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

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

blog.twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 371 posts

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

#341

Post by 082349872349872 »

konjin wrote: post #220
roughly wrote: post #47

I'm fascinated by the comments here, which seem to be assuming that Twitter is operating in an environment in which the predominate source of trending information is well-meaning individuals and not motivated state-level actors intent on disrupting an election.

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

Going by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area to get to 50% of US pop (165 mm) one only needs to cumulate down from the 23mm of the New York metro area to about Greater San Antonio (2,550,960 people), the 25th largest metro area in the country.

Of course, lacking a one person one vote principle, the 50% cutoff for electoral counts may look very different. Nie mój cyrk, nie moje malpy.

Na desh komante mi; na desh pagal mi.

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

#342

Post by bedbot »

What will Twitter do when the President loses the election, as he is likely to, and then immediately takes to Twitter to proclaim that a fraud has been perpetrated, as he is virtually certain to do in that scenario?

Will they really just tag his claims with a "this is misleading?" Or will they take the approach that is most certain to preserve order, and ban the President?

This is not a drill. This is a question that Twitter will be confronted with this once, and never again. No new policy need be created. If principles are compromised in doing this, it is a one-off.

Putting aside debates about cancel culture and ideological bias, Twitter already censors various kinds of uncontroversially harmful speech, and the President's claim--to the small but not insignificant segment of his supporters who are angry, credulous, and well-armed--that the election was stolen will surely qualify as such a statement.

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

#343

Post by bleepblorp »

bleepblorp wrote: post #326
mostlysimilar wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any recommended reading on this topic?

I'm speaking from remembering things I read over the past few decades on Usenet (yes, that far back) and on blogs. I'd be amazed if any of this is still online.

Going back even further than that, however, James Burke's Connections warned of the risks of weaponized data mining in 1978, decades before Facebook commercialized the use of data mining to sell behavior modification as a service.

Dystopian futures aren't hard to predict. The hard part is getting enough people to listen to the predictions to prevent them from coming to fruition.

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

#344

Post by konjin »

shadowgovt wrote: post #318
konjin wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of people are not worth talking to.

I agree. For example, they'll whip out ableist slurs like "crazy" at a moment's notice. It's tedious.

Is cute that you find it so tedious that you went through my post history.

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

#345

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

ValentineC wrote: post #176
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…

> >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. I don't know if a Twitter PM will read this, but showing Likes in my feed — and not having an option to turn it off in the official mobile app client — is one big reason I stopped consuming tweets. It's a shame that the only way to opt out…

For the love of god, you read tweets you don't consume them.

Please fight back against this appalling trend of word-wankery.

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

#346

Post by watwut »

tpmx wrote: post #225
konjin wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those thoughts aren't welcome on HN any more.

As a European looking at this spectacle from a distance: SV is eating itself. Well, good for Europe, I guess. Edit: but also good for China, and they're a lot better positioned to take advantage of this.

Add another European, wtf you talk about? For one, this is not SV eating itself issue, this is America eating itself and going into dangerous state.

Second, if America eats itself, impact on Europe will be negative. There is little Europe has to gain on this and a lot to lose.

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

#347

Post by rhcom2 »

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 like saying "our system isn't broken, users just need to be smarter." Sure it would be great but I don't see it happening and in the mean time real harm happens.

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

#348

Post by kaonwarb »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #345
ValentineC wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> >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. I don't know if a Twitter PM will read this, but showing Likes in my feed — and not having an option to turn it off in the official mobile app client — is one big reason I stopped consuming tweets. It's a shame that the only way to opt out…

For the love of god, you read tweets you don't consume them. Please fight back against this appalling trend of word-wankery.

Eh... this is an established usage of the word. Meets definition 3b in Merriam-Webster's, for example [1]. And what of photo/video tweets?

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/consume

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

#349

Post by arminiusreturns »

allenu wrote: post #151
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…

The principle of using skepticism is a sound one, but what do you do when the majority of your users don't employ that practice? Just let misinformation spread and just be okay with the ramifications on society because "it's not my problem my users are gullible"?

A meta comment: I've noticed this is a variation of another argument I hear from the national security side, usually from the Kissinger-Brzezinski-ites in particular who argue that their anti-democratic actions are because the people are too dumb to govern themselves (The so called "Crisis of Democracy") and therefore in some machiaviellian realpolitik way, their unconstitutional actions are justified. (One of Kissinger's famous quotes being something to the effect of the "The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer".)

I keep thinking back to the freedom of speech circuit Christopher Hitchens did and some of the great speeches on the topic he gave, some of which are him broadly denouncing the ability, want or acceptance of any person or group of persons to be the one who decides what you can and cannot read and/or say. I wonder where the voices of whoever holds those intellectual reins these days is, because I'm not hearing it.

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

#350

Post by reducesuffering »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #154
crazygringo wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are nuking them right now (temporarily). It's not just being discussed, it's being done . But most of the time people like getting content recommended. It's what consumers want.

> It's what consumers want. Do consumers want it, or is it merely taking advantage of some more subconscious human behavior patterns. And if the latter, is this something that is bad for humankind?

Tobacco 2.0
Post reply on HN