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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: 0s | 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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supportlocal4h ◴[27 May 20 14:45 UTC] No.23324113[source]▶
Imagine if a U.S. president were to flagrantly make up a claim that some other country was developing weapons of mass destruction. Imagine that there was no way to verify this claim. Imagine that the president insisted on invading said country on the basis of the unsupported claim.

Do most people still expect that someone in that position will not post clearly false messages, specially when those messages affect something as fundamental as the death of thousands of people and the overthrow of a government?

Iran contra, Watergate, Vietnam, ...

Is there any trust left?

It's bewildering that the answer is, "Yes". It's discouraging that so many presidents have so often deceived the people so horribly. It's much much more discouraging that the people don't learn.

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czzr ◴[27 May 20 14:57 UTC] No.23324343[source]▶
What exactly is your position? That no one should believe any statement from any politician ever and so there is no reason to demand that politicians live up to any standards?

How exactly is a society with those principles supposed to function?

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1. mc32 ◴[27 May 20 20:37 UTC] No.23329628[source]▶
All modern administrations maybe aside from Jimmy Carter’s have had shenanigans going on. None of them are clean. So it’s clear there will be lies from everyone. Some intentional, some mistaken.

That said. I don’t see a solution to this dilemma. It has no satisfactory solution.

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2. krapp ◴[27 May 20 22:16 UTC] No.23330777[source]▶
Calling a President out on their lies seems like a satisfactory solution to me.

Unfortunately, the modern political climate is such that even that is considered censorship. We can't even dare claim that lies exist, because obviously no one person or institution can be trusted to define what is and isn't truth without an ulterior motive.

So the only politically correct solution is to assert that all politicians are equally (maximally) corrupt, all statements are equally valid, all attempts at nuance are motivated by partisan hypocrisy, and any possible solution is a slippery slope to an Orwellian dystopia, so we have no option but to simply let the fire burn.

Although I must say, it is strange how none of this seemed to be the case prior to 2016.

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3. iratewizard ◴[28 May 20 04:22 UTC] No.23333364[source]▶
Melodramatic. Big tech has appointed itself as the gatekeepers of truth, and has regularly added new creative types of censorship. Look at his Twitter, where positive comments are reparented so professional noise makers can whine. Look at all of the content creators who have been deplatformed, demonitized, and algorithmically deprioritized in favor of allowed speech. Creative, right?

Now is an opportune time for Trump to make a big claim to get attention and frame reality to his advantage. Politics 101. Trump is actively being attacked by a well established and well funded machine. Reminding people of this as election time approaches mobilizes them.