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Comment by gsibble | Hacker News Reader

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gsibble

"incorrect or disputed information"

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

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

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

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

> you're being obtuse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You're reacting to just the word "absolute" and misinterpreting what he meant. In that sentence it just means "very much". You could delete it without changing the argument.

Nor does removing my initial objection change the response.

But giving Trump a platform to lie to hundreds of millions of people is?

As they have left trump’s false claim up, just with a note below it, doesn’t that still leave the reader/viewer as the ultimate arbiter of truth?

The reader can decide for themselves whether Trump or the other linked sources are more trustworthy.

Right but then they omit links which verify his comments.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/close-results-in-pater...

Trump said that all people in CA were going to be mailed a ballot without being registered to vote. That’s objectively false.

Jack’s explanation for putting a warning label on that to let people know that actually they do need to register to vote makes sense.

Trump can make another tweet with those 2 links if he wants. Twitter isn’t stopping him.

They have a civic integrity policy, per that article. That gives the leeway to decide something like misleading voters requires adding a link to the tweet but not fact checking everything every person says.

What I’m saying is it’s not binary. There’s a spectrum.

It's deeply sad that one party is now so devoted to disinformation and the destruction of democracy that they whine when somebody provides a small-print link to third party fact checkers.

Such pathetic little snowflakes.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar like this. It's against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Note these, for example:

"Don't be snarky."

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

You may not owe pathetic snowflakes better, but you owe this community better if you're posting here, because we're hoping not to explode: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

Sorry; I know that you work hard to ensure that HN remains a safe space for white supremacists, mysoginists, and other bigots. I hope I didn't undo your toil by briefly making one such person very slightly uncomfortable.

It is clearly important to PG, sama, and you that HN be a place where hateful people with power can leverage that power, spread disinformation, and make others feel unwanted, so long as they do so using a thin veil of polite language. You do excellent work in achieving that goal.

People use the same logic to accuse us of being communist agents and "totalitarian liberal thought policemen" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20438487). It always feels like the mods are against you.

Please drop the denunciatory rhetoric when posting here. It is tedious and does nothing for your cause except alienate people. It's what smart readers come to HN to get away from, regardless of what they agree with politically. Everybody here disagrees with some bits and agrees with some too, but that doesn't mean they want to spend their days reading boilerplate.

I think it's fair for there to be at least one place on the internet that isn't suffused with ideological copypasta. That doesn't make me a white supremacist misogynist bigot nor a totalitarian liberal thought policeman—nor a centrist milquetoast, to cover that base also.

> I think it's fair for there to be at least one place on the internet that isn't suffused with ideological copypasta.

Holy shit your arrogance is off the fucking _CHAINS_.

Not only have you failed miserably at that goal (this site is comically predictable with it's politics; and it's also trivially easy to game); but your head is so far up your ass that you think you did something that nobody else did.

Wow.

You are a much worse and much stupider person than I thought you were; and I already thought you were nothing but an absolute fucking useless sycophant who is hoping that moderating this site will eventually result in pg/sama giving you a role that has carry.

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