
Jack Dorsey explains why Twitter fact-checked Trump’s false voting claims - maskedinvader
https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/27/twitter-vs-trump-fact-checking-dorsey/
======
gsibble
"incorrect or disputed information"

"This does not make us an “arbiter of truth.” "

Deciding what constitutes incorrect or disputed information in a political
climate absolutely does.

~~~
Supermancho
> Deciding what constitutes incorrect or disputed information in a political
> climate absolutely does.

Absolutely not. Absolute means something and you're being hyperbolic, at best.
It's the human condition to make selective decisions, including meta-
decisions. It does not make you or I an arbiter of truth because we do it, nor
does it make Twitter or youtube arbiters of truth. This is "equality of
outcome", territory which is nonsense.

~~~
dang
> you're being obtuse

No name-calling on HN, please. It's specifically against the site guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

The more polarized things become, the more all of us here need to breathe and
treat each other well.

~~~
happytoexplain
This is an interesting example - I'm guessing the poster said "obtuse" where
he now says "hyperbolic". While "obtuse" is definitely just an insult,
literally, my experience is that it's used colloquially with an implied
"deliberately" prefix to mean not "deliberately stupid/slow" but rather
"deliberately avoiding some truth as a rhetorical defense". Of course, better
safe than sorry.

~~~
dang
Right, it was edited that way. Commenters shouldn't edit things in ways that
undermine existing replies—that's discourteous and can even be passive-
aggressive.

Words that imply 'deliberately' are probably best avoided in HN discussion
because they're mostly a way of attacking the other person. Another common one
is 'disingenuous'.

~~~
atomi
To be fair the original comment (which is top comment at the time of this
writing) is not making a good faith argument.

~~~
dang
Commenters here need to follow the rules regardless of what someone else did.
Otherwise we just end in a downward spiral, because it always feels like the
other person started it.

If by the original comment you mean
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23333929](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23333929),
I don't see any indicator of bad faith there. Maybe it's wrong or even very
wrong but that's not the same as bad faith.

~~~
atomi
For posterity, the bad-faith in the original comment is based on the fact that
the poster states that tagging something as disputed is itself arbitration.
But the act of tagging a tweet as "disputed" is a purposeful deference of
arbitration to 3rd parties. In other words, the action is the opposite of what
he/she is saying and the poster is either self-deceived or wantonly
obfuscating truth and deceiving others - very bad-faith.

~~~
dang
I think you're reading that comment overly literally. But even if you're
right, the psychological state you're deriving from it does not necessarily
follow. You're the one filling in that step, and then using it to attack
someone else ("bad faith"). That's the part we ask people not to do here, for
what should be obvious reasons. Before you get to "the poster is either self-
deceived", your post here is a fine critical comment and could easily just
stop there.

------
knaik94
From a business standpoint, being proactive about misinformation being spread
is going to make them stand out as a seemingly more moral company. More people
will read and engage. The perception of the feature is slightly muddied right
now because the fact check is being painted as politically biased. But the
bigger picture is that helping people vote and be more informed helps people
of every political background. If a tweet had the wrong date for election day
and twitter had fact checked that, would correcting that be wrong as well?

~~~
scaredtobeme
It's exactly the opposite. People are going to cringe at their hamfisted and
obviously partisan interventions and their transparently hypocritical
justifications for them. I don't agree with the opposing side politically but
this is a losing move. The fact that their "head of site integrity" is an
extreme partisan is icing on the cake. I'm surprised to say this, as someone
who despises Facebook, but Zuckerberg seems to be playing this smarter, trying
desperately to appease both sides. It reminds me of a guy standing with a foot
on each of two diverging trains, but at least he isn't shooting himself in the
foot.

~~~
happytoexplain
It sounds like you're defining anybody who is explicitly liberal or
conservative as partisan, which is deeply ironic.

~~~
scaredtobeme
Maybe I used that word wrong. I just meant someone who's strongly on one
political side. Those things mostly go together in a two-party system though.

------
RickJWagner
It's a dangerous precedent.

When a Democrat is in office, will Twitter appoint a rabid conservative to
make the fact checks? Because it seems the current "Head of Site Integrity"
has a long history of making incendiary opinionated posts against Republicans,
rural states, etc.

Fairness should matter in the media. Without it, we're on a bad path.

------
corporateslave5
The whole fight behind voting really is political. It helps the left and it
hurts the right. It’s like gerrymandering. Sure, people have the right to vote
and should be able to, but that’s an intellectually dishonest way of
representing changes in voting.

~~~
twalla
I'd argue that if increasing turnout to be more representative of the
population as a whole hurts your party then there's something fundamentally
flawed with what your party is offering to the populace.

~~~
dehrmann
Something to think about: the electoral college is halfway more representative
of people who can't vote (minors, non-citizens) because, in a sense, the
elector represents them, and their neighbors who did vote probably have
similar political views.

~~~
mattnewton
How nice of my neighbors to vote for others. Increased voter turnout removes
the “probably” though by directly sampling. And then you don’t need
anachronisms like the electoral college.

~~~
dehrmann
My point was about representing people who can't vote. Direct sampling ignores
them entirely.

~~~
kmonsen
But we don’t want elections to be decided by people who are not allowed to
vote. If we wanted those people to vote we would simply let them instead of
some weird indirect system.

------
occasionopinion
The initial warning label should have been simple and kept to objectively
defensible claims.

"Donald Trump said people in California do not need to register to receive a
ballot. This is false. See $governmentSite for further information".

It _was_ a mistake to use media organizations with partisan opinion sections
as fact-checkers. The most important people to reach with that warning label
are the most likely to dismiss any information from those media organizations.
A warning label is useless without trust.

But, I am optimistic about Twitter's use of fact-checking. I've watched both
sides of the political spectrum slip deeper and deeper into delusion, and this
is one of the few glimmers of hope. Twitter has the platform, the reach, and
the power to effect legitimate positive change. I feel increasingly every day
that the truth is slipping between our fingers. This feels like one of our few
chances to realistically combat misinformation.

I meet people from both sides of the political aisle who have _incredible_
blind spots. People who actively follow politics and yet often have never
encountered basic counter-arguments to their narratives. The modern media
landscape allows people to live ensconced in an information bubble. Twitter is
the most bipartisan platform that exists, and thus in the prime position to
pop those bubbles.

I appreciate that Twitter is attempting this step. This has almost no
likelihood of increasing users and a strong likelihood of decreasing users.
They have chosen to do something that will likely hurt their bottom line out
of conscience.

~~~
loopz
Social media platforms have been working to minimize effects of false news for
several years now, and such measures are expected by politicians and the
public.

------
m0zg
Here's Debbie Wasserman-Schulz in 2008 saying mail-in voting leads to fraud:
[https://twitter.com/M2Madness/status/1265698785813987328](https://twitter.com/M2Madness/status/1265698785813987328)

Why does the entire liberal establishment (and its "free" press) insist on the
non-sensical notion that mail-in voting is _less_ prone to fraud than in-
person voting? The DNC doth protest too much, methinks.

~~~
millstone
The "mail-in voting is fraud" idea is a transparent attempt to disenfranchise
voters who happen to live in cities and don't have 2+ hours to wait in line.

Is in-person voting better? Republicans have been working to close in-person
urban poll sites for years. They want to make it as hard as possible for city
dwellers to vote, full stop. [1].

[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/11/us-
polling-s...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/11/us-polling-
sites-closed-report-supreme-court-ruling)

~~~
m0zg
Was it also a "transparent attempt" in 2008 as well? Or should Debbie be "fact
checked" here? I'm getting all confused.

------
notadog
Duplicate of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23333504](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23333504)

------
shibeouya
I like Twitter, I really do. But Jack's statement make no sense.

If Twitter wants to step over its bounds as a platform, then it will
absolutely be scrutinized as such.

What I find incredibly dishonest is that Twitter's head of "integrity" is a
well-known troll who has on multiple occasions called Trump a nazi and more.
How can we take their "integrity" seriously when it is led by someone with
such an extreme political bias that there is no doubt this will impact what
gets censored or not.

IMO this is not Twitter's role and a very slippery slope.

~~~
goatinaboat
_who has on multiple occasions called Trump a nazi and more_

Regardless of what you might think about Trump it's a bad look for Twitter to
have put someone so obviously partisan in that position
[https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/head-of-twitter-
site...](https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/head-of-twitter-site-
integrity-called-trump-white-house-officials-actual-nazis-and-mitch-mcconnell-
a-bag-of-farts)

They have definitely stepped over the line of "we're just a platform" and into
"we are taking editorial stances on things now".

Kathy Griffin, who recently called for Trump to be injected with a syringe of
air, still has her account and still has her blue checkmark.

------
slg
>Per our Civic Integrity policy, the tweets yesterday may mislead people into
thinking they don’t need to register to get a ballot (only registered voters
receive ballots). We’re updating the link on @realDonaldTrump’s tweet to make
this more clear.

That might be the worst possible answer. That isn't what people on the left
found objectionable with that Tweet and specifically signalling that out isn't
going to assuage the complaints coming from the right.

------
wahern
We live in such strange times. The party that for decades bemoaned moral
relativism has, because of its skepticism of global warming and other
supposedly liberal narratives, convinced a large swath of Americans,
conservative and liberal, that the truth itself is relative, or at least to
pretend to believe so. That's why people are so quick to disavow being
"arbiters of truth" despite that once upon a time it was assumed everyone
acted as an arbiter of the truth--who would dare give their voice to non-
truths?

I keep returning to the notion that conservatives have become the standard
bearers of radical leftist philosophies, such as poststructuralism's arguments
about the non-existence of objective "truth". Republicans seem hellbent on
proving this out. I've been arguing this for the better part of 20 years,
though only recently did I stumble upon similar opinions, such as the satire
piece, "Foreword to Newt Gingrich's Post-structuralism for Republicans:
TrumpTruth and How to Make It, by Betsy DeVos, US secretary of education".

~~~
millstone
It's not that the truth has become relative - nobody is saying "you have your
beliefs, I have mine." We are at each others' throats because there's
vanishingly few shared facts.

There's hardly any mechanisms left to bring about shared truth. Even a life-
threatening pandemic falls short.

~~~
pas
Because the world is very big and we're really well insulated from most parts
of it. Yeah there are hospitals full of patients in Wuhan, who cares. Yeah I
can't go to Rome this year, because those frightened Italians closed shop,
even though the plague is only in Northern Italy. Hah, those New Yorkers are
losers, they don't even have enough morgues, probably because the constant
crime! Damn these irresponsible city dwellers brought death to our doorsteps!
Uh, well, Joe the neighbor got well after two day, so fuck these mask-donning
gun-fearing science-suckers, don't tell me what to wear, and I won't cover my
face, I'm not a Muslim woman!

And so on, and so on. The cognitive dissonance is palpable at every turn, but
that doesn't help those who are in its grip. 100+ years ago people blamed that
new thing, electricity, for the Russian flu, now people blame 5G. Just as
sometimes lovely religious folks blame gays, rock and roll, and video games
for everything.

There are very few clear cut things in our world that our brain accepts as
such. (The Earth is round? Well, it seems flat to me. An anvil falls down
faster than a pillow, so that must be because it's heavier.)

------
dhhwrongagain
What a mess. We should just return to catholic monarchy or at very least
restrict voting to a trusted nobility. Democracy is really just a euphemism
for rule by the media, and the media just serves private corporate interests.
it’s unrealistic to trust the average layperson to make decisions on matters
of state. I wouldn’t trust my cook to cut my hair.

