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Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

(techcrunch.com)
707 points patd | 2 comments | 27 May 20 12:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.71s | source
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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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Consultant32452 ◴[27 May 20 15:17 UTC] No.23324608[source]▶
I feel like the only people who think Twitter is a credible fact checker of the President are not the people who would believe anything the President says anyways.
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1. LordDragonfang ◴[27 May 20 17:40 UTC] No.23326903[source]▶
While this feels like it's true in the broad strokes, and it is certainly a good quip, it's important to remember that there are always going to be people on the border between one and the other, who can easily be influenced to fall a certain way if they believe a certain exclamation or falsehood.
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2. Consultant32452 ◴[27 May 20 18:27 UTC] No.23327660[source]▶
I don't believe those people matter politically. Every election there's a lot of rhetoric about "undecided voters" but in practice the campaigns don't care about those people. I know undecided voters isn't exactly what you're talking about, but I think the concept applies.

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.