It’s unclear what Section 230 executive order will do to social media companies
buzzfeednews.com
buzzfeednews.com
At most there will be courts involved, and the order will be considered null and void. Similar to many of his executive provisions that got declared invalid by the courts.
This is just a narcissistic/rage hissy fits, or just another attempt to create noise and detract from the real issues of this country is facing now.
Basically another political show/childs play from our president
By that you mean games, actual checks and account balances from bribes right? Just another mafia state style leverage play here.
Not that things cannot be significantly improved or that I'm not extremely disappointed with our level of political executive leadership, but if this is what you think a mafia state is, I wonder what you would call the situation in other countries where things are significantly worse.
The zero-sum game disciples are in power and calling the shots. I don't personally subscribe or believe in that ideology but it cannot be denied that the current state of the world is steeped in it.
In game theory, if the other side cheats and your side keeps cooperating, you will lose every time. There is a great little game theory game that highlights it here called The Evolution of Trust [1].
Wrongdoing anything? Noone could call for his accountability.
You're investigating him? You'll be fired. And every successor of yours who does the same.
You're his friend or donor getting in trouble with law? No problem, it will be taken away.
So, yes, I'd think twice before saying any of his actions would do "nothing".
You may want to read the article.
He's not saying Twitter "can't exist" (and why would he? It's his platform of choice.) -- it seems like they're going to say that if social media companies start editing content, they're no longer platforms and instead publishers, who can be sued for their content.
This could be very problematic for Facebook, Twitter, and Google, who would suddenly be open to a lot of lawsuits based on their users' content.
They could and have been sued all along. Plenty of people file inane lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter and Google all the time for content that gets posted on their services. I wouldn't be quick to imply that these lawsuits would result in successful outcomes for the plaintiffs would it not have been for the existence of Section 230.
You don't think it's a problem that a platform which controls the information that reaches millions of eyes, acting as a mouthpiece for the president, applies a totally subjective "fact check" disclaimer based on an uncharitable interpretation of the president's tweet, while pretending to be politically neutral?
And while ignoring similar misstatements from other politicians on both sides of the aisle?
The issue here, and I cannot stress how dangerous this is for society, is that an entity which gatekeeps information for millions of eyes, is pretending to be a neutral party while overtly manipulating the messages of politicians from one political party.
This creates a manufactured consensus which is influences policy and elections according to the whims of a handful of high level managers/executives at Twitter. It's an abhorrent concentration of unnofficial, unchecked soft power and it was hugely irresponsible and unethical for Twitter to publicly pick a side without a massive disclaimer.
This isn't even getting into the holes in the "fact check". What a joke. How much hubris do you need to believe that your tech company can act as an arbiter of truth?
We (those arguing against you) are not empowering Twitter as the new POTUS, merely trying to minimize the current one’s ability to cause damage via lies and hateful rhetoric. (Things you or I would have been banned for years ago)
There will come a time to deal with Twitter’s societal overreach too.
There is simply no objective definition for either of these concepts and if you may be fine with Twitter having this kind of power now, but you may regret it if the shoe is ever on the other foot.
Having a corporate arbiter of truth is antithetical to a free society, especially when creating one's own platform is impractical because of network effects.
Who is going to fact check the fact checker? Effectively Twitter has the final word because this is their platform - not because they are correct, and if these political squabbles had an objectively correct answer then we wouldn't have multiple parties.
People are find with it right now because it's en Vogue to hate on the president, but that doesn't mean the fact checking is justified or even honest - and I reiterate, the dangerous part here is that people implicitly take Twitter to be an authority when they absolutely are not. Their fact check isn't even accurate, but people don't tend to question what they want to hear.
Twitter's role is a neutral party - the same way that journalists are ultimately doing a disservice to society by editorializing everything while claiming to be neutral. It is dishonest and divides society from the top down.
If Twitter really cared about the "lies and hateful rhetoric" they would have put their money where their mouth is and banned him years ago. It's just a meaningless gesture to drum up more drama, more clicks, more views.
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Obviously any President has lots of legal options when deciding how any law is applied and interpreted.
It appears that this is a shot across the bow from a political standpoint or to use another military metaphor, Trump is attempting to shape the battlefield on this issue and there are indeed lots of legitimate issues regarding Section 230.
Cutting off the nose to spite the face
Twitter should be able to beat all of it, but the point would get made and shareholders would bounce as soon as they could.
Don't forget to seize the website in the process.
None of this represents my opinion. It would be negligent to not notice the tools already exist.
His direct pipeline would remain intact.
Everyone has a twitter account? How many people would you lose in transition just via friction? If he spewing hate via twitter to spewing hate via instagram/facebook then facebook might ultimately find themselves pressured to do something about it especially if a major US company had been cratered in an obvious repressive act of tyranny. Zuckerberg might lack in character and backbone but do you really believe all its employees are equally lacking?
If he moves to the neo nazi land of gab might even less of his followers follow? Can gab even handle increasing its userbase by 80x?
Do you think the nature of the platform doesn't matter at all as far as engagement or value of engagement? People engage on twitter a lot already even without the president. Familiarity implies normalcy. On twitter his crazy crap is bookended by all the more normalcy of people's regular lives. If it was surrounded by white supremacists and crazy it wouldn't carry the same cache and would turn off a good chunk of the moderates.
I'm going to call it. He can't pull the trigger on Twitter even if he was allowed because it would reduce the effectiveness of his messaging by half.
And you're probably right about the atmosphere on Gab not allowing him to use that platform to get the same reach.
But Facebook. That's a platform with more subscribers than Twitter. Way more. 3 times as many in the U.S.
So, going with the premise that Trump was able to nuke twitter, how quickly do you think Zuckerberg is going to pick a fight with him if he decides to post there 30 times a day instead of at twitter? I'm not so sure all that much.
Facebook is now that thing that I only ever log into on my computer when I want to talk to family members and ignore people sharing dumb things.
Twitter is that thing that chimes 2 seconds after someone I am interested says something interesting.
I don't think they are the same thing at ALL.
It's how he won the presidency.
But now the power structure is different. The President and his followers can turn Facebook into something akin to twitter just by using it that way. The mechanics of any given service aren't written in stone. Facebook could easily ping your phone whenever someone you follow posts something new. Or Instagram, Snapchat, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_on_social_media#R...
That said, I'm having trouble seeing how Trump is wrong in his application of Section 230. Section 230 was intended to protect free-speech platforms by allowing them to eschew editorial control without being held responsible for what users say. If Twitter starts exercising editorial control, then doesn't that mean that they should be held responsible for what's said on their platform? This strikes me as Twitter wanting to have their cake and eat it too: they don't want to the legal liability of editorial control, but they don't want the bad PR of allowing free speech on their platform.
If we're actually basing our laws and their enforcement on principles, then we a) have to decide whether Twitter is a content platform or a communication platform, and b) we can't just abandon our principles because Trump accidentally says something correct.
No more ability to cut costs like they have had the luxury to do so thus far.
Yes! And very broadly so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
(Which, as much as it pains me as a hippie liberal to admit it, is probably the best decision in context. Enshrining even things like corporate election finance as "speech" makes is VERY clear that government regulation of actual opinion on behalf of private entities is verboten. At the time none of us saw Trump coming, but if the price for protecting a twitter correction is a bunch of Comcast-funded PACs? Yeah, I'll pay that.)
The thing that strikes me is that the political tribe that crows about this stuff constantly, when faced with an actual attempt by the executive branch to control the speech of private entities... is absent.
Where is the HN libertarian debate squad now? Fucking crickets is all I hear. I despair for society.
Slowly, surely, we have allowed an unprecedented growth in executive action. Haven't we decided already that it's okay to be in a perpetual state of war since 2001? Why have we allowed the military industrial complex keep us embroiled in foreign wars for half of our lives?
And if you want a glimpse at how powerful and non-partisan this complex is, look at the pushback the president received when he tried simply to pull out of Syria.
1. http://thisishistorictimes.com/2009/02/one-ring-to-rule-them...