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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

#411

Post by IanCal »

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…

Unfortunately the idea that alcohol can kill the virus (if you drink it) is taken seriously by some, and has resulted in more than 700 deaths in Iran https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/iran-700-dead-drinkin...

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

#412

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

avsteele wrote: post #148

The problem Twitter is going to face has nothing to do with Trump. By doing 'fact checking' like this they they open themselves up to the charge that anything that doesn't have the little (!) meets some standard. Expect 10x more people @jack, @twittersupport etc... every time they see something they find misleading. This is a bad move.

Written above “utterly unsustainable”. I can see no long term win here, esp when the arbiter they chose clearly has his own issues.

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

#413

Post by _never_k »

cwperkins wrote: post #242

Its 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 think for the political arena it would do us good to try to emulate the US House of Representatives where representatives are given equal time to address the floor.

This is a weird example. Representatives don't listen to each other. The speeches are for their constituents.

>Featured Comments are chosen by a team at NYT, presumably from ideologically diverse perspectives, and they choose comments that are insightful and rich in information without toxicity.

Agreed, the solution to the problems caused by getting rid of gatekeepers is to bring back gatekeepers. How do you do it with something like twitter though, where there were no gatekeepers to begin with?

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

#414

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

2019-nCoV wrote: post #316
Loughla wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ask some oracle what "fact" is and shun every other point of view? This statement concerns me, greatly. Its implication is that facts are merely point of view statements. That is just, well, it's just wrong. Facts are facts. The truth is the truth. They don't care what your beliefs are. If it is empirically true, then it is true. Why and when did it become okay to hand-wave and dismiss anything you didn't believe i…

How can a statement about the future be empirically wrong?

So if the president says "The sun won't rise tomorrow", we can't reject that statement out of hand?

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

#415

Post by sergiosgc »

2019-nCoV wrote: post #316
Loughla wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ask some oracle what "fact" is and shun every other point of view? This statement concerns me, greatly. Its implication is that facts are merely point of view statements. That is just, well, it's just wrong. Facts are facts. The truth is the truth. They don't care what your beliefs are. If it is empirically true, then it is true. Why and when did it become okay to hand-wave and dismiss anything you didn't believe i…

How can a statement about the future be empirically wrong?

Easy. A "statement" can't be wrong, but a "prediction" of the future must be built on a predictive model that has worked in the past, and the model must be fed parameters rooted in reality. Failing that, it is wrong.

If Trump's statement about fraud is not predictive, then it is fiction and meaningless instead of wrong.

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

#416

Post by FireBeyond »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #216

Forget about the free speech albatross. To me, what Twitter is doing looks like a clear case of election interference. They are basically giving free ads to the opposition of Trump. He tweets something, they annotate it with a link to media sources that are heavily biased toward the democrats. Will they be giving the same treatment to @joebiden? He has been known to lie and plagiarize throughout his political career.…

> To me, what Twitter is doing looks like a clear case of election interference.

I'll be sure to look for the DNC ads on Fox, if they're not told they're unwelcome.

Or pro-choice messaged ads in conservative religious publications.

Hey, Fox could even agree to run Trump ads for free.

None of those things are election interference.

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

#417

Post by rchaud »

The powers that be in Beijing and China must be pinching themselves; none of their predecessors had gotten this fortunate, for this long. Every day the US leadership appears committed to demolishing its outward image of a prosperous and stable democratic order. Meanwhile, they can continue running roughshod over political opposition and bullying their neighbours, totally unopposed.

Russia has used the past 15 years to take South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Crimea and cement Putin's now-lifetime grip on domestic institutions.

China, free of US pressure has refined its global logistics and supply chains, increased its military buildup and has becomes the world's go to vendor for 5G solutions. While also keeping Taiwan, HK, Xinjiang and South China Sea firmly under its thumb.

Meanwhile, the US stumbles from crisis to crisis, with a good chunk of its 99% literate population now thinking that mail-in ballots, a cornerstone of its voting system are rife with fraud, and that wearing masks is a political stance.

Oh, and Hacker News, in response to the country's chief executive's blustering about closing down social media, ponders if fact-checking is a 'solved problem'.

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

#418

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

stickfigure wrote: post #340
yesplorer wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They can talk to more than 5 people at once, just not through the WhatsApp platform. I take it you think email spammers are also unjustly treated too.

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

#419

Post by ojnabieoot »

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…

Literally hundreds of people, including children, have died drinking bootleg alcohol being hawked as a COVID-19 cure. It is simply not the case that “any reasonable adult” knows your joke is a joke - that may be the case in developed countries where people have reliable access to actual doctors. But in developing countries this has been a serious problem.

Misinformation kills innocent people. A harsh no-tolerance policy is acceptable given this is the worst global health crisis in 100 years.

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

#420

Post by RandomTisk »

Traster wrote: post #105
falcolas wrote: post #54

Free speech is not just an American constitutional right; many countries throughout the world consider free speech to be a human right. So, yeah, many of us get a bit worked up when people are kicked off platforms, because they are being silenced, sometimes to the point of being shut out of the modern internet entirely (when their rights to a DNS address are comprehensively removed). Hate speech and lies are terrible…

Okay, so I think there's some nuance there, I think there's a pragmatic line to draw - I don't think someone has a right to say anything on twitter, I just don't think that's twitters role is to be neutral. But I think there's a line where we go from a product that's curated and moderated - something like twitter, to something that is truly infrastructure. The DNS example is great, I don't think a DNS company should…

Then Twitter has to lose their protections as a 'carrier' and become a publisher with all the regulation that goes along with being a publisher.
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