There are ways to educate people to develop critical reading and identify when they are being lied to on the internet.
Censorship and sanctions are less preferred because:
1. They create even more distrust and encourage conspiracy theories
2. More importantly, just like journalists (who have agendas), fact checkers also have agendas. The journalism problem is solved by pluralism: having many different media platforms with different agendas allows for balance and exposure to various facts. However, due to the monopolistic nature of the social platforms, we can't have that here. What happens is that a very small number of people controls what we know and what we don't. Just imagine if Fox News was the only news platform - devastating, isn't it?
For these reasons, social media should not be allowed to decide on they're own what is fact and what is not.
letting misinformation spread tends to spread misinformation. shutting misinformation campaigns down disrupts them, and if done broadly enough prevents new ones from gaining traction. yes, it might spawn new conspiracy theories, but if they only reach a few people they cause far less harm than the widespread misinformation that the actions are meant to disrupt.
One point of note is that the prediction of "users in banned communities will just take their hate elsewhere" did strike true. Users either left reddit to take their views to other websites, or moved to either directly related or tangentially related subs. While I don't think this is an excuse to not stand up against bad behaviour, it very much proves that this is akin to shooing criminals away from your town to terrorise another.
But I don't think that's a problem. You'll never rid the world of viciously tribal behaviour, so your only hope is to herd the perpetrators away to a location where their actions will bother as few people as possible.
Not exactly true, since the posters themselves thrive on attention and reaching more ppl. For example /r/fatpeoplehate's equivalent at Voat eventually became far less active than it was on Reddit where it was reaching /r/all a lot and gaining new viewers, commenters, posters etc.
Reddit certainly hasn't rid itself of viciously tribal behavior; it's more tribal and toxic than ever. But that toxicity is directed at people the reddit administration doesn't like, and at people who've been driven away from reddit, so you may be right that fewer people are bothered now, but only because the separation from people with other opinions has become so wide that people who disagree no longer hear each other.
I haven’t followed the Reddit situation closely, who are the victims of Reddit leadership’s disapproval?
I’m sympathetic to that second point, but I don’t know if I agree isolation is what’s driving the gap in understanding. The tone of disagreement has veered heavily toward saber-rattling in the last decade, which predictably encourages opponents to embrace more extreme positions in an ideological arms race.
It doesn’t take long for that mechanic to generate a chasm of understanding or respect, since reversing it would require one side to “disarm” in hopes their opponent would do the same and meet them in the middle. The trust just isn’t there and so the chasm continues to grow, further eroding trust along the way.
The point isn't whether misinformation should be shut. The point is who decides what is information and what is misinformation. And how do you stop vested interests from just branding anything they don't like as misinformation.
Problem is eventually true information gets labeled as misinformation and then censored. Happened and happens in lots of countries that enforce censorship such as USSR and China.
Everyone has an agenda and when the people who label something as misinformation are in a small group and are unaccountable to the public, it’s almost inevitable this will happen, considering the incentives.
I think you might be conflating macro and micro. At the level of a single issue it can be effective if used sparingly.
The argument, as I understand it, is that frequent and continued use of these techniques over time lead to those issues.
Anecdotally I have had several conversations with younger, misguided men, that considered the suppression of holocaust denial information was proof that it never happened. In their logic, why would would some much effort be placed in suppressing this information if it was so obviously false.
I think we're still learning. E.g.: deplatforming individuals works pretty well. Milo Y isn't relevant. On the other hand, there's some evidence that deplatforming movements is less effective: right-wing extremism shifting to Telegram, QAnon conspiracy theories moving to smaller forums. Possibly the effects vary depending on how large the population of believers has become?
I am in favor of shutting down misinformation (although I also know the same tools can be used for bad reasons), but I think the field of digital mass communication is young enough so that we're best served by remaining open to new discoveries.
I do wonder if we'd be better off phrasing this as a conversation about discoverability rather than one about censorship.
I really don't understand this: the left believe that they would never be censored? Censorship is about power, and the scale of power can tilt towards either side pretty soon. What if later the country moves towards the right, and the left gets censored for legitimate discussions on election fairness, on health care, on tax reform, on education, or on corruption of politicians? Would you left feel happy if your questions were labeled disinformation? The left did read history about how an entire nation got silenced, right?
A different way to look at this is to consider that 'the left' has already been through this, repeatedly, and is exploring ways to directly counter right-wing propaganda rather than passively sit back and assume the 'marketplace of ideas' will just take care of it as centrists tend to do.
It's unfortunate you're being downvoted for this, as it's true. It's literally illegal to teach anti-capitalist political philosophy in the UK, but there's endless whining about private corporations acting as they see fit with their own property.
Speaking as a leftist, I assume that corporations view me and my ideology as an enemy and would silence me and others like me if we became too influential. I don't think compelled speech is the answer, and I don't believe I have any intrinsic right to use social media to amplify my messages.
>Department for Education (DfE) guidance issued on Thursday for school leaders and teachers involved in setting the relationship, sex and health curriculum categorised anti-capitalism as an “extreme political stance” and equated it with opposition to freedom of speech, antisemitism and endorsement of illegal activity
I would argue that the left is already censored, so right wing censorship is just leveling up the field, but I guess it depends on how you define the left. When you have half the country assenting that a candidate who doesn't even believe in single payer Healthcare is "radical left",the all hope for discourse is gone.
> There are ways to educate people [to] identify when they are being lied to on the internet.
Do you have a link about this? Because I would love to know of such a technique. Some of my family doesn't know how to identify conspiracy theories from truths.
> There are ways to educate people to develop critical reading and identify when they are being lied to on the internet.
In my experience, the tech community hates this form of education (the humanities).
> having many different media platforms with different agendas allows for balance and exposure to various facts
This can be a false balance. The Clintons aren't drinking the blood of babies. Cranks suck up all of the oxygen around a discussion, they don't expand it.
> This can be a false balance. The Clintons aren't drinking the blood of babies. Cranks suck up all of the oxygen around a discussion, they don't expand it.
It isn't. Social media hasn't decided on its own that Biden won the election. The state governments that perform the election and publish the results did that.
If you want to know whether you are being lied to, learn math and science. The best info on covid, for example, doesn't come from any journalist, but from the CDC. You just need to know how to find and read it. What exactly do humanities courses help me with here?
> If you want to know whether you are being lied to, learn math and science.
I've got a PhD in CS. I've spent 22 years in the organized education system. Yet I'm barely able to actually understand research results in adjacent CS subfields, let alone an entire scientific discipline. It is absolutely not feasible for even a dedicated person to become meaningfully expert in a large number of fields.
> What exactly do humanities courses help me with here?
The primary loop of humanities work is critical analysis of texts written by humans. A field like history is literally media analysis, except that the media was created by actors in the past rather than actors today.
True (or mostly so), but not useful. Math is obscure, and science is not trusted.
Not that "we" are any better -- we can't even get technologists (or doctors) to understand statistics. How can we hope for a general-population understanding of scientific process?
My answer: We can't. We can hope for leadership that steers the conversation in a useful direction, but democracy sometimes gets in the way of the elevation of useful leaders, and the media has no interest in promoting good (mostly boring) governance.
HN and other forums are also social media though, no? Whether it's online or a billboard on the town square it's still social media in a sense. Personally I agree with your sentiment, but in my mind I equate no social media with "the giants" like Facebook, Instagram, tiktok, Snapchat I guess.
I'm not sure exactly what makes them different from more focused forums, but it's something and – in my opinion – I don't think it's a net good for society.
Personally, I have no account with these services. I used to but I deleted all of them and it's made my life richer, not poorer.
I most certainly have, but regardless I fail to see your point. Do you mean to suggest Facebook et al don't have rules or don't enforce those rules? That's just objectively false.
The platforms are designed for growth, forums aren’t. Rule enforcement isn’t their priority and it’s much harder to do it at their scale. Pretty simple really.
I don't have all the answers, but many G7 governments have been working on laws to hold social media accountable for hate speech, including Canada, where hate speech online is not legal.
Pornhub (based in Canada) recently decided to allow uploads only from verified accounts due to political pressure. Twitter/Fb could also require ID verification, for example. They basically already do (require a cell number after account creation), but it's not enforced in all countries.
Anyway, no magic bullet, but if they are held accountable, they will find solutions pretty quickly, as Pornhub did.
> Censorship and sanctions are less preferred because: 1. They create even more distrust and encourage conspiracy theories
Do you have evidence for that? What if you're wrong and your suggestion is making it worse? It's bold to claim in the age of social media that you know the best way to control it when we're in new territory.
It's not like the 80s or 90s when the only way to get and spread news was gated through a small number of newspapers and TV channels. If the media at the time refused to publish a story because of quality or trustworthiness issues, is that really so different here?
I'm not sure that every writer has an agenda. When talking about vaccines or other things that generally benefit everyone, I certainly don't have an agenda, and I expect that genuine researchers (probably most of them, just that we don't necessarily know which) are the same. Well, unless you consider decreasing worldsuck to be an agenda.
Actively exposing yourself is also not something I expect to be helpful. I dove into the 5G conspiracy theory and it's not like the statements or the people are retarded. They will bring reasonable-sounding arguments and respond to you in proper language. I needed to dig rather deep and have a really decent understanding of radio-related topics to know that there isn't a grain of truth to it. For example, digging into sources of sources of sources, you discover that the trail runs cold. Does that mean a statement was made up, or that you just can't find it? It's rather hard to prove that a certain paper does not exist (some of the court-submitted documents referenced papers published by reputable organisations and I figured "surely they don't lie to the court, this has to be somewhere?!" It's a huge time sink and I even got help from one of the believers in digging up the reference, but I never found it and they never got back to me). And even if you find the source, how can you tell if it's real if you don't have a basic understanding of the topic yourself? Exposing yourself to the other side mainly helps when you currently believe the conspiracy theory, which is exactly what you're trying to prevent in the first place. If you're susceptible to this sort of thing, I'd not be surprised if this advice gets more people sucked into the wrong things.
Twitter (and social media) is largely not journalism. Twitter is a for-profit organization that chooses how to obtain maximum profit. So far, profit comes from user engagement, regardless of the nature of content. That they are choosing to intervene with the user-created content in new ways does not change their top-level goals. Their responsibility is to make money, and any lesser goals they decide are company values. If you disagree with those values, specifically that misinformation that erodes a bedstone of elected representative democracies should be discouraged on their platform, then by all means, encourage as many people as you wish not to use this ad-supported corporation.
> educate people to develop critical reading and identify when they are being lied to
All we need to see are nationwide initiatives being planned, funded and executed broadly across education channels.
Could you provide some references that indicate this is happening? Or at least beginning to happen? Is this a viable proposed solution, or is it rather a theoretical or philosophical alternative to real solutions to the mass misinformation crisis?
Nonsense. Targeted censorship has the exact effect of taking the steam out of nonsensical conspiracy theories because you stop the spread of incorrect ideas.
The root problem is how to decide what idea is incorrect. Usually this is decided by a public debate, where multiple people express their opinions, and the issue is concluded after reading and being exposed to the different perspectives. The problem with social media platforms censorship is that it is decided very quickly by a small group of people, without understanding the full scope of perspectives on the matter.
This is why:
> you stop the spread of incorrect ideas
is a dangerous method - you do stop the spread, but who says you do it right?
I'd argue that it's rarely been decided by a public debate. It's traditionally been decided by (for example) the small number of companies who are in the business of publishing textbooks. Or the small number of people who teach law at prestigious universities. Or the small number of people who decide which textbooks will be bought in Texas, particularly since Texas is a large enough market so that this decision affects other states as well. Or religious figures, laying down a decision about what doctrine can be taught in churches.
Obviously in the past these small groups of people have made the wrong decision, and sometimes that's had very bad consequences. I am not arguing that this is a good methodology. I am arguing that we can't assume that public debate will generate a better set of decisions.
At some point, even though all of this is subjective, it’s common sense and we can go back and forth on this endlessly but it’s wholly apparent that false conspiracies that threaten the stability of the best society the world has seen should not be encouraged. So most of us, and the people in power make that decision especially given that the company is private and they can do what they want.
Given the russia hoax, the ukraine hoax, the pretend-the-hunter-biden-laptop-is-russian-disinformation hoax only the willfully ignorant would trust anything that comes out of mainstream journalism these days. They have an agenda and they're buddies with big tech.
It's going to be quite something to see if twitter/facebook/google can create a digital ghetto for half the country.
Good God people, we are above this ridiculousness. Can we please just talk about the philosophy and principles here? If you mention the name of a politician you've already lost.
I tend to be more on the left but I still value free speech and I'm anti-censorship. Can we talk about that?
1. Is what Twitter is doing censorship?
2. If so is it ok?
3. Are we setting dangerous precedents?
4. Should big tech companies be trusted with this power?
These are important questions and this community is well positioned to discuss these.
1. Not in the sense we normally understand it. They’re interfering with a massive tactical misinformation campaign that’s attempting to weaponize their platform. It’s in the same bucket as banning ISIS from using their platform as a recruiting tool.
2. Yes, but it’s a real problem that they’ve created a platform where it’s necessary for them to do this.
3. Oh, absolutely. This is not a situation we want to be in.
4. No.
The harder question is how do we get out of this situation, and if its possible at all without shutting down all the social networks.
I'm still not understanding why we are questioning their right to do this? Back in the old days, you paid for an advertisement in the newspaper. Your right to post that ad was completely controlled by that paper. If you posted an ad with inflammatory or blatantly false information, the newspaper would refuse to run your ad.
Imagine if I was Nixon running against JFK, and I attempted to buy an ad in the Times on the second page, immediately after the election, indicating that the election was fraudulent, and that I had actually won. Would anybody have run that ad? Absolutely not. What's incredible is that Twitter does actually allow these tweets but simply indicates the facts may not be accurate.
But we all understand that an old newspaper is quite different, right? Now 'news' is instantaneous, simultaneously 'published' everywhere, unedited, capable of rousing the rabble like a lightening rod...
Yes, and obviously I understand the legal difference between these two models as well. Section 230 is still an experiment, one that was put in place primarily to protect intermediaries, like ISPs. It allows for a free and open Internet, and without it, the Internet as we know it is dead.
How do we square this against the control and restrictions a publisher has? Because that is what keeps publishers in check, and prevents them from printing lies, or publishing things that are too radical. And how do we pragmatically solve this issue, in a way that can be as fast as the Internet?
One way to look at it might be, how bad would this dystopia look, you know, the one where a 'publisher' is redefined a bit. Section 230 should continue to protect ISPs, and Proxies, and anything that supports complete and total net neutrality. But any service that 'filters' what I see, in any way whatsoever, should automatically fall under old school publisher libel laws. That's the issue. It's not that Facebook or Twitter are broadcasting freely, it's that they are modifying and adjusting what user's see, using unknown algorithms. Much like the FCC regulates the RF spectrum, and approves devices, the FCC needs to approve algorithms, and determine if they qualify for Section 230. Fixed it. Discuss.
Do they ban ISIS? Because it looks like they've spent more time going after Trump and his base than they've done actually fighting the spread of Islamic extremism on it's platform. You can find old accounts with horrific stuff said about the very society we live in, about LGBTQ rights, about women's rights, etc. I think Twitter is taking the easy way out.
When I grew up, before the internet, all media was owned by big corporations. They 100% controlled what was distributed.
Now people are complaining that corporations decide that they allow comments on their platforms. Big deal.
I already know what you are thinking: but these corporations are monopolies! Well, it's corporationS, so probably not. We have Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, various news sites, etc. Plus we still have all traditional things like TV, radio and newspapers.
If democracy didn't fall in the past 50 years, it's probably not because big corporations decide which information to spread.
All the misinformation that is now out there, spread by lunatics, is probably a bigger threat.
As a general rule, when engaging with thoughtful people, if your presumption is that it's obvious you are correct and a phrase like "big deal" enters ones repertoire, it's probably a sign you are not arguing the same point, since if it was so obvious then thoughtful people would have come to the same conclusion.
One reason this issue is worthy of debate is because it is novel - we have not been a position before where there are a few global scale 'public squares' under centralized corporate control, through which it seems inevitable the whole world's discourse will flow through in some form or another. Nevermind the fact that these corporations' business models are directly tied to influencing human behavior on those platforms - the incentives align in a direction that seems incredibly harmful both in theory and practice.
As society evolves and advances, particularly an advanced society like ours with many exponentially advancing elements, new emergent phenomenona appear. We ought to not appeal to tradition to guide us in all cases: we could be dealing with something genuinely new that our generation needs to address directly, because our ancestors could not foresee it, even though they tried to create generalized systems. I would argue that is the case now, much like it was the case in the response to large changes in society like the industrial revolution and the creation of nuclear weapons. In fact, your mention of monopolies is an exact example of this: we created this concept in a legal sense, in response to unexpected damages that come from having monopolistic actors. If anything, leveraging the argument of monopolies existing or not in your argument is a tacit concession that such structures can be created and have moral weight in determining how we should act.
In our era, arguing society needs to create new legal and policy structures to ensure social media and these global public squares best serve us all seems reasonable to propose. We seem less likely to do that insofar as people reject the idea that such a discussion is ridiculous, because we already have all the existing mental models and tools we need to address the problems they bring.
I'm sympathetic to the "we survived worse we'll survive this too" but it certainly is quite novel in many ways. I don't want to be cliche at this point but I'm sure the Roman Empire thought they'd survived worse too.
I don't consider myself one of the "scared of AI" people but I do approach it with caution. Even if "AI" doesn't gain some power, there's no doubt that using technology some _humans_ have gained _enormous_ power over others that hasn't historically been possible, even for the most vicious of tyrants. History has also demonstrated that some people can be really nasty when controlling others.
By no means am I saying FB, Twitter, etc are controlling tyrants. The idea that people don't do well with power seems relevant though.
> In our era, arguing society needs to create new legal and policy structures to ensure social media and these global public squares best serve us all seems reasonable to propose.
I fully agree with that. But I think the point that I'm trying to make is different.
> we have not been a position before where there are a few global scale 'public squares' under centralized corporate control
I think that we differ in opinion here. The novelty from my point of view is not 'centralized corporate control', because we always had that. The novelty is 'global scale public squares', because we never had that at this scale.
So the real novelty and concern in my opinion is not that corporations try to control those squares, but more that those squares are opened up to everyone to say any crazy thing they want.
I'm not arguing for or against it, because I think it's a very complex topic. I dislike censorship just like anyone else, but I also dislike spreading disinformation to large groups of people.
Specifically: what happens when the social media companies start abusing this once it is accepted? What if they start discrediting those calling for antitrust, demergers, and breakups?
1. No, the post is still available for viewing. They're just stopping it from spreading. I'm free to write an article. A media company like NY Times or Fox has no obligation to spread that article to their viewers.
2. Yes - you should be free to use the platform but there is no right to have your thoughts shared automatically to others.
3. No. People are extrapolating this into wild future scenarios.
4. This isn't power, it's responsibility. I think it's a good thing that Twitter is taking an effort to deal with this.
> Can we please just talk about the philosophy and principles here?
Not everything fits into incredibly simple one-sentence principles. There seems to be a bias in some communities towards trying to make absolute approaches to complex problems and the false conclusion that if we don't have an absolute principle that we have failed.
1. I don't think so. Not in the "free speech" sense. Twitter owns itself and should be permitted to do as it pleases with its property.
2. I don't think it's okay, but I think a proper response to it lies in the social sphere, not at the end of the government gun.
3. I think this is probably an inevitable outcome for humanity's first swing at social media. It's centralized and so will come under the control of some partisan group or another. I think the behavior will push us inevitably towards more decentralized platforms.
4. I'm not convinced they have power - not power that can't be removed from them by society, anyway. If they misbehave or underperform enough, society will move on. See MySpace.
Abstraction without reference to concrete available examples is likely to result in beautiful theories unmoored from reality.
I personally prefer a maximalist position of no censorship of any kind ever. I would also like to live in a world populated solely by philosopher-scholars in which reach is based solely on the intellectual content of one's ideas, and phenomena like spam and marketing did not exist. Alas, I do not.
If twitter and facebook disappeared tomorrow, along with parler, gab, mastodon and all other similar social feeds; would your life be better, or worse?
I don't necessarily think that's wrong, but I do think (in general) that government has a role in protecting people from "private compan[ies] exercising their free market rights" when it crosses a line (i.e. regulation, etc). I couldn't tell you where that line is or where it should be, and I'm not even saying Twitter has crossed it (I increasingly wonder if they have but it's so hard to know with the limited information and visibility I have).
But I do think we're running out of time to do anything about it should action be appropriate. If Twitter is stepping over the line in taking down people that speak against the incoming administration, that said administration is going to protect them? I highly doubt it. (I wouldn't expect Conservatives would either were the tables turned for the record. In fact they have a history of jailing people protesting wars and what not, so I know they wouldn't).
I just fundamentally disagree that this can be reduced to the philosophy and principles. I've consistently objected to Twitter doing this kind of thing in the past, and I don't want them to continue doing it in the future, but this one situation is a very special case.
I don't think that you can stick to philosophical principles because those tend to be too simplistic and real life is messy.
Twitter as a private entity should in theory have the right to do whatever they want. OTOH, their platform gives them influence over the democratic process. In theory people shouldn't be censored. OTOH it is easy to fool people with targeted propaganda.
Philosophizing is not going to get you anywhere, really. It's a technique of the past. There are many competing effects at play here. I think the more rational approach is to actually study the real world system to find a policy optimum that achieves a set goal. Philosophy should be relegated to figuring out that goal e.g. should it be democracy over all else or maybe individual rights or something else.
I don't think we can escape philosophy. For example you it sounds to me like you are arguing for the philosophy of pragmatic consequentialism :-D
Who's outcome is most important here then? Is it Twitter's, is it the users, or the public at large? And how do you determine which is what? Draw a line at 50% and say if it benefits (a subjective measure) more than 50% then it's a good outcome, otherwise bad?
It has been fascinating to watch the pendulum swing back and forth between headlines that social media platforms aren’t doing enough to curb misinformation and headlines that social media platforms are overstepping their bounds by trying to intervene when their platforms are used for misinformation.
Obviously everyone has different opinions on the matter, but I’m beginning to suspect that the Venn diagram of the two sides of this debate has a lot of overlap in the middle. It seems we’ve entered an era where it’s trendy to despise social media platforms regardless of what they do or don’t do. Cynicism reigns supreme in the public discourse about social media platforms.
Everyone seems to carve out an exception for their preferred platform, though. Twitter users mock Facebook and brag about deleting their FB accounts. Redditors mock Twitter users. Hacker News comments are frequently self-congratulatory for “quitting” other social media platforms and so on.
Ironically, the more we hear about social media platforms, the more people seem to forget that these are really driven by concerning underlying social issues. Why are so many people willingly subscribing to the people peddling misinformation in the first place? It’s hardly limited to one platform. The prevailing narrative that a handful of engineers are shaping the thoughts of the nation by manipulating “the algorithm” to emphasize divisive content ignores the fact that people seem more eager than ever to engage with it. Some times I suspect that what the social media cynics really want is for us to return to a time when the communicating on the internet was only accessible to the few of us who were willing and able to figure it out. Now that the genie is out of the bottle and everyone can access global communication with ease, we need to accept that these are societal problems, not just the side effects of a few engineers tweaking algorithms.
It’s also time that we start expecting people to take some responsibility for their own social media usage. We’ve spent so much time blaming “the algorithm” that people now treat social media as an uncontrollable black box or even an addictive drug. It’s time we normalized things like muting the friends you don’t want to see in your feed, unfollowing people who rile you up, and otherwise curating the content we all consume. Contrary to what I read online, it’s trivially easy to tune my Facebook feed and use social media responsibly. However, we never hear about responsible use. It’s always just “delete your Facebook account” or other extreme measures that don’t work for grandma who really just doesn’t want to miss out on photos from family. It’s time we start educating people on responsible use instead of preaching social media abstinence as the only solution.
You make it sound foolish and shallow, but I think it's quite reasonable that the venn diagram has overlap in the middle. These platforms quite intentionally assumed two contradictory roles: that of editor, and that of public square.
When they take steps that are consistent with one of those roles' responsibilities, they undercut the other. To the extent that they quite intentionally did their best to assume both of those roles, it's not entirely ridiculous to give them flak for failing to meet the expectations of those roles.
I'd be more sympathetic if not for the fact that they got into that position entirely intentionally.
>Twitter users mock Facebook. Redditors mock Twitter users. Hacker News comments are frequently self-congratulatory for “quitting” other social media platforms and so on.
I don't smoke Marlboros like some kind of animal, I smoke Parliaments.
>Some times I suspect that what the social media cynics really want is for us to return to a time when the communicating on the internet was only accessible to the few of us who were willing and able to figure it out.
I think you're close, but I don't think the inaccessibility made that time period so charming. Not every website used to have a cookie policy and push notifications and a recommendation engine showing you the hottest articles you have to read.
It’s naive and simple explanation, that social media are fully responsible for a divide, but people like that.
People here like to believe there’s only one bad guy, and before internet being available to non-geeks (who view themselves as smarter than rest of society) and social media, we were all living in one big global kumbaya.
I don’t want to remove all blame from social media - they do contribute to a divide, but their impact is vastly overblown.
Those who make the world smaller by drawing it toward them (and especially who profit from it) wind up at the epicenter of the resultant territory war.
I'm not a Twitter user, nor do I particularly like the cult that has formed around it, but I really like Twitter's approach to Trump's dangerous lies: put it on display and then explain why it is absolute horse shit. It's not censorship in the slightest...they don't stop him from making an ass of himself. They combat the free speech lies with some free speech of their own: the truth.
That being said, I wish this sort of Twitter treatment extended to people that aren't the president, who enjoys some sort of special exemption from the normal ToS.
I disagree on the overstepping. Twitter is a private company and can do what they want. There's entire forums online dedicated to flat earth theory, government intervention is not needed.
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
You want to remove this?
So the runners of every forum on the internet will be responsible for content posted?
Not all forums engage in this type of moderation. In fact, most don’t. At some point, moderation turns you into a publisher. For example, book publishers generally work by receiving content from authors, deciding which works they would like to publish while rejecting others, and then using their distribution power to send it out to people around the world.
What part of that process is different from what Twitter is engaging in here?
Really? I'm gonna say that posting pics of your butt on non-porn forums is gonna get you booted from most of them, likewise if you post spam or contraband media. Even on social media where no moderation facilities exist, if one or a few participants are serially abusing the channel and can't be persuaded to stop or leave, the other users will tend to set up a new channel that doesn't include those bad actors and be more careful about who they invite in future.
It sounds like you are complaining about the inability to game the system (in this case the TOS) by demanding that all potential abuses be proscribed in advance or excluded from moderation.
No, we're saying that currently the platforms enjoy unlimited immunity.
Courts have departed from the most natural reading of the text by giving internet companies immunity for their own content. Section 230(c)(1) protects a company only when content is "provided by /another/ information content provider". Nowhere does this provision protect a company that is itself the information content provider.
And an information content provider is not just the primary author or creator, it is anyone "responsible, /in whole or in part/, for the creation of development" of the content. (words of justice Thomas)
Because of Youtube/Twitter/FB selective showing of content outside of the good faith clause, they should be liable, yes. Keep the law, just enforce it. If you're not going to enforce it, you might as well get rid of it.
They currently enjoy unlimited immunity in a way the spirit of the law does not allow. You can't enjoy tax breaks etc. of being a platform and then go and ban content that you don't agree with, but which is not harmful in the way the law lets you do. I.e. the law lets you remove illegal content, but if you are being treated as a platform, you can't just go and, oh, I don't know, not let the New York Post show a breaking story about Hunter Biden's laptop.
Exactly. They are either a publisher or a platform. There is no in between. They need to take their pick, and deal with the liability if they want to continue on the publisher path.
> They are either a publisher or a platform. There is no in between.
In the print world there is an in between: distributors, such as bookstores, newsstands, and libraries.
They do not become liable for false claims in books they sell. It is the authors or publishers of those books who are liable. If the bookstore itself produced libelous material, such as in a press release, they would be liable for that.
Book distributors generally will carry any book given them by a publisher, regardless of content. Twitter is engaging in moderation, which puts them not just in the business of distribution. They are playing the publisher role - receiving content from authors and deciding whether or not to publish it. That is the very definition of a publisher. And yes, publishers can indeed be sued.
I don't have a tendency to believe in misinformation, I have a strong rational way of assessing information.
I read recent changes in global politics like this:
Lets control the Internet, let us use it only for Digital ID,contact tracing, face recognition,IOT software and corporate approved messages, lets DRM every bit of entertainment a put an order in this chaos. If you don't agree with this, sorry you have no choice, we are the owners you are the slaves. This is the future. This is the big reset. You are polluting the Earth, here listen to this autistic kid, she is our mascot, because of the children. Don't ask about pedophilia in high levels of society, don't ask about covert operations and psyops, this is conspiracy, there are no such things, the powers that be always have your interest in heart.
This is the beginning of a very dark moment in human history, freedom of speech is not a relative idea. Factually freedom of speech is the reason for us to advance. Debating with clear intent to objective analysis is the way forward. This shit reminds me of dark ages of Inquisition, and actually is fascism and big corporatism in action. Do not expect people to applaud or comply. People will revolt. Just saying:)
Unfortunately my countrymen are not known for their rational level-headed discourse, and tech workers really aren't inherently better people just because they know computer stuff.
> my countrymen are not known for their rational level-headed discourse
How does this help? Also it's not about being tech-savvy or not, yes we're all normal people. It's trying to maintain a level of reason on this forum. I'm genuinely interested in what people think of what Twitter does, but the tone of nearly every reply in the thread is somewhere between mildly polarized and extremist/conspiracy theorist.
Your post implied that you believed HN users above devolving into political bickering. My reply is meant as explanation as to why that belief is unfounded. Should we be better? Yes, but as long as we aren't banning political discussion entirely it's going to happen.
It's easy to say that people simply aren't better than this and this will simply continue to happen. I don't completely believe that. I was hoping that writing the above comment might inspire those not already crazed to maintain a more rational tone and perhaps flag and downvote more on the level of "merits the conversation" than "I (dis)agree with this".
> It's easy to say that people simply aren't better than this and this will simply continue to happen. I don't completely believe that.
Trusting in people's good nature alone has never worked. If the community doesn't implement some mechanism to control the activity it doesn't want, then it will be done. You can refuse to believe that if you want, but I think you will find that belief challenged by reality.
Not coincidentally, a mechanism of control for dealing with undesirable behavior is exactly what this whole Twitter thing is about in the first place. Since we've agreed that people here are not inherently better than the general populace, what makes you think that HN is more immune to this sort of thing than a community like Twitter or reddit?
We do have some mechanisms to control activity that we don't want, but we do need to be level-headed enough to use it.
> what makes you think that HN is more immune to this sort of thing than a community like Twitter or reddit?
I've always perceived HN as fairly elitist, e.g. composed of many top earners and skilled people. The term is often meant negatively; in this case it might be a positive feature. Reminding people that they're on HN, where I think most expect a higher standard than on Twitter or reddit, might make them try to be better. I'm not saying we are composed of some elite, just observing that it's often perceived that way and that we can actually try to use that notion in a good way, to improve the conversation.
I mean, there’s an attempted coup going on. It strikes me as unreasonable to expect a normal, dispassionate conversation on the topic of “the outgoing government says they might refuse to leave”.
Do you think there are many people here that would support a breakdown of the democratic process, a coup? I'd hope that those people are in the vast minority. You can be passionate about a topic but that's different than extremist. I'm passionate about privacy but it's not like I think that people using Facebook are retarded and write about it in full caps.
> Do you think there are many people here that would support a breakdown of the democratic process, a coup? I'd hope that those people are in the vast minority.
Your naivete is being taken advantage of by bad faith actors.
It's a bit ridiculous at this stage to suppose that those supporting Trump's coup attempt are doing so in good faith.
If you are not an American, I suppose it makes sense that you are not aware of the current political climate. If you are American, then you've been deliberately ignoring the obvious.
Do you think there are many people here that would support a breakdown of the democratic process, a coup?
There's enough. Aggregating various recent polling, it seems that about 1 person in 8 is OK with that, and maybe 2 more (for a total of 3/8) are passively in favor - that is to say, they won't do anything about it, but won't object if it happens. You don't need a majority of people to support a coup; indeed, that's kinda why it's such an attractive option to the unscrupulous.
An important problem nowadays is that our media and interpersonal communications take place at lightning speed, but out political technology is many respects still rooted int he 18th century, and our administrative technology covers a span from 19th century unresponsive bureaucracy to 21st century oppressive surveillance. Politics as presently constituted does not work well for a lot of people, and so they are not invested in maintaining the status quo.
Put simply, our economic infrastructure is highly distributed, but power is highly centralized and that makes a lot of people angry.
While I don't entirely disagree with what you're saying, I think you have to be pretty cautious about looking at social media. You could (and many people I'm familiar with did!) scan Twitter around the time of the Seattle autonomous zone and see lots of people calling for the rule of law to end.
Just last week there was a case filed with the Supreme Court, asking them to throw out the election results in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona. (Hopefully we can agree that this would be a coup if it happened?) The President, most of his party in the House, and almost 20 states explicitly endorsed it.
Challenging the validity of an election is not a "coup". We need these challenges to keep our elections secure. I cheered Hillary for telling Biden not to concede under any circumstances.
The left-biased media was worried about election fraud for months before the election (good!) and are now declaring it the "most secure election in American history" in spite of the broad introduction of mail-in voting.
People living in democracies should scrutinize the hell out of their elections.
They challenged the validity of the election, and they failed. Yet they continue to insist on fighting a losing battle and possibly refusing to leave the White House.
That's called a coup attempt. A pathetic one, sure. But a coup attempt nonetheless.
No, they are challenging the validity of the election and have so far failed. This is an ongoing process. You don't get to declare it a one-and-done just because you don't like that it's happening.
To quote Justice robert Jackson on the nature of the Supreme Court, "We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final."
I agree with you int hat I think people should have a chance to deploy their arguments but you need to bear in mind that there are a lot of people who are willing and able to resort to force in place of argument.
But the challengers have not proven themselves to be honest/trustworthy players so far. They go on camera and claim to have seen "massive fraud" but so far have presented no compelling evidence to the courts, just rambling confused arguments that judges have thrown out...
There are many cases being presented in the courts, by many plaintiffs. I'd be surprised if there weren't some frivolous ones in there. That doesn't mean they all are, and we can't know until they are presented. If your argument is simply "No good case has been made yet, therefore no good case can be made," well, I don't think anyone with sound reasoning skills will agree with that.
No good case has been made yet, out of a hundred cases. To believe that a good case could be made but they simply didn't is to believe in a ridiculously high level of incompetence of the best minds the president could assemble. It's extremely strong evidence that no good case could be made. It's not 100% but nothing is 100%.
No, your argument requires that we ignore the fact that good cases may take time to develop.
Consider the Voter Integrity Fund by Matt Braynard. It's one of the more convincing arguments I've heard to date, and involved making many thousands of phone calls, analyzing the resulting data, generating reports, and collecting sworn testimony. All that didn't happen overnight, and they didn't begin immediately after the election.
>I'd be surprised if there weren't some frivolous ones in there.
But the frivolous ones are being made by a team of "presidential" "lawyers"...
> If your argument is simply "No good case has been made yet, therefore no good case can be made"
That's not my argument, nice effort trying to use your powers of deduction, but I'd take it back to the supplier and tell them it's defective.
> we can't know until they are presented.
So should we give Team Total Landscaping all the time they'd like?
I would bet some money that there was at least 1 fraudulent vote during the whole election. I would bet more money that there weren't that many fraudulent votes that if they were cancelled it would flip the results and give Trump the win. Trump and Giuliani are screaming "massive fraud", which sounds like they have a good case, but they've shown up to the court empty handed. Some have argued "they're just preparing the very good case", geezus christ that's not how that works, and besides, their time is running out.
If a team of astrophycists from a famous university started screaming "Something's happened to the sun, it won't rise tomorrow", we'd pay attention. If we ask them to show us what data they have, but they refuse, and they just continue yelling shit, we'd start wondering if they're still sane. And if the sun rose tomorrow, we'd be more certain that they've lost the plot. Maybe they'd change their claims, still offering no proof, but if the sun still rose the next day...
If a group of homeless people claimed the same thing, we'd probably laugh and continue with our day. Sadly some people are being fooled by a bunch of "homeless" people, probably willingly because they can't admit to themselves that they've been fooled by conmen.
Election challenges are fine! If Trump concedes on Monday after the Electoral College vote, I'll happily admit that I was wrong about this issue and I let my paranoia get the better of me.
I think he's made it clear that he will not do that, and election fraud challenges are just the easiest strategy currently available to pursue his objective of staying in power.
I think I mostly agree with your first statement. I have a different take on the legal proceedings (there's still the vote count, at which point congress can make challenges, etc.)
But certainly there are limits to how far the challenge can go. I'll be right there LOLing with you if he needs to be bodily removed from the WH. I disagree that he's given any indication that he'd go that far, though. Once his options are exhausted, he'll leave.
I'm fine with private platforms (including HN) getting to decide what is and isn't harmful to the community. Should HN allow low effort comments and memes in the name of free speech? When online communities have no moderation, they inevitably get hijacked and become awful.
It's actually nice that instead of Twitter just hiding/deleting the offending posts, the posts are still there for you to see (in a less convenient way) so you can decide yourself that you're happy with the standards Twitter is trying to set.
If you're not happy, you're free to go find or create another community online that has moderation you're happy with. I don't understand how anyone can feel they should be allowed to inject themselves into a community and act however they want with no repercussions, and everyone else just has to put up with it.
Facebook and Twitter are not communities in any meaningful sense, because they are global, and generally speaking meant for "anybody" to talk about "anything" (of course the limits of this generality are exactly what's under discussion). More like a telephone.
The proper analogy to HN's moderation would be the owner of a FB Group kicking someone, which I believe is fine and good. What Facebook and Twitter are doing, and especially as they move beyond the less-controversial "hate speech" to the more controversial "disinformation", is the whole global platform moderating everything, and is veering dangerously close to being... I'm struggling with the word, but something like partisan but less one-dimensional. It's not hard to see this path leading to these global platforms simply causing the speech that occurs on them to match the politics of the people in charge at Facebook and Twitter. And nobody needs to hear for the billionth time about the rights of private companies and the law - we know, so save your keystrokes, please.
> Facebook and Twitter are not communities in any meaningful sense, because they are global, and generally speaking meant for "anybody" to talk about "anything"
Why do Facebook and Twitter not have an "I hate this" reaction (I'm aware Facebook added "angry" but this was fairly recent)? Or a way to mark people as enemies as well as friends? Why do they prevent you posting certain kinds of graphic videos or images? Why don't Twitter let you post messages of any length? These are all limits to your freedom to express yourself.
They let you create your own groups/communities, but Twitter and Facebook clearly have their own idea of what they believe to be healthy discourse and what kind of interactions they want to nurture, and they encourage that through their UI features and moderation. Same with HN with upvotes/downvotes, who gets to vote and dedicated site moderators.
> is the whole global platform moderating everything,
It's not as simple as you're making out. I'd be against my ISP moderating what I post online, but there's more to the internet than just Facebook and Twitter. They might be popular but they don't have absolute control and aren't a prerequisite to other forms of communication or self-organisation (unlike your ISP or mobile provider).
> Instead, when users attempted to react to or share the tweet, a message popped up from the platform reading, “we try to prevent a Tweet like this that otherwise breaks the Twitter Rules from reaching more people, so we have disabled most of the ways to engage with it.”
The policy on claims about elections appears to be outlined here:
> We will label or remove false or misleading information intended to undermine public confidence in an election or other civic process. This includes but is not limited to:
> disputed claims that could undermine faith in the process itself, such as unverified information about election rigging, ballot tampering, vote tallying, or certification of election results; and
> misleading claims about the results or outcome of a civic process which calls for or could lead to interference with the implementation of the results of the process, e.g. claiming victory before election results have been certified, inciting unlawful conduct to prevent the procedural or practical implementation of election results (note that our violent threats policy may also be relevant for threats not covered by this policy).
Twitter is really building a quagmire for itself here. It's trivial to "dispute" a claim. Who "verifies" a claim?
What Twitter really seems to be saying is that they'll remove content they don't like. There's veneer of process and impartiality, but it crumbles even on superficial examination.
Why not just come out and say that Twitter owns the platform and will delete or manipulate anything at any time for any reason?
It's easy to imagine this happening the opposite of what I presume is the intended effect. I can easily visualize a future in which these sorts of tactics inflame and divide, and cause some people to give the claims more weight, not less.
Less easy, at least for me, is to imagine a future where this strategy results in a more civil and evidence-based dialogue. If the surface on which claims can be compared and evaluated, absent restrictions placed by the platform itself, continually narrows, it seems to me that the civic dialogue necessarily narrows with it.
A desirable future for the information age is one in which quackish claims are endemic but ineffective.
It is shocking to me that some people actually prefer to rely on "fact checkers," as if those people are somehow more intelligent, and less biased than the readers themselves.
In fact, the idea that someone could check these facts for you, almost explicitly stipulates that you, the reader, are somehow less capable. But we are not talking about changing oil in the car, or doing brain surgery, we are talking about maybe the only thing that each individual can do on their own, unsupervised, to the beset of their ability - use their brain.
> It is shocking to me that some people actually prefer to rely on "fact checkers," as if those people are somehow more intelligent, and less biased than the readers themselves.
In the large majority of topics, there exist huge numbers of people who are far more expert than I am. I don't just prefer expert "fact checkers" in fields like medicine, law, science, plumbing, wiring, etc., I depend on them. Similarly, there are certainly journalists who have much more time and experience when it comes to these topics than I have.
If I have to investigate and validate or debunk every claim by myself, I'd never have time for anything else. I do a great deal of this already but it's sort of naive and egotistical to think one's capacities in this area are unlimited.
And to the extent that people do, it subjects them to manipulation - a strategy crudely referred to as 'flooding the zone with shit' in order to waste the time of the most discriminating and thoughtful on studying bullshit claims which take far less time to produce than to evaluate.
I'm rather looking forward to being bored for the next four years. Unremarkable displays of mere competence. The yawn-inducing functioning of a 'by the book' administrative organization. The dull business of sensible policies and reasonable proposals. Reporters nodding off during pressers. No longer cringing at the thought of checking the news. Not having to check the news anyway. Droning monotones explaining in far too much detail and precision things of little general interest. Sheer bliss...
Could they have implemented a voting ring detector instead, and not based it on what the content is?
I wonder if toxic content on Twitter could be dealt with more by limiting content that only gets engaged in an extremely polarizing way, with lots of brainless replies, or maybe content that is way more interesting to a person's followers than the rest of Twitter should be voting-ring-censored.
I do think Twitter is making an effort but they need more rigor. How do they classify what is misinformation. What is the guidelines? How do they identify information from misinformation?
Fighting misinformation needs a lot more structure. Otherwise it’s a slippery slope of censorship. I hope they keep on tweaking it until the majority of public can trust it.
Both FB and Twitter censored the news about criminal investigation of Hunter Biden before the election, citing "misinformation", "disinformation", or simply "conspiracy theory". And now MSMs are reporting the same investigation, even citing emails from Hunter's laptop. If this is not censorship, I don't know what it is. Or, per the left here, censor is totally justified if we label a piece of information as hate speech, disinformation, or whatever amoral in the left's eyes? As for facts or discourse, who cares, right?
America’s free speech is taken to the extreme. It cannot be possible in another country.
- Fix the law. Punish the lawyers, officials who violate the law.There should be some fucking fear for misusing the common people.
- Regulate social media and popular sites. For example: prevent actions (post, repost, likes etc) on social and political posts by unverified accounts.
No human has the right to threaten or use violence against another human for communicating data. American free speech isn't extreme, it's simply ethical.
A threat is itself just a kind of datum, describing a future intention of variable specificity. When you start to explore that boundary, it turns out to be rather fuzzy and fractal.
Before election: Hunter Biden case is a "Russian conspiracy" and labeled as fake news. Only news outlet posting about it gets discredited and shadow banned on social networks.
After election: Feds are on Hunter Biden case (before the election even!) and it is real. Coverage on news networks now.
All of this editorializing and censoring is setting a dangerous precedence. It's obvious there's some sort of agenda, just not sure what it is. Could it be that they (who is they even?) want Biden elected and then make him step down due to his son affairs so Harris becomes the first female president with a migration background?
"> Update: Twitter has now changed course and is allowing people to comment on and like Trump’s false election tweets after reading a short warning about them. They seem to have partially backed down here from the earlier policy of no liking and no commenting."https://twitter.com/arlenparsa/status/1337775151849627648
Good. He needs to finally shut up and get the hell out. The losing tantrum has continued long enough. Time to leave before he cracks the country in two irrevocably.
To those who are downvoting: he lost pretty much every legal case he threw at this problem. He lost the election. It wasn't stolen. Give it up. There's no Kraken, just a bunch of grifters trying to take your money (including Trump himself).
> Time to leave before he cracks the country in two irrevocably.
hasn't this already happened?
It'll take a long time to recover the damage done to foreign policy. even worse is the division, which was already present thanks to how distant people are if they are a few income brackets apart. he really knew how to worsen all this and make the chaos work for him.
whoever repairs the damage in the coming years has their work cut out. maybe we've learned something as a collective? (I don't think so because while humans are smart humanity is the worst)
Nah, but the Iran deal is almost dead, the US lost the leadership in the TPP, and although India, the Philippines, Korea, Japan and Australia played well, the CCP grabbed more power than ever in this trade deal.
The CCP also managed to take control of eastern Africa and managed to make an indian ocean trade route that COMPLETELY avoid India. Well done. Also during the squabble between Trump and Kim-Jun-Un, the CCP just send 4000 troups in 16 different location around the Indian ocean, to "secure their investment".
TBH i'm glad there is a little competition to the US, and that the CCP successfully outplayed the US on a diplomatic standpoint, but please don't conflate foreign policy and war. War is such a small part of foreign policy overall.
I think the poster you're replying to is just regurgitating the common right-wing talking point that Obama was a war-monger, and that Trump did not start any new wars. (Counterpoint: Under Trump, air strikes rules of engagement got loosened, and more civilians died: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/20... ).
On the topic of foreign policy fuck-ups, another consequence of Trump is that countries about to do deals with the USA under Biden will ask, "So, will this deal be undone in when the next administration comes to power?" and will be more hesistant or they'll manage to get a better bargain because of the US's loss of reputation.
> he lost pretty much every legal case he threw at this problem.
That’s an understatement. After the second loss in the Supreme Court he and his allies are at 1 win, 57 losses. He lost the election and lost every case that mattered, while winning one inconsequential case. What a loser.
I agree with you! The way the police acts is often awful and overly broad. I'm all for diminishing their power. But this makes your comment down the thread even more confusing. You said: "He's trying to be clever and say "civil war" without saying "civil war". The LARPers on the right seem to be enjoying this a great deal. I'm sure the FBI will be very interested in their calls for violence."
So, are you against using police force unnecessarily or for it? Because you seem to be saying that people should be visited by the FBI for their comments online, like it happened with this kid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgqeJi_Z6aM. Or are you only for it if it's against your political opponents?
Whoever instigates violence is at fault, let me get that clear.
But I believe there is a responsibility on the side of organizers to be more vocal about peace than they are about the change they are trying to implement as other more righteous and respectable figures have done in the past.
If you allow your movement to become one of violence and all you have to say is to point the finger at others, whether you are correct or not, you are grossly inferior of the civil rights movements of the past.
But I believe, as many others do, that this movement was not born to achieve any measure of civil rights, though that may be the intent of many.
Making an enemy of an clear necessity of any society ( a police force ) and only being satisfied when injustice is performed on the offender is madness. There are corrupt police, do something productive about. Burning your own house down solves nothing, unless perhaps your goal is a new house.
I've no problem with people protesting the gross incompetence of two poorly trained people in a position of relative power, I just think its ludicrous that it got turned into an excuse to loot and vandalise unrelated buildings and structures.
If your gripe is with the police, go and burn down a police station, not the Portland elk statue or a corner shop owned and run by your neighbour.
Maybe not, but going by all the "acab" graffiti on that elk, its not a hard jump for people to relate the two. It would be nice if certain organisations would have spoken out against the bad actors using their name to commit crimes.
> Heaven forbid that people protest getting killed randomly by the police.
Did anyone in power make any proposals on how to fix what was being protested about? In contrast, I saw a lot of politicians talking about how awful the protesters were as if they were protesting just for the sake of it.
Hence the reminder, both for GP and those voting in the thread. Most of the time it doesn't matter so much, but I figured I'd at least try to help preventing an echo chamber here where useless polarized statements are voted on based on how many followers that pole has...
After 4 years of hearing that Trump only got to where he was due to Russian interference without Twitter doing even a single fact check, let alone any banishments I think Twitter has a remarkably itchy trigger finger when it comes to Trump claiming similar reasons for Biden gaining the upper hand.
Contrary to the hypocritical ravings of the left, I think election challenges are healthy for democracy. I wish they happened every time. I don't have a lot of trust in them as-is, and whatever the outcome of Trump's challenges, one of them will be that anyone thinking about committing fraud will likely think again after all this.
In general most people I see aren’t against the legal challenges. They are against the trial in the court of his supporters opinion that he is running. Because arguments that are meritless/fabrications can be brought up with no repercussions. Based on the pitiful weak arguments he made in court it seems like his team wasn’t even trying to win an actual court case, they were playing it up to rally his base.
The trial in the court is a legal challenge. I don't really have a problem with Trump (or Biden) supporters being rallied. Why does "rally his base" have a bad connotation in your mind?
Because it tends to lead to public officials getting death threats or people with guns outside of their houses at night. Whatever that is, it's not rallying.
I think the angst in the public sphere is much, much deeper than some politician "rallying their base".
My take is that the federal government has accrued far, far more power than was ever intended. The entire population of the US has to fight over who is in charge at the federal level in order to live their lives the way they would like.
The founders had the right idea - a federation of states with a variety of laws that the people could choose among, glued together by a weak federal government.
That was the Articles of Confederation more than anything. The current federal government was meant to be strong after the fiascoes of the AC. And the Founders, once they were in power, almost universally worked towards a stronger federal government and concentrating power. I mean, Jefferson purchased Louisiana from Napoleon unilaterally without consulting congress; maybe the most massively illegal abuse of power in the history of the US.
It’s ok to challenge and ask for proof. It’s not ok to blatantly ignore this proof once provided without any justification. It’s not ok to “feel” something is’t right because it’s against your bias.
I downvoted you. I'm a German who, like most Germans, does not like Trump.
The article is about Twitter exploring new ways to shape interactions with the content from Trump, a retreating politician, on their platform.
This development is far more relevant to me than the largely US american pro/contra Trump debate, as my own societies discourse is dependent on those very same platforms.
I therefore believe that it is completely wrong to justify Twitter's continuing trials on discoursive influence over the notion that it's alright since Trump might be a particularly bad actor.
I think that's off topic and misses the point.
I just thought I'll explain since the thread appears to be very heated right now. People might attribute up & downvotes to a far smaller set of reasons than they should on a platform as global as HN.
Armed with what? Since about March or April we've had a not insignificant number of people armed with Molotov cocktails, what difference is there when they are armed with factory made weapons? Frankly, anyone that threatens or carries out acts of violence is at fault, regardless of their political persuasion - don't turn a blind eye to actual criminals just because you think you might agree with them.
Since about March or April we've had a not insignificant number of people armed with Molotov cocktails, what difference is there when they are armed with factory made weapons?
Those people with molotov cocktails have been almost exclusively targeting property rather than people, and specifically corporate rather than personal property. I'm not suggesting you should approve that, but it is categorically different.
As for your question, it makes a huge difference. While any weapon can be used to inflict harm (by definition), some make that significantly easier than others. It's facile to ignore this and pretend all harms are equivalent.
What if he tweeted encouraging people to go murder [insert any of the groups he has repeatedly attacked] ? Would the absolutism of allowing that outweigh the obvious problems it would bring on?
Four US presidents have been assasinated, two wounded, and there have been attempts on many more, including Trump. Clearly speech critical of the president cannot be allowed on twitter.
I originally left out the word "he," which made my question less clear. But if a president encouraged murder, do you think that should be left alone? What if he tweeted he would pardon anyone, even further encouraging it?
> The article is about Twitter exploring new ways to shape interactions with the content from Trump, a retreating politician, on their platform.
...
> I therefore believe that it is completely wrong to justify Twitter's continuing trials on discoursive influence over the notion that it's alright since Trump might be a particularly bad actor.
what you see is a global company acting locally and so not too surprising, no? Algorithmic biases and assumption engineered so the service is successful with a US ideology. Nobody asks the question in any tech company does the product only work in my market (unless you're outside the US). There are plenty of German companies (start-ups especially) which first design for a market that works in the US. Even language support is first English before they become local. FAANG and every SV start-up thinks first whether that works here in the US. It's just normal business sense and no big scheme of why they do this. Twitter does it because it makes sense for them to fight back against lies and disinformation that end up killing people. Free Speech ends here.
Bit awkward but I'll use the example I had in mind. What would have happened if people stopped Hitler from standing in beer halls blaming Jews for everything. He wouldn't have been able to gather a following and influencer so many people and so many lives would have been spared. I use the Hitler example, because what we're seeing is Trump trying to grasp power not via a vote but undermining the vote and is stirring up tensions pretty much like Hitler.
I get everyone thinks free speech is essential, but we live in a world where free speech is not a thing for very valid reasons. Germany only promises freedom of opinion; they don't actually promise you can tell anyone that opinion, try denying the holocaust. And in Germany, you're not legally allowed to insult someone (civil matter, but still not legal), in Berlin, and someone got convicted (eventually overturned but the fact it happened is massive) for farting on a police officer. The US, which claims to be the centre of freedom, has one of the lowest press freedoms and a multitude of laws to keep things secret. There are things that we know people shouldn't be allowed to say. Freedom of speech is a myth and should not be used to enable the destruction of democracy or to spread propaganda (in any sense).
I'm sure the majority of people here would agree terrorism propaganda videos shouldn't be hosted on twitter or youtube, and people shouldn't be allowed to promote terrorism. Well, this is basically the same, in many of the Trump supporter stuff, I've seen calls for domestic terrorism.
Also, I think a lot of people don't realise why we're seeing an increase in companies stepping up here. Biden has offically won, now. All states have certified who won. The election is over. All that can be done now is stirring up hate and starting a civil war.
Challenging elections to ensure they're fair and legal is hardly undermining them. It forces them to be strengthened against fraud.
I don't think Bush/Gore undermined anything.
I don't think Hillary undermined them when she told Biden not to concede under any circumstances. I don't support her or Biden's politics, but I cheered that position.
You actually don't have a legal right to a lawyer who lies about fraud whenever they aren't in front of a judge and their actual freedom depends on telling the truth.
That's because in that case you had the infamous butterfly ballots in one large Florida county, where a very poor UI led to a large number of people voting for both Gore and Buchanan. You also had a large number who voted for Buchanan but for all the other offices voted for people that it was very unlikely a Buchanan supported would vote for.
For those not familiar with them, the ballots listed Bush at the top of the left page, with Gore listed second on that page. Buchanan was listed on the top of the right page, with the list on the right page vertically offset so it was like this:
------
Bush | |----------
-----| | Buchanan
Gore | |----------
-----| | McReynolds
Browne | |----------
-----| (and so on)
Nadar |
(and so on)
You voted by punching a hole in the center column next to your candidate. So to vote for Bush, you punched the first hole. To vote for Buchanan, you punched the second hole. To vote for gore you punched the third hole. McReynolds the fourth, and so on.
The ballot was wide enough that you might not realize that there were Presidential candidates on both pages.
It is very hard not to conclude that many people who wanted to vote Gore saw he was second on the left page, and so punched the second hole, and some realized their mistake and tried to correct it leading to both holes two and three punched.
That's why the challenges there did not undermine anything (other than confidence that whoever designed those ballots was competent). We had actual concrete and sound evidence that a large number of ballots did not reflect the intended vote of the voter, and there were enough of these to affect the outcome because it was an extremely close race.
The 2020 challenges so far have failed to include any concrete and sound evidence. Its all been things like that surveillance video that they say shows extra ballots being sneaked in late at night, which when you look at the whole video instead of just that short clip you see that those were ballots that had always been there--when counting stopped for the night they were put in their standard ballot storage containers, and what the clip is showing is those ballots being removed from those containers when counting resumed.
Or things like that statistical argument that was in the Texas Supreme Court filing that said there was only a one in a quadrillion chance that Trump could lead in the evening and then behind after more ballots were counted overnight, which completely overlooked that in-person ballots were counted before absentee ballots, and that Democrats were far more likely to vote absentee because of COVID than were Republicans.
That's why 2020 challenges are undermining in a way no previous election challenges were. They aren't going to force any strengthening against fraud because they are failing to point out any fraud to strengthen against.
The quality of the evidence presented by challengers to the election is what is being examined in the courts. You can certainly assert that there hasn't been any concrete and sound evidence, but someone else can come along and assert the opposite. You're both making the same mistake of making an assertion and accepting it as fact while we are currently undergoing the process of determining the validity of the evidence.
Such proclamations come off as either "Nothing to see here" or "Lock her up" rhetoric to me. Too much, too soon.
Some of us are trying to be open-minded about the evidence being presented, while others accept the first argument that supports their bias. I think it's wiser to take the first tack.
How much more research do you do on any particular piece of evidence after some media outlet tells you that you don't need to worry about it?
Challenging elections to ensure they're fair and legal is hardly undermining them, but isn't what Trump is doing. He is grasping at the barest of legal straws, all the while asserting that he is right. For a good review of just how off base these lawsuits are, Legal Eagle has done a good review of them [0,1]. (Warning, long-form content with sponsorship segments.)
I don't really care what legal straws he grasps at, though. I say go for it. Any challenge only serves to strengthen our democracy, excepting any that succeed in spite of being wrong.
I have so far seen no reason to worry about the latter bit.
So? That isn't the only input to the system. The conclusion here obviously cannot be "then grant no power to anybody" unless you are the most extreme left-anarchist. Power has the capacity to harm but also aid. We must balance the risk of harm against the potential for aid.
The ability to run a standing army can be used for ill. Yet we have an army.
The ability to regulate corporate pollution can be used for ill. Yet we have pollution regulations.
The ability to throw people in prison via the justice system can be used for ill. Yet we have laws and courts and prisons.
The reason you are getting downvotes is because you aren’t seeing the bigger picture. This has nothing to do with Trump, and everything to do with platforms that have a de facto monopoly on certain types of free speech suppressing it in favor of certain groups. It’s all well and good when they are suppressing people that disagree with you, but not so much when the opposite is true.
This is why “platforms” like Twitter need to lose their liability protection when they engage in such behavior. They are no longer playing the role of independent platform in need such protection; they are a publisher that is deciding what can and cannot be viewed. That is perfectly acceptable, as long as they are held accountable for that content. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
A de facto monopoly means one that is, for all intents and purposes, a monopoly - despite the existence of alternatives. Is anyone going to read your content on any of the services you mentioned?
Facebook is in a different category. Are you really arguing that Parler, Mastodon, and Gab have userbases that are on par with Twitter? How exactly are you defining “plenty”?
There are alternatives with appreciable communities and free and open access. Use them if you don't like Twitter's policies, and don't for a second think that freedom of speech entitles you access to a private platform.
Freedom of Speech has never been a guarantee of platform access or forced association.
The trouble is that by visibly taking action against a particular group, that group will feel the need to retaliate - this is the most sure fire way to radicalise a group I can think of.
Filter bubbles and shadow bans already exist, and while I think they are particularly insidious for people wanting to find multiple opposing views on something, they are invisible to the average user. Just make sure that Trump's tweets and interactions don't get shown on any feed except his own page, and any retweets are only shown to the people that retweet him, and be done with it.
People still think they have the freedom to read and speak about naughty opinions, but they never get further than the "desk" of the person that wrote those opinions.
There doesn't seem to be much remaining restraint against suppression of conservative speech, since so many norms have now been revoked. You don't have to agree with these people to understand the basic formula that if a large enough group feels like they have been disenfranchised and are now being suppressed from talking about it by those in power the result is always the same.
The way out of this was for the winning side to get out ahead of it and do everything in their power to legitimize the election for these people. They didn't have a moral duty to do so, but it was foolish not to, since now by not doing so we've seen a deep, cemented, hatred and distrust of the outcome and the other side that from my vantage point is materially worse than before and could have been avoided to a large degree.
We're in trouble. People on the "winning" side of this dispute seem to be celebrating as the other side's hopes are dashed and their speech is marginalized, but in fact they ought to be terrified, since insofar as the other side isn't persuaded of their error and their beliefs deepen in light of the coercion being used against them being seen as a form of confirmation, things are going to be worse for everyone going into the new year.
A strange irony from this situation that I hadn't realized is that it seems that if one is on the winning side of a dispute its the point of maximal confidence the other side will be coerced into submission that one actually should be the least confident that the dispute is going to be settled, since it means coercion has been accepted as the only possible method to settle it. In fact, its that moment, the one where persuasion is understood to not be viable, which presents the greatest danger.
Our history points to another example of the point of presumed capitulation in fact being the start of anything but, but I won't make the analogy at the risk of it (rightly) being torn apart.
> The way out of this was for the winning side to get out ahead of it and do everything in their power to legitimize the election for these people.
How does one do that when the people you are trying to convince are inherently unconvincable? They refuse to acknowledge experts, legal authorities, or any application of logic. If one of them steps out of line and goes against the narrative they are torn apart for it.
You're categorizing literally tens of millions of people (in the last poll) as all having the same belief structure. In reality, you have a wide spectrum of people having varying degrees of suspicion about the current election. The goal isn't to convince all of them, but for enough of them to have reasonable confidence in the election to be willing to accept it and reject the positions of those who want to escalate things with the belief it was fraudulent. Polling implies there is a wide gulf to bridge, with moderates having extreme doubt in the result. This is unsustainable.
I would imagine to actually get to that point there are really only a few simple steps needed: full forensic audits of the disputed states, as well as a day in court in SCOTUS. I believe so far those have been largely denied or blocked (the merits of doing so are irrelevant) - if those were acquiesced by the winning side and accelerated at the outset it seems highly likely to me we would be nowhere near the precipice it seems we are now.
Look, Trump has lost nearly every single case brought forth about the election. Not just lost, but badly lost. Embarrassingly lost. Even a cursory glance at these cases show allegations with no supporting evidence or only hearsay.
If any person still thinks the election was stolen after that, they're not a reasonable person.
More than a third of polled Americans see the election as illegitimate, and that includes Democrats and non-affiliated voters. [1]
This doesn't mean they're right. Unfortunately, no matter how "unreasonable" you think these people are, when they exist in such numbers and feel with such confidence they've lost the ability to have fair elections, the result of suppressing, ridiculing, and marginalizing them is fairly predictable.
> 98% of Dems think election victory is legitimate
That leaves 2% of Dems that disagree. They aren't wrong in saying their stated figure includes Democratic party voters, just misleading.
> 97% think there was no widespread voter fraud
Assuming this reflects all polled people and not just Democratic party voters, then yes, 3% ≠ 1/3 and they are wrong. Assuming this figure only reflects Democratic party voters, that seems to suggest that 1% of Dems believe that there was widespread fraud, but still think the victory was legitimate.
I apologize if this was misleading, my point was to emphasize that the population involved in the "one third" proportion was not Republicans. (It's a third of Americans, not Republicans.) Thinking a third of Republicans think there was widespread election fraud would be concerning and somewhat surprising (at least to me, given "widespread fraud" is far from being in evidence) so it felt worth emphasizing that was not the population, but it in fact includes polled Democrats and Independents.
In fact, it's much worse than that: a third of Americans believe it (which shows its appeal to centrists and/or the depth of Republican belief), and if you dig into the crosstabs, the number of Independents who believe it (approx 1/3rd) and Republicans who believe it (approx 3/4ths) is quite concerning. For such an extreme question ('widespread fraud') I would have expected this to be a fringe belief. The belief that would have made these numbers less surprising would have been questions such as "do you believe there is some evidence of targetted fraud" etc. Given that I'd suspect nearly 100% of Republicans believe some form of fraud occurred. If so, the entire losing party believes they were cheated to some degree. This isn't a recipe for reduced conflict from here. It means that the radical end of the party is large enough to be meaningful, and it means that large parts of the population will be less likely to condemn actions they take given the widespread shared beliefs.
> Do you believe there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, or not?
> 77% R
> 3% D
> 35% I
To feel secure that this isn't going to spill over into a conflict, we should expect to see a similarly marginal number of I's and ideally less R's (this should be a fringe belief in the Republican party, but it's not.) This question is the most extreme form of the issue, as well. (Few ought to believe widespread fraud definitely occurred, many more likely believe it’s possible strategically targeted fraud occurred, a much weaker stance but similarly dangerous.)
I'm guessing you'll just assume the I's are closet Republicans. But don't blame me if you aren't willing to face reality that this skepticism is not just going to go away through coercion.
> I'm guessing you'll just assume the I's are closet Republicans.
While this may have shifted a bit since 2019, 38% of the public identify as independents, but 13% are R-leaning independent, 17% are R-leaning, and 7% aren't leaners. [0]
If you assume leaners are exactly like partisans and further assume the non-leaners are stealth leaners split equally between the two parties, you'd predict 36% of I’s would believe in large scale fraud. If you force all non-leaners to the D side or all to R side, you get a predicted range of 28%-44%.
So, yeah, the results actually seen (35% of Is believing in widespread fraud) are very consistent with the “independent" numbers being entirely predicted by partisan bias of “independents” combined with whatever factors drive the distribution of beliefs among party identifiers, with nothing nonpartisan about “independents” on this issue.
Would you agree that Independents, regardless of their internal preference, are a good barometer of centrists vs extremists? I do. And as such, we ought to want arguably 'radical' beliefs like that there was widespread fraud to be marginal in such groups if we want to feel confident it isn't something that needs addressing to avoid conflict over it.
> Would you agree that Independents, regardless of their internal preference, are a good barometer of centrists vs extremists?
No, the US distribution of political beliefs is not a unidimensional center-weighted distribution. More independents are either extremists outside the main parties on the main axis between the parties or sitting equally far off on axes orthogonal to that axis than are centrists.
And most centrists are in the neoliberal capitalist faction of one or the other for the major parties.
I meant specifically on this issue, which clearly, due to its nature, is highly partisan along R/D lines given the fairly obvious incentives to believe one way or another to gain power. Do you think on this specific issue (that the election was stolen) that Independents ought to tell us a bit about what the average, non-partisan belief is?
> Do you think on this specific issue (that the election was stolen) that Independents ought to tell us a bit about what the average, non-partisan belief
Not in any meaningful sense; largely for related limits to those discussed upthread for general centrism: research on voting behavior that has shown those who identify as independents are not particular independent, and contain an identifiable major subset as reliably partisan as those who identify with a major party.
If by “average, non-partisan belief” you simply mean the belief of the average person who doesn't identify with a major party, then, sure, you will have defined it such that independents are key. But this isn't useful information.
I guess this leads to the question of if there is any way to use polls to get a read on how apolitical observers feel on a given issue through party affiliation. It sounds like the answer you have is "no", but I guess that leaves little value in polls in issues such as this one, given the salient issue (at least, to me) is how strongly it is held by non-partisans. I guess not for this thread.
> I guess this leads to the question of if there is any way to use polls to get a read on how apolitical observers feel on a given issue through party affiliation
My main criticism was claiming Dems support your position. I'm sure there are a few, but not enough to really matter.
Otherwise, I see the extended "election fraud" campaign as an excuse to squeeze out more money for Trump (bad), generate emotional support for the Georgia election (good), and help a guy in Texas get a pardon (lol).
I didn't claim Dems support this position. Beyond that, claiming that "there is widespread fraud" is "my" position, when I've stated otherwise clearly, shows more bias on your part. What makes you think I think there was widespread fraud? Perhaps you're projecting: if you defend people who are being suppressed and ridiculed, this doesn't mean you agree with them. Perhaps you are only able to imagine defending people you agree with?
I realize how what I wrote could be construed saying D's support the claim, especially if you presume I'm some kind of partisan hack trying to troll you. In fact, what I was emphasizing (poorly) was that the population sampled from which has one third of support includes Democrats and Independents, since I would have found one third of just Republicans believing there was widespread fraud to be somewhat surprising. I should have written "sampled from a population that includes Democrats and Independents" - I'd like to assume everything else I've written in this thread is evidence I'm not trying to trick anyone or score points. I am genuinely concerned at the level of dismissal, ridicule, and suppression of skeptics of the election, since the floor on this is a third of the country and history tells us what to expect when you leave that many feeling powerless to overcome a presumed deep injustice via speech, voting, and the legal system.
Your reply shows some pretty busted mental models, revealing bias or poor reasoning. Let me break it down for you. The reasonable people in this debate can speak clearly about this in a way you don't seem able to.
> Actually, no. If there was no election fraud (as it seems to have been proven)
Your claim here seems to be that there was no election fraud, and it seems proven. Two problems with this statement:
- You cannot prove there was no election fraud, it is unfalsifiable.
- Beyond that, the idea that there was no election fraud is absurd on its face. We should expect there to have been some election fraud, with some liklihood of finding evidence of it, since in an election as large as this one there is always election fraud to some degree.
What I think you're trying to say, is there is insufficient evidence to prove there was sufficient election fraud to have an impact on the result. If that's the case, I agree with you. But commentators who say things like "there is no evidence of fraud" or "there is no evidence of widespread fraud" are wrong in the former case and creating a strawman in the latter. And of course, the effect of saying fallacious things like this is it just serves as confirmation for the other side that you are acting in bad faith. The specific claim made is that there was targeted fraud in specific districts in swing states to tip the result. I don't think there is sufficient evidence to show this.
> then they all have the same wrong belief, regardless of degree
My point is the degree matters if we care about avoiding a conflict.
> The goal isn't to convince all of them...
I don't know what you are saying here. My point is that if you are trying to persuade people of their errors in reasoning, you shouldn't expect to convince all of them, just a sufficient amount to reduce their confidence in their wrong beliefs to change the dynamics of the situation enough to avoid the worst possibilities.
> Both of those have happened. So why do you, a reasonable(?) person on HN trying to convince us that it hasn't?
This is objectively false. A full forensic audit of all the states has not occurred (some local forensic audits of sampled ballots in specific counties in some states has) and SCOTUS has not heard any cases (yet) about this issue. I don't know why you state obvious untruths, beyond just being ignorant of the facts or something.
How is the president actively undermining the core ideals of our country conservative speech? His childish behavior is the problem, the fact that all these tech companies have to step in to prevent him from actively harming the country is a symptom of his own megalomania running unchecked for so long.
YouTube has stated they will ban content, no exceptions, that contains skepticism in the 2020 election, and they've started doing so. If you can't recognize this for what it is, it's not my problem personally, but it will soon be all our problem if enough people like you are willing to tolerate it.
(And yes, before you construct a strawman response, YouTube is within their rights to do this. But that has nothing to do with if it's something we think is morally correct to do, nor how we should think about the second order effects of doing so, and the dangerous precedents it sets.)
This is no different than how our country operated for the entirety of its existence. The major news outlets never made it a normal practice to help crackpots spread their theories.
YouTube has tolerated this for much longer than the never we previously had.
The end game could be the GOP going full confederate and the Democrats nuking them with the 14th amendment, Section 3. "Sorry guys, this court judgement now says you're banned from holding any public office, federal or state." Simply giving aid or comfort to those engaged in insurrection triggers this section. In this sense, having actual bullets being fired by "rebels" would be the biggest Christmas gift the Democrats could get.
Looking at what would come after this, Texas alone is the size of occupied Europe. 75 million Americans voted for trump and the Republican Party this year.
It would be impractical for the US to ban either the democrats or republicans without either authorizing secession or experiencing a conflict comparable to one of the world wars. It’s doubtful there would be any winners in either scenario.
And then what? People who have a mental model where if, God forbid, things come to that point, they will just come to an underpants-gnome like step that settles the issue seem ignorant of history. What you illustrate will just be a point of further escalation, one of a long chain that will lead to a real shooting war, unless one side turns away from the abyss on their own volition, not because the other side "nuked them" via a legal case.
What happens then is that the full power of government would be in the hands of the democrats, likely including the power to impeach and remove members of the Supreme Court they don't like. If they control enough state legislatures they get to amend the constitution as they see fit also.
There is no prospect of a rebellion overcoming the US military machine, and its presence would allow the GOP to be purged and suppressed. Maintaining a low level of guerilla activity would allow this to continue.
The GOP is playing a very dangerous game for themselves moving in this direction.
OK, lets say that we find ourselves in a situation (again, God forbid) where the Democrats have secured all levers of power in response to a small violent uprising, and the mechanism was not through a vote but through a legal process which barred Republicans from the government.
What do you think happens if half of the country sees that government as illegitimate, including many members of the military? Governments aren't magic. They exist only if enough people see them as legitimate. The scenario you outline, as supported by polling data, implies to me approximately a third of the country would reject this outright as a legitimate government, with a high bias towards the military.
Are you really thinking this through? Do you know how easy it would be for there to be a guerilla war in the US, which is organized in part by military defectors? All it would take would be for enough belief that the country's goverment had become tyrannical. This is exactly the premise of the two prior situations where Americans mobilized for war on our own soil. The scenario you outline is precisely the situation that most strong supporters of the second amendment believe it was created for, and why they exercise it - to provide a deterrence and eventually, if needed, a mechanism to overthrow a tyrannical government.
To the extent that individuals like that rebel, they are simply setting themselves up for extermination. This is not the 1860s with a distributed state-controlled military; the rebels will not have the supply chain for modern warfare. They will at best be a dispersed nuisance that can cause pain, but to the extent they do so they ensure their own destruction.
If someone talks up rebellion and civil war to try to prevent some legal action of a democratically elected government, I will just look in them in the eye and say "Rebel and be damned."
You seem pretty confident in your ability to predict how such a terrifying scenario will go. I hope we don’t get there because enough people like you do not sufficiently fear it.
you know, people like to talk about facts and about how this is true and that is false. usually there is some nuance to every “fact” (ie you should not take things as absolute truths).
this is not one of these times. it’s as clearcut as it gets when it comes to facts and still we see this alternate world. all generated by one guy. it’s the type of thing where reality is definitely stranger than fiction
He's trying to be clever and say "civil war" without saying "civil war". The LARPers on the right seem to be enjoying this a great deal. I'm sure the FBI will be very interested in their calls for violence.
You're equating fringe groups with a mainstream political movement. Those kinds of caricatures are only possible because half of US voters have been totally deplatformed and are unable to speak for themselves. I am very worried that is a recipe for violence.
Those people literally created those platforms specifically to separate themselves, because they didn't want to consider their speech equal to that of their critics.
You're quite literally posting in a thread about Twitter deplatforming people. I don't understand how you can argue about people leaving Twitter for other platforms "just because."
No, this is a thread about Twitter limiting the degree to which users can interact with misinformation and propaganda from the White House, which you decided was about deplatforming.
Your assertion that Twitter has somehow "deplatformed" half of the electorate, despite even a cursory look at the site showing a vast amount of Republican and pro-Trump content, and the fact that far less than half the country even voted for Trump to begin with, is ridiculous, and it's obvious from your comment history that you're a troll account anyway.
But yes, Parler, Gab, Voat and other alternative platforms were created by right-wingers specifically to have a "safe space" where they could post freely without having their views confronted. They were not deplatformed to those sites, they left for those sites willingly.
No, you can't be Twitter, a platform under the law and enjoying all the associated perks, and then censor the New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop. You step into publisher territory at that point and open yourself up to liability. You also can't go and ban the whitehouse press secretary, same deal.
If Twitter would act honorably and allow open conversation, conversations that obviously don't contain death threats, etc, then there would be no need or even desire for an alternate platform.
The problem is that Twitter is acting illegally with its censorship, since it enjoys platform status and all the perks associated, but can ban conservative content.
Everyone should be on Twitter, saying whatever non-illegal political content they want, but they can't because Twitter is disobeying the law.
looking at the division in society (not just US but all across the West and on the world-stage even), it's absolutely hard to remain neutral. not hard because I'm a "crazy commie" Democrat thinking Trump needs to go, nor because I'm a "dumb" Conservative thinking the election was stolen (not my language but the way these camps view another). This is sadly pretty standard political discourse even in other countries.
The thing that really scares me in all this is how each side is 100% certain about all the bad the other side is and how a single comment can land people as labelled as "the other". I know for myself and in my bubble that Trump and his cohorts are terrible and playing dirty, and responsible for thousands of corona casualties. But I take a look at the other side and see how absolutely hardened they are in their view that they got conned. They are equally convinced as I am about them backing the correct side.
It's no longer only about who got conned but by how discourse in this climate is impossible. It's easy to just hope things are going to settle if only the right kind of leadership steps in. But the amount of work that camp has cut out reuniting this division is almost impossible.
Impossible because the division has been instigated from the top so we automatically trust that it gets mended by the top. But the real work is in bringing those families back together that no longer talk, or those friends people lost due to "politics".
the only reason I still tune into my own biased news bubble is to scour it for signs of rhethoric, or ideas in how to mend this mess. and what scares me is I haven't seen anything yet that addresses some of the root causes here. class divide, racial divide, and the richest of this world (those leaders HN often celebrates, Bezos, Musk etc) having become richer even during the pandemic. Maybe we wouldn't have all this discussion if a human life was valued differently than just in terms of the revenues they generate for society. It also shows me that the place to find peace isn't a "democracy", or certain pocket of society, but within myself.
FWIW, I believe seriously in the potential for drugs like MDMA and psilocybin to help those with closed minds — on left and right — to approach tired political divides from novel perspectives. And that this is necessary moving forward.
I am an extreme pessimist. I think our perspective is so warped, and our cognitive biases so deeply baked that meaningful collective healing and growth will take place if and only if it’s partially energized by psychological healing & opening on the individual level through psychedelic therapy.
I am routinely laughed out of serious discussion for this view.
At this point, we have to come to terms with the republicans shift to the far right and all that entails.
Amongst the republicans I know they are happy to believe anything Mr Trump says and denounce any party dissenters as Rino’s. When their trusted media sources such as fox and tucker Carlson didn’t confirm the party line - they jumped to newsmax and OAN. They’re shocked and dismayed when courts and institutions don’t embrace what they view as reality.
I doubt that restricting misinformation on major platforms will do more than move the audience to Parler and other friendlier mediums. This is a demand problem and not a supply problem. And I’m not sure how to fix the demand problem.
People need to stop and consider the meaning of that phrase and how it applies in the modern day. People don't seem to care that we're making "lies" a justifiable basis for censorship. Whether you believe Trump is lying or not, we are accepting and normalizing the existence of a third party that censors things deemed to be "lies" for the greater good.
What's more, is that it being defended under the guise of "well, they're a private corporation, etc etc." Yes, and they do have the right, but that is orthogonal to the fact that we are normalizing and welcoming it. Twitter having the right to do it and we as a society supporting their actions are separate from each other. But people like to muddy the waters by claiming that it isn't "censorship" because it's a private corporation. But it is censorship on their platform, and again, the support for the censorship in general is the disturbing part. It's not as if the people supporting Twitter's actions are saying "we should only censor people on Twitter"...they want it everywhere that there is a platform.
There's also voices that say "well, it's Trump, and he is the President, so there should be an exception because he can influence a lot of people." Taylor Swift has as many followers (~88M) on Twitter. Do you think if she started saying similar things as Trump, people wouldn't be calling for her censorship too? Can Taylor Swift start a civil war as easy as Trump can? Probably not, but who makes the determination of "you are censored because we believe people will listen to you" ?
Controversial speech only seem to be acceptable so long as nobody listens to you. Is that what we want?
I am disappointed that anyone thinks this is a good idea, regardless of your political view.
The principles behind the United States are that we prefer a mess to tyranny and noise to suppression.
It's not about Trump. It's about whether we trust anyone to make decisions about what is right and not right for someone to say, because whoever has that power will inevitably abuse it.
If you feel fine about this now because you disagree with the person being silenced, then just try to imagine being on the other side of that - calling out what you perceive to be a great injustice only for someone to have the power to take away your voice completely.
This is not a constitutional argument, as Twitter isn't government and not bound by first amendment, it's a principles argument. If you support suppression of speech that's "obviously wrong" to you, you're gonna be in a lot of pain down the road when someone finds YOU obviously wrong.
Having been born and lived in the USSR, this is very real. A lot of folks who were on the "right side of history" in 1917 when it came to suppressing/killing "the obvious enemies of the people", found themselves against the wall in the 20s and 30s. Once you create a system that's more powerful than people, it's just a matter of time before it decides that you're not good enough either.
My personal opinion is that every single Presidential election should always be followed up by a well-funded third party integrity analysis and postmortem. I’m not talking about canvassing and re-counts, because those only look at the very last step in the process of tabulation.
We should always be looking into voter rolls of who voted versus things like change-of-address filings and death certificates. We should always be checking the math on percentage of registered voters and looking at outliers. We should always be investigating provisional ballots, for example people who came to vote in person and were told they already voted. And probably many other things along these lines.
I think the other side of this is that the Constitution puts States firmly in control of their own voting process and procedures, which means there are 50 different sets of rules for how these elections can be held, and then in the months and weeks leading up to elections there’s a flurry of lawsuits that try to change all the rules one way or another, sometimes with changes being made up until the final moments of the election. This hugely erodes public trust in the entire process.
Now, I think Twitter has made some objectively very bad calls in the name of censorship the last few months. Freezing the NY Post’s account after the Hunter Biden story in particular. I think the “this tweet is disputed” flags are ultimately another failure on their part. Aside from being objectively the wrong thing to do in some cases, mostly I just doubt that these actions will have remotely the intended effect.
I think there's ample evidence there was voter fraud on a massive scale. This is a problem because it's a wide held belief that won't go away by decreeing there wasn't or by appealing to Twitter as the arbiter of truth.
I'm not trying to start a flame war here. Please don't decline into partisan bickering.
What I took away from reading the texas lawsuit is that what you had happen was states were making changes to their election practices due to covid without actually changing the laws. Think how divisive things like voter ID laws are and it's not hard to imagine no election rule changes are going to get passed in a hurry.
Specific examples are pennsylvania allowing absentee ballot 3 days after the election even though by law any ballots arriving by mail after election day are void.
Poll watchers who monitor votes being counted were not given meaningful access to monitor even though by law they must be given access.
Due to the huge number of absentee ballots election counters did not verify ballot signatures as required.
The reason all these lawsuits failed is because there is no real injunctive relief you can seek. And no court is going to nullify an election.
None of these things are evidence of voter fraud but the fact that election officials were allowed to deviate from the legal requirements dictated by law is something I find controversial and is something we should be allowed to talk about.
A) >>>Specific examples are pennsylvania allowing absentee ballot 3 days after the election even though by law any ballots arriving by mail after election day are void.<<<<
That is incorrect. PA Supreme Court ruled that there is no specific law against that ...Pennsylvania Republicans had sought to block the counting of late-arriving ballots, which the state's Supreme Court had approved last month..... [1]
B) >>>poll watchers who monitor votes being counted were not given meaningful access to monitor even though by law they must be given access.<<<
That is also incorrect. The dispute was about how far away they should be. Both Democratic and Republican observers were at the same distance which was at least 6 feet because of COVID. One of the Judges allowed for the distance to be narrowed for everybody
C) >>>Due to the huge number of absentee ballots election counters did not verify ballot signatures as required.<<<
That is also incorrect. Where state law mandated it, this was done.
D) >>>The reason all these lawsuits failed is because there is no real injunctive relief you can seek. <<<<
This is incorrect. The lawsuits failed because
a) the lawyers actually stated in court that they were not alleging fraud but were 'concerned'
b) the lawyers said in court that there were some irregularities but not enough to change the outcome
"a completed mail-in ballot must be received in the office of the county board of elections no later than eight o'clock P.M. on the day of the primary or election."
That’s a reasonable analysis. It’s very different from Trump’s claims on social media - he says that these facts are evidence of voter fraud, that any honest court would nullify the election, and that he still hopes to find a way to overturn the election result. If the discussion were just about improving the system for future elections I’d be all in favor of allowing it.
There are quite a few pro-Trump users here and a lot of users that dislike politics. The former seem to only come out to defend him and the latter downvote all political discussions. At least in my experience.
What’s incredible is that people presented themselves as “witnesses” and stated, under oath, stories that they just read on some random blog and not events they witnessed personally.
You would have thought the lawyers who prepped them would have stopped them from wasting the courts' time.
This is part of the reason that in some countries it is illegal report anything significant about an active investigation. You don't want to pollute the witness pool - even if what is reported is 100% categorically true, the fact that someone might know something they otherwise wouldn't have known is bad for an accurate and just investigation.
If it is so obvious, why are all the legal challenges, even the ones involving Trump-appointed judges, failing? Why can't the challengers come up with a scrap of evidence?
What county has a score for Biden at "781%"? I'd love to read more about that. Was there a lawsuit filed where I can read about this claim in some official form?
Donald Trump himself wasn't a politically viable candidate until people took his transparently bad faith, virulently racist birther lies in good faith. Have we learned nothing?
I really don’t understand the perspective that this is about information control. The guy is engaged in a plot to overthrow democracy in the United States, and summoning social media pressure is one of his core strategies for how to make it happen, so Twitter is taking action to limit the amount he can summon on their platform. If it were about censorship they’d just ban him.
What percentage of Americans do you estimate genuinely believe that Trump is literally seeking to overthrow democracy, even indirectly? And I'm not asking your reasons for believing it.
30% or so, rising to well over 50% among people with high political engagement. Nearly every political commentator I personally follow, left or right, has expressed this view. (And to answer the implicit question, yes, I would have to severely reevaluate my stance here if I learned that I’m in a filter bubble and this estimate is way off.)
Censorship and sanctions are less preferred because:
1. They create even more distrust and encourage conspiracy theories
2. More importantly, just like journalists (who have agendas), fact checkers also have agendas. The journalism problem is solved by pluralism: having many different media platforms with different agendas allows for balance and exposure to various facts. However, due to the monopolistic nature of the social platforms, we can't have that here. What happens is that a very small number of people controls what we know and what we don't. Just imagine if Fox News was the only news platform - devastating, isn't it?
For these reasons, social media should not be allowed to decide on they're own what is fact and what is not.