out of a molehill, selectively chosen, click-bait editorializing ('people are expressing') - none of this is helpful, and doubling down on it as the only content to put in that pane seems quite foolish.