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Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

(techcrunch.com)
707 points patd | 8 comments | 27 May 20 12:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.258s | 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. yesplorer ◴[27 May 20 13:59 UTC] No.23323333[source]▶
Whatsapp forwards is largely a solved problem. Now you can't forward whatsapp messages to more than 5 people at a go. And if you try doing 5 people at a time consecutively, your account is automatically deleted even before you reach 30 total forwards.

Some people adopted a strategy of adding users to a group and dropping whatever message they have but that too is solved by allowing only known contacts to add you to groups.

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2. stickfigure ◴[27 May 20 14:11 UTC] No.23323524[source]▶
Your solution is to ban humans from talking to more than 5 others at once?
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3. x86_64Ubuntu ◴[27 May 20 14:27 UTC] No.23323817[source]▶
They can talk to more than 5 people at once, just not through the WhatsApp platform. I take it you think email spammers are also unjustly treated too.
4. ◴[27 May 20 14:29 UTC] No.23323845[source]▶
5. JimDabell ◴[27 May 20 14:35 UTC] No.23323945[source]▶
Forwarding WhatsApp messages is a tiny subset of "talking to people".
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6. metrokoi ◴[27 May 20 14:49 UTC] No.23324188[source]▶
It is an interesting solution if nothing else. What about capping the number of users or followers to 100 or 1000 other people? That is closer to how humans interacted for the vast majority of history since the development of language. If you think about it, it's extremely unnatural for single people to have direct communication to millions of people. Information can still spread from social group to social group. I don't endorse the idea, but I would be interested to see how it might work and how information would spread and ideas change.
7. yesplorer ◴[27 May 20 15:43 UTC] No.23324986[source]▶
you can talk to hundred people at at time. You just can't forward the same message to more than 5 people at the time. What's the problem with that?
8. stickfigure ◴[27 May 20 18:50 UTC] No.23327997{3}[source]▶
The subject of this thread is "how do you lessen the spread of misinformation?" across all of social media, and the parent claims that whatsapp has largely solved this problem. So we're talking about applying these restrictions much more broadly.