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Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

(techcrunch.com)
707 points patd | 7 comments | 27 May 20 12:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.981s | source | bottom
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tuna-piano ◴[27 May 20 13:39 UTC] No.23322986[source]▶
There's an unsolved conundrum I haven't heard mentioned yet.

After the 2016 election, there was a thought that too much false information is spreading on social media. This happens in every country and across every form of communication - but social media platforms seem particularly worrysome (and is particularly bad with Whatsapp forwards in some Asian countries).

So what should the social media companies do? Censor 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?

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1. cwhiz ◴[27 May 20 13:50 UTC] No.23323171[source]▶
>So the question remains - do you, or how do you lessen the spread of misinformation?

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.

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2. jobigoud ◴[27 May 20 14:13 UTC] No.23323561[source]▶
Misinformation spreads a lot human-to-human too. Like on Whatsapp or Facebook for example.
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3. cwhiz ◴[27 May 20 14:29 UTC] No.23323851[source]▶
It does but that also happens in real life outside of digital spaces. It’s not something you can control.

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...

4. metrokoi ◴[27 May 20 14:59 UTC] No.23324381[source]▶
What would be required to prove your identity? Would you be able to tweet anonymously, or must you tweet under that identity? There are some issues with that, for example people without government identification would not be allowed to tweet. Perhaps you could use unique fingerprints, but that turns into a huge privacy concern and I can never see that being accepted. Maybe there are some unique bio-markers that could be used which people feel would be irrelevant or otherwise useless enough to not be an invasion of privacy.
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5. cwhiz ◴[27 May 20 16:09 UTC] No.23325400[source]▶
Drivers license, utility bill, phone number, credit card, etc. The same types of things that other services ask you to provide to prove that you are a real person.

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.

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6. ll931110 ◴[27 May 20 21:51 UTC] No.23330513{3}[source]▶
That would be deal breakers with whistleblowers (Edward Snowden).
7. metrokoi ◴[28 May 20 03:08 UTC] No.23332966{3}[source]▶
The point of proving identity would be to curtail the bot problem. If someone can fake identification in order to get an account created, then it's trivial to just make up a fake name and picture of a person. Forcing people to not be anonymous does nothing to solve a bot problem, and causes a lot of problems. What if that person is gay with a very conservative family that would not accept them? They would be unable to speak how they please with mandatory non-anonymity.

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.