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Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

(techcrunch.com)
707 points patd | 3 comments | 27 May 20 12:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.641s | 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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palsir ◴[27 May 20 13:46 UTC] No.23323093[source]▶
Fact checking is far from a solved problem. The can of worms that Trump opened when he started the "fake news" conversation is still very much open.
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newacct583 ◴[27 May 20 13:49 UTC] No.23323144[source]▶
Trump didn't start that "conversation". "Fake News" was a term originally intended to reflect the false "news-like" advertisements that were being purchased on social media (primarily Facebook, and primarily targetting conservative users). Trump appropriated it as a way to label unflattering news coverage from mainstream sources.
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pyronik19 ◴[27 May 20 13:57 UTC] No.23323285[source]▶
Hardly just unflattering, MSM pushed the "Russia" narrative for 3 years and there was literally nothing there. Hard to call that anything other than fake news. In fact its looking more and more like the actions from the Obama admin were likely highly corrupt and there will likely people going to jail. Just recently the media has been reporting that Trump called the virus a "hoax", which was a complete lie.
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1. hraedon ◴[27 May 20 17:56 UTC] No.23327153[source]▶
Mueller went out of his way to say that his investigation did not exonerate Trump, and realistically the only reason more people did not go to jail (and a lot of people went to jail, including one of Trump's campaign managers) is because key players were successful in obstructing justice.

Like, you can be skeptical of the idea that the Russian interference was decisive in the election without dismissing the very real lawbreaking that happened.

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2. coffexx ◴[28 May 20 02:34 UTC] No.23332797[source]▶
> Mueller went out of his way to say that his investigation did not exonerate Trump

I think it was inappropriate for him to stress this, and that it undermined his legitimacy and the legitimacy of the investigation. It isn't the job of an investigator to "exonerate" people that havn't been charged or prosecuted for a crime.

As far as I can tell all these comments did was validate his supporters beliefs that the investigation was a politically motivated attack, and simultaneously served as a psychological "out" for his detractors that were convinced he was in cahoots with Putin to undermine the country. Widening the divide between 2 sets of people that really ought to reconcile.

Disclaimer: I am not american, so this is an outsiders perspective.

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3. hraedon ◴[28 May 20 16:23 UTC] No.23339108[source]▶
What alternative did he have? The president's hand-picked AG had released an extremely misleading "summary" of Mueller's findings, which the president was using to claim total exoneration.

Trump's supporters would have taken any action beyond cowed silence as evidence of a "politically motivated attack," because that's been the president's messaging. The investigation itself was characterized as "politically motivated messaging," despite having been started under Trump by Trump appointees.

Mueller isn't responsible for "widening the divide," and there was nothing he could do to heal it while living up to his mandate. The president, or at least the president's team, did a lot of illegal things during the election. You don't meaningfully hold them to account or heal "the divide" by falsely exonerating the president.