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Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

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

#331

Post by throawy1234 »

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…

I was in the social media support for one of the candidates during the Democratic primaries. Because of that we had direct access to twitter and the DNC social medial group.

We noticed David Rothkop who had a decent size following and contributed to MSNBC and the DailyBeast was a registered foreign agent of the United Arab Emirates [1]

David Rothkopf had made some wild accusations against two presidential candidates who were most critical of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

We asked Twitter multiple times that if anyone is a registered foreign agent and is constantly commenting on the US primaries and elections, that twitter should flag that account with some indicator or icon.

All Twitter's government public relation person did was to give us some lip service and didn't do anything about it.

[1] https://efile.fara.gov/docs/6596-Exhibit-AB-20180927-1.pdf

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

#332

Post by nkkollaw »

exabrial wrote: post #205

I once got a strike on social media for posting an article about a German doctor that recommended whiskey to cure covid19. It was a joke, and any reasonable adult would know this is false. It's hard for me to feel sorry for companies that go down the fact checking route with algorithms; It always ends up causing more damage than value. 12 years ago we didn't have this problem, and I think that's mostly related to the…

Well, I don't think it can be see as a positive even if human beings are the ones to fact-check.

Who is someone working for Facebook or anyone else to flag my messages because they think they're not factual?

This is crazy.

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

#333

Post by shadowgovt »

nautilus12 wrote: post #325
dathinab wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the one hand I don’t think we should leave it up to companies like Twitter to censor things. True, but the think is Twitter did not censor his post . They added a "fact-check" hint that just pointed out that he was speaking made up thinks containing a link to an informative article. This is very different to censorship. People can still freely decided to believe him, or read the facts and don't or read the facts…

For people that treat a "Fact Check" as an automatic "filter out this information" (I think there is a huge subset of the population that does, people don't thoughtfully take into account Fact Checks, they just treat them as a rebuke), it has the net effect of censorship. The move by twitter is kind of dumb in that sense because the population has already polarized into groups that think anything trump says is false,…

Allowing him to post on their service with a counterpoint stitched right underneath his misinformation is far preferable for him to alternatives they could choose.

Those alternatives would be "censorship" (in some sense; not any real legal sense).

This is not censorship.

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

#334

Post by mplanchard »

nicc wrote: post #301
thatwasunusual wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the one hand I don’t think we should leave it up to companies like Twitter to censor things. Is it really _censorship_ to fact check tweets? I mean, Twitter hasn't _removed_ (i.e. censored) any tweets from Trump, just added an annotation.

Yes, of course it is. Most people will all of a sudden ignore someone's message. I have no idea why anyone would argue in favor of Twitter. When has it become required to be an expert in the field to be granted the privilege of leaving a comment on a forum? When has it become unacceptable to lie? People lie all the time. Advertisements lie to you, politicians lie to you, your mom lies to you. It's really annoying tha…

There’s a difference between you or I saying something incorrect (willfully or not) on the Internet and a world leader doing the same. Twitter already distinguishes famous people, world leaders, etc. in a variety of ways. It seems reasonable that this would be one of them, given that the potential reach and impact of anything they say far, far exceeds that of your average Tweeter.

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

#335

Post by aiwowp »

dathinab wrote: post #298
Ididntdothis wrote: post #235

I feel like we are slowly reaching the state the movie “Idiocracy” describes. I feel very torn about this. On the one hand I don’t think we should leave it up to companies like Twitter to censor things. On the other hand I find it hard to believe that the president is constantly claiming things without any evidence backing up. It started with the claims of millions of illegal voters in 2016 and the commission they st…

> On the one hand I don’t think we should leave it up to companies like Twitter to censor things. True, but the think is Twitter did not censor his post . They added a "fact-check" hint that just pointed out that he was speaking made up thinks containing a link to an informative article. This is very different to censorship. People can still freely decided to believe him, or read the facts and don't or read the facts…

Trump's claim was that there _will be_ fraud if we have mail in ballots.

Unless Jack Dorsey knows the future, I'm not sure you can fact check something that hasn't happened yet.

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

#336

Post by donarb »

username90 wrote: post #259
gjulianm wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there no way to consider social media as unreliable overall and not bother fact checking anything there? The issue is that this is not just a random social media post, it's coming from the President of the US, and most people expect that someone in that position will not post clearly false messages, specially when those messages affect something as fundamental as the election process.

The message isn't clearly false. See this article for example: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-... > Yet votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show. Election officials reject almost 2 percent of ballots cast by mail, double the rate for in-person voting. You could say tha…

That article was 8 years old an deals mostly with people who vote absentee.

States like Oregon and Washington have systems in place to make sure every ballot is counted. You get 18 days to send in your ballot, you can check online to see if your ballot has been received. If not, you have plenty of time to request a new one.

Oregon has been voting by mail for almost 20 years. In that time they have sent out about 100M ballots with only 12 cases of voter fraud found.

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

#337

Post by giardini »

gjulianm wrote: post #174
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…

> Is there no way to consider social media as unreliable overall and not bother fact checking anything there? The issue is that this is not just a random social media post, it's coming from the President of the US, and most people expect that someone in that position will not post clearly false messages, specially when those messages affect something as fundamental as the election process.

Under a doctrine of free speech, politics has no "clearly false messages". There are only "messages". You are, however, allowed to state that a message is "clearly false".

Thus if you wish to say that the world is flat, then you are allowed to say so, and others are allowed to state their supporting or opposing arguments on the same topic on the same forum, and everyone is allowed to listen.

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

#339

Post by whatshisface »

zentiggr wrote: post #308
Ididntdothis wrote: post #235

I feel like we are slowly reaching the state the movie “Idiocracy” describes. I feel very torn about this. On the one hand I don’t think we should leave it up to companies like Twitter to censor things. On the other hand I find it hard to believe that the president is constantly claiming things without any evidence backing up. It started with the claims of millions of illegal voters in 2016 and the commission they st…

I find it incredibly easy to believe that the president is constantly claiming things without any evidence backing him up. It started decades before the 2016 illegal voter claims, and has been a flagrant, constant, malignant part of his personality since childhood. Research the constant streams of lawsuits and other allegations against him, his companies, and many of his closer associates. And then wonder how someone…

Has there ever been a time in history where politicians weren't slimy lying weasels? I feel like a lot of people came of age during the Obama era, which had a friendly media, and never realized the truth about how presidents usually are until we got to the Trump era and the media started doing its job again. Does anyone remember how we got in to Iraq?

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

#340

Post by stickfigure »

yesplorer wrote: post #269
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…

Whatsapp forwards is largely a solved problem. Now you can't forward whatsapp messages to more than 5 people at a go. And if you try doing 5 people at a time consecutively, your account is automatically deleted even before you reach 30 total forwards. Some people adopted a strategy of adding users to a group and dropping whatever message they have but that too is solved by allowing only known contacts to add you to g…

Your solution is to ban humans from talking to more than 5 others at once?
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