Twitter may slow down users’ ability to ‘like’ tweets containing misinformation • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter may slow down users’ ability to ‘like’ tweets containing misinformation

#141

Post by j4kp07 » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 3:20 AM UTC

betwixthewires wrote: post #133

nemothekid wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Digg wasn't a terrible hateful echo chamber, reddit was not, most topic oriented forums are not Those platforms, from the topic oriented platforms, to digg & reddit all stressed moderation. What's new is this idea that any sort of moderation is an infringement of free speech and content platforms should moderate as little as possible. Moderation used to be far stricter when platforms were smaller.

It's not that any sort of moderation is an attack on free speech. It is that the meaning of the word "moderation" is being stretched and warped. When those sites began, moderation was removing illegal content (illegal in the US), and community moderation was ensuring on topic discussion. You could essentially say whatever you felt like, and those places didn't devolve into cesspools of hate. Nowadays even on topic di…

eg. Reddit moderates their vote buttons. If you upvote the wrong thing, they suspend and/or ban your account.

Re: Twitter may slow down users’ ability to ‘like’ tweets containing misinformation

#142

Post by j4kp07 » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 3:31 AM UTC

jmull wrote: post #119

betwixthewires wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forcing your own caveat on what I said before other people get to read it is a good bit different that simply freely speaking, regardless of the fact that you own the medium. Either Twitter is a place for us to speak or it is the blog of the moderation team. It cannot be both. If they want to caveat everything everyone says then you're right, the solution is to not use the site, but it isn't because we don't like…

> Either Twitter is a place for us to speak or it is the blog of the moderation team. It cannot be both. That’s your opinion, but not one Twitter shares, apparently. > Twitter is no longer a website designed for people to have discussions with one another It is already not that. It was never that.

If they are running a blog, then this is more evidence that Twitter is acting as a Editor.

> It was never [a website designed for people to have discussions with one another].

I'm old enough to remember when Twitter used SMS gateways. Because the idea was to connect multiple people so that they may share ideas and have discussions.

Re: Twitter may slow down users’ ability to ‘like’ tweets containing misinformation

#143

Post by dudeithinkBLM » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 3:50 AM UTC

drchopchop wrote: post #98

prohobo wrote: post #8

Regardless of your view on "misinformation", this sounds like a stupid idea that's meant to cover Twitter's butts in the short-term. The goal of any social platform should be healthy engagement. Where is the research that this change will foster that? Twitter isn't really the place to be testing half-baked ideas. Also, misinformation is coming from mainstream media as well as conspiracy theorists. At least conspiracy…

This is not "totalitarianism", it's the reduction of free newsfeed distribution. Twitter, and society, doesn't have a long-term interest in a newsfeed flooded with false/defamatory information (widespread voter fraud, for example) >conspiracy theorists are trying to find the truth Some of the biggest conspiracy theories that flourish on the web are the result of viral, provably false, information. These people are no…

Ugh, those three listed are widely accepted in truth seeking community to be utter nonsense. They are ridiculed and dismissed as theories planted by shills and three letter agencies to make conspiracy theorists seem crazy. Instead substitute three conspiracy theories truth seekers actually believe: "three World Trade Center buildings fell on 9/11", "fluoride in the water lowers your IQ" and "vaccines are full of contaminants and neurotoxins". Just looking out for you bro.

Re: Twitter may slow down users’ ability to ‘like’ tweets containing misinformation

#144

Post by musicale » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 4:54 AM UTC

xlm1717 wrote: post #78

olladecarne wrote: post #64

"Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome." This whole ad driven attention economy is probably as dangerous of an invention as nuclear weapons. We're caught in a state of psychosis and individually none of us can do anything to fight the billions of dollars spent on advertising that tries to make us feel inadequate. Targeted ads and recommendation engines need to be banned. I know some people say they lik…

Individually we can do something to fight it. If you can't block the ads, learn to ignore them.

Like ad-blocking, ad-ignoring is unfortunately something of an arms race. The better people get at ignoring ads (e.g. "banner blindness") the harder advertisers work to make them hard to ignore, either by making them more "attention grabbing" (e.g. modal windows, auto-playing video, etc.) or baking them into the content (e.g. sponsored posts, advertorials, product placement, etc..)

Re: Twitter may slow down users’ ability to ‘like’ tweets containing misinformation

#145

Post by berryworm » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 7:40 AM UTC

nemothekid wrote: post #125

berryworm wrote: post #14

What would it take to replace Twitter and Facebook?

I don't understand what you would gain by replacing Twitter and Facebook. The incentives and structures that created them are here to stay. Anyone who thinks their open source pet projects wouldn't face the same problems Twitter has at the scale 300M active users is just being woefully ignorant of politics at play here and still thinks Twitter can be built in a weekend. In 2016, you had a guy jokingly claim that he w…

I don't think misinformation is caused by social media as such, and it is not the problem I would care about solving. I care about freedom of speech and owning my own content. People should be free to build their own bubble and make up their own minds about information they find online.

I also don't think anybody would choose to be censored, that doesn't make sense. Maybe you could offer optional spam or misinformation filters, but why would anybody force them one themselves? Twitter and Facebook also employ "fact checking services", which would simply be applied voluntarily to other networks.

I also think the problem is way overblown. On Twitter you can choose who to follow. If select the right people, you won't get the misinformation spam.

I never claimed a replacement could be built in a weekend, and the incentives are exactly part of the problem and part of my question. It seems technically possible to built something like Twitter on a distributed basis with nobody having centralized control, but it probably wouldn't be as snappy as Twitter. People stay on Twitter out of convenience, and also because of the network effect. You would have to make lots of people switch at the same time. That is the challenge.

Re: Twitter may slow down users’ ability to ‘like’ tweets containing misinformation

#146

Post by onion2k » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 7:55 AM UTC

AntiImperialist wrote: post #134

onion2k wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still don't get it that _NO ONE_ can claim they know what is/is not fake news because everyone has their own incentives. This is precisely why it's important that Twitter calls out when things are stated as fact without evidence. Twitter never actually say things are fake; they say things are baseless and without evidence. If you want to post things that are influential you simply need to back that claim up with…

Will Twitter employ people to actually verify anything themselves? What will they go by when there are multiple versions of stories based on who you ask? Will they block all the stories where there are anonymous sources? Will they block all opinion pieces? And no, lack of evidence doesn't make things fake. Lack of evidence is just lack of evidence. Even for things that may require evidence, evidence can always be fou…

And no, lack of evidence doesn't make things fake.

That's kind of the point I was making. Lack of evidence doesn't make something fake, but it doesn't make it true either. Twitter is pointing that out and telling people where things don't have evidence so they shouldn't automatically accept it as true (or fake). Where something is incredibly influential and could lead to violence I think Twitter should be wary about publishing it. People's safety is important, so while I don't think Twitter should block speech I do think putting a warning on it is reasonable.

If Twitter had existed since the 60s, would it be right for them to block everything mentioning Higgs boson until evidence for it was found in 2012?

Anyone with even the tiniest bit of science education talked about the Higgs Boson as a no more than a possibility and definitely not a fact until it was proved experimentally and the evidence was clear for anyone to see. If people had been saying it was definitely real then a skeptical warning that there wasn't any evidence to prove that might not have been a bad idea.

Re: Twitter may slow down users’ ability to ‘like’ tweets containing misinformation

#147

Post by onion2k » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 7:57 AM UTC

xlm1717 wrote: post #79

onion2k wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still don't get it that _NO ONE_ can claim they know what is/is not fake news because everyone has their own incentives. This is precisely why it's important that Twitter calls out when things are stated as fact without evidence. Twitter never actually say things are fake; they say things are baseless and without evidence. If you want to post things that are influential you simply need to back that claim up with…

That would be fine if they didn't preferentially apply that call out only to certain groups of people.

Who should they be applying it to that they're not?

Re: Twitter may slow down users’ ability to ‘like’ tweets containing misinformation

#148

Post by berryworm » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 8:15 AM UTC

k32 wrote: post #33

berryworm wrote: post #14

What would it take to replace Twitter and Facebook?

Twitter: https://joinmastodon.org/ https://pleroma.social/

I'll check out Pleroma. But so far, they don't seem to have succeeded in getting people to switch over in significant numbers?

Re: Twitter may slow down users’ ability to ‘like’ tweets containing misinformation

#149

Post by AntiImperialist » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 10:22 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #146

AntiImperialist wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will Twitter employ people to actually verify anything themselves? What will they go by when there are multiple versions of stories based on who you ask? Will they block all the stories where there are anonymous sources? Will they block all opinion pieces? And no, lack of evidence doesn't make things fake. Lack of evidence is just lack of evidence. Even for things that may require evidence, evidence can always be fou…

And no, lack of evidence doesn't make things fake. That's kind of the point I was making. Lack of evidence doesn't make something fake, but it doesn't make it true either. Twitter is pointing that out and telling people where things don't have evidence so they shouldn't automatically accept it as true (or fake). Where something is incredibly influential and could lead to violence I think Twitter should be wary about…

> If people had been saying it was definitely real then a skeptical warning that there wasn't any evidence to prove that might not have been a bad idea.

You're completely wrong on this one. Not only did physicists believe in the existence of Higgs boson, they built upon the premise that it existed for all those years.

Sometimes evidence is not always possible to present or just not practical. Also, there are various degrees of what kind of evidence is acceptable. The evidence required to publish a paper in a scientific journal is different from what is required to make a legal case or report in a magazine. So, with a premise of "requiring evidence", you can be very flexible in terms of what you allow and don't... which is what Twitter seems to be doing.

Re: Twitter may slow down users’ ability to ‘like’ tweets containing misinformation

#150

Post by croon » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 11:44 AM UTC

betwixthewires wrote: post #133

nemothekid wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Digg wasn't a terrible hateful echo chamber, reddit was not, most topic oriented forums are not Those platforms, from the topic oriented platforms, to digg & reddit all stressed moderation. What's new is this idea that any sort of moderation is an infringement of free speech and content platforms should moderate as little as possible. Moderation used to be far stricter when platforms were smaller.

It's not that any sort of moderation is an attack on free speech. It is that the meaning of the word "moderation" is being stretched and warped. When those sites began, moderation was removing illegal content (illegal in the US), and community moderation was ensuring on topic discussion. You could essentially say whatever you felt like, and those places didn't devolve into cesspools of hate. Nowadays even on topic di…

The only thing that's new is that 30 years ago it wasn't considered noteworthy to ban trolls/loudmouths/nazis. But those people weren't elected president either, so there's that.

If you think platform moderation has changed, I think you're better off looking at public figure discourse/debates/pundits 30 years ago and compare it to now.

That's what's changed. Moderation is honestly much lighter now, it's just the noise that's a lot higher.