He won't though, obviously.
replies(1):
Also do you feel it is wrong for media to report that something is incorrect if it verifiably is?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/20/faceboo...
Of course people see bias against them. It’s classical confirmation bias: every time something goes their way, it’s unremarkable, but as soon as something doesn’t, it’s noticeable.
Isn’t it equally possible —nay, probable even, especially in this case— that the perceived bias is only the prevailing opinion of the majority against whom one is in a minority?
Twitter has every protected right to criticize the president (which they should have been doing a whole lot more of but that's a different discussion). That's the whole point of "freedom of speech" in our Bill of Rights. Our government literally cannot do what Trump wants to do, and to try to say that he can is to explicitly say that the Constitution is meaningless and void.
And to be perfectly honest, I’m all for it, especially if they’ve done this (and will do this more broadly, as you suggest) despite expecting to take a substantial ‘hit’ to their bottom line.
God help us if we ever get a competent authoritarian into office who's cunning enough not to say the corrupt part out loud.
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/30/trump-vot...
Also they should not have called that "fact checking" or "debunking".
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-reach and almost unachievable to have both perfect free speech on these platforms and actually run them as a viable business.
But let's lay that aside, those people who make the argument claim to be adhering to an even stronger dedication to free speech. Surely, it's clear here that having the actual head of the US government threatening to shut down private companies for how they choose to manage their platforms is a far more disturbing and direct threat against free speech even in the narrowest sense.
Nonetheless, this is pretty much par for the course for what the world has come to expect.
Edit: It turns out that though phrase is often attributed to Voltaire, it was actually Evelyn Beatrice Hall, as noted by the poster below, to whom I am grateful for the correction.
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, but they’re not the only thing being silenced.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...
But given that that worked out so well, I'm sure there's no problem :P
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322672
Edit: To clarify, I'm saying it doesn't relate because my point is that deleting hateful garbage off a private platform isn't censorship, and Twitter should fix their hypocrisy by deleting all hateful garbage with equal veracity, rather than the alternate fix, which would be to allow it all.
BTW, I view most politicians from both parties, DNC, and RNC to be corrupt, controlled by special interests.
Not to go to far afield here, but I will vote for either a democrat or republican based on public records of who their donors are. Turns out that based on this criteria I usually vote for Democrats but not always.
These gigantic centralized silo monopolies that recreate the experience of AOL online.
They have way more power than any American (or any other country) company should have in the world. Their reach is global, what they do, impacts millions of people who have no say whatsoever.
I long for a much more distributed system. (Doesn't have to be some fancy federated system.
I would be happy with real competition by a few hundred companies distributed around the world.
Closing down, or neutering the behemoths would be the most useful thing Trump will ever do.
He will soon realize that he cannot, or maybe he just forgets about it, or maybe he tries and the supreme court strikes it down. I cannot imagine how much money is flowing from the silos to lobbyists in Washington right now.
Of course, most Presidents have been constrained by some modicum of understanding that their oath to uphold the Constitution applies to the whole thing.
https://twitter.com/Liz_Wheeler/status/1265463081997484032
This isn't going to end well, and unless Twitter is going to exercise this impartially (which is impossible given a human is involved), they are going to lose their platform status, and justifiably so.
Obviously, based on his history, it is just a reaction, but not necessarily an idle threat. I am both hesitant and interested at the same time. It is a little like his stance on FISA. It it clear any changes are just to benefit the president with other benefits being an afterthought, but some of the power held by FISA and social media should be curbed
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12656016113107394...
Reddit is the best example of that. I don't want to defend him but look at every single news and politics related sub from /r/news, /r/worldnews, /r/politics etc.
But that happens here too. Honestly I blame the upvote downvote system more. Reddit and HN are both really wrong with it
Why is it bad that were refusing to let something like stormfront operate in polite society? Your free speech absolutism is dangerous.
You can't debate an inherently bad-faith interlocutor, so dealing with Nazis points "out in the open," "in the marketplace of ideas," will not work. It will only legitimize their viewpoint as one worthy of consideration, thus debate. It's cool and good what happened to them.
I’d also like to see social media and search engines legislated as utilities... but I’m in the EU so my opinion scarcely matters, to be perfectly honest.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/26/review-tr...
Many states already do mail-in ballots and they're much more secure than the sketchy voting machines currently in use: https://qz.com/1783766/these-voting-machine-security-flaws-t...
The other half is to realize that in the US representative democracy, the people who change policy are the ones who are dedicated enough to the task to make a career out of it, at the expense of other things they could be doing. Because the system isn't managed by the will of the people; it's managed by the will of the subset of the people who put the (quite large amount of) effort in to be known and heard. Most Americans don't even do the base work of showing up to vote in every election (and the turnout numbers are too low to explain that effect by voter suppression alone).
Those with other things to do and not enough time to be devoted full-time to policy-craft label those who do "special interests."
The NRA is a special interest, but so is the ACLU. And the NAACP. And the AFL-CIO. And the EFF.
This case is an exception. Twitter drew a line in the sand. It is in exactly the right place.
The PoTUS is threatening to shut down elections in November: he seems to be doing everything in his power to have a national emergency then when people can't vote, to shut down post offices, and to ban voting by mail. Any other problems with the PoTUS, we should address in the ballot box and through citizen activism (not through corporate activism). But when the PoTUS tries to shut down the ballot box or shut down citizen activism, that's different.
I don't think he's likely to be successful, but I didn't think coronavirus would hit us this hard either. In January, it was a manageable billion-dollar problem. We did nothing. Now, it's a multi-trillion dollar problem. Right now, Trump trying to cancel the election is a manageable problem too; by his personality, if he doesn't get traction, we're done. He'll move on. But if he does get traction, we'll have a completely different scale of problem on our hands.
On the other hand, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube et al are undoubtedly massively influential on the public opinion and their corporate position on political topics - Yoel Roth's recent tweets serve as a decent example, showing clearly that this person cannot be an objective "fact checker" - essentially create a public forum where I am not able to exercise my first amendment rights (and, legally speaking, rightfully so). I cannot help but to find this very concerning.
YouTube (despite numerous issues with their interpretation of free speech), for instance, starting linking Wiki articles under videos that cover certain topics or are uploaded by certain channels. Videos by the BBC show a notice that the BBC is a British public broadcast service, simply informing the viewer about the fact that any bias they might encounter can be easily identified (feel free to switch "BBC" with "RT"). I've found that to be a decent middle ground between outright suppressing views by a corporation pretending to be the authority on certain topics and broadcasting everything without any context.
The trouble with Twitter (in some people's view) is that they play both sides- they're just a public platform when there is something illegal that they're hosting, but they're a curator when they don't like what you've posted.
No, Trump is one of the few people that the first amendment of the constitution of the United States doesn't apply. Free speech is broader than any specific law, whether you think people deserve it or not.
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.
This isn’t how the law works, and Trump’s enemies, the Democrats, control the House of Representatives.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects the ability of online services to moderate content, this has been repeatedly upheld by the courts. The only way it could change is if the Senate, House, and President agree on a new law and pass it.
If you want to learn more, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
This isn't news to anyone, he's openly said Republicans would never be elected again if it was easier to vote.
HN will do what it do, but I can't escape the feeling that in an era where a President uses Twitter, HN will become less relevant as a technological discourse destination if it lacks the will to touch the ramifications of technology and politics combined.
What I see is that they've proven that voter fraud is not a problem in the United States. And, by extension, that there is no problem with mail-in-balloting leading to voter fraud. Looking at two states that only vote by mail, they have 27 cases of voter fraud in THE LAST TWENTY YEARS.
Voter fraud, whether in person or by mail, IS NOT A PROBLEM. It's simply Trump working to sow the seeds of insurrection should he lose in November.
Give people their Facebook but remove the algorithms from the timeline and close all groups to make it harder for people to spread misinformation and group together to celebrate it. Or close it all together, social media doesn't have that many upsides. My observation from more than ten years with those tools.
No idea where the problem lies in Twitter but marking tweets with lies and conspiracy stuff is a step in a good direction.
Just because there's not as much traction or acceptance among the users of reddit for conservative or right-wing ideas, comments etc. doesn't mean Reddit itself is actively silencing voices. You can't force people to not downvote things they don't like or agree with.
The claim is not that it's easier to commit fraud. The claim is that allowing vote-by-mail compromises the integrity of an election. That's why it's important to show that voter fraud is quite rare (your link includes cases back to 1990 at least) and has a fairly high chance of being detected. Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah conduct elections entirely by mail. Trump voted by mail!
If they start fact-checking everybody, it is. Otherwise, they're just campaigning for the other side.
It's always interesting to me when I observe it in action, because not even the US legal system---a system that, among the systems of the world, enshrines free speech as more untouchable than most nations---agrees with this absolutist premise.
Here's the problem. Who is doing the fact checking? Who fact checks the fact checkers?
The world isn't black and white. State press releases are not facts. There is no authority that is the arbitrator of truth.
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 people? Disallow certain messages (like they do with terrorism related posts)?
They settled on just putting in fact check links with certain posts. Trust in the fact deciding institution will of course be difficult to settle. No one wants a ministry of truth (or the private alternative).
So the question remains - do you, or how do you lessen the spread of misinformation?
but they also did the same quarantine to r/Chapo_Traphouse, a leftist podcast subreddit, so I'm not sure why you think it's not equal. Did you not know about Chapo being quarantined?
There are separate issues like economies of scale that don't allow a completely level playing field - however a monthly UBI where part of it is required to be allocated to be used for digital services (e.g. pay for Facebook vs. being bombarded by manipulative ads) would allow everyone to afford costs of bandwidth-CPU usage etc to take that burden off of private companies and would level the playing field.
Similarly these massive platforms like Facebook wouldn't have grown to their scale if people's data and networks were completely mobile with no friction, therefore it would be a competitive battle based on governance and not merely difficulty, laziness, leading to strong defensible network effects.
> The 1st Amendment doesn't shield you from criticism or consequences.
> If you're yelled at, boycotted, have your show cancelled, or get banned from an internet community, your free speech rights aren't being violated. It's just that the people listening to you think you're an asshole, and they're showing you the door.
The notion of "post-truth politics" is one of the major issues of the day. "Everyone knows there are facts" is not actually a given in modern discourse.
linkage ??
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.
The problem is this tactic is consistently agaisnt many dissident publications, often on pro-democratic ones by autocratic countries. So what/where do you draw the line for "this speech is unacceptable so we won't propagate DNS entries for it", and who draws it? USA? ICANN? The host country? Each DNS gets to pick and choose?
Going in the other direction, if this speech is so bad, why don't ISP's just ban the IP? We could do like Youtube automated takedowns, only it's a packet blackhole.
At the expense of pushing the satire, what we really need is Deep Packet Free Speech Inspection (tm). All packets are inspected by a blockchain-powered AI in the cloud for acceptibility and lack of Nazi content. All servers which respond to HTTPS must escrow TLS keys to enable Freedom Audits.
If allowing an operator to have DNS records or an IP address "legitimizes" them, then we need some full-blown worldwide consortium which determines the (il)legitimacy of each and every domain. Who has votes in this consortium? What if China wants to put the kabash on some Uyghurs because of "Terrorism" but Netherlands want to keep it up. Sounds like a beaurocratic nightmare.
Is there no way to consider social media as unreliable overall and not bother fact checking anything there? All this tech is relatively new but maybe we should think in longer time scale. Wikipedia is still not used as a source in school work because that's the direction educational institution moved. If we could give a status that nothing on social media is too be taken seriously, maybe it's a better approach.
Let me end this on a muddier concept. I thought masks was a good idea from the get go but there was an opposing view that existed at some point about this even from "authoritative" sources. In that case, do we just appeal to authority? Ask some oracle what "fact" is and shun every other point of view?
I really don't like twitter for all the crap and bots that's on there. I think it's a terrible format. But I think we are in a middle time, were new publishers and formats are rising at the same time as traditional media is falling. Hopefully larger publisher's and media organizations such as Facebook, Google and Twitter take the power and responsibility they have seriously.
Like every newspaper website that has a comment section. They are responsible for the parts they publish but not the user generated comments. There is no legal requirement to be one or the other.
For whatever reason, most people seem to get this backwards.
Here is the relevant legal code Section 230 C1: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service, a platform, shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
There is nothing in the law that says a publisher is responsible for user generated contact (even if they moderate it). In fact the law says just the opposite.
Edit: added note in parenthesis
But the argument would be that your average forum, blog comment section, etc. isn't one of the most important mediums of communication in the world's leading superpower's democracy
(b) you'll have to be more specific about what you mean, but the "tantrum" I've heard is that the system as set up over-represents land over people, not that the result is illegitimate. A legitimate result in a badly-crafted system is materially different from claiming the process as designed is compromised.
He’s mindless in his opinions. He’s not against a policy or a politician. He’s separating society.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/26/do...
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fact-check-tru...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/15/no-braine...
[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-nfl...
1. They had someone with a clear history of strong anti-Trump and anti-Republican sentiment take the action (https://twitter.com/LevineJonathan/status/126545757821512499...)
2. Twitter chose a prediction rather than a factual statement to fact check ("Mail-In Ballots will be..."). Why not start with a truly factually wrong statement about the past?
3. They picked something that is actually debatable! A bipartisan committee concluded it carried some risks in 2005: https://www.wsj.com/articles/heed-jimmy-carter-on-the-danger...
The notion that a company can ever be trusted to "fact check" (aka determine objective truth) is just completely laughable. The closest we can come is labeling agent beliefs about truth ("X says Y is false").
Doing nothing would be better than doing this. Even better would be building solutions that allow community-based (and ideally personalized) derivations of consensus (this is what we're doing at LBRY).
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.
By giving your own.
In other words, we just need more speech, not more restrictions on speech.
-- reply to below because I'm restricted and at comment limit (ironic, eh?)
> Isn't that exactly what Twitter did? They left the speech up, and added a note below it expressing their opinion that a particular link demonstrates that the tweet was not factual.
Anybody can reply to a comment on twitter and cite the facts, and people can reply to those comments and contest or argue them. The specific difference is Twitter's "fact checking box" cannot be replied to - which makes them the ministry of truth.
All Twitter had to do was create a @twitterfactchecks handle and reply to the posts in question - perhaps promoting their reply to the top so that it is most visible, but then people could reply to @twitterfactchecks contesting their opinion (a fact check is always an opinion, if you didn't get what I was hinting at above.)
I’m guessing you mean that they should be held accountable for what people post there? Or is there a different angle I’m not seeing?
This it it. We did it. There is nothing for us to do, but celebrate.
Youtube: Censors youtubers, documented in so many cases. It also gives "authoritarian news" a heavier weight in the algorithm. Removes comments with "communist bandits" in Chinese.
Twitter: Seriously bans people if they say the wrong pronoun
Reddit: A few people controls the majority of big subreddits, bans people with conservative views outright. Bans people that upvote stuff that they don't like. The have removed, banned hundreds of subreddits and users in the last few months. While they have chinese owners.
Facebook: Surprisingly the best of the bunch when it comes to serving every viewpoint imo. But they have had huge privacy implications just so many times.
But even so, I am very torn on the subject. The best thing would probably to force these companies not to censor/ban/remove people based on opinions. But the best thing for the world would most likely for these social media sites to not exist in the first place.
Personally I think social media sucks but I think most people are not ready to live without it either.
The subject at hand are public statements from the president of the United States. How exactly does one not "take that seriously"? Given the gravity of the situation: if it's wrong, and you know it's wrong, surely you have a responsibility to tell people it's wrong. Right?
> Ask some oracle what "fact" is and shun every other point of view?
How is Trump being "shunned" here? Twitter put a correction link at the bottom of his tweet.
(1) Private forum, displayed in the public. (2) Those rights protect your speech from being suppressed BY THE GOVERNMENT. (3) Correct if you meant legally as a private company running a private forum, they can manage the content as they see fit, including fact checking the POTUS. Or incorrect if you meant you have a legal right to exercise your speech on their platform free of their rules.
> Media Matters for America pointed out posts where r/The_Donald members fantasized about or encouraged violence related to Oregon’s recent climate change vote where Republican lawmakers fled the state Senate to prevent a climate change bill from passing, one of them even implying that he would respond to any police action with violence. r/The_Donald members posted comments like “none of this gets fixed without people picking up rifles” and “[I have] no problems shooting a cop trying to strip rights from Citizens.” The posts were later removed.
Various other bits of misbehavior ensued: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald#Quarantine,_restr...
> In November 2019, the subreddit's moderators attempted to evade Reddit's imposed quarantine by reviving and promoting a subreddit called r/Mr_Trump. This subreddit was banned by Reddit's administrators in accordance with its policy that "attempting to evade bans or other restrictions imposed on communities is not allowed on Reddit." Days later, Reddit's admins warned the subreddit's moderators about trying to out the alleged White House whistleblower in the Trump–Ukraine scandal in violation of Reddit's rules on harassment and inviting vigilantism.
and Reddit bans the left-wing equivalents for similar actions: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/us/politics/bernie-sander...
> Over the summer, the “Chapo Trap House” message board, which has nearly 153,000 members who chat about the news and memes of the day, was censured by Reddit, which hosts it. The page now has limited reach and is in a sort of digital purgatory, where it remains.
I mean I can say whatever I want on this platform as well, but if I cross a line my posts will be hidden and eventually my account blocked. And that is fair, it's what I agreed to, and not only that but it's morally just.
The free speech extremists confuse freedom of speech with protection from consequences.
Interestingly, Trump and some other celebrities on Twitter have had special protection from said consequences.
You absolutely can, and that's even been a norm in the US since CDA Section 230 was implemented specifically to make that possible, within certain bounds, which Twitter sits well within.
Admittedly, that's been progressively chipped away recently.
Because the 'correct answer' to many questions is 'it depends...'. You enumerate the advantages and disadvantages of various options and pick an option that satisfies some sort of evaluation function (which may depend on your point of view). Some of the advantages and disadvantages are facts while others are probabilities.
This of course doesn't work well in short form media or for people who like things simple.
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 fact there was some UX resistance to hitting the "reahare" button.
The easiest is to get rid of bots and control who can tweet. Anyone can create an account but to tweet you need to prove your identity. Bots are the real issue. Trump lying on social media is a problem but it's not fundamentally dissimilar to him lying on TV or at a campaign rally. He is a liar and whatever platform he is on he will use it to lie. The problem is all the bots masquerading as humans making people think and believe that the lies are mainstream facts.
The anger at the kneeling protestors is especially revealing considering the debate centered around whether the private NFL could interfere with the expression of the players.
Trump responded in an aggressive manner that can be perceived as threatening. That’s one discussion, and one I’m not currently capable of engaging in rationally.
The other discussion is whether Twitter did right in this case. Rather than tell Twitter they’re out of place, I actually think they did the right thing, provided they’re willing to do it _more_, to shift towards having this performed by a group with some transparency around it, and to reference sources when they do so.
Seeing politicians I can’t stand called out in public for lying is deeply satisfying, but won’t change my mind about anything. I’d be interested in seeing what happens when fact checks on all politicians are considered expected & there’s a purported neutral party doing so. Can that be done without the process itself being eaten alive by political agendas? Would I personally be open to fact checks on politicians that I myself favor, and would it change my perspective on them? It feels worth trying to find out.
Ultimately, even if we end up deciding that an approach is unworkable, I applaud anyone willing to at least try to clean up our discourse right now. It’s ugly enough to have created a divide that will eventually threaten violence at scale if not addressed.
Edit: curious why the downvotes; this was deliberately civil.
Because doing it without centralized government control is bad. But regulation of speech can be good. Take a look at https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1189120.shtml for an interesting discussion.
These are interesting times we live in, with a President leveraging modern communications technology in a way that hasn't really been seen since the fireside chat era of the Roosevelt administration.
Will they be giving the same treatment to @joebiden? He has been known to lie and plagiarize throughout his political career.
Who qualifies as a reliable source for fact checking? I see links to sources like CBS and CNN, neither of which are known as bastions of truth, and both of which have failed many fact checks themselves, in recent memory.
With that straw man though, it's fairly easy to poke holes. How do we ever even implement that? Even if we ignore the sheer volume of posts, a single post is often difficult to fact check. The lie can be subtle, but even worse is the human language and how much room there can be for misdirection, dishonesty, etc.
In my spare time I work on a project (not even close to release lol) with the goal of easing information sharing, retention, etc - as I figure part of the problem to the current age is a lack of information. Wikipedia is great, but it's quite large form discussion and I think we need better tools to help us document our own conclusions. BUT, even in all the effort I've put towards this tool I haven't dreamed of quantifying the truthiness.
I just don't see how we're going to cope with these sort of truth problems. It concerns me. It feels like information is a tool of war these days, and I am concerned we're losing.
Twitter saw speech they disagreed with, and they fixed it with more speech. They haven't censored any of Trump's arguments, they didn't delete his tweets. They just added their own commentary on top of them. That's what Republicans have always claimed they wanted. Argue that people are wrong, don't censor them. Don't throw people off the platform, add a fact-check.
I grew up listening to Republicans rail against the Fairness Doctrine, and I basically agreed with them on that point. Forcing private broadcasters to act like they were neutral on every issue was problematic. But now apparently that's flipped and free speech means forcing a private company not to take sides on any issue, even when taking a side doesn't require censoring or restricting anyone else's speech.
Any Republican that was genuinely anti-censorship would be cheering Twitter's move, even if they disagreed with the content of this particular fact-check.
Conspiracy theories and baseless nonsense is the price you pay to be able to criticize those in power. It is a price worth paying.
But seeing this mislabeled as "bias" has got to be the silliest and most hyperbolic over-reaction I've ever seen.
It's somebody being a minor asshole on Twitter. That is not bias of any substantial sort.
Feelings are important, but as somebody who does get his (overly sensitive) feelings hurt by that statement, I'm at least mature enough to place it in context.
We need to grow up as a society. There are faaaaaar worse actual biases on display everyday on Twitter, from people with far more power. We have a president who's threatening to use his own political bias to shut down or regulate companies based only in what he perceives as politics.
But, yeah. There's a lot of people that would be better off not on social media. But it's so addictive that they can't help themselves.
I, for one, have stopped using social media (unless you consider HN social). And I've had a lot less friends because of it. But it's been a huge improvement in my mood and outlook on life.
It’s insane how little respect the US has for the integrity of its political system. As long as it may hurt the “other” side everything is ok without regard to the damage they are constantly doing the health of the system.
I mean I want to say they should let that happen, but the US is toothless in that the population wouldn't revolt if it happened. Twitter would end but nothing would change.
But it's not going to go there, Twitter will sit with the government, they'll make a deal, some palms will be greased and they will bow to their government overlords.
Companies are fucky like that; on the one hand they influence public discourse and voting behaviour, on the other they're morally flexible and will grovel for their government masters if they get to earn money there (see also Google and China, Hollywood films and China, etc).
People are still waiting for twitter to clear up all the bots. From what I am aware the challenge is not bots but people masquerading 1000s of accounts manually, so it's actually a misnomer to call them bots.
It was clever of them to convince the internet community that it's about "free speech" when it's actually always about the costs.
I'm not sure why, but a lot of people seem to think it is the opposite: you have to be neutral to be protected. There was a court case that ruled that way before section 230. Congress wrote 230 specifically to reverse that.
The poster asked what could be done. I’m at least trying to answer the question.
Do you have solutions? Share them! Let’s discuss.
The interesting thing that I think Jack Dorsey should respond directly to Trump's tweet about regulation is "I'm sorry you no longer find Twitter useful. Feel free to use a competitor's product." The main reason that the social networks haven't clamped down is that they need the eyeballs and controversial figures generate a lot on both sides (hate/love).
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 experience please let me know.
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. In this way you will be exposed to other perspectives. The ways we can achieve this are similar to the approach NYT has taken to comments. You can still sort comments by most recommended, but there are also "Featured Comments". 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. Does anyone else think that would be a good idea?
I think its important because I truly believe Americans are far more alike then different and just about everyone feels like they are under attack or have been violated. Its time to heal and listen and understand that we are in it together and the people that we really should be castigating are the people filled with prejudice to the point where they have shut themselves off from hearing other perspectives. I believe there is a vast middle in the USA, but its currently getting drowned out and it should have a louder voice.
Crash Course (the YouTube channel) published a short series last year on Navigating Digital Information (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtN07XYqqWSK...). I really appreciated its pointers for how to deal with social media.
"Debates" (insofar as that concept even exists on a platform like Twitter) started on false grounds should not be allowed to continue.
If I make a claim "A, therefore B, therefore C", and A is demonstrably false, I'm not going to insist we keep discussing B and C for the sake of not "ending the debate". I should be forced to either concede or find a new line of reasoning.
Other industries have things like the FCC or the FDA where companies can say, "Look, we did our due diligence, the FDA approved our drug."
If the information is useful and worth reading, the viewer will pay back the publisher, an amount which covers the initial publishing cost and additional revenue for the publisher.
Conversely, if the information is garbage or incorrect, the viewer will not pay the fee and it will be a loss for the publisher.
The payments can be small, cheap and fast via Bitcoin's Lightning Network.
Although I doubt he put that fact checking warning up all on his own, there must have been a policy in place that senior management agreed to, and legal have presumably okayed.
They're an American company and can choose to justify fact-checking only the US President if they want. It's not like hypocrisy has bothered them in the past; it clearly didn't bother them when the US elected a troll and they fixed the glitch of their own TOS suggesting he be banned from their service by modifying the TOS to have a carve-out for "newsworthiness."
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.
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 that 1% increase in problems is small, but in close elections that could easily be considered huge.
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 in, personally, just because you don't believe in it? What is this world?
Joe Biden is for the idea: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/17/opinion/joe-b...
Right now, he's:
* Doing everything in his power to have a public health crisis (which means people can't go out to vote)
* Working to bankrupt the USPS so people can't vote by mail
* Threatening to go after states which support vote-by-mail (that's the tweet and similar statements -- withholding federal funding to states which vote by mail)
That's a concerning set of signals.
That's not a verbal threat like a declaration of war, if that's the link you're looking for. It's a threat like when a country conducts military drills on your border, or like when there's a new virus outbreak on the other side of the world. Problems might or might not materialize, but you should take actions to be ready both to minimize the odds of problems, and in case they do.
Our current PoTUS is an opportunist. He hedges and hangs out ideas to see if they'll get traction. If he gets any traction on an idea, he exploits it very effectively. If he doesn't get traction, he moves on. That has upsides and downsides, but in this case, it's to everyone's advantage that he doesn't get traction.
And the response should be very similar. If a country appears to be preparing to invade, you prepare to defend yourself. That doesn't mean you need to be obnoxious about it or try to provoke a war (politeness pays), but you do want to respond to the threat.
I apologize if I was imprecise in my wording. The word 'threat' has multiple meanings. I don't want to vilify the PoTUS, but I do want to make sure the checks-and-balances stay in place. That take vigilance against threats, both real and potential.
I'm not quite sure about your intent, but I think this is a more effective phrasing:
"You say you are a person, but I say you are a banana. As a banana, who are you to dispute my facts?"
Personally I don’t have a problem with anyone who wants to vote by mail being able to request a ballot. Most states already allow no-excuse absentee ballets.
I think the problem arises when the State automatically mails ballots to every registered voter at an address.
If too many ballots show up at a house because someone requested it, there’s a paper trail. If too many ballots show up at a house automatically, there’s zero paper trail to be able to tell if they were all filled out and mailed back, besides the overall voter participation rate going up, which surely it will do.
While technically proclaiming the virtues of joining an army to fight for them can be considered freedom of speech and should be protected, in practice it's not because they're a deplorable terrorist organization.
Trump is working the refs even though they are already very much in his favor.
I think you're misunderstanding the section. A publisher of content is very much responsible for it. After all, it says that "no provider [...], a platform, shall be treated as the publisher" i.e. a platform is not a publisher (so therefore a platform is not liable).
However, if you stop being just a 'platform', you could become liable for the content you host. I think moderation in general is fine, but if you started curating the content I think you could get in trouble.
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 groups.
How is it a fact that mail-in ballots will not lead to rigged elections? Just that there's no evidence to support it doesn't mean it can't be true (however unlikely). If we're really to police politicians, surely it should be only on absolutely logically false points?
The point about that only registered votes will receive ballots and not just anyone might be a real correction, but it sort of depends on who can be a registered voter, I don't know the details of that. It also seems like a relatively minor point.
And the third correction is just horrendous. Trump targeted California, and they add a "get the facts" that other states also exist. How is that categorically relevant? Obviously Trump is concerned with leftwing influence, so he's singling California out, it's most certainly valid.
So Twitter releases what's possibly the most culturally significant feature they've released in 10 years, and they fuck up 2 out of 3, and the only one they might have gotten right has not enough information and seems to be minor?
To me it seems there's only 2 rational explanations: whoever made the check the facts did so without oversight or involvement of a committee, and will be fired, or Twitter simply does not want to actually do this, and tries to get out of the public pressure to do so by making a weak attempt and then giving up. I hate to be cynical, but the first one option just doesn't seem very likely given the gravity of the situation.
edit: if I was the CEO of Twitter and I would have given the final 'go' on the "what you need to know" it would have looked like this:
- In the state of California only registered voters receive ballots.
So: no hear-say about evidence that is missing, no accusing a politician of lies and definitely not naming that politician in every line. Just the facts, and let the reader figure out how that reflects on the tweet the politician made.
1. Questioning whether the Electoral College (and its tendency to devalue votes in some states) has a place in the modern US.
2. Questioning whether the election itself is completely rigged (via fraudulent votes).
#1 is the question many liberals have been asking. #2 is thee claim that the entire GOP has been making for years, despite their own investigations never turning up more than a few individuals voting fraudulently (but never systematic fraud perpetrated by the political left, as they claim).
Or how they call it on the right side: Clown World. Guess nobody is happy with the current affairs.
Here's also some history on the law https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/legislative-history
Also preempting the brigade downvoting anything that has the word 'conservative' in it by pointing out that Joe Biden is actually for this idea as well (middle of article when he starts talking about the Facebook hearings and CDA 230):
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/17/opinion/joe-b...
Maybe it's time for the US to become a member of the international community, by adopting common codes.
Trying to fact check that kind of person makes no sense. The man himself makes no sense, and he knows. He's a troll and also the US president.
Once you start fact checking where does it end? A lot of people have different views on different things and there is no clear right or wrong.
What I would like to see is that the US political system starts fact checking itself and stop spreading misinformation. This should be done out of self respect.
Still: good question!
I suspect, however, that he does not have the time to sit tweeting trash all day long while “leading” this country.
2. Who decides what is a viable source? As a part of their "fact check", Twitter linked to CNN, which is almost as bad as Fox News these days. This really isn't helping their case for supposed neutrality.
3. I don't like Trump, didn't vote for him, and find his tweets embarrassing. But I don't need Twitter to tell me what to think.
Check the text yourself [0] there's nothing in there about having to either be a complete free zone or even to moderate neutrally to get protection from civil liabilities. Personally I wish they'd take a tougher stance but legally they don't have to and I /really/ don't think it's a good idea to legally require them to because the definition of what is and isn't moderation worthy will change on a dime. [1]
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
[1] Especially under the 'unitary executive' theory which is used a lot to try to undermine any congressional restrictions or accountability on the executive branch. That means the interpretation and enforcement can and will switch overnight every 4-8 years.
Recent election winners have used social media to present, more effectively than using just the press, a preferred narrative that has - IMO - conned the electorate and won narrow wins for parties/people based primarily on falsehoods.
You can't preserve democracy by relying solely on elections.
Those who seriously, and serially, abuse the system also attack the ability of people to post/make their vote. Again happening the ability of the demos to choose their candidates.
In some countries the system stands markedly against a fuller democracy - by use of things such as electoral colleges, or first-past-the-post voting systems.
TL;DR see para.3
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 and still believe him.
It's comparable with threaten to shutdown or control printed press when a specific new letter complained that what he says is complete makeup and wrong.
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 that the truth police is going to go and check your tweets or comment—even if you ignore the fact that the line between facts and opinions isn't always easy to see. Even facts like Taiwan being its own country or part of China or the Armenian genocide can be denied, and people should be able to say that—and perhaps rightfully get shit for that, but still be able to say it.
We're going back to the Middle Ages, where if you say Earth isn't flat or God doesn't exist (replace with global warming isn't caused by humans, Covid-19 is man-made), you're executed.
Sad.
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 looking for such solution, if only because masses' mood swings faster than technical solutions are implemented, and your features will be there when people are fed up with constant conflicts.
Education != censorship. The tweets were never deleted.
This is exactly what we need today when everyone blindly trusts what they read online because they like the person who says it and tell their audience that anyone saying differently is lying
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 can screw up so badly that they run a casino into bankruptcy. A money printing factory, and it was so badly managed that it folded.
And this is who the "disaffected" voted in.
I only hope that this little episode is the shock to the system that wakes up enough people. But there's too many Trumpers for me to think that's happened.
> There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone..... ....living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!
There's no justification at all for that tweet. He's saying that mail-in votes will lead to substantially fraudulent elections, eroding the trust in the process. One could even consider what he's saying as dangerous to the democratic system itself.
How can a separation of powers approach still check itself? Like different term limits, VP powers, congressional army? Banning factions or breaking up parties that get too big, banning private donors? Rooting for the American experiment to get sorted!
Not at all. Free speech in both cases. He is free to say what he thinks, we (us as individuals, Twitter as a company, everyone) are free to say we think he is talking complete and utter balderdash if that is what we think.
A president trying to silence Twitter's statement about what he has said by intimidating them is an attempt at censorship though.
As for the gun issue, nobody in the gun crowd liked that comment from him. Some have even argued they're not going to vote for him going forward as a result. But when the alternative is people who literally believe that the second amendment doesn't exist, doesn't say what it says, and don't believe that the SCOTUS rulings that have come down on it have any effect, what choice do they have?
If I start lying to me team at work, I'll have a very uncomfortable meeting with my boss.
If our sales people start lying to clients, the company may get dragged into courts.
If head of state lies when publicly addressing the country in many other countries, they'll be held accountable before congress.
But US seems to be about absolute freedom, and not about following ANY rules, no matter how basic. I never get why people accept such a system.
Maybe we need a new word for it altogether?
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
I think the right to free speech isn't some enshrinement of the right to spew garbage, but the realization that restrictions of free speech can very easily be turned against 'good' causes.
Who is someone working for Facebook or anyone else to flag my messages because they think they're not factual?
This is crazy.
Those alternatives would be "censorship" (in some sense; not any real legal sense).
This is not censorship.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2018/dec/...
If the movie describes reality then it does it pretty well and then apparently reality can be described as a joke.
If the movie satires reality and we cannot discern the satire from reality then reality was already a joke to begin with, we just didn't know.
The question is not how did we get here or how did this happen? But how do we get out of here? :)
Worse, for me in the UK, his success got adopted by UK Tories, now we also have a people in positions of power who just dodge hard questions and where possible exclude press as punishment. People in power who lie and aren't held to account. It's diabolical -- but by subverting the rule of law they're able to continue.
[to those voting down: these are convicted cases of voter fraud. If you are in favor of fact-checking these cases demonstrate the core question: who deserve this power?]
Let's fact check these fact checkers.
Here are some cases convicted in court of election fraud, a lot of them involve fraudulent use of absentee ballots https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...
And there is also a problem with the chain of trust, since 28 million mail-in ballots went missing in the last four elections: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/24/28_mil...
Or what about the mail carrier recently charged with meddling with the ballot requests in his chain of trust? https://www.whsv.com/content/news/Pendleton-County-mail-carr...
And if you think politicians would never cheat, a Pennsylvania election official just plead guilty to stuffing the ballot box. He was paid by candidates that I believe won: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/05/21/doj-democrats-...
YOU can claim vaccines are a fake, and that's bad, but won't have harder consequences on you.
A medical doctor can't claim the same thing without losing their position as a medical doctor; they kinda lose a bit of that "it's just my opinion" card as part of the responsibilities they have with society.
Who is Twitter to fact-check world leaders?
When world leaders rarely tell the truth, how can anyone realistically think that such a system could even work, even if it made sense?
0. https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/21/18700605/section-230-inte...
If I'm wrong I like being corrected. It means I learn something. Of course if I think the correction is incorrect then things get a bit more complex and a longer discussion will ensue.
For videos, see https://joinpeertube.org or https://libry.tv
For micro-blogging, see https://joinmastodon.org
For photos, see https://pixelfed.org
For others, see https://fediverse.party/
On HN, it's a lot tougher to follow specific people, though it's cool to see posts and then follow up with what they've recently posted or commented.
Based on the positive reaction to the "birthrates are at all time low!" article last week, it looks like most of the HN crowd is happy about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23246734
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mail-in-ballot-voter-fraud...
What's True
While no U.S. government agency officially compiles state-by-state data on voter fraud, and requirements for mail-in voting vary by state, analysis by elections experts shows that fraud is slightly more common with mail-in voting than in-person voting at polling places.
What's False All types of voter fraud in U.S. elections is minuscule in comparison to the number of ballots cast, according to elections experts. Taking that into consideration, it is problematic to make comparisons between types of ballot-casting systems and erroneous to claim mail-in voting "substantially" increases the risk of fraud.
That's the thing. If there is no evidence to support it, it cannot be asserted as an unequivocally true statement. Trump doesn't claim that it "might" be true, or he "believes" it to be true, he says, effectively, "this is the unarguable truth". And Twitter says "not so fast".
And I wonder how many of these people will vote him in once again... How can there be so many smart people in the US yet this guy ends up as their leader?
With other words:
- fact check => removal == bad especially if automatised, basically censorship
- fact check => warning + link to some source + maybe slightly less visibility in search (but still visible and potentially still even first result) == ok, people still can make their own opinion there is basically no censorship.
(Side note, yes I'm aware that even "non" censoring methods can have a minimal censoring effect due to peoples laziness, but it's quite limited and IMHO acceptable especially if linked sources are objective.)
Also, if they're false it should be easy to correct them.
Anyone who thinks about this for more than 20 seconds will see that this is about control, not protecting poor Twitter users who supposedly can't decide for themselves.
Details in https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/270642-idi...
But the dynamic is definitely different and seems a lot more anonymous unless you are a really high profile account like antirez, patio11, drewdevault, or a CEO of some well known company or startup.
The system is stuck in two local maximums: news publishers which use their own web properties as some kind of newspaper/television hybrid, and social media platforms which conceive of media as only posts, votes, & comments. They're both "monolithic architectures" (so to speak) which lack the kind of modularity or extensibility that would enable innovation.
On the Internet, we should be looking at information within the context of general computation. There are data sources (reporters, individuals, orgs) which get mixed with signals (votes, fact-checks, annotations) and then ranked, filtered, and rendered. An open market would maximize the modularity and extensibility of each of these components so that better media products can be created.
The social platforms are in a difficult position because they have total control over what's carried on their platforms, and so they want to assert a position of neutrality -- which is why they're adamant they're not media companies. But if they're controlling any part of the pipeline other than compute and hosting, they're not a neutral platform. They're a part of the media.
The way we've historically walked the tight-rope of misinformation vs censorship is to create an open market for journalism so that there's accountability through the system. I don't think we'll have an open market until we componentize social media and stop seeing journalism and the design of social media as two distinct things.
Trump is making an extraordinary claim. He must back up that claim, whether that's by revealing that there's a true plot against him; referencing historical data; or something else.
Claiming mail-in votes will be majority fraudulent, and by implication that the entire vote is invalid... is a much stronger claim, which IMO requires much stronger proof.
Given that mail-in ballots have been in used for a long time, there's a good history of data, so it's not predicting the future out of nothing, but based on past evidence.
The twitter fact-check link in fact goes into that precise thing.
No, it started long before that. Trump's political profile came about from being the most famous advocate of Birtherism[1] -- promoting the idea that Barack Obama is not American and demanding his birth certificate.
He later reached a plurality of Republican primary polls by saying that undocumented Mexican immigrants are rapists and murderers[2].
Trump has been a conspiracy theorist for years now.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_consp...
2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/...
The difference is that Twitter's editorial voice differs from the voice of some Twitter user.
And that's just the head of the team. You can see the hard-left and pro-Antifa affiliations of the team outlined here: https://nickmonroe.blog/2019/11/28/dear-jack-twitter-is-poli...
You can't give authoritarians the benefit of the doubt. They'll take that inch and turn it into miles and miles.
Trump is well beyond benefit of the doubt bankruptcy.
This is also patently false - they're sending out ballots to registered voters, not everyone regardless of how they got there.
> That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!
Who are these "professionals"?
I thought that according to the right, Americans were perfectly capable of making life / death decisions for themselves and those around them during an active pandemic. So a trivial thing such as misinformation should be easy to deal with for them.
For an example, I could pull the same trick on your comment. I could try and convince people that "does indeed," implies 100% confidence, and then I could point out that since from a Bayesian perspective you should never reach 100% confidence, you can't know what you're talking about. Obviously nobody would buy that, because it's not you that wrote down 100%, it was me.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
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?
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?
Now adding information is somehow bad? There is no consistency in this argument.
A lot of past US Presidents were likely no more competent, but their images demanded that they appear such. Reagan was probably suffering from dementia. JFK was high most of the time. It's just that the PR strategy for those guys was different because their public personae were groomed for different expectations.
Well that, and neither had Twitter.
Idiocracy is an easy pull and rings true because of outward appearances, but the reality is (and probably always has been) closer to Vonnegut's Player Piano or Kubrik's Doctor Strangelove.
Someone being able to say "I think your opinion is wrong" is no less a freedom of speech matter than someone being able to state an opinion in the first place. Freedom of speech does not, or at least it should not, give special privilege or protection to the first person who speaks.
It's called the "alt-right[0]."
And at the fringe of the fringe, right-wing accelerationism[1].
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right
[1]https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/11/11/20882005/accele...
Twitter isn't requiring anything from anybody to comment on anything. They're just putting forward their own opinion. Much like Trump is putting forward his. The only difference is that people trust Twitter more than the current POTUS.
Students who take and show competency in pre-algebra qualify to move on to higher level maths building foundational knowledge for the more complex systems.
It wouldn’t necessarily have to be 1:1 in the model and structure of classes, but that’s my thinking. Media literacy shouldn’t be a one semester course, maybe not even a one year course, but instead a component of a radically different educational framework that informs our young students how to critique, analyze and reason their way through the digital frontier.
By no means would this kind of shift in education be easy, but in my mind ease is as much a threat to progress than hardship in some cases.
Do people here just not want to see it regardless of its factual nature? That seems like the eventual issue with “fact checking” social media posts.
Some New Confucians and Neo-Reactionaries argue that this kind of basic oversight should be provided by a novel council/board of "wise scholars", or people with real intellectual accomplishments which are not under serious dispute-- appointed with very long, perhaps lifetime terms. There's really no equivalent to this in the U.S. other than perhaps the Supreme Court, but the House of Lords in the U.K. is quite similar and does not currently have much of a political role, so it could be repurposed with relative ease.
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?
If Trump's statement about fraud is not predictive, then it is fiction and meaningless instead of wrong.
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.
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'.
Misinformation kills innocent people. A harsh no-tolerance policy is acceptable given this is the worst global health crisis in 100 years.
They know exactly who he doesn't want having guns, and why, and it's not them, and they agree, so there's a strong silence.
I don't want to be dismissive, if you have some kind of distinction you're trying to get at, I'm open to hearing it. But I personally don't see a big conceptual difference between Reddit and a forum, other than that one of them happened to get bigger. And I'm pretty skeptical of using size as a criteria here, because it would force us to say that Google+ and MySpace stopped being social media at some point when they dipped in popularity.
How much did this “reopen America” botnet influence national discussion? People don’t innately expect a Twitter or Facebook user to be a bot. We have to remove these bot accounts.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/nearly-half-twitter-accounts-dis...
One may also argue that the president harms our country's image but again, senators and congressmen represent us as well and can also influence large amounts of people.
That does not mean he must go uncontested; people can still dispute everything he says by responding (the original form of fact-checking). The discussion should instead be about whether or not political figures should be able to block people. I remember that was an issue a while ago, and I'm not sure where it is now.
For one thing it's extremely classist, throughout the movie popular culture is seen as fodder for dumb people while high culture if for clever people. Beyond that it also says that, effectively, dumb people and poor people are the same thing (as exemplified by the "white trash" segment at the start of the movie) and that dumb, poor people are bound to breed dump, poor people (and apparently they do that a lot) while clever people would breed other clever people (but they don't do it because... reasons). So social determinism taken to the limit.
I mean just look at this intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZ0ZUy7P3E
What are examples of clever people? Darwin, Beethoven and Da Vince.
Examples of "degeneracy"? A girl in skimpy clothes, wrestling and a... woman with boxing gloves? Because clearly "panem et circenses" is a novel concept.
Then we go to say "with no natural predators to thin the herd, we began to simply began to reward those who reproduced the most and left the intelligent to become an endangered species". So we're now talking full-on eugenics. Also Beethoven was well known for fending packs of wolves in his youth, proving his evolutionary superiority.
And I'm this point I'm literally one minute into the movie and I could go on and on and on. At best it's elitist, at worst it's much darker than that.
If you like the movie as a funny comedy then be my guest, but please stop bringing it up in political discussions. If anything it's a symptom of the very thing you're decrying: a dumbed down, unnuanced caricature of political discourse.
So basically he is afraid of more people voting? Like how is a election where more people then ever vote rigged? Like wtf.
This might fall in line with the analysis of <forgot name sorry> which claimed that election results are more based on which people vote and which don't then on swing voters and that swing voters are pretty much irrelevant.
If this is true and it turns out that an majority of voters in the US is more on the side of the democrats then a voting method which makes more people vote could indeed cause a long term defeat of the republicans in a fair democratic non rigged manner!
Free speech and the correctness of a message are orthogonal concerns - the Earth is flat is a false claim no matter whether there is free speech or not and neither supporting nor opposing arguments have any bearing on that fact, they may however influence other people accepting or rejecting it.
One tactic I think is likely to come from Barr and the DOJ is a corrupt selective enforcement of anti-trust laws - decide Twitter and AWS are monopolies but Facebook and Microsoft are not.
Surely you see the irony of your trying to regulate how Twitter formats their free speech on their own platform?
Maybe I have to yield this point, and say that Twitter should also call out politicians on making baseless statements. (Which will be all of the time because twitter doesn't have a very neat way of including footnotes, and politicians are not known to publish tweets as academic papers) but even then the commentary should be something like:
- the trump administration has not published evidence to support the statement that mail-in ballots lead to rigged elections.
Which is very different from just saying it's a false claim in my opinion.
Agreed. Congress should be ashamed of themselves.
If fraud is more common with mail in voting and some states (or everyone?) converts entirely to mail in voting, how much will fraud increase overall?
Will it increase enough to change the overall results? With Michigan and Wisconsin being decided in 2016 by less than 1% of the vote, there's not much margin for error, fraud, or mistakes.
In order to make that reasoning (you could say that arguments are not false or true, they're just arguments) he's using false (CA will not be sending ballots to "anyone") and unsubstantiated (mail-in ballots have been working for years without extended robberies and forging, why would this be any different?) claims.
You can search and reason about the words so that "technically" he isn't lying. But the actual message he's sending is very, very clear.
So... no evidence of fraudulent use.
28 million out of how many? "almost 1 in 5". so roughly 150 million ballots mailed out over multiple years and elections, and < 20% are not returned. Or something else?
What does "unaccounted for" mean? They knew they were mailed out. All I can divine from that is 'not returned'.
"There’s little doubt that as the number of mail-in ballots increases, so does fraud."
Yet, right above that in the article, it says of the 28 million - "no evidence of fraud". How many more mail-in ballots do you need to get evidence of fraud? 200 million? 300 million?
What is the insinuation? People are mailing their ballots back, but they're getting "lost"?
It seems that when there's evidence found - as in, criminal investigations turn up fraud and people are charged and prosecuted - "there's evidence of fraud!". When no evidence is found... that's also evidence that it's going on, but not discovered yet. That's how I read this hysteria over 'mail in ballots'.
"He was convicted on five counts of tax fraud, one of the four counts of failing to disclose his foreign bank accounts, and two counts of bank fraud."
So, he was convicted of tax fraud and bureaucratic discrepencies. While factually related to the investigation, none of these charges has nothing to do with what the investigation was about.
This is something I don't understand about current politics, a leader uses their people to create greatness. If it's "Trump's policies" wth is everyone else in the political system doing? In the UK we get "Boris says" but it's quite clear all policy decisions are being made under Cummings, and he gets them presumably from liaison with Tory donors.
Trump/Boris clearly know nothing about medicine, epidemiology, public health care so if ideas actually there's they should probably be rejected.
Why this focus on individuals, as if one person should be holding power in a democratic government. That's clearly wrong.
> How can a separation of powers approach still check itself?
If you approach the problem (and it is in fact a very real problem) from an engineering/computing perspective, would a possibly useful approach be to develop an AI that consumes all (or as much as possible) relevant data, and then spits out instances of events where accountability is lacking? Tune it on the overly eager side so it spits out lots of false positives along with legitimate issues, and then a bipartisan committee that consists of representatives from various factions (government, corporate, unions, finance, law enforcement & military), as well as the general public to sort through what comes out.
This would obviously be a fairly major undertaking, but nothing beyond all sorts of other things we do on a regular basis I wouldn't think, and from the amount of news stories and forum comments on the matter, I think the problem is big enough to spend a fair amount of time and money on coming up with some solution.
"Freedom of speech" isn't freedom to force private businesses to provide a platform for your content. There are plenty of businesses besides Twitter that will provide a platform for the type of discourse you are looking for.
They realize that simply deleting the posts in question and banning the user (Stable Genius) would have a serious backlash from the hard-right. They did what they feel was the next best thing, which is to call out the garbage for what it is by slapping an unremovable label on it. It sort-of seems like a "win", they get to smack-down the asshole, yet not "censor" him.
Unfortunately Stable Genius is playing a different game.
It's a game where outrage, even when directed at him, actually HELPS him. It gives him yet another grievance to trot around, yet another distraction for the public, more leverage for his base, more grist for his vitriol. Meanwhile other republicans will use this cover to continue to cram through unpopular and self-serving greedy agendas, in "shock doctrine" style.
The thing is Twitter is not news, it has no loyalty to the public or the truth. It is a purely money making enterprise, like any other corporation. Jack Dorsey and the board can do whatever the F they want.
It is amazingly easy to lie with statistical "facts", through careful sampling, use of technical language, and overly broad or narrow definitions: https://medium.com/@hollymathnerd/how-to-defend-yourself-fro...
I could write a "factual" article claiming hundreds of mass shootings in 2020 (obviously false). I just need to define a "mass shooting" as an incident where four or more people are injured (no deaths required).
Or an equally "factual" article claiming that zero mass shootings in 2020 (also obviously false). I just need to define a "mass shooting" as an incident where twenty or more people are killed.
Exact same dataset, two different and mutually exclusive "facts".
I stopped using Twitter on January 20th, 2017. I had been a user since they started, but I went through and programatically deleted every tweet, like, follower, etc. I now just have my name and I never use the site. I wish more people would do the same. Don't delete your account, just stop using it.
If Twitter had just held everyone on their platform to the same standards, I would be somewhat accepting of them as a neutral platform for free speech. But they decided to ignore the threats, lies, bullying, name calling, racism, sexism and more coming from not just Trump, but all of his followers. So they can go to hell for all I care now.
There are a heck of a lot of non-reasonable adults on social media.
Unless something is very explicitly and prominently labeled as a joke or satire, in a way that won't get separated from it when it is re-shared by your downstream viewers, there's a good chance quite a few people will not catch on that it is not intended to be true.
Social media can be particularly bad in this regard because it often encourages only spending a short time reading each individual post. It pushes breadth over depth.
> 12 years ago we didn't have this problem, and I think that's mostly related to the fact there was some UX resistance to hitting the "reahare" button.
I'm not sure that is most of it, but it contributes to increasing volume in people's feeds, pushing the breadth vs. depth balance toward breadth so makes things worse.
1. Ballots contain: a ballot, a serial number, a small envelope and a large envelope. 2. The voter fills in the ballot and stuffs in the small envelope and closes it. 3. Voter now needs to get a code from a webpage and add to the serial number card. Here's the part where infrastructure in Iceland is excellent. Nigh everyone has personal electronic certificates on their phones so authentication is easy. I must admit I have no idea how easy or hard this would be in the States. 4. Puts the small envelope and the serial number card in the large envelope and closes it. 5. Mails in the large envelope. 6. Precinct opens the large envelope and validates the serial number. If it is valid, puts the small envelope in box headed for counting. 7. Count the votes. Declare results. 8. Investigate the "bad serials and validation number".
There are fun things to think about doing to increase confidence in the voting process. In this scheme I describe the validation code could be a hash of the serial and a salt. Then you could actually release all the validation cards so voters can actually verify that their ballots were counted.
Do most people still expect that someone in that position will not post clearly false messages, specially when those messages affect something as fundamental as the death of thousands of people and the overthrow of a government?
Iran contra, Watergate, Vietnam, ...
Is there any trust left?
It's bewildering that the answer is, "Yes". It's discouraging that so many presidents have so often deceived the people so horribly. It's much much more discouraging that the people don't learn.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12656495454107443...
$TWTR already down 5%.
For instance, there are other sites that take a very different moderation strategy (4chan comes to mind.) If Twitter developed a moderation strategy like Voat or 4chan, likely people would leave for a company that utilized a different moderation style. Then you'd be wondering why there isn't "free speech" on that platform.
This gets to the root of the issue, the crux of the argument isn't whether one is entitled to have a public space to spread ideas, but whether one is entitled to a platform by which their ideas can be spread. A platform whose ubiquity is paradoxically dependent on that platform's ability to moderate what type of discourse is permitted.
I'm going to take you at your word and accept that world leaders rarely tell the truth: so they should ALL get the same treatment then. But instead of stamping their output with just "fact-check this", why not unilaterally label all of it with: "may contain lies, omissions and half-truths"?
Normally such threads come from people which are somewhat in the process or trying to de-mantel a democracy. So a US president saying something like that is quite worrying even if his intentions are not to undermine the US democracy.
Because Twitter adds an annotion to a statement? An annotation that leads to facts/more information?
Why?
> When has it become unacceptable to lie?
If a world leader does that, it needs to be addressed. Would you accept all the information that comes out of other countries, for example North Korea?
Edit: There is even a sister reply to this comment repeating the same nonsense, from a Google employee. Misinformation winning again.
First link has plenty of people convicted of voter fraud using absentee ballots: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...
> 28 million out of how many? "almost 1 in 5". so roughly 150 million ballots mailed out over multiple years and elections, and < 20% are not returned. Or something else?
The second link was there to provide data on what happens to absentee ballots along the chain of trust. As you said 1/5 is unaccounted for.
The third link is one court case of a mail man meddling with absentee ballots, and admitting to doing so. It shows the chain-of-trust of mail system is much weaker than what we expect with in-person voting.
Would you be happy if 1/5 of the people that showed up at the voting office was unaccounted for?
> It seems that when there's evidence found - as in, criminal investigations turn up fraud and people are charged and prosecuted - "there's evidence of fraud!".
Seems like you commented without inspecting all evidence or in bad faith when you ignore the evidence in the first link of convicted cases of absentee ballot fraud, then state this.
[1] NOFX reference, I normally wouldnt refer to anyone as an idiot, especially on HN which is where I come to feel dumb by comparison.
He later reached a plurality of Republican primary polls while saying...
If you use "by" it implies causation, something no one is able to know, whereas "while" accurately points out that the two events only occurred simultaneously.
Now I'm not sure if you were just writing casually, and I fully expect that now that I've pointed out this "minor" technical shortcoming in your statement you will see my point, and I'm in no way implying that you had a strong intent to imply a cause and effect relationship between these two events...but please don't underestimate the potential significance the aggregate effect millions of seemingly minor slip-ups like this (this is only one example, and only one form) can have on the collective consciousness (aggregate of the internal mental models of all people) of the members of national and global societies when individual members of those societies are subjected to it over a long period of time. If you now think about it, it may seem like you "know" how large of an effect it has, but you actually have literally no way of knowing with certainty and accuracy what the actual effect is.
The world is incredibly complex, filled with all sorts of randomness and incredibly counter-intuitive events, but this is not how we perceive it. We perceive the world as extremely structured and organized, as if mostly everything "adds up", but only because our brain evolved to provide this illusion to our consciousness. This "good enough" illusion rose to the top over all other evolutionary paths that were tried, under the set of conditions in existence at the time they evolved. If conditions (variables) changed significantly, would we be shocked if a formerly highly trustworthy ML/AI model started producing less accurate predictions? I don't think so. Then why should we be surprised if the biological AI in our minds exhibits similar behavior when the inputs undergo a fundamental change? To me, this would be the equivalent of believing in magic of some sort.
People's (that includes you and me) perception of the world is formed based on the information they consume - all of it. It may seem (clear as day, and in full UHD+ resolution) that your personal worldview is based solely on strict evidence and logic, but the fact of the matter is, this is not how the human mind works. Sure, some minds are better at it than others, but the exact degree to which that is true is also unknowable, and making judgements on relative capability are subject to the very same phenomenon I point out.
I will wrap this up with a challenge: for the next month, read not just the news, but also all the general conversations and individual comments in social media forums from your normal perspective, and then also from this perspective. Carefully consider(!) when people are discussing a complicated, massively multivariate issue, whether the discreet observations and assertions that people make are actually knowably true, "first-principle" facts, or if they are actually predictions produced by an amazingly sophisticated AI model. This will not be easy, at all...it will be very difficult and require extreme discipline (you are literally fighting against nature), but the results may be incredibly interesting (perhaps one of the most interesting things you have encountered in years), if you are willing(!) to give it a serious try.
EDIT: Just to be clear I'm not saying your post is ridiculous, but Trump is. And yes the following is somewhat sarcasm END EDIT.
Let me guess next Mercedes and BMW have a oligopol on cars and china will be classified as a company with an monopol on cheap products.
The crazy/scary think is that I believe Trump would totally cable of doing it if he get's the legal power and time to do so...
Examples:
- "36,000 Americans could be alive today if President Trump had acted sooner." [This is entirely speculative and impossible to prove, similar to Trump's mail-in voting claim]
- "The hard truth is Donald Trump ignored the warnings of health experts and intelligence agencies, downplayed the threat COVID-19 posed, and failed to take the action needed to combat the outbreak." [This is false, and certainly not a "hard truth". He took early action including closing the borders to China, which Joe Biden deemed xenophobic at the time.]
- "I've said it before, and I'll say it again: No company pulling in billions of dollars in profits should pay a lower tax rate than firefighters and teachers." [This is highly misleading, and could benefit from context, e.g. https://www.wsj.com/articles/does-amazon-really-pay-no-taxes...]
- "In the middle of this crisis, President Trump is trying to cut food assistance. It’s morally bankrupt." [This is misleading. He's not cutting food assistance; the USDA is attempting to add a work requirement to SNAP benefits.]
- "In the middle of the worst public health crisis in our lifetime, President Trump is actively trying to terminate health insurance for millions of Americans. It's unthinkable." [Highly misleading if not outright false.]
Are any of these black-and-white false? No. But neither is what Twitter is fact checking Trump for. If they were to apply fair standards, they would "fact check" Biden too. But they won't. And we all know why. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the person in charge of this new policy has called Trump a "nazi" and a "racist tangerine."
A good way of looking at rights is: yours end when it begins harming someone else. For example, one can “assemble”[^a] and protest, but once you start getting violent, your right to protest is gone and you’ll probably be arrested.
Tangent:
However, there is a controversial reading of the concept of free speech (concept, not First Amendment), and that is: what about monopolies silencing you? Most people would agree that removing a disorderly person from your restaurant is ok, but where do you draw the line when it comes to monopolies?
As in, what if a restaurant chain owned 90% of the restaurants (all brands included) in the country, and they banned you because they didn’t like the words coming out of your mouth?
I don’t know the answer to that.
----
[^a]: quotes because the First Amendment refers to it as “assembling”
I'd probably understand that you posted it as a joke, but I'd also know that regardless of your intentions, many people would not understand the joke.
I think you probably earned your strike.
There are several ways you could measure this - is it based on the S&P Index? Rising GDP? Income inequality reducing? Low unemployment? Balance of Payments? Not all of those measures may be true at once, and if they're not true which one is the correct measure?
The relative importance could vary from person to person. Somebody with, say, a large pension fund might see the S&P Index as the most important measure. Somebody else might view it as income inequality.
You could argue a case for each one, and each voter would have to make up their own mind as to whether they agree with the statement.
Would we really want people to be the inverse ? Meaning would we like them to be more fascist or accepting of fascism ?
What exactly happened that AntiFa has become a group that people don't support ? Maybe I missed something there.
The political order the US created under those circumstances is unraveling. Americans across the US should be focused on making the communities they live in food-secure and energy-independent. It's time to plan for environmental and economic resilience. The next century will be rocky and the US is unprepared. The US will not be the largest producer in the world, but if we can revitalize local production then we can at least be the hardest to kill. The revolution we need it localism.
How exactly is a society with those principles supposed to function?
What does "unaccounted for" mean?
"Would you be happy if 1/5 of the people that showed up at the voting office was unaccounted for?"
huh? how does that compare to ballots mailed out that were not returned? Again - "unaccounted for" is... nebulous. If 100m were mailed out, and 20m were not returned... are they "unaccounted for"?
There's context missing here. What are the historical averages?
If in any given year, 20% of mailed out ballots are not returned, and that's pretty average for 10-15-20 years... 20% "unaccounted for" is a non-issue. If the average is 4%, and in one election it's 20% or more... yeah, that's an issue that needs investigation. That information was not provided in the articles I saw, instead they just appear to rely on "big" numbers.
i have developed a loose curriculum for the latter half of that pipeline, but getting the education uniformly distributed throughout the public mind market is the hard part.
You're actually suggesting that posting dissenting information is censorship?!?
Black is white! Good is bad!
Edit. From Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Oregon#Balloting
Ballots packs are mailed to every registered voter 14 to 18 days before the election. When the ballot pack comes in the mail, it includes:
An official ballot
A secrecy envelope
A ballot return envelope
Once received, an Elections Official at the elections office where the ballot is received will compare the signature on the ballot return envelope to the signature on the voter registration card to verify that the voter is registered to vote. Once verified, the secrecy envelope containing the actual ballot is removed and polled with the other ballots. Once the "polls" close at 8pm on Election Day, the ballots are removed from their secrecy envelopes and counted.
Imagine what happens when $countryX realizes that bribing a few mailmen is even more cost effective than misinformation campaigns?
This is all directly related to his work for Russia and Russian interests, in exactly the same way that Al Capone's famous tax evasion conviction was the result of his operation of a criminal organization.
Why did you move on from the comment most relevant to the topic of the fact check? Fact check disputed evidence of absentee voter fraud, and firs link shows evidence.
I put the first link first to establish a common frame that the fact checkers were wrong, and the second-to-third are more advanced topics.
First link demonstrates the question we should ask: Who deserve the power of determining what is true or not? Does a committee at twitter deserve that power?
> What does "unaccounted for" mean?
That is the crux of the problem with the mail in ballot chain of trust, isn't it?
You wouldn't have to ask this question at a physical voting spot, where this would be irregular and systems are in place to document the chain-of-trust to the degree necessary for voting.
For anyone who believes that Twitter should be in the business of fact-checking, or censoring harassing or disinformation, tell me which of these should be fact-checked or censored:
1. "Don't wear masks. They don't work and take away masks from healthcare workers."
2. "The government is lying about whether masks work or not because we don't have enough masks for everyone."
3. "Masks help. Everyone should be wearing masks, wear a home-made mask if we don't have enough store bought ones."
4. "Fact: coronavirus is not airborne"
5. "Coronavirus is airborne."
6. "Scientists think Hydroxychloroquine might be effective in treating coronavirus, link here: "
7. "Scientists think treating men with estrogen might be effective in treating coronavirus, link here: "
8. "Look at this video of this Karen calling the police and lying because a black man who just told her to leash his dog. Do better white women."
9. "Look at this article about this Shylock who scammed thousands of seniors out of their retirement money. Do better Jews.
10. "Look at this Laquisha and her five kids taking over the bus and screaming and disturbing all the other riders. Do better black women."
11. Look, another tech-bro mansplaining and whitesplaining why racism isn't really a thing. I can only stomach so much of this ignorance.
12. "Under the Trump administration, there are actual Nazi's in the White House."
13. "Trump is a traitor against his country, he criminally colluded with Russia to rig the election."
14. "Representative Scarborough killed his intern."
15. "There is a paedophilia blackmail network that is pulling the strings behind the Democratic party."
16. "There is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free"
17. "The United States is the highest taxed nation in the world -- that will change."
18. "Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri."
19. "If Democrats were truly serious about eradicating voter fraud, they would severely restrict absentee voting, permitting it only when voters have a good excuse, like illness."
20. "Absentee voting is to voting in person as as a take-home exam is to a proctored one. And just as teachers have reported a massive cheating as a result of moving to take-home tests during coronavirus, we can expect massive fraud as we move to mail-in ballots."
Here are my answers if I was running Twitter: I would not fact-check any of these statements. I would censor the one's using derogatory racial language that is 8, 9, 10, and 11. Also 8, 9 and 11 should be banned for harassing a private citizen. For the potentially defamatory statements -- 12, 13, 14 and 15 -- if made by a real-name account they should be let stand and the offended person or organization can sue in court for defamation if they think it is false. If made by an anon account, the statement should be removed if reported.
Agreed. All politics is local after all. The problem is that the economic incentives are pointed in the polar opposite direction. Startups can't get funding if their ambitions are limited to their city, or even within the borders of their country.
As was mentioned in an article I can't locate, a lot of the world's top technical talent is stuck working at well paid jobs, on products that simply don't matter relative to the challenges humanity is facing.
Twitter et al. are where modern speech happens. They pushed themselves into this position, and thus upholding the human right to free speech also falls upon them.
So long as Twitter is not shut down, then perhaps some government oversight (to the limit of holding Twitter responsible for what and who they censor) is appropriate.
Free speech, in this case, trumps my intense dislike of our current administration.
"Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud"
Look at the_donald, which had a mass migration off of Reddit, and everyone said Reddit was going to shutdown without their ad revenue. Still waiting...
Interesting to see public information warefare playing out in real time.
1. A total of 34 individuals and 3 companies were indicted by Mueller's investigators. A total of 8 have pleaded guilty to or been convicted of felonies, including 5 Trump associates and campaign officials. Here's a Wall Street Journal article about the convictions: https://www.wsj.com/articles/mueller-indictments-whos-who-15... Also, here's a long Wikipedia article about the whole investigation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Counsel_investigation_...
2. When the Mueller report was about to be released, Attorney General Barr wrote a memo to Congress that purported to summarize the principal conclusions. Trump and Republican supporters seized on this to claim Trump was exonerated. In fact, Mueller explicitly stated that he did not exonerate Trump. Further, in a subsequent letter of his own, Mueller stated that Barr's memo "did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance" of the investigation. (Washington Post article here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/muell...)
3. A bipartisan report from the US Senate affirms the findings by US Intelligence agencies about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Here's a Wall Street Journal article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/senate-report-affirms-u-s-intel...
There are many more findings, but I tried to be concise in response to the specific claim that there is "nothing there".
When the investigation began and Mueller was appointed, Republicans praised him. (C.f. Fox News article: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/robert-mueller-appointment-...). Now they claim the investigation was either unlawful, or that FBI investigators were criminals, or similar. One does not need to take my or anyone else's word for what Mueller's team reported. You can get the redacted report from the government or even Amazon, and read it for yourself. You can also get the Senate committee's report from the government and read it for yourself. It is clear to me (and should be clear to anyone who has read the report or followed the story) that it is a flat-out lie to say there is "nothing there", and that Trump supporters have shifted from welcoming a fair investigation into Russian interference to attacking the investigators. And that's where we are now.
Tax fraud rendering you guilty of all the bad things you were ever accused of is not really sound logic. Also, I am not really defending Manaford - tbh after reading more on him, this whole Ukrainian foray seems to be one of his lesser offenses. But for example in the case of Flynn/Trump where prosecutors were taped discussing how they need to "find him guilty of anything or provoke him to cross the law", there is no doubt of bias.
But here is what people seem to gloss over -- Yes, Oregon has been voting by mail for almost 40 years in fact. But it wasn't just done overnight. In fact, the process started before most here were born; in 1981 mail-in voting was allowed at the local level[0], and it wasn't until 6 years later that it was determined to be something Oregon would do every year. And it wasn't until 2000, nearly 20 years later, that presidential elections were included.
What we're talking about for this election cycle is drastically and suddenly switching the method of voting, not phasing it in over 40 years like Oregon did. When you make a drastic change like that, the situation is ripe for failure and abuse, because the people and systems in place are not equipped to handle the situation. Frankly, they don't even know what they're getting into until they're into it, and a major election is not the time to find out that the whole system is messed up.
Then perhaps you can give me some more clarification:
* What about the Russian troll farms running fake pro-Trump social media accounts?
* What about the hacking of Clinton's email server and strategic release of those emails right before the election (even though the e-mails ended up containing nothing incriminating)?
* What about the many people lying/obstructing justice that were investigated? Why were so many people caught lying if there was nothing to hide?
Honestly curious, I'm not from the US so I don't have a horse in the race and I don't know that much about the investigation, but it seems to be quite obvious something fishy is going on there. Whether or not Trump's team was personally involved is another matter, but it seems obvious Russia meddled in the election extensively to assist Trump in winning. That alone seems quite alarming to me.
It also feels like you are defending it primarily because it happened to someone on your team, and you would not be defending it if the situation were reversed and, say, Clinton was assisted by China or something like this, even if she had no part to play in the assistance.
Applying this to Twitter, Facebook et al. is not that big of a leap.
> completely destroys the business model of several hundred billion dollar businesses
They are not entitled to their business model, especially not at the price of trampling upon something broadly considered to be an inherit human right.
I think people also have a problem with the violent methods employed by Antifa, such as beating up unarmed journalists.
Would that be too harsh? For sure it would prevent needless deaths.
Recommendation: "Hiding in Plain Sight" by Sarah Kendzior: https://www.amazon.com/Hiding-Plain-Sight-Invention-Erosion-...
Seriously. I am getting a "we have always been at war with East Asia" vibe from this latest uproar.
If you use Google search tool to look up "mail-in voting fraud" and limit the search to before April 1st, you get a lot of concerned articles from NPR, NY Times, Propublica, etc, that mail-in voting fraud is a problem to worry about, and that expanding mail-in voting might lead to more fraud (and they also think Republicans will benefit from this expansion): https://www.google.com/search?q=mail-in+voting+fraud&source=...
But then Trump tweets about and there is a 180 and now it is disinformation to claim that a massive increase in mail-in voting will lead to a massive fraud problems.
Two old quotes are interesting to me:
From NY Times in 2012:
> “Absentee voting is to voting in person,” Judge Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has written, “as a take-home exam is to a proctored one.”
From Pro Publica in March 2020 ( https://www.propublica.org/article/voting-by-mail-would-redu... ):
> “To move from a couple of thousand to a couple of million requires an entirely different infrastructure,” said Tammy Patrick, a former county election official who is now a senior adviser at the nonprofit Democracy Fund in Washington, D.C.
Just from those two quotes, it is not at all unreasonable to extrapolate and predict that massively increasing mail-in voting on a tight schedule is going to be a huge fricking problem. I don't know what the answer is, and I don't which party is going to benefit more. And even if you think Trump is wrong, he is still making a prediction that is based on real concerns, which is something that politicians do all the time, it is not a blatant error of fact.
I think the article's headline "says it doesn’t matter if you’re a publisher or a platform" is incorrect, because if sec 230 eliminated that distinction it would be in conflict with the first amendment. The interviewee also never makes this claim. It's more so that current rulings of section 230 simply say that you don't "publish" but "platform" user generated content.
As far as I know the contention is where the limits of this are. There definitely is a point where it stops, since a digital magazine very much is a publisher and responsible for the articles it puts out. Some people think heavily curating already means that it's not just user generated content, while others think it's fine.
In the end, I think this is something that will eventually be decided by a (supreme?) court ruling. Trump won't get to decide this alone, but I don't think it's impossible for him to escalate this.
"The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state" is a specific claim, and would need to be supported. It's a different category of claim than merely boasting "I am the best president".
The government being selective about which expressive choices by a platform operator are get favorable treatment under law rapidly gets into violations of actual Constitutional free speech protections, unlike the private actions that people are making fake “free speech” claims about.
Until there is no hard evidence, those troll farms are conspiracy theories. Besides, these days the left press is so ridiculously biased that NYT, Guardian, etc could easily qualify as troll farms.
* What about the hacking of Clinton's email server and strategic release of those emails right before the election (even though the e-mails ended up containing nothing incriminating)?
You mean the "e-mail server" (lol) which was "hosted" at her bedroom? You do realise that here of all places there is probably the highest number of people to see how ridiculous this is.
* What about the many people lying/obstructing justice that were investigated? Why were so many people caught lying if there was nothing to hide?
There is always something to hide, the question is were they guilty of what they were accused or not. Also after this appeared:
'What is our goal?' one of the notes dated January 24 2017 - the day of the interview - read. 'Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?'
I would not give too much credibility to those investigators.
1. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8271953/Unsealed-me...
For example, a federal judge barred Trump from blocking followers, despite Twitter being a private platform.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/23/trump-cant-block-twitter-fol...
In general, provocative and non-defensive violence seems to be a strategy employed by a small minority of people involved in the anti-fascist movement. As is usually the case, the loudest voices are amplified, so the small amount of provocative violence is highlighted by the news media, as well as by the critics of the anti-fascist movement.
The contention above was that there was "literally nothing to" Russian interference in the 2016 election. Manafort's convictions for activities related to his attempts to hide his Russian influence is clear evidence to the contrary.
I don't see anyone saying this makes Manafort guilty of "all the bad things he was ever accused of". But it makes him guilty of hiding Russian influence in the 2016 election, which was the point to be demonstrated.
If other states see higher problem rates in their vote by mail, it's likely a selection effect due to vote by mail being not the main method.
```
This article does a good job of explaining the issue https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/social-medi...
Here's also some history on the law https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/legislative-history
This is not a conservative-only point of view: Joe Biden is actually for this idea as well (middle of article when he starts talking about the Facebook hearings and CDA 230): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/17/opinion/joe-b...
```
You are allowed to be informative without being obnoxious. I was not aware of this issue and the article on theamericanconservative have an interesting point of view. The tone you used however will make most people here ignore or dismiss you. Yes, there is an anti-conservative bias on HN, but most people will still read an argument even on breibart if it is good.
I understand the concern of the article but imho cancelling 230 might cripple them, and the propostion of state regulation will make them lost their power overseas. Will it allow other, european, asian or SA platforms to emerge? If the answer is yes it might have interesting side effects.
B: don't demand that politicians meet standards
Your argument (not mine): A -> B
Then you argue that B is dysfunctional so A leads to dysfunction.
Can you not imagine some C such as
C: demand that politicians live up to some standard
Wherein A->C makes everything better?
The fact that you concocted B to discredit A is a logical fallacy called "strawman".
Either you already understood this, but hoped for an audience that did not, or you didn't even realize what you had done. I point it out here for your possible benefit and for the possible benefit of anyone else who doesn't understand this flawed reasoning. I apologize to everyone who recognized it immediately and has then suffered through this response.
I think the main problem with twitter is scale: Because the network allows you to reach the whole world it also is a big target for disinformation networks and the sheer volume of posts makes it uneconomical to moderate.
If you look at mastodon, the instance I'm on has about 600 monthly active users. That's pretty easy for an admin to handle. If a bunch of users show up orchestrating a disinfo campaign the admin would notice, and if an instance is a source of disinfo it can be blocked.
Instance will stop federating with other instances if they are too much to deal with, so admins are incentivized not to grow beyond what they could moderate, to maintain access to the fediverse.
Whenever some known person from the "right side of history" says something clearly bad, there are always comments like yours "but but but", whereas when the source is on the "wrong side of history" it is taken as final and irrefutable proof of their evilness and no amount of perspective or depth is allowed.
Things will get better when we can give a level headed non-partisan response to statements like
>Today on Meet The Press, we're speaking with Joseph Goebbels about the first 100 days...' - What I hear whenever Kellyanne is on a news show.'
Russia had some paid shit posters and a 100k Facebook ad spend.
Blaming Russia is just a cop-out. No need to hold ourselves accountable, it was those damn Russians!
It's always surprising to me to see tech folks disparage humanities studies, then seem flabbergasted at how to fight problems like disinformation/misinformation. IMO, studying language, literature, and criticism are critical skills for operating in a culture that is flooded with information.
In terms of what we can do right now... I've been following Mike Caulfield on Twitter (@holden) and he is doing some interesting work on developing mental tools that school kids can use to evaluate the information that comes to them in social feeds.
I also don't feel bad for tech talent getting fat off ad revenue. There are alternatives that contribute more to society but you have to be willing to sacrifice for them.
> There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent
Translation: 100% certainty that Mail-In Ballots are substantially fraudulent
Where do you get the 2% from?
> Maybe he thinks 2% is “more than substantially”
We don’t know what he thinks - we know what he wrote. And he didn’t write a “maybe 2% chance of fraud”
He specified a 100% certainty of substantial election fraud
our biological systems are infinitely complex and shouldn't be arbitrarily subject to whims of fashion or fear. the panic and frenzy whipped up by media and politicians, rather than information and intuition-building, are principally at fault here.
As far as I see reading about the report, there were multiple indictments made against several Russian entities and nationals for online campaigns supporting Donald Trump [1]. They were (obviously) not prosecuted, but the evidence is there, otherwise there would be no indictments.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/mueller-indicts-russians-...
* Besides, these days the left press is so ridiculously biased that NYT, Guardian, etc could easily qualify as troll farms.
This feels to me like you are not diversifying your news sources at all, and are only reading biased right-wing news and using that to feed your existing biases. The left wing media is not anymore biased than the right wing media, and there exists a scale of bias on both sides (there exists both ridiculously biased left wing media and ridiculously biased right wing media and everything in between).
I suggest you diversify where you get your news from to get a clearer picture of the world. Try to keep more of an open mind. Nothing good comes from blindly following one side or the other - both sides have plenty of good and plenty of criminals.
* You mean the "e-mail server" (lol) which was "hosted" at her bedroom? You do realise that here of all places there is probably the highest number of people to see how ridiculous this is.
Plenty of people have a private e-mail server at home for one reason or the other. This was blown up way out of proportion. Partisanship has heavily clouded your judgement here.
* There is always something to hide, the question is were they guilty of what they were accused or not. Also after this appeared:
* 'What is our goal?' one of the notes dated January 24 2017 - the day of the interview - read. 'Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?'
* I would not give too much credibility to those investigators.
This seems like a conspiracy theory to me. Weren't the investigators Republicans themselves?
The rise of right-wing, racist, nationalist, jingoist, corporatist strong-man authoritarianism.
I think there's a shorter term for that...
* The tampering envelope is extended to weeks instead of hours.
* There is a non-zero risk of vote secrecy violation.
* There is a non-zero risk of voter pressuring.
Coming from a country that earned the right to vote through violent revolt, it is strange how established democracies, especially the US, are cavalier with weakening the voting process: vote on a Tuesday [???], no paper trail voting machines [???], mail-in voting [???].
Then the rich most likely win, whether they are right or wrong.
And given How wrong Trump is on many things (including what he himself has said in the past) that is not going to be a good thing. Yes there will be popular gatherings where many people put in a bit to counteract disinformation from small groups of well funded individuals (or just one well funded individual) but those things take with organised orchestration or luck (often both) to be successful, more so than the actions of smaller groups or individuals.
While this would reduce individual knuckle-draggers shouting from the rooftops because they feel slighted, and would reduce knee-jerk reactions somewhat, it wouldn't shift the balance of power significantly at all at the top end, it would just change how score is kept.
> If the information is useful and worth reading ... if the information is garbage or incorrect
This has exactly the same problem as the current situation: how do the people who currently believe (and propagate) misinformation behave any differently under this scheme? They might not forward the misinformation as much due to the cost, but that same will happen with provable facts because the cost is universal so the current balance probably wouldn't be upset.
A private content publisher is allowed to moderate the stuff they publish. Simon and Schuster rejecting my novel is not censorship. This principle includes highly permissive content publishers like Facebook and Twitter. I don’t think anyone here is seriously arguing that the Klan deserves a Facebook group. Obviously it’s well within Facebook’s rights as both an online business and a publicly-accessible service to kick the Klan out. So I am really not seeing what is so authoritarian about removing misinformation about public health - the only way your argument is even remotely defensible is if you wrap it up in a ridiculous thought experiment. And being banned from Facebook for posting conspiracy theories is no more Stalinist than being banned from Chuck-E-Cheese for booing Munich’s Make Believe Band.
To get to your actual point:
Shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater when there is no fire will land you in jail. Lying about the efficacy of your pharmaceutical company’s medications will (or should) land you in jail. And a successful libel/slander lawsuit can ruin you. Some of these legal issues are thorny and I have mixed feelings on them (until recently Canada has highly repressive libel laws). But certainly lying pharma executives who get people killed should go to jail. Certainly the guy who pranked the crowded theater should be held criminally liable for the resulting stampede. Free speech is not and had never been the same thing as freedom from consequences of speech.
If it’s just some guy ranting on the street then yes, congratulations, the state should leave him alone.
For more stories just google "Military main-in ballots lost"
Tweeting anonymously is a non-starter unless they can curtail the bot problem in some other way. If they could curtail the bot problem then they would be doing it already and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Half the content on Twitter and Facebook is from bots. I would say this is the most fundamentally urgent problem to solve to protect Democracy in this country.
The issue becomes with what fact checkers omit, who’s statements are scrutinized and whose are the ignored as “jokes”, what part of a statement they choose to focus on, or any sort of perspective at all. If you’re an adult you know that life is shades of gray.
Was Biden being racist when he said “you ain’t black” if Blacks don’t vote for him? How would a fact checker properly handle this?
“Fact checking“ even with the best intentions, is it game I don’t think we want to play.
> Interesting to see public information warefare playing out in real time.
Agreed
Open the ballot envelope and the secrecy envelope
Note who you voted for
Pack the secrecy envelope and the ballot envelope
Use the vote information in whatever way they see fit
Variation:
Hey grandpa Joe, I'm here to help you vote
Note who you voted for
Help you pack the secrecy envelope and the ballot envelope
Use the vote information in whatever way they see fitI intended to imply causation. I deeply enjoyed your not-at-all condescending lecture about how gullible, biased, and imprecise I am, though. In return, I will advise you not to be presumptuous about internet strangers' intelligence.
> something no one is able to know
Untrue. What if you just asked voters, "Why did you vote for Trump?" Or what if you asked them, "What issues are important to you?"
Some of the best predictors of Trump support were:
- support for building a wall to prevent undocumented immigration from Mexico[1][2]
- anxiety about immigration in general[1]
- a belief that the US is, was, and must remain a white, Christian nation[3]
In fact, a majority of Republicans see immigrants (legal or not) in general as being a net-negative on society[4].
There is a reason Trump's rallying cry was "build the wall". There is a reason he is the candidate of choicee for white nationalists (which is not to say that I'm claiming that all of his supporters are white nationalists). Most Americans agree with me, though[5].
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/08/25/5-facts-abo...
2. https://news.virginia.edu/content/center-politics-poll-takes...
3. https://www.prri.org/research/white-working-class-attitudes-...
4. https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2015/09/28/chapter-4-u-...
5. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/05/most-amer...
Also, what stops someone from doing that with the current voting system? We have computers do the counting with little to no oversight; They could easily be programmed to report people who “voted the wrong way.”
With regards to your variation, that’s an inherent weakness of vote-by-mail, yes. There’s not much that can be done about that other than outlawing vote-by-mail.[^a]
[^a]: Due to the way the Constitution is written, the power to decide the method of voting is not with the federal government. As such, the Tenth Amendment delegates that power to the states. Meaning, the power to require “secret ballots” rests with the states, and many do not have such requirements in their Constitutions. It also means that the federal government can’t outlaw vote-by-mail without a Constitutional amendment.
On voting machines, good point. We should not use voting machines either.
Americans get too bogged down in the muck to look up to realize what's actually going on around them or be aware of just how hypocritical they are.
In a perfect world I would execute elections in the same manner we do in Iceland. Voting booth, paper ballots, pencils for marks. We have a presidential election this summer and everyone was worried if COVID would suppress the vote. Looks like it won't since we only have 2 active cases and new cases are almost none (can't find the numbers atm but iirc we had 7 new cases in the month of May).
[0]: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/auto...
Also, the US previously had the fairness doctrine which seems to have worked well in comparison with this era without it (though I have not done much research into it, and I can see how an administration like the one we have today would abuse it).
The whole POINT of 'free speech' is that there are no consequences.
(And no you shouldn't be allowed to shout 'fire' in a theatre).
Specifically, the consequence of other people exercising the same freedom of speech, including by deciding not to relay certain speech of the self-styled “free speech” advocates.
Either the president does not know the constitutional limits on his power, or he knows them but still thinks it's a good idea to claim power that he does not have. I'm not sure which is worse.
In this case, it just seems like Twitter disagrees with him. They aren't really arguing facts.
Why not put them in jail as well, at least until the danger is passed? I mean, they're killing innocent people with their misinformation and this is the worst global health crisis in 100 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_and_Virtue_Ministry
Why? because things and people are always named after what they are! See Biggus Dickus
But the more accurate statement is that some groups of people decided not to vote at all because they disliked Hillary, and other groups of people decided to show up and vote.
Can 15 really sue the person for defamation? Regardless, IMO, the DNC is part of the government and therefore open to public criticism, especially anonymously. This goes for all the other statements here about government bodies and officials.
I'm having trouble processing "tech-bro" as something worth censoring, but I have to admit it's derogatory and aimed at a particular stereotype, and so it's in the same category as the other statements. But it leads me to wonder: Don't all descriptions of a certain group of people end up falling into that category? Where does the line stop? People will (and have, historically) just start using the non-derogatory descriptions as derogatory ones if you censor the ones they currently use.
That's not the consequence here.
The consequence is “other private parties might choose not to relay your speech or continue association with you, exercising their own rights to free speech and association.”
Me not allowing you to use my resources to magnify the reach of your message isn't analogous to the state subjecting you to capital punishment.
> The whole POINT of 'free speech' is that there are no consequences.
No, the whole point is that the state doesn't have their thumb on the scale, allowing ideas to succeed or fail by their ability, or not, to attract support from private actors. Legislation in which the state intervenes to prevent private consequences through the exercise of free speech are not only on their face contrary to free speech, but sabotage the operation of the marketplace of ideas.
It seems to me your criticisms very much fall into "letting the perfect be the enemy of the good" territory. States have conducted some version of vote-by-mail or absentee balloting for decades, and there's no evidence I'm aware of that either of these have, in practice, materially increased voter fraud. Furthermore, studies on existing voter fraud conducted by groups like the Brennan Center for Justice and the Heritage Foundation have concluded the incident rates are around 0.0025% -- and that's the high end of the estimates. Even if your concern that a push to move most states to vote-by-mail in the 2020 election causes that number to go up substantially proves valid, how likely is it, truly, that it increases by the two orders of magnitude it would take to bring it up to a quarter of a percent -- and that such an incredible increase goes essentially unnoticed and unchallenged?
They’ll get dragged for doing anything that doesn’t align with X party. If not his tweets than something else.
Not saying people shouldn’t have common sense about what they post on a public forum tho...
Has this always been the case for you? or just in the past few years?
I didn't care about news until the first gulf war. Then something flipped a switch in my brain and I could not get enough news. When news broadcasters started adopting websites in the 90's, I was like a junkie.
I don't recall significant partisan division over Gulf War I, but I do recall a hard left/right split with the house takeover by Gingrich in 1994, and then the Clinton impeachment. Late 1990's is where things started to become bifurcated (remember, I wasn't paying attention in the 70's and 80's so it could have been as bad).
Fast forward to mid 2010's and suddenly there are too many websites with "news" combined with SEO and recommendation algorithms spouting demonstrable nonsense that I can't help but hear Steve Bannon's "Flood the zone with shit" argument.
Because it is working on me. I am over-educated (an engineering patent attorney for a top silicon company), I get paid to be a critical thinker. Facts and news just are clearly under assault from the zone-flooding angle to the point where being critical wears me to the bone.
Was this intentional, or is this a consequence?
Has the zone been successfully flooded as Bannon commanded?
You are forgetting that most Americans are self-proclaimed independents and not sworn to support either of the two parties.
Imagine if HN or Reddit didn't sort by popularity? Everyone would need to sort through /new. ...that's not scalable.
What would be better would be to reward controversial content. If lots of people downvote something, and also lots of people upvote, then maybe it needs more attention, not less?
So that rather than creating ever-more-extremist bubbles, people are more likely to see opinions that make them force them to appreciate other points of view.
Right now, social media is a pretty bad cesspool. No one takes the blame for allowing sociopaths to dominate those platforms.
That hurts the bottom line so the social media companies won't do it unless they are forced to.
> Revert to chronological feeds based on timestamp alone
At the very least this should be an option (and not one that is automatically reset every time you view a page -- I'm looking at you facebook).
(Disclaimer: I am pro mail-in voting and lean leftist in my political beliefs. I am merely disagreeing that there are no pushes to encourage people to vote that are also anti-trump.)
Although it also sounds like it would be great for entrenched incumbents and cause barriers to entry.
> Nor does he have any real regulatory authority that could be employed that wouldn't also bite him back
I'm not convinced of that. Trump has repeatedly shown he is willing to exercise executive authority to the fullest extent possible and the courts have repeatedly affirmed his ability to do so. I'm not sure what kind of "bite back" you expect, but that kind of thing has never been an obstacle for Trump. At the end of the day I think you're right that he's bullying them, but I think it's wrong to believe that he won't actually go after them if they do not comply with his demands or at the very least retract the fact-check and praise him
I now think the problem with this is a lack of standards. It is documented that textbook manufacturers publish different history and science texts based on the region of the country regarding the civil war or evolution.
Not to be a nihilist, but what makes you think underfunded schools that struggle to teach basic reading will teach media literacy and criticism with any success? and will be supported by publishers that feel the same way?
I also think critical thinking is VERY hard. Harder than people imagine. It is hard to teach, hard to deploy, hard to practice. I'm not sure even 20% of the population could muster the brain power required to sift through today's onslaught of zone-flooding garbage.
It's wishful thinking at best to believe that Twitter replies can effectively refute arguments. They don't establish public dialog unless the OP retweets the responses. You can't call it a dialogue if, effectively, there's only one person talking. Even simple refutations fail on Twitter.
"We can't fact check one person because it'd be hard to do the same for a large number of people" is classic perfect-as-enemy-of-good. We get huge bang-for-buck by handling some obvious outliers and known bad actors, and that's worth doing.
Language has implied meaning, it's one of the maxims of conversation in the field of linguistics, of the Cooperative principle [1].
If you're going to immediately jump to technical dissection of a conversation, you should probably consider the relevant field first.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle#Maxim_of...
I think what this discussion is revealing is that a lot of people, and a lot of people that work it tech it seems, actually do want someone to tell them what to think. Which may be part of the baseline or mean human condition. Thinking and deciding for yourself is hard, and when other people think and decide for themselves in a different way than you it seems to generate an immune response and a reaction that calls for intervention from above.
Like, you can be skeptical of the idea that the Russian interference was decisive in the election without dismissing the very real lawbreaking that happened.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/15370/party-affiliation.aspx
If you look at the week by week numbers, you see variance; I suspect most independents lean one way or another, but their willingness to commit in a poll varies based on various affairs.
they wouldn't, and even if they did it would be a helpful change. society's legitimization of twitter (a brand whose logo is on so many unrelated products, billboards, flyers, advertisements etc) is what makes his disinformation on that platform dangerous.
if he's siloed to somewhere that is obviously just for his supporters, it will have far less of a dangerous effect. people made the same threat about alex jones, and deplatforming him was absolutely a positive for society.
With regards to your other point: Hillary did not win the election, no matter how you spin it. She won the popular vote, but that means nothing in terms of who becomes President (read: who wins).
We also don’t “value some people’s votes more than others.” The Electoral College votes based on the way that state’s populace votes, and every electorate’s vote is equal. However, each state can have their own rules regarding how those votes are distributed: some states are winner-takes-all at the state level, while Maine and Nebraska are winner-take-all at the district level.
One can argue whether the Electoral College should exist at all, but it’s worth keeping in mind why it was created: we are a union of states (United States of America), not a homogenous unit (United America?).
I would really like a settled question on whether mail and groceries are safe to touch. There was a study that came out saying the virus could exist on different surfaces for different periods of time. News reported last week that CDC update the website that indicated that the study was flawed. Soon after the CDC added clarification which still leaves the conclusion open. https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/s0522-cdc-updates-co...
Oregon may have taken a long time as it was a leader. Charting the unknown. States enabling more mail in voting now have well established examples to follow. Its hardly "drastically" changing anything.
What counts as "injured" or "killed"? If shots are fired and the resulting human stampede kills 4 people, does that count as 4 mass shooting deaths? Obviously the shooter is at fault, but these details affect the interpretation of events.
My undergrad was in statistics. In our capstone course, my professor had us read journal articles and discuss the statistical analyses within. I remember one study we read (peer reviewed, a couple dozen citations), and my professor's take away was, "I can't say it's wrong, but based on the data they gave, I can't for the life of me figure out how they reached their statistical conclusions." So yeah, it's a "fact" that the researchers reached a certain conclusion, but the conclusion itself is not fact.
I don't believe in post-truth, but "Facts are facts; truth is truth" is a philosophical statement, not a practical one. And even then, we have an entire field of philosophy to iron out those details, which we call epistemology.
But giving a strike? That's going too far and your case highlights why: you can't make a joke anymore.
A strike is stifling free speech whereas a label is just informative. It might be biased, it might not be, but it doesn't prevent you from expressing yourself, be it by making a joke or spreading accurate information or spreading ridiculous conspiracy theories.
I guess this demonstrates the tactics that is highly unfavorable to help people make up their own mind:
1) mislead by ignoring evidence, pushing a narrative using "authoritative sources" that fall far short of objectivity standards
2) if #1 fail vote down (shadowbanning, downvotes, etc etc)
3) if #2 fail censor and ban.
4) if #3 fail tell people to ignore those showing contrary evidence, by without evidence claiming they belong to bad group X or because they can't possibly understand due to having identity characteristic Y
This is so boring and trite. It should be clear to everyone at this point that enough people are awake to these tactics to force a discussion on equal terms. With all truths on the table.
I'm pretty sure most judges would recuse if they had statements like that surface.
Sections (a) (1) and especially (a) (5) here, for example: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibili...
Hence I think that statement should be extremely narrowly applied to direct physical violence (and threat of), and that’s it. Anything more and you are just masquerading as wanting to censor speech under the guise of that highly exploitable statement.
The ability to control the "public" spaces gives one effective control over "speech". That's a lot of power.
Having that power entirely outside of democratic control troubles me.
The companies would also presumably have to allow commercial spam.
The bigger issue is these platforms only get those free speech protections because they're platforms. The moment they start editing content like this, they become editors to a publishing platform, and they should be held liable for all that they've published. You can't just have your cake and eat it too, today they make you happy to censor the evil orange man, tomorrow they may censor those you support.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
We're seeing with YouTube that they're deleting posts against Communist China:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324695
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23317570
Worse what happens when you cross Facebook imposing Chinese censorship on the whole world?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13018770
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12479990
What happens when Google is used to push liberal bias?
Vimeo deletes videos claiming such bias from Google despite clear evidence in video:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20302010
"If we break things up, we can't stop Trump" replace Trump with any political candidate you've ever supported by the way to understand why this sort of thing is dangerous:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20265502
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20697780
I am sure I will get into fire for this comment, considering my citations were flagged to death because people don't agree with others. But mark my words, if the tables were flipped and they were censoring all your favorite candidates, you'd be outraged and against anything that would hinder free speech.
If you take away anything from this post be sure to be this:
Twitter, Google, Facebook etc are considered "platforms" the moment they editorialize content, they become publishers. Platforms are protected for obvious reasons, they cannot reliably contain every single thing a user posts, but a publisher dictates what is published, and is definitely liable for what they publish. These platforms want to be hybrids, but that gives them dangerous power to push agendas as they claim they are trying to stop.
There are a tiiiiny number of companies that are controlling global communications, and that should make us all uncomfortable.
Being banned from one restaurant in town, should not mean you're banned from all restaurants in the world.
> how do you lessen the spread of misinformation?
...and provide constructive content please.
> Does emotional or mental or spiritual/religious harm count?
Actually, it depends. Sometimes yes; sometimes no. Anti-bullying laws are very much a thing, but then there’s the Westboro Baptist Church (where the courts have ruled their hate speech is protected).
Wikipedia has a list of “free speech exceptions”[0]. Among those include fraud (sometimes in the form of depriving someone of property through lies), CP (harm to minors), threatening the President, and others.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
> "There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent."
Twitter labeled it as unsubstantiated, and provided a link to facts on mail-in ballots. Even if they didn't, his tweet is factually incorrect.
and therein lies the problem. The issue is the scale in the first place. Twitter et al produce so much garbage because they're designed towards virality outside of any human scale.
Bring social networks down to the size that a community can coherently operate in and you've diminished the problem.
HN arranges by popularity but actually in a fairly limited way. There's no scores shown and the downvotes are capped, and most threads you can actually read through because they've got less than 200 comments or so.
Do the same for Facebook or twitter. Limit connections, hide visible upvotes or likes, cap the number of people something can be shared with by one user, make people choose who they are in contact with, which immediately puts scarcity and value on connection and communication. Obviously there is no commercial incentive for these companies to do this, who live off the entropy they generate.
The real effort is in getting your historic/likely supporters to show up rather than stay home. If someone is a big Biden supporter, there's almost nothing you can say that will get them to vote Trump. And vice versa. So your hope is to get your likely Biden supporter angry/scared/whatever enough to get off their butt and vote. That's what these things are about. That's why Trump says crazy flamboyant things. It's why Twitter never fact checks things like the gender pay gap, perhaps the most debunked concept in all of economics.
For me, seeing the world through this lens results in a lot more things making sense. It's especially true now that information/news is so siloed. People in power can say basically anything they want as long as it's emotionally aligned with their team. And their team will never know they've been lied to, because they don't watch the other side's rebuttals. For example, Twitter is fact checking Trump on this mail in ballot fraud issue in the same week that there's multiple examples of mail in ballot fraud in the news. But the people who think Twitter is a reasonable source to fact check Trump will never see that, so they will get away with it.
Those laws are called common carrier laws.
It is already illegal for many communication platforms, that a subject to certain classifications, to discriminate on the basis of the content of the speech that they distribute.
Common carrier laws are not controversial. Few people would argue that we should get rid of common carrier laws.
> Being banned from one restaurant in town, should not mean you're banned from all restaurants in the world.
So is the suggestion that I should be forced to serve people I don't want to serve?
The fact he says what he does un-sourced, and people believe him because he speaks from the authority of his office, is the troubling thing.
Regardless, I was responding to the 1st amendment claim by the GP.
Woops. It was 9 that arguably wouldn't be harassing a particular person if the article they were commenting on was about how the person had been convicted in a court of law. My thinking is that signal boosting something bad someone has done is not harassment if they have actually been convicted of a felony.
Can 15 really sue the person for defamation? Regardless, IMO, the DNC is part of the government and therefore open to public criticism, especially anonymously.
The DNC could sue the person, but under current American libel laws, which are very strict, they would probably lose. Basically as long as the person can show some grounds for honestly believing the claim, however stretched or flimsy, the person is not liable. Libel laws in other countries are less strict.
But it leads me to wonder: Don't all descriptions of a certain group of people end up falling into that category? Where does the line stop? People will (and have, historically) just start using the non-derogatory descriptions as derogatory ones if you censor the ones they currently use.
I think the rule would be that if you are referring to a group that is a protected class (sex being a protected class) then you should use the word that that group uses to call itself. Or the very least, a neutral term, not a term invented by critics. So with "tech bro", it was not a term coined by men in tech themselves, it was coined by people who were criticizing male tech culture, and so should not be allowed.
It's always going to be a bit subjective, and there will be churn of epithets over time, but even reducing the number of derogatory epithets used by 95% is still better than nothing.
People can lie with statistics and people can lie without statistics. The latter is much easier, but the former is possible, as you lay out.
That's why we need to check whether an alleged fact is true, or at least can be confirmed from multiple sources of evidence so it can be accepted as true for the time being. We can also check statistics for anomalies and errors. Statisticians do that all the time.
All of that is fact checking.
Thus Facebook isn't one giant blob of people yelling at each other, but has huge numbers of groups where people can meet, while also being able to find/contact almost anyone else. Of course I participate in small decentralized forums relevant to my specific interests/hobbies, but I don't only watch those, and you probably don't either. That would be like only ever reading local news and skipping news about your state/country/international events. You can do that but you'll be putting yourself at a big disadvantage, which most people prefer not to do.
Please do show me the data.
Baseless nationalism is just as unwelcome from any country as it is fron the USA. Stop it.
Oh, ok. Would you mind then explaining in detail how it is you came to know(!) what was and was not the comprehensive, multivariate motivation of all the people who voted in Republican primary polls, and how you managed to measure/calculate accurate values for each variable (or at least this one single variable, for each person, or even the aggregate for the overall group)? I mean this question literally, not rhetorically.
> I deeply enjoyed your not-at-all condescending lecture about how gullible, biased, and imprecise I am, though. In return, I will advise you not to be presumptuous about internet strangers' intelligence.
I made no personal criticisms of you, or and presumptions about internet strangers intelligence. Rather, this is just a manifestation of the very things I was referring to.
>> something no one is able to know
> Untrue. What if you just asked voters, "Why did you vote for Trump?" Or what if you asked them, "What issues are important to you?"
a) no one has done that, at scale, and in a form where very specific conclusions (like yours) can be formed
b) even when people answer a question "truthfully", it does not necessarily reflect true cause and effect, which are largely determined by neurological processes in the subconscious mind, that even the very best neurologists/psychologists barely understand, and that even the person in possession of the mind is not privy to. As an example, does it seem you know, absolutely, that the specific things you write here are True(!), absolutely? And yet, if I ask for epistemically sound, confirmable quantitative evidence, are you able to provide any, that does not consist of, or rely heavily upon, a narrative?
> Some of the best predictors of Trump support were...
These are all attempts to measure and understand reality (based in part on some discrete "measurements", assembled into a persuasive narrative form). They are not reality itself. But, this is not to say these these measurements are not accurate - perhaps they are even very accurate - I am simply stating that it is unknown how accurate they are.
In particular, I recall there being a very popular article/blog post that went hugely viral on Twitter comparing Trump's election margins in key states with the number of supposedly "suppressed" votes in that election, allegedly demonstrating that Trump won the election that way, where it was clear that the author knew the supposed voter suppression scheme wouldn't even work as described. Part-way through, after the breathless claims about hundreds of thousands of voters, was a careful ass-covering disclaimer about how what actually happened to voters on the purge lists which would supposedly stop them from voting would depend on the state. That disclaimer was because, in at least one of those key states Trump had to win and probably all, being put on the list didn't stop people from voting at all - they just had to confirm or update their address when they went to vote.
Parties have little in common with what they were even 20 years ago.
No, it's not. Permitting private bias without government consequence is the definition of free speech. Restricting it is contrary to free speech, and is permitted only to the extent that it fits within recognized Constitutional limitations on the right of free speech.
Sure. But now imagine if we applied the same provisions to twitter or facebook. We could say that if they don't follow common carrier status, then we can hold them responsible for any crime done on their platform.
This is would almost effectively the same thing as forcing them to follow common carrier laws. And it would have the same effect as requiring them to follow the 1st amendment, but doing it in a round about way.
It is not exactly the same as using the 1st amendment. But it is close enough.
Because, TBH, we already use these laws for commication platforms, such as phone companies.
Bad, ignorant, hateful ideas are bad because they are wrong; if they were true, you would not call facts "bad". That being the case, the correct response is to defeat them with truth-- not censorship, whether state or privately enacted. Censorship is just admitting that you dislike the ideas but cannot argue them down with reason and are resorting to the cudgel.
Although virtually none do so in unrestricted fashion. Hate speech, racism, genocide denial and so on aren't protected by free-speech in the overwhelming amount of legislations even in countries with a liberal tradition, and just like any other right free speech is subject to limitations.
Let's suppose, for instance, that Twitter is deemed large enough to be a "public forum" and no longer makes moderation decisions outside of removing illegal content. The clear, obvious consequence for such a decision would be that most people would cease to use Twitter. It would no longer be a "public space" because that "public" would no longer be there.
People would stop using Twitter for the same reason the public doesn't use 4chan. Anecdotally, I don't want to be harassed for my sexuality on Twitter. I wouldn't feel safe, or want to participate in a site that allows open attacks against people due to their gender identity, race, or religion. And let's not kid ourselves, the "conservative" view points being "censored" on Twitter aren't really "conservative" views at all, it's just hate speech, harassment, and attacks against marginalized people. Even semi-famous self-described fascist content creators continue to use Twitter above radar, provided they don't explicitly distribute hate speech on the platform.
Marginalized people of every form would find another place that is moderated to flock to. That would become the new "public place" that so-called "conservatives" would wish to invade.
Surely, it's clear here that having the actual head of the US government threatening to shut down private companies
The United States President has neither the authority nor power to start censoring Twitter on his own. Right now, Jack Dorsey has far more power over allowed public speech in America than Donald Trump.
That's fair, it's certainly one of many hurdles that this sort of a solution would have to face.
Not to be a nihilist, but what makes you think underfunded schools that struggle to teach basic reading will teach media literacy and criticism with any success? and will be supported by publishers that feel the same way?
Well I'd probably answer that by starting out with an inquiry on how nihilism is a factor in what is a completely valid question about implementation? A school's ability to fund this kind of program from textbooks to technology to training staff and instructors has to be considered, this type of educational program doesn't happen in vacuum.
So I'd say you're right to ask questions about the disparity in school funding and how it would affect a media literacy curriculum-even if I'm not sure it's particularly accurate to describe such questions as "nihilist", they're completely necessary. But by no means am I intending to make any sort of value judgement about how successful this school or that school will be by merely suggesting taking a stab at introducing media literacy into public schooling.
To the questions of publishers, excellent question again. Maybe there are some models already out there worth exploring and iterating upon to maximize the value across the various school systems and school models (public, montessori, et al), a few people have commented that there are comparable programs where they live, I'd be curious to see if there are systems worth replicating in this thought experiment.
I think you raise excellent points here, all things said.
One more thought: Simple >>> Complex.
Small variations in a technically correct process may break some of its properties. The more complex the process, the easier is to inject variations, some of them adversarial. If gerrymandering is to be taken as an example, this can be taken to quite some extremes by two sides driven to win the zero-sum game at all costs. But even in absence of that, bugs happen.
To nitpick one detail, I'm not persuaded by the secrecy violation prevention argument. You either prevent secrecy violation by anonymization, or you prevent vote fraud by keeping a link between the voter and the ballot. You can't have both at the same time. In person voting minimizes the bounding box of anonymization: in space, at the ballot box, and in time, the election day. Hopefully both parties afford to have observers during this space-time interval. As you spread out the voting process, both spatially and temporally, it becomes increasingly impractical / too expensive to maintain observers of the entire process.
I mean the influencers would never voluntarily cede a legion of followers but they'd absolutely and vocally support Trump if he moved to a different platform and all his fans would create accounts on that new platform if they didn't have one already.
> society's legitimization of twitter...
We're in complete agreement there, it's a tough cultural problem, not sure how we solve it without just teaching the next generation to be highly skeptical of social media platforms.
> he's siloed to somewhere that is obviously just for his supporters, it will have far less of a dangerous effect
I don't think it makes much difference, it costs nothing to just "exist" on twitter even if you engage primarily on a different platform, twitter would just become one of many targeted dumping grounds for all the crap they cook up in the silo. Honestly I'm surprised it hasn't happened already, but I think it's their next logical step, something like a mainstream 4chan.
Twitter is merely labelling a tweet as being factually incorrect, it's not hiding the content.
Example:
- CC laws guarantee that if you are able to host your speech on your own server that ISPs have to route information requests to it.
- CC laws do not guarantee you can force Reddit to host your speech on their own private servers or force Reddit to give you broadcast access to their audience.
the Supreme Court certainly has not upheld compelled speech. And internet theories about private services as de facto public forums continue to be defeated in court (PragerU v Google being the most recent example).
Now in fairness this was before airborne transmission was as well established [1]. The Tweet came 45 minutes before the LA Times article documenting airborne transmission at a choir practice. But still -- it is unforgivable that they said, "Fact: COVID19 is NOT airborne" rather than saying, "We don't know."
And it really shows the dangers with Youtube's policy of banning coronavirus related videos that contradict World Health Organization advice -- there is no magic pixie dust that makes the WHO an infallible authority, and like any bureaucracy, they are subject to increasing rot and incompetence over time.
[1] Actually, to be more specific, it seems this whole "airborne" versus "droplet" transmission distinction that the WHO was adhering to is a false dichotomy and that it is much more of a messy gradient than sharp distinction.
[1] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p035w97h/episodes/downloads
For me, free speech is fundamentally about trying to rectify the injustice of an imbalance of power between those in authority and the ordinary citizen. During the Enlightenment, the authorities were monarchs, but even before that, the origins of free speech can be seen in the Reformation, the authorities being the established Church and the battles being eg the right to a Bible in your own language or the right to worship without priests.
In modern times, authorities can be just straightforward, well, authoritarian. Global leaders & business people who tweet or post on FB carry an authority ex officio that make their proclamations much more acceptable to the neutral reader. That in itself is a dangerous situation and Twitter or FB absolutely need to take control. If these companies want us to take them seriously as champions of free speech, they have to play their role to help restore that balance of power, by being far more stringent about fact-checking the tweets of those global leaders than they would be for ordinary posters.
Those right-wingers who love to proclaim themselves champions of free speech are really objecting to the Tyranny of the Majority. That is not an authority that requires a rebalance of power. It is just an established opinion.
That's not really true (I say this as an American). Sure, the US government is highly unlikely to change their policies based on what people living in the EU think. That doesn't mean the EU can't legislate such things within their own borders though. There's no technological reason a search engine or social media platform couldn't be based in the EU; for example, Qwant exists (https://www.qwant.com).
I didn't say she did. I said she won the democratic election, which you call the popular vote. It's the same thing.
> We also don’t “value some people’s votes more than others.”
This is another tomato tomahhto splitting of hairs. A Nebraskan voter's vote is worth about 3.4 Californian votes. If you don't consider that as "counting some people's votes more than others", I don't know what to tell you. We can argue about whether you think that is a good idea (aka have the electoral college debate). But there should be no debate whether we do systematically prefer some voters over others.
Except they are held responsible if they don't curate. Look at laws like SESTA to see how platforms that don't self-curate content that could sexualize minors are legally liable.
I'm not saying SESTA is bad, I'm saying this idea that platforms need to be hands-off towards curation to maintain safe harbor protection is not true.
Seems like it would be more acceptable.
(sorry for the ads)
>Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
I don't think that's a problem. Sounds like working-as-intended.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/21/18700605/section-230-inte...
In one of their episodes, they interview the CEO of YouTube about what they're doing to stop the spread of misinformation on web content platforms like their own.
Her response is that they're no longer tailoring their recommendation models or carousels based purely on engagement alone, but also based on potential harm or impact, because the common misinformation preys on being highly engaging. The biggest example of this is how YouTube is dealing with Covid-19 misinformation, that the "COVID-19 news" carousel on the home page doesn't get much engagement but is important for people to stay informed.
It's a good listen if you have the time: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/podcasts/rabbit-hole-yout...
The problem with social media is that the big platforms, like the post office or your ISP often ends up as an natural monopoly that can be just as dangerous to your political freedoms as any out of control government department by virtue of being just as powerful in the real world.
This lead to huge stability in Iran and the middle-east and arguably lead to the rise of Al-Qaeda and a super unpopular right-wing religious government in Iran that they have now.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
Republicans are willing to look away, and let Trump run rampant, if it means that they'll get their part in return (judges, etc.)
Trump, in turn, will say anything. He has no restrains, and knows this - he can say absolutely anything, and no-one within will do or say anything.
Right now, the presidency (for Trump) is a case of survival. He needs to remain in power, in order to escape whatever civil charges he'll face.
For his own sake, Trump should have never ran for Presidency. He hates his job, and got lost in his own ego.
[EDIT] to be clear it's fine to think some parts of our election systems suck (they definitely fucking do) but "it's not democratic" isn't a very useful, meaningful, or even clear objection, per se.
Crazy what people will do due to misinformation.
There were some news reports after Trump's suggestions to use disinfectant as a COVID-19 cure that hundreds of people had called health services to ask if it was indeed a legitimate way to get rid of coronavirus. Now I'm wondering how many didn't call and just went ahead with the "treatment".
clearly there is nothing simple about this
I'm gonna go ahead and disagree with you here. The US is such a prominent nation, that can make or break the economies other countries, depending on their political actions.
I've seen a lot of this "It's US politics, so none of your business" writing when criticizing Trump - but fact is that most countries are not perfectly de-coupled from each others. The US relies on some countries, while other countries relies on the US.
Sure, you do not have any right to vote for him, but you sure as hell are entitled to voice your opinion on him.
Next, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have become de-facto presence for political figures, companies and individuals. Erased from here, they cease to exist. Almost like scrubbing a Google search result.
The above points COMPEL the U.S. government and any other government to consider the possibility that they are now a public utility (like electrical companies) and an essential service. The argument that they are private companies and therefore should forever be removed from the jurisdiction of the 1st Amendment (in the case of the U.S.), since this only applies to government, is extremely antiquated. Did smartphones and Presidential tweets exist in 1776?
If electrical companies and railroads can be regulated and for-profit, then why would "my company, I do what I want" magically apply forever to Faceook, Twitter and Instagram?
I am NOT defending what Trump was quoted saying here. I AM making a case that we need to update our legal framework to account for modernity. And to account for a heretofore unpredictable and unfathomable technological achievement of an instant network of human ideas and presence that is controlled by a few California companies. I'd bet money that the question will be considered in the coming few years by the high courts, and there's a non-zero chance they'll agree with what I've just said.
> So is the suggestion that I should be forced to serve people I don't want to serve?
Well, yes. Like a utility company.
It doesn't matter who is hooked up to the water/sewer/internet/etc., they get service. I think the platform/publisher debate needs to actually be had.
Right now Twitter/FB/etc. are acting like publishers (silencing some, ignoring others) rather than platforms. If they are going to take responsibility for what is on their platform, they need to take full responsibility (a publisher). Or, they need to take no responsibility, as far as that goes under the law (a platform, which I here conflate with utility).
As it stands, all of the major social media companies are biased to the US left, and they cater largely to the left [0][1]. When they silence, they silence the US political right. Or comments that are critical of the CCCP[2]. Or legitimate medical opinions about Covid-19[3].
[0] https://dailycaller.com/2017/08/11/conservative-and-independ...
[1] https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/social-media-companie...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/05/youtube-auto-del...
[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/youtube-facebook-spli...
I don't see how you can teach the essence of critical thinking when it's in itself a fiercely individualistic don't-just-trust-the-authority idea.
If you teach it as such, you will get people to believe in any and all crackpottery because "I learned not to trust school and experts, I now found the actual truth that my school has repressed in this creationist UFO book on how aliens built the pyramids".
The other option is to teach them not to trust anything that comes from "unapproved" sources, only believe your government institutions, UN orgs etc. This may seem like a good baseline for the average person but it's just appeal to authority and not critical thinking.
I think there is just no such thing as "critical thinking" that could be taught as such, in itself. You have to go to the object level. If you want to dispel creationism, you have to teach biology and talk about how we know what we know about evolution and make sure people deeply understand it in their bones and they don't just regurgitate what they think you expect of them. It's the same in every subject. If you want people not to believe in magic healing crystal energy vibrations and parapsychology and homeopathy, you have to get them to understand some principles of real medicine and real physics (with equations and exercises all that). Only someone who has firm foundations on the object level, can successfully apply critical thinking.
One thing that could be taught though is propaganda techniques, marketing psychology, how it relates to the brain's reward systems, how ads are designed and monitored, A/B testing and tracking in cell phones, addiction. How cults form, the human biases that cult leaders use, a lot of stuff about human behavior, social psychology, trust, different personality types. Fallacies, pitfalls of thinking. But all these are very meta and again, to have a good grasp of these, you need a good actual base on the object level.
Most of actual critical thinking in the real world looks like "wait a minute, that doesn't feel right according to my model of how the world works". It's not really by matching things against a shortlist of logical fallacies that you had to memorize for some test.
Twitter's platform is private, not public. Twitter should waste no more time in making that crystal clear.
If you own the printing press, you get to decide what you print. If it were otherwise -- if the government, or anyone else, could control what we said and didn't say with our private resources -- well, that's not anywhere any of us really wants to live.
As with all things trump, the man spends his days flailing about from one tantrum to the next with no actual focus or initiative. Bluster all day, every day.
To be clear, current US law protects things that one can not change about themselves eg: race --and even this is a bit of an oversimplification (see being gay or a woman)-- but it in no way prevents a restaurant from serving someone because of the attire they are wearing or the speech they are speaking.
1. The veracity of twitter’s fact checking. This absolutely does not matter, since Twitter may host or refuse to host whatever they want on their own website, including incorrect fact checks if that’s how they get their jollies (not that there’s any evidence that their fact checks have been incorrect so far, because there isn’t). On the other hand, Trump doesn’t have the same right, because he doesn’t own Twitter.com
2. Hate speech, and whether it is ever justified. Again, this doesn’t matter. Twitter has the right to remove (or visibly flag as the case may be) any post they want on their website, for any reason they want. They might do so because a post is hate speech, but they’d be just as firmly within their rights to do so for any other reason.
I think all of the confusion in these comments exists because the law is very simple, but many folks here don’t like the conclusion:
1. Twitter may fact check, flag, or remove the posts of Trump or any other user completely at their discretion, even if their fact checking turns out to be incorrect. Nothing about this violates Trump’s first amendment rights in any way.
2. I had hoped this was obvious, but in case it’s unclear to you, Trump and the US government absolutely do not have the power to shut down or punish Twitter in any way just because they don’t like the way that Twitter has fact checked Trump’s posts. This would in fact (obviously) violate Twitter’s first amendment rights.
Finally, there is no legal distinction between a “platform” and a “publisher” that in any way restricts the control that a business has over their own website. Anyone who claims otherwise is simply incorrect, and not worth listening to.
Where is this in US law? Are you confusing DMCA safe harbor issues with speech?
All platforms take control over content - otherwise they could not remove child porn, PII, etc., and they don't lose DMCA safe harbor exemptions, which only applies to copyrighted items posted by users.
You are missing the point. Using objective reporting to paint a bad person in a bad light is exactly what "the media" should do.
I went to cnn's homepage and clicked on this article[1]. Lets look at the first paragraph:
> President Donald Trump's use of the bully pulpit to defy his own government's advice on face coverings has turned into the era's latest ideologically motivated assault on science and civility. His noncompliance is a symbol of his refusal to adopt the customary codes of the presidency during a crisis and his habit of turning even a dire national moment to political advantage.
You can't possibly call that objective reporting. The factual content is true, but highly highly subjective and filled with inflammatory language.
Saying "Trump refuses to wear a facemask in defiance of $HealthExpert's advice" is objective. Calling that act "an assault on science and civility" is a heavily inflammatory and subjective stance.
To be clear, I don't disagree with CNN here. Trump is being dumb. But you can't pretend like CNN is objective or unbiased.
CNN, like all news media, is a private, profit seeking corporation who will pander to their audience to generate ad revenue. And there is nothing inherently wrong with that. But turning around and treating this multi-million dollar corporation as the sole arbiter of absolute, objective truth is plain foolish.
[1]https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/26/politics/donald-trump-covid-m...
EDIT: Some argue that this is an opinion piece and so my point is invalid. Up in the top left corner, this article is marked as "Analysis by $Author" instead of just "by $Author". They don't label it as an opinion, and they don't place it differently on their home page. It is an analysis on current events, written by a CNN reporter, hosted on the CNN front page. This is an explicit endorsement of the content of the article, and it's crazy to say that CNN is absolved of all journalistic integrity because this article is an "analysis" versus "regular" news. The only difference is the addition of the single word "Analysis" hidden in the top left corner. This article is clearly meant to be treated as any other.
I suppose that is the problem with using examples, though. People would rather pick apart the example rather than face the larger claim. Without examples, of course, the point would be dismissed as unsubstantiated. It's just not possible to change people's minds, I guess.
EDIT 2: This is what an actual opinion piece looks like: https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/21/opinions/trump-racist-tweet-m...
They disclaim that the article is the authors opinion, they host it in the opinions section, and have opinion in the header, etc. The article I linked is not an opinion piece.
It doesn't need to be a solved problem to provide value by flagging highly questionable content. And many statements are known to be false or misleading, and providing info to people who don't know better is a step in a positive direction.
It's not as crazy an idea as it sounds. You may already be forced to. You cannot not serve people based on a protected characteristic.
If twitter/facebook is allowed to serve as a primary means for an government organisation/department to serve as the primary way which it communicate it's not to hard to argue that that line have been crossed where it have to act as an "open access" common carirer, from an pragmatic real world stand point.
Putting an purely technical definition as the core of this debate is arguing over how many angels can fit on an pin needle, and not of any real value for deciding what kind of society we want.
If you run a DNS server, you're free to refuse to carry any record you want. And people are free to use or not use your DNS server, based on its policies. (There are various DNS servers that purport to block ads and malware, for instance.)
If you run a blog, you can choose to not allow comments at all, or moderate them as you see fit. If someone wants to reply in a way you don't want to host, they can respond via their own blog.
If you run a hosting company, you can (and should) refuse to host spammers, malware, people launching DDoS attacks, and so on.
If you run an email server, you can choose to reject spam.
Many interesting and desirable policies happen at the meta-level, based on that fundamental principle along with freedom of association. People will choose which servers to use based on the nature and quality of moderation; it's one of the defining aspects of a service.
Even before we knew about the Seattle choir, Twitter could have given the tweet a fact-check in the form, "Actually, there is conflicting evidence and we are not sure to what extent it is airborne." But of course on what authority does Twitter make that fact check? There are no easy answers.
I am arguing that common carrier laws already exist, and are not controversial.
And that it really isn't much of a stretch to change and expand our existing, uncontroversial, common carrier laws, so as to apply to other things that really aren't much different than our phone system.
Even if those laws have yet to be slightly updated to apply to the modern era yet.
But we do. Any facts that cast certain religions (but not others!), or certain lifestyle choices (but not others!) in a bad light are considered _____-ophobic. Bad.
Facts are routinely politicized and made out to be evil.
> Censorship is just admitting that you dislike the ideas but cannot argue them down with reason
This is true. And this is why it is so hard to have an honest debate. Many people in the United States (perhaps elsewhere?) think with their feelings, and not facts or reason. The videos of people screaming over the top of presenters on college campuses are case-in-point.
The world as a whole is marching towards the cudgel. Hate speech laws are a manifestation of this. What remains is the removal of an individual's right to defend their life. After that we have tyranny.
A tyranny of the majority—which you appear not to understand is a bad thing[0]—is a disaster and precisely what modern democratic institutions seek to avoid. It always leads to the repression of minorities, whether that's ethnic minorities, religious minorities, or political minorities. I doubt you would be much in favor of tyranny by a majority of a different political persuasion.
I really saw a chilling effect in r/SyrianCivilWar after the rise of ISIS. Media showing graphic violence would remain on the site for several more years -- r/WatchPeopleDie was removed only last year -- but videos considered to be "supporting" ISIS (even if only because they showcased recent advances by ISIS or allies) started being removed from Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, and other places. I think that even LiveLeak eventually started removing some of these videos. Reddit itself started banning pro-ISIS posters.
There was plenty of all-sides hand-wringing before 2016 that social media wasn't doing enough to suppress terrorist propaganda.
"After the recent spate of terrorist attacks inspired by the so-called Islamic State, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called for greater cooperation from social media companies like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in combating hate propaganda."
https://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/08/how-social-media-cos-try-to-...
The social networks banned a lot of content that would be legal to publish in the United States. They went well above and beyond removing only the "imminent lawless action" speech that falls outside of First Amendment protections. And with good reason. Plenty of lawmakers were ready to make their lives miserable if they didn't take an aggressive anti-terrorist stance.
It's fun to daydream about big American social media companies removing only such speech as would be unprotected by the First Amendment. But sites like YouTube have never offered that much latitude. Even in the pre-Google days YouTube didn't allow porn -- not even perfectly legal, mainstream porn. And of course it's perfectly legal to advertise locksmith and dental services but I don't want platforms overrun with high volume advertising for those businesses either. Finally, both Republican and Democratic legislators were talking less than 5 years ago about how social media had a responsibility to curb terrorists' propaganda, regardless of the stronger protections enshrined in the First Amendment.
I don't really like where we are with social media, but I wish that the discussions we had around these issues on HN were more historically grounded instead of centering on partisan polarization around the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath.
For example, if you let an apple fall down to the ground and you say "The apple fell to the ground", then you can't really know whether it's a fact or not, because you don't have access to the official logs of the Universe where it would be recorded that "An apple fell to the ground". So you have to trust your senses (and for example the fact that you're not under hallucination or visualizing an illusion) to put some confidence into this belief. If you know you're not under drug usage and if there are other witnesses of the event, then you'll have a very high degree of confidence into the idea that the apple indeed fell on the ground, so much confidence that you would consider it a fact.
When it comes to complex questions about society and everything that we can read on the news, such degree of confidence is very rare. In the end, the threshold at which you consider something to be "a fact" is subjective and for this reason I think all this "facts aren't opinions" thing is dangerous, because it gives the illusion that what we call "facts" are absolute and binary, whereas it's often things we just have a high confidence about, and so it opens the door to slide our standard of what a fact is.
What matters is that our view of the world shouldn't be shaped by what we hope or believe the world _should_ be, but by what it really _seems_ to be. And that is sufficient enough without having to get on one's high horse with "facts".
I don't question the casual usefulness of the word "fact" in appropriate contexts, but when the discussion at hand precisely handles the very nature of what is a fact and what isn't, we need to dig down the true implications of the word.
The problem though, as I think some of the posters above have touched on, is how can Twitter effectively account for media biases in a way that will not make them look biased? I suppose that's just begging the question of: should they care if they appear biased?
One thought I've had is that perhaps, for every tweet that Twitter decides to put a 'fact-check' on, they could link to three different sources of information - one with a well-established left-bias, one with a well-established right-bias, and one without any well-established bias. Just an idea, I'm sure that'll probably present problems as well.
Which Twitter did - https://twitter.com/i/events/1265330601034256384
This focus on complaining about just CNN is a red herring.
There's a long list of news organizations:
A data source that only reports facts that support its theory is still reporting facts. I think, rather than tune it out, combining it with other sources gives a richer picture.
And from the children's side: It's already extremely hard to teach kids anything at a deeper level, especially those ones who will later on become susceptible to misinformation. If I look at my Facebook feed, schoolmates who got bad grades around age 10 are the ones sharing fake quiz results, horoscope stuff, "you won't believe what THIS person..." articles, listicles, racist stuff etc. Sure it's just correlational, but I think we don't have much better ways than we currently do in school.
If we could go back in time and design some critical thinking curriculum, are you sure you could teach something useful to those struggling 10-year-olds, that would keep their adult selves away from Internet bullshit?
If it truly was far left, why doesn't Wikipedia host pages of Pol Pot and Stalin filled with praise? Or, in lieu of praise, at least apologism?
I know this is a very massive hypothetical, but it’s one I’ve wondered for a while. Basically, as the head of one of the branches, he could have subordinates forcefully removed, but who’ll forcefully remove him in this case?
Threats to our democracy need to be checked.
This isn't about Trump or about giving or not giving someone the benefit-of-the-doubt. If it were Obama, Warren, Bush, or whomever else, I wouldn't want to give a path to cancelling an election either. The PoTUS doesn't have that kind of power, and it the PoTUS is making moves suggesting that kind of power grab, they need to be checked on it by the rest of the system, whoever it is, and regardless of intent.
That's the point of checks-and-balances: they're something we should be able to agree on regardless of whether we trust the individual. They're about the system and not about the person.
Yes. That's why I made the suggestion to begin this thread with. What those 10-year-olds who grow-up to become adults (as we all do) do with that information is impossible to ever truly know, but I think something of value could be taught, yes, absolutely.
But I disagree that funding is a red-herring, no it's not solely about the money, but as I said: curriculum implementation does not happen in a vacuum. It's relevant, and I don't see many useful discussions about implementation specifically happening without it. If there's a discussion to be had about the ethics or merits of media literacy, sure money probably doesn't carry as much weight--but I'm trying to speak as broadly as possible on the topic to avoid the trappings of turtles-all-the-way-down kvetching about the stylistics over how the discussion is framed.
You're not going to persuade people who are playing that game. They're just going to keep playing the game, and enjoy the fact that they're "winning" (in their own terms). But I think you can make it so that they lose in the battle for hearts and minds.
This is a cost benefit analysis, there are known upsides with no proven downsides and the only downsides seem to be unproven.
Phones systems are are not platforms to host speech - i.e. CC laws can't force me to play your phone recording in my private home when someone calls me.
You talk about how established Common Carrier laws are, but that's precisely what they're established for - transportation. Hence the word carrier. CC laws were originally for unbiased trucking and rail transportation, and do not guarantee that you can force a private warehouse to store your goods.
No, this is totally incorrect.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (47 U.S.C. § 230)
I hope this means we finally get some big profile names in the fediverse. A lot of celebrities are talking about the issue but I have yet to see anyone mention valid alternatives.
Threatening to shut down private companies -- not for limiting speech, not for refusing to distribute speech -- but for exercising their own right to free speech alongside the free speech of others (in this case the president).
There is no right to unchallenged or un-responded-to speech, regardless of how you interpret the right to free speech.
If you aren't being taught critical thinking already in English, History, and Math then what are you being taught?
Isn't that the entire point of those classes?
Why should Twitter do that. They're a tech company and are in no position to add to anyone's statements—specially a world leader's.
> If a world leader does that, it needs to be addressed. Would you accept all the information that comes out of other countries, for example North Korea?
It already gets address at the next elections. Even if it doesn't, are you saying that Twitter is the right institution to address lying from world leaders?
Does the leader of North Korea post on Twitter? Why are you comparing the leader of the freest country with the most oppressive?
So many questions...
"The answer to bad speech is more speech."
Brilliant people who have said this or some trivial variation thereof:
- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis:
https://prospect.org/culture/remedy-speech/
- U.S. President Barack Obama
https://www.answers.com/Q/Who_said_answer_bad_speech_with_more_speech
- Penn Jillette
https://bigthink.com/in-their-own-words/why-the-solution-to-bad-speech-is-always-more-speech
- Google CEO (then) Eric Schmidt
https://www.news18.com/news/india/the-answer-to-bad-speech-is-more-speech-googles-eric-schmidt-598251.html
So wave the bloody shirt, that's AOK, but say that vote by mail facilitates fraud, and you get a personalized "We Don't Think So!" message from twitter.
Twitter hosts outrage mobs that have the stated goals of getting people fired, and it has caused people I was following to quit the platform.
They simultaneously want to exercise editorial discresion while not being liable for for all the outrageous or outright wrong speech they do host.
I am saying that these laws are uncontroversial, and it would only require a slight expansion and change to them, to order for them to cover very similar things, that aren't that much different than what CC laws currently cover.
Yes, I understand that CC laws don't technically apply to what I am talking about. I am instead saying that it would only be a slight change, to make them apply, and therefore not as big of a deal as people are making it seem.
> but that's precisely what they're established for - transportation
I don't see how telephone companies transporting your phone calls is much different than twitter transporting your tweets. Yes, it is not exactly the same. It is slightly different. But only slightly.
> CC laws can't force me to play your phone recording
> do not guarantee that you can force a private warehouse to store your goods.
The private warehouse, or end phone user, in the twitter example, would be the end user. Twitter, is arguably, transporting your messages. And then the end user is not forced to keep it.
So even if CC laws were changed to apply to twitter, the end user would not be forced to keep their tweet. They could delete it, or not follow you, or whatever.
Just like how if I make a phone call to someone, they still receive the phone call, but you don't have to pick of the phone. The same argument could be applied to tweets.
> Phones systems are are not platforms to host speech
They have to transport speech. In the same way that twitter transports speech.
In my view, the most powerful person in the world unilaterally shutting down companies he disagrees with is much closer to tyranny.
If I own a store and someone injures themselves on the premises I am held liable for that. I did not force that person to enter the store but the benefits of having a store outweighed the risks. Why should internet companies receive special treatment? They should be 100% liable for what happens on their "premises" if they are going to take the risk of allowing user-generated content.
Twitter should decide what business they're in. If they're a platform for people to discuss ideas, they should stay out of expressing their opinion, absolutely. What's next, is Microsoft going to fact-check what you're saying while you talk on Skype and add a message over your voice?
> The only difference is that people trust Twitter more than the current POTUS.
That's so cool! Perhaps you've found who can beat Trump in 2020—Twitter. I thought there was no hope, but maybe...
https://twitter.com/search?q=%22Make%20Whites%20Great%20Agai...
They are working as editors which does not provide them FCC section 230 protection.
In general, the last 50-60 years have seen private individuals and businesses stripped of their rights to turn away customers, in the US mostly under the guise of the CRA, FHA, etc. YouTube finds itself remarkably (and unsurprisingly) unrestrained by these kind of (progressive) laws.
- Manifesting my like or dislike of the man immediately places one side or the other of tribal warfare, and that is precisely what I’d like to see less of;
- In my experience Americans are extremely testy and sometimes downright hostile when foreigners express opinions about their governance (the whole foundational process, at least as it is taught today, was of a rejection of ties to the Old Wolrd and its old, flawed ways)... I’ve even had people berate me online for being a condescending neo-imperialistic foreigner meddling in their affairs ‘proving’ that the Democrats are traitors who sell out America’s interests to foreigners (because if foreigners prefer Democrats, it must be because they get something in return);
- I sometimes get somewhat annoyed at others when they bring up “pizza, pasta, mafia” caricatures of my own home country (Italy) so I always wonder how much of what I think I ‘know’ is simply stereotype.
For all these reasons, I prefer to be as impartial as I possibly can.
A) Twitter, a private company, was merely adding a warning to his tweet which doesn't restrict his speech at all, and has long been defended by conservatives that private companies restricting speech is not a violation of the first amendment
AND
B) Trump threatened to use the powers of government to stop someone from violating his speech that is not protected by the first amendment is ACTUALLY VIOLATING THE FIRST AMENDMENT?
>Trump falsely claimed that mail-in ballots would lead to "a Rigged Election.
We don't know if the claim is false; it hasn't happened yet. It could have said unlikely, improbable, whatever. Making this statement, however, is just as charged as the one it opposes.
In real terms, what are you imagining here? Trump having the NSA execute a DDOS against Twitter? I feel like you have to get to some pretty fantastical action-movie type plots to make this happen.
It is irrelevant how many true things CNN says, or how broadly other organizations agree with them. CNN is still not presenting things in an objective way. Which means that those you would like to convince will flip the bozo bit because of the bias, and never even hear the evidence.
Note that we seldom notice bias in others when it matches our own. So CNN's bias is invisible to its core audience. Just as Fox News' bias is invisible to theirs. But it can't be missed by anyone whose biases differ, or who are actively looking for whether things are presented with bias.
But http://gatewayjr.org/how-a-popular-media-bias-chart-determin... gets it right. CNN skews liberal, and isn't particularly accurate. It is better than Fox News...but not by much.
that doesn't mean that it isn't possible for some facts. in fact, i believe social media are among the best positioned to do so for surprisingly many facts.
For example, we had something approximating it in Hungary, in history class. The very fist history lesson we had, was on historical sources, how historians work, "who benefits?", how you can know that a coin saying "minted in 350 BC" must be fake etc. And then later it was all facts and gospel, no critical presentation of different possibilities and interpretations and framings. Because it would be overwhelming.
But to actually train critical thinking, all classes should be redesigned in this manner, encouraging kids to poke holes in the material, but teachers can barely venture out of the confines of the curriculum. An elementary school physics teacher won't be able to explain things to you the same way a professor could if you raise some criticism or find a plothole in the simplified lie-to-children presentation. They'll just say, "that's how it is, memorize it".
It's a very difficult problem and hardly scalable.
Apple does this with the App Store, where it is possible to get away with breaking app store rules if the app is not downloaded very often. It is not worth the time and energy for Apple to challenge apps that no one is downloading in the first place.
On twitter, with regard to illegal content it also has to matter the degree. How illegal / and reprehensible is it? How often is this tweet being requested?
I think it really depends on what you view twitter as. If it's a communications platform, like your phone, then yes 'merely labelling a tweet' is as troubling as your phone company deciding to shut your call off when you mention to a friend that you're going to vote for Biden. If Twitter is a publishing platform, then it certainly can expose its editorial bias, but one must really consider whether or not it should have to pay its writers.
One thing that seems relevant in the discussion about speech restrictions on social media is the fact that most if not all of the major websites are deliberately set up to maximize user engagement. The site is designed, measured and iterated on in order to induce users to comment as much as possible.
That practice seems to be incompatible with unrestricted speech. Eventually people run out of nice things to say. Facebook's policy is very obviously "if you don't have anything nice to say, say something anyway, we want money". Free speech has been sustainable historically because it's natural for people to think before they say something controversial, but now we have websites that actively undermine that built-in filter.
Swastikas have a rich cultural history from long before NSDAP.
EDIT: to all the down-voters, I am not sure why the down-votes, but I suspect doing a Web search for "japan swastika" or similar may enlighten you.
EDIT2: FTR, I did not think of my post as some supposed big revelation, rather I mostly wanted to share my appreciation for the various Swastika forms (as old graphical art); and also thought banning Swastikas in general might be insensitive to Asians.
That said...
Reading other more recent comments though I think we're drifting a bit here and introducing some creep into my initial suggestion: critical thinking and media literacy certainly have some overlap in the types of class and even perhaps overlap in topic, but I'm unsure if I'd necessarily agree that 'media literacy' as a school topic needs to go all the way down the rabbit hole of of unpacking "critical theory" and "how to think critically" just to hold courses on what I initially and deliberately called 'media literacy and criticism'.
Your points are nonetheless well met, however-it definitely is a difficult nut to crack, and I can't help but wonder if it's a type of thing where if the immediate benefits maybe don't come from solving the problem but manifest as external results from simply looking at existing similar curricula and going from there-to maybe lower the initial hurdles of implementation that you and others spoke of? What do you think?
We've become quite protective of the data that's collected by digital products for fear of a concentration of power.
But then we all see the internet as a great 'leveller', and we don't want to disturb that balance.
The likes of the FDA (or your local equivalent) work at a certain scale... Perhaps civilly agreed constraints can be applied to companies who have managed to cultivate a userbase of a certain size.
Like a 'tax' of a kind on the amount of 'trash' you're allowed to ignore, before the police physically ensure you and your users can't abuse state infrastructure for whatever your nefarious purpose is.
> Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
> ...
Basically, if Congress decides Trump is incompetent, Pence will immediately become President. No impeachment trial will be necessary. And if Trump refuses to leave the White House at that point, he will be forcefully removed. Whether that’ll actually happen remains to be seen; Section 4 has never been invoked since its ratification.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-fifth_Amendment_to_the_...
A great place for one of these "hyperlinks" would be to show everyone this photoshopped picture you're talking about. Not everyone follows whatever sites you'd consider to be "news".
And no, I'm not going to do the legwork and search for random articles trying to figure out what the fuck you're talking about.
You also might want to consider that a person with legal power, say a government official, might be held to a higher standard of informational accuracy than some rando posting a photoshopped picture.
Tech CEOs can now influence the public as much or more so than any politicians. So this is fundamentally about power to influence.
Trump is mad because he thinks he is and should be the most powerful person on the planet. This action stands in contrast to that.
* Trust but verify. I'm not aware of a cost-effective way to monitor mail-in voting. Suppose I want to observe the process. Do I need to sleep in the voting collection room for 18 days in a row to monitor that no one is messing with the ballots? What about the post office? What about the post truck?
The argument 'is the proven voter fraud higher when using voting process X vs process Y' cuts both ways. I haven't seen evidence to conclusively prove that proprietary voter machines with no paper trail tamper vote counts. And yet most people agree that paper trail voting is a much more trustworthy approach.
I'm really bugged by the leap of logic that fact checkers will supposedly always parrot the government line, when even this specific thread itself is about a fact checker existing that's going against the president's line.
I believe that the unclear identification of an article as 'news' or 'opinion' is a general problem with media. The demarcation was usually clear in the print media, it's often not clear in the digital media. I'd love to see improvement.
I often ask for examples of the press treating Trump unfairly, and I'm always (not sometimes, always) given links to opinion pieces. The public can't seem to discern between the two, which points to a general problem of media illiteracy. This illiteracy is then used to draw false conclusions about the media as a whole, and your post is doing the same.
Let's look at the tweet from the linked article and see how reporting should happen:
>"Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices" "We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016."
1. Republicans claim social media platforms silence conservative viewpoints. 2. Donald Trump intends to regulate/close them down if they are engaging in this, or prevent them from doing so with regulation. 3. Donald Trump claims that social-media platforms tried to do something in 2016 (insinuating that they meddled with the election).
I don't know about you but I would love actual investigative journalism to look at the above points as it's so loaded and could practically swing elections if confirmed and people decided to act on it.
So the items they need to do for the above facts:
1. Track down some legitimate poll of how Republicans feel about this. Find peer-reviewed studies that look at data-dumps or reports by the media companies. Send emails to social-media companies with details, request data about the makeup of account actions or bans, etc. If < 50% of republicans feel this way, call him out on it. <-- that sort of thing is fact-checkable for Twitter.
2. Talk about the options that Donald Trump has. Investigate the legality about it, consult some lawyers, showcase a poll on the matter, investigate how Common-Carrier laws might apply to this, etc. The media should assume he is right and play that out. What if Donald Trump is on to something and the statistical facts are being hidden. Investigate. Make a note of this and write an article in half a year about how it disappeared from his campaign so he broke his promise/commitment. Hold him accountable, help people see the things that they may have forgotten, be the voice of clear-headed reason and good outcomes for all involved.
3. Really, same as the above on some level. It's been almost 4 years, there is bound to be a plethora of peer-reviewed sources and concluded outcomes. Mention the outcomes of some of the claims during the 2016 election, track down some polls and tie it all together. They're supposed to provide insight and a big-picture view of it all.
Whether they are paying people or writing automated systems to remove content they disagree with, these companies argued for this legal protection on the grounds of protecting free-speech, and now that they want to restrict it they don't deserve those same protections.
It would have to happen through the courts, and the courts won't allow it.
They can bully Twitter and threaten to e.g. withhold federal contracts (though even this runs into legal trouble) but how does the executive branch just "shut down" a platform?
You can't just send in the FBI and put a halt on things.
This will just be more of his mindless rage that a certain portion of the population gobbles up. His real goal is to discredit Twitter et al, which is unlikely to have much impact.
All that said, the concept of where and how to apply common carrier is of course controversial, hence the entire net neutrality debate. If an ISP isn't required to carry content the idea of an information service (ie Twitter) being required to is borderline absurd.
Any "conservative" content that has been kicked off of platforms like YouTube has been specifically targeted not for political reasons but because they were spreading hate speech and/or dangerous disinformation. Things like racism, sexism, religious intolerance, specific accusations (ie Joe Scarborough is a murderer) or dangerous disinformation (ie 5G causes Coronavirus) are not intrinsic to any group of people. There's still plenty of content around mainstream conservatism that can be viewed freely.
I think any attempt to argue a slippery slope isn't valid. People aren't computers and just because you can't apply a mathematically rigorous distinction between these kinds of speech doesn't mean that a reasonable person can't easily distinguish them.
–Stephen Colbert, at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner
The first amendment is not a blank check to express anything you want in the U.S.
Okay, give me the keys and Ill do it.
The difference would be one is a company, the other a real person. No need for the company to get involved.
People who ignore the correctios and other tweets will ignore the company anyway.
That's because the content I am responding to is a red herring to the question of Twitter's actions.
This derailment into "Is CNN biased?" is not relevant when the majority of news organizations are in agreement about the president lying in the tweet.
Further muddying the waters with claims that it's all just an "opinion" anyways is also non-sequitur because there are definitive facts about mail-in voting showing otherwise: https://twitter.com/i/events/1265330601034256384
Or he knows what he is allowed to do and is just saying stupid crap like he usually does. Trump doesn't have a filter and just says/tweets whatever pops into his head. This could be another example of that.
Basically quoting Sasha's argument "freedom of speech is not the freedom of reach". Spreading lies, hate and false information is everyone's right if they do it in their home alone but they shouldn't be allowed to reach bigger audiences.
Video here: https://youtu.be/PVWt0qUc0CE
And just like before the fact checkers, people believe what they want to believe, nothing more, nothing less.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum...
Perhaps tell them a story and ask them to rewrite it such that the bad guy comes out looking like the good guy and vice versa, or similar manipulations and framing exercises. To pick out manipulative phrases from presidential speeches, like peace, democracy, our great nation etc. But that would directly conflict with what they hear in other classes. Or perhaps use the example of dictatorial propaganda, text and posters alike, point out manipulative stuff.
Perhaps one interesting thing would be to peek behind the curtains. To tell them how news are made, how books are produced, how science works, what is peer review, how they can look up the original primary source (but this is too advanced for kids...). That books and knowledge and articles don't just fall out of the sky, they are deliberately produced with goals in mind.
I fear that ultimately it would devolve into a "don't believe everything you read, kids!", similar to "don't do drugs" lectures.
Freedom of speech is a concept, and a legal definition in the US. It's true that Twitter has no _legal_ obligation to uphold free speech since it's not a government entity.
But if you support the _concept_ of free speech, Twitter is stiffing conversation by playing a moral judge on what is considered truth and what's considered lies.
The Constitution was written 200 years ago without any of the today's technology. Back then, all "speech" happens either live in person, or by individual printing presses. Government back then was the biggest threat to the concept of free speech, so it's indoctrinated in the constitution as a legal concept.
Today, public discussion space has moved onto social media platforms. Government is no longer the biggest threat to speech (because of the Constitution), but private companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc who can just ban anyone at will and cause them to lose the ability to reach their followers. If you want to protect free speech as a concept, then we need to update our legal concept to include any platform or service that's identified as critical to public discussion.
Similar to how electricity companies are regulated as utilities companies because they're so crucial to people's daily lives, social media platforms should be regulated as speech platforms because they're so crucial to today's conversations happening in society.
This is the hard truth. You won't like it because you hate the man. But it's the truth / end devil's advocate
I have stated multiple times that I am aware that CC laws do not currently apply to these situations.
I am instead saying that these laws could be slightly changes, because, philosophical, there isn't much of a difference between a phone calls, and tweets or FB messages.
> is borderline absurd.
Apparently people don't think it is absurd to force phone companies to carry most phone calls.
And IMO, there isn't much difference, philosophically between a phone call and tweets or a FB message, even if our laws haven't been changed slightly to apply to them yet.
Surely you understand that the company posting a fact checker is a more credible source, and that there are plenty of twitter users who, even if they disagree with Trump, may not be aware of the facts.
* How to source and read cited sources of online publications
* Copyright, fair use, associated topics (memes would be a great way to capture the attention of a middle schooler and would be a perfect tangent to these topics)
* Print and online advertising, how print markets have changed and evolved with the new digital landscape and the influence advertising and money has on content production (Youtuber's and patreons, again, a topic relevant to a young captive mind and one they're familiar with)
There's genuinely NO shortage of boilerplate contemporary lesson plans all across the internet covering "media literacy" as an applied subject matter for young minds-such that I don't really believe this to be as difficult of a teachable subject as many people commenting here are trying to make it out as being[0]
[0] https://mediaeducationlab.com/topics/Teaching-Media-Literacy
You're effectively calling for some sort of cultural revolution that stamps out anti-Semitism through proper education. Seriously we've tried this with other topics, all they're going to do is say you're indoctrinating children, then you'll inevitably fall into a defensive position where you feel like you have to back it up with numbers and eloquent arguments. Bam, they've won because there will always be a first movers advantage with information: your opponent can now make an outrageous claim that people see, internalize, and then never see your rational follow-up to. You're all so incredibly terrified of censorship when the real terror is right in front of your eyes: a torrent of information, engagement, and half-consumption.
This is so incredibly tedious. I see the same thing that I'm describing here happen with any number of semblance of social progress: homosexuality, trans rights, even marijuana legalization. This cyclic pattern has to be hell, I can't fathom any other possible explanation for such a thoroughly trained helplessness.
I fail to see how those two are equivalent, shutting off would be removing the tweet, they did not do that. Labeling something is not equivalent to censuring the tweet or cutting off communication.
Warning users is similar to phones letting you know they think a caller is spam.
I will be interested, and open-minded, when reading your treatise explaining how one could conclude that Trump has been an objective reasonable President.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/21/opinions/trump-racist-tweet-m...
It is at a /opinions/ url, it has the word "Opinion" in the header, and it has this disclaimer above the article:
> The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own
Most importantly, it is not posted directly on the CNN home page. You have to click a link to go to the opinions section to see opinion articles.
The article I chose as an example is not an opinion piece. It is presented to the user the same way every other news piece is, just with the word "Analysis" tacked on in the corner. No reasonable person would say "Oh, this is just an analysis, I shouldn't take it seriously".
The good news is that the presidency (and the leader of the executive branch) is very time limited. The constitution is so clear that there is no wiggle room at all, no matter what happens between now and January next year, the only way he stays in power is by winning the election. Also it seems pretty clear there will be a democrat as acting president if we fail to vote for a new one, but that is mostly coincidences and luck this time around.
The last four years have shown that there are no real checks and balances and they depend on one party keeping its own members in line, and that the GOP have moved far, far, to the right as they are loosing the potential to win fair elections. Winding this down is not going to be pleasant, and in the long run we desperately need reforms. Also it seems like the current best case is that the GOP get voted out everywhere, but that is also a terrible outcome, we need a real opposition party and competition of ideas.
As soon as you start talking about what happened with those other witnesses, the group begins influencing the way each other remember what happened, and the narrative becomes more "real" than the actual memory. The more time that passes, and the more times the story of the apple falling from the tree is told, the more reinforced the narrative becomes, regardless of how the apple got to the ground.
I doubt he would shut Twitter down (if only because he needs it more than it needs him), but I don't doubt for a second that he would use the executive branch to retaliate against them.
It is also the case that being restricted limits monetization on those videos, but advertisers don't want to be associated with those topics.
That said. I don’t see a solution to this dilemma. It has no satisfactory solution.
I just ctrl+f'd for "public forum" and yours was the first hit. One thing in particular I would like to comment on is that post-Trump's election I started listening to some of my SO's legal field podcasts because I wanted less sensational analysis. I very distinctly remember a series on the Opening Arguments one where they went into some depth about why Twitter should be legally considered a limited public-forum (this was in response to some other Trump-Twitter hubbub at the time).
So, just granting that, how does potentially being a "limited public forum" change it's rights and responsibilities to it's users? What about the heavy US government involvement in these companies, how could that change the analysis? What about the fact that dominate platforms are able to control the narrative due to that domination? Doesn't that completely fuck up the free speech concept? "Everyone uses X, but you can't because we don't like you, so you can have your free speech over there in that corner where nobody is." What kind of dangers in the long run does this present? Why do these companies so easily fall into models of censorship, and what kind of future would that mean for the public? (not looking to actually get into the convo necessarily, I'm commenting on the meta of the discussion and wish these kinds of questions were being asked more)
I personally hate youtubes banner for controversial shit. It always links to some shitty ass Wikipedia thats been heavily controlled/edited. Wikipedia is just not a good source of info on controversial topics, (though looking through revision history certainly can add context of what is "missing").
Also missing from the parts of the discussion i've yet read, is the question of what sort of software we're using.
At the risk of using a buzzword, decentralized comms could reduce the risks of constitutional shutdown. And maybe even be better.
The threat to force private entities to toe the line is the only speech issue here. If you think people want unedited speech then I believe Gab could use some of your money.
This is one of my biggest pet peeves with the current political climate. Everyone forgets the Y axis on the political compass! This is why people who understand that both parties are authoritarian could see past the Russiagate and other bullshits but most of the country couldn't.
If one is still falling for the left/right paradigm one won't be able to understand the bigger picture at play. It's much more about authoritarianism vs libertarianism.
Arguing that Twitter users must prefer said curation / censorship because Gab exists doesn't hold up because Twitter has other obvious advantages, like a massive network effect.
No, it cannot even be considered a free speech issue (except insofar as Trump proposes to censor Twitter). Those of us in the con law/democratic theory community, and everyone else in the universe who is even semi-rational, use them term "counterspeech" to describe what Twitter did.
Traditionally, counterspeech is seen as the virtuous alternative to censorship---as the thing that us snotty free speech people tell those who call for their opponents to be censored to do instead. John Stuart Mill would jump up and down and pop champagne in celebration of what Twitter did.
For you to say that its wrong to discuss media bias because Trump did a bad thing is dishonest at best. Yes, Trump is acting a fool on Twitter as he always is. That does not mean that the news media is beyond reproach and it is wrong to call into question their biases.
Can you maybe explain your thinking?
Have you done the math? The document you reference is absent of impact analysis, even vague on the numbers. 1,071 incidents but how many actual votes? How many votes were actually cast? How many were caught before they were counted? Let's take Alabama. 14 reports, but actually first four are all the same incident. So 11 reports. Not off to a good start there. Nine of the remaining were single instance voting. Two were a conspiracy. One conspiracy was caught, in 1994 when it occurred, but is labeled as "Disposition: 2005", which I initially assumed meant that they were caught in 2005, and had gotten away with it. But in fact they were caught at the time because they submitted 1,400 votes in a county of 7000 people. The one that got away with it was caught at the time, and earned the role of a city commissioner of a city of 68,000 people. And yet the person was elected anyway, despite the evidence. So you've got "14" incidents, that are really only 11, and only 1 that got away with in a small city election where even they were caught yet allowed to win. So with just this one state, of the 14 claimed, there was only 1. So for 1071 that's 76. Over 30 years. There are 20,000 cities in the usa. So ~600,000 elections of all sizes they found 76 instances of successful fraud, and only in non-state-wide elections. And that's just me spending thirty minutes with your primary document.
What's interesting is that the Heritage Foundation didn't publish that math. Didn't get into detail.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2013/dec/12/lie-year-if-y...
In this bizarre hypothetical, Twitter would presumably just fail over to servers outside the US, as would all other significant tech companies. Or, y'know, California might secede. It's such a weird proposition that it's hard to speculate about.
As we know, the private websites have incentives to allow politicians to use them as pulpits because it drives "engagement" and, in some cases, because they want to sell political ads or ad services.
I don't think that quite describes the situation. Those with no money often have no recourse against Google, Facebook or CNN. But those with money whether individuals or corporation (even outside the media world), have many ways of shaping opinion, whether that shaping is public relations, SEO, media-creation or legal action.
Just during the time that Facebook has attempted to spread the standard, cautiously wide mainstream view of covid and the shutdown through their information center, I've received an ocean of polarizing false-claims about Covid and the shutdown through sponsored ads. Those ads cost money and they certainly show how today, money, any money, has a voice.
Considering they could log out (or open a private tab) and view the content, obviously it wasn't access to the information that was fundamental but the act of the President taking a step to reduce someone's access.
With that in mind, the underlying host taking a similar action is either a) Okay because it's their system? or b) Bad because they're blocking or altering the message?
We're in this really weird spot of free speech vs private property vs public forum vs free access vs..
Companies growing does not make them into utilities. Utilities are providers of very specific commodity services which are specifically defined by statutory law.
Monopolies (as in anti-trust law) are companies which abuse their power to hurt the consumer. Traditional anti-trust law doesn't work against social media companies because consumers pay no cash for the transactions. We could change anti-trust law, but since there is no analog, it's not clear what we would change it to.
> There certainly is precedent for governments compelling utility providers to not restrict their services arbitrarily.
There is also precedent for governments to uphold a concept of "decency" (the same government that defines it as "I know it when I see it") which communities can judge for themselves, without a written definition. I, personally, don't see the judgements that social media companies make as "arbitrary" (they do have written ToS and they attempt to give their content moderators guidelines/baselines for judging decisions).
How many other presidents have had a lifetime of lying publicly and being caught at it over and over for decades, and still lying and spouting obviously false BS, over and over, throughout a lifetime?
Every other prior president that I have any knowledge of their lives prior to office, has never displayed the level of inability to see anything but what they want to, and an inability to see facts and corrections as anything but personal attacks.
He is a classic narcissist, unlike anyone that's ever held the office before.
Johnson is the only other one I can think of who ever reached near this level of unstable behavior.
> the truth about how presidents usually are
No, Trump is unique in the history of the office. Bush doesn't hold a candle to Trump's personality disorder. Saying so fails to acknowledge just how critically self-absorbed and malignant his behavior is.
What about the executive and majority stockowners of these companies, and how they might abuse their power?
I would rather prefer a federated structure like email. Anybody can choose their own clients to generate their own biased/unbiased feeds, and with plugins for fact checking.
Elizabeth Warren had a position on making the big tech companies open platforms. That was along the same lines, and would provide a far better solution than handing off the power to control people off to FB and Twitter execs
He offered to sell them a pre-made cake (in compliance with non-discrimination laws). The question was whether he could be compelled to perform an act of speech (custom-making a cake) that violated his sincerely-held religious beliefs.
the US first amendment protects against GOVERNMENTAL infringement.
in terms of this Twitter tempest-in-a-teapot, they ALSO have a right to free speech and Trumps demonstrably FALSE claims can absolutely be addressed, labeled as false, and that is an absolute right to free speech that Trump has already threatened with specious "governmental action" which PRECISELY violates both the letter and the spirit of the first amendment!
Trump is violating it!
The word 'Analysis' is right there in the title on their web site, it's not confusing in the slightest to a reasonable person imho.
This is a campaign contribution with a real economic value that should be calculable. So let's just let the FEC figure out the value of this contribution and all of the existing regulations will apply.
He's not playing a media game when he praises every network that talks him up, and calls everyone else Never Trumpers, conspiracies, and fake news.
That's a narcissist who can't accept ever being wrong. Have you ever seen how he waffles and grabs at any straw any time he's told to his face that something he said or tweeted was blatantly wrong? It's very obvious, diagnosable behavior.
Not simplistic at all. More like all too well informed, and honestly afraid of what his personality cult might do even beyond the damage they've already caused.
The discussion being had between diverse perspectives is not helped when the platform starts flagging things with its own hand-picked opinion.
This can be mostly likely summed up as self-selection bias. Discrimination laws are not being applied unequally to people of differing political opinions. It is much more common that people's political identities are self-chosen based on their own personal identity and experiences.
So true! People should consider why we call politically correctness that. We don't call them facts or truth, but that they can be said and not hurt "feelings".
For example, I have the right to refuse to serve someone who has written bad checks at my establishment, for example.
Or I have the right to refuse service to someone who has caused harm to my clients.
I was referring to non-protected classes of people.
For example, I have the right to refuse to serve someone who has written bad checks at my establishment, for example.
Or I have the right to refuse service to someone who has caused harm to my clients.
Which leads back to my question: Should I be forced to serve these people?
And even if they did, I don't see how that changes anything. This is CNN's analysis of the news, and it has all the problems I outlined in my original comment. This is not disclaimed as the author's own opinion, it is CNN's explanation of the news, and it is filled with subjectivity and inflammatory content.
You would have to be incredibly dishonest with yourself to read that article and not conclude that CNN is biased against Trump.
And I reiterate: I don't think bias in media is inherently bad. But it is foolish to think that private media corporations are unbiased, altruistic arbiters of the complete and objective truth. This is the point I am making, but I suspect you would rather continue to nitpick the examples I have chosen rather than engage in a good faith discussion.
I'll admit that the piece you linked blurs the line between analysis and opinion. You assert that it's not an opinion piece, but I'd assert that it's absolutely not news, it's not reporting, and the larger points of my parent comment still stand: I don't think it's fair to point poeple to this piece and say "look how unfair CNN is".
Probably because the point you're trying to make here is 1) nitpicking a detail of a hypothetical example which wasn't particularly relevant to the discussion, and 2) the "but it's not always a symbol of hate" argument is a rather common neo-Nazi talking point.
The noise we interact with is the intersection of waves created half a world away and the waves we create or come into contact with locally. The best perspective to maintain, in my opinion, is that local is the most important. If you were under immediate threat of death (eg a stranger with a knife in your home), you probably wouldn't care what's happening in DC, you'd be 100% focused on the danger in front of you. I measure that as "more important". The problem is in distant or murky danger, where you don't want to be caught off-guard. You have to be able to gauge your ability to adapt and achieve safety in comparison to the magnitude of danger, then limit your anxieties. Do what you can to be prepared and accept the rest. (This is what I have learned from a lifelong anxiety disorder).
There is also no general mechanism for making sense of the massive amount of information being produced, so it's overwhelming. Google attacks the problem as an indexing tool (I'm sure they're attempting to become a generally intelligent agent). Wikipedia is a curated collection of humanity's abstract knowledge. Neither describes causality of arbitrary macroeconomic events though. If there was one broadly accepted source of truth then we'd all cling to it like a life raft.
Btw, political discrimination is illegal.
You have the right to free speech. That's not disputed. You are entitled to it. However you don't have the right to distribute that free speech on a private companies platform, that's a privilege offered by the owners not a entitlement.
It's very simple. Like it or not, that's your constitution.
Lets just play this out.. The president of the US (a supposed conservative) closes down one of the largest private companies in the US.. Not for doing something illegal as with `SilkRoad` for example.. But for practicing their own business policies.
Does that sound right to anyone ?
Wo have given too much power to these private companies.
So I think it's more of a third choice - He doesn't care if he has the power, he's just creating chaos and conflict to excite his base, as he has been doing for years.
it's more concerning that people are taking it seriously enough to create so much chatter. it's not even a free speech issue, insofar as twitter is not a government entity. there's literally no 'there' there.
Clearly competition is not solving this problem. So should the federal government do something about it? Maybe.
If you are a conservative you believe in property rights. Thus, private companies can make whatever rules they want...with their property...and if I don't agree with them, I go elsewhere.
The same is true with Twitter. So it makes this whole fiasco so hypocritical. If you claim to be a conservative but you don't respect a business' right to set its own rules, you're a charlatan.
They’re called “campaigns.”
And they work especially well on the kind of people who think Trump’s posture of outrage is in response to genuinely outrageous behavior.
I thin that their transparently profit motivated move in treating him so differently-- by not banning him-- weakens their moral case against regulation.
Twitter's relationship with Trump isn't about anyone's right to free speech, it's about twitter's income stream.
> we wouldn't be as conflicted it it was an interracial couple that he was denying services to
I don't believe you would be able to make a "sincere religious conviction" argument against it - I'm not aware of any mainstream religions that prohibit interracial marriage as part of their doctrine (as opposed to an epiphenomenon of the cultural practices of the people who make up the group).
Only you get to make the decisions that define your character. Others observe your choices and choose to associate with you, or not to.
> And by what metrics are so perfect they won't be abused or change in 5 years?
There are no metrics. The free, global, unfiltered publishing platform is free to decide that they just don't like you. Nobody is entitled to free unfiltered publishing of their content.
I should note that if you're willing to pay, there's basically nothing that you can't get published on the internet. For some reason people get the 'free' in free speech confused with zero-cost. You can publish whatever repugnant material you like, you just don't necessarily get the eyeballs that some believe they're entitled to.
IANAL but an example could be:
Someone posts a pirate ebook on their facebook profile. They can hide behind the "yeah but it was the user" harbor.
vs.
Someone posts a pirate ebook on a facebook profile, facebook staff thinks it's cool and puts it on a special themed section called "Pirate picks from today". They will be in trouble.
The question is whether fb/Twitter should be subjected to freedom of speech restrictions or not
The Levering Act disagrees with you. The government itself has been forcing people to swear they're not members of the communist party for decades.
Provide some co text like a news article or something. If you can't provide some context for people to understand maybe that's the signal to you that whatever random shit you're talking about doesn't quite rise to the level of seriousness of the President spewing unsubstantiated bullshit as claims of fact.
If you think some "leftist" was making absurd claims of fact or saying demonstrably untrue things, report them to Twitter asking for their post to be flagged.
In King County, Washington where I live they record and livestream all ballot handling during elections [1] and the drop boxes themselves are designed with security in mind [2]
1. https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/elections/about-us/security... 2. https://crosscut.com/2019/10/these-ballot-boxes-keep-your-vo...
That probably won't happen though, this is really just about stirring up a frenzy of right-wingers so Twitter will have to bow down to them and give them more and more concessions in hopes that somehow, someday they'll stop accusing everything of being biased against them.
One thing that I hope people remain aware of is that there are a number of different arguments in play and while sometimes they have similar outcomes in specific situations, they often wildly differ.
For example, there is the argument that Twitter is not to be considered just a private company, as decided by a court when Trump was not allowed to block other accounts. The argument would be that twitter blocking a user entirely would be restricting their right to interact with their government officials through an official channel. Now, if Twitter blocked such a user from interacting with everyone except government officials, then that would be acceptable because the person is still allowed to interact with government officials through official channels. Also Twitter would be able to stop acting as an official government channel by ending any accounts that count as such and free to fully block a user thereafter.
This is not the same argument that you are talking about, but I do commonly see people treating it as the same.
You need to think about entities based on their properties, not the labels that are attached to them. That ought to be obvious to people who program for a living; think of a private company with a speech monopoly as the good old .txt.exe scam.
You're attaching the label "not government" to Google, but in terms of properties it is like the government. YouTube has openly admitted to manipulating video results despite it costing them money to do so. Their monopoly position is so strong that the YouTube leadership rules us like a dictatorship.
I would prefer it if these tech monopolies were simply broken up. But failing that, they need to obey the first amendment or be shut down in the US.
Europe is a different beast, but I think the UK at least should adopt the US first amendment.
Twitter frequently selectively enforces its own terms of service. They punish some users and then intentionally let other users get away with atrocious behavior with no consequences. I've witnessed this across hundreds of various Twitter accounts over the last several years, so the number of times this happens must be rather epic. Numerous agencies of the US Government can choose to pursue Twitter for that. Twitter will find it impossible to correct their chaotic, selective, biased approach to how they treat their users so very differently. Angency N from the government slaps Twitter with an increasing fine each time they fail to properly, equitably enforce their terms of service. Start at $100 million and double it with every violation. Twitter will be bankrupt before a month is out.
Twitter would get on their knees and beg for mercy almost instantly. The US Government can break any corporation it wants to, anytime it wants to.
If the Trump Admin wants to be really devious, Nixonian, they'll target the executives operating the companies. Sending the IRS & Co. to make their lives a living hell. These companies will capitulate instantly.
Just ask the PRISM companies how this works in reality: you have no choice but to bow. It all depends on how nasty the Feds are prepared to get.
Well, a few other crowds did move to it but were quickly banned under the argument that their speech did not count as speech and thus wasn't protected. I remember it being quite a humorous (ironic?) twist for a company claiming to champion free speech.
Many people are guilty of not actually understanding why people believe what they do. They will read arguments by people on their side but won't read the best arguments made by the opposite side. They will instead read the arguments by either people who make crappy arguments or by people on their own side explaining the opposition's view. This typically results in awful, often strawmen arguments for the opponent's views.
If teachers could set up debates between students on topics I think it would be good. Ideally, the student should disagree with the side they are supposed to defend, though isn't always possible. This will force them to look up the views held by the other side. The teacher should understand the best arguments on both sides and should step in when arguments are being made incorrectly or when a student misses a good response.
This of course would often times not work well because teachers don't understand their opponent's views so I am not sure how to actually handle this. You could possibly have a teacher with a different view help moderate the debate, but there is a disproportionate amount of teachers who are liberal (I've seen some studies that put it at over 80%) so it would not always be practical.
This doesn't always work on every topic like math, but it could be helpful in both English (for meaning behind books, poems, etc) and various history topics.
I am sure there are additional ways to help students learn critical thinking but this could be a good way if teachers are actually able to present both sides in a fair way.
People have used sincere religious arguments against interracial relationships for decades if not centuries. The reason it's not invoked now is because we've had a couple generations where the law of the land was obviously morally superior to the scriptures, to the point it's not seriously debated anymore.
Of course no social media company will be shut down over this- Trump has absolutely zero power in this regard (I think half of Trump's frustration is in realizing how little power a president truly has).
Anyway, he doesn't think he is a king. He thinks he is an emperor.
Even if Twitter's motive was to help its users, that's just common sense. Does Twitter have such a low opinion of its users that it needs to treat them like 5-year-olds?
> You would have to be incredibly dishonest with yourself to read that article and not conclude that CNN is biased against Trump.
I read it as a non-values neutral piece, and that is not a slant against Trump so much as it's a stance against a pattern of behavior with harmful ramifications for the country's public health. Do you think there's a neutral ground between recklessly endangering public health for political gain versus not doing that?
> But it is foolish to think that private media corporations are unbiased, altruistic arbiters of the complete and objective truth.
I don't know who you're arguing with on this point.
> Phones systems are are not platforms to host speech - i.e. CC laws can't force me to play your phone recording in my private home when someone calls me.
> You talk about how established Common Carrier laws are, but that's precisely what they're established for - transportation. Hence the word carrier. CC laws were originally for unbiased trucking and rail transportation, and do not guarantee that you can force a private warehouse to store your goods.
But here we have an example of Twitter modifying communications in transit (by attaching additional information that is not metadata and not part of the original message). This would be like the post office marking letters from you as "do not open" in bold red letters before they reached the receiver.
Where in the US Constitution does it say presidents cannot threaten companies? Obama had his share of threats. I'm sure they could find a suitable legal issue with Twitter targeting Trump while ignoring members of Congress.
We've been doing it for years, on every president and congressman in America.
There are such things as indisputable falsehoods. And when important people relay them as the truth there are dozens of fact checking organizations that exist only to call these individuals out and hold them accountable to their word.
The fact that Twitter has started doing this with one specific individual is neither new nor innovative.
Imagine a future president picks a Catholic forum to make the same sort of announcements that Trump currently does, specifically a catholic forum that bans any advocacy of pro-choice discussion. It is relatively easy to find a similar forum on any side of a modern hot button political issue.
It's named "common decency" for a reason.
Nobody is going to teach their kids to unleash their bulldog when someone does not agree with you ;)
There are tons of edge cases with free speech, but we almost certainly want the free market to experiment with potential solutions. It would be great if there were attempts at a free speech Twitter, a free of hate Twitter, free of disinformation Twitter, etc. and let the chips fall where they may.
So is it a "human right" to use a business's services even if they don't want you to, or not? Be consistent. If it is, it's a human right violation to politically deplatform people.
> has been specifically targeted not for political reasons
This is obvious bullshit to anyone who follows youtube/twitter/facebook censorship drama. Tons of people have been deplatformed without having e.g. harassed anyone.
> they were spreading hate speech
Is this supposed to impress us? That something someone said falls under this recently-made-up category that coincidentally includes a bunch of factual rightist talking points?
> There's still plenty of content around mainstream conservatism
I'm sure you feel that way, but conservatives certainly don't agree with you.
> I think any attempt to argue a slippery slope isn't valid
There's not a slippery slope argument here - YouTube, Twitter, and others have deleted content that many conservatives think is obviously fine and within the bounds of civil discourse.
Here are two related things that came up in my feed literally today:
https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2020/5/26/21270290/you...
My immediate reaction to such sentiments is that the ones who hold them would have imprisoned Galileo and poisoned Socrates. We can comfortably say that the truth exists. We cannot so comfortably say that we know what it is.
Blackwater is a private enterprise and arguably is able to legally kill (and is in a sense a form of private military). Beyond that obvious example, private police agencies have existed in the US for some time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_police_in_the_United...
https://www.factcheck.org/2016/09/trump-pence-acid-wash-fact...
> Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump falsely claimed Clinton “acid washed” 33,000 personal emails to delete them, calling it “an expensive process.” The FBI said Clinton’s tech team used BleachBit, which is a free software program. It does not use chemicals.
These sorts of "fact checks" are blatant horse shit that always go in one direction. Some "challenge", the very antithesis of any sort of good faith discussion on the facts.
Or are you asserting that mail-in-ballots are secure or secure-enough to maintain the American democracy?
now if they want to use limited public goods, well then there's a role for the FCC or something like it...
Unfortunately, the modern political climate is such that even that is considered censorship. We can't even dare claim that lies exist, because obviously no one person or institution can be trusted to define what is and isn't truth without an ulterior motive.
So the only politically correct solution is to assert that all politicians are equally (maximally) corrupt, all statements are equally valid, all attempts at nuance are motivated by partisan hypocrisy, and any possible solution is a slippery slope to an Orwellian dystopia, so we have no option but to simply let the fire burn.
Although I must say, it is strange how none of this seemed to be the case prior to 2016.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (47 U.S.C. § 230)
Cite two.
Your idea that safe-harbor laws only apply to platforms who don't self-curate is absurd precisely because there is illegal content they, the platforms, can be held liable for instead of the users.
This is a device feature, not a company one (I think at least). Plus spam has a clear meaning of unwanted commercial messages. I still receive calls from political campaigns regularly, and I would hope my phone company did not take it upon themselves to stop that.
Be a bit more tolerant of other people's point of view.
Anyway, I think you are misinterpreting the intention of that sentence. It basically means that, in principle, the behavior of being a "provider or user of an interactive computer service" does not imply that it is "the publisher or speaker of any information provided [...]". But that does not exempt them from potentially being the actual publisher, and all the rights/obligations that go with it.
Trivial example: Someone publishing its work on the web (hence becoming a "user of an interactive computer service") does not imply that they lose copyright; even though they "shall [not] be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided [...]".
Again, IANAL, but I read a lot of copyright, safe harbor law, DCMAs, etc... and it goes like that.
Regardless of the context of this case, it's odd that the state can now seemingly force someone to engage their creativity and artistic sensibility for any reason. It is now federal judicial precedence that he must lawfully create a satisfyingly beautiful cake for anyone who= asks. What if it's not beautiful enough? Is that punishable by law? Who judges the beauty?
Probably the baker should have just made a half assed cake...
My instinct is to reply "Then show us how it's done with your own government. It isn't easy, is it?"
===== The world would be a better place if Twitter did not exist. =====
Note the lack of caveat, nuance, or elaboration here. It's not conducive to making the argument in a compelling and convincing way, especially not in the ways espoused by Hacker News. People who agree with that statement are going to agree. People who don't are going to be outraged.
If you do agree with the above the real question is what to do about it. Does the problem lie with the people at Twitter? With capitalism? With democracy? With the particular implementation that is the United States? Is this just something inherent to human nature? Or is the internet to blame? There are no simple answers to these questions. But perhaps the mediums that we use to have the discussions have a substantial impact on the conversation.
Adding a fact-check link to a Tweet is not censorship. Nobody took Trump's link down. And Twitter has a 1st Amendment right both to comment on what it wants to comment on, and to avoid commenting on what it doesn't want to comment on -- regardless of what their reasoning behind those decisions is.
Again, Republicans should be applauding this. Open dialog is what you wanted, right? You wanted no censorship, just open debate. Well that's what you got. Twitter didn't censor the post, they debated it. And they have every right to do so.
If your argument is that Twitter needs to be 100% politically neutral every time it makes a comment on anything, and that its editorial staff shouldn't have the ability to form opinions or choose what they comment on, then that's the Fairness Doctrine, regardless of what you want to call it.
It is of course also legal for Twitter to choose how they outright censor content because of Section 230, but I give Republicans a little bit more slack over objecting to that protection, since at least Section 230 isn't literally a Constitutional right. But anyone who wants to complain that companies should be required to be "fair" when adding political annotations is not someone who supports the 1st Amendment.
The Articles of the US Constitution aren't an enumerated list of illegal actions. It's the wrong place to look for limitations of presidential power.
I love that our expectations of the current president are so low that we will use excuse them because "the previous presidents did it too!" You aren't actually saying what he's doing is legal; you are simply increasing the importance of precedent over the statutory restraints of power -- it's a very dangerous argument to make.
As far as politics today is concerned, I would sure hope that both conservatives and liberals both agree that is it wrong to deny service based on someone's membership in a protected class.
Fact checking entertainment is nonsense.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...
2) Twitter isn't a post office, it's a privately owned website. They do not handle transportation requests for information on the internet, just their own private servers meaning they are not a common carrier.
3) Even if you conflate twitter with being a privately own post office, CC laws do not prevent them from putting "Toxic" stickers on any toxic waste being handled by them.
Lets say the states decide to send out mail in ballots to all members of a house hold. A parent intercepts the ballots and fills them out on behalf of the kids or grandparents, or even the previous tenants. All of a sudden casting multiple votes becomes much easier by a single person.
In a more cynical situation, the ballots are intercepted and returned filled out by party members.
Why would I tolerate a blatant falsehood?
> that does not exempt them from being the actual publisher, and all the rights/obligations that go with it.
With respect, you're totally misinformed. Social media websites do not fall under any kind of "publisher" obligation, this is a totally made up meme that people spread online.
Now, if you want to argue that we should change the laws so that these websites would fall under some kind of publisher obligations, I would disagree, but that would at least allow room for "tolerance of other people's point of view". However, in terms of the actual law you and the parent are unequivocally incorrect.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...
They're not wrong. Every single time Section 230 comes up, there's somebody here arguing that Section 230 doesn't actually mean that companies can choose who they want to censor without becoming a publisher.
But it does. That was the explicit point of Section 230, and that's how Section 230 has played out in legal courts ever since it was established.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
----
But of course, that entire debate about Section 230 is irrelevant here because Twitter hasn't censored anybody, and I haven't seen anyone give a clear reason why neutrality requirements on commentary wouldn't be outright unconstitutional, regardless of what Section 230 says.
Twitter's "Head of Site Integrity" Yoel Roth boasts on his LinkedIn that he is in charge of "developing and enforcing Twitter’s rules".
> “He leads the teams responsible for developing and enforcing Twitter’s rules”
Here's a few of his tweets:
> Massive anti-Trump protest headed up Valencia St. San Francisco.
> I’m just saying, we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.
> The “you are not the right kind of feminist” backlash to yesterday’s marches has begun. Did we learn nothing from this election?
> Yes, that person in the pink hat is clearly a bigger threat to your brand of feminism than ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE
> How does a personality-free bag of farts like Mitch McConnell actually win elections?
> “Today on Meet The Press, we’re speaking with Joseph Goebbels about the first 100 days…” —What I hear whenever Kellyanne is on a news show
This same person doesn't stand up to his own purity tests:
> It wouldn't be a trip to New York without at least one big scary tranny.
> "Trans is a category worth being linguistically destabilized in the same way we did gay with 'fag,'" he wrote. "Sorry, but I don’t subscribe to PC passing the buck. Identity politics is for everyone."
Twitter's "fact check" is literally wrong. Until few years ago, every one agreed that mail-in ballot has massive fraud:
> “votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised & more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...
Just 1 week ago: Close Results In Paterson Vote Plagued By Fraud Claims; Over 3K Ballots Seemingly Set Aside - A county spokesman said 16,747 vote-by-mail ballots were received, but the county's official results page shows 13,557 votes were counted — with uncounted ballots representing 19%
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/close-results-in-pater...
> California Secretary of State confirmed double-voting in one case and suspected double-voting by a number of other registered voters on Super Tuesday:
https://www.scribd.com/document/456618983/CA-SOS-Duplicate-V...
Yesterday, WEST VIRGINIA – Thomas Cooper, a USPS mail carrier in Pendleton County, was charged today in a criminal complaint with attempted election fraud, U.S. Attorney Bill Powell announced.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndwv/pr/pendleton-county-mail-c...
In 2004, Jerry Nadler (Democrat) asserts that paper ballots, particularly in the absence of machines, are extremely susceptible to fraud:
Future head of the Democrat Party Debbie Wasserman Schultz opposing mail-in ballots due to the risk of election fraud in 2008:
West Virginia Mail Carrier Charged With Altering Absentee Ballot Requests:
https://time.com/5843088/west-virginia-mail-carrier-fraud-ab...
Also Twitter’s Trump ‘Fact Check’ Does Not Disclose Company Partnered with Groups Pushing Mail-In Ballots.
-----------
https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/822654925217873921
https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/823312544425132033
https://twitter.com/catfashionshow/status/298477704666300416
Trump's assertion is based on the notion that mail-in-ballots see higher rates of fraud than in-person. It's not difficult to see why that would be the case, but I will concede I don't have first hand numbers.
The insidious thing about this situation is that there is now a lot of anger on both sides. If cooler heads had waited a bit longer, collected real data on the rates of voter fraud, actually addressed Trump's concerns about stolen/forged ballots rather than calling him a liar and linking to puff pieces from two of his biggest and unfairest outlets, we would stand a better chance at resolving this amicably.
I¨m hoping you are not suggesting the same? If so, we¨re not even operating in the same reality.
"Statistics show." Yeah, no, that's not how it works. Evidence shows, and there isn't any, or the New York freaking Times would describe it.
No knowledgeable person believes what Trump is saying about mail in ballots. I don't think he believes it. This is really different.
No one said they did. But also Section 230 does not imply that they're exempt of that, in the case they become such a thing. And remember that those rights/obligations are acquired the moment they are exercised.
Consider the following:
Twitter (the platform), on its official twitter account (on their own platform) decides to publish something which has legal repercussions. Are they exempt of them because of that statement on Section 230? No, not at all.
> There are multiple levels of fines. It starts at hundreds of thousand of euros but it can reach up to 4% of the global annual revenue of the company with severe cases.
How can these euro countries claim to be free societies when they restrict the most basic element of personal freedom?
It's not just France. Several of the euro countries have laws like this.
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/14/france-passes-law-forcing-...
Your point of "toxic" labelling is interesting. I think there is a difference in the non-physical realm though as "toxic" as it applies to ideas is subjective.
See, "incompetence" doesn't mean blundering. It means senility or insanity. Firing Comey may be many things, but it's not incompetence.
You want him gone? Get in line; a lot of people want that. But you're going to have to either vote him out or impeach him. And to impeach him, you're going to have to persuade more than one Republican Senator that he's crossed the line - which means you need something that the other side recognizes as an actual case.
It appears that removing the liability shield for social media platforms[0] is a popular position for both Republicans and Democrats by a wide margin. Nothing has transpired, yet.
However, the §230 is nuanced. There's case law where the liability shield defense has been rejected. See the defamatory information issues [1] where the site merely editorialized the headlines and was deemed a publisher.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
Politics gonna politik. Neither team red nor team blue is above slimy tactics. That's not an excuse not to push for a viable, non-partisan solution.
I personally don't think periodically scrubbing rolls is either the right solution nor a good one. When they are scrubbed, the scrubbing is usually done by elected officials (who are almost certainly not above the corruption temptation) and who generally choose to over-scrub given too little confirmable data (causing false positive to be removed and increasing the burden on the average voter who doesn't know what happened or how to assure that their ballot isn't invalidated).
Citizens should demand that the government actually use the data is already has on us and keep our address and eligibility current. One simple PubSub system with {Post Office, DMV, Credit Bureaus} as publishers of address changes and {Elections, IRS, etc} as consumers would fix this pretty quick.
they didn't edit anything; it was very clear what he posted and it was his exact words as written. there weren't even any dark ui patterns to make it look like the fact check was part of what he said.
Dorsey is being incredibly smart by trying to figure out how to break into the African market. He probably wants to do payments there. Get in early, win the market. It's genius.
Just look at what's happening with Belt and Road.
Africa is going to be huge.
If I had his money and influence, I would be doing the same.
From your own quoted source:
"A defendant must satisfy each of the three prongs to gain the benefit of the immunity:
1. [...]
2. [...]
3. The information must be "provided by another information content provider," i.e., the defendant must not be the "information content provider" of the harmful information at issue."
The moment you create your own content (even if you are a content provider yourself) you lose the protection of Section 230 over that. Editing/policing content is, in most cases, akin to creating content. You cannot make a list of "staff picks" and then claim that the content comes from other sources. Putting that list together (even if you're just quoting somebody else) is equivalent to an action of creation, you are the creator of that list. You chose what to put in it and what to exclude. You ARE the original creator of this and Section 230 does not apply for you.
I don't find it surprising, but do find it sad. Few people understand how the internet works, and that there's probably an alternative to every platform, utility, or library out there.
There's nothing to reconcile. A social media website is not at all like a government, I don't see what the laws in Europe have to do with that.
If a Twitter user posts child porn (which is an example of an illegal act in the US), and Twitter knows that it is on the platform and does not remove the content, do you know if Twitter would therefore become liable for the content?
(Again, this is more exploring Section 230, not about the specific controversy du jour.)
* The PRC government right now
* Pretty much any government behind the iron curtain during the cold war
* The Catholic church over much of its history
...
I mean, come on. Pick any reasonably competent totalitarian regime and you'll find that one of core pillars of the support structure is precisely "control over public discourse".
So maybe in context putting a fact check link under a tweet doesn't sound so bad?
> Direct quote, you can easily find a full transcript and see for yourself. Yet you didn't even know this existed. You're being lied to every day and you don't even know it.
You are assuming I'm being misled because I¨m not up to date on the latest "controversy" to hit PragerU.
I watched the whole press briefing when it happened, I'm very aware of what Trump said. And your direct quote is as much a direct quote as that which you suggest was unfair. Both are low on context.
The problem (in full context) was his multiple use of "both sides" referring to both good people as well as bad.
Whether he explicitly referred to neo-nazis or not is trying to divert the focus away from the fact that only people on one side was killed, only people on one side the night before chanted "jews will not replace us" and "blood and soil", and only people on one side were sporting a flag that symbolizes slavery.
I'm not glossing over the fact that there were violence on the other side, as there always will be.
But what the narrative cast by "charlottesville hoax" is sidestepping is that one side wouldn't be there if there wasn't for the need to stand up to (some portion) literal nazis.
Repeatedly uttering the words "both/all sides" in any context at that press conference is indefensible.
The web is nearly entirely privately owned, which makes answering this question difficult.
On one hand, the web is where we do 90% of our communication these days.
On the other hand, the web is privately owned not public.
I’m convinceable either way. Did telephone companies have a right to censor land line speech? Should ISPs be able to censor? Should Cloudflare? AWS? If telephone companies would have run afoul of the 1st amendment to regulate phone speech, It seems like other “foundational” industries like ISPs and Cloudflare should be regulated to be “dumb pipes”.
Where social networks fall is less clear.
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 not how democracy works
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_as_a_public_uti...
The web is nearly entirely privately owned, which makes answering this question difficult.
On one hand, the web is where we do 90% of our communication these days and losing that right seems like losing most of the first amendment.
I’m convinceable either way. Did telephone companies have a right to censor land line speech? Should they? Should ISPs be able to censor? Should cloudflair? AWS? It seems like industries like ISPs should be regulated to be “dumb pipes”. But where social networks fall is less clear.
See, the thing is, during the trial in the Senate, Trump’s lawyers literally said:[0]
> Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest, and mostly you're right. Your election is in the public interest. And if a president did something that he believes will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.
The fact that all but one GOP member voted to acquit is extremely concerning.
> Firing Comey may be many things, but it's not incompetence.
It may not be incompetence, but it sure as hell is corrupt.
[0]: https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/29/politics/dershowitz-quid-pro-...
20-30 years ago mass media was only accessible to people with large amounts of money to purchase advertising or run their own media platform such as a TV or radio station or a newspaper. It was closed to everyone else unless you could pull off some stunt to get five minutes of fame and somehow leverage that to deliver a message.
Now you have these vast platforms enabling anyone with a few bucks and cheap computer to potential address millions upon millions of people in near real time. It's completely unprecedented. In many cases these platforms are free as long as you comply with some minimal platform rules and regulations around what you can and cannot say. For most platforms the rules really are pretty minimal. Twitter is one of the least restrictive. You have to be a real obnoxious ass to get kicked off Twitter.
Somehow people have become so accustomed to this free and ubiquitous open access mass media that what was just a few decades ago impossible is now seen as an entitlement. Refuse to let your platform be used to deliver my message? You're censoring me!
Censorship refers to the use of force to prevent someone from speaking. The government has a legal monopoly on force, so generally this requires a law to be passed or perhaps an abuse of the civil court system to leverage the government to shut down someone's speech.
I can't speak for every country but in the USA that is extremely rare. We take the first amendment very seriously around here. You've got to go pretty far to get actually censored. You can buy books on how to make illegal drugs for example, or slander public figures on social media with baseless accusations, or publish software designed to directly facilitate illegal activity, and rarely will anything happen to you.
Being denied access to speak via someone else's privately owned and operated platform is not censorship. Nobody is preventing you from speaking. They're just refusing to assist you in delivering that speech.
Imagine someone walking into a newspaper office 40 years ago and demanding to have their op-ed printed (for free!) and then shouting "censorship!" when the newspaper refused? It's ridiculous.
I thought conservatives were skeptical of entitlements, especially when they involve other peoples' property.
Firstly, stop qualifying it with "hate", "factually incorrect", etc. It's a cheap tactic by authoritarian types to justify censorship. The religious zealots, authoritarian governments, etc all use the same argument you do to censor. Free speech is free speech whether you like it or disagree with it or whether it is factually incorrect.
Secondly, the question is whether a private company has a monopoly position. For example, we wouldn't allow power, water, telephone, etc companies from denying service based on what these companies feel are hateful or not. A christian ceo of these companies can't deny service to lgbt homes/companies/etc just because he doesn't like them or their speech. You get the idea?
Thirdly, if a social media platform is a vehicle for communication by elected officials, should that platform be allowed to limit citizen's access to said politician. I believe the courts already ruled twitter cannot deny people access to trump's twitter. But I'm not sure.
> Surely, it's clear here that having the actual head of the US government threatening to shut down private companies for how they choose to manage their platforms is a far more disturbing and direct threat against free speech even in the narrowest sense.
Yes. It is a concern worthy of discussion. But so are the other aspects of this issue which you naively dismiss as "hate"/etc.
There are absolutely sincere people whose religious beliefs are that interracial marriage is morally wrong[1].
> Reagan says many black athletic stars choose white wives in a willful attempt to make their offspring lighter, challenging God’s plan. “He don’t want them to be like him, so he’ll marry another. … It’s another defiance of God’s law, it’s a worldly way.” And the pastor condemns fellow ministers who perform interracial marriages. “Some of the men in pulpits should have a pantywaist instead of a preacher coat on!”
[1] https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2014/02/19/tennessee-pas...
No. Practically every social network and publisher creates their own content occasionally, yet there's plenty of precedent for companies like Google, Ebay, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook being protected under Section 230.
A better, more accurate way of phrasing your objection would be to say, "Section 230 does not protect you from lawsuits over the specific content you created." So if Twitter's company-written annotation was found to be libel, they could of course be sued over that.
But adding your own content to a forum/platform has no bearing on whether Section 230 applies more broadly to other content that you host. Take a deeper look at your example:
> You cannot make a list of "staff picks" and then claim that the content comes from other sources
This is exactly what Amazon, Apple, and Google Play do every day. And all of those platforms have been ruled to be protected by Section 230 in multiple lawsuits -- covering everything from trademark violations to defective products. The fact that Amazon has a "recommended brand" section does not mean that they are liable for everything that shows up on their store. And that's a principle that's held up in real courts over, and over, and over again.
> Editing/policing content
I don't want to keep beating the same horse, but that's not what Twitter did. They didn't edit Trump's tweet or restrict it, they added their own speech next to Trump's tweet. That has nothing to do with Section 230, it's just a generic, common case of 1st Ammendment protected counterspeech.
It's easy to get people to question advertising, because they aren't emotionally invested. Once you stray into religion and politics, people often stop caring that they're hearing plainly untrue, or even self-contradictory, ideas.
I was talking in a broad sense. I never accused or defended twitter of doing anything. Please stop making such weak strawmans.
Regarding the rest of your arguments, you're basically agreeing with me with a different set of words. I am glad you got the point :).
To sum up: If the platform becomes the "information content provider", defined as "any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information", then they loose the protection. The statute also excepts federal criminal liability and intellectual property claims.
Creation or development of information can exclusively be moderation, as has been shown in copyright cases. Cutting (deciding what to show and what not to show), re-arrange or changing the context can create new original work, which would make the creator an information content provider for that. At the same time, doing either of those does not automatically cause the moderator to become a creator of original work.
As lawyers like to say, it all depends on the details of the specific case. To take a extreme example outside of this twitter discussion, taking an video interview and cutting it to create a new narrative would make the editor responsible for that whole new version.
Section 230 does NOT give the NYT immunity for anything in the articles themselves, where they operate as a publisher. However, absent S. 230 protection, those articles and their publisher still enjoy regular First Amendment protection, which is quite strong. In particular, there are nearly insurmountable obstacles for a public figure to win a defamation lawsuit in the US.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/07/obama-tax-inve...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-obama-financials/obama-th...
Not sure this will support the original commenters point, as these "threats" have a basis in reality and appear to be good causes unlike Trump's, but these are "threats" by Obama at least according to the journalists involved.
Edit: why the downvotes? I am showing that the Trump supporter above is full of shit, Obama's "threats" were for good causes
What's actually in scripture has very little to do with the religious beliefs many profess.
Let’s see fact checks on diet claims, exercise, claims about social solutions, claims about the economy, etc., etc. Let’s see fact checks on their own advertisers.
He uses twitter because the influencers are on twitter. There's a reason he posts there instead of on his campaign website.
If he really thought leaving twitter wouldn't cost him anything, he would have done it already.
It's a problem that we cannot actually engage in any debate or correction. President Trump is a perfect example of this, he drops his Tweet and then, poof, he's gone. He will not respond to difficult question about freedom of speech, etc.
Trump drops his talking point and runs away, then Twitter drops their "fact check" and runs away. I don't think anyone is the better for it. Nobody's minds have been changed. Nobody has been educated or given serious thought to difficult issues. Nobody has had empathy for others. Having the "fact check" is better than not, but not much, and "fact checks" are not always correct.
If we could somehow social engineer our way to meaningful debates on these difficult topics, we would be much better off. I know the President can't respond to millions of people, but if we could, somehow, systematically choose just a few of the best counterpoints and force some dialogue, then a lot of the "bullshit" would immediately evaporate.
Section 230 also wouldn't have necessarily protected them before SESTA/FOSTA either, federal criminal liability was always exempted. It's just that SESTA/FOSTA made that a lot more explicit and generally widened that liability.
Section 230 isn't a blanket protection against literally anything (it also has a number of holes surrounding copyright). It's just a much broader protection than many people online think, and the areas where it doesn't protect platforms typically don't line up well with where Internet commenters think it shouldn't protect companies.
IANAL, don't go out and do something stupid and then claim that I said it was legally OK. But in general a good heuristic for talking about Section 230 online is that it's, "not unlimited, but probably broader than you're thinking." But if you're trying to launch your own service or something and you want legal advice about where exactly the line is drawn, you should talk to an actual lawyer.
> They provide the reader with facts and evidence. They do not include their own opinion. They are similar to professional teachers. The draw conclusions from events, but the conclusions they state are clearly based on evidence.
I think the article could be called 'analysis' based on your definition, but the article definitely is less clinical than this definition would suggest. It reads more like it was written by an "angry teacher" vs a "professional teacher".
> I don't think it's fair to point poeple to this piece and say "look how unfair CNN is".
I would agree with you if this article was clearly marked as something less than factual reporting. You touched on the issue of branding different kinds of articles earlier. If CNN is going to push this article to their front page and not disclaim the author's opinion, then they need to be responsible for its content. I don't think putting the word 'Analysis' in small grey text in the corner releases them from their responsibilities as a news organization.
The content of the article is biased and inflammatory, even if factually sound. CNN put their seal of approval on this biased content, and so I think it is fair to say "look how unfair CNN is".
No, not at all, because Section 230 has nothing to say about the scenario you are describing.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information _provided by another information content provider_
In your scenario Twitter is the provider of the information, so naturally they are liable for the legal repercussions of posting that information. Everyone already understands how this works intuitively, obviously when something illegal or otherwise legally significant is posted to the internet there isn't even a question of whether or not the posting platform is legally responsible for it as long as they are perceived to be taking reasonable steps to remove the offending content. If the site operators are posting the questionable content directly then obviously they are liable.
That's not what we're talking about though, we're discussing twitter having labled Trump's tweet as misinformation. I guess you're suggesting that twitter is the "publisher" of that warning and thus they are legally responsible for it, which is true, but there is nothing illegal about what they published so the hypothetical is moot.
"Despite YouTube's ubiquity and its role as a public-facing platform, it remains a private forum, not a public forum subject to judicial scrutiny under the First Amendment," the court said."
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/youtu...
Meaning that the statement by eanzenberg:
>"As they move into a “publisher” role, they will be liable in count (sic)."
Is not wrong. At least not over what concerns Section 230.
To paraphrase and summarize the whole discussion:
"As they move into a “publisher” role, Section 230 will not exempt them from what they do."
"Despite YouTube's ubiquity and its role as a public-facing platform, it remains a private forum, not a public forum subject to judicial scrutiny under the First Amendment," the court said."
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/youtu...
It's become increasingly obvious that the argument around censorship has never been actually about censorship but rather as another political bludgeon you can use to beat your opponent over the head with by scoring some easy points since censorship = bad. They ignore the power dynamics at play which is what makes censorship possible.
Law enforcement must also work at scale, and focus on illegal behavior that is having the most impact.
When a court finds this power is used improperly, such as the arrest of Stormy Daniels in Columbus, Ohio, there are penalties.
For something like this to stand, I believe conservatives will have to prove major examples conservative bias. Unfortunately, the tweets in question so far will not be great evidence of that.
There are forms of government where certain forms of speech cannot be challenged. Well, not safely anyway.
I should know, I lived for 20 years in that sort of place (Eastern Bloc kid).
The US Constitution is indeed an enumerated list of federal governmental powers, including the President's. At least that is the standard interpretation. Obviously there are an infinite number of ways those enumerated powers might manifest themselves but the overall scope and nature of the powers is indeed limited by the US Constitution.
Section 230 isn't absolute, there are several specific exceptions. One example is the FOSTA law from 2017 which explicitly overrides Section 230.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1865
> The bill amends the Communications Act of 1934 to declare that section 230 does not limit: (1) a federal civil claim for conduct that constitutes sex trafficking, (2) a federal criminal charge for conduct that constitutes sex trafficking, or (3) a state criminal charge for conduct that promotes or facilitates prostitution in violation of this bill.
There are some other examples I'm not thinking of off the top of my head, but on a note directed more towards the general discussion, I'd point out that creating laws to limit the scope of Section 230 is illustrative of the kind of freedoms it affords site operators in the general case.
You can't foster rich discourse without removing/flagging bad content. That's like trying to clean a litterbox by adding more litter rather than removing the shit. Eventually the whole thing is just going to stink.
Except the his administration part. I dont think cheney and rumsfeld believed it. It was largely manufactured. And the “counter arguments” werent really arguments. The administrations own advisors said the uranium couldnt have been sold.
And the tubes they barely clung to as proof were heavily contested by just as many that believed it internally. Thats not actionable intel.
And when the advisor outed his own reports publicly, his wifes career was ended by being outed.
It was malicous from within from specific participants, but not necessarily the president. Unvetted, unactionable intel was used as cover. Nothing more.
Bushes negligence was not being throrough and surrounding himself and empowering the absolutely wrong people. But the buck still stopped with him.
Twitter's upcoming option to limit replies is being touted as a politician's dream, but in the US it's likely going to be unuseable for the same reason
A slightly different problem, but Tom Scott did an excellent video on the automation of the copyright system on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU
In summary, auto copyright checking solves Most copyright issues, to a degree that no other solution can really provide. And while there are a small (yet very unfair) number of false positives, the benefit that the system as a whole allows far outpaces that downtrend: for YouTube to exist!
With regards to fact checking, I'd be more interested to hear how many people who read those kind of "fact flags" actually change their opinion in an easy case (flat earth, climate change, etc.). Honestly, the problem of "true truth" might never be solved, but so will the cause of incompetence never disappear.
I'm glad we came to an understanding but this is a strawman. You might as well be saying "Section 230 does not exempt twitter from the law". This is very obviously not something anyone is arguing.
Arguing that a platform shouldn't have to host arbitrary content isn't the same as saying that a platform should get to host arbitrary content. If you run a website I'd argue that you shouldn't have to post other peoples' content on it - that doesn't mean I think you should get a free pass to post any illegal content you like - which was the issue with election interference.
And it seems the market have already chosen that a slightly moderated but not too heavily model seems to retain and attract the most users.
Twitter I don't think is putting in place these moderation mechanism for fun or through their own personal CEO's own moral and ethics. They do what they think will be best for business.
To be specific, here you can only use mail-in ballots as an exception if you live outside the border of Sweden, and you can only make a request to use the mail-in ballot if you visit an embassy first or use the digital identity system through one of the Swedish banks, which then operate similar to the embassy in its role in identification processing.
Naturally using less security does not mean fraud has happened in the past, but it should be relevant to the question if fraud may happen in the future. If we have factually evidence it won't happen then Sweden should change it rules to make it easier for people to vote and reduce costs to embassies. If we are uncertain, well, then the question is a fair game to ask what is good enough security and what isn't.
Outright ban all user tracking and profiling transparently with annual code audits and watchdog groups that can punish those in charge for not adhering to this, no advertisements, no selling data, and put 18f on the job of designing/developing it based off sound human principles, no army of behavioral researchers and Psychologists A/B testing bait-and-click engagement dark pattern metrics that penetrate deeply into the reward system of our neuroplastic brains and yanks on that lever of addiction formation with ease. Cut the bullshit and I'm on board. I'll even work for free on this if you promise to make it a reality, hell consider it a public utility if you have to so it stays funded and maintained.
The Advertising industry needs to be lobotomized and severely scaled back to more traditional forms of reaching people where they are, not vacuuming up every ounce of data their movement, click, search, and vitals generate unbeknownst to them. Good riddance.
You're aware that comments on NYT articles are also human-moderated, yes?
He has 80m followers on twitter alone, that's ~20% of all twitter users, even if half of that followed him to a new platform it would be instantly legitimized, it doesn't have to be bigger than twitter to be a success. That's without considering all the ancillary support from Trump media allies who would direct all their fans to engage on Trump's new platform for the sake of freedom and free speech in America.
> If he really thought leaving twitter wouldn't cost him anything, he would have done it already.
I believe it's the next logical step. Twitter doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, the media will report on whatever Trump says no matter where he posts it and his supporters will inevitably skip the reports and go directly to the source.
It's not really clear why other people enable the President, which is the underlying reason why you can't reassure people that he's ineffectual.
I tried to make the question more precise, but I’m not quite sure what I’m asking. I guess I was hoping to hear more from you because normally I’ve only heard it from books, not from an actual person who lived under it.
pg’s trick for getting interesting answers is to ask “What surprised you the most?” That may be relevant here — if you had to pick some surprising differences, what specifically would they be?
Are people aware that there are two classes of users on Twitter, subject to different sets of rules? Twitter hides this fact, for some reason, but it's something that ought to be glaringly obvious to anyone viewing any of a user's tweets.
[1]: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/publicint...
The issue here is whether these private companies are actually making rules within their own private domain, or if they control a public space.
If you feel like you intuitively know the answer to that question, take that as an indication that you haven't loaded enough of the prerequisites in your mind to actually understand what is at stake.
There are simple arguments for both sides of the equation, but the details become maddening before you even get to the complications of how it's all subservient to advertising, personal data tracking, and in a realm that is testing our current definition of monopoly.
[1] https://thehill.com/policy/technology/499847-trump-to-sign-e...
As always with him, the proof is in the projection: he's accusing others of interfering in the election (states expanding mail in voting, Twitter, etc.) while he's actively doing it himself.
Fundamentally you still have the choice of curating some content or not. On the extreme ends are things like hate speech and exploitive content. Then there are “false” or incorrect information. You either allow them unchecked or you don’t. This isn’t a technological problem.
The fact that there's a new conservative talking point about the dangers of voting by mail (and no other aspects of voting security) shows that this message is bullshit.
The reality is that the conservative party actively works to curtail voting because they are in the minority and it's the only way for them to stay in power.
Social media is the opposite. Abusive users of those networks operate at the application layer, and can spoil the experience of other users at the application layer but (likely) not at the network layer. So they moderate user activity at the application layer.
In each case it's about trying to ensure bad actors don't ruin other customers'/users' experience. It's just done in different ways depending on what part of the network stack the bad actors do their work in.
2. Twitter already automatically adds posts to special themed sections called "What's happening", so even if you were right there is no added liability.
3. Adding fact checking is not adding things to special themed sections, so this is off topic.
The way I see it:
- The "town square" concept (and whether individual social media apps/websites constitute what is historically called that in the legal realm). Can a person say something which should get them banned from a town square? What if multiple town squares coordinate their actions against a single user/content?
- Private party "censorship". Is what social media companies do "censoring"?
- The role of 1st Amendment in "protecting speech" of private individuals against private companies (which historically is not covered by the 1st Amendment, but is covered by the principle of Free Speech)
- The role of 1st Amendment in "protecting speech" of private companies against the president (which might be covered under the 1st Amendment, depending on other factors)
- Whether the 1st Amendment protects from threats from government officials, as opposed to actions of officials
- Private sector companies using their own moderation rules+workforce (including vague rule definitions and no ability to get a judgement about where "the line" is)
- Brigades of political activists using the moderation systems against their adversaries
- Whether the political tendencies of employees at the relevant social media companies have any significant bias for/against specific users/content
- Whether a private sector company is allowed to curate content on its property (and the sub-arguments which revolve around ToS/EULA/contracts)
- Legal responsibilities+liability of social media "platforms" under "Section 230" (and some people misunderstand this industry to be under Common Carrier laws, which regulates more commoditized telco systems)
- Second-order effects of account bans, including loss of access and content under shared accounts (eg. getting banned from your Facebook account also leaves you locked out of any account you connected with Facebook Connect / OAuth)Edit - to be clear I did not downvote
The best I've found so far is a supreme court case called Marsh v Alabama which has nothing to do with the internet but does touch on the application of the first amendment to a private physical space.
Yes it is, it just involves adding an html element below it
> Will they get into the business of fact checking everyone over certain number of followers
Their choice, because of the first amendment they can do it to anyone or noone at their leisure or based on whatever criteria they like and as arbitrarily as they like.
> Will they do it impartially world-wide
Their choice, because of the first amendment they can choose to be as impartial or as partial as they like as locally or globally as they like.
> How can they even be impartial world wide given the different contradictory points of view, valid from both sides
The simplest solution is to not be impartial, but that's a decision that is wholly up to them and whatever they decide is protected by the first amendment
See how simple it is? They do whatever they feel like and the government is obligated to not interfere. The end.
(Other governments might object to some of these decisions, the US government most certainly has no legal power to)
I was being particularly pedantic because it was relevant to my parent comment.
The Articles of the Constitution are affirmatively defined positive powers of the branches of government. They are not affirmatively defined negative powers.
The Bill of Rights (the first 10 Amendments) are closer to that, but they don't specifically talk about The President and their scopes have had to be interpreted by courts to determine (1) are the rights they guarantee applied to {all people, all US residents, all US citizens, etc} and do they protect against {US government, state/local governments, other private citizens, etc}.
Could that be a 'limited public good'? Due to the network effects, it seems like only one website at a time would hold this status.
(2) Civil liability
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected [...]
How does this square with the fact that Donald Trump regularly blocks people from viewing his Twitter account for disagreeing with him or refusing to acknowledge his (apparent) infallibility? Is that not a much more egregious violation, and by an actual government official to boot?
You don't see a problem here?
Twitter is not a living room.
Arguing from bad faith does no one good.
Life is not binary.
> stop acting like what gets posted or removed from twitter is anything other than a bullshit triviality
Should we not care about something that gets removed from Twitter because the French or German or Chinese government didn't want it there?
> stop acting like what gets posted or removed from twitter is anything other than a bullshit triviality
Should we not care about something that gets removed from Twitter because the French or German or Chinese government didn't want it there?
And on top of that would force the government to pay for Twitter's legal fees. And probably also for economic damages.
If you're going to make legal nitpicks, you should probably have a thorough understanding of the jurisprudence.
You can host a webpage on a raspberri pi and reach millions of people.
Secondly, media platforms affect the reat of society amd its perfectly reasomable that some standards be set for how they operate. Thats usually some form of fair treatment, and you should not be denied a platfork for fictitious or discriminatory reasons
I initially thought that he could not gut the American administration _too_ much because of institutional inertia and the systems put in place that still had you country functioning pretty well once he took power. But now here we are, him having placed stoodges at the head most most institutions and gutted them of power.
If he could do that, he most obviously could lead to Twitter falling apart. Another poster outlined here how that could work:
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
He can't block them. That's my point.
"Trump can't block users from his Twitter feed, federal judge rules Blocking users from viewing his Twitter account is unconstitutional and a violation of the First Amendment, according to the judge."
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/trump-can-t-block-users-his...
I don't think he should be allowed to block americans from posting legal content on his feed.
If twitter created some arbitrary rule like "We're going to fact-check all state/government personnel.", then the state/government personnel would just change platforms.
it's a real issue -- it's potentially more dangerous to push politicians to lie on platforms that fact-checkers can't respond and provide feedback towards, and if twitter starts playing hardball against politicians that's exactly what will happen.
A ton of small echo-chamber communities that splinter off as a result of perceived hostility or discrimination from twitter (but really any social media group) and the general public may be more hostile/dangerous than having these groups of people being vetted by the public at large constantly on twitter or other popular platforms.
What would NOT be lawful would be Trump to close them down because they did what they did. That is full stop illegal if he did it. Not sure how legal it even is to threaten it this way.
At this point, Twitter might as well even close Trump's account. Still legal, still within their rights.
States that allow no excuse mail in ballots are evenly split between red and blue.
Do you have a specific critique of statements Twitter made in this case?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/18/a-toxic-w...
One of the people making the argument is Nate Matias, the guy behind Civil servant, which is essentially the first open testing system to see the impact of content moderation rules on users -
https://www.fastcompany.com/3068556/reminder-you-can-manipul...
Somehow the right-wing rage machine never takes on that particular free speech battle. Strange isn't it?
[1]https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/trump-violates-federal-...
[2]https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/23/trump-twitter-bloc...
Free speech means you have the right to express yourself. It does not mean a private company is at all required to give you a platform... They can moderate content as they choose.
As far as tagging an individual user account in this way, I'm sure there are provisions for that in the TOS that Trump agreed to in order to use the site.
On a legal level, I can't imagine anything has been done wrong. On an ethical level, the only problem I see so far might be that Twitter is taking it upon themselves to be fact checkers, and personally I don't mind so far, I think the public benefit probably far outweighs any negatives.
No, the state (because the citizens wanted it that way) can merely require you to treat people the same regardless of race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation if you are offering services to the public. If you offer services to the public you can't pick and choose based on that criteria. You're free to create whatever you like, for whomever you like, if you're not a public business. Plus you can still refuse services to lawyers, people without shirts or shoes, or people who indent with spaces if you're a public business.
I fail to see how the state not enabling bigotry in services offered to the public constitutes oppression.
And I wish you were right. That was how I always read it too but we've found out repeatedly - and recently - that state & local governments (and state universities) can ban numerous things, contrary to the 1st Amendment.
And I'm against it as long as it is an american behind the account.
> Somehow the right-wing rage machine never takes on that particular free speech battle. Strange isn't it?
Nothing strange about it. People with agenda all want censorship when it suits them. This entire thread is chock full of left-wing rage machine defending censorship just because it suits their ideology.
Left-wing rage machine and right-wing rage machine are ultimatel the same thing. They want control and obedience.
This stance just ignores the facts of electoral college vote allocation as well as the related and probably much more important existence and power of the Senate. The rules that define the federal government intentionally discount the contributions of millions in the most populous states. It's a crime that would have been rectified decades ago were it not explicitly written into the Constitution (see Baker v. Carr).
I don't disagree.
> the idea of Twitter and other social networks being utilities isn't something I invented
Fair enough. I don't blame you. I just don't think it's easy or reasonable to overload the word "utility" as applied to content, which is exactly why it's currently governed by Section 230 and not Common Carrier.
Given your followup I now understand what you were saying.
1. less likely to be counted 2. more likely to be compromised & 3. more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth?
Or are they just some examples of mail-in voter fraud? (Some aren’t even that, still just discrepancies being investigated)
the massive federal bureaucracies don't turn on a dime and are still running fine (we have food, power, water, commerce, justice, etc.), despite trump's paranoia around having anyone around him stealing his limelight, including competent cabinet members and heads of other federal agencies. hopefully these next few months are the final season of reality tv government here.
Absolutely!
> I don't believe in post-truth, but "Facts are facts; truth is truth" is a philosophical statement, not a practical one.
Bingo. :)
The most Twitter can do is tell you to find somewhere else to publish your speech. The most the French / German / Chinese government can do is destroy your entire life and the lives of everyone who publishes or consumes your speech.
So when a government leader starts talking about suppressing critical speech, that's a lot more worrisome than Twitter deleting tweets. The abuse of power is hardly comparable. You might even say that in comparison, it's a bullshit triviality.
But whether or not you like the feature, the idea that the president of the United States would threaten “shutting down” Twitter because he doesn’t like a feature is beyond the pale, full stop.
Go back farther and read about his actions regarding The Central Park Five. His history is full of complete bs like this.
Yes, if Twitter publishes something defamatory in their own name, they're liable. No, they are not the publisher of any content they choose to moderate.
I would like to see it greatly narrowed.
Even if we ignore this particular instance as a special case where the act was justified, large companies having unfettered control over most political discourse in the country, and wielding that power in an arbitrary, unaccountable way is still a problem.
I think it was inappropriate for him to stress this, and that it undermined his legitimacy and the legitimacy of the investigation. It isn't the job of an investigator to "exonerate" people that havn't been charged or prosecuted for a crime.
As far as I can tell all these comments did was validate his supporters beliefs that the investigation was a politically motivated attack, and simultaneously served as a psychological "out" for his detractors that were convinced he was in cahoots with Putin to undermine the country. Widening the divide between 2 sets of people that really ought to reconcile.
Disclaimer: I am not american, so this is an outsiders perspective.
Trolling is free speech, being a jerk is free speech, hate speech is free speech, pornography is free speech. Any forum that sets the bar at "free speech" is going to be filled with the dregs with depressing speed. There's a reason why Gab never really gained serious traction.
Now that it's here, and they're all on it.. "the coffee shop can throw you out" seems a little trite. I don't like Trump either, set him aside, what if we were on the wrong side of Twitter's politics?
Having a national social media would have the side benefit of allowing a better identity system than social security numbers which are a travesty. I have to share my social security number with many people, but also somehow keep it safe? Instead, I should have a public and private key pair, and this could be associated with my National Social Media account for a single identity, and sign messages with my private key if I need to apply for a loan, or a lease, or whatever.
The National Social Media account could enshrine the same protections afforded by the US constitution - free speech, you cannot be censored top down, only by people blocking you. The government cannot spy on your usage patterns or edit your messages, and so on.
If Trump were to get such a thing created, and it worked reasonably well, and he started using it exclusively instead of Twitter, I think it would gain a lot of traction. I know I would try it out.
An evolved, but still incorrect view is that a private entity is legally or constitutionally obligated to apply their policy about hosting speech consistently across all users.
EDIT: Imagine if we allowed phone companies to listen to all calls and then censor the ones they didn't like. People would be outraged. This is what is happening on the Internet.
I'd be fine with retaining Twitter's right to add commentary, as they did to Trump, as long as it's clear who's saying what.
It is an unacceptable form of censorship to hand over our modern day equivalent of the public square to private companies, and then allow them to police what people say in it.
Freedom of speech was always intended to be protected in public. The Internet is now our equivalent of the public space. It is time this problem is solved once and for all, and the Internet is now reclassified as both a public utility and a public space.
Yes, those of us with technical know-how can argue that personal websites are that equivalent. But this is depriving those that see Twitter, Facebook, et. al. as a public platform, of the right to have their voice heard. A tweet is now the equivalent of a placard on the street. Do we really want to censor that because we messed up in how we allowed the Internet to be run?
Disagree, because street space is limited, whereas there are a multiplicity of websites you can go to. It isn’t just a matter of personal websites. There’s a Twitter-like, Gab, which can be used. The president and his multi-million dollar campaign apparatus could easily strike a deal with Gab to host some more Gab servers and get their message out via Gab to anyone of their twitter followers who wants to sign up.
Never mind that Trump is not actually being censored on twitter in any way - his message still went out to all his followers, simply with an appended notice that Twitter itself considers the message to be factually wrong.
EDIT: this is like saying that the President has the right to publish whatever content he wants in a specific newspaper. Back in the day, a city might have a dozen newspapers - they could each print what they liked and if they decided not to print a person’s letter to the editor, that was no violation of free speech. Or if they print the letter to the editor with a note explaining they disagree with it, that certainly doesn’t violate free speech either.
Until everyone can agree on a universal arbiter for what those things mean in a concrete way, there will always be demographics who strongly disagree.
The reason free speech exists as a concept is because of a historic understanding that there fundamentally cannot be an unbiased arbiter for 'good' or 'bad' speech.
On the other side of this, the internet is increasingly controlled by a particular demographic with a particular definition of what things like 'hate speech' mean. Which suppresses and censors a wide range of topics that the other demographics do want to discuss. When the entire internet makes it impossible to express certain views, we can't claim to have free speech anymore. It's not good enough to say 'well if you don't like it then you can go and shout your views out on the street instead'.
The weapon against 'incorrect information' is education, not censorship. Censorship has never worked to actually quash 'wrongthink', it only marginalises and energises demographics who are censored, and drives them to eventually revolt. See: trump winning presidency.
I am taking issue with the fact that we have allowed private companies to be the gate-keepers of what should be public spaces.
I honestly think you could pick a random 16 year old kid off the street and they'd make a better president than Trump. That's the sad and embarrassing state of affairs that is U.S. politics. I tend to err on the free speech side when it comes to social media platforms, but when you're the U.S. president and spreading baseless conspiracy theories and blatant lies with real consequences, then you damn well should get fact checked and called out on your nonsense.
Never been a more embarrassing time to be an American.
We will never see protests of the 60s and 70s scale today in person. People do what they did back then online. And they don't go out and protest because they feel like their voice is being broadcast enough through social media. And yet to have that censored by private companies is unacceptable when that in the modern day use case.
Nobody sees a news-paper as a public space. The fact that anybody can make a social media account and instantly publish information that can be read by anybody, and the fact that people conceptually now see public profiles as public spaces, means that we need to treat them that way.
Twitter already requires a phone number, prepaid credit cards can be very cheap, and not everyone has utility bills in their names. Many people cannot get drivers licenses. These are great for privileged people, but discriminatory against unprivileged people. I don't think stifling their voices is something we need more of.
There doesn't exist any platform right now where one can share an idea and have that idea go viral, unless the idea is first gated through private censorship.
Sure one could make their own blog or website to express their idea, but the chance of it spreading is then pretty much 0, because again any means for links or ideas to spread are all 'private squares' with their own censorship.
This is how the internet broke free speech. This is where the law needs to catch up with technology.
Even without explicit abuse, this is effectively the government saying "you must transmit this information, no matter what", which is an unwelcome intrusion of governmental power, in my opinion.
We don't know that the mail-in ballot system here in California is absolutely, with 100% certainty, immune to abuse. We do have reasonably good circumstantial evidence at this point that it does not appear to increase the chance for voter fraud, and furthermore, we have reasonably good evidence, based on multiple studies conducted over many years that anyone can easily find if they care to, that there are very, very few fraudulent ballots cast in American elections. There is, however, also reasonably good evidence that American elections have a history of efforts to prevent eligible voters from casting votes at all, and that this is far and away the kind of "voter fraud" that we need to be concerned about.
As a general axiom, therefore, in American elections, campaigns that have as their goal making it more difficult for eligible voters to vote in the name of "reducing fraud" should be viewed with, well, a high degree of suspicion.
This just doesn’t make sense to me. Ever since the first anti-spam technology was deployed, online web forums and mailing lists have employed moderation. There’s law on this going back to the early 1990s when AOL and CompuServe had to moderate their platforms. Nothing has really changed except that there are more options and more ways to get the message out than ever before.
Want a public space? Simply get a server and throw up a phpBB or wordpress or mastodon or gab or GNUSocial instance and you’ve got your own space. As president, trump could easily get the word out via email to his millions of registered supporters and they would flock to the new space and post there.
It's weird how the administration that is responsible for de-regulating ISPs also wants to regulate platform-holders because they're concerned about how they treat their message.
There doesn't exist an avenue to meaningfully exercise free speech on the internet. You can make your own blog, but it will never go viral. Because the only means for something to go viral is that 99.9% composed of privately censored platforms. We've gotten into a situation where censorship has changed shape from 'one is prevented from expressing a view' to 'a view is prevented from reaching an audience'. Which is far worse than old school Stalin era censorship.
This is not an easy question, but it is clearly a case of the law needing to be updated in light of how technology has evolved. We can't claim to have free speech if there's de-facto no way to exercise it on the primary communication channel of our time.
Concrete example: it has recently come out that youtube has been silently censoring a wide array of comments that express anti-china views. Like most users, I was completely unaware that this is going on. Youtube distorted my perception of reality by suppressing an entire class of opinions from being visible. They didn't tell anyone that they're doing it, there was no transparency, and when they were caught, they said 'whoops it was a bug sorry lol'. That's crazy. What else are they suppressing? I do want laws to stop that even if it exposes me to comments I don't like.
Or consider the degenerate case: Imagine Facebook takes over the entire internet. They buy Google, they buy Twitter, they buy pretty much everything than an average user will ever see. And Zucc comes along and says, from now on any mention of a certain political view on any of these platforms will be censored. This is ok by the rules you're proposing, but it's clearly not ok in terms of the spirit of free speech laws.
The fact that 3 billion people (from a quick Google search) are now using social media means that the goal posts have changed. 3 billion people are using the services of private companies to make their voices publicly heard. They think that they are exercising their right to freedom of speech by using something so accessible and ubiquitous. As accessible as public squares used to be.
To turn around and say "sorry, social media might be really easy to use and might be the primary form of communication for most people in the first world, but private companies should be able to control that" is very disingenuous.
The reason this is so tricky is that there is simply no historical precedent for this level of hyperconnectivity. But I certainly reject the idea of using the old laws of public vs. private companies to dictate how we as a society use the publicly accessible and readable internet.
People who have been de-platformed can always go to Gab (I know they had issues being dropped a few times but my understanding is they have adopted a decentralized approach and resolved it). It is freely available on the internet. The only reason people are using Twitter instead of Gab is that the marketplace prefers the lightly-moderated Twitter to the complete free-for-all of Gab. Edit: again, Trump is a billionaire, he could easily fund more Gab servers and blast it out to his followers and get his message out.
> People don't go out and protest anymore because they do it online.
I invite you to visit Washington DC whenever the virus is over and see the large in-person protests that regularly happen in the nation’s capital.
Never mind that there’s a physical riot / protest going on yesterday and today over police brutality, today, in Minneapolis.
> And they don't go out and protest because they feel like their voice is being broadcast enough through social media. And yet to have that censored by private companies is unacceptable when that in the modern day use case.
So the reason they aren’t going out in person is because they aren’t being censored. Look at what is going on in Hong Kong over the past year if you want to see what happens when people in the modern internet-connected world are actually angry. You get millions on the street, not just posting online.
Check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier
What would be novel in twitter's case, is that rather than recognizing that the phone company is a natural physical monopoly and hence must not refuse service to the politically unpopular, twitter is more of a natural social monopoly because of network effects. It would be an expansion of the doctrine, but it's arguably justified to the extent that you can't just go 'start your own twitter'.
No. The reason people are using Twitter is because most other people are using Twitter. The network effect is very real and very strong on social media.
If you wanted to protest something, would you go to the least populated public space that people are gathering, or the most populated?
We have allowed the most highly populated places where people share ideas, to be controlled by a private company. That is not in the spirit of freedom of speech in the slightest.
Anyone who uses the internet has a choice of millions of websites. Everyone using twitter and seeing the twitter notification on Trump’s tweets knows that twitter placed it there. If they were outraged, they can use Google and find alternative social media sites like Mastodon or Gab.
Trump could do the same.
There is simply no comparison to a “public square” since there are easy, accessible alternatives to get the messages out over the internet.
If you want to talk about “public square”, perhaps the easiest comparison would be internet access itself. If ISPs cut off Trump’s internet connection for posting wrong think, that could be seen as a free speech issue I think. But even banning him from any specific individual website is simply a matter for that website’s owner to decide.
I thought it was to protect citizens' rights to hold their governments accountable.
>On the other side of this, the internet is increasingly controlled by a particular demographic with a particular definition of what things like 'hate speech' mean.
Hilariously, I agree with the wording but am willing to bet we disagree on who the controlling demographic is. Everyone remembers the stronger emotional reactions.
Trump has millions of followers on his email lists. He could send out an email or SMS tomorrow inviting his followers to begin posting on a new Donald Trump Gab or Mastodon server. Edit: heck, he could even post it on his twitter!
He chooses to post on twitter instead. He doesn’t even try to use an alternative website.
This is not about restricting his free speech, this is about him trying to drum up controversy.
Child porn is unprotected speech that does not enjoy first amendment protections. What you are advocating for is giving the government control over forms of protected speech, which is a whole different ball of wax. Creating precedent that the government should regulate acknowledged protected speech is not a good idea at all.
> What would be novel in twitter's case, is that rather than recognizing that the phone company is a natural physical monopoly and hence must not refuse service to the politically unpopular, twitter is more of a natural social monopoly because of network effects
Twitter is not a monopoly.
The issue is that if you express 'wrongthink', then the 99.9% of platforms will prevent your idea from spreading, even if it would have otherwise spread or become popular.
This is how censorship has changed form. It's no longer about stopping someone form saying something, it's about preventing certain views/ideas from ever being allowed to spread or become viral or reach a wide audience.
Twitter is notorious for soft-censoring posts, where only connections 1-2 hops away from the author can see them, and then they don't exist. Those posts, no matter how much they resonate with people, can never spread to a large audience.
If we backport it to the real world, it's a bit like saying, sure we still have freedom of speech. You are welcome to go and say anything you want inside this soundproof box with room for only 1 person.
Social media companies always act like they are completely guiltless in the rise of the harmful far-right, but these far-right people exploit their inventions to obtain cultural relevancy. The right truly struggles to create culture on their own
If that's the case, the common carrier concept is helpfully already fleshed out for us in the law.
Good night.
Instead he seems to say whatever outrageous thing that can get attention so he's the center of the news cycle. Once again, it worked.
When he actually does something to silence twitter, I'll be upset too. But I'm not falling for the "big crazy talk ploy" again.
From a free speech perspective, it's straightforward, private parties can choose to relay (or not) whatever viewpoints they want, and can choose to relay those viewpoints with or without commentary.
From a “what’s an ideal policy” perspective, maybe it's not, but “your policy is not ideal” isn't an exception to free speech justifying government intervention.
> How can they even be impartial
Private actors aren't required to be impartial. In fact, the whole premise of the marketplace of ideas is that private parties will be partial in choosing which ideas to present and how to present them.
Twitter is not transporting your tweets, they are storing them and distributing them to anyone who asks to see them (given a very loose definition of ask).
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. There’s no spirit in there that you need a law degree and 10 years on the Federal bar to really draw out and interpret at some courtroom seance. It’s words with the force of law, and we are a nation of laws.
Now if you read the rest of the Amendment, you’ll note that it says nothing about the President, it says nothing about the Courts, and it says nothing about any kind of exceptions, like if the speech is exceptionally hurtful. It also says nothing about the States, that came later post-14th Amendment, but not in the manner that the drafters of the 14th Amendment who had nothing on Madison intended. Rather than the Privileges or Immunities clause, not to be confused with the Privileges and Immunities clause, it came about by the due process clause through a process called incorporation, wherein individual rights in the Bill of Rights began to apply to the States.
Oh, and most importantly, it says nothing about the Internet! Now there is a way to get the result that you intended, and it is really rather simple. It turns out that if you want to make changes to the law, you pass a law. You build a consensus, and a coalition around that consensus, and you use the powers vested in lawmakers to get your result.
So what about the President? Well he doesn’t really have any power to regulate speech either, other than the powers that Congress gives him, which it can’t grant because it doesn’t have the lawful authority to make those laws. That happened once, at least once, with the Alien and Seditions Act not long after the ink on the Bill of Rights dried. This would later come to be understood as “unconstitutional”. My point is the President has no more power than that which is listed in Article II and which the Congress in its lawful capacity vested in him, that is to say statutory powers, some of which only exist in specific circumstances. It’s still a lot of power, more so than it should be in my opinion since Congress has abdicated much of its responsibility, but it isn’t enough to do anything more than his Article II powers plus whatever Congress has granted under its Article I authority plus amendments.
So where do private companies fall in here? Welp, they’re still private companies, not public. They’re not governed by the First Amendment. If they were nationalized, they would effectively fall under the First Amendment because Congress is the supreme branch of the government no matter how much they sell themselves short with that coequal horseshit. You don’t have to agree with the decisions that private companies engage in, just like I don’t agree with you, a private citizen, invoking the “spirit of the law” rather than deferring to the actual text. If the law can mean whatever you want it to mean, then it effectively means nothing and our entire conception of the Rule of Law falls apart. It’s not perfect, it is not always just, but it is the basis for the form and authority of the Federal Government. Lasting changes to the law come about by passing more laws and anything below that standard is ephemeral. As for Twitter? It can do whatever it wants. They have been undermining their credibility as a useful platform for communication for 10 years and I see no reason why they would stop now, but either way the First Amendment exists to protect Twitter from the Government, not for the Government to be protected from Twitter. The President has a level of speech that goes beyond free speech because his speech has the force of a government order to his subordinates no matter how stupid or asinine and regardless of the medium. I don’t like it, but that’s the world we live in.
Well, that's the tactical reason.
Bigger picture, conservativism is about narrowing and liberalism about broadening and equalizing access to the levers of power; conservatives for narrowing the franchise both because of immediate tactical advantage and because of fundamental ideological reasons.
Who the hell actually expects that from any elected politician, let alone Trump?
Is the idea that all politicians constantly controversial among other adults? I thought we all knew this?
> bet we disagree on who the controlling demographic is
I don't have a horse in the race. All I'm saying is that there is a bias due to the existence of a controlling demographic, and this undermines free speech when that demographic is able to censor what's visible to the average internet user. As a proponent of free speech, I'll fight for it even if it means that it unleashes views that I disagree with - that's the exact purpose of it. The most terrifying part about accepting censorship because you happen to agree with the censors, is that the censors will change over time and you will eventually find yourself on the receiving end.
You're not intending to, but by giving the government the ability to regulate political speech you are.
And yes; telling Twitter what they can do with political speech is governmental regulation of protected speech. You're giving the government to decide what forms of protected speech get extra special protection, which is a form of regulation.
> I am suggesting that Twitter might be a monopoly, and subject to the common carrier doctrine, on "being the watering whole for the entire media/political class".
So, I can declare any company a monopoly if they have cornered a specific user base, no matter how vague? Is Slack now a monopoly because they're popular in tech offices? Can I regulate declare Reddit a monopoly for sports fans and regulate it as such?
What is the general principle that will decide whether or not a company should be regulated as a monopoly? And how in the world do you define the "media" class in order to regulate companies like Twitter?
Only 22% of Americans use Twitter daily. That is not a monopoly, period.
> but I think we can all agree that you can't just start your own Twitter and have the same unique position of political influence.
Sure, but that's no argument for an expansion of government power.
As with most of Trump's dumber scandals, he has already literally confessed to his impure motives.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-nw-nyt-mail-v...
Edit: some might think this list is comprehensive, but the first page says it is a ‘sampling’, a 400-page sampling.
wait, 938 convictions over what looks like is over two decades? Just in the presidential election years that's something like 625 million votes. That's very little fraud.
(and there's some nonsense in there if it's trying to present itself as voter fraud...like the California cases of candidates misrepresenting their home address. What does that have to do with any voters?)
I feel most people arguing for "free speech" applied universally to governments and private parties don't really understand the classical nature of it very well and how it functions as a pillar of democracy. If they did they would understand the paradox it would create when the restrictions placed on government are applied to private parties..
Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which immunized from tort liability "interactive computer service[s]", was passed in response to a 1995 NY state court case that found Prodigy liable for statements posted on a forum by one of its users. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod.... The test the judge employed in that case was the degree to which Prodigy exercised editorial control over user-posted content, and in that case the judge found Prodigy exercised such sufficient editorial control that the discretion it effectively exercised in failing to remove the statement made Prodigy liable.
If Section 230 was revoked then that test of editorial control would presumably become the law in many if not most U.S. states as, AFAIU, the test wasn't created out of whole cloth, but rooted in well-established precedent. Some states might go another way but I doubt it; categorical, bright line limitations on liability are an unusual feature of judge-made law (which emphasizes fairness in the context of the particular parties, with less weight given to hypotheticals about society-wide impacts) and are typically created by statute. Other jurisdictions seem to have ended up applying very similar rules as the NY court, and even supposed Section 230 analogs (e.g. EU Directive 2000/31/EC) seem more like the NY rule in practical effect than Section 230's strong, categorical protections. Manifest editorial control seems like a sensible test for deciding when a failure to remove constitutes negligence; sensible, at least, if you're going to depart from strong Section 230-like protections. But I would expect significant variance in the degree of control required to be exhibited absent a national rule. In any event, massive sites like Twitter and Facebook might be faced with some stark choices--go all-in on censorship, or take a completely hands-off approach a la Usenet.
Personally, I'd like to vote by mail because there's a bit of a global pandemic going on. Preventing me from voting in a safe way (with a simple, well-tested solution, I might add) is an outright assault on my right to vote. So the integrity of your vote is really harmed far more by the willful incompetence of those in power.
But it doesn't predate the concept of government or the idea of government’s accountability to it's citizens; it appears to have emerged directly attached to that concept in Athenian democracy.
> Free speech is about ensuring that there's a broad pool of ideas in society so that it doesn't stagnate into a degenerate vertical of narrow beliefs.
No, it's really about preserving the proper subject relation of the government to the citizenry, as opposed to the inverse.
It's not against coalescing around consensus ideas, it's against the state dictating where that consensus will fall. There's obviously situations where nominally private institutions are de facto arms of the state, so you can't simply ignore formally private institutions, but just because a private actor has a powerful voice doesn't mean they stop being a free participant in the marketplace of ideas and must be constrained in order to preserve an artificial absence of consensus.
We've already lost the right to privacy, we don't have the right to not self incriminate, we don't have the right to be free of arbitrary punishment, we aren't presumed Innocent until proven guilty, and we don't have unlimited free speech.
Do I think this as it should be? No. We exist, as humans, on the internet and therefore should have human rights.
And of course even if the sheer number of votes is not on the same order of magnitude as all votes cast, we should still worry because a relatively small number of votes can have an outsized effect when placed appropriately.
Edit: as the first page states, this is not a comprehensive list, but a ‘sampling’.
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.
> 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
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.
I suppose the pandemic is a valid point for wanting to vote by mail, but concerns for voting integrity are still there. I think there should be an easy-to-implement contactless yet in-person way to vote (maybe similar to how you get a coronavirus test), which would avoid the rather drastic action of allowing universal mail-in voting. Know that there are many states who ban / regulate it for good reason.
great, but what does that have to do with providing evidence that
> There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent."
is not substantial nonsense based on zero evidence, but more importantly (given that this thread is about "lying"), that
> The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one.
isn't at all true?
The basic problem you're going to run into is that common carrier status was designed to ensure equal public access to limited resources. In most cases this will either be a physically limited resource (railways, pipelines, power lines, long haul fiber) or access to resources that were actually created by the government (radio frequencies, highways, licensed taxicabs). Common carrier status is frequently also applied where eminent domain was used to create the infrastructure in the first place.
Basically, common carrier was designed to solve the problem of limited infrastructure, and their application to telecommunications has been spotty. I would remind you that ISPs are not common carriers under US law. Ma Bell might've gotten broken up, but the power of the FCC to do that was actually repealed in 1996.
The problem is that social media networks aren't a limited resource, at all. The damn things keep popping up, closing, and buying each other. I've had well over a dozen social media website accounts so far at least, and that's probably under counting.
So any attempt to declare Twitter specifically a common carrier is going to have to center around this idea that they have a monopoly on media and political figures. Of course this is an extremely vague concept; how do you decide who is a "media" or "political" figure? And what percentage of them must be on a site before that site should become a common carrier? What if they’re on multiple social sites at once? And how exactly do you define what is and is not censorable wherever media figures are present? And how in the world would you codify this into law in a way that wouldn't be overturned as unconstitutional?
Honestly, the contortions required to make Twitter a common carrier are so strained, they strike me as something started with the end goal in mind.
His speech is not being suppressed. In fact, he’s probably the person who has the least problem in the entire country of being heard or noticed.
Edit: by the way, ask MySpace, AOL, MSN, or other failed once-popular social networks how well the “network effects” worked out. People know how to use a different website if they actually care to do so.
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’.
163 cases of "fraudulent use of absentee ballots" over 1988-2017. Probably a lot more useful to worry about the scantron machine accuracy.
Look at theDonald.win as an example. Reddit banned their forum, so they created a new website where they can post.
Trump has the audience of millions to create a right-wing only website where his followers can chat together if they wish, or he could encourage his followers to join Gab.
Voting is a responsibility and a civic duty. It need not be effortless, and in fact it should not be effortless. It should be economical, practical, predictable, safe, and secure.
Registering to vote is one step in the process. It’s something anyone who wants to vote can and should know about. Typically cities/towns will send out a census every year which if you do not complete will result in you being removed from the voter rolls, but I’m sure it varies by state.
Once you’ve registered I think most people would expect they can lookup their designated polling time and place and arrive then to place their vote. You would not want someone who has registered and expects to be registered to be unexpectedly removed from the rolls, for example, and only discover this at the last minute.
This also doesn’t address the auditability concern. I would be extremely wary of any system which can associate a serial number on a ballot with who it was mailed to. Such a system is totally unacceptable in my opinion.
By comparison, I have absolutely no issue keeping a list of who requests a mail in ballot, just like I have no issue with keeping a list of who votes in person. Obviously people who receive a mail-in ballot cannot also vote in person, right?
So I don’t particularly like the idea of banning in person voting either. I’m sure many people will find voting by mail convenient, but I’m sure there are also people who find that physically voting in person is both an important ritual and more reassuring that their vote actually is being counted, but also could be more convenient for them.
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.
Now is an opportune time for Trump to make a big claim to get attention and frame reality to his advantage. Politics 101. Trump is actively being attacked by a well established and well funded machine. Reminding people of this as election time approaches mobilizes them.
You're ascribing to conservativism what should belong to a particular political party at a particular time. Yes, the current Republican party does intend to limit franchise by minorities, and this has literally been stated ala Hofeller.
That is not a conservative position and many things the Republican party does are not actually conservative.
Just as Democrats at their worse can be about finding equality by restricting rights and treating people like zoo animals, the Republicans at their worse are about winning the power grab ethics be damned. And at those extremes, neither party represents the values of liberalism or conservativism.
You must love philosophy. Is this really the first you have heard someone use a hypothetical in an ethical argument?
There is simply nothing that indicates voting by mail is less secure than our wonky voting machines, but there is plenty of evidence that ballots by mail help more people vote.
The only reason to oppose mail in voting, much like supporting rejiggering districts (gerrymandering), is to rig the vote. Your feelings of insecurity simply don’t matter, as they are entirely unfounded as well as flat out wrong.
The entire point of the "fact-check" - and what people object to - is the privileged position, that makes direct replies impossible.
Regardless, the actual storage of phone calls, or tweets, is not the reason that most people would say it is important for these things to not to be discriminated against or for.
Or another example, it is arguable that the water company stores water. And the storage of the water is a part of the transportation of it.
To use the example of phone calls, most people would not be OK with the phone company choosing to read your voice mail, and determining if you are allowed to store it based on the contents of it.
Regardless, the storage part is not the actual interesting part of the question here.
> Clicking through the new prompt from Twitter brings users to a fact-checking page debunking the president’s false claims with the header “Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud.” The page also offers a summary of the issue with bullet points providing context for the misleading tweets and links to stories by CNN, the Hill, the Washington Post and other news sources. Still, the prompt itself stops short of calling the tweet’s claims incorrect or misleading, instead opting for neutral language.
But that's the objection. Mail in voting is problematic because the fraud is so hard to detect.
Suppose someone obtains and submits a bunch of mail in ballots. Ballots of people who don't normally vote etc. How would they even get caught? "We haven't caught very many of them" is the problem.
> The only reason to oppose mail in voting, much like supporting rejiggering districts (gerrymandering), is to rig the vote.
You could say it's to prevent someone else from rigging the vote.
Also, this:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-is-no-evidence-th...
So if it doesn't really affect the balance of legitimate ballots and only makes fraud more difficult, why would somebody be against it unless they're legitimately concerned about fraud?
It’s a complex and laborious process, including multiple partially automated steps both in sending, receiving, and processing an application for an absentee ballot, as well sending, receiving, and processing the absentee ballot itself (in one of several possible languages, as requested by the voter).
This includes a manual step of comparing the voters signature on an outer envelope, which is scanned by machine and presented to remote data entry techs for side-by-side comparison with the signature on the scanned application for the absentee ballot. If the signatures aren’t a good enough match as decided by the human, the ballot is rejected (and the voter eventually notified).
So if you’re not sending applications for an absentee ballot out to voters, where is this signature coming from that you are comparing against? It can’t possibly be the electronically captured signature on the drivers license, because that one is chicken scratch...
[1] - https://www.ocvote.com/election-library/docs/2007%20Grand%20...
I’m okay with Twitter and Facebook doing whatever they want to their crappy websites. They aren’t the web, they’re not even all the social media apps on the web. They’re just a couple of large fish in the Ocean.
The mistake you’re making is assuming the discourse on Twitter matters. Arguably the President’s tweets do matter as much as anything the President does, but outside that scope it isn’t as representative of society as the site’s core users believe it to be. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t punch above its weight in driving discourse, but it is just one more tool in a world that is not lacking in ways to send what is effectively a text message.
I mean arguably this forum post I’m writing is hardly distinguishable from a text message. I’m typing this on my phone, and there’s a decent chance you or someone else is reading this on their phone.
On any given day someone might be participating on Twitter, Facebook, an IRC channel, their email, Discord, Slack, Reddit, whatever. They might even write a blog or publish a podcast. At the end of the day it is all communications, as much as saying a toast at a wedding or a cheers at the bar. It’s not important to me that Twitter shoots itself in the foot so long as they’re not the only way for people to gather and communicate, and they are objectively not the only way for people to gather and communicate because that’s an enormous chunk of what people spend their lives doing.
EDIT: this occurred to me after my original post, that I didn’t really address your gather to protest point.
First, the kind of protesting that you’re talking about taking place on Twitter falls into two categories: coordinating a protest in meatspace, or collectively whining.
Second, actual protests still happen all the bloody time in meatspace. The March for Life, the Women’s March, there was a controversial protest in Virginia a few years back with a controversial counter protest which ended with someone driving an automobile into the crowd. There was a drive-thru protest in Michigan a few weeks ago, and people gathered to protest Newsom closing the beaches in Orange County not long after that. Protests, in the free to assemble sense, are still a largely meatspace event with some coordination taking place using whatever modern comms tech is convenient. Back when modern comms tech wasn’t convenient and available and safe to use, Hong Kong protesters turned to mesh networking applications last year.
That is some evidence that mail-in votes can be abused. And you should consider how hard it is to detect such abuse. I’d love to see some evidence on why the benefits of mail-in voting outweighs the risks.
Also some evidence on your claims that mail-in voting favors one particular party would be enlightening.
> President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order aimed at social media companies on Thursday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters Wednesday evening, a move that comes as the president and his allies have escalated their allegations that companies like Twitter and Facebook stifle GOP voices.
https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2020/05/27/trump-executive...
The single largest case of voter fraud in this countries history happened in North Carolina in 2018. That was committed by a Republican.
If you investigate the voter fraud instances in Trumps own listing you will find that the majority of them are committed by Republicans.
Combine this information with the efforts by Republicans to suppress the vote and you can see the problem. In North Dakota, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a law that required all citizens to have a physical mailing address to be able to vote. Sounds resonible right? Well, this was after a Democrat won a Senate election in that state thanks in large part to the Native American population. Most Native Americans live on reservations in that state and part of living on the reservations is a lack of physical mailing addresses.
Nothing about having a physical address is going to make voter fraud less likely. It's plain as day that Republicans are just interested in suppressing the votes of people who vote against them.
The effect may be large or it may be small, but there will be an effect. If you truly cared about voter integrity you would care about this too.
Meanwhile, I make the claim that the echo chambers will stagnate rapidly outside a big platform. The echo chambers need constant exposure to gain new ideological members. If left to a private-club-platform, they will not showcase themselves.
Note that there is a strong adherence to the YCombinator’s code of conduct on the current platform - but we come back to discuss ideas here, not to a not-vetted forum. By making the level of adherence to fact checks, discussions will improve.
There's not really any "publisher" anyway. Everyone is an equal participant. A two-way conversation is one where each user attaches some money to each message to effectively bypass a spam filter and have their message promoted to the top of the recipient's feed. The back and forth sending of money means that neither participant is earning or losing - they're just swapping money.
It is only costly if you are sending messages out and getting no responses. (Ie, nobody wants to converse with you or subscribe to receive future messages from you). Meaning your information is garbage or uninteresting.
Wealthy people will be forced to provide good or engaging content in order to continue receiving revenue. If they're just putting out junk information then they'll eventually just be burning money as they won't be able to develop a reputation and nobody will subscribe to receiving future content from them.
SPAM would be profitable in this scenario. Each advertisement a user receives in their feed will have money attached to it. The advert can be ignored, in which case the recipient keeps the money, or the advert might be clicked or have a promotion code used to make a purchase - in which case the advertiser then knows whether the recipient is interested in their products and will likely pay a higher fee next time to promote their adverts up the user's feed. The advertiser then has a strong incentive to limit the messages they put out and instead focus on who they're delivering them to.
In the current situation, it is simply too cheap (zero cost) to publish. The costs, if any, are subsidized by good content or user's data being sold to advertisers. By putting a cost on publishing, the good content is paid for directly and the bad content is largely ignored - demoted to the bottom of each user's information feed.
So are you arguing that the president has a greater right to free speech than Twitter?
I don’t care who commits the fraud. I want my vote to count as it should. So that’s a why I believe we should be vigilant about mail in voter fraud.
Your Native American example is an example of a corner case that should be addressed properly. Indeed it is unfair if there were no other ways for Native Americans to vote (surely they could vote in person? If not, I’d classify that as a violation of rights). But this doesn’t extend generally, not does it nullify general mail vote fraud concerns.
And I would add more evidence under the claim ‘majority of fraud committed by Republicans’ in order to be more convincing.
And I certainly did not claim that mail-in voting favors one particular party, simply that it enables more people to vote and is at least as secure as any other system of voting that we have in the US. That said, I think it is worth asking - why is one party, with truly zero supporting facts, so vehemently opposed to voting by mail? And why is it the same party that so unabashedly gerrymanders voting districts: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/how-the-...
I know political rants are semi-frowned upon these days on HN, but it is deeply important that we as a society figure this stuff out.
I am not a free speech extremist, and recognise you need to balance the competing demands as these platforms are defacto digital town squares. There are several problems that currently exist. They are:
1) Who decides what is and isn't on the platform Now that the web has effectively been centralised into a handful of organisations, being locked out of a platform can be seriously harmful. There are no appeals, or arbitration on decisions made. No courts to provide an independent check.
2) Asymmetry of rule application The biggest issue is rules are not applied fairly. Certain types of people seem free to repeatedly break the rules on platforms without recourse.
(If you want to argue that a platform is treating people differently because of political affiliation, then yes, I'd agree that the argument about Masterpiece Cakeshop would apply - but it's far from obvious that any platform is in fact treating people differently because of political affiliation.)
As has been demonstrated at DEFCON for years now, voting machines used in dozens of states are laughably insecure and easily tampered with. Mail-in ballots would be much more difficult to pull off large scale voting fraud with due to their distributed nature.
And the distributed nature is the problem. At the polls you have representatives of both major parties there to make sure nothing untoward is happening. How are you supposed to secure something that happens literally anywhere?
I think your distinction is valid and correct, but somewhat pedantic.
You said the only reason to oppose mail in voting is to rig the vote. That’s a pretty strong implication. But I would say an open mind would ask the other direction: why is anyone opposed to increasing voter integrity? You can’t simply ignore that. Voter integrity appeals to me as a normal-ass American with 1 vote.
You may have noticed I haven’t been political, and stay on principle. We as a society should be able to talk openly about principle without corrosive contempt for those with differing viewpoints.
No, I'm ascribing to conservativism what has defined it since the classic liberal/conservative divide emerged in the Enlightenment (well, except that at the very beginning the conservative position was merely to retain the existing narrow distribution of access to the levers of power, resting on appeals to religious and other traditional bases; it's only after the liberal side had some success in broadening access that the conservative position became actively reversing that progress, but it has remained so since.)
It's a thing that actually happens:
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/cudahy-officials-co...
https://www.dothaneagle.com/news/crime_court/woman-convicted...
https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/cahokia-village-tr...
There are also even more small time cases like this:
https://gvwire.com/2019/08/23/mexican-man-who-supports-trump...
Where it's only one person voting when they're not eligible. Those cases often aren't even prosecuted, but at scale it adds up.
Frankly, there are dozens of such cases in Oregon alone.
Your "assertion" does not "fit the facts"
My point was not on the merits of the case, but rather that many people on one side demand that this be made illegal, and yet on the other demand that twitter shut trump up. They demand free speech for themselves while silencing critics.
With ordinary mail fraud, the victim tends to notice. You have a bill for something but the something never arrives.
With mail in ballots, if someone registers people who didn't register themselves and then takes their ballots, the real constituents weren't expecting to get a ballot and then don't notice when none shows up.
There are also a lot of problems that have really nothing to do with mail fraud. When people fill out their ballots outside the context of a polling place with election monitors, anybody could be intimidating them or paying them to vote in a particular way and then verifying that they do.
http://www.g-a-i.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Voter-Fraud-...
Would you trust Elon Musk to put truth under tweets from his company? With his behaviour in the last month(s) I wouldn't trust him with shit.
The next step is Google putting "fact checks" beside search results? Or what? Or a ministry of truth?
Im from Germany, and we see what's going on in America. And we all saw it happening already here, years back.
But I guess every nation needs to go its path and needs to fix their problems on their own.
Another concept is just following a set of moderators.
Either way there is already Secure Scuttlebutt.
That's more than five cases a year, of those that have been caught. Five stolen elections a year seems like a lot.
> Probably a lot more useful to worry about the scantron machine accuracy.
The scantron machine isn't purposely trying to alter the election results so the errors it makes aren't all in the same direction.
If you have something to say in good faith, let me know.
Exactly! This is American Civics 101. When you become President, you lose things because you have power. You and I have more legal authority to restrict speech than the President.
I've had little love for every Republican administration, but this is the first time I'm actually afraid of them. What is happening now is not conservatism, it's fascism with a dash of Christian Dominionism.
> Bigger picture, conservativism is about narrowing and liberalism about broadening and equalizing access to the levers of power; conservatives for narrowing the franchise both because of immediate tactical advantage and because of fundamental ideological reasons.
Are you in marketing? Because you sound like it, and I'm not buying what your selling.
Let's try Wikipedia for grins:
"Traditionalist conservatism, also referred to as classical conservatism, traditional conservatism or traditionalism, is a political and social philosophy emphasizing the need for the principles of a transcendent moral order, manifested through certain natural laws to which society ought to conform in a prudent manner."
Now that's a bit better. Using that definition tell me how that applies to Trump's GOP.
Disclaimer: I have no love for the DNC either, but at least with them it's a more genteel corruption and their ostensible goals are not entirely unpalatable.
p.s. @dang, I'm in dangerous territory here being political on HN, but it was meant to be germane to the OP.
Though if I may be blunt, faulting individuals for living under a political system that does not engender cohesive leadership isn’t really fair (which is another reason I prefer not to wade into the American political debate).
When a company has a total monopoly over a sector, you are obliged to use the service they provide or you will simply go without that service entirely.
Twitter is not a clear example of this, because it doesn't really have a solid monopoly. But Google and Facebook certainly are - there really isn't a competitor to YouTube or Google Search, and there isn't a competing social network to Facebook.
Every current and past Secretary of State from each state will tell you election fraud happens, and that it's rare enough it doesn't have an effect on the outcome.
Trump is lying when he said there is a 100% certainty of a rigged election if there's widespread mail-in ballots. Be clear about what he means by rigged. A system-wide fraud that influences the outcome of an election.
It's the same kind of lie about 3 million voters being "illegals" in 2016 and why he lost the popular vote. It's the same kind of lie he told about buses being shipped up from Massachusetts to New Hampshire to explain why he lost New Hampshire. The same lies about "you will not believe what my people are finding in Hawaii" about Obama's birth certificate. And the thousands of people cheering on 9/11. And the hundreds of people he knew who died on 9/11 yet went to no funerals, zero zip.
And it's the same tactic he used in 2016 to set the stage for his loss. When asked if he would accept election results if he lost he refused to say yes, he only said he'd accept the election results if he won.
He excels at creating doubt and confusion. That's his entire life history way before he was in politics.
He's an asshole. He's a complete waste of space. He's a whiny little bitch. He's always been this way. It's not new. He was this way when he was a Democrat too. As president. As candidate. Before he was even in politics. He has always been a piece of shit asshole. He will always be a piece of shit asshole. And hilariously this is a completely unremarkable observation. The absurd claim would be that he's a compassionate person of strong ethical and moral character, a role model you want your kids to look up to, mimic, and be like when they grow up.
There is nothing about a reservation that prevents it from having a mailing address. People on reservations receive mail all the time. Even someone who doesn't currently know what it is can find out. And it seems like a pretty crappy voter suppression method if it at best only works until people figure out what their mailing address is.
> Nothing about having a physical address is going to make voter fraud less likely.
Having a physical address proves you live in the district. It prevents people from making a mistake and voting in the wrong elections, or voting in the wrong elections on purpose. It gives the government something to investigate if they suspect fraud. The perpetrator will either have to give their real address (leading investigators right to them) or a fake address (allowing investigators to prove that person doesn't live there).
> It's plain as day that Republicans are just interested in suppressing the votes of people who vote against them.
The Democrats do the same thing. They regularly e.g. schedule school board elections off-cycle (a separate election day than the major elections for statewide offices) so that most people don't show up, which allows the election to be dominated by teachers unions. And there isn't even a pretext for doing that -- it has no other purpose, and wastes a ton of money to hold a separate election.
You can read about exceptions here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_ex...
But not for the purposes of section 230. And there's significant precedent to this effect that you'd need a supreme Court ruling to change it.
I guess what would shock you is how normal it felt for us, back then. I mean, when that's all you know, that's just how it is.
You had to be careful with the general frame of the ideas that you expressed in public - but that was normal. You could not freely leave the country - but that was normal. Anything that had to do with the government was a bunch of lies - but that was normal.
Yet life went on. People grew up, got married, got a job, etc.
We used to tell a lot of jokes about the government - I guess as a way to cope. I miss those jokes.
That's why I'm saying that the object level is important. Teaching meta is way more difficult.
Also, as I wrote somewhere else, if I look at my Facebook feed for posts of former schoolmates, the ones who had good grades at the time and ended up in higher ed, learning about the world, they don't post fake news and clickbait and horoscopes and don't allow random apps to post in their name etc., while those who used to be struggling and couldn't learn English (as a foreign language) well etc. they do post junk.
Now there are always exceptions, like the university educated engineer who turns to build a perpetuum mobile and cries conspiracy for "getting silenced" etc. But by and large what it comes down to is having a large body of knowledge and understanding about the world. It's not particularly that their "critical thinking" skills are better. They have just read more, learned more, can use foreign language sources, generally have a better model of how the (natural and social) world works, condensed to "intuition". Simply dropping in a "critical thinking" course for kids won't make a significant effect I fear.
Voter intimidation is a lot easier, for example, if you know where and when to turn up.
You would probably find it easier to tamper with a voting machine if you know where they're going to be, and if more people have access to them, too.
The issue is that a few giant corporations have got a cartel going. It's really an antitrust problem which is only a speech problem because the market is the marketplace of ideas.
There's no hard criterion, but YouTube is a great example; it is so dominant in the video industry that either you use their service, or almost nobody will see your videos. Facebook is another one - it is now the only social network of its type, and also owns Instagram. If your content is banned from Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and deranked on Google Search, your audience reach will drop to almost nothing. Just two companies control the majority of speech on the western internet.
Twitter IMO doesn't fit into this pattern; it is quite good with free speech. Richard Spencer still has a Twitter account!
I'm also not sure about the methodology there, so perhaps someone could explain it to me.
From what it looks like, GAI started with 60,000 matches from the state data. Then they... added additional identifiers and confirmed c.7000 of them? How do you get from uncertain data to more certain data in this way?
There seem to be c.15,000 instances of prohibited addresses being registered, which I don't believe alone indicates voter fraud.
If Trump posted that America was being invaded by little green men from outer space would it be unreasonable to annotate that too?
I also don't know that I would want Trump to be silenced, since he's often his own worst critic.
I don't think Twitter is stopping him from saying bad things, either; in fact, they're pretty explicitly letting him say things, and they just happen to have something to say about what he's said, too.
For a start in California mail in ballots have to be signed and the signature has to match the registered voter's signature on file.
So you're assuming someone can steal a bunch of registered voters' ballots and fake their signatures.
Here’s an excerpt from your article about the devious voter fraudsters: “At the time of the election, (Robbins) was suffering from kidney infections which impacted his cognition,” said Oregon Department of Justice spokeswoman Kristina Edmunson. “He does not remember voting two ballots, but acknowledges that he did and is extremely remorseful.”
Edit: clarity while trying to maintain brevity.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-28/trump-fur...
> Close Results In Paterson Vote Plagued By Fraud Claims; Over 3K Ballots Seemingly Set Aside
> A county spokesman said 16,747 vote-by-mail ballots were received, but the county's official results page shows 13,557 votes were counted — with uncounted ballots representing 19 percent of all votes cast
> The spokesman later told the Paterson Press that the additional 2,390 disqualifications were due to the election board comparing signatures on the ballots to those previously on file for voters, and the new ones not matching up. The spokesman also would not explain the breakdown of what ward those ballots were from, or which candidates were voted for in those disqualified ballots. According to the Paterson Press, four wards had more votes go uncounted than the winner's margin of victory — meaning the uncounted ballots possibly could have tipped the election in favor of one of the candidates.
I think it’s not worth debating political topics on HN because all I get is comments flagged (aka disappears), downvoted and people being intellectually dishonest. Seems like no one clicks on any of the sources before downvoting and attacking.
If we are going by evidence then finding the cause of the lower voting participation in the US should be the goal, for which there exist plenty of research studies conducted over many decades. A lot of people have wondered why there is such a large difference between EU and US. The general conclusions is not the lack of more easy to use internet based solutions, but rather to concepts like minimum wages, trust in government, belief in the efficacy of voting, combining the system of taxation to voter registration, access to voting centers, and voter fatigue when people have to vote in multiple elections in close proximity.
The resistance and general suspicion to internet based solutions with weak security should not be taken as a campaign to make it more difficult for eligible voters to vote. A government website where an anonymous user can put in a a registered person postal address in order to trigger part of the voting process should be viewed with legit suspicion.
No speech was disallowed, so this would be much ado about nothing.
To take an fictional twitter example, blocking a user from a website is unlikely to create a derivative work. Removing a post in the middle of a twitter chain that makes up a story could change the narrative and content of that story, and if done intentionally would create a derivative work. The user could then sue twitter for copyright infringement, and if the new story is defamatory, under liability laws. We could for example imagine a rape story where the post that includeded the word "Stop" was removed, where the author would then have a legit legal claim against the moderation.
It all depend on context, intent, and the details of a specific case. The tools of moderation does not define what is legal and what is not.
The Chicago “Democratic Machine” laughs and says “hold my beer.”
GAI was unable to conduct a comprehensive review since a complete data set of state voter rolls is currently unobtainable. (it was denied)
Grave ballots would require new/additional votes. That would sure the expected ballot returns.
There are a ton of ways to verify elections statistically that you could read into
- minimum wages - trust in government - belief in the efficacy of voting - combining the system of taxation to voter registration - access to voting centers - and voter fatigue when people have to vote in multiple elections in close proximity
(Let me add disenfranchisement after a prison sentence etc, too.)
And he should not make a stink about mail votes and any number of random accussations. Look at the big picture. He has us debating the finer nuances about one tiny individual bomb in his ground covering barrage of crap. Mission accomplished. How's the Corona effort going, by the way?
Unfortunately many will read and forward the original post, and be ignorant (sometimes deliberately so) of any corrections.
Looking at it the other way: if responding with corrections is so powerful why not just respond to the post with a "potential misinformation" warning with a correction, perhaps citing sources that show the information to be correct? In fact citing sources in the first place could remove the problem entirely if the information is verifiably correct that way.
> this is about control
Correct: controlling the spread of misinformation.
> not protecting poor Twitter users who supposedly can't decide for themselves
No, it is trying to protect twitter users who won't think for themselves.
With that, we are left with the following attack vectors: the server and its software, either via hacking or via subtle rule tweaks, targeted ballot invalidation, voter pressure. As a technopesimist, I'm especially uncomfortable that a key piece of the process is an opaque blob of silicon that can't meaningfully be inspected by a human observer. Echoes of Diebold voting machines, plus billions of dollars poured into elections. But I can see why HN audience is prone to be persuaded this is a good idea.
That was literally my entire point. The broader issue is can entity X force entity Y to shut down a service, eg shutting down Stormfront. If one country allows them to stay up, they stay up. This is how the internet is supposed to work. The alternative I pointed out was deliberately dystopian for the point of satire, apparently that was lost.
If your experience has been that everyone is in agreement on the topic, I suggest it's because you're getting your information from sources with a specific political leaning. The consensus is not aligned with that statement; In fact, the general consensus in the statistical community is the opposite.
I never even insinuated Obama's threats were not for good causes. Part of being a president is to execute laws and regulations which includes threats of action.
Since I have no doubt someone will take my "President" comment above out of context, I will not refer to a political figure by their former position title. To me, wishing/expecting to be referred by their former position is akin to using it as a title of nobility and expecting to be treated as nobility.
Clarification: serial number is mailed with the ballot, contains a signature (like two part keys for API f.ex.). You submit the serial for signing through authentication mechanism (verifying the voter). The signature can be either PKI or hash. This way you can validate serials, signatures and have them independent from the ballot after separation. If you have designated drop-off locations you insure the ballots are tamper-proof after being filled out (barring massive system-wide fraud).
Distributed social media might solve this problem, but to be honest I don’t know a single person in my life on one. And I’d never heard of Secure Scuttlebutt before.
Who they would have voted for isn't actually relevant. The fact that they didn't (in our hypothetical) vote as a result of the FUD is evidence of interference.
If someone was making robocalls telling voters that voting machines in their district weren't to be trusted and some number of people didn't vote, would you consider that to be interference?
> And you can’t ignore the main point, which is voter integrity, which I as a normal American agree with.
What is a "normal American" and why would you say that in this context?
By definition, I'm a "normal American" and I also care about "voter integrity". However, I just have absolutely no reason to believe that mail-in voting, which has been used widely for decades by the select states (blue and red) which allow everyone to do it and by _every_ state which allows for absentee voting, is any less secure than any other method.
If you've seen any of the presentations/POCs from Defcon's Voting Machine Hacking Village, read anything about how easily Diebold machines can be manipulated, etc. I just can't believe you'd make the argument that mail-in voting is less secure in good faith.
There has never been “unbiased” media in the USA. Even PBS, NPR, and in other countries the CBC and BBC have been (often quite rightly) accused of bias.
I’m not sure what the ultimate answer to “fair public discourse” is, but “government regulated media” surely isn’t the answer we want.
My comment literally states from a NYTimes article that stats agree with me:
> “votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised & more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...
This case from just last week had a 19% fraud:
> Close Results In Paterson Vote Plagued By Fraud Claims; Over 3K Ballots Seemingly Set Aside
> A county spokesman said 16,747 vote-by-mail ballots were received, but the county's official results page shows 13,557 votes were counted — with uncounted ballots representing 19 percent of all votes cast
> The spokesman later told the Paterson Press that the additional 2,390 disqualifications were due to the election board comparing signatures on the ballots to those previously on file for voters, and the new ones not matching up. The spokesman also would not explain the breakdown of what ward those ballots were from, or which candidates were voted for in those disqualified ballots. According to the Paterson Press, four wards had more votes go uncounted than the winner's margin of victory — meaning the uncounted ballots possibly could have tipped the election in favor of one of the candidates.
Unless you can actually counter my sources without crying victim of "ad hom" attack which I certainly didn't, my original statement stands true.
But in addition to direct counterarguments, there's also the need to consider effects and what beliefs about what is happening predict should be observable.
How does one reconcile these cherry picks against the larger pattern that states that allow no-excuse-needed mail-in voting don't have higher fraud rates than states that do?
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/07/18/snopes...!
The below is just a snapshot. Just a teensy-weensy bit of research will give you hundreds of articles like the below.
Report from Government Accountability Institute: http://www.g-a-i.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Voter-Fraud-...
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2018/07/11/voter-fraud-inves...
https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/oakland-county/2...
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-skid-row-voter-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/central-figur...
https://www.dothaneagle.com/news/crime_court/fourth-person-c...
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2018/07/11/voter-fraud-inves...
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-09/duplicat...
> “votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised & more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show.” - Ion Sancho, the elections supervisor
Archive if the NYTimes link shows paywall:
The Reactionary Mind - Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reactionary_Mind
Here's Georgia:
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/23/us/georgia-gets-tough-on-...
Here's Florida:
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/29/us/18-are-arrested-in-199...
You can find plenty of examples of voter fraud, vast majority is through mail-in (including absentee and ballot harvesting)
> The Miami Herald won a Pulitzer Prize for its investigation of a 1997 mayor’s race in Miami that was thrown out by the courts because of an estimated 5,000 fraudulent absentee ballots.
> A 2003 mayor’s race in East Chicago, Indiana, was overturned by the Indiana Supreme Court because of absentee ballot fraud, as well as other problems such as individuals voting whose registered residences were vacant lots.
> A stolen election in Greene County, Alabama, involving hundreds of fraudulent absentee ballots resulted in 11 people being convicted of voter fraud.
> In Essex County, New Jersey, there is an ongoing investigation of fraudulent absentee ballots in a 2007 state Senate race. Charges have already been filed against five people, including campaign workers who were submitting absentee ballots on behalf of voters who never received or voted the ballots.
Even the democrats used to agree to this fact until Trump came along:
In 2004, Jerry Nadler (Democrat) asserts that paper ballots, particularly in the absence of machines, are extremely susceptible to fraud:
Future head of the Democrat Party Debbie Wasserman Schultz opposing mail-in ballots due to the risk of election fraud in 2008:
This isn't just about mail-in voting. It's about absentee and ballot harvesting too which accompanies mail-in voting.
You accused me in your first reponse to me on this subthread of having a mind impossible to change. What I'm looking for is correlation; that would make me reconsider my position. While correlation is not causation, a causal explanation ("mail-in ballots make it easier to commit undetected fraud") without a correlation it predicts is highly suspect. Find correlation between the states that have had mail-in voting for longer periods of time, and for more people, and identified instances of voter fraud. Confirm there are more instances in those states than in states that have more curtailed access to mail-in voting. Tricky to get the numbers right (probably have to do a state-by-state search of laws to find when they enacted no-excuse absentee voting), but here's the list of states that allow it (https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/vopp-t...) and here's a collection of voter fraud incidents identified (https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud-print/search?name=&state...).
I haven't spread-sheeted this, but at a first glance I'm not seeing a correlation between no-excuse-needed mail-in and fraud. Alaska allows no-excuse-needed and has 0 instances recorded. Texas does not allow it and has ~25 recorded.
The President's administration itself commissioned a study on voter fraud and did not find widespread fraud activity (https://apnews.com/f5f6a73b2af546ee97816bb35e82c18d/Report:-...).
To pop this entire discussion up a meta-level to the original topic: clearly this is, at least, a controversial issue. I think given the combination of the controversy, the President's one-sided take on it, and the authority from which he speaks granted him by his office, Twitter was at least justified in fact-checking him. This is a controversial topic, and he speaks as though it is not from a position of authority encouraging people to believe him without questioning the details. I appreciate you question, even if your conclusions disagree from mine; in contrast, the way Trump uses his Twitter feed to push one side of a topic juries are still out on is irresponsible as a President, and while Twitter taking "the medium is the message" somewhat literally in fact-checking him makes me slightly uncomfortable in terms of what larger rules they might employ, I'm glad somebody from an equivalent position of authority to his voice on their service is doing so.
... and we should probably all find the response of the most powerful civil servant in the United States being to threaten to close that institution in response, unconscionable.
This all hinges on this one thing, anything short of this and Twitter’s statement on Trump’s tweet is correct.
It's Twitter's web server, which is a private property of the for-profit company. They don't have a contract with the Trump that they distribute the expression of Trump without modification. So it's their right to express their idea on their web server.
If the Trump want to distribute a true unmodified expression to the public, he can easily do so by setting up his own web server.
I am not asking you if mail in voter fraud has ever happened, I am asking you if there is proof that there is more mail in voter fraud than in person voter fraud.
I don’t think you will be able to give me anything that indicates this, much less proves it, Twitters statement stands correct
Would you prefer a president who's a punching bag for the entire world? Or one who fights back?
And how is this relevant to whether voter fraud claims that are made in an absolutist manner by the President when they are still controversial should be pushed back on by other authoritative voices?
And is it acceptable for the President to "fight back" by threatening to cease to uphold his oath of office and attempt to undermine the First Amendment directly by shutting down a media source for reporting facts in response to statements by a civil servant?
"authoritative voices" doesn't mean anything now a days. Look at WHO debacle.
Before, being correct made you an authority. Now a days, being an authority makes you correct.
Somehow all the authoritative voices got everything wrong in every hoax I mentioned.
Utterly absurd hyperbole. There are a billions of people in the world who do not use Facebook, comparing the use of Facebook to drawing breath is about as ridiculous as it gets.
Correlation doesn't imply causation. Authorities on topics making errors get reported on more often because it's news. They also have more responsibility to be correct; the alternative to authority isn't truth, it's people taking wild guesses without the benefit of training. They are wrong more often, and they don't tend to make newspaper inches without that error causing some disaster because it's expected that people spouting off in a field outside their expertise would be wrong more often.
Nobody is systematically fact-checking HN comments, for instance, because none of us are assumed to be authorities on anything. ;)
A President, in contrast, is supposed to be an authority on, at least, the Constitution (or at the least, to know when their expertise is lacking), as he takes an oath to uphold it. The current President is demonstrably not (multiple EOs overturned by the courts are evidence of this). And his threats against Twitter show an extremely disturbing willingness to abdicate his responsibility to uphold the First Amendment. If the media is being hard on him, it's because they're doing their job; his behavior admits scrutiny beyond the extreme scrutiny his office alone already admits. When not even the Federal Election Commission agrees with the President's grandiose statements (https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/499890-fec-chairwoman-...), the media is asleep at the wheel if they aren't fact-checking him.
Correlation does not imply causation. I hypothesize problems increasing while we've had Presidential Presidents (and to my memory, we've only had the one type!) isn't being caused by Presidents; it's caused by the world becoming increasingly complicated as systems interconnect, economic engines get larger, and money, people, and information flow more swiftly. I know some people believed electing a "non-Presidential President" might generate a different result, but honestly... Are things, on net, better now than they were in 2016? Not even the economy is on an upswing anymore.
https://apnews.com/f5f6a73b2af546ee97816bb35e82c18d/Report:-...
It does not mention mail-in voting anywhere. Also this line:
> In a letter to Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who are both Republicans and led the commission, Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap said the documents show there was a “pre-ordained outcome” and that drafts of a commission report included a section on evidence of voter fraud that was “glaringly empty.”
This tries to confuse the reader for political reasons as if it was a Republican who made the conclusion. But it wasn't, Matthew Dunlap is a life long Democrat. Since AP mentions "who are both Republicans", then they should have also mentioned that Matthew Dunlap is a democrat but they didn't - which shows there is a bias in this article and they are trying to sell a specific side of the story. Another easy way to point out the bias in the article is that later on, it quotes the vice chair of the commission:
> “For some people, no matter how many cases of voter fraud you show them, there will never be enough for them to admit that there’s a problem,” “It appears that Secretary Dunlap is willfully blind to the voter fraud in front of his nose,” Kobach said there have been more than 1,000 convictions for voter fraud since 2000, and that the commission presented 8,400 instances of double voting in the 2016 election in 20 states. “Had the commission done the same analysis of all 50 states, the number would have been exponentially higher,”
Yet despite all these, the article's headline is "Trump commission did not find widespread voter fraud". The correct headline would be "Trump commission found more than 1000 convictions for voter fraud Democrat Matthew Dunlap says that's not enough proof for voter fraud."
Also "there hadn’t been any prosecutions for double voting or any non-citizen voting in years" is simply 100% false.
> California Secretary of State, Alex Padilla, Democrat (described as activist, engineer, and civil servant) confirmed double-voting in one case and suspected double-voting by a number of other registered voters on Super Tuesday:
https://www.scribd.com/document/456618983/CA-SOS-Duplicate-V...
^Seems like this has been deleted but this article talks about it:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/california-confirms-...
You can filter this page by all double-voting fraud criminal convictions. There's 8 pages of names all the way till 2019 for double voting:
https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud/search?combine=&state=Al...
https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/commentary/datab...
I am aware of flaws in cherry-picking authorities. That's exactly what everyone else is doing (including the media since 2015) while accusing the other side what they are guilty of.
From Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals - "accuse them of what you are doing"
Irrelevant. The relevant fact is "The now-disbanded voting integrity commission launched by the Trump administration uncovered no evidence to support claims of widespread voter fraud, according to an analysis of administration documents released Friday." The individuals who had to FOIA the informtion because the Executive refrained from turning it over voluntarily don't factor into the outcome of the FOIA'd data. Kobach's commentary on what the commission didn't find is irrelevant, and he did not provide evidence to back up his commentary anyway. Political allegiance is a smokescreen here. The facts show "Trump commission did not find widespread voter fraud."
You and I disagree on that interpretation because, IIUC, you think 1,000 instances is significant. It is not. Not across decades of data and millions of votes. In fact, it basically shows the integrity-maintaining systems in place are working as intended.
Saul Alisnky's rules cut both ways. If you don't want people cherrypicking, stop doing it.
A not-insignificant portion of his base supports him because of exactly the sort of attitude you display in your post: arrogant, smug, baseless condescension. Did you learn nothing from the whole "basket of deplorables" incident?
https://wjla.com/news/nation-world/trump-won-the-majority-of...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_of_deplorables#Analysis
> 1,000 instances is significant
Now that's just silly. You are conflating "1285 convictions" with "number of votes" which is wrong. 1 person can manipulate thousands of votes - and they have. Read the convictions. Entire elections have been overturned. It takes 270 to win.
I also stated the "there hadn’t been any prosecutions for double voting or any non-citizen voting in years" is simply 100% false but you didn't reply.
You can see all the way till 2019, there's been several convictions of double voting:
https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud/search?combine=&state=Al...
The article is literally saying one thing while the data says exact opposite and yet you are trusting the article instead of the raw data. I don't know what else to tell you.
Supporting Trump because the mean lady made an insulting (but not untrue) comment about his base one time doesn't make them not morons - at best, it just makes them morons with a persecution complex who don't care that their movement has been brigaded by racists and xenophobes.
The EFF has received millions in funding from both Google as a corporate entity and one of Google's co-founders as direct donation.
This is one of the reasons campaign finance reform is such a wicked problem; if the real goal is to diminish the corporate voice relative to the voice of the common citizen, one has to account for the fact that money can buy basically every mechanism by which voices are amplified. It can even, subtly applied, buy the opinion of the common citizen.
We'll agree to disagree on what the data says in the report; you claim it's significant, I (and statisticians and voting law scholars and some Congresspeople) claim it's not.
All of this is an irrelevant distraction to the top-level question of whether it's acceptable that the President of the United States---a country that clearly enshrines freedom of speech, and of the press, for the purpose of disputing the facts as accepted by civil servants---should respond to a private corporation exercising those rights by threatening to shut it down. Every recursion we add to this thread is further evidence of why those rights are baked into the Constitution and why they're necessary, and casts a dark cloud on any civil servant who would attempt to thwart them.
Hypothetical: imagine instead of Twitter, the President had chosen Hacker News as his primary avenue for broadcasting short messages to the public. And instead of the two of us dithering on this topic, it were https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang using his editorial voice as site moderator to drop a top-level fact-check subthread under the President's threads.
In response, the President threatens to shut down HN. Acceptable or no?
A large portion of his base supports him and squeals with delight because he antagonizes people that are intelligent, educated, and open-minded. Those people are morons. All of them. And if that sounds arrogant or smug or condescending then good.
If I've learned anything working with state governments, it's that they all think they know better than the other states. They'll all set off on their own paths, rather than duplicating the successes from other states.
Only after a few annoying failures will they come to something akin to parity (in the case of immunization registries, it's the CDC's specification guidelines, which were there all along).
Trump's supporters would have taken any action beyond cowed silence as evidence of a "politically motivated attack," because that's been the president's messaging. The investigation itself was characterized as "politically motivated messaging," despite having been started under Trump by Trump appointees.
Mueller isn't responsible for "widening the divide," and there was nothing he could do to heal it while living up to his mandate. The president, or at least the president's team, did a lot of illegal things during the election. You don't meaningfully hold them to account or heal "the divide" by falsely exonerating the president.
Pretty good if you don't live in Stockholm. The worst hit areas is the retirement homes around the Stockholm region, which account for most deaths. The other areas of Sweden are operating mostly like normal except for industries that been effected by closed borders. Economically we are currently a bit ahead compared to our neighbors because of difference in tactics in handling the pandemic, but it is expected to go down as the Swedish economy is comparable more depended on exports. Most news focus on the economic depression as a result of the pandemic rather than on the health sector. Latest news is that a few airports are closing down, and that the partially state owned airline is having economical problems.
But for the same reason it's a lot easier to prevent. If you show up at the polls to intimidate voters you get arrested. If you do it to other members of your household, or your employees or union members, nobody there is independent. Anybody who reports it still has to live or work with those people the next day, so people don't report it.
> You would probably find it easier to tamper with a voting machine if you know where they're going to be, and if more people have access to them, too.
Not when there are election monitors there watching you. With paper ballots you fill out your ballot behind a screen, but you drop it into the machine in front of everybody.
Also, many of the voting machine vulnerabilities are as a result of submitting specially crafted ballots. Which is another reason you want to give people their ballot and have them fill it out by hand and submit it immediately, instead of giving them an unlimited amount of time and access to a computer and a printer while "filling out" their ballot.
Of course the better solution in either case is to use voting machines without security vulnerabilities, but there aren't always enough ponies for everybody.
60 years ago, LGBT voices would have been censored on tech platforms. Few years before that, blacks were censored.
I am a brown immigrant myself (I try not to bring it up as I think it shouldn't matter but it does in this context) and I get called nazi and white supremacist and all sorts of names on Reddit just because I have certain right leaning views. I am libertarian myself. I am banned from pretty much every politics and news subs. I find it impossible to even put my voice on Reddit on political topics and the same is true here for HN too. People say "build your own site" but when we do, we get attacked and dropped by providers. I think people have a hard time empathizing because they aren't in the same shoes.
Also the "private corporation" excuse is never used when for example the Baker who couldn't bake the cake for the gay couple for religious reasons got taken to court 3 times. I don't agree with the Baker and I would bake the cake myself but I would allow him to practice his own religious views. I don't like the double standard.
Also it is well studied that the brains in left leaning people is different than right leaning. For example the "amygdalas" is more active in right leaning people. It's an area of the brain that's associated with expressing and processing fear and threats. It's a biological difference. Falls in a similar category of race, sex etc.
When 50% of the population is being throttled, I think it's time to fix things.
Do you think it's fair for a site like Reddit to provide all sorts of porn to a 12 year old kid but ban right leaning views? How can democracy exist when half the population can't voice their opinion.
Also I am not just talking about censorship of right wingers. I am talking about people like Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang too. Nor am I talking just about US. Canada and others like HK and Taiwan too.
1 more thing. From the proposals made by Josh Hawley:
> Preserves existing immunity for small and medium-sized companies. The bill applies only to companies with more than 30 million active monthly users in the U.S., more than 300 million active monthly users worldwide, or who have more than $500 million in global annual revenue
So HN won't be covered anyway.
All that should matter is the form being delivered to the correct address of a registered voter, and that voter only voting once - with the obvious identity / address checks being undertaken on registration.
And Twitter enjoys no immunity here. If the President wants to sue them for defamation or libel for fact-checking them, he's welcome to. They own the fact-check copy. I'd have no issue with him suing them as a private citizen. Good luck with it, I say to him. Truth is an affirmative defense.
As for the rest... I don't know what to tell you. Freedom of the press does not imply requirement others listen, or obligation to provide presses to people. Demanding those things implies the ideas cannot stand on their own in the common marketplace.
(Baker is a different issue; sexual orientation is a protected class in law. Political views or "being President" is not, for self-evident reasons).
From an article by Ian Millhiser:
‘ Voter fraud is a fake problem
Despite Trump’s claims that enhanced access to mailed-in ballots will increase voter fraud, such fraud barely exists. The state of Oregon, for example, has provided more than 100 million mail-in ballots to voters since 2000 but has only documented about 12 cases of fraud.
Similarly, according to the Brennan Center for Justice’s Wendy Weiser and Harold Ekeh, “an exhaustive investigative journalism analysis of all known voter fraud cases identified only 491 cases of absentee ballot fraud from 2000 to 2012” — and billions of votes were cast during that period.
Thus, Weiser and Ekeh write, “it is still more likely for an American to be struck by lightning than to commit mail voting fraud.”
These negligible examples of voter fraud, moreover, need to be weighed against the potential impact of a pandemic. If voters are either unable to leave their homes to cast a vote or unwilling to do so due to fears of becoming infected, hundreds of thousands or even millions of voters could be disenfranchised if they are unable to vote by mail.
So even if Trump’s warnings of voter fraud are offered in good faith — and not merely as an excuse to reject voting rights policies that, in his own words, do not “work out well for Republicans” — the president is proposing that we disenfranchise thousands or even millions of voters in order to prevent a small handful of fraudulent ballots from potentially being cast in 2020.“
This is in the context of systematic efforts by the current administration in concert with right-leaning local governments to suppress voting in ways they think will help them win the election.
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/20/21264821/trump-michigan-nevada...
So you THINK you're the smartest guy in the room...and yet you can't even conceptualize that, somewhere among the US population of 330 million people, with ~6.6 million geniuses, that there are intelligent, educated, open-minded voters who heavily-weighted policy issues such as border security, 2nd Amendment, and countering a rising China, looked at their Candidate options, and opted for Trump as a best-fit to pursue their prioritized issues.
If your brain can't fathom that possibility, then ARE you objectively better than ALL of them? That's far beyond statistically improbable. I would hope that you would cultivate a sense of introspection and contemplate the subject. All of us would benefit. Seriously. No one in America gains when portions of our population are completely unable to productively engage with their fellow citizens, which they've cast wholesale in a mold shaped by the most ridiculous, caricatured stereotype possible.
> Justices handed a small victory to Melissa and Aaron Klein, the owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa in Gresham, Oregon by dismissing a state court ruling against them and telling state judges to look at it again. By doing so they avoided a high-profile decision on competing claims between gay rights activists and businesses which refuse to serve them on religious grounds, an issue which could have become electric in an election year had it stayed on the court's docket into 2020...
So in this one, the supreme court didn't really make a decision. They sent it back to the lower court.
But that baker is now back in court again with a different gay couple. So people definitely like forcing him:
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/masterpiece-cakeshop...
Another case had opposite outcome:
> 2018 ruling, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which the Court ruled that a Colorado baker who refused to make a cake for the wedding of two men must do so.
Another case also had opposite outcome:
> A similar case, involving a florist in Washington state who refused to provide flowers for a same-sex ceremony there, is on the way to the high court. The Washington Supreme Court had previously ruled against the florist, reviewed the case in light of the Masterpiece decision, and recently reaffirmed its unanimous decision.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/06/17/supreme-court-passes-...
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/usa-supreme-court-re...
It’s definitely a threat. But I don’t see any people backing down, and using “chilling” to me is just pathos to try and make one side seem right. It’s a disagreement on what to do and how to run our big platforms.
This isn't how common carrier laws work.
The way that common carriers laws work, is that companies that are subject to them do not have the right to pick and choose who they sell to, if they want the protections that theses laws provide.
Twitter isn't currently subject to these rules. But these laws already exist, and are uncontroversial, and could be extended to other platforms.
For example, if Twitter lost it's current content immunity, by being deemed a publisher, then it would be subject to significant liability, and may have to change up how it runs itself
Of course, as a progressive (I'm guessing), you would hope the overton window stays firmly within the progressive comfort zone. This has little to do with the fact that progressive laws do, in fact, generally work in opposition to conservative (rightist and/or libertarian) politics, even if we can retroactively come up with some clean-sounding justification like "it's about human rights". It's not self-selection bias.
You dodged the meta-question by trying to appeal to the specific attack on Section 230 that has been proposed (scoped to particular sizes) so you didn't have to answer whether the HN shutdown hypothetical would be acceptable. It would not be. Neither would shutting down Twitter. Size is irrelevant.
If you really can't see it, there has to be some kind of observational defect in your model of the world. Forcing people to do work they don't want to do is bad because compulsory labor is bad. It blows my mind that this is not immediately obvious to people who live in a society that (reasonably) vocally opposes slavery.
Also, "not enabling bigotry" is an insanely stilted way of saying "forcing people to perform labor they don't want to".
http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/northwestnews/files/s...
This is the same tired argument that every bigoted person whines about when they're 'forced' to treat human beings like human beings.
You'll be extremely relieved to know that nobody forced them to open a business that sells products and services to the general public. They made that choice. The only thing they are 'forced' to do is follow the extremely reasonable "don't discriminate" requirement.
If you really can't see it, there has to be some kind of observational defect in your model of the world.
The reason that activists engage in deplatforming activity is that it's effective at destroying movements; brands like Milo Yianopolous and Generation Identity were totally destroyed by deplatforming by a few key social networks.
I can provide the evidence on those if you don't believe me.
He really does understand the base, the media and pollsters, and other the other candidates never really got that in the last election.
A LOT of politicians are willing to lie and fan those flames, but he has been more successful at knowing what lies to tell and really breaking new ground with his bullshit.
Does anyone think that a conspiracy theory invented by Rick Perry or Mitch McConnell would go viral or catch the public eye like one of Trumps half assed tweets?
I don't object to a good-faith defense of Twitter etc. as arbiters of truth, because it's entirely possible they'll do a good job and become a responsible authority. I do object to the idea that only the political right would have a problem with them, and that the only problem anyone could have is tyranny of the majority. I'm more worried about tyranny of Jack Dorsey than tyranny of the majority.
>If someone opens up the Facebook app for 5 minutes a month they are considered a MAU. Suggesting that browsing an app for a few minutes out of a day is comparable to authoritarian control over 1.4 billion people demonstrates a complete lack of perspective in reality.
Your strawman is what lacks perspective of reality. The average FB user spends 30-60 minutes on Facebook each day, depending on the source.
But freedom of reach is a part of freedom of speech.
Thought experiment: Imagine an individual woman went into the store and said to him "My son is marrying his boyfriend this weekend. Can you make a custom cake for them?" The baker says no. Should that be illegal?
Thought experiment #2: Imagine an alt-right troll goes into a Jewish bakery and asks for a cake that says "Jesus is Lord". The baker says no. Should that be illegal?
I think the other major concern I have, other than the methodology, are the definitions - I still don't know whether 8500 represents 8500 people who voted twice (17000 total votes cast), or 4250 people who voted twice, or something in between, or some thing completely different. Perhaps I missed this.
Yes, if this is consistently and fairly enforced, I agree - only doubting that it is because I honestly don't know, and hopefully never have to find out firsthand.
> many of the voting machine vulnerabilities are as a result of submitting specially crafted ballots
Yeah, fair enough. I don't know enough about the vulnerabilities, but if this is the case, I agree.
Having said that, the comparative fairness argument supports a status quo that rewards bombastic discourse, at the expense of truthfulness. We now know it is socially pernicious.
I am 100% better and smarter than every Trump supporter on earth. All of them. Border, 2nd ammendment, rising China...if you want to talk policy I am most certainly your Huckleberry.
So it's cool to discriminate if you offer something that's separate but equal?
You'd first have to a establish a definition for the term "control".
> The average FB user spends 30-60 minutes on Facebook each day
Voluntarily interacting with an app for 45 minutes a day does not in any concevibile interpretation meet the definition of "control". The user is literally in complete control of the apps they interact with on their phone or computer.
He made threats to retaliate, clearly to chill speech he disagrees with.
They are not the same thing. Not even close. And businesses will have to take his behavior into account, especially if some people give him a pass for this.
Trump keeps moving the bar, or trying to, in terms of pushing back against any organizational or legal limits on himself.
It has been both amazing and depressing to see how quickly people start making excuses for him, and declaring his behavior acceptable when it is clearly corruption.
They are however only protected from civil liability for good faith restriction of otherwise legal content on their platform. To the extent to which that moderation is done on content that is compliant with the TOS, or without prior notice and indication of what terms were violated, or only selectively with an agenda to influence the broader social discourse, they may not necessarily benefit from an assumption of good faith, and therefore may be subject to civil liability.
And honestly, who wouldn't want social media companies to have a more fair and transparent TOS and moderation policy?
So if I run a chess forum and disallow posts that are not related to chess, your belief is that if one of my users posts a libelous statement about another user's alleged conduct during a chess game at a tournament in their city, I should be on the hook for the first user's post?
If I can afford to spend maybe 20 minutes a day reviewing all posts that keyword-based scanning suggest might not be about chess, I should have been able to fly to the city that tournament was in and conduct an investigation to determine if what the user said was true before allowing the post to stay up on my forum?
it’s a small squeak though, unlikely to last more than a news cycle. he just loves the twitter limelight too much, loves being a bully, and really needs the media distracted on him for the next 6 months. we’ll get a bunch of these tirades as he tries every outrage to see what sticks with the media and keeps that sweet camera lens on him.
A total falsehood that is easily disproven by the many millions of people who have friends that don't use social media and the many thousands of successful companies that don't advertise on social media.
Same goes for Twitter. By your logic, Twitter has no grounds to complain when Trump screws them over for censoring conservatives, because no one forced them to go into business.
Are you really thinking about this? I feel like you're just responding with bad-faith platitudes.
Yeah. 'Nihilist' wasn't the correct word. Perhaps fallacious was more accurate: I think the subtext of my Q was, "If you can't fix everything why even start?" Which is dangerous.
I think I was fishing for answers: how is critical thinking even taught? My only experience with school was my one pass through it. And I didn't start critically thinking until my late 20's during the Clinton administration. I remember taking a critical thinking class in college (engineering school) and just sitting there as a freshman with my mouth hanging open when called on to make a critique.
It took a degree of engagement for me to become critical about issues. But then I was one-sided, and it took literally 20 more years before I started realizing there are two sides to an argument.
Not to toot my own horn, but I was very smart and very unobjective about anything outside of tech for 4/5ths of my life.
> But by no means am I intending to make any sort of value judgement about how successful this school or that school will be by merely suggesting taking a stab at introducing media literacy into public schooling.
I don't know how many other HN'ers have the same question, but I'd really like to know: how would a teacher proceed to instill what took me 40+ years to learn (and still learning!) into a teen-aged brain?
Any teachers out there?
You sound like a raging extremist. It's ironic that you're so sure you are smarter than like 100 million people.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: I just checked the account history and am glad to see that you haven't made a habit of this in HN comments in the past. Please don't start!
Many of his followers are bots, and almost 75% haven't logged in more than 120 days. I'd be very surprised if more than 10% of his followers were real and active.
>I believe it's the next logical step.
If it was that easy he would've done it already if just for the ego boost. Twitter is getting him something that he doesn't think he can get on his own.
>his supporters will inevitably skip the reports and go directly to the source.
Again, my family is full of trump supporters and none of them read his tweets directly.
As long as their terms of service is applied equally and consistently it should be legal as far as I know. Maybe you could make the argument that their rules are discriminatory and aren't being (or can't be) enforced equally, but that's different from telling a company that they have to accept any type of content without restriction.
FB, YT, Reddit, Twitter, etc. have been removing posts and banning users for years. So, the act isn't new, but the fact that it's being applied to the President is new.
So you've just privatised policing of free speech, and it's now subject to arbitrary rules and whims of management and wall-street. Twitter can ban you if they don't like what you are saying, and they are not obligated to enforce rules equally or to even explain what you breached. The terms and conditions are very fuzzy on to what is actually offensive.
If I host my own website, my cloud provider can ban me. If I self host at home on my own server, my internet service provider could cut me off - my ISP contract has a specific clause in their contract, stating that they could cut me off if they deem my content offensive, they are judge, jury and executioner and they owe me no explanation.
All of this creates great potential for foul play, where a hypothetical rich or powerful person or party could silence embarrassing news with a few phone-calls, and there is sod all you could do about it.
