Hacker News Reader

Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

This is so thoroughly depressing. There is a very real need for a debate about the place social networks have in the spread of misinformation, but no-one wanted to have it. Now we will anyway, but by debating it in the most hysterical terms possible. No good will come of it.

View on HN

The ouroboros bites itself; having escalated all other debates to the most hysterical terms, and allowed the injection of far higher volumes of nonsense than it's feasible to fact-check, the fate of Twitter is going to be decided in that febrile environment.

The success of Twitter after the Arab Spring was that it became a revolution-causing technology. The downside of that is that it can cause a revolution whether you need one or not, and the outcomes of revolutions are usually much worse in the short term and often in the longer term.

(I note this is already flagged off the HN front page!)

> the outcomes of revolutions are usually much worse in the short term and often in the longer term

This is a pretty strong and unfounded statement. Would we even have the relatively free and democratic societies we exist in now without the revolutions of centuries past?

I see revolutions similar to heavy mutations in evolution. Most of them leave society in a worse position, some, however, do bring long-lasting improvement to social governance.

Sounds like a case of survivorship bias at work here. How many revolutions led to failed societies that aren’t around any more?

The US is a bit biased by considering its revolution a great success - which it was, for the white population. There was never a wholesale slave revolt, but the revolt of the slaveowners was successfully suppressed.

Conversely the UK never had a popular revolution and transitioned to constitutional monarchy (eg also Sweden).

France was very bad in the medium term; the Terror, subsequent invasion, Napoleon etc. Perhaps only a fully free society at the 5eme republic.

Much of the world by sheer number of countries got its freedom either at the end of WW2 or the Cold War.

Cuba and Haiti are still going badly.

Twitter was a second order effect from the fact right at that food became too expensive for the low-income countries.

> Looking at long-term trends in rain, crops, food prices and migration, they were able to determine how these factors contributed to social instability in the region.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-an...

With deplatforming, I come down on the side of viewing popular webapps as public venues - the concept of censorship most decidedly exists apart from the first amendment to the US Constitution. But this action is not censorship, rather it's adding some editorialization while leaving the original message intact. It's less intrusive than a site requiring a signin to view NSFW content. Politically, it seems analogous to a counter-protest facilitated by the venue being protested at.

And what legal basis could possibly be here? Implementing this action through legislation would be an uphill battle, never mind an executive order. Unless judges are also drinking the leave Trumpney alone Kool Aid, I don't think the hysterical "debate" is going to have much to do with the fate of Twitter. The only interesting thing here will be watching a man-child finally be told a hard "no", as the fallout from his ruinous actions finally starts catching up with him.

> Unless judges are also drinking the leave Trumpney alone Kool Aid

I have some bad news about the past three years of judicial appointments...

I'm not one to be naive, but it feels like justifying any executive order would require stretching logic quite thin. Executive orders generally get a pass because they function by instructing federal agencies how to operate. This one would seemingly be an attempt to directly order a private company to do something.

It might take one or two rounds of appeals to find a sensible judge that agrees the President doesn't have this power. But overall I wouldn't think Trump has been able to replace enough judges with stooges as to destroy the whole system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com