It's pretty obvious that DT is not going to shut down the very platforms he relies on for his political survival. Even he's not that stupid. Nor does he have any real regulatory authority that could be employed that wouldn't also bite him back. So this is just him trying to bully the platforms into letting him say whatever without being exposed to any criticism or being called out for bullshit.
Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
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Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reaching Idiocracy is a pretty big understatement. To be honest, it feels that the president should have a babysitter, if you look at his constant tweet tirades.
What kind of oversight could even work though? We have the Queen in my neck of the woods but that is not exactly accountable and never does anything to check poor governance and only rips off taxpayers. We also have non-confidence votes which can bring down a Prime Minister, and it seems to work (in minority governments at least). How can a separation of powers approach still check itself? Like different term limits,…
The difficulty here is that Congress has, for various reasons, not stepped up to do its job.
There are millions of people better-qualified to do the job of President, but a sufficient number of Congresspeople have decided, for reasons I only partially fathom, that Trump is somehow preferable to Pence.
Responsibility for America's debacles, and now, in part, the death of a hundred-thousand people, lies at McConnell's feet, not Trump's. Trump's lack of qualification for the job has been on display since before he took office. McConnell, on the other hand, clearly knows exactly what he is doing.
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#393Its evident to me that our strategy to combat misinformation is not going great at the moment. I've been on Reddit for over 13 years and the site has gone through many changes. What if we changed our thinking from removing/flagging bad content to fostering rich discourse? I'll use r/politics for example, I currently do not think there is productive or rich discourse being had there. If you have had a different experi…
Is it really a technical problem, though? If the majority of people _want_ to fight and is more willing to act in bad faith to hurt the opponent / win the argument rather than willing to correct their opinion by discovering facts, I don't think any technical solution could, nor should, try to correct that ("nor should", because it could quickly turn into some sort of oppression). That being said, I commend you for lo…
I think it is to some extent. The "Tyranny of the Majority" on internet forums pushes people to finding safe spaces for them. It's great that you can find subreddits for your interest and I even think they should exist for political ideologies, but I think it would do us a big service to see the main political arena to be more like the US House of Representatives.
For me, I see the main problem is that we need to create demand for fair and balanced news sources. I really don't like when you only hear about perceptions of other perspectives from pundits/activists, instead of hearing the opinion from its source. I think this is breeding prejudice. I think there is a vast amount of misrepresentation and the backlash we see is from people who often don't feel like they have the proper avenues to express themselves.
I try to be part of the solution, by paying for subscriptions for Bloomberg and WSJ. Its a hard problem, that's for sure.
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#394Its evident to me that our strategy to combat misinformation is not going great at the moment. I've been on Reddit for over 13 years and the site has gone through many changes. What if we changed our thinking from removing/flagging bad content to fostering rich discourse? I'll use r/politics for example, I currently do not think there is productive or rich discourse being had there. If you have had a different experi…
>I'll use r/politics for example, I currently do not think there is productive or rich discourse being had there. If you have had a different experience please let me know.
The top post on r/politics on Super Tuesday was about Sanders winning Vermont. There was no discussion to be had about Biden absolutely cleaning up.
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#395A "conservative" government threatens to shut down private businesses. Wait, what? Maybe the billionaire hotel magnate from New York should arrange a leveraged buyout of the business he doesn't like, and shut it down when he owns it.
Just to distance myself from the current "conservative" establishment, I would argue that their views are not conservative so much as they are a relatively newer form of fascism. Typically with fascism there is nationalism that prioritizes the citizens of the nation above all else, but with this new "conservatism" in the US, the nationalism is a bit more race-based. But other than that it's much more close to fascism…
>the nationalism is a bit more race-based
You could almost say it's a white nationalism. But really I think it's less about race and more about capital and political fealty. Loyalty to the seats of power above all else, and your value to the party and its "society" determined relative to your capital holdings.
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#396Putting aside concerns about overreach government powers, would ending social media as we know it really be a bad thing?
I could do without Facebook and Twitter, but what counts as social media? Does Stack Exchange count? Hacker News? Email?
We probably need a more detailed vocabulary for describing various types of social media. In my opinion, the most insidious forms of social media share three attributes:
* Broad reach - they are accessible to and used by a population broadly for public communication rather than a specific subset of the population or private communication.
* Optimized for engagement - Content is personalized and optimized for individual engagement. Compare this to a stream of content organized by time (email inbox) or basically time with minimal voting/decaying (HN)
* Feedback is quantifiable and visible - Likes, retweets, upvotes (ie, engagement metrics) are countable and displayed to users. I think this gets at something deep in the human psyche and encourages users to chase those metrics.
It turns out that in systems with all three (FB, Twitter), you create enormous echo chambers that only occasionally flare up into outrage when they inevitably leak to a broader audience. This is great for engagement but pretty self evidently bad for society.
Lots of sites fit somewhere on this spectrum (including HN and Stack Exchange) but have basic safeguards to prevent the worst types of behavior. But this is usually because they aren't profit motivated to slide all the way to one side on the three factors above.
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#397I’m an outsider (not American, don’t live in America) so I’m almost not entitled to have an opinion on the matter, but it always strikes me as fairly odd when people of one persuasion or another rail against the ‘bias’ that they perceive against them in one circumstance or another (including media coverage). Of course people see bias against them. It’s classical confirmation bias: every time something goes their way,…
This is basically true. Liberal or conservative, everybody I talk to who can communicate ideas without injecting vitriol into every word agrees that 90% of "censorship" of conservatives is just censorship of standard low-value hateful garbage, and that genre of speech, while committed on all sides, is highly overrepresented by conservatives, which makes life hard for the majority of conservatives who are rational.
PragerU has their content taken down and/or restricted on a regular basis from big tech platforms. Their videos express generic and cliche conservative ideas and values. While many people may not agree with what they say it is a far stretch to call it "low-value hateful garbage".
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
twitter is a private organization. Regulating the speech of private organizations is a dangerous slope to be on.
Twitter already regulates speech though, to their own agenda. I got into the gender debate recently (a big mistake), and so many gender critical people get suspended or banned just for believing in reality (that males can't be women) and standing up for women's rights. A man (Zuby) got suspended for simply saying 'dude' to someone. People get their accounts deleted for 'misgendering' people. Twitter is already, hardl…
> Twitter already regulates speech though, to their own agenda.
Are you saying that if someone has a website, they shouldn't be allowed to set the rules for that site. Are you going to allow me to post whatever I want on your website?
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#399Offtopic: The difference of reading newssites with and without JavaScript enabled is so insane, it's crazy how my flagship phone on a 200k WiFi connection grinds to an halt on the first few seconds (apart from the jarring experience of jumping content)
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
lol what, he is biased for pointing out misinformation from a prominent public figure, after years of Twitter being criticised for allowing false information to proliferate?
I think he is referencing those tweets: https://twitter.com/LevineJonathan/status/126545757821512499...
That's attacking the person rather than the action - were the fact checking moderations wrong?
Sure, their personal political bias should put them up to a greater level of scrutiny; but it they can still fact check without bias.
So, have they?