Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

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.

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.

To be honest, it feels that the president should have a babysitter, if you look at his constant tweet tirades.

Or how they call it on the right side: Clown World. Guess nobody is happy with the current affairs.

And here we are? How did this happen?

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.

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.

Senselessly creating and reporting on "conflicts" and "scandals" makes them the most money. Trump is just playing their game.

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.

With all the facts being checked?

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.

Those alternatives would be "censorship" (in some sense; not any real legal sense).

This is not censorship.

Unless Jack Dorsey knows the future, I'm not sure you can fact check something that hasn't happened yet.

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? :)

[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-...

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?

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.

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.

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...

Anyways, by downvoting you already showed that you don't care about open discussions. Good luck with that.

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.

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.

So where is the line between slightly and substantial?

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.

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.

Even the above linked claim in snopes says fraud is more common with mail in ballots.

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.

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.

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'.

> 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.

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.

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"?

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?

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.

[2] https://xkcd.com/603/

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.

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.

Imagine what happens when $countryX realizes that bribing a few mailmen is even more cost effective than misinformation campaigns?

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.

I 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...

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.

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.

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...

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...

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.

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.

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?

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 ;)

Pretty interesting phenomenon.

Go back farther and read about his actions regarding The Central Park Five. His history is full of complete bs like this.

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.