Twitter to ban political advertising
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This is what has kept our society well informed and critical thinking for a hundred years. It’s also allowed for different sides of things, because you can interpret things like socioeconomic statistics and facts differently and write about them as such, but you can’t make up things.
This died with Facebook, YouTube and the non-editorial entertainment “news” and as a result we have anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers and what not.
I have no idea how to regulate it though, but I think we need to do something.
Choosing to wait and observe is always a viable choice, to be considered alongside all forms of intervention.
We have those laws in Poland too. They lie on front page and apologise with small font on the last page.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/de/9/9c/Bild_Gegendar...
If you ask me, that‘s a good thing. If the stakes of an ad campaign with fake news or hate speech would be having to run a disproval campaign of the same size, on the same audience (if you are proven wrong) — I‘d be fine with it. Political ads weren‘t the problem. A complete and utter lack of regulation for the medium was.
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
(Counter to the current worry, it seems to me that outright lies in mainstream publications are actually somewhat rare. When they happen they are generally corrected. Though there is a recent trend of rushing to publication to appease an overly emotive audience, getting things wrong, and then having to correct days later, after everyone's already been influenced. NYT especially.)
This used to be somewhat addressed in the US television segment by taking it even a step further, and requiring news shows to not only be truthful, but represent both sides of controversial issues. It was called the Fairness Doctrine [1], but it was revoked in 1985.
> This is what has kept our society well informed and critical thinking for a hundred years.
What makes you think you are a well-informed and critical thinking society? Don't most danes think alike just like most saudis, chinese, russians, etc. Don't most danes think and believe whatever news/propaganda tell them to believe just like saudis, chinese, russians, etc?
> This died with Facebook, YouTube and the non-editorial entertainment “news” and as a result we have anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers and what not.
And? Did the world end?
Do you realize that there was a time when it was "truth" that the earth was flat? Do you realize that there was a time when "pro-vaxxers" were ridiculed as much as anti-vaxxers are ridiculed now? If people like you were in power, we'd never have any progress.
I'm not an anti-vaxxer or a flat-earther. The easiest way to discredit them is with speech. More speech, not less. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. And free speech is the best antidote to falsehoods.
No, but people died needlessly.
Yes, and Denmark too. Also, the United States has laws about lying in print as well, see for example libel laws.
Boris Nemtsov got shot in broad daylight in the centre of Moscow.
This is a bad argument that ignores the concept in the GP post, that of intent, and instead addresses an unchallenged point that humans don’t know everything yet.
What has been proven again and again is that bad information drives out good, because it's so, so much easier to write bad information. So you need to keep a tight lid on people who spread actual bad information. If not you might end up as the US, with a reality-tv star as president.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leah_Remini#Scientology
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-used-to-be-opposed...
- https://www.self.com/story/from-anti-to-pro-vaccine
As far as challenges of the put your money where your mouth is kind, this one was pretty easy. So easy in fact, that you should take a moment to reflect on why you were so quick to get on a moral high-horse of burden of proof.
Was it though?
Let's break down what happened.
A: Claim X. B: Can you support X? Claim not X. C: Can you support not X. You should provide support for not X before asking for support of X.
Is it really reasonable to call out B for not providing support and not call out A for the same? B was the first to ask for sources, but A made the claim without sources. It also seems like if B only made the claim not X and didn't ask for sources, they would have been less likely to be called out themself.
So is asking people who ask for sources to provide sources really reasonable when we don't make the same request of people who are making claims without any sources? It seems to give a first move advantage and thus wouldn't be reasonable.
What we saw above was:
A: Claim X
B: Support X, I've observed Y.
C: Support Y too, please.
In this particular case, Y was arguably the inverse of X but it was nevertheless described as having been observed many times, but without any sources.
You would have to prove effectiveness. i.e. out of 100 anti-vaxers, 90% stopped believing in bullshit. If it works on 1 person out of a million, that's pretty useless.
But it is well known fact that piling on more information does not change entrenched belief, it has been subject of peer-reviewed research for decades. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont...
I do not have to prove anything. As I have already said, the burden of proof lies with the person making the claim, i.e., not me.
Even as a child in primary school, I learned in science class that theories are rarely proven, because it is so easy to disprove a supposedly proven theory by providing counter-evidence.
This is all somewhat tautological anyway. If you don't believe that people ever change their mind when presented with better information, then why are you even bothering to comment? Isn't it futile?
Haha, quite possibly. I mean, even with the best will in the world, can you file commenting on HN under 'useful activity'?
I would like a source on that. Dont take it personal, but I dont see how this is anything but tanky signaling to feel better about yourself. Here in Germany people were rather active in making sure the new far right party AFD wasnt given a platform. By now they are very close to being the strongest party in multiple states. All that deplatforming did there was giving them a quicker rise. You cant deplatform a large sections of society, you are only creating a stronger echo chamber for them by trying. And i have to remind you, the echo chamber only exists because we didnt want to talk to these people. Deplatforming attacks the people not the ideas behind them. Nothing good can (or ever did) come of that. On the contrary, it only strengthens the community under attack and gives them an enemy to connect over. The only reason its attractive again as a tactic is because its easier. Convincing people through a discussion is hard work. I am very much afraid of the day when people are no longer capable to have a discussion because they have forgotten how due to living in echo chambers their hole life. I dont have high hopes that large parts of the left still know how to convince people with arguments, which in turn doesnt give me high hopes for the future. So yes, pls dont fuck us all over I am really not interested in another Reichstagsbrand because people liked how they viewed them self when working on deplatforming.
I worked on modding a political forum from its laissez fairs days to its current operating philosophy.
Bad speech regularly frowns out signal, and in times of crisis, will overwhelm the channel with emotion.
It’s easier to make vague funny one liners which reach the top of the page, drowning out that 8 page report on the telecom industry.
Bashing a political candidate? Channel crusher.
Once the channel is overtaken, crazier philosophies start opening up - nationalism, religious cleansing, minority targeting.
Start moderating to keep the demons away?
The banned users start forming their own sites and attacking you. Bread crumb arguments are spread to lead new users down a dark road and create more enemies.
Eventually what works is banning all known bad actors and mention of those sites.
We’ve also isolated them, so it’s obvious to anyone objective who goes to their corner of the world what their priorities are.
Because once they are isolated, they create their own boards - and on those boards the metastatis of arguments is obvious.
Clear calls for ethnic cleansing, “the minorities did it.” Etc. were rife.
And here’s the kicker - even the mods on that sub forum started banning users.
So when the actual nazis have to ban nazis, is it counted as a win for the model?
Since you brought it up, lets look at the topic of ethnic cleansing and how deplatforming would treat different people and what the result is. Say someone was never interested in politics or isnt that old and has some naivete left traveled to an area with extreme ethical or religious conflicts witnessing it first hand. An intimate view of decades old conflicts where parts of the civilian population are at each others throats and in some places even the threat of massacres is still very real if it werent for massive police or military presences. Take your pick from northern Ireland to some places in the Balkans to the variety of African conflicts with an unimaginable level of hate in some areas. Picture school children needing a police cordon on their way to school to escort them through screaming protesters because they have the wrong ethnicity or religious affiliation. Once people are personally affected or witness something they find atrocious they get motivated to think about it. How could the situation be improved? Talking with the people in the region he hears a specific mantra very often. As long as we still live door to door this conflict will continue. So the persons asks himself what could be possible solutions? The current situation is clearly intolerable to anyone with a sense of empathy. The person reads up on the conflict and its a decades or even century old issue. Quite alot was already tried, you can read books upon books of articles how the situation might be improved and about the numerous campaigns that were already completed. And still here we are today. So what were other regions that had the potential for ethnic conflicts but which are now resolved peacefully? A short look into the history books and you learn this was often achieved by deportations. You might not even have to look far, the formerly German provinces in Poland or Czechoslovakia dont have a any conflicts today, on the contrary. So apparently moving one of the groups is the solution. Sure this was often accompanied throughout history with atrocities, but back then horrible regimes and dictatorships were in power, now we have a properly functioning governments, those atrocities are a day of the past. Just horrible stories from the darkest days of humanity. We never had such a peaceful period in Europe and everyone knows we reached the end of history. So why not relocate one group and ensure permanent peace? So he asks, why dont we just deport every xyz in zyx?
My worry is, how many people on the left are still capable to explain to him why deportations and ethical cleansing are not just not a reasonable thing to do? Why his conclusion is wrong? Instead of just screaming Nazi and publicly shaming him? Could you? With deplatforming he is told that what he is talking about is called ethnic cleansings and he is a horrible Nazi for even mentioning such a thing. So he gets banned and has to look elsewhere for a solution to the problem he witnessed. He finds one of the isolated fringe boards. They are the only place to talk about it. While granted there are alot of Nazis, who cares, you find morons everywhere and they get banned on the platform as well, so he is obviously not in a Nazi board himself. He talks a while and finds some people who agree with him, who tell him that the mixing of inherently different groups is the core issue. He saw it himself after all. You just have to look as far as the Identitarian movement who put a lot of effort into discussion guidelines on how to convince people. Believe me if i tell you, they do know how to debate with someone, you cant cling to the cliche of the drunk skinhead.
That is of course a rather unbelievable story, who witnesses one of those conflicts after all? They are often shitty holiday destinations. But how many have had negative personal encounters with people who fit the role of a migrant or Muslim? The story is the same everywhere with every topic, we dont live in a perfect world and the far right is readily available with easy convenient answer for perceived or real problems. Are you still able to convince someone in a discussion about refugees and womens rights? And with convince I dont mean explaining someone why it is wrong to say something. What deplatforming is is peer pressure. You dont convince anyone with that. You just convince them that you have no answers yourself and to keep their mouth shut till an opportune time arrives. Before the internet that meant never being able to talk with anyone about that in your village or town because the neighbors might find out, with the exception of maybe a more extreme pub round. Your only real option was to look for a straight up Nazi Kameradschaft in the wider vicinity. That was a big step to take. Today they can easily look for more "reasonable" people or even join a major party. Deplatforming at its core leads to people getting targeted for what they say. The people get combated, the ideology behind it stays untouched. If we want any hope for the future that doesnt include a civil war or living in a fascist dictatorship we should look hard at switching that. Combating the ideology and convincing the people. Granted those debates are difficult and furthermore, a horrible past time. Most people dont want to talk about such atrocious things and dont want those discussion to happen in their living room. Just not having these discussions and excluding people who want to talk about it is much easier. Especially if you can feel good about yourself by going the easy way. The person vanishes from your view and becomes someone elses problem. Until they are all our problem.
You have a hypothesis, that deplatforming stops the spread of far right ideology. Thats a hypothesis we can easily test, we dont have to rely on your gut feeling how your policies affected the rest of the world around you. I think we can agree that we are just witnessing for the past few years an extreme rise of the far right across the globe. We are faced with openly far right parties which have made unbelievable rises in parliament and are in quite a few places on the way to becoming the strongest party and with that, will someday likely be the government. They already are the government in some places. Openly authoritarian politicians get elected and unthinkable thinks are happening like separating children of migrants from their parents and putting them in prison camps. And children dying due to lack of care in those facilities. I am sorry if i have to burst your bubble, but the current situation is a fucking emergency, the house is on fire and what we are currently doing is clearly not working. That leaves us with the question why deplatforming, exclusion and public shaming currently doesnt work? There are basically a few options as i see it (shamelessly stolen from a infamous German blog for people who are bored at work).
1) The strategy is valid and would work if it wasnt for those traitors in our midst who dont go along.
2) The strategy is valid and would work we just have to convince more people to join in.
3) The strategy is fundamentally broken and does not work.
4) The strategy is working, we just have to wait to see results.
If you see more options, please do share. I mean it. The situation is to damn severe for 4) we cant go on pretending like everything is fine and the situation being no different from combating the emergence of a Nazi youth club in small towns in the 80s or moderating a voluntary association in form of a board. If you have hopes for 1 or 2 i have to disappoint you. As an anti authoritarian myself let me tell you I sure as hell wont rally behind censorship. There is no authoritarian solution to the problems we face. While my view of the state of the world is granted horrible, I am sure i am not the only one who thinks this way. While the divide in the left between authoritarians and anti-authoritarians was not really a topic for the generation after the fall of the Soviet Union it is very real.
Your hypothesis On the other hand is worth following if you have substantiating facts that back it up.
Basically; your experience is interesting but it isn't clear it applies here. Moderating a forum is not the same as maintaining real social cohesion when people genuinely disagree with each other.
When you have a single specific mechanism that can be applied to “real world polities”, then perhaps this discussion could work.
Otherwise you are talking about a federation of forums and the state of the art when it comes to effective moderation models.
I also recommend volunteering as a mod in one of these forums.
It’s a great place to see what’s going on at the point where the rubber meets the road- grounding your future ideas in tested experience.
edit: Since we came to recommendations, I would suggest you actually talk to some Nazis to see what they are all about. Not some troll on a board but people who show up to a rally of a far right party. Ask their voterbase why they are there.
>Bashing a political candidate? Channel crusher.
I see this all the time on Reddit in subs like /r/politics and /r/news, sarcastic quips get thousands of upvotes and dominate the discussion with no room for any dissenting opinions. Makes it real hard to find out who's being genuine in their approach and who's towing the party line for upvotes. Reddit isn't great for discussion though.
I suppose my question is, what stops your forum from becoming an echo chamber? Are "vague funny one liners" and "Bashing a political candidate" considered bad speech even if they're not leading to crazier philosophies? Would the hundreds of one liners about Trump in /r/politics be considered bad speech? Where can I find genuine discourse?
Recognize that political speech is too valuable for political actors to leave to its own ends.
They will create tools and ways to influence it, and the internet allows for maximal influence and personalization.
I suggest an entirely more radical approach in future.
Make a prediction on a topic of your interest. Ask others to do so as well. Put it up in a public location. Set a time limit.
After the time limit see who’s prediction came true.
Talk through action and proof. Any idle political conversation represents a poisoned pool or a soon to be poisoned pool.
Right now maximize for threat awareness and not for open conversations, because the bad actors have the bigger guns.
> Eventually what works is banning all known bad actors and mention of those sites.
How do you reconcile these two? Because it seems like the first defeats the second.
In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
Deplatforming makes it look like their is no logical or moral counter. It is not an explanation of why the ideas are bad. Platforming and debunking is reasonably likely to expose bad ideas as weak.
Many people (me included) find this approach very unpalatable because of how inherently authoritarian it is. (Ironically, this suggestion often comes from the same people who are concerned by how underrepresented some groups are in the public discourse and how the voices of those groups are not heard, and want to artificially amplify those voices). If you have studied history of any repressive regime where dissenters were deprived of any conventional platform and were reduced to circulating their ideas in the underground, you might empathise.
It's absolutely fine not to take certain groups seriously. But it feels (to me) deeply unfair to undermine their very ability to speak.
Examples: Should climate change deniers be given the same space as actual science?
Should communists (to not only focus on far right) be invited to every serious talk about economy?
> Should ... be invited to every serious talk
Of course not; but "inviting to every X", or "giving the same space" is very different from disallowing X to share the same space (especially if said client change deniers or communists are prepared to have a conversation using roughly the same epistemological tools as actual scientists). There is no onus on platform providers to ensure that every opinion gets the same attention as others; my argument is that they merely let others be.
This isn't necessarily true. I was listening to a podcast about conspiracy theories and how misinformation spreads (the name of which is failing me right now), and in one episode there were some scientists who were dealing with a particular subsegment of the conspiracy theory crowd who would make wild claims about their scientific field. Trying to blackball them or shut down their voice was often all that was required to add fuel to their fire because "obviously these scientists were trying to suppress them because they didn't want the truth getting out".
What ended up being much more effective was inviting some of the conspiracy theorists to speak at one of their scientific conferences. It ended up completely taking the air out of their claims, because none of them were willing to get up and try and defend their ludicrous theories against a bunch of trained experts.
Short of creating an iron grip on all interaction with information a la China, deplatforming people is temporary, as creating and finding a new platform is easy and simply leads to a more concentrated echo chamber for their ideology to fester in. Voat, Gab, Hatreon, 4chan, 8chan, etc. There will always be another platform that opens up in response to other platforms shutting them down. And soon instead of having the original fake news or hateful ideology in the public, you now have a distilled, more extreme version of it leaking into the public.
I don't know what the perfect solution is, but simply deplatforming people isn't going to be it. It will likely be something more like drowning out conspiratorial ideas with high volumes of truthful ones, rather than simply trying to cutoff the oxygen of the conspiracy theorists.
Evidence seems to suggest that the current attempted solutions are not working.
(1) The Danes who wrote those laws were elected by the citizens in a fair and open democracy.
(2) The enforcement (presumably) falls on their judicial system. One that is transparent, progressive and highly respected around the world.
(3) That Denmark has one of the lowest rates of corruption in the world.
(4) That Danes are free to pursue information elsewhere (as in the entire internet) if they don't like whats available locally.
But besides those things, you're right. It's just like the situation in Saudi Arabia, China and Russia. /s
Not really comforting to a slightly smaller minority that didn’t vote for them. A democracy is not a panacea and that’s why the US has the bill of rights to raise the bar on changes to fundamental rights.
> One that is transparent, progressive and highly respected around the world.
By whom? People in other countries don’t give two shits about judicial interpretations of laws in another country.
> That Denmark has one of the lowest rates of corruption in the world.
Corruption is orthogonal to government structure. Massively oppressive regimes can operate entirely inside their own laws and not be corrupt.
> That Danes are free to pursue information elsewhere (as in the entire internet) if they don't like whats available locally
Are they allowed to spread said information? If not, that’s not significantly better than the arrangement in China.
It is much easier to construct a shared agreement on what is true in such an environment. That they are a democracy is less of an issue than the fact they all face a very similar environment and can probably agree with each other on what the truth is because they are all looking at the same thing.
The extermination of the native americans were perpetrated by americans who were elected by citizens in a fair and open democracy.
You seems to have a naive understanding of democracy. People always forget that the nazis won elections. People forget that the greatest evils ( genocide, atomic bombings, etc ) were all perpetrated by democracies.
There is a reason why democracy is called tyranny of the mob.
2) Just because you say they are "transparent, progressive and highly respected around the world" is meaningless. There is nothing inherently good about being "progressive". Once again that is a naive understanding of progessiveness. There was a time when nazis, communists, etc were viewed as progressives. But most importantly, just because they are "competent" today doesn't mean they are eternally competent. You do realize governments, judiciaries, etc can change right?
3) That's because they are filthy rich due centuries of european colonization.
4) Are they?
> But besides those things, you're right. It's just like the situation in Saudi Arabia, China and Russia. /s
It is just like that. Do you know how I know? Saudi, chinese, russians, etc all "self-congratulatory" excuses for why they need censorship. Just like you did.
To you, denmark may be heaven on earth, but to me denmark is nothing but a nazi collabotor who got off easy after ww2. Also, if denmark is so saintly why are the inuits in greenland ( the land you stole from them ) doing so horribly?
First of all, I'm not Danish. I don't know why you assumed that.
Look, the OP simply said they have a system whereby proven falsehoods need to be corrected in the newspaper. That's all. They just have to correct mistakes that can be proven demonstrably false.
It seems perfectly reasonable, but don't take my word for it. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_Denmark -
> In 2004, 2005, and 2009 Denmark received a joint first place in the Worldwide Press Freedom Index from Reporters Without Borders.[5] Since 2011, Denmark has consistently been in the top-10 out of 179 countries in the index and it was fourth in 2016.
People in Denmark have literally risked their lives exercising freedom of the press. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_carto...
For some bizarre reason you equated that record with the Saudis, Chinese, Russians and (most hilariously) with the Nazis. Your hyperbole is lazy and ill-informed.
And no, Denmark isn't perfect. No country is. I never claimed otherwise. So don't bother the straw men. The topic was freedom of speech and freedom of the press. A topic for which modern Denmark has an outstanding record.
We don't have any laws on the books in Russia that forbid newspapers from telling lies I am willing to bet neither does China or Saudi, because that's not needed for authoritarian censorship.
Boris Nemtsov got shot in broad daylight in the centre of Moscow. They don't need laws
If I were to say:
"2x as many white Americans were killed by police as black Americans in 2018."
This a true fact.
If I take note of the fact that black Americans only constitute 13% of the population, then I can say
"A black American is 2.3x as likely as a white American to be killed by police."
This is also a true fact.
So not only are facts capable of telling a narrative, but it gets much more complicated once you start introducing conclusions.
If you say "A black person is 2.3x as likely as a white person to be killed by police in America. American police are being racially discriminatory when killing civilians."
This is a fact and a conclusion, and most news consists of facts and conclusions. Both the fact and the conclusion serve a particular narrative, and that's an issue. The problem is that a news organization with a different set of objectives, or simply operating under a different framework, would be entirely capable of coming to an entirely different conclusion, or introduce entirely different facts alongside it.
"A black person is 2.3x as likely as a white person to be killed by police in America. However, despite making up only 13% of the population, black Americans committed 36% of homicides, with an overall much higher representation in violent crime across the board. Only 5% of police shootings are with an unarmed victim, with the rest resulting from an armed altercation."
Different narrative.
In America, we understand that there is absolutely nothing more dangerous than an entity that feels entitled to control what is true. It might make things easier, and it might actually produce better results so long as the entity doing so is competent and benevolent, but nearly every structure in America is meant to serve as a bulwark for the cases in which the entity in power is precisely the sort that you do not want to be making those decisions. And to be frank, Europe should probably be more wary of that.
“Pope endorses Donald trump” being the classic example
Not lying with statistics
“Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire its prosecutor. The prosecutor said he was forced out for leading a corruption probe into Hunter Biden's company.”
another source, in this case the ny times, would be equally free to publish the statement:
“Vice President Biden was overseeing American policy toward Ukraine at the time, and he did push for the removal of the country’s top prosecutor, who was seen as corrupt or ineffectual by the United States and Western European governments. But there is no evidence he did so to benefit Hunter Biden or the oligarch who owns Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky.”
> The prosecutor said he was forced out for leading a corruption probe into Hunter Biden's company
> there is no evidence he did so to benefit Hunter Biden
It’s entirely fair to report what the prosecutor said provided it’s clearly attributed as it was here.
You’re free to draw your own conclusion that the prosecutor is possibly lying.
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/ewarren/status/118301988086768025...
The problem is that it doesn't only matter that stated facts are correct; it matters also that people reading them interpret them correctly. Natural language is messy; people jump to conclusions also because often we do communicate intentionally by hiding meaning between the lines.
> It’s also allowed for different sides of things, because you can interpret things like socioeconomic statistics and facts differently and write about them as such, but you can’t make up things.
But maybe my English wasn’t good enough to carry it through.
I don’t think narratives are a problem as such. People are allowed different opinions in a free society. Our laws are there to prevent people from printing things that are outright false, but these laws are being circumvented on the modern media platforms because they apply to editiorial staff but not private citizens.
Which is a problem in a world where influencers have more viewers than news papers.
Obviously you can still manipulate real facts and tell a lie (like the classic photo cropping example): that should be prohibited as well.
Narrative with conclusion is challenging to deal with for large swathes of the population, myself included.
"Some people say [lie]." (Fox News favorite)
"According to some theories, [lie]"
"Doctor Ganz Rechts Rassenreinheit says [lie]"
I'm not trying to be snarky, but in all honesty, how do you feel this is working out for the US at this very moment?
I don't think the free speech absolutism present in the US was ever meant to suggest that there isn't such thing as undesirable speech, but rather that the potential for tyranny under regulated speech is a danger well worth avoiding at any cost.
In addition to that, America is a country that works forwards from principles much more often than European nations, which very often work backwards from objectives. To frame the right to free speech in regards to whether or not it is "working out" is not a particularly American frame of reference. The principle that individuals should express themselves as they see fit, and that this is the foundation for a free and open society, is essentially square one.
Have any examples to back this up?
I dont even necessarily disagree with your original argument, but can we get away from the Europe vs America debate that always pops up on this board as if they can be compared in a reasonable way? Europe is made up of a bunch of independent countries alot of which have objectives and principles that conflict with other entities within Europe, let alone outside of it
European posters do this all the time in health care discussions.
It's a fact.
>Have any examples to back this up?
This is an example to backup the statement. The US starts from a strong principle of free speech. European countries generally don't value this as highly, and will censor speech if they feel it is necessary.
When I said "working out", I wasn't talking so much about which effects free speech is having (although that is a question well worth asking) but more about whether speech in the US really is as free as it was ~4 years go.
Could being attacked on twitter by the president for something you say not be construed as a very real retaliation by the administration and thus a curtailment of free speech?
No, someone talking to you in a public forum, even in a hostile fashion, is not a curtailment of free speech. It’s just free speech.
Free speech isn’t the right to not have your feelings hurt.
If Trump attacking people worked on Twitter, there wouldn’t be any democrats left in office at this point.
Great. We still have many of the rights others have been stripped of. We haven't faced any invasions or domestic warfare in over a century, we have the worlds strongest economy, etc etc. Best of all, we can say pretty much whatever we want and not go to jail for it.
However, banning political ads on Facebook does ban political ads on facebook, and banning lies does ban lies.
Tech is not some magical playground disconnected from reality. Time for SV to grow up and engage with society and politics - they’re not an “optional, inefficient” part of life.
Setting a baseline of limiting/banning provably false information is a good thing. Yes, it doesn't stop all forms manipulation of people towards any given agenda, but it certainly doesn't make it easier, and means things have to be at least slightly anchored to reality.
This is such blatant and obvious nonsense. You philosophize on basis of the assumption that central authorities ('government') by definition cannot be trusted, and we should therefore be wary of anything that reeks of centralized decision making.
That is a supremely American way of looking at the world.
Despite the good intentions behind the decentralization of power and the checks and balances that have been built into your system, you have ended up with a nation where the most powerful person has blatantly and publicly broken all the norms and all the rules, who regularly and repeatedly tells the most outrageous lies, and where a very large amount of people stand behind him nevertheless because of large scale & organized disinformation campaigns by the likes of (decentralized) propaganda entities like Fox News.
How does your system deal with that then? Not very well, it seems.
Wouldn't it be great if you would have a powerful centralized body that can say "Ehm, you guys keep on telling outrageous lies, we're going to forbid it and if you keep in doing it you'll be slapped with a fine that really hurts and your CEO might have to go to jail"?
What you don't seem to take into account in your comment is that centralized bodies can protect the weak from the powerful. If you only have decentralized entities, it's survival of the fittest – which is a nice way of saying that the weakest get eaten or die. I don't want to live in a society that has these values.
In regards to whether or not it would be great if we had a powerful centralized body that could determine what constitute outrageous lies worthy of a fine, no, for the reasons I've already stated, I do not think that this would be a good thing. I have no problem with European and Asian countries granting their (very often highly competent) governments greater authorities than what is afforded to the US government, but I think it's supremely important that there remains at least one superpower fundamentally predicated on a mistrust of a central authority.
It's based in European, and more specifically, British Enlightenment thinking, the apotheosis of which (with regard to freedom of speech) is On Liberty[0] by John Stuart Mill, an Englishman. To quote:
> THE TIME, it is to be hoped, is gone by, when any defence would be necessary of the "liberty of the press" as one of the securities against corrupt or tyrannical government. No argument, we may suppose, can now be needed, against permitting a legislature or an executive, not identified in interest with the people, to prescribe opinions to them, and determine what doctrines or what arguments they shall be allowed to hear. This aspect of the question, besides, has been so often and so triumphantly enforced by preceding writers, that it needs not be specially insisted on in this place.
It appears his hopes would bring disappointment were he still around.
[0] Chapter II: Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion https://www.bartleby.com/130/2.html
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Edit: Fixing markup. If anyone knows of a document describing the markup rules, please let me know, it would save me an awful lot of edits ;-)
Nope, that’s not how it works. People consistently keep retrying ideas for government and economics over and over because they get tempted by promises while ignoring history because “this time it’s different”.
It's a circular argument in the sense that because liberty and freedom are defined for the mainstream framework, any outside framework, in order to be accepted by adherents of the mainstream framework, must provide a vision compatible with the existing framework.
We're stuck in a hole in terms of what can be done outside academia in the real world.
In terms of a graphical model, voting is dependent on not only opinion but also motivation. Somebody that thinks you’re wrong is more motivated to downvote than someone who thinks you’re right - one has an ax to grind, one does not.
Though, you're right - I think a lack of reason given for disagreement itself can reveal something interesting - not only that they may not have a reason, but that they can't articulate the reason well enough. In real life we often don't voice disagreement for either of those reasons. In my view, HN is no different.
You are not supposed to downvote when disagreeing. You are also not supposed to complain here about mod votes. You should read HN netiquette and email them instead.
Btw, down voting based on disagreement happens on Reddit just as well. Reddit is a bunch of smaller, semi autonomous communities where quality differs. You could even say quality differs per HN thread.
Both pg and dang have expressed that on HN you really can downvote if you simply disagree.
>You are also not supposed to complain here about mod votes.
Although I was more annoyed at the time, I wasn't trying to complain, I really just wanted to know what problems people had with my post.
>down voting based on disagreement happens on Reddit just as well.
It happens, but at least it's against the etiquette of the site as set by the admins - various subs may have their policies, true.
Where?
I admit I didn't find either way at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I did find this:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
> Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
The former obviously applied.
As for the latter, while you didn't comment about HN turning into Reddit, I'd say comparisons in general fit this rule.
> It happens, but at least it's against the etiquette of the site as set by the admins - various subs may have their policies, true.
AFAICT it happens rampantly, and far more than it does here. That is my very subjective experience, I'm sure everyone has their own, which is why such a discussion leads to no good. It isn't objective/unbiased, nor intellectual.
The fact that Mill wrote those words 200 years ago does not mean they are incorrect. We stick to the rules of Roman law in many aspects, although it was written pretty long time ago. Pythagoras formulated his theorem quite long ago too, yet we still learn it at school.
There are certain ideas that seems to be universal, that just make people lives better. People tend to challenge them and thanks to that we get goodies like Communism and Nazism.
It also does not mean they are correct or meaningful, at least not in every case they are applied or quoted...
You're confused about the point your parent was making. Let me try to explain the context to you:
Top of thread: we think this way in Denmark (a country in Europe)
Reply: we think this way in America
Reply: "This is such blatant and obvious nonsense. ... That is a supremely American way of looking at the world."
Your parent: actually this way of thinking comes from Europe
Your parent is not saying this way of thinking is correct, only that your grandparent is silly to call this way of thinking "supremely American" and imply that it's inferior to European thinking.
How would you deal with foreign media that violates the laws? You'd either have to permit them - which opens up the country to foreign meddling, since they can and have spread propaganda - or sanction/block them, like Russia and China (and Australia.)
Also, suppose despite your best efforts, Trump still gets into the White House. He's installed loyal yes-men in many departments already - if they defy him, they'll resign under pressure or be fired. He'd easily gut this Ministry of Truth and weaponize it to quash CNN/NYT or even climate scientists.
I'm quite on the left and not averse to regulation or centralization, but it's wishful thinking to assume this "powerful centralized body" is going to do the right thing.
See, for example, the use of corruption taskforces in many countries to purge political rivals or even honest bureaucrats who won't take your bribes. Corruption should be illegal, allegations should be investigated but things can go very wrong and these checks perverted against their intended function.
I don't see the problem with subjecting foreign media to the same or even stricter laws. Yes, it's difficult to enforce the law against foreign nations, especially your friends, so enforcement often doesn't happen. That doesn't mean that foreign meddling ought to be made legal, which would be a step backwards in view of laws like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countering_Foreign_Propaganda_....
No. It wouldn’t. When that kind of power (arbiter of truth) is placed in a single point, that point will become the highly contested point of control. Eventually, inevitably, the body would end up turned to some ruthless power of the day, and would serve as the most phenomenal propaganda machine.
“The Ministry of Truth is pleased to announce that bootlace production is up a thousandfold this quarter, due to the heroic efforts of the King. You may now cheer.”
Total decentralisation is the only sane route - you build a bulwark out of billions of human minds, and you build inertia into your system such that emotional volatility led by events or propaganda efforts is smoothed out.
This is basically the concept of democracy and electoral cycles - group consensus on what reality is and how it should be responded to, with a temporal buffer (the election cycle length) to smooth out rash decisions.
Our systems need amendment to better smooth our inherent volatility, which has been provoked by our exponentially growing sphere of information - but this can’t come at the cost of handing control over something as fundamental as the idea of truth to some technocratic committee. That’s how you end up with gulags.
Edit/addendum:
Further musing on temporal smoothing of volatile and labile humanity led me to recall the idea of Concents in Anathem - groups are sequestered away for a year, a decade, a century, or a millennium, and are allowed only at those intervals to interact with the outside world. This monkish dedication to record preservation minimises informatic drift within the group, and provides a continual negative feedback factor to the unstable curve of truth, thus preventing the rewrite of the past, and therefore the present and future.
A decentralized system is not controllable directly, but can only be as smart as the mean of the population[0]. Also, it also has a mechanism of control - propaganda. It's not all that effective, because you can have competing groups countering one another, but the side effects of that are relevant here: people take sides and reason by soundbites, while facts and critical thought get crowded out. Which means the more competing propagandists you have, the dumber the system becomes, even if all propaganda attempts cancel each other out.
So, on one hand you have a system with a very good quality ceiling but easy to manipulate; on the other hand, you have a system more resistant to direct manipulation, but consequently with a much lower ceiling that that also goes monotonically down as attempts to manipulate the system increase. Or, in other words: good results with high risk of bad results, vs. consistently shitty results.
Can't we do better? Are we doomed to choose between only those two?
--
[0] - Assuming a normal distribution, by the central limit theorem. If that doesn't hold, things could get even worse.
They aren't guaranteed to be smart or just (sadly there probably isn't anything which qualifies) but they are are stable in a "not likely to piss off everyone into an insurrection" way.
It is better to let everyone speak and everyone to make their own decisions
I mean, just a few weeks ago ABC posted a video from a Kentucky range and claimed it was fighting in Syria[0]. Is that simply horrible journalism, or a lie?
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/15/media/abc-news-error-video/in...
https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing...
The side doesn't really matter, what matters is giving that power to government will lead to one side winning and entrenching themselves via said power. I believe it's better to let free citizens learn wrongly on their own than to pretend government can teach the so-called right things.
Majority of the people simply trust the media they like or get used to. They usually assume news from these channels have been fact-checked or are trustworthy but we all know messages can be crafted in different ways.
In other words, the media can potentially/likely manipulate how people think and make decisions.
I think this is irrelevant. People will listen to what they like to hear or what matches what they already think. NOBODY is exempt from this, I dont care how smart you think you are.
Have you ever considered the option that you might be the one who is disinformed? European media have a tendency to "group-think" and to extrapolate certain narratives to the extreme. For example, I observe that even reputable German news outlets like "Der Spiegel" put a negative spin on every single story about Trump. My guess would be that the Danish media is simiarly biased given your views. And apparently, your laws did not prevent that from happening.
No. And i'm from Europe, the supreme "nanny state".
But it still has a negative effect on public discourse. It's like information pollution.
This should be basic assumption of the all laws. Remember early 20th century and legal takeovers of governments by warmongering maniacs in Europe?
It was legal, there was trust toward government. All it took was a single group to take over Germany and start WW2.
Even if no one will abuse the law currently, you have absolutely no guarantees(as democracy is popularity contest) that no one will try to abuse them in future.
>> That is a supremely American way of looking at the world.
Not really, it is very prevalent in Europe too - especially Eastern Europe which suffered under Russian communist occupation. Mostly because it was the case in those countries - the populace still remembers government actively working against people.
>> Despite the good intentions behind the decentralization of power and the checks and balances that have been built into your system, you have ended up with a nation where the most powerful person has blatantly and publicly broken all the norms and all the rules, who regularly and repeatedly tells the most outrageous lies, and where a very large amount of people stand behind him nevertheless because of large scale & organized disinformation campaigns by the likes of (decentralized) propaganda entities like Fox News.
>>> How does your system deal with that then? Not very well, it seems.
It works perfectly... for those in power. From citizens perspective it is a nightmare.
>> Wouldn't it be great if you would have a powerful centralized body that can say "Ehm, you guys keep on telling outrageous lies, we're going to forbid it and if you keep in doing it you'll be slapped with a fine that really hurts and your CEO might have to go to jail"?
What prevents this centralized body from making politically motivated decisions? If we go to the extremes we have examples in history - heresy trials, censors in communist Russia, and even current example - China.
One could argue for centralized body of such power in only a single case - system transition by force with benevolent ruler that will dissolve itself after transition.
Good Luck with that.
An established institutional culture of apolitical service, reinforced by respect for those who uphold it and consequences for those who violate it. The kind of thing that the U.S. still expects of its military, judiciary and public service, and the kind of thing that is corroded by political leaders showing contempt for it.
Finding the value of $Centralized_Power might take a while.
Calm down. This isn’t productive to discussion.
> that have been built into your system, you have ended up with a nation where the most powerful person
For being the most powerful person, he doesn’t get much done and is in the process of potentially being impeached. Sounds like an argument in favor of the checks and balances and an argument in favor of less power being concentrated at the federal level in general.
> publicly broken all the norms and all the rules
Publicly broken “all the rules”, really? Methinks you’ve been drinking some koolaid.
> Wouldn't it be great if you would have a powerful centralized body that can say "Ehm, you guys keep on telling outrageous lies
Absolutely not. A ministry of truth that dictates what people say and answers only to politicians is about the worst and least imaginative solution to the problem.
> What you don't seem to take into account in your comment is that centralized bodies can protect the weak from the powerful. If you only have decentralized entities, it's survival of the fittest
False dichotomy. State-level governments in the US are very capable of handling many of the responsibilities that have amassed at the federal level.
If you think more centralization is better, why not have a single world government that decides what is true? The government choosing what is true is working pretty well for China, why don’t we just let them take over control?
SCOTUS is close to one of these centralized bodies you speak of, and they purposely only deal with cases that have gone through every other avenue. And even then, they are not trying to determine truth, but only fit the verdict within the existing body of law. I would prefer less decisions being decided in this manner.
no.
Literally every government and civilization in the history of the world has eventually failed or been corrupted.
Given this inevitability, how is it not better that citizens have protections against a failing government abusing that power? Avoiding centralization of power is one such protection. This is not an "American perspective", it's a simple conclusion reached after looking at history.
"American jobs are being taken by illegal immigrants from Mexico."
Is this a lie? No. But is this disingenuous and misrepresenting much more significant contributors to job loss? Yes. Is it a lie then?
"Transgender women are women."
Is this a lie? Depends entirely on definitions and presuppositions.
Secondly, I think the more important takeaway is that the vast majority of the issues we're having in regards to political discourse have absolutely nothing to do with us not agreeing on facts. Neither side for most of the hard issues are relying on outright incorrect facts.
So not only do I not think that identifying outright lies is as simple and free from bias as you suggest it to be, I also think that the cases in which this could be universally agreed upon would contribute very little to the majority of serious political discussions happening today.
Both of which are believed by huge amounts of Americans.
You do if you want to make some kind of law about it. You are correct, there are plenty of instances where a story is blatantly false and could be taken care of by some kind of preventative action. But the distribution of possible lies is extremely long tailed. For every one of these instances, there are dozens where it is not entirely a lie, but not entirely the truth, or is biased, or a half-truth, or editorialized, or an extreme conclusion, etc. Libel and slander laws already exist, but are rarely invoked because of this reason. It is nigh impossible to create any kind of system or legislation that does more than what these laws already do, while also properly dealing with all of these edge cases.
I mean, even your examples could easily get around any kind of preventative measures by couching their language. Instead of "Obama was born in Kenya", it could be phrased "rumors have begun to circulate that Obama was in fact born in Kenya". The desired effect of planting this lie in people's minds is still successful, but with a few words there is now no way to create a framework that legally prevents people from spreading lies that way, that is also consistent and not overbearing.
I just took a look at a long list of lies by your current President. It has nothing to do with facts like the ones you've stated above. These are simply lies. You can't argue that it's some interpretation, or just half of the picture or anything like that. It's simply a bunch of words phrased as a fact but they never happened.
I can't see anything good coming out of this for any country. It ruins the ability to have a real debate in a society, and I think it harmed America (not only of course) greatly.
And one last thing - yes, it probably shouldn't be one person from one political side that decides what's completely false and shouldn't be published (or perhaps better, be corrected), but I don't think it should be so impossibly complicated to create a system in which representatives from all sides can do this together. America already has structures like this implemented.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-history-of-lies-on...
Edit: I would appreciate if whoever is downvoting can please explain why they are doing so.
As a Canadian I 'preferred' Obama, who ran on the line "change you can believe in" -- but he led the US empire substantially the same as any previous... and so this "can believe in" line, it really expresses a truth. The substantial piece was not that America would change, but that you could _believe_ in the fact that it would change. Little actually changed in America, at least from a distance. And once people stopped believing in the change... one gets Trump.
Disgusting as he is, Trump really is "changing" America. And his lying is more transparent and blatant and crass, but also more theatrical and aggressive. It's weaponized.
The idea that one side tells lies, and the other only truth is part of the problem here.
>You can't argue that it's some interpretation, or just half of the picture or anything like that. It's simply a bunch of words phrased as a fact but they never happened.
"Russian collusion" appears to fit this description, yet I still read about it every day.
The entire political game is composed of stretching the facts to control the narrative. If you see it as one-sided, you're not paying attention.
> The idea that one side tells lies, and the other only truth is part of the problem here.
This is just an observation about your current president, there is no "other side" to it.
Your divisive thinking is the problem here. Someone said that Trump lies, they didn't say "Republicans lie and dems don't," but that was somehow your interpretation of the statement that Trump lies (which is true of any president, yet you and I both know in our heart of hearts that he lies more than anybody by an overwhelming margin).
That's what I assume, but you know what they say about assumptions.
The most basic kind of truths are facts. We at least need to agree on those as best we can first. And then apply critical thinking on the the squishier stuff on top.
Except for that for a lot of "facts", according to Rousseau, we already have 4 truths: what you say, what I say, what we agree upon and what really happened.
So, while the pursuit of truth is important, I'd argue that respect towards each other even when we cannot agree is the most important thing.
"Iraq had WMDs in 2000s" != "I strongly believe Iraq had WMDs in 2000s" != "I find it plausible that Iraq might have had WMDs in 2000s" != "According to that UN report, Iraq had WMDs in 2000s" != "According to NYT, which quotes that UN report, Iraq had WMDs", etc.
A lot of problems are caused by people who say "X" when they should say "I strongly believe X", or "I think I read somewhere that X", or "I'm not sure, but I think X".
It's depressing.
This is Circle of Competence applied[0]. It's admitting what you know you don't know so you don't make mistakes by being overconfident.
So, for instance, if 'tptacek here says a factual statement about security (and there's no large thread contesting it), I'll treat it as gospel. But if he says he's unsure about it, or he read it somewhere, I know to attach less weight to it. I'll code in it my brain as "uncertain, but passed the sniff test of a relevant expert". Etc.
The same principle works in more mundane aspects of life. Whether a person believes something (and how much), or whether they're just reporting something they've read elsewhere, matters a lot for evaluating a factual statement independently.
You left out the last step,
!= Bush administration says Iraq had WMDs
Once you've set the bar re: certainty for a particular discourse neighborhood, you can just make claims at that level thereafter without feeling dishonest. As long as you're sensitive to cases where others may have joined without enough context to know that you're out on a limb.
Lying and misreporting are two different things.
Here s an article about typical media strategies https://theconversation.com/four-things-you-need-to-know-abo...
Such countries will usually fabricate stories by implanting evidence or killing witnesses, not just by repeating them
What s different about autocrats is that they will unscrupulously plant evidence and kill everyone who knows
I've only met a few people who are skeptics about the existence of facts--but I find that they're likely to be skeptics about other things too.
I think that if it's a position you arrive at via honest philosophical inquiry, it's not a hazard at all.
The position to be wary of is where you still believe in the truth, but are so beleaguered by the cacophony of voices claiming to know it that you're willing to accept that somebody else has access to it if it means that you get to just peacefully be on their side and don't have to bother sorting through it all anymore.
That is too say: claiming to know the truth is often a proxy for being too intellectually lazy to bother forming a good argument, and I think that nihilism is preferable.
How do you know?
Yes Trump tells a lot of lies, but I also think each side of the aisle tends to ignore their own hyperbole (or at least fail to appreciate when the other side is hearing “lies”)
And I don't know why is it, that majority of Americans are so accustomed to lying that they tolerate it from politicians. In Finland if politicians get caught with outright lying, it's career-ending if it's bad enough. Prime ministers have resigned over it, party leaders seen their polls slump. In US if Republicans are caught lying (Democrats too I guess to lesser extent), it's a simple distraction and meh from public. Their supporters don't simply care and I guess are not capable of criticizing their own party.
I've been recently thinking that what US has now isn't that far stretch from a single-party system since the parties in power don't really have to fear losing their support. There are no other options, so they can just pass the ball between each other, putting up a show and doing whatever since people can't really choose anything else. If your only option is picking between two assholes, which one you pick? And when the population doesn't know to demand change, what will happen? Nothing.
Yes there are advantages with two-party system, but what I see it has really rotted the political discussion and ideologies into two boxes that can't possibly overlap. In multi-party systems coalition governments can be bit sluggish but at least they offer people a real opportunity for change, and letting go of the old, obsolete power structures. For a country that is so keen on free-market and unrestricted competition, you are awfully restricted in your choice of political parties.
If 50% of the country believes something is a lie and 50% believe it’s mostly true, is it really a lie? The truth is most political “lies” are only considered lies by the opposite party.
And about lying, there are degrees of lying that can be established. The earth is not flat even though some believe it to be so, to state the opposite is untrue. On the other hand, sure you could say eg that Americans have obesity problem (compared to the rest of the world) or they are just normal weight as "only" 1/3 of the population is overweight. But which is a truth or a lie?
I think the problem is largely a cultural shift in politics where the issues have become secondary to the rhetorical war between the two opposite ideologies. It's not about establishing a truth in a sense than it's trying to beat the other party. Yet there is a consensus that can be established, honesty that could be had when stating facts and acknowledging their up and downsides. It's not just black and white wordplay.
Perhaps we should just get rid of the politicians, have our best scientists (preferably chosen at random from a pool of candidates) run the government and people would just vote on things that they wished to improve (immigration, job-safety, healthcare etc). All results would be evaluated afterwards and their effects measured with meticulous statistics. I know that it could be abused too, but even that would be better than what is the current situation in US government.
The reason? So he can be more influential on that 1% of issues he cares most about. If he doesn't get influence on that 1% (like we saw with Syria) then he breaks with Trump, because he has a bottom line: the set of issues he wants to influence. This is true for all politicians. They have a political calculus where they are willing to sacrifice legislation or points in certain areas for the sake of being able to affect legislation in most other areas. Functionally this means that politicians do things like accept big campaign donations in exchange for going easy on a certain sector. I believe most politicians want to do what they think is best for America, but that comes with a single constraint--that they're the ones accomplishing it. And that comes with a hefty cost.
I'm just spitballing here but... grandfather in all existing medical insurance contracts unless the individual chooses to terminate the contract. Let the insurance industry bank on the fact that the number of grandfathered contracts will only trend down over time.
Maybe it would hurt their profit margins, but how much hurt? Probably not enough hurt to knock down the industry is my guess.
From personal experience the issue we have with fake news is not caused by a president. It was the polarization from the 2016 election, which has resulted in people valuing the narrative over facts. Nothing was a clearer example to me personally when later that winter as I was participating in a conference located in Stockholm, which had a track title "Fake News", with an invited keynote speaker who was a previous board member of the wikipedia foundation. The keynote talk was made to present a narrative that media had failed to present information to the voting population about trumps scandals, and as evidence there was a image from a study showing survey result about what people knew about each candidate and their scandals. The conclusion was that if media had done their job then obviously the election would had ended correctly rather than electing Trump.
The numbers were extremely biased against Clinton and fitted the narrative so perfectly that I got a bit suspicious. Looking at the recording of the talk afterward I noticed that the evidence had a reference printed inside it. A moment later I had the paper itself, and what do I find above the image? The researcher explicitly saying that anyone reading it should not draw any comparable conclusions about the numbers as the survey operated during a period of 9 months. The researcher noted that if they had done a new short survey closer to the election date then the numbers would look very differently. It pretty obvious that people can not answer a survey with knowledge of scandals that occur in the future.
Fake news will continue as long we try to make facts fit a narrative, rather than first looking at the facts and then construct a theory about the world.
Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are not leftist strongholds, where "infighting" might allow the Other to win, but people prefer the narrative that "Bernie Bros" ruined our beautiful democracy. Clinton got millions more votes, but it didn't matter. The Electoral College turning it doesn't fit the narrative they've been fed that people further to the left are responsible.
You're right about polarization though. Less than 100k votes wouldn't matter if the country wasn't divided right down the middle. Choosing the future of our country shouldn't be a matter of who can influence a coin toss more.
My very first check of that assertion has a fully "True" rating of 20%[1]. And if you count the entire true spectrum it's 73%. And there is not a small sample size. I assume your statement is only regarding the current executive branch?
I also tried a spot check of the Congress, but my very first check also failed to meet your criteria[2]. The problem with this is that it undermines your entire point. The executive branch has the most strained relationship with objective reality, and that stems from the demands of the current president. They're basically forced to lie for political reasons because the truth is too damaging.
[1] https://www.politifact.com/personalities/barack-obama/ [2] https://www.politifact.com/personalities/mark-warner/
Off the two democrats congressional Leaderships, Nancy Pelosi has 14% and Charles Schumer has 11% in the True category. This in contrast with the republicans that has 12%, 0%, 10% and 5% (trump).
I don't think I can agree with this. When dealing with one group who is using facts to push a narrative/conclusion you think is false, it can become quite easy to push back without outright lies. Once misleading facts have been introduced into a discussion, the level of civility drops. That opens the door for the further drop into outright lies. Especially if one side feels they are less versed in manipulating statistics.
I've spoken to many people who view lies of omission as being just as dishonest as outright lying, especially when done to manipulate someone (normally this involves when a child has lied to their parents and isn't related to anything political). As such, a lie of omission or selectively using facts has now introduced dishonesty into the conversation, making the other side feel like they are just using the standard that was already been set.
>It ruins the ability to have a real debate in a society, and I think it harmed America (not only of course) greatly.
I feel this occurs as soon as someone starts relying on presenting facts to push a certain narrative because it sends the message that it is now acceptable to have a dishonest conversation. At that point, any discussion changes into a matter of winning at any cost.
My theory is this is exactly the value proposition various news companies provide - they do it for you. "We give you the Abstract and the Conclusion".
If anything, that -hampers- critical thinking. It removes the need to apply logic and deduction to stuff that happens and just accept provided explanations of outcomes.
Would we trust a Scientist if they only explained background and results of their experiment, and didn't discuss the actual methodology and analysis of what they did and how they did it? How is that much different from being a Magician? Or saying, "Trust me, I know I'm right"?
Consider this case, hot off the presses. Yesterday Aaron Sorken wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg in the New York Times in which he stated the following:
"And right now, on your website, is an ad claiming that Joe Biden gave the Ukrainian attorney general a billion dollars not to investigate his son. Every square inch of that is a lie and it’s under your logo. That’s not defending free speech, Mark, that’s assaulting truth."
Really? Sorken knows for sure that Biden was not self-dealing? Joe was totally not thinking about his son's half million dollar no-show job with a corrupt Ukranian firm when he ordered the Ukranian government to fire the guy who was investigating it? Wow, that's a really amazing level of access to the truth!
No doubt Sorken has heard and completely believes the mainstream narrative: the prosecutor was himself corrupt and all right-thinking people wanted him removed. (Never mind it's entirely possible that this narrative is true, AND Biden was self-dealing.)
My point is not to convince anyone that Biden was self-dealing. My point is that Sorken is calling objectively false something that is clearly plausible.
This is how it goes. Most people are invested in narratives, and they are keen to suppress ideas that counter their preferred narrative. The idea that they will somehow draw clean lines between facts an interpretations has always been a foolish hope.
It seems to me that truth isn't so hard to find when one actually looks for it.
American understanding birthed a society that openly fosters fascism. It should only be used as an ironic example, not as some sort of highroad ethical argument.
In my honest opinion - every law should be made with assumption that in the future, or even now, an actor will exists that will abuse it to the utmost limits.
One of reasons i am vehemently against article 13 in Europe, or anti-hate speech laws(as those can be abused to basically turn into censorship laws - while doing absolutely nothing but hiding the symptoms of systematic problems).
"start introducing conclusions".
So not just stating facts after all?
Another thing is the choice of facts you decide to state. All media have a bias in what type of news they decide to cover. Usually they pick stories based on what their audience wants to hear. I don't think there's a solution, besides trying to be more critical about medias in general.
The body consists of a board of all media agencies and they self-regulate their behaviour and adhere to their commonly agreed principles (e.g. if you get facts wrong, people can demand follow-ups with a correction etc).
In my eyes the US has a ideological perspective on many issues, that are basically "solved" in other democratic nations (with gun-law beeing the most shining example). I accept that you cannot directly apply solutions that work in one nation to another without reflecting the differences in culture and law, but it happens all too often that Americans claim something can't be solved, while it works perfectly fine somewhere else, without having sacrificed neither democracy nor freedom.
When it comes to media regulation, it is a question of law and enforcement. If you don't trust your own courts to objectively judge what accounts to a violation and what does not or is ambiguous (like in your examples), then you have a problem with your justice system beeing influenced by politics and the principle of the seperation of powers is broken.
News outlets are then free to print articles containing opinions, studies and conclusions, but this are called editorials and not news articles, and by definition they do carry the opinion of the writer and his/her innate bias on the matter. Even in this case, saying something false is different from interpreting the data or facts at hand. For example, you could write and publish an editorial examining the same statistics as before and come up with the conclusion that there might be a racial bias - some people might agree, some people might not, but it's still an opinion based on hard data and doesn't contain a lie. If you, however, started saying that it's all a plot orchestrated by the reptilians running society to make you think that there's a racial bias, that would indeed be a lie with no factual basis and should be punishable.
There are facets and sides to every story you tell, but reducing everything down to the point where you conflate news reporting, opinions and lies is, imho, stupid.
> This is a fact and a conclusion, and most news consists of facts and conclusions.
Journalists usually quote somebody else for the conclusion, they don't use themselves as a primary source. And if they're good they get multiple quotes from different people to give a view of the differing opinions.
So they print blank pages?
Ironic.
Sigh, I wish news could work out in a level-headed, respectable manner like that.
Instead we have “news” reduced to opinions-of-the-day, fat middle fingers shoved in faces to rile up attention (figuratively speaking), and clever ways of turning current events into enticing blockbuster rollercoasters of reporting with crafty “news-scaping”.
(Not all news is like this, FWIW. When information has to be reluctantly peddled for a pittance, like news media is stuck with begrudgingly trying to get people to buy their holiday fruitcakes, then the etiquette of pride in truth gets tossed).
Before Snowden we had some conspiracy theories that NSA is spying on everyone, but those who claimed that were ridiculed.
Before the communism fell the truth that Polish officers were murdered in Katyn forest by Soviets was considered a lie (official "truth" was that Germans did that) - this truth was so annoying that for a long time (until 1980ties) even Western countries official policy preferred lies only to maintain good relations with Soviet Union.
For a quite a long time (till 1960ies) people thought that this is a good idea to check if shoes fit using X-rays. The truth of that times was that X-rays used in that way are safe.
And I can go on like this for hours.
People lie, people make mistakes, people have shady interests and motivations, human knowledge is restricted. If we enforce official "truth" we never learn the truth. Maybe this will help to keep societies in peace (in the Orwellian way).
Communists tried that, luckily they failed. Chinese half Communism half Confucianism tries that now, we will see how it will end up.
"The Best Countries for Women is a perception-based ranking based on the responses of nearly 9,000 women who filled out surveys for the 2019 Best Countries rankings. The ranking is derived from a compilation of five equally weighted country attributes: care about human rights, gender equality, income equality, progress and safety."
Combined they make the statement that you can label yourself as non-feminist and still care about human rights, gender equality, income equality, progress and safety.
I'd love to see an example
We also get politicians which the one who gets the most attention wins elections, because internet is an attention economy. It does not mean that getting as much attention as a possible for a politician means that you have good intentions. Never in our past have companies have had access to information which keeps us mentally hooked to their services. There need to be some kind of safety standards.
What if new science tells us that seeing certain types of news results in X condition, 20% of the time ?
Social networks are stuck.
Are you literally blaming YouTube for flat earthers in Denmark?
The issue is that all regulators are human, and all humans have biases. No man is fit to play the censor.
Given the modern flat earthed movement was essentially grown on YouTube why wouldn't it effect people around the globe?
Is YouTube banned in Denmark?
The actual matter is for controversial statements. I very much prefer those statements to be allowed, discussed, debunked if needed, than outright forbidden. In liberal democracies, the press is generally considered to be a needed counterpower (along with the establish executive, legislative and judicial powers of the state). Putting it under the control of the judicial power kind of weakens it.
All in all, though, I believe we have wide freedom of press and freedom of speech not unlike what they have in the rest of Europe and in reality not that different from what they have in the US. Yes, we do have a media liability law which makes the editor (or even the journalist or the publication) liable for defamation in the content and for publishing certain information about a person's private life. The effect is that Danish publications are forced to worry about defamation against persons or corporations, or groups of people such as certain statements regarding religions, ethnicity etc or about information regarding persons' private life.
But apart from what I describe above, newspapers can publish more or less whatever they want without fearing criminal or tort liability. They mostly have to fear ridicule. A Danish editor will not be held liable if his newspaper writes wrong facts about the unemployment rate, crime, business climate, taxes or just about anything else that is in the news.
I believe the answer to why Danish media still have a decent standard despite free online news and Google and Facebook getting the ad money, is found in the subsidies. Virtually all large media in Denmark are either public entities or private entities that are heavily subsidized. By far the largest Danish media is the national radio and TV station. All the large newspapers receive huge subsidies. They simply still have budgets to pay for journalism.
Here is a list of the recipients with amounts: https://slks.dk/fileadmin/user_upload/SLKS/Omraader/Medier/S...
i assume this is sarcasm, as society has historically been mostly illiterate and unschooled.
right now is when we are the most informed in the history of humankind.
till then most people around the world didn't know how to read and write.
my own eastern european country had an illiteracy rate of 95% in 1920.
Then there are opinion pieces - which by definition are opinion not facts.
I seriously have no good idea how to regulate that: international or national certifications are bound to be abused(lobbying in case of former, national interest in case of latter) and current system is absolutely dogshit.
Honestly it is because all news outlets optimize for one thing only - money - and money nowadays comes from one thing mostly: selling ads, or to be exact - selling access to serving ads to people with specific interests.
As long as selling ads en masse is the most profitable options the current system will exist. Clickbait/Yellow journalism will thrive as long as it's only purpose is to attract attention.
Secondly, there is no absolute, objective truth and there never will be.
The best we can do is to individually strive for telling the truth and hope for the best.
People are so gullible, and some would argue that if they fall for things like that, it's on them. In my opinion, Twitter is getting into a muddy situation with this: what is "political", what is "advertising"... and what is "paid", are all terms that could have different interpretation.
One could argue that Twitter may have just said "hey you, if this is illegal, send a court order and will take it down, otherwise everything stays", forcing governments to actually define what goes and what doesn't, instead of relying on for-profit companies to tell us what we can see and what we can't.
But that train departed so long ago.
I’m extremely interested in the idea that a society has incentivized both a robust free press and accountability to speak the truth...
If that is the case it seems like those lessons would be very useful to democracies the world over.
During the rush to digital a section was launched “facts are sacred”
Hahhahahah
No it was “Comment is free”, that is what generated clicks and ad revenue
sigh
Why should it be treated any differently than other media?
What we need is a return of the Fairness Doctrine in the US (and something similar to the EU) and application of the policy to social media advertising and news outlets. It won't stop foreign psy-ops, but it will stop a lot of the internal-originating lies and deception.
Why doesn't the laws apply for Facebook? Ads are something they are profiting from, therefore implying involvement and thus
Has Facebook reached the point where they could be fined for simply hosting untrue content? They curate and don't show everything so the argument of being just a "market of ideas" rings untrue.
The problem is, who gets to define what's truthful and how do you quantify the bar for "truthfulness"? This is a deep philosophical question that doesn't really have a satisfactory solution at this point. Some cases are "obvious", but laws shouldn't be written with just the easy cases in mind.
> This died with Facebook, YouTube and the non-editorial entertainment “news” and as a result we have anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers and what not.
This is incorret. Anti-vaxxers and anti-vax protests have existed since the inception of vaccines back in the 1800s [1]. Flat earthers for longer.
It's a convenient narrative that the internet somehow created these anti-science movements, or somehow spread them, but that's not really supported by facts. Celebrities like Jenny McCarthy arguably spread that message far more than people talking with each other on Facebook.
If I purchase ads on Facebook saying Republicans support the Green New Deal (but they don't), will Facebook take the ads down?
I often see these clean, easily provable anecdotes from those who support some kind of suppression of speech. I worry though: often the truthfulness of real world statements are difficult to determine. Even when truth is easy to determine, there are few arbiters of information that everyone alongside the aisle trust. As a result, no matter how easy or difficult truth is to find, without trust no one will believe the truth even if they hear it clearly.
I find political speech pervasive, and believe that almost everything a person says or does has some political element. Determining the periphery of political speech,as a result, would be inherently political.
That misses a whole bunch of political advertising. Most of it, I'd wager.
Starting somewhere bad without a plan is actively bad.
Here's the thing, people. FB and Twitter are pretty much garbage. That's fine, and we all mostly agree about that.
Here's the worst part of social media in general: it's uniting the absolute shittiest of the Republicans with the absolute shittiest of the Democrats and encouraging them both to get together and form a government agency that defines "truth" and then forces private entities to enforce that truth.
There is literally nothing Twitter or Facebook or any other social media website could do that would be this actually bad.
That covers most political spending on the national level. Political spending for state offices (which dont have to report to the FEC) is a whole other story.
And propaganda back then wasn’t so clear cut. We were allied with Russia and at the end their population was truly decimated.
While her question could seem to be reductive, I think it's accurately reducing the question to a point where the answer is easily approachable to most people and, while often time the actual advertisements less obvious lies in practice, a lot of facebook advertisements are knowingly spreading falsehoods and that is hurting the political dialog.
That was probably the only point Zuckerberg made that I agree with, though I don’t doubt that we think that way for different reasons.
If I know social networks are deleting ads or posts that are deemed untruthful then 1) how do I see who determines the truthfulness of the network’s content and 2) how can I trust that nothing else is being removed at will? It’s a classic argument.
Personally, I trust myself to filter through information and make informed decisions; more so than Facebook or Twitter. I think that many people prefer not to make informed political decisions on their own for a variety of reasons. Be it a lack of time, ambition, or research knowledge, it harms us as a whole when we allow ourselves to be told what political opinions to hold.
So even if the networks don't delete the content, they are already determining what we should and shouldnt see, no?
Having an algorithm or AI determine what I will or won’t see on a social media page is marginally better than a person deciding that no one should see that content. With that said, my bottom line here is that I would prefer that my internet experience go completely untampered with. I come online to discover new things that I wouldn’t see otherwise. Whether that’s a new hobby or a political falsehood, I want to discover and form an opinion on it myself.
The founding fathers thought that if government was given such power it would be abused to stifle speech that fell outside of those categories so the only way to protect speech was to protect it all.
I tend to think that if this is true for government, it's probably true for large corporations as well.
Yet we usually manage to distinguish them. I don't think this is an intractable problem.
slander/defamation/libel aren't criminal laws. It's civil law.
That's why the Covington Catholic School kid has to sue "trusted" liberal outlets which allegedly defamed him in a civil court for instant.
Zuck's response was, "well, I think it's BAD if you LIE. Telling lies is bad." but wouldn't say that Facebook would moderate that kind of content.
I personally don't see a legitimate free speech claim saying that political parties should be allowed to target opponents with plain, simple falsehoods like that (which already happen through the mail system, mind), but I'm open to hear.
I ask because speech is already restricted when it comes to advertising; companies are compelled to put up disclaimers, the FTC will come down on misleading ads, etc.
So, if society's surviving okay with those restrictions, is there a reason that political chicanery shouldn't be held to some standard also?
What is the free speech argument for not drawing a line at that?
Would that actually be legal? Are you allowed to try to suppress the vote like that?
AOC's hypothetical ad shouldn't be policed by Facebook, it should be policed by the police, or at the very least be an example of criminal defamation that is handled in the court system. I Am Clearly Not A Lawyer but I am surprised by looking at the existing legislation on criminal defamation that it's not.
To the broader question, about whether all lies in political ads should be banned, the free speech argument against is that while it's easy to invent easy and obvious cases of lying, enforcing that policy in reality is very difficult and puts Facebook in the position of censoring speech that one side may consider a truth and the other may consider a lie.
And, choosing not to determine the peripherey of political speech, is also political. Inaction is a choice, which by its nature supports the status quo.
I am not saying inaction, or the status quo, is necessarily good or bad, although I don't agree with the implication in the parent post that Facebook shouldn't do something.
What should be done is delicate and will always require constant negotiation, and be in flux. I am a proponent of free speech. Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, is, of course, a classic example of a "surpression" of speech, and, the history of the US court system in ruling that books which were banned are legal to publish, etc, is a good example that our legal system has tools to negotiate these issues and can do so.
Just move the propaganda two hops away.
When Spain changed organ donations from opt-in to opt-out the rate increased from 30% to 9x%. That's one tick of a box.
I see these comments a lot and I don't know if people purposefully try to downplay the role of smart design because they pursue an agenda or if people seriously don't recognise how significant small changes in design can be.
If we'd manage to hide false information behind two clicks we'd have done the world a great service.
Does this render the concept of a "forest" meaningless?
I run a site. I want to get rid of all fraudulent spam but allow legitimate commercial product advertisements. I train a model to tell the difference (or maybe I just make a human judgment call). It is better than guessing but worse than perfect: false positives and false negatives exist and expose me to criticism from interested parties.
Your position is that this renders the concept of spam meaningless because I promised to get rid of spam and allow non-spam content.
If you have robots chopping down forests, there's not much to do when they're wrong except apologize and explain that algorithms are hard.
It is therefore possible for a concept to grow to include contradictory examples, at which point people will typically split the basket into two distinct concepts, like a forest vs a grove. The point at which that happens is somewhat arbitrary, but it also doesn't exist a priori. Someone has to try to use the word ambiguously. Words don't have meanings until they are used by people to mean.
It is even possible for a distinction to not be made, and for someone to experience cognitive dissonance when two contradictory examples remain in the same basket.
> I worry though: often the truthfulness of real world statements are difficult to determine. Even when truth is easy to determine, there are few arbiters of information that everyone alongside the aisle trust.
This is true, of course, but why is this such a serious or novel concern? All criminal trials, for instance, require making a judgement on the truth about reality. Of course some cases are very hard, and sometimes we get the wrong outcome. But what else do you suggest? That no one ever attempt to determine anything about reality?
a. Congressional Republican majority b. Some elected Republicans c. A group of Republican voters
If AOC ran that ad, it very well would be truthful for B and C, but should Facebook interpret the ad as describing A? There's way too much nuance to be the single arbitrator.
For example, imagine my TIMECUBE PAC ponies up for 2500 targeted facebook micro-campaigns with very slight variations depending on the target demo with an ad spend of $20, $50K cost. Would it be actually possible for anybody to get Facebook to tell them who I was advertising at, or what those ads were?
TV ads are broadcast and you can have one grad student check some boxes per market, they just need an extension cord and a bunch of TVs to watch.
Internet ads can have a spend of one and they're gone, or behind this really slick infinite scroll. If 40 people see the ad really whats the likelihood of gleaning useful information?
The Old World Mad Men style Ad is blasted from the antenna, printed, or plastered on a billboard. With Old Media you can tell easily who's being targeted because you can't narrow down based on "Likely to be Pregnant". A TV commercial is incapable of pranking your roommate[0], this stuff is a wholly new category, and its profitability is larger than Uber's 2019 Q2 posted losses.
While this handy search page is for sure an improvement over Facebook's previously completely opaque ad market, I disagree that this is an improvement over the Old Media.
I'd also imagine the Old Media ads have a lawyer or compliance person overseeing the business, and while I know FB has the lawyers I doubt anyone is motivated or empowered to hit the brakes.
[0] https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking...
Just look at the content surrounding the ads on daytime soaps, college ball, anime cartoons. Billboard next to (My apologies for this shorthand, I can't think of any polite way to make this next analogy) "Inner City" liquor store, suburban daycare, or just along the interstate.
As well as dead reckoning, I'll bet a local library has the spend on paper in some industry publication. Anyone in the industry can probably rattle off the spend and get pretty close. Plus, since they are marketing ad space for money, why not send over a proposal and see what the initial offer is?
Surely this takes more time than glancing at some Facebook reactjs ad timeline which is for sure not edited by an algorithm, but like I said there is a finite amount of billboards and tv channels. One grad student wouldn't do it, but however many you need for the internet is sure going to cost you.
However, this search box doesn't adequately explain who is seeing these ads. It does expose which state the ads are shown within, and the general demo (age, gender), but if I am not mistaken the ad targeting service is way more fine grained than this. Isn't this stuff down to the zip+4 or even, "near a Starbucks"? Facebook faced a lawsuit[0] in 2019 for Fair Housing Act violations, the complaint alleges that facebook let people advertise housing while excluding "Hispanic", "New Parents", etc in the target demographics.
It also looks like I can search back 7, 60, 30, 90 days or "All Impressions". There's no way a librarian had any input in this.
In addition, I suspect that if I were to actually do analysis here Facebook would start demanding PII, especially if I start crawling the searches. Is there an API for this? The infinite scrolling is IMO useless for any real use cases such as monitoring political ads in general.
It does appears as if I could use this search box to find one ad campaign or all of one org's campaigns. But I kind of suspect I'd need a whole bunch of grad students to do data collection?
Do you know if other platforms also expose some political ads?
[0] https://www.salon.com/2019/08/21/digital-redlining-facebooks...
Basically an arms race of lies, where those willing to lie the most have the greatest advantage. What's worse is that the most insidious of the lies will appeal to the parts of the targets' psyches that wants very much to believe the lies, and therefore unlikely to proactively fact check (i.e Pizzagate).
And as has been the trend of late, lies that are eventually publicly debunked will be minimized as being "just jokes".
This is why people always bring up that the "Free speech" is a concept that applies to governments(never-mind the historical origins in ancient Athens which was largely around protecting political discourse and dissent from prosecution..). Like many restrictions placed on the government it falls apart and becomes contradictory when applied to the individual.
The practical considerations differ by orders of magnitude when we're talking about paid advertisements.
I had a bit of a different take. I actually think even this simple statement is incredibly difficult to verify.
First, we have to define what the Green New Deal even is. I don't mean this to be snarky, but even that is difficult.
Then we have to define what support means. Does it mean positive comments in the press? Do we need to go lookup in Lexis-Nexis every statement the candidate has made about the Green New Deal?
Even if we limit it to actual votes, it's still problematic. Did the candidate vote for the markup in committee? Did they vote to move it to the floor? In the Senate, did they vote for cloture, but vote against it on the floor? Did they vote for the bill out of conference?
Some might recall, we spent a good portion of the 2004 campaign arguing over whether John Kerry voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it.
This stuff is extremely subjective. It's probably something like a day's work for a seasoned reporter to accurately fact check a claim like this, and even then it's open to interpretation, which is easy enough to express in a fact check, but pretty hard in a binary judgement of truth.
I think people should be more comfortable with non-binary truth, based on the likelihood that something is a lie or not based on historical record. I would put more trust in a statement from someone with a record of telling unbiased truth versus someone with a record of frequently spewing lies or having ingrained bias.
Otherwise, if you don't make these types of initial simplifications, it becomes too complicated to start evaluating the truth of any statement, including scientific ones. And it's okay to be make a mistaken evaluation, just reevaluate and adjust the simplified "truth" assessment model based on more recent data.
There is a danger in deferring a "truth" assessment: a community loses a sense of shared truth leading to polarization, doubt, confusion. And a so-called "neutral" person is, by not taking action, implicitly supporting the dominant narrative, which may be a lie after all.
Careful, getting a bit too postmodernists in here. If you look at it too hard all "truths" become false eventually, and that can pave the way to apathy.
>And it's okay to be make a mistaken evaluation, just reevaluate and adjust the simplified "truth" assessment model based on more recent data.
And how many politicians on both sides of the aisle double-down on an issue just to remain consistent to their base? Or worse, change their position thanks to millions of dollars worth of lobbying or the promise of a high-up position once they're out of office?
>And a so-called "neutral" person is, by not taking action, implicitly supporting the dominant narrative, which may be a lie after all.
Maybe the Stoics were on to something. If the masses believe the lie, doesn't it become the truth?
Isn't the point of seeing the truth as non-binary that they cannot become false? Just less likely to be true?
This seems intrinsically more amenable to changing one's mind on the truth of something, though I agree that not having an opinion on the truth of something is apathetic. Just because you strongly believe that you're about 60% sure that something is true doesn't make it less strongly held.
I do this all the time in scientific analysis... estimating how likely I am to be correct is part of the job.
If I want to have a conversation about free speech, and a postmodernist begins questioning if we even actually have free will, or if it's even valid to discuss morality if it's entirely possible we exist in a simulation...you haven't actually advanced anything. You've just made soup. Postmodernism is a tool for turning building blocks into soup, and that is more often than not extremely counterproductive. Though it is, to some degree, necessary.
I think the fundamental problem is that aggressive postmodernism will often disregard presuppositions with absolutely no interest in understanding the utility/value of the presupposition.
Note, PR takes literally the exact opposite tact to communication. We’re barreling deep into a post-truth world with an incredible amount of money fueling this. See also: non linear warfare, hypernormalization, Edward Bernays, why to buy a newspaper when it never makes money.
My opinion is that many apathetic people become that way because of being treated unfairly (in their view) or feeling helpless, and way less people become that way because of thinking too hard.
"Or worse, change their position thanks to millions of dollars ..."
Well, I see new data: lobbying $$$ that could make a previously trusted politician biased. Time to update my simplistic model on his related political ads to being less likely to true. There might be another politician who changed positions based on new or emerging body of evidence - maybe this person is more trustworthy this time. New data -> updated evaluation.
"the masses believe the lie, doesn't it become the truth"
I'm not familiar with post-modernism or Stoicism. But I sure hope that the proportion of people who believe one thing does not ultimately determine its truthfulness. The way I would initially simplify this is to rely on the likely proportion of unbiased people who hold one position versus the opposite. And by unbiased, I simplify that by not trusting greedy people, or people who have not studied the policy or history of it or other places who've tried different approaches. I think these initial simplifications will already cut down many viewpoints and voices that I do not need hear, in order to make an informed voting decision.
Strongly disagree, this would imply that an individual's support of a narrative can change simply by the environment around them changing while the individual stays static.
Three Christians, two athiests, and an agnostic are sitting at a bar. Does the agnostic support Christianity? Two of the Christians leave. Does the agnostic now support atheism?
Anyway, the OP was about political ads that can affect how people vote, a decision to vote or not affects the community. Being agnostic about something (aliens) does not necessarily have the same gravity of effect as believing in a political ad.
- one: you are bringing religion into a discussion where it isn't necessary
- two: it hangs in a frame where a causual passer-by might think this is usual. I mean: if I write "if the rabbits chases the cats and the dogs do nothing" an hypothetical reader who knows nothing about cats and rabbits might easily get the idea that this is a common occurrence, while in fact it is fact a very unusual one.
- two: I think this is fine. In an example where a bunch of people are sitting in a bar and a big group starts bullying a smaller group, someone who does nothing is allowing this to happen, and we can attribute moral responsibility for them allowing this to happen. Just because everyone knows that it's normal for someone to always get bullied by the larger group doesn't make it okay. If someone doesn't know or understand that bullying is wrong, assigning moral responsibility is more complicated, but neither of those things depend on their knowledge of the frequency of bullying. There is a way in which available information is important, but not this one.
Hmmmm. I think you managed to sneak in another subtle error:
If that was your idea then, at least in an Internet context, you should probably write about how Atheists are bullying Christians.
I'd avoid this example at all. It feels contrived and either you intended it or not it smears a good number of innocent people.
Use something neutral instead:
Group a and group b or something.
I referred to the groups as "The Larger Group" and "The Smaller Group." I'm not sure what you're getting at.
Writing - especially in an Internet forum context - about Christians bullying Atheists
is about as fitting as
- in a historic context - writing an example about Jews killing Nazis. Yes, it has happened, more than once. And no, for some reason that doesn't make it a good example except when we are discussing that particular topic.
Besides, as was mentioned above you are both pulling an unrelated group of people into this and you are pulling religion into an argument about something else.
Snide remarks like that is equally annoying regardless of if they come from you or from the old relative who always wants to frame everything good that happens as a miracle from $DEITY
Both you and the old relative might mean it well and get som points from people who agree with you but on the larger scale it only increases tension.
Guy Who Chose To Make It About Religion, over here! FWIW I was just looking for a concrete example that would illustrate the preposterous nature of the statement I was replying to, and when I searched my brain for people who don't have a position on something "agnostic" was the one that immediately came to mind. Having the hindsight of seeing this little back and forth between you two, maybe "undecided voter" would have been more apropos... but I feel like that could have potentially spiraled out, too. In any event, I wasn't trying to start a holy flame war and I didn't imagine that anybody would go on a tangent about the religious aspect of it.
That said, why not stoke these flames unnecessarily? As for whether athiests gang up on Christians more than the other way around, I don't think the "internet" context is relevant; the internet is the context we're discussing this in, but the hypothetical bar was IRL (or at least, that was the interpretation of the author and the author has never heard of a bar that isn't IRL). Where I live (Midwest US) Christians ganging up on athiests seems more common than the other way around IRL, so if we need to unpack the realism of philipov's modification to my example and willfully ignore the fact that their choice of which group would be cast as the aggressor was just based on which group was initially larger in my example (which was in turn based on which group is larger IRL, but I don't feel the example would be substantially different if labels were reversed) I'll vote for "marginally more realistic than the other way around and nowhere near the same ballpark as a roles-reversed holocaust."
Edit: s/the holocaust/a roles-reversed holocaust/
In this context, the question is whether something is political speech or something else. What is included and excluded from that category will get pretty interesting.
We saw the same thing with compelled union dues in the public sector. Were those for political speech or just routine union activity? SCOTUS said it couldn't tell the difference, so a public institution couldn't compel employees to pay dues.
I guess twitter thinks they can tell the difference, but I suspect there will be a lot of controversy.
For a general view:
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Probabilistic_logic
Bayesian side:
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/A_priori_probability
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Bayesian_inference (Bayesian Updating)
To me, this seems like less a problem with degrees of truth, and more a problem with faith in simplistic arguments.
2) Plaster claim over grainy black-and-white photo, with attribution. Run TV/internet campaign with it.
If you're having a lawyerly debate about the technicalities of the accusation, you've already lost.
It's like how Republicans (tend to) oppose "socialized health care" but support Medicare. A lot of politics is just playing with words, and "Green New Deal" offers plenty of ambiguity.
Take the decision out of what is true / not true out of it and just remove the political advertisements all together.
Very similar problem. I would expect that they would keep track of who is doing the flagging and whether their flagging is consistent with other flaggers, and various other tests for "naturalness" and lack of bias and so on. Then weight things appropriately.
Under this guidance for example, Shell could advertise all they want on twitter, but running an ad against Shell about how they pollute the environment or contribute to global warming would be banned.
So then your options are to ban all advertising, or be selective in what advertising you allow. Which is inherently a political position.
Secondly, suppose you could not advertise about shell so what? You can advertise for Greenpeace and related causes.
Which, again, means companies like Shell could advertise all they want, but anything that calls them out would be considered political.
One would have to have a purposefully obtuse definition of political speech to outlaw ads by charities but allow Shell.
Twitter isn't drawing a line in the sand as much as they are deciding to ban the whole beach and kick everyone off it.
You're saying that all speech is somehow political. I agree. Yet you must admit that on an advertising platform, there are some forms of political speech (e.g., the type allowed by ad buys) that, in lieu of some external regulation, will be _inherently_ biased. That is, the economic arrangement can only pit one group against another.
The only _true_ solution to this problem is a platform where the stakeholders (users) also govern all parts of the platform like a common pooled resource. But we know this cannot happen because, well, capitalism.
So I do not discount your claim that all goings-on in public fora are inherently political, I'll just pit two concrete facts against your abstract observation: 1) limiting political ad buys will be less bad than not limiting political ad buys and 2 we can only start really reasoning about your abstract concept of relative existential truths after we fundamentally fix a fundamentally broken economic and technical arrangement.
Pressure from lawmakers and the public alike can change their policies. And we can always vote with our feet.
Quit trying to micro manage everyone.
Accept payment to publish messages on a competitive platform - and let readers, being mostly competent adults, figure content out themselves.
Regardless of competency, there should be some eligibility requirements to vote. Holding a job should be one. Proof of citizenship should be another.
1. Do you have any evidence that people were more competent at a younger age in 1800? In fact I would think that the opposite is probably true - but again this seems impossible to prove so I'm simply asking you if you have any reason to believe what you're saying is true other than your feelings.
2. People without jobs have just as many rights as those with jobs. Do you also think people without land should not vote? Perhaps not women? Maybe black votes should have less of an impact? I'm curious if you're not American- maybe this would explain a cultural difference I am missing?
How does flipping burgers qualify you to have a say in how to run a country?
Take away votes from the uneducated, the criminal, the insane, people with low IQ, and the tax dodging millionaires.
And if readers were ‘mostly competent’, and able to decipher the truth, we wouldn’t even be having this convo
Strange how many purporting to wave the banner of "equality and diversity" want absolute control over others, rather than respect the natural sovereignty of the individual.
Printing presses and distribution were expensive - even more so back in the day and before their invention it held - arguably even more so.
It may be a good ideal for having ideas standing on their own weight but a precedent it is not.
It’s repulsive and short-sighted, it appears to me they have forgotten or disregarded the old adage to not claim a new power you wouldn’t trust your opponents with.
Asking a corporation to be in charge of arbitrating those disagreements doesn’t seem like the end game these politicians are actually pursuing here. Instead my interpretation of their motivation is to silence their opposition.
They are trying to setup a system where they are gatekeepers of these political disagreements, ignoring the fact that the same system will almost certainly be weaponized against them.
For what it’s worth I’m on the same “side” as these politicians for many issues, I just feel like they are playing a dangerous game here.
We're talking about setting rules that span literally _billions_ of conversations. Taking fully for granted the notion that there are facts that are objective, 100% knowable facts: The question isn't about how the system handles obviously false or obviously true statements, it's how it handles everything on the margin. There were tons of things that were considered conspiracy theories that we now consider clear fact: people like you would have been the ones saying "of course we shouldn't allow people to claim the CIA is drugging and torturing and raping children"[1] in America in the 1950s, or "of course we shouldn't allow people to claim the government is euthanizing the disabled"[2] in 1930s Germany or any number of "obviously false" things that were very much true.
I have no reason to believe your particular example falls into that category, but the sweeping claim that arbitrating political facts is trivial is profoundly ignorant of even a tiny bit of history.
[1] Project MKUltra
[2] Aktion 44
Facebook is arguing for the right to poison the well with a literally unlimited volume of toxic disinformation, rather than figure out a way to reduce if not eliminate that harm. Perhaps they limit the number of political ads that any single account can view to some small number. Perhaps they can only fact-check ads on topics that reach a certain view-count level. Or if it's too difficult of an engineering problem for Facebook to not poison the well, then they can stop hosting political ads.
If Facebook had not started its fact checking system nobody would be asking it to fact check political ads now.
The concept of fraud and libel are related too. It is fraudulent to claim you are someone that you are not.
Not to say that special pleading for abridging rights hasn't embedded itself via ex-nilho doctrines turned precedent.
No one could genuinely believe that probating de-facto bribery is indistinguishable from censorship. Indeed it's very telling that banning _all_ political ads is objected to as being allegedly "biased".
Easy solution that should make everyone happy: a complete ban on all forms of advertising, on all platforms, in all mediums, without any carve outs for any group, cause, or creed.
Or we can just continue to let some people mind-hack the public so that other people can get rich.
They worked, and then came attempts to avoid campaign finance laws.
Choosing not to take money for potential political advertisements is good business for the owners of a public forum.
If it’s easy to verify, it’ll be good for anyone that cares about knowing what true public opinion looks like.
Being the arbitar of truth is both an unavoidable demand and an impossible task for Twitter. Being a "public square" where politics is decided/discussed makes the implications of this problem especially acute. Fairness, whatever that means, is doubly important in democratic media.
Their detractors (and would-be regulators) will ultimately demand a "corporate policy" and judge them by their inconsistency... Why is this banned and not that? That is, a set of rules applied in all circumstances. Clear legible rules applied consistently is where cracks in theories like "truth and lies are easily discernable" inevitably appear.
It's an impossibly hard line to police. "This is a political ad," OTOH, is an easier judgement to make. Contraversial decisions would be tolerable too, deeming one and political but not another. East is probably an overstatement, but political/not-political is easier than truth/lies
I particularly like his last point:
> A final note. This isn’t about free expression. This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. It’s worth stepping back in order to address.
Which I cannot read in any way but “f-you, Facebook.”
And honestly, he’s totally right. This issue is NOT about freedom of expression...it’s about freedom to pay for expression (and freedom to pay for having others see your expression), and I don’t think that’s inherently a good thing. It’s certainly not what the first amendment is about.
He was even more explicit:
> For instance, it‘s not credible for us to say: “We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well...they can say whatever they want! ”
https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/restricted...
> The policy varies across markets but generally applies to ads that advocate for or against a candidate or political party, or ads by candidates and/or entities registered with their respective electoral commission.
edit: as u/ben509 pointed out, the above link only refers to political campaigns. Here's the link that defines "political content" as both campaigns and issue advocacy (at least in the U.S.)
https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/restricted...
https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/restricted...
I'm sure it will be better defined in the final policy.
And common sense. common to whom?
Let's just keep in mind that Trump spent way less on the election in total than Clinton did.
Doesn't the same argument also apply to ads in radio, TV, newspapers, mass mailing, email campaigns, and paying a guy to hand out brochures? Would you agree that it is equally bad to allow political ads in all these contexts? Genuinely curious here if the principle is meant to be applied consistently, or if the internet is different somehow.
We love democracy. We love freedom. We love choice. But mostly in theory and not so much in practice when it comes to the masses. Anyone seen Napoleon, Squealer, and Snowball hanging around?
In fairness Twitter has been public since 2013 and in that time only turned a profit in 1 year.
These ads wouldn't make or break them, and its far more valuable to get the PR while FB is in the media for the same issue.
The incumbents are already known. Challengers have to make themselves known, and paid advertising is one of the main ways that is possible.
For me, it just made me annoyed at Whitman.
A quick googling gave this¹ doc, that says MW spent $178.5M against $36.7M from JB. Brown won easily.
¹ https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article...
Candidates + parties + PACs + lobbying + think tanks + advocacy organizations spent $10B in 2018 in the US, whereas the US almond industry made $12B in 2018. So I expect political spending to not be able to change ad prices very much compared to commercial ad spending.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...
It's true that (A) the candidate with the most money (B) usually wins, but that doesn't mean A causes B. It's more likely that the most popular candidate attracts both the most money and the most votes, simply by being more popular.
Only one country has the first amendment, and this decision from twitter is globally applicable, so it shouldn't factor into the decision.
Do you think other countries don't have freedom of speech or freedom of the press?
I am not an American, and to me this comes across as either absurdity or corruption.
>Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of the people to peaceably assemble...
Press is pay to express. Only difference is the scale and price.
Are there any other companies?
Freedom of the Press has always been about expression and the ability to pay for reach. Printing presses were - and are - horrendously expensive.
That's basically what Jack is saying too. I don't see how "Freedom of the Press" could be construed to mean that publishers are obligated to run any ad that somebody is willing to pay for. That's never been the case.
As you say, this does not oblige anyone with a press to use it for any given person's benefit.
It just means that the basic concept of paying for expression and to expose other people to it is something baked into the First Amendment. Just not the Speech Clause.
I think his comment his written to imply that it is possible for this to happen. In which case, it does not require supporting evidence beyond the logical consistency of itself, which is sound, I believe.
They are real people, aren't they?
to who?
The entrenched who already have a mass information platform available to them (news).
I shouldn't have to google for someone as politically active... ...you're literally working to elect someone president.
Both Hirschfeld and Osborne first logged in to their accounts in February 2011, well before the first known IRA activity in 2013. WIRED’s analysis found at least 63 accounts created between 2009 and 2013 included in the list provided to Congress.
It's reasonably well known to anyone who's used the site that old accounts are fairly frequently hijacked by others, so this doesn't invalidate Twitter's claim.
[0] https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9268-social_bots_fake_news_und_f...
He controls it all
I imagine the following scenario: I'm the CEO of a social network trying to raise a new round of funding. I go to investors and say that we have 100M users on the platform and growing by 10M users per month. The investors like these numbers and decide to invest. A few years later, the investors find out that when I said 100M users, I actually meant 50M real human users and 50M bot users. When I said growing by 10M users per month, I actually meant by 5M real human users and 5M bot users per month.
At what point does this become criminal fraud?
It’s not hard to ask.
He’s blocking that too
Social movements that have a political connection / associated with a particular party or candidate?
This is going to be s can of worms.
Once you start paying for ads you are an organization.
Still, I think they're now in a better spot than Facebook.
I know that the FEC maintains guidelines for what Coordinated Communications, but I've never heard of this definition of "political ad" - can you provide a link?
If the thing/person being promoted can be voted on/in, it's a political ad.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21380985
A user who works in digital advertising said they do the following:
> You don't take money from clients who are representing/selling anything other than goods or services. You evaluate creative & landing pages for each and every campaign. It's extremely simple.
Seems like a mostly good solution. I guess you could still sell political services and goods though? Not sure how you would draw the line at that point, all goods and services can be argued to be political.
Using "scale" as an out doesn't fly. Sometimes you have to cut back on growth and/or scale to do the right thing. No human review clearly hasn't worked, so either automate or get humans in there. More likely, start with the latter and replace with the former over time.
Automating can help with the more obvious stuff, but there are many ways it can fail in either direction. For example, failing to detect hate-speech dog whistles, or inadvertently suppressing ads from minorities where the language patterns fall outside of what it sees as "the norm".
Anyway, like I said, I'm not disagreeing with you. These systems definitely need considerable improvement, but doing that isn't as trivial as it may at first seem.
Even if they lose money by manually reviewing a small ad that was flagged as possibly political, it doesn't mean it costs more to review 1/100 low-volume ads. They're also paying to classify useful data to train their model.
For example, Facebook crawls links sent in messenger. [0]
No source, but I believe the major advertising platforms, e.g. Google Ads are doing this today to check for banned content.
Facebook could build a heuristic of banned pages & not allow ads to be published. Humans could manually verify things at the edges.
There is a whole industry called link cloaking, that shows the crawlers a sanitized page, and the human targets the actual landing page.
It's a cat & mouse game between ad publishers & blackhats, often times foreign nationals outside of US jurisdiction.
I'm trying to think through the scenarios where a political campaign might use blackhat techniques to subvert verification crawls, and it's not clear that it would stop all cases, but I believe it would stop most.
Political campaigns could use the Facebook accounts & payment information of foreign nationals to temporarily push ads until they were reported - would the liability of blowback be enough to prevent it?
Fine:
Donate to fight cancer
Not fine:
Donate to Candidate X to support cancer research
I also donate to ACLU, but you have to be willfully obtuse to not accept that it predominately backs left-leaning policy viewpoints, and vocally so — again, fundamentally political in nature.
PP can as well. They can't say "vote pro-choice" but can advertise that they provide women's health services including abortions.
Basically: you can talk about what you do that isn't related to elections or votes in congress.
So in your example, I think it's absolutely clear to most adult Americans what "Donate now" means. It means "Donate now so that we can fight for your gun rights" or "Donate now so that we can fight for a free and open internet".
I do worry that Twitter is just ratcheting up the difficulty they're already facing with political speech on the platform.
Ultimately, every position you can possibly advocate - including the position that you want people to purchase something or donate to someone - has packaged with it some vision of how society might best operate. In other words: in a society where decisions are made in a political way (which is a good thing), every message is political. Every message.
https://deadspin.com/by-banning-protest-signs-mls-is-trying-...
This is a problem I have with modern social movements, when they fail to get audiences in public spaces they seek out captive audiences or to be disruptive as possible to completely unrelated places. Hold your rally in a park or march down main street or a pedestrian way or in front of some place you're protesting. Stop walking down highways and forcing your messages in places which have nothing to do with your cause.
It doesn't really seem like MLK's Selma to Montgomery march or Ghandi's Salt March would've passed this smell test.
Absolutely. So let's get rid of advertising at games. Not just political advertising; all advertising. No Democratic or Republican ads, but also no Toyota or Chrysler ads, no Coors or Bud Light ads. Unfortunately, there's too much money at stake for that to ever happen.
But political ads are different. I don't think Coors drinkers get offended when they see a Bud Light ad.
Sports isn't something people need. Some sports leagues cost a lot of resources to run. If these sports leagues become less profitable, then some of the investment will move into other entertainment and your sports professional league will slowly disappear.
But I agree, without advertisements, professional sports would not survive, so it's not going to happen.
Companies that buy advertising at games pay a pretty penny for it. Fans who buy tickets to games have paid to watch the game, not to advertise their cause. If fans want to advertise at games, they can pay the advertising rate.
that said, just because a product is free doesn't mean ads aren't "selling" it, which exposes the flaw in my criteria: if you're selling a political product, an ad can both be trying to sell a product and be a political ad at the same time.
Seems to me that Twitter advertisements would likely take the same path, where the bought political influence is instead abstracted away into generalized "awareness campaigns", push-polls, etc.
Politics don't go away just because you ontologize them as "private sector".
But we all life with boundaries and we cope just fine. Why should this street in front of my house have a 35 MPH speed limit? What is special about 35? Why not 36? Why not 34? Who is to say that one is better than the other, so let's not try and all and let everyone pick their own speed.
Just as it would be possible, but stupid, to invoke slippery slopes to argue there should be no speed limits, invoking slippery slopes to argue against any regulation is a cop-out. Why not advance a real argument vs just arguing picking the optimal boundary is impossible?
If anything, prosecutors have been taking your attitude and gaming the system with plea deals, so you're not merely wrong, but horribly wrong.
But nobody says "Johnny the crazy axe murderer gets to roam free because who is to decide what is true or not?" Which is just about where the speech debate is for some people.
"9 out of 10 doctors recommend Colgate," is a fact when Colgate picks the sample of doctors. A trained eye will realize that's actually an opinion, while it's designed to represent a fact. This works because people's opinions can be shaped by presenting an opinion as a majority.
This technique is probably one of the most commonly used and it has many variants, such as, "Your child could be in danger of edibles in their Halloween candy." Technically a fact, but actually a disguised opinion.
A better analogy would be a certain tax rate for "cars" and another lower one for "trucks" so as to not harm blue collar small businesses. We would start seeing more personal vehicles designed to be "trucks" even if they weren't used for large hauls or some sort of business purpose.
And, of course, we already see exactly that happen to car designs.
The argument is that the incentives are there to follow the letter of the law and abuse the spirit, putting less onerous personalities at a disadvantage.
That would be a pretty poor analogy since taxes are mandatory and imposed by the government.
Nobody should feel obligated to use Twitter.
You can't just decide to create an alternative tax system, but you're definitely free to build your own microblogging / social network.
And I wasn't going for a perfect analogy, just a better one.
Arguing against 'the optimal boundary is impossible argument' assumes you agree with his base axioms, that things like money are more important than the exploration of other principles. These are not slippery slope arguments, but the very base of politics itself. Why have any rule.
I would like to think, using the autobahn as an argument to make the point that parent's post wasn't as self-evident as it could appear. I agree the autobahn has it's own value judgement to be discussed if one so wishes.
Notpick: only some portions of it don’t have speed limits. Even on those, it’s recommended to drive under the usual limit.
(Yeah, I know, Reddit-style jokery, bring on the downvotes...)
Twitter will do whatever the hell it wants on its own property and has no obligation to listen to anyone except the voice of 51% of its shareholders.
If you don't want your communications to be under the total absolute control of a corporate entity you have no influence over, you might want to pack your bags and get off for profit social media.
You don't need to have an "argument" about "policy" on your own Mastodon instance. If upstream does something you don't like, you fork it. If another instance does something you don't like, you block it. Because thats actually your platform then.
And the grandparent just argued that we should easily be able to regulate companies. You're saying the opposite, now we can't regulate because they're quote-unquote "private"?
Well, which is it? Can we regulate for-profit companies for the good of the nation or not? If not, why not?
If you have a user base in excess of 1% of the general population, you are a "Platform" and cannot restrict entrance by individuals or businesses, or full participation thereof, except upon a court order limiting said participation. [Fines t.b.d., but expect them to be punitive in nature.] This law supersedes any Terms of Service a provider might wish to enforce.
Want to enforce "whatever you want" on your "platform"? Stay below the 1% threshold and you're good. Otherwise, you need to interact with the public in a completely neutral manner.
Correction: Twitter is a corporation with publicly-traded equity.
A "public company" isn't the same as a "public good" or controlled by government and regulated as if it were owned by the entire republic
Is this a joke? Literally The New York Times refers to Twitter as a "public company"[0], as does the rest of the known universe. Educate yourself.
[0] https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/11/07/live-blog-tracking-t... "Twitter began life as a public company on Thursday..."
Yes, the term "public company" is used widely, but it doesn't mean what you think it means given the rest of your comment.
Whether a company is publicly traded or not makes no difference on how much the government can regulate it. Educate yourself.
That is what you got out of comment? That certainly wasn't my argument, and rereading what I wrote, I still don't see how you get it.
Let me be succinct: I wasn't arguing for or against Twitter's actions or making any suggestions for what I would do. I was simply pointing out that making an argument solely on the grounds it is a slippery slope is vacuous.
<company> will do whatever the hell it wants on its own property and has no obligation to listen to anyone except the voice of 51% of its shareholders.
We can have discussions about what a business can and cannot do beyond what they are currently allowed to do.
If the shareholders are motivated by religious belief? Great question. I'm afraid to consider how the supreme court would decide
And given the studies showing how little the will of the people influences the conduct of congress in the US I'd strongly consider petitioning the government barely a step beyond an equal waste of time.
Which isn't just rolling over and taking it - but actually fixing it goes way beyond a moment of outrage enshrined in text on the Internet.
One problem is the fuzzy nature of "political" advertising: For example, many people think of Planned Parenthood as a political organization, and some people think of Planned Parenthood as a health care provider. Ought Planned Parenthood to be allowed to advertise abortion services on Twitter?
The question is whether this is a lesser evil than allowing political ads but selectively blocking stuff with very broad and potentially inconsistent moderation rules. I personally think totally blocking is the easier of the two in terms of decision making but I expect this will generate far more false positives in the end on the fringes and grey areas.
It's a good thing we'll now have two different experiments, on a large scale, to see which one is more self-destructive.
One of the main problems that I see is the outsized influence we've given to the very-vocal but small parties on social media to have on silencing other people and groups, going well beyond the limited free speech exceptions we previously observed in society for over a century (culturally, not just legally). Neither of these approaches really addresses that problem at FB/Twitter. Which is why I'm curious which one is going to expand those grey areas, where the abuse/downside risk remains, rather than reducing it.
That is not correct: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/does-th...
> Under U.S. law, many falsehoods—even some deliberate lies—receive the full protection of the First Amendment. That is true even though “there is no constitutional value in false statements of fact,” as Justice Lewis Powell Jr. wrote for the Supreme Court in 1974. Nonetheless, the Court has often refused to allow government to penalize speakers for mistakes, sloppy falsehoods, and lies. Political lies are strongly protected; but even private lies sometimes are as well.
The judicial and court system are already tasked with finding truths, how is that not "the ministry of Truth" ?
- https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/29/which-count...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Kingd...
I really like how you cannot advocate for the abolition of the monarchy, very progressive
- https://www.cecc.gov/freedom-of-expression-in-china-a-privil...
- https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/resource/rule-law-free-spee...
It is only a matter of time how the government can abuse these laws. This is why the 1st amendment is brilliant, cannot be abused.
I think cases like George J. Stinney's prove that it is not a reliable process. Best is to avoid any judgment when it is not necessary, like limiting freedom of expression.
That is generally why >90% of all lawsuits in negotiated settlements without going to trial/verdict.
The reality of having laws against broadcasting lies is that they will be applied sensibly if the rest of the system is sensible - and if it is not, you have worse problems.
The issue isn't a slippery slope as much as it is centralising power to a single point vulnerable to corruption & allowing politically charged decisions to be hidden behind opaque bureaucratic processes.
You would be hard-pressed to ever see a government give ground where once they have asserted authority. Only encroaching further into our rights.
The problem with law enforcement is you need people to pay them and tell them what laws to enforce.
The problem with lawmakers is you need some means to determine who gets to make the laws.
The answer is the guy with more guns and pointy sticks. The guy with more guns gets to tell you that while you’re in his land, whatever land it is, you’re going to give him money or goods.
Social contract theory mitigates this to a degree, by specifying the method by which you select who the guy with the most guns is. Sometimes it’s more than one guy. Sometimes it is a lot of them, and they all counterbalance each other, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that what keeps them in power is a piece of paper and all the guns they’ll ever need to back up what it says on the paper. Everything else is norms and traditions and processes. This is power.
The problem with social contract theory is that the contract can say anything. You just need enough people with enough guns to agree that this contract serves their interests enough.
Well the US Constitution wasn’t written in a vacuum. It was written by, largely, Englishmen and some other Northern Europeans subject largely to English rule. They already had values and cultural norms and traditions, they just needed the document. Well they had one already, several actually, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitutions of every State. The Articles were not doing the job of serving the interests of the people, in the view of the framers and Madison in particular, and they swapped it out.
Now go read Article I. Examine the structure. There’s a selection process, and there’s minutia about procedure, and there are limitations. The Article I branch is Congress, it is the supreme authority of the government, not coequal with the Presidency or SCOTUS, you were lied to about that, but above them. If Congress were one guy and could speak with one voice, it could do almost anything, impeach and remove the President, any sitting Judge, any Officer of the government, amend the Constitution, and declare war at will.
These are very good reasons why Congress isn’t one voice, and it is many.
Now to get back to what you were saying, the problem with with laws against things like “broadcasting lies” is you don’t know that they will be applied sensibly. The more laws you have to begin with, then more rope you have to hang the citizenry.
The First Amendment, and for that matter the Second and Third, the reason they are as ironclad as they are is specifically to prevent abuses by the Federal Government. It was to appease the faction at the time known as the Anti-Federalists who felt, rightly in my opinion, is that the more guns you give the Federal Government, the more potential abuses for power because there will be (have been and are) who will attempt to co-opt the Federal Government to wield those guns.
Congress doesn’t need the power to determine what is a lie and what isn’t. You don’t need laws to punish liars. If you have faith in sensible systems, then the system you want to have faith in is the people. If you don’t have that, then you can’t have faith in Congress.
It's true that there are limitations on 1A. But these are very frequently misunderstood. For example, the bit about "shouting fire in a crowded theater" is incorrect.
That's incorrect. There exist many statutes that criminalize certain commercial speech. And 15 states have criminal libel laws on the books. SCOTUS hasn't ruled that criminal liable laws generally violate the 1st amendment even though they have overturned many examples in the past.
And there is no general prohibition against criminalizing speech that isn't protected by the first amendment such as fraudulent or illegal commercial speech.
It is exactly that, but that doesn't actually end the real conversation people are trying to have.
Do we support the idea that the govt shouldn't restrict speech, but that we as society should? There are a lot of "chilling" effects seen in history.
On other hand, TOTALLY unrestricted speech is a completely different ball of wax, complete with plenty of hairballs in there. There's the ever-present (yet valid) "what about child porn", but there's also a lot of the issues that are arising in recent years with explicitly false statements and representations designed to influence the average person. Sure, such statements can't survive enough research, but it's easy enough to make it hard to research, to create conventional wisdom that is just wrong. Society where we cannot trust "facts" cannot sustain - it will fracture into separate societies in which trust CAN be held.
And on the gripping hand, we have those that argue for truly unrestricted speech in words, but actually just have confidence that their viewpoint will win out, not by virtue of reason and logic but by virtue of fear and hate.
When I was young, I believed in absolute free speech. I'd quote Voltaire, I'd defend any attempt to allow communication, even that which made me uncomfortable, but I did it for noble reasons. A lot of my more liberal views came about because I supported the efforts of those that made me uncomfortable to express themselves. Nowadays, despite those personal growths, having seen how much we CAN'T handle truly free speech, I'm much more hesitant.
Clearly excessive suppression of speech, be it from the govt or be it from society, is terrible. But now I'm horrified to see that truly restricted speech just empowers demagogues. It ends up not being truly free speech either, as it creates fear of reprisals that can't be proven. It promotes the name of speech while restricting the ideal.
We need to discuss what our true objective is. We can't find the line yet, perhaps we never will, but perhaps we can narrow down the grey area a bit.
But right now, we have the believers in unrestricted speech as a noble ideal, with users of unrestricted speech to restrict ideas hidden among them, arguing with those that are fine with the govt not restricting speech but wanting social protections, with a decently large group that is wondering if keeping the govt out fully and leaving it to social repercussions is perhaps flawed that also joins in.
Saying "the first amendment only restricts the govt" is a fine statement about the current law. It doesn't address anyone's actual concerns though.
No one has said the constitution applied to Twitter. Everyone knows the first amendment applies to governments only.
Yet free speech still has a huge cultural role in western countries that goes well beyond government charters, for very good reasons. That's the reason why it's embedded in law in the first place, not the other way around.
Almost as exhausting as people saying it's exhausting.
>No one has said the constitution applied to Twitter. Everyone knows the first amendment applies to governments only.
Odd way for the GP to open up an argument then.
>One thing about the first amendment is that it doesn't have conditions. This type of thing that Twitter is doing will be full of them, ie selectively defining what's political or not.
If everyone knows that it doesn't apply, then everyone should just leave it out to begin with. Also, in implementation, it absolutely has conditions. 0/2.
>Yet free speech still has a huge cultural role in western countries that goes well beyond government charters, for very good reasons. That's the reason why it's embedded in law in the first place, not the other way around, we didn't start caring about free speech because the US constitution adopted it, nor should we dismiss it where government rule ends
Huh? It was added because the founders had first hand experience with government suppressing rebellious rabble rousers who threatened their power. It guaranteed freedom of religion, the press, and assembly. Of course that's what they were fighting for. In what way did it go "beyond government charters"?
I am the OP and I specifically referenced the first amendment as an analogy to highlight the dangers of grey areas, which are the things the constitution avoids by making them absolute. Which is where all the risk remains with this sort of policy, and the reason why it's relevant to Twitter.
Saying the first amendment doesn't apply to private companies is meaningless in that context.
Context matters. Pigeonholing a tired counter argument where it doesn't fit isn't contributing to this conversation. Although I suspect you didn't actually read the comment before replying, only the first sentence.
> Everyone knows the first amendment applies to governments only.
You say that, and yet …
"@jack .Something smell really"fishy here".I don't agree with. I don't get it.Hidden socialism in plain sight.Chaos & Anarchy .Blasting the first amendment .This declaration remind me of the Russia ,Cuban revolution .A cruel dictatorship Socialism/Communism . Extremely dangerous !" https://twitter.com/albertobmas/status/1189659185258147841
"It's a sad day for the First Amendment, but a long awaited confirmation of the stupidity of the masses!" https://twitter.com/DoogieFrasier/status/1189644420121055232
"Right. Sure. We all believe this one. Aside from being against the First Amendment, no one can possibly be stupid enough to believe Twitter will stop pushing the leftist agenda. Only those with an R or conservative leaning will be stopped. Yawn" https://twitter.com/SharonRaeL/status/1189641756947746819
"'We need more regulation of advertising.' @jack can I introduce you to the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States?" https://twitter.com/brianfrobbins/status/1189641373055668226
"And who decides that the political advertising is earned? and isn’t this a violation of the first amendment rights? And what is the process for earning said right which is enshrined in the Constitution to advertise their beliefs or interpretation of fact? @tedcruz @realDonaldTrump" https://twitter.com/TheMightyMacky/status/118963820772345446...
"@jack just took away our 1st amendment rights!" https://twitter.com/AbrahamHershfie/status/11896409454127841...
"Oh wow mr hi horse. Such a great platform. Ok for some ppl to call others pieces of shit but some get banned! 1st amendment jack" https://twitter.com/surfdadRED/status/1189656480062099457
If you mention the first amendment in the context of a private organization and you don't explicitly note that you understand that it doesn't technically apply in this situation, I'm going to associate your argument with the arguments of the people quoted above.
Not true in the slightest.
See my other message in this thread for some examples (from today!) of people who think the first amendment is relevant when talking about private companies.
And you know what? I’m totally OK with that! The content is still allowed on Twitter (and whether that’s a good/bad thing is a totally separate discussion). The only thing they’re saying is that they won’t let you pay to amplify its reach. Nobody (other than the advertiser) is going to shed a tear for those misclassifications.
It just means that a few more people will have to be naturally clever / viral / whatever to get their message out. And I’m totally OK with that too. There was once a world where Twitter wouldn’t take money from _anyone_ and everyone had to be clever to be seen or heard on the platform. Not such a bad thing.
The first amendment does have conditions that arise through legal construction, since it alone is not the whole of the Constitution.
Speech is not reach. Freedom of Speech is not the right to be heard, it is the right to speak your mind. If people decide to not listen to what you say (followers), you have no right to force them to (adverts).
https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/introducti...
It does. You cannot shout "fire" to incite a panic for malicious purposes. We already determine that those lies are not protected by the First Amendment.
> the phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater" has since come to be known as synonymous with an action that the speaker believes goes beyond the rights guaranteed by free speech, reckless or malicious speech, or an action whose outcomes are obvious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
Twitter doesn't have organic speech, period. And now they're justifying why they allow some political ads, but not others.
And it is not independent / non-zero sum. If "A" gets more influence, it may take from "B"'s opportunity. And if the growth function is indeed super-linear, then B's opportunity is very quickly squashed.
I don't think a system that favors people based on how much money they have access to is great, but I also don't think a system that elects people based on their fame is great. Having both paid and unpaid options for reach provides a little bit more balance.
Proper enforcement is hard. They won't get there soon. It'll come slowly for a few years to avoid mistakes. When AIs get reliable at detecting lies/harassment, enforcement will become the norm. (my prediction)
If that organic component is bad like The Rock running terminator style, that may be very obvious given there isn't an astroturf campaign to keep that bad organic support alive.
What matters when running for an elected office is visibility and recognition. This recognition and unpaid organic reach may have not been what won Trump the US Presidency, but there is little doubt it won him the republican primary.
What are your expression worth if you wouldn’t be able to pay a service, cellphone/internet connection/reddit gold to express that? How is paying ads different than paying a campaigner set up a loudspeaker in the middle of a city?
But then again, since twitter is a private enterprise, I fully respect their right to act on their own platform.
It would be one thing if our rights were restricted so that we could never pay for reach of expression. That seems like it would be a violation of free speech. But in this case (as noted) it’s a private entity enforcing their own legitimate policy exclusively on their own platform.
What paying for expression has come to is that you can dominate discourse simply by paying more. So if you have money, you can buy influence even more directly than by paying for bribes and courting legal ramifications.
The reality is marketing works, and that is to say, people's opinions can be changed quite malleably by just inundating them more-and-more with the idea you want them to adopt, whether it's seeing a movie, listening to an album, or adopting an opinion.
Freedom for all cannot exist where power can buy influence in this fashion, and that's where freedom to pay for expression is more complicated than, say, printing my own newspaper and sharing it with others. It lets you also gain the system and buy-up all options of expression (e.g., all ads in a newspaper or website) and in the more insiduous ways, buy "grassroots" influencers through sockpuppet accounts.
I don't have a solution, but it doesn't mean there's not a fundamental problem when we make freedom to pay for expression free of roadblocks to dominating behaviors.
I've discovered new small family restaurants I never would have noticed if I didn't get their postcard ads. Similarly, thanks to ads I've heard of new political candidates challenging long-time incumbent politicians - they may be spending much less than the incumbent but they could afford to write me a postcard.
Maybe instead of a digital ban, there could be rationing on a per-user basis of how often they are repeatedly shown a political ad from the same faction. That way challengers can get their word in.
And they have. This is not consenting communication. This is broadcast. Different game, different rules.
1. Suppose you advertise for an donations to an adoption charity? Finding good homes for children is surely universally recognized as a wonderful, noble cause. Advertise on Twitter.
2. Now suppose the adoption charity partners with and funds pregnancy centers needing adoption services.
3. Now suppose that many of these partner pregnancy center don't offer or recommend abortion services.
4. Now suppose that proposed legislation requires pregnancy centers to provide information about abortion, with resistance from these pregnancy centers.
5. The organizations directly funded by your charity are now embroiled directly in one of the most hot-button political issues of the last 50 years.
Is your charity now political? Can it run ads on Twitter?
---
Note: A common misconception is that there is no such thing as 509(a) political charity. This is incorrect. Non-profits are only restricted from supporting political candidates. They can support political issues all they want and do limited lobbying.
The easy thing is for Twitter is to just use 509(a) status as the yardstick for bordline orgs, but that line would be far into the "politics" space.
Absolutes don't really work well in the real world: there are too many trade-offs to be balanced and too many positive goals that are at tension with each other. For instance, and absolute right to paying for free expression sounds nice in isolation, because we value free speech. But we also value democracy, and democracy doesn't work well when an oligarchy or foreign power can use its massive wealth overwhelm and confuse the expression of the common people.
They compared the cost to mail a letter vs a commercial. At the time they stated, "$1000 is beyond the reach of the majority." which at the time was what campaign donations were limited to.
Cellphones and internet connections are content-neutral pipes that convey content between a willing listener/reader and a speaker they select. So paying for those is a very different case than buying ads, and especially buying false ads.
Especially now that we're 25+ years into the web era, I don't think there's a strong argument for the legal necessity of paid political advertising at all. If I'm curious about candidate or an issue, I can find out anything I want from anybody who can use two thumbs to type something into a box on Facebook or Twitter. I can also get vetted content from a variety of aggregators, from commercial media to non-profit election guides to Wikipedia-style references to my friends sharing things on social media.
Given that, a law saying, "Nobody can pay for reach," certainly wouldn't harm democracy any. And it might help. So I think this is a great step forward on Twitter's part.
We outlaw things when a) they cause sufficient harm, and b) don't have sufficient countervailing utility. E.g., kitchen knives remain legal even though people are murdered with them, but you aren't allowed to buy a tactical nuke. I'm saying that whatever previous necessity drove us to allow political advertising despite the historically obvious harms, the Internet makes that much, much smaller.
[0]: https://youtu.be/_mP9OmOFxc4a
[1]: https://youtu.be/DZCBRHOg3PQ
[2]: https://talesfromthecrypt.libsyn.com/tales-from-the-crypt-61...
Putting it on a blockchain is abdicating responsibility for any and all content, saying "hey, we just wrote the code, we don't store or propagate any of this ourselves."
If they just want to decentralize & use peer-to-peer instead they could also do that, and a blockchain still wouldn't be a useful aspect there. That's just a mailing list.
I'm still kind of amazed that the government hasn't cracked down on bitcoin miners for hosting child pornography yet; every full node is hosting it. If the government ever wants to crack down on blockchains they have a valid legal excuse. The longer they go without cracking down, the more it seems like we as a society are accepting the existence of a censorship free medium of communication.
I'm not convinced that nobody else would host it. If they really made a blockchain anybody could post to it would seem difficult to stop other companies from making frontends for it.
How are those companies going to make money from hosting tweets? Are you letting blockchain hosts inject things? If so that's a security & privacy nightmare just waiting to happen. If not, it's financially insane to host it unless twitter pays people to do so. And if they do that then hey they're simply contractors for twitter, and twitter is again bearing the full burden of responsibility.
This all assumes I'm interpretting Dorsey's statements correctly, and of course I may not be.
Why do you assume that? Modern blockchains are not proof-of-work, and the only info you need on a blockchain are permissions and encryption keys to data on other distributed storage networks (e.g, IPFS.)
So the cost isn't really very high, and probably worth the tradeoff for groups that feel alienated or disenfranchised.
Bandwidth & storage isn't free. Why would anyone voluntarily just do that for Twitter? Even if it's literally entirely free to setup & host, that's still someone's time & motivation to do so. People do this for blockchain because they're trying to get rich off of it. There's no money in hosting tweets.
Yes, that is the point. Making censorship more difficult is one of the main goals of blockchain technology.
When was the last time that a court successfully reversed a transaction on the Bitcoin Blockchain? The answer is never.
Sure, they have sent court orders to companies, or whatever, but the blockchain itself has never been reversed by court order.
To the degree that you provide a service the courts can order you not to provide it. If you've built something which makes it necessary to remove all content to remove any content, that's on you.
But this announcement is absolutely stellar. Who knows if Harris influenced him ;-)
I suspect it’s marketing people / short-sighted profit minded people rather than the legal team running the place.
And if you are asking about inmates meaning, it’s an idiom, “the inmates are running the asylum” meaning the least useful/knowledgeable people have taken over from the competent.
https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/the+inmates+are+running...
I think inmates would be a good dysphemism for the legal department too.
I'm starting to see these "rules" more like "laws," and starting to look more closely at how some of these platforms are governed in the same way I look at how governments are governed:
- Who makes the laws? - How does one become a lawmaker? - How long can one be a lawmaker? - Who enforces the laws? - How strong is the rule of law? - What are the consequences of breaking a law? - etc etc.
How does this analogy sit with you?
Since the left has a embraced intersectionality, you can't be a "libertarian" and lean "left", that's completely incompatible, or I'm not sure what left you are talking about. That Dorsey puts up a facade because he lives in the silicon valley? sure, just like the higher ups at Alphabet.
Words clearly do not have meanings anymore
Given the larger overlap between Facebook users and people who vote, we'll need follow-up from Zuckerberg to really make this stick. Step in the right direction.
I totally support it. But I've also got to be brutally honest: I wonder if this is a sincere moral stance on Dorsey's part, or more of a business calculation that, leading up to the lightning-rod 2020 election, accepting political ads ultimately has the potential to do more damage to Twitter's reputation than the money would make up for -- or have them wind up being on the wrong side of, and in the subsequent targets of, whoever does win.
But I wouldn't be surprised if it's happily both.
I know you asked for Twitter but I guess it's similar. Zuckerberg also considered dropping political ads altogether, as they are controversial
OTOH, it means political messaging on the platform will be entirely controlled by how the firm manages the organic newsfeed, which even if in theory it is subject to election and campaign finance laws, there is very little regulatory experience or direct case law on. Shutting out official ads actually magnifies managements freedom to shape the political narrative and the relative power of illegal influence operations.
And non-obvious astroturf probably is better for engagement on the platform than overt political ads.
NYTimes is happy to take money for political ads while they are shouting that FB and Twitter should do fact checks.
It's worth taking some time to figure out the ramifications of all this.
* the unprecedented targeting ability of social media ads vs traditional broadcast/print * the unprecedented amount of disinformation (especially from foreign governments) vs traditional broadcast/print
If you can't see the difference between the two, frankly, you haven't been paying attention.
Another recourse, would, for example, be unbiased open debates where candidates can promote themselves, I think this is a great idea personally but it won't work without
1. Public funding.
2. Actual enforcement of the unbiased natures of these debates.
Who's solution is a copout?
You're saying that it is inconsistent for Twitter to not accept payment for political ads, but a print newspaper to do so. This is correct. But that inconsistency reflects the fact that the decisions are being made by different people.
What would be a non-copout solution that twitter could implement?
If we a society decide that Twitter shouldn't be the arbiter of valid and invalid political advertising, why is them avoiding the issue entirely a bad thing?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/business/media/cnn-trump-...
But go ahead and make this a partisan thing.
Roger Ailes is gone as of July 2016. There is no longer anybody conservative running Fox News. Median political opinion in the USA (maybe not your neighborhood) is to the right of Fox News. To maximize audience, Fox News is as left as it can go without being left of any notable competitor. Because there is no significant competition to the right, Fox News can grab more audience by going left.
Meanwhile, over at CNN, there actually is a narrative delivered from the top down. Every day at 9 AM, Jeff Zucker has a call in which he directs the anti-Trump message of the day. Info about it got leaked a couple weeks ago: https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/10/14/exposecnnpart1/
Following that leak there have been several more: https://www.projectveritas.com/category/content/in-the-news/
Jeff Zucker gets directly involved. He even went into the control room during an interview to disable ads, extend a 7-minute interview to 25 minutes, and instruct the interviewer to “Just fucking nail her!” in reference to guest Kellyanne Conway. He says “I am the one saying we should just stay on impeachment.”
An employee laments that “we used to cover news,” and “we used to go out and do stories.”
So this is 2019. Don't be the frog slowly boiled in the pot. CNN has been very badly corrupted by narratives that are delivered from the top down.
It's like porn: hard to define precisely, but you know it when you see it.
If facebook follow this, that would be a massive step in the right direction.
What will be really interesting is whether Twitter tries to work with governments or whether they unilaterally come to their own rules. There be dragons on both fronts.
https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/restricted...
edit: This is a better link, as it defines the more general term of "political content", which covers both campaigns and issue advocacy:
https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/restricted...
Profile ads are banned, yes, because they involve teh candidates. Policy ads are banned because they again involve politics.
We can start anywhere! Let's say 'nothing from any entity that receives money from a political party'. Or 'anything mentioning election candidates'. Or 'anything with certain keywords in it'.
What you're not stopping to ask yourself is 'who are the kinds of people that need to advertise about politics'? Yep, exactly the kinds of dickheads you don't want polluting our information streams with their bullshit. Out with all of them!
> Yep, exactly the kinds of dickheads you don't want polluting our information streams with their bullshit. Out with all of them!
I'm sure you'll be shocked and outraged when a story lands in a few months because someone you like is protesting this policy.
While 'we' (I'm not American) might have plenty of stupid laws, we also have some very good ones. We've gotten there by taking necessarily-flawed first steps. I have no doubt Twitter will overlook something. But I'm glad they're doing it anyway, and we will get somewhere better in steps. It's better than navel gazing about "What's a law anyway?"
Also, granted, GP didn't explicitly state that he's against the law, but this kind of smug, condescending slippery slope argument keeps getting brought up all over HN, hence my over the top reaction. So many thread seem to devolve into this kind of pointless "Yeah but define <> first" at the hands of Rationalists™ and are worse for it. They get nowhere and it makes for infuriating reading.
A great example of this is Ferrari's evolution to avoid the F1 cigarette ban. They started with the word Marlboro on the side of their car, then they moved to a barcode that resembled a pack of cigarettes, and now they are partnered with a front company called Mission Winnow (google it, it's really interesting) that is widely believed to be subliminal advertising for Marlboro.
There will always be those who break laws, doesn’t mean that we should stop making laws.
Laws don't have anything to do with this thread?
Your argument is that breaking a law is expensive and only those with money can break it so why bother with laws. Beyond ridiculous.
The example you’re using is also not convincing. Statistically insignificant amount of people know or care enough to watch F1 races.
We have 1 user on the internet vs $1 Billion in advertising budget. I'm going to trust that Philip Morris is better at quantifying the effect here.
> Your argument is that breaking a law is expensive and only those with money can break it so why bother with laws. Beyond ridiculous.
This still has nothing to do with laws. It's an important distinction to make between laws and corporate policy because one carries very high punishments whilst the other is mostly without recourse.
My argument is in no way proscriptive. Only descriptive.
> It's an important distinction to make between laws and corporate policy because one carries very high punishments whilst the other is mostly without recourse.
I agree with this.
This is mostly incorrect. There are _some_ countries where tobacco advertising laws are the reason for Formula 1's tobacco advertising ban, but the rule being circumvented is FIA's tobacco ban. Interestingly, in countries where tobacco advertising is illegal, Ferrari often changes their livery to not include Mission Winnow.
Twitter's engagement model (popularity ∝ importance) is still flawed in gameable ways, and political operations have the money to pay to play those games.
>paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle
Ignoring the technology aspects of this for a minute: he's basically arguing directly against the Supreme Court's Citizen's United ruling, which I find interesting. If we're going to argue that money is too corrupting in online political advertising then it really doesn't have anything to do with being online.
> We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought.
Will they also ban politicians? Accounts buy followers to grow and look legit, including politicians. Just removing ads isn't removing power of money, as people are (and will be) spending a lot of money to get organic reach.
Some of their most popular accounts are politicians accounts. That brings tons of traffic to Twitter and makes money for them.
While I don't disagree with their decision, I think they maybe overstating positive impact it'll have.
I don't think they will. 'Politicians ban' will be equivalent to banning free expression, and twitter is against that.
This is certainly more expensive for them, more uncertain, and more likely to blow up in their faces if someone is determined to have been paid. Certainly it may also reduce attainable reach.
It's difficult to see how this will play out even though the alternative strategy is obvious. Hopefully the people will chalk some advantage.
EDIT: As others have noted, corporations, which are inherently right wing, will still be able to promote their messaging, so there is some disadvantage to the left. Marketing pay-day loans? That's a right wing exploitative program for example.
In many European countries, including France where I'm from, there are never any political ads until an election season (which could either be tradition or regulation). During election season political ads are tightly regulated to prevent someone with a higher ad budget from swarming the "airwaves" with the kinds of disinformation/propaganda that is so prevalent on U.S. television networks and other media.
Political ads (and statistical coverage of early poll results) is also banned in the days before a major election to diminish the impact of manipulation/disinformation campaigns (discouraging voters because they assume their vote won't matter).
Yet these could subtly touch on subconscious minds of potential voters to move the needle toward specific party, movement or candidate.
Can I promote a tweet encouraging people in a particular state to register to vote? Probably. What if I target people who like the NRA or Planned Parenthood? Same question for voter turnout tweets ("don't forget to vote tomorrow!"). The devil is in the details.
Politicians already make use of that kind of veiled advertising with hot button issues. And there's a reason sometimes campaigns are mostly the same at the core except for PROBLEM X WHICH MUST BE SOLVED NOW OR WE ALL DIE.
It's only really in the valley that companies think listing opinions that significant percentages of the country disagree with is a good way to build marketshare.
Perhaps this will disincentivize investment in electoral politics, but it won't rescue the public discourse from financiers' influence.
Otherwise you wind up in this super nebulous area where you have to either be an arbiter of the "truth" or what qualifies as a "political" advertisement.
Also, I would be in favor of an outright ban on all advertising until X days within the election, where X is < 60 days.
But because twitter isn't taking money directly from those politicians, it perhaps reduces their perceived culpability. It seems like a good move for twitter.
I'd also like to ban political polling, it is used to push a narrative far too often instead of discussing the actual issue. Another issue is that parties will shape their positions according to polls and not what they actually think. Lastly, some people want to be on the "winning team" and will pick party based on who is in the lead.
I fully support this move by twitter.
Twitter will stop accepting money for political advertising. This is not the same as "stop(ping) all political advertising on Twitter".
Other people will continue promote things there and get paid for it regardless of what twitter's policy is.
I worry that a widespread misunderstanding of this will increase the public's vulnerability to paid manipulation on Twitter, particularly in a way that maximizes the impact of the least honest parties.
I really like Twitter’s decision and the idea behind it. But I also worry this would end up toothless toward bad actors, and restrictive for those who want to act morally.
(calculated from https://articles2.marketrealist.com/2019/05/why-facebook-con...)
So not a lot, but still it's 1%
This will not help with trolls and viral campaigns though.
Regulation will come with any functioning democracy. If an entity other than the State has too much power, Democracies will eventually dismantle or defang it, as they should.
I feel like this is a major blow to democrats more than republicans as democrats have a larger audience on Twitter. Do democrats not think they too benefit from carpet bombing ads?
> We've made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought.
> - https://twitter.com/jack/status/1189634360472829952
If Democrats have a larger audience, they don't need to pay for the exposure, they already have it.
Meanwhile the ad spend can be reserved for networks full of more middle-of-the-road people. I guess that’s the big battle ground. And I wonder if republicans can direct more ad spend there now that Twitter is off limits. I guess I’m wondering if Twitter was a necessary drain on their resources they don’t have to worry about now?
If a candidate or their representatives publish false information in the election season and any citizen complains about it, the election commision can try the candidate and perhaps even ban the candidate from participating in the elections.
The onus is directly on the liar to not lie
So we'd have elections with no candidates at all. Or, more realistically, we'd have ones that have opinions matching opinions of those people who sit on the commission. Nice system, though it's not clear why bother with elections then at all - we just let the commission - after all, people who know all the truth must know how to select good people who tell the truth? - to choose suitable candidates. Elections where candidates that the commission doesn't like are excluded are no elections anyway - you can look at Russia how it works, they have "elections" exactly like that - people not approved by Kremlin largely just are excluded from participation, so nobody can vote for them.
Anyway, a good election commision can be formed by pooling career civil servants, equal representatives from each political party, a bench of retired judges elected by the Senate for a unit time.
The commision can not make any policy decision. All they can do is ensure that the elections happen in a clean way. Also banning is one of the extreme decisions, but if they do ban the candidate, the party has to provide someone else to contest.
A democracy where all candidates are liars is no better than Russian democracy where there are no candidates
In every democracy "all candidates are liars", if you call a liar anybody whose views can be contradicted by somebody else. Most of what candidates talk about aren't scientific facts, they are opinions and projections and moral judgements. Even about scientific facts there is considerable disagreement - what was considered a healthy diet a decade ago, is seen as a nutritional disaster now, so would a candidate that advocates old diet be called a liar? What about advocating current one - would such a candidate be a liar in a couple of years? Some economists think rent control and minimal wage are a disaster, others think they are a very reasonable and beneficial measures. If a politician agrees with some of them but not others - is she a liar? There's not a lot in what politicians say that can be scientifically and robustly verified as true or false - and those things that really can are largely inconsequential - even if some politician decides to proclaim pi equals 4, it's unlikely any actual policy would be influenced by that. So it would devolve into partisan bickering and gotcha hunting. Which you can amply witness on multitude of "factchecking" sites, which devolved very quickly from objective observers into presenting opinions as facts on one side into "factchecking" internet memes and obvious marked satire on the other.
That's a good thing. The views on governance policy can differ. I have no problem with those things.
I am talking about objective truths like Earth being flat, incorrect dates, misinformation in speech etc
There are grey areas here too, example being religion, and I concede that area becomes needlessly murky. Having said that, it needs to be discussed
For example: An ad for free HIV screening services is political by certain perspectives.
A policy of "there are no Twitter rules for politicians, just don't make us a direct accessory to it" is disingenuous at best.
I'm wondering how that'll affect Twitter's business model though. Assuming political ads counted for a fair percentage of their revenue stream.
Each TV station has a limited number of ad-seconds they can allocate per day. Because ad-seconds are scarce, prices are expensive, so you get a small number of expensive ads.
OTOH, Facebook can support a practically unlimited number of ads, shown to different users, changing as people scroll.
It is _much_ easier to fact-check or apply human judgement to a small number of TV ads than to millions of social media ads.
Disclaimer: I don't work in the ad industry, I know nothing about this. I just haven't seen anyone talk about the difference in scale here.
So promoting an account can have the same effect as promoting a tweet, though perhaps at a higher cost (because it's a less efficient way of promoting a tweet). If political advertisers end up doing this, twitter may profit from their policy shift, but without actually achieving the putative goal.
Surely HN commentators are smart enough to try to answer their question before posting it. Well, did political ads exist before social media? How does that work? Etc etc.
Twitter's bullhorn will thus only be available to those people and messages that Twitter likes.
Those messages that Twitter doesn't like will be algorithmically confined to a unlighted cellar, for display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.
The problem with social media advertising is the targeted nature of ads. If you take that out, and place ads like DuckDuckGo does, it is not that different from newspaper ads and much less dangerous.
I don't think political ads were ever really a problem on Twitter. The crux of Twitter's problems are what I like to call virtual populism (i.e. bot armies retweeting propaganda and fake news).
With virtual populism, the illusion of an organic movement is created and this illusion eventually draws in real humans (after all, bots don't vote).
I can't agree enough with this. Very well put, and I think we all know who the winky smile refers to.
Journalists and politicians seem to put a lot more emphasis on twitter than most people seem to care about.
...or what Jack said: paying to increase reach.
I think I always thought that Twitter ads were these magical separate entities, when really, they seem to be normal Tweets that are just paid to be more popular.
Who decides what's "political" and what it's not?
Wait for it..... the shit show has just begun!
So... what is the definition of an issue?
I see twitter where there are fake profiles and their posts. twitter allows anyone to register with a fake email using services like mailinator and continue spreading lies. They should be banned.
I think ads are okay as we have been manipulated by ads via media newspaper etc. no one questions them, what about the news reporter who is biased and writes news like the ads. Atleast the ads we know are ads and sane person can determine based on history that ads are not truth.
I wonder if now that political advertising is banned on twitter if the illegal / immoral bot and human armies of agenda pushers will have a larger advantage than before now that those who follow the rules have lost their outlet of spreading their message with their donors money beyond their own profiles and their existing followers?
Does this mean that it is a block for direct political buys by a candidate
Or will they go through every single and and judge each one if it is political or not?
Twitter is admitting it can't police political advertising on the scale that it runs. So it's banning it.
This is a good move.
Independent new agencies - truly independent, with only one stated goal, being factual.
otherwise, like all good deeds, this will mainly affect smaller parties that don't have enough funds or traction. big ones will continue to advertise via established (i.e. more expensive) routes.
What role do you think these networks should play in distributing these posts to our door?
Banning political ads is crucial linchpin to getting money out of politics.
From the Supreme Court: "The Court affirmed a First Amendment interest in spending money to facilitate campaign speech, writing, "A restriction on the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communication during a campaign necessarily reduces the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached." Further, the law's "$1,000 ceiling on spending 'relative to a clearly identified candidate,' would appear to exclude all citizens and groups except candidates, political parties, and the institutional press from any significant use of the most effective modes of communication."
The Court upheld limits on contributions to candidates.
For more information checkout: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckley_v._Valeo
edit: In 2002 there was another campaign finance law that went to the Supreme Court, again for freedom of speech. In McConnell v. FEC, the court ruled, "the need to control corruption overshadowes any minor threat to free speech".
When I run an ad on facebook, if the ad contains "issues of national importance" that ad is subject to the same rules as political advertising. From facebook, this includes any ads on the following topics:
-civil and social rights
-crime
-economy
-education
-environmental politics
-guns
-health
-immigration
-political values and governance
-security and foreign policy
Some examples of ads that I have run and had personal experience with that would then be banned if facebook enacted a similar ban:
-Ads for any non-profit or charity dealing with the environment. This would include ads raising money to combat de-forestation in the amazon, setting up marine sanctuaries, or ads about drilling rights in the arctic (all ads I have seen recently or worked on creating)
-Any ads about women's rights or reproductive rights. This includes any ad for planned parenthood, or similar organizations. Also includes ads for charities that raise money to support women's rights in other countries.
-Ads for charities raising money to support refugees in Greece. In fact, every ad for every charity that does basically anything would be banned. These charities deal with issues that are inherently political: the environment, reproductive rights, human rights...the list goes on.
So if facebook banned all this advertising on it's platform, what were going to end up with is a situation where the internet (for all intents and purposes, for millions of people "the internet" is essentially facebook) is a place totally devoid of anything that is not a strictly commercial enterprise. Selling T-shirts is ok, raising money for charity is not OK. Maybe this is the boundary we want to collectively set.
Also, saying that this is only for paid reach specifically is not really fair. Paid reach is the only kind of reach that actually exists for all intents and purposes on these platforms. It's a pay to play market.
If you ban all political ads, you are also banning anyone from advertising anything that deals with "issues of national importance" and this will hit charities (and anyone with a message that is not strictly commercial) particularly hard.
We work with personalities who want to sell T-shirts with political messages on them, for example. Those will now be banned. We work with a yoga studio that wants to highlight their commitment to full time employment for their employees. Those ads would be banned. We work with an author who writes about abortion. Ads for her book would be banned.
Is this the kind of platform we want facebook to be? Like it or not, facebook is how millions of people engage with the world. I don't want to live in a society that is so afraid of political speech that we have to ban everything that might hurt us. Let us decide for ourselves what to believe. Are some lies going to get through? Yeah they will. But that's the consequence of allowing more "free speech" on a platform. Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want. They have no obligation to uphold free speech. Personally, I think Mark Zuckerberg understands that banning these things sets a dangerous precedent, and I only hope that he is able to defend his decisions and explain his reasoning.
Because the alternative to allowing some lies to get through in ads is much much worse.
We don't even know where Twitter will draw that line, making it a difficult problem for them.
They could, for example, allow charity ads, while banning "Vote for X ads."
Twitter stand is simply: we won't make money directly from political ads because 1 - we don't make money there anyway, and 2 - this is good PR. However we will make all the money we can off ads tied to the free for all of russian bot posts, AOC posts, Trump posts, and Uncle Buck retweets.
Anyone who thinks Jack Dorsey cares at all about democracy vs profits has blinders on.
Part of the value of running a legit ads campaign is the finances and incentive to beat away fraud and black market/black hat techniques.
- I haven't found a lot of utility in Twitter outside of reaching really specific insiders/decision makers. In terms of direct response FB is far superior and FB also wins with targeting, reach, and the persuasion/recall studies we've done as well. That is to say TW doesn't get much if any of our client's budget. Seems some larger 'brand name' candidates get better direct response. Point is it's a small fraction of our digital spend, and I would guess far less than .5% of twitter's ad revenue.
- what about paid 'influencer' or social marketing ads? e.g. I pay person XX to post organically. Or the much larger problem of bots/fake/gamed content.
- TW seems to be (I can't quantify though maybe others can) to be either totally inept at reducing fake/gamed content at worst complicit because they need the growth from fake numbers. This seems like it has much larger impact than paid political advertising and should be the first thing to get serious about. This seems like if the goal is to lose weight cutting your nails probably isn't the first thing to do.
- I had a strong reaction reading Dorsey's tech points saying ML, micro-targeting are 'powerful and very effective for __ advertisers.' But to me it seems odd to make a differentiation that it's ok to use these 'extremely effective' tools to profitably 'target and force people to see their __ ad' while blocking political speech (to help this point I left political/commercial blank, try flipping them). TW will happily 'force people to see' ads for alcohol, sugar companies, etc and the point is it works, whether selling a politician or product or Disney if the tech is dangerous for politics why isn't dangerous for commerce (or where is the line in dangerous commerce)? IDK I think I have a different perspective on the fundamental importance of political speech than this group. But this seems like an odd argument to me. To that point of drawing political lines, what about a company advertising to sell copies of a racist book on replacement theory, which has been shown to correlate with recent rise of dangerous white nationalism (mass shooters buy the book) and externalities like electing Trump?
Or they don't want?
The vocal minority would never let this happen as they would take it as being silenced for their views.
I absolutely agree with you.
Twitter surfaces tweets from people you're not following in their UI. You may get notified, for example, if one of the people you follow interacts with the bot's tweet.
You can argue that any other advertising is still political (e.g. retail ads promoting a ‘capitalist agenda’).
Annoyingly, Facebook decided that I was advertising Political content, and therefor requires a whole series of additional verification steps, as well as a disclaimer of the fashion "Payed for By _______" right beneath my ad.
Needless to say, it gives my advertisement a feel which I don't think it should have. It's not a political advertisement. Nor is it about a political, or social issue. Nor does it promote anything - campaign, legislation, or otherwise.
It's an ad, for an app, that provides access to data in a totally unbiased (and unaltered) way.
TLDR; These companies are casting a really wide net in the wake of the election ads scandal. Unfortunately, some people are getting targeted who (IMO) shouldn't be and there's ZERO recourse. No phone number to call, no rep I can explain things to, nothing. I appealed the decision and it was - no joke - instantly denied. If twitter is anything like Facebook, this means I can no longer advertise my app on twitter. Lame.
When Trump can exhort violence without being shut down, Twitter is being hypocritical, and putting profit over democratic principles.
This is such a bogus move, because Twitter knows Trump has out-raised opponents by leaps and bounds, and the only way to cut his message is to stop all political adverts.
Remember, Twitter actively engages in censorship that overtly leans left, so much so that over the past 10 years, PEW research has found a massive, unmistakable tilt to the left in Twitter membership, which was close to 50-50 not too long ago.
So Toyota can buy ads to promote their gas burning cars, but I can't buy ads to encourage people to stop burning up the environment.
Only profit-seekers can buy mindshare.
This whole debate is absurd. Trump rose to the White House on $1B worth of unpaid media exposure by being an outrageous personality. How is that better for democracy than paid ads?
I recall seeing a Tweet from US Senator Lindsey Graham today which was essentially a hack-job attempt to raise additional defense money for Trump.
My first thought was "this really needs to be flagged", until I noticed the small little "promoted" tag under it.
Well, no more of that nonsense.
There's no need to insult every single Twitter user like that :-)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=morse.vedppa.a...
Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO
1:05 PM · Oct 30, 2019
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1189634360472829952
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1189634360472829952.html
--------------------------------------------------------
We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons…🧵
A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.
A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.
While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions.
Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse: machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale.
These challenges will affect ALL internet communication, not just political ads. Best to focus our efforts on the root problems, without the additional burden and complexity taking money brings. Trying to fix both means fixing neither well, and harms our credibility.
For instance, it‘s not credible for us to say: “We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well...they can say whatever they want! ”
We considered stopping only candidate ads, but issue ads present a way to circumvent. Additionally, it isn’t fair for everyone but candidates to buy ads for issues they want to push. So we're stopping these too.
We’re well aware we‘re a small part of a much larger political advertising ecosystem. Some might argue our actions today could favor incumbents. But we have witnessed many social movements reach massive scale without any political advertising. I trust this will only grow.
In addition, we need more forward-looking political ad regulation (very difficult to do). Ad transparency requirements are progress, but not enough. The internet provides entirely new capabilities, and regulators need to think past the present day to ensure a level playing field.
We’ll share the final policy by 11/15, including a few exceptions (ads in support of voter registration will still be allowed, for instance). We’ll start enforcing our new policy on 11/22 to provide current advertisers a notice period before this change goes into effect.
A final note. This isn’t about free expression. This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. It’s worth stepping back in order to address.
It's kind of horrifying that one can make such a statement, acknowledging the dangers of advertising, but still insinuating that commercial advertising somehow isn't dangerous and harmful, just the political ads...
And precisely for that reason, it is dangerous ;)
Whenever you see an ad, remember that they've diverted funds from improving the quality of their product and paying their workers well, and instead decided to use that money to try to deceive and manipulate the public into forming a positive impression.
savage
So? We can address that when we get there. This is a step in the right direction for once.
I will bet anything that Twitter allows political ads for the 2024 election with Trump gone.
It's hard for me to interpret those other media as working "just fine":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Horton#Horton_in_the_19...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_Door_(advertisement)
On edge cases time will work out standards, that's what these companies ought to employ humans for.
Facebook is taking the safer position in this case, IMO, from a legal/regulatory perspective. It'll be interesting to see what shakes out.
Did you cut the cable years ago? I think perhaps you've forgotten how bad some political ads on TV are.
A tv channel has like 6 to 9 slots per 30 minutes of content and most of those slots have the same ads playing multiple times in a day. I would guess that there’s at most 1-2 hours of unique ad content for one channel per week to review.
With user generated content and thousands of unique ad slots, using humans to verify is prohibitive.
Since when?
Remember "this is your brain on drugs"? Or how about the "drugs fund terrorism" super bowl ads? That was a blatantly false campaign designed primarily not to discourage drug use, but to make it difficult for mainstream organizations and their people from supporting drug policy reform.
Isn't every Volkswagen ad which touted fuel economy in their diesel vehicles essentially a blatantly false ad on the issue of climate change and carbon use?
Many pharmaceutical ads have some blatantly false messaging, whether overt or not, and all of them carry the same political message: that the current system of regulation and intellectual property around drugs is healthy for people.
TV is overrun by blatantly false ads that, once you think about it, have an unambiguously political component.
For social media to start fact checking ads is actually a big change, but maybe the right thing to do, even if it's hard.
here's our current definition: 1/ Ads that refer to an election or a candidate, or 2/ Ads that advocate for or against legislative issues of national importance (such as: climate change, healthcare, immigration, national security, taxes)
https://mobile.twitter.com/vijaya/status/1189664481263046656
Just shut down Twitter and let's move on