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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

I think several things can be true at the same time:

* It's pretty worrying that our fascist-adjacent president is spreading doctored videos with essentially no repercussions.

* Asking FB/Twitter/etc to police videos could be quite a mess in its own right.

* This is a pressing problem for democracies around the world.

(Note: I don't use the 'f word' lightly. Too many on the left use it freely with "people on the right they don't like". I think a person who loathes the free press, loves dictators, chafes at the idea of the rule of law, and threatens violence against political opponents fits the bill, though).

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> Note: I don't use the 'f word' lightly. Too many on the left use it very freely with "people on the right they don't like". I think a person who loathes the free press, loves dictators, chafes at the idea of the rule of law, and threatens violence against political opponents fits the bill, though)

You forgot "hates an independent judiciary" and "uses office for personal enrichment". Some may quibble with the use of fascist to describe him, but he's very clearly authoritarian and anti-democratic. What has surprised me is the relatively large percentage of my compatriots who are also authoritarian and anti-democratic. All that stuff about the constitution was just lip service.

> What has surprised me is the relatively large percentage of my compatriots who are also authoritarian and anti-democratic. All that stuff about the constitution was just lip service.

To the extent that the constitution maintains the status quo, it is embraced. To the extent that it upsets existing social order, not so much.

According to Stenner's theory, there is a certain subset of people who hold latent authoritarian tendencies. These tendencies can be triggered or "activated" by the perception of physical threats or by destabilizing social change, leading those individuals to desire policies and leaders that we might more colloquially call authoritarian.

...

Authoritarians prioritize social order and hierarchies, which bring a sense of control to a chaotic world. Challenges to that order — diversity, influx of outsiders, breakdown of the old order — are experienced as personally threatening because they risk upending the status quo order they equate with basic security.

https://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism

> Some may quibble with the use of fascist to describe him, but he's very clearly authoritarian and anti-democratic.

That's pretty strange, seeing as he ran under the party that generally strives for lower government control in our lives - the direct opposite of fascism. And he has lessened government control in a variety of ways. One example (albeit one that is probably unpopular on HN) is deregulating telecoms.

The claim that Trump is even fascist-aligned is really only defensible if one uses the modern definition of fascist: a person that holds political views one deems offensive or bad.

I was watching bill maher show on hbo and there was some older female guest( don't remember the name) and she was like maybe we should contact our uae friends and have them give our president the khashoggi treatment. Everyone in the room started clapping and cheering. wtf.

I can't really comment on that without seeing the clip myself, but in general, I find that show and other's like it to not be conducive to good conversation.

The audience is always extremely biased, and stops the flow of conversation every other sentence to clap and cheer. People in turn seem like they're just trying to get a soundbite off with a rise out of the audience. And then on top of this, the panels are 5 people, which feels like entirely too many.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It destroys intellectual curiosity, which the site exists for.

I generally agree strongly with that, but FB is caught up in this - and social media is in general.

Trump didn't spread the video, his lawyer Giuliani did. Trump pinned a video of spliced moments of Pelosi stumbling on her words: each segment was raw footage.

How is pinning the video not spreading it?

It's a different video. The one Trump retweeted is undoctored footage of Pelosi stumbling over words, because she actually does that.

It’s amazing how hard it is to get someone to believe something counter to their baseline assumption.

People “know” Trump spread the video, even though it’s simple irrefutable fact that he did not.

The media is often responsible for amplifying and distorting an act to the point where the original act and actor are indistinguishable. Kind of exactly like what happened in the doctored video.

This is perhaps an incredible example of the pot calling the kettle black. Just yesterday, the TIMES reporter tweeting a fake quote of the President, only admitting he made it up after it went viral, and claiming, “it was plausible”.

IMO the media does this against Trump pervasively and highly effectively, to the point where it is nearly impossible to distinguish what Trump may have actually said, forget about what he meant.

I’d say the Charlottesville comments are probably the most famous example of this.

It's worth thinking, too, about the role this New York Times opinion piece played in convincing people so strongly of something that isn't true that the untruth was upvoted whilst the comment pointing it out is greyed out. They make it sound like the perception she was "drunk or perhaps crazy" was entirely the result of the deliberately and maliciously doctored video. Clearly it wasn't. Anyone who didn't investigate things themselves is left with the false impression that everyone mocking this Pelosi appearance was using a fake doctored video to do so - including the President of the United States - even though the author of this never technically lied.

Currently my comment is +4, so I wouldn't be so quick to say it is greyed out. Regardless, claims based on vote totals are not useful and distract from discussion: vote totals consider only the subset of the population willing to participate in site-based voting, which will pull from the polemics much more than the moderates. And besides, the structured refutation comment format of mine above is rife for false corrections, in that frequently such comments are only be a distortion or a deflection of the truth. People learn to blind themselves of the content of the message over time, furthering the partisan lock on their minds.

>IMO the media does this against Trump pervasively and highly effectively, to the point where it is nearly impossible to distinguish what Trump may have actually said, forget about what he meant.

>I’d say the Charlottesville comments are probably the most famous example of this.

Could you explain why this is an example?

https://blog.dilbert.com/2019/04/30/the-fine-people-hoax-fun...

And he never does :)

Happy covfefe to you too. :)

You are misreading my comment: there were two major videos of Pelosi that came to the fore recently. The one that Giuliani posted on his twitter was the one mentioned in the article, and the footage and audio was distorted and slowed down. Trump did not post this video. Trump posted the second video comprising of spliced segments of Pelosi speaking, each segment was raw footage of the House Speaker.

  the footage and audio was distorted and slowed down

Jimmy Kimmel has done this hundreds of times in his recurring "Drunk Donald Trump" segment over the past 3.5 years, usually with no disclaimer. Should he be censored?

Broadcast television has much stronger legal standards than Facebook would ever consider, too.

No, because it's comedy. If people are getting what they consider "news" from late night comedy they don't understand the purpose of the show. I'd say the same thing about the Daily Show, Last Week Tonight, etc. They're not news, they're comedy shows that focus on current events. The larger elephant in the room are the news network opinion shows like Hannity and Carlson. These shows open with something to the effect of "this is just my opinion" but then spend the rest of the show speaking as everything they're saying is fact when in fact it's opinion and 100% not news.

Why do we expect people to make this distinction for TV but not for things they read on the internet?

I don't. I expect to make this distinction no matter where I consume media. If anything the Internet is even worse though as the lines are much less well defined.

This is why it's kind of tricky. I think most people get that comedy people do one thing and are ok with that as long as it's clearly labeled. Perhaps the president and people who work for him ought to be held to a different standard though?

Is it a pressing problem, though?

Google William Randolph Hearst. Or look up the antics in some of the US elections in the early 19th century.

Also, Trump DID NOT SPREAD THE DOCTORED VIDEO. The video he retweeted was undoctored, merely a collection of clips from C-Span. The reason there were no repercussions is because he did absolutely nothing wrong.

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