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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: 0.361s | source | bottom
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itchyjunk ◴[27 May 20 13:42 UTC] No.23323027[source]▶
Hm, is fact checking solved problem? I remember someone here had their game flagged just because it referenced SARS-CoV-2. I hear almost daily horror stories of youtube algo's screwing up content creator. As a human, I still struggle a lot to read a paper and figure out what I just read. On top of that, things like the GPT2 from OpenAI might generate very human like comment.

Is there no way to consider social media 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?

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gjulianm ◴[27 May 20 13:46 UTC] No.23323090[source]▶
> Is there no way to consider social media as unreliable overall and not bother fact checking anything there?

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.

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1. giardini ◴[27 May 20 14:10 UTC] No.23323520[source]▶
Under a doctrine of free speech, politics has no "clearly false messages". There are only "messages". You are, however, allowed to state that a message is "clearly false".

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.

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2. UncleMeat ◴[27 May 20 14:29 UTC] No.23323842[source]▶
And he wasn’t prevented from saying anything. We got more speech here, not less.
3. danbruc ◴[27 May 20 14:31 UTC] No.23323887[source]▶
Under a doctrine of free speech, politics has no "clearly false messages".

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.

4. beart ◴[27 May 20 14:38 UTC] No.23324005[source]▶
> Under a doctrine of free speech, politics has no "clearly false messages".

I'm really not following this argument. If something is stated with a political purpose, it cannot be false?

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5. colejohnson66 ◴[27 May 20 14:56 UTC] No.23324319[source]▶
Free speech (a la First Amendment) has limits. Case in point: the FTC and deceptive advertising; The courts have repeatedly held that deception is not protected speech.

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”

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6. gadders ◴[27 May 20 14:56 UTC] No.23324328[source]▶
I think the argument is that political arguments are rarely of the "The sky is blue" category, but more along the lines of (and I'm making up an example here). "The economy has never been better"

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.

7. misun78 ◴[27 May 20 18:13 UTC] No.23327421[source]▶
“Yours end when it begins harming someone else” is in itself a slippery slope and a dangerous precedent used by folks to limit free expression. How exactly do you define “harm”? Does emotional or mental or spiritual/religious harm count? If so you are one step closer to a complete dismantle of the first amendment.

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.

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8. colejohnson66 ◴[27 May 20 18:21 UTC] No.23327557{3}[source]▶
It’s for sure a slippery slope, but it seems to be the way the courts have ruled. Thankfully, they’ve generally taken it case by case (except for the Miller Test), and (generally) rejected the concept of “prior restraint”. It’s why I said it’s a good rule of thumb, not an absolute.

> 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...