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

#271

Post by shadowgovt » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 12:58 AM UTC

nbardy wrote: post #204

paganel wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking all the necessary steps so that one exact candidate (Trump) won't win the next election is "undermining democracy" already, especially as those steps now come from both business (Twitter, FB) and the media (Washington Post, NYTimes). Maybe the Democrats and the people who are called "liberals" don't realise it just yet, but they've lost the game because they've started playing Trump's game. Like I said, they m…

It's unfortunate how few people on the inside don't see it this way. The slippery slope is real and we shouldn't start sliding down it just to beat Trump.

The slippery slope towards... Checking facts?

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

#272

Post by shadowgovt » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 1:00 AM 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…

But there's no way to improve human behavior on BS detection. Certainly not this close to an election.

What is one to do in an environment where a ridiculous number of people believe that the president is fighting a secret pedophile sex ring? It certainly doesn't seem to be a problem the free market of ideas is addressing successfully.

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

#273

Post by StanislavPetrov » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 1:00 AM UTC

deanCommie wrote: post #236

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do you think social networks would be less toxic and less abused if all the devs at Facebook or Twitter were apolitical? It isn't possible to be completely "apolitical" but you can be non-partisan. For me this isn't a left vs right or Republican vs Democrat issue, its an establishment vs everyone else issue. If this policy was in effect in 2002 and 2003 people would be getting censored and banned for disputing "the…

> people would be getting censored and banned for disputing "the fact" that Iraq had WMD Literally nobody was buying that Iraq had WMD. It was clear that the politicians were riling themselves up in a patriotic furvor. The evidence was weak from day one and it was clear a propaganda machine was in play. > Twitter doesn't have a monopoly on the truth, I am so sick of statements like this that ultimately lead to inacti…

>Literally nobody was buying that Iraq had WMD.

You must be very young, because this is totally false. Both political parties, every network and every newspaper was not only uniform in their belief and assertion that Iraq had WMD, they ridiculed and attacked everyone who denied this falsehood.

>Israel, Russia, Britain, China, and even France held positions similar to that of the United States; France's President Jacques Chirac told Time magazine last February, "There is a problem—the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq. The international community is right ... in having decided Iraq should be disarmed." In sum, no one doubted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/01/spies-l...

There should be no doubt that disputing the official narrative on Iraq WMD would have been censored by Twitter and other big tech companies that use establishment narrative as the only benchmark for truth.

>SOME THINGS ARE JUST TRUE AND SOME ARE NOT. There is no "two sides" to them. There is objective truth and objective lies.

And just who should decide what these things are, you? Twitter? The US government?

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

#274

Post by 1123581321 » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 1:02 AM UTC

landryraccoon wrote: post #251

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…

Why doesn't that cause Wikipedia to completely break down then? Wikipedia tries to be in some sense an arbiter of truth, they do get it wrong frequently, and yet it still holds together.

Wikipedia has a community system and process to delete and revert statements, and contributors can mostly only evolve a collection of documents that do not draw attention to the contributor. Individual contributions mostly do not go viral. And for whatever reason, enough members prefer this system to keep it.

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

#275

Post by _qulr » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 1:07 AM UTC

deanCommie wrote: post #236

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do you think social networks would be less toxic and less abused if all the devs at Facebook or Twitter were apolitical? It isn't possible to be completely "apolitical" but you can be non-partisan. For me this isn't a left vs right or Republican vs Democrat issue, its an establishment vs everyone else issue. If this policy was in effect in 2002 and 2003 people would be getting censored and banned for disputing "the…

> people would be getting censored and banned for disputing "the fact" that Iraq had WMD Literally nobody was buying that Iraq had WMD. It was clear that the politicians were riling themselves up in a patriotic furvor. The evidence was weak from day one and it was clear a propaganda machine was in play. > Twitter doesn't have a monopoly on the truth, I am so sick of statements like this that ultimately lead to inacti…

> Literally nobody was buying that Iraq had WMD.

This is literally false. As you said, "SOME THINGS ARE JUST TRUE AND SOME ARE NOT."

I didn't buy it myself, and there was certainly significant opposition to the Iraq invasion, but to say nobody was buying it is a huge exaggeration, unfortunately.

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

#276

Post by russellbeattie » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 1:09 AM UTC

konjin wrote: post #213

Sounding more and more like a moral panic. Can people in the big cities not accept people in rural areas reject everything they think is good? It's not a foreign plot, it's a fundamental disagreement about values.

Stop that apologist crap. I grew up in a rural area and I know these people quite well. People in rural areas reject science, general knowledge and social norms of the "big cities" because they are frightened and ignorant, not because of some equally valid world view.

Their response to climate science is stubborn ignorance. Their response to different cultures, races and religion is bigotry. Their response to democracy (when it doesn't suit them) is reactionary. Their response to education is closed mindedness. There's nothing to respect here.

Rural people are happy to have iPhones, as long as they don't need to understand the science behind the technology, understand the multicultural aspects of it's existence or respect the people who created it.

As Asimov said 40 years ago:

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

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

#277

Post by stale2002 » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 1:16 AM UTC

driverdan wrote: post #119

stale2002 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's never a situation where you let people say whatever they want What? There are tons of places where the only restrictions on what you say, is determined by the law. > You have to set some of sort of standard The standard could be "Whatever is allowed by US law", which is extremely non restrictive on speech.

> The standard could be "Whatever is allowed by US law", which is extremely non restrictive on speech. That would result in 90% of user generated content being spam. There's no law against me sending you 10 spam DMs a day on Twitter. Is that really what you want?

> There's no law against me sending you

Giving people the choice of whether they want to accept moderation or not, seems reasonable.

For example, if twitter allowed everything that is allowed by law, but also gave people control over content that they see, then that seems fine.

There is a fundamantal difference between disallowing something, and giving a user the option of not seeing certain content.

IE, I do not believe that the block feature is censorship, for example.

> Is that really what you want?

I'd want to have the option to control the content that I see, as opposed to twitter forcing its own decision. I don't see a problem with someone choosing to allow spam to themselves, if they are OK with that.

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

#278

Post by tpmx » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 1:24 AM UTC

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #273

deanCommie wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people would be getting censored and banned for disputing "the fact" that Iraq had WMD Literally nobody was buying that Iraq had WMD. It was clear that the politicians were riling themselves up in a patriotic furvor. The evidence was weak from day one and it was clear a propaganda machine was in play. > Twitter doesn't have a monopoly on the truth, I am so sick of statements like this that ultimately lead to inacti…

>Literally nobody was buying that Iraq had WMD. You must be very young, because this is totally false. Both political parties, every network and every newspaper was not only uniform in their belief and assertion that Iraq had WMD, they ridiculed and attacked everyone who denied this falsehood. > Israel, Russia, Britain, China, and even France held positions similar to that of the United States; France's President Jac…

From my perspective in Europe in 2002/2003:

There was an incredibly harsh and damaging debate on this matter. Back then I was on the losing leftist side. We watched the Fox News broadcasts in horror.

Nowadays I find myself on the rightish side. Fox News is still insane though.

In my mind the current equivalent of the outsized influence of 2002/2003 Fox News programming is the political influence of employees of SV companies.

Somehow the common factor here is americans imposing their misinformed view of the world to the rest of the world with force, be it physical or cultural.

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

#279

Post by mistermann » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 1:30 AM UTC

deanCommie wrote: post #236

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do you think social networks would be less toxic and less abused if all the devs at Facebook or Twitter were apolitical? It isn't possible to be completely "apolitical" but you can be non-partisan. For me this isn't a left vs right or Republican vs Democrat issue, its an establishment vs everyone else issue. If this policy was in effect in 2002 and 2003 people would be getting censored and banned for disputing "the…

> people would be getting censored and banned for disputing "the fact" that Iraq had WMD Literally nobody was buying that Iraq had WMD. It was clear that the politicians were riling themselves up in a patriotic furvor. The evidence was weak from day one and it was clear a propaganda machine was in play. > Twitter doesn't have a monopoly on the truth, I am so sick of statements like this that ultimately lead to inacti…

Perhaps, but a problem is that people aren't nearly as good at discerning one from the other, and they are especially bad at conceptualizing the notion of unknown, which is what most things are. Luckily, the media is able to define a lot from that category as axiomatic, so most people no longer have to consider those ideas, provided those who aren't down with the program can be managed (which can also be effectively managed via axioms).

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

#280

Post by konjin » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 1:33 AM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #261

konjin wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, have you lived outside of a 100k US city in the last 10 years?

How is that relevant?

If you have never met a representative sample of half the country it seems reasonable to assume anything you don't like is done by someone evil outside it.