But I absolutely want and need to know what they're saying. A platform that provides a direct way for them to speak shouldn't be interfering with that.
I would question whether social media posts are immune to fact checking, but you didn't post an official press release, so apparently I can't.
I haven't really ever used Twitter. I sometimes end up on a developer or product page in doing some web surfing, but I can't think of any information I was able to retrieve through another medium that I would rather have received on Twitter.
For example, some top search results for a developer was a tweet of benchmarks. I read the tweet and then made my way to his site and to a conference video on the subject. I wish his site had been my top search result.
Maybe Twitter is a good forum for "subscribing to notifications" and using it to broadcast external links along with word-bites is a good use of the platform?
I'm interested in how you or anyone think about this, especially about the idea of "translation" and "protection" that various media stamp on issues.
I'm further interested in "live news" and I hold the opinion that live news isn't necessary to me or to be even available to anyone. I'd rather have a transparent recording and processing pipeline that delivers to me newsworthy stories(I can't read everything), but that I could also inspect to see how editorial decisions could have omitted or changed meaning (looking at compiled source material through a search medium designed for that task).
As an example take a magician who can trick you into believing things which are not true simply by being clever about how certain things are framed. Another example are experimental set ups in which false memories were reliably induced (just google it).
I am not taking a strong position in the case of twitter here, but I want to highlight that your premise: „I don‘t need someone to protect me from its content“, might be a little bit naive or overconfident in your own ability to „see the truth“. We are limited in what we can make sense of and we are easily manipulable. Mindfulness, self-awareness and self-reflection might be able to raise the bar a little bit but in the end, I wouldn‘t even trust too much in that. I am still often enough fooled by a magic trick even when I KNOW how the trick works.
That's not what he said. He said he wants to see what people say directly, not filtered through anyone else. Then he can decide for himself what is informative and what is fake news. I feel the same way.
One wouldn't learn physics by seeing what the entire human race had to say on the subject because virtually the whole of humanity knows next to nothing on the topic. We instead filter it by people that are known to be knowledgeable on the topic. People that are paid to teach it, people that work in relevant fields, people that have published papers in journals that themselves act as filters.
When people say they prefer twitter it is because given the entire population of users its trivial for any person to find people who reinforce what they already think no matter how silly. If you believe the flat world was farted out by a goat there are fellow goat worshipers that will by happy to make you feel good by expounding on the topic.
Sure, that's the point. I want to do my own filtering, not depend on someone else's.
> One wouldn't learn physics by seeing what the entire human race had to say on the subject because virtually the whole of humanity knows next to nothing on the topic. We instead filter it by people that are known to be knowledgeable on the topic.
But how do we know who is knowledgeable? There are plenty of websites out there with crackpot content whose authors claim to be knowledgeable.
One common way is to accept some kind of credential that is supposed to correlate with being knowledgeable. For example, person A is a professor of physics, and person B is a random person on the Internet with no credentials, so person A is much more likely to be knowledgeable about physics.
However, that still doesn't mean you should believe everything person A says about physics, because, unfortunately, person A is probably not going to be as careful as they should be about distinguishing actual proven physics, physics that is confirmed by experiment, from their own opinions. Watch a Brian Greene or Michio Kaku special on quantum mechanics and, if you don't know much about physics beforehand, you will come away thinking that Star Trek style transporters are just around the corner. Read a pop science article by a string theorist as a lay person with no background knowledge and you will come away thinking that physicists have experimental proof that a multiverse of 10^500 universes exists.
And this is in physics, a hard science, where we can do experiments that confirm particular predictions of our best current theories, General Relativity and quantum field theory, to thirteen or fourteen decimal places. Imagine what it's like in softer disciplines. And the more important the consequences, the more likely it is that people who are thought to be knowledgeable will fail to distinguish between what's actually known and confirmed and their own opinions. Physicists misleading people about quantum mechanics or string theory is regrettable, but nobody is advocating huge public policy choices based on quantum mechanics or string theory. That's not true in other disciplines.
So the unpleasant fact is that I can't trust others, even experts in their fields, to filter for me. I have to do my filtering for myself. That's why I don't want people to give me their opinions and spin about things. I want to see the raw data so I can decide for myself.
If the (far) right's discourse were aligned to reality and facts, liberal leaning people would have no reason to say reality has a liberal bias.
Beside any political consideration, media, right and left leaning had always bias in the way they present information. Well ahead of social media existence. The difference now is Social Media now gave voice to an army of idiots and the most extreme views, like flat earthers, E.T, far right discourses, once restricted to a few fringe publishing for public exposure, has now find his way to mainstream discourse.
but then
>> fact checked in the press
Now _that_ sounds awfully naive to me. Have you seen the CNN leak that came out the other day? "If Jeff Zucker wants impeachment, there's nothing you can do" - direct quote from a CNN media coordinator. Zucker literally tells everyone to bash Trump all day on the daily 9AM conference call. The "press" isn't there to do journalism anymore.
I don't need to see Trump's idiotic personal attacks on other world leaders or AOC twitting insipid things like "Tax the rich." to farm virtual internet points, all of it is 100% meaningless and has 0 political interest.
It's world politics, not a reddit thread were everyone talks about his favorite marvel superhero for fuck's sake. Just have a look at any of Trump's twit comments, it looks like a parody. We're not that far from "Rich men bad", "Criminal bad", "Tax bad", "Wall good", "Terrorist bad", "Health good": it's level 0 of politics and not too far from level 0 of communication.
Believe it or not, some people are smart enough to make decisions for themselves, and don't need the corporate media to make decisions for them.
I've seen their fact checking, it's hilariously biased.
we know for a fact that most people are susceptible to misinformation and propaganda. the modern advertising industry should be more than enough proof of that
Because it seems liberals want to paint any conservative idea as propaganda, just because it's a different though.
From my perspective, and proven via wikileaks, the Democrats have been a propaganda machine, and definitely conspire with the corporate media, but sure, let's target the President.
They are free to do whatever they want, they are not free from criticism.
That's why I don't deal with Twitter, I support freedom of speech, and clearly they don't. So them, and the Saudi's that own them can go tweet themselves.
Which is to say, they can give any reason, or no reason at all, for showing a user the door. That's their prerogative as the owners and operators of a business.
I think the majority of HNers:
- Don't like it when private companies do racism
- Like it when private companies do censorship
So they should just say so. Don't try to bamboozle me with tactical Libertarianism.
And I'm from a small town, and I've been to many. I've never seen a sign like that.
I especially don't see how someone would chalk it up to democrat propaganda.
There are plenty of liberals who should sprout misinformation and should be de-platformed. Many in the anti-vaxxer movement are liberal politically and have caused real harm.
Well, that's ridiculously easy on Twitter. Just follow them.
What is changing here is whether you hear from them just because your buddy Ed(wina) thinks they said something amazing, when they have a track record for breaking the Twitter rules.
IME, keeping on Twitter's good side is a pretty low bar is you're powerful and well-connected, so you will still hear plenty from the usual suspects.
> I've seen their fact checking, it's hilariously biased.
Twitter recently published their rules for fact-checking, and it involves relying on a very small set of third-party fact-checking organizations.
Look it up for yourself.
I was responding to the GP "We have no obligation to allow them to use social networks for propaganda purposes."
> Twitter recently published their rules for fact-checking
Didn't find anything, care to link it? I hope it's not PolitiFact
So follow them. You'll get everything they say delivered right to you, same as before.
But in general, agree with your sentiment.
That's interesting. I do the exact opposite. I turn off retweets for the vast majority of people I follow because I'm interested in their original ideas and not of random retweets of random stuff. I allow retweets for a very small fraction because they have demonstrated that the stuff they retweet I find actually interesting.
You have the right to say, and publish, what you want. You don't have the right to compel anybody to listen to, agree with, or publish what you say.
I might make allowances on the grounds of free advertising, but there's going to be plenty of quid pro quo in the process.
I am sure as fuck not going to do anything just because they told me to do it. If you want to throw your weight around you can do it officially.
And just so we're clear, I'd include people I personally voted for in this. That's not enough reason to set precedents like that.
If/when the "leader of the free world" decides not to use Twitter (or make that a subordinate communication channel), things will become normal again.
Right now it's a race to the bottom.
The majority of Donald Trump's power is derived from his ability to say anything he wants (and have his crazy base eat it up). If we took that away from him he would be terribly crippled in what he could do. It seems to me we're really just giving them a platform to abuse.