Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms • Hacker News Board

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

#951

Post by ForrestN » Thu, May 28, 2020, 3:51 AM UTC

lordvon wrote: post #948

It seems like most people here believe there is no evidence of mail-in voter fraud (for some reason...). Here’s a huge list of convictions for ‘fraudulent use of absentee ballots’: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p... Edit: some might think this list is comprehensive, but the first page says it is a ‘sampling’, a 400-page sampling.

This list proves the total irrelevance of voter fraud. Going back 30 years there are only 1000 such cases in a country of 300M+!

To justify severely hampering the public’s right to vote you would need to demonstrate a pattern of recent fraud efforts that swung elections to the side committing the fraud. as far as I know there are exactly zero of those at the federal level, and probably near zero at any level of government.

There is no legitimate independent body studying this who believes voter fraud in the United States justifies the widespread disenfranchisement strategy the GOP is applying in so many elections across the country. Full stop.

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

#952

Post by miguelmota » Thu, May 28, 2020, 3:51 AM UTC

Twitter tweeted this out recently:

> We added a label to two @realDonaldTrump Tweets about California’s vote-by-mail plans as part of our efforts to enforce our civic integrity policy. We believe those Tweets could confuse voters about what they need to do to receive a ballot and participate in the election process.

https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1265838823663075341

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

#953

Post by thomk » Thu, May 28, 2020, 3:55 AM UTC

bt1a wrote: post #100

rlyshw wrote: post #72

Honestly just more proof that we need decentralization of the Internet. Handing over control of our digital platforms and identities to 3rd party for-profit companies is not the way the internet should work.

Aye but with no one in charge, how can the masses protect themselves against ever-increasing disinformation campaigns?

The same way we do it with email.

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

#954

Post by Rapzid » Thu, May 28, 2020, 3:57 AM UTC

ck2 wrote: post #842

Traster wrote: post #36

I think this is going to be a discussion thread that is almost inevitably going to be a shitshow, but anyway: There are people who advocate the idea that private companies should be compelled to distribute hate speech, dangerously factually incorrect information and harassment under the concept that free speech is should be applied universally rather than just to government. I don't agree, I think it's a vast over-re…

wait, how does this work, someone in power does something tyrannical and authoritarian and so we just step back and argue the finer points of why it may be okay to have certain regulations or not, thereby ignoring the whole point it's their tyranny dodging democracy? to be fair this has been going on for three years now, something insane is done, instead of focusing on the insanity, people pivot to the policy this is…

Yeah it's pretty interesting we are sitting here arguing about free speech nuance(with people who lack a basic understanding of it as would have been taught in high school civics TBH) and weak-man arguing if the POTUS tweet was really inaccurate based on the purposeful vagaries of the first sentence while rest contained straight up factual errors(lies?).

While we are doing this the most astonishing thing happening is actually the extent to which the POTUS is constantly lying and spreading miss/disinformation. Every day. For more than three years now as you point out.

I wouldn't be surprised if Trump is the single greatest source of lies and otherwise false and purposefully misleading information in most peoples lives. Perhaps even greater than all other sources combined! That and the amount of effort spent discussing this for years is incredible.

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

#955

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:08 AM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#956

Post by Thorentis » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:09 AM UTC

SllX wrote: post #942

Thorentis wrote: post #921

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entirely, 100% disagree. The Internet is now our primary form of communication. It is the information highway. Sticking to the whole "free speech only applies to the government" is adhering to the letter of the law and not the spirit of the law. Posting on Twitter is now the equivalent of standing in a public square and yelling your protest. Allowing private companies to shut this down because we made the terrible mi…

This whole hokey spirit of the law BS is really irritating. Here’s the real spirit of the First Amendment: it is an explicit limitation on the authority of Congress over certain freedoms spelled out within the First Amendment. Go read the First Amendment, just the first five words. Here, I’ll spell them out for you: “Congress shall make no law...” Now here’s the thing about the Constitution: it means what it says. Th…

Are you okay with the most populated spaces for people to express their opinions, that have de facto replaced the public spaces used for protest and expressing views in times gone by, being controlled by private companies? Are you okay with those same private companies using their effective monopoly on 3 billion social media users' ability to express themselves to censor opinions they don't like?

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

#957

Post by lordvon » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:12 AM UTC

ForrestN wrote: post #951

lordvon wrote: post #948

It seems like most people here believe there is no evidence of mail-in voter fraud (for some reason...). Here’s a huge list of convictions for ‘fraudulent use of absentee ballots’: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p... Edit: some might think this list is comprehensive, but the first page says it is a ‘sampling’, a 400-page sampling.

This list proves the total irrelevance of voter fraud. Going back 30 years there are only 1000 such cases in a country of 300M+! To justify severely hampering the public’s right to vote you would need to demonstrate a pattern of recent fraud efforts that swung elections to the side committing the fraud. as far as I know there are exactly zero of those at the federal level, and probably near zero at any level of gover…

Hmm. It is a rather arbitrary condition that we should be able to prove that voter fraud swung an election before we should be worried about it. There are a lot of recent convictions, which should not happen at all. And I don’t see how a ‘small‘ amount of evidence can prove the point against the evidence.

It should be worrying that this is happening at all. Our vote is one of our most precious forms of expression. This list of convictions is just the ones the author knew of, the ones that just got caught.

Oh and I would love see any evidence on the disenfranchisement you mentioned to update my worldview with. Don’t worry, if you give me a little bit of evidence, I won’t take it as proof that you are ‘wrong’.

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

#958

Post by stubish » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:18 AM UTC

Twitter and other media platforms will be terribly upset if it becomes illegal regulate content published on their site.

I await with popcorn. It is going to be hilarious if tweets from 4chan become constitutionally protected.

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

#959

Post by fortran77 » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:21 AM UTC

Traster wrote: post #36

I think this is going to be a discussion thread that is almost inevitably going to be a shitshow, but anyway: There are people who advocate the idea that private companies should be compelled to distribute hate speech, dangerously factually incorrect information and harassment under the concept that free speech is should be applied universally rather than just to government. I don't agree, I think it's a vast over-re…

Twitter distributes a lot of dangerous information unchecked. For example, today, thousands of people were tweeting fake or improperly captioned photos related to the horrible events in Minnesota this week.

Just two examples: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/make-whites-great-again-ha...

and https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/police-minnesota-trump-ral...

There were others; blaming people and nations that had nothing to do with this brutal horrible act for aiding and abetting.

Twitter will do nothing about this very harmful behavior. I reported some of the most egregious fake information being tweeted or retweeted and nothing happens.

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

#960

Post by amadeuspagel » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:27 AM UTC

Imagine a future where billionaires buy stakes in twitter to influence their "fact-checking", corporations use their ad-spend as a lever to get twitter to "fact-check" stories critical of them while various levels of government try to use everything from privacy law to building permits to pressure them to "fact-check" their opponents more and themselves less.