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Comment by partyboat1586 | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is _the_ place where political discourse happens. It's an unfortunate state of affairs for some that it happens to be a private company with a bias. And for better of for worse it does have a bias.

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If enough people feel that it has a bias, and are discontent with it, they are free to start their own platform. They are also free to not moderate their platform, or even moderate it with whatever bias they so choose.

This has happened a few times (Voat, Gab) and the utopia of a hands-off content platform has never played out to anything other than a cesspool. Popular platforms remain popular and useful because they have the power to make editorial decisions.

I also assert that the world is not locked in to Twitter today, just like we were not locked in to Digg a decade ago. Users will flock elsewhere if they sense a need.

Great and then we will see even more echo chambers.

What people need is not another right wing echo chamber and not another left wing one either.

Twitter was that neural platform for a while where ideas clashed but now they risk the right splintering off and that is not a good thing for anyone.

Letting false election interference stay up, with a link to facts about actual elections, is pretty much the exact opposite of an "echo chamber."

It's easy to parrot oft-repeated slipper slopes arguments, but doing that is actually the echo chamber. Especially when now even bothering to check to see if it applies in certain situations.

People are free to reply to Tweets with sources and facts if they want to. I just don't think that should be Twitter's job.

This case is fair enough but I really do believe in the slippery slope argument.

It's also clearly not an echo chamber to talk about it here considering the number of downvotes I'm sustaining. I'm also seeing posts get upvoted before they get downvoted so it's controversial... Which is a good thing for discourse!

> If enough people feel that it has a bias, and are discontent with it, they are free to start their own platform.

This is, of course, disingenuous. It's like saying, just a monolithic railroad company was about to bulldoze your house in the mid 1800s, "If you're discontent, you can always start your own railroad company." We're dealing with a complex system of interconnected motivations. "Start your own Twitter" is an anti-solution.

Unless I'm mistaken, Twitter isn't really in the business of bulldozing houses or otherwise introducing themselves into your daily life without consent - the simile feels forced.

Wrong, because no one is bulldozing your house.

You’re on a street with a 100 houses and one of them is having a cool party. But the cool kids don’t like you and don’t want you in their house. The other 99 houses (Gab, Mastodon, theDonald.win , bulletin boards, etc.) welcome you in, but you don’t think their owners are cool and don’t want to hang with them.

Should the government force the owner of the cool party house to let you hang with the cool kids?

Many would say that violates freedom of association.

> Popular platforms remain popular and useful because they have the power to make editorial decisions.

Bingo. I think this is a point that isn't made enough: to the extent platforms like Twitter can continue to exist, it depends on their ability to remove spammers, harassers, and other unwanted participants. Imagine using email in 2020 without a spam filter. Because Twitter isn't an open protocol, they provide both the protocol and the spam filter.

To ask them to stop removing any content would be as disruptive to their business as asking GMail to let all emails through.

“ Twitter is _the_ place where political discourse happens.”

Say what? https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...

Twitter is a minority.

Fox News Channel is arguably the place where political discourse happens. It’s the most popular cable news network in America.

Should Fox News be regulated and forced to have a democrat on each show?

Fox News is subject to liability and lawsuits if they publish defamatory statements on their platform. And that statement by Pew says nothing about the leverage and influence that Twitter enjoys on the national conversation.

Twitter was crazy for Bernie, but Joe Biden won the primary anyway.

Twitter is a self-selected minority of power users. It isn’t “The place” for political discourse, it’s simply a popular online web forum. Facebook is likely at least as influential on politics as twitter is.

That's not real political discourse, that's programming. Also major networks regularly quote Twitter.

The thing Twitter has is that it is a public forum where people who disagree can meet. I'd hate for it to become an echo chamber like Fox news.

They practically do have a democrat on each show. Times have changed, and Fox News is not at all what it once was. They even hired Donna Brazile, famous for slipping CNN debate questions to Hilary Clinton in advance and then being given the job of running the Democratic National Committee.

We really have reached the stage where "facts have a well-known liberal bias", haven't we?

What is and isn't fact is for people to decide by themselves based on evidence. Not whatever Twitter decides is the truth. There are very few hard facts in this world especially surrounding politics.

> There are very few hard facts in this world especially surrounding politics.

Surely this is false. The world is full of hard facts—politics less than the sciences, sure, but still [0]. What are much rarer (non-existent?) are undisputed facts.

[0] To be clear, I distinguish hard facts in politics, like "Trump is the 45th president of the United States", from hard facts in political science, of which there indeed seem to be very few.

> What is and isn't fact is for people to decide by themselves based on evidence.

That is why Twitter is linking some facts to go along with the President's tweets.

Which facts you choose can show bias. Let people supply sources in replies.

Is the free speech of Twitter to be abridged? Section 230 allows good-faith moderation. Whether or not you believe they should do it, current law and court rulings have come down on the side them being allowed to do it and maintain their safe-harbor status.

We are taking about reform not what the current state of the law is. Twitter has an outsized impact for the small number of people who make those decisions.

You have to look at social media like a newspaper that publishes letters to the editor. They're the editor, you're writing letters. The editors are free to throw away crazy letters, edit letters for length, syntax, and content, or discontinue the section entirely. That's what free speech is. If a newspaper won't publish your letter to the editor, you can make your own newspaper and publish whatever you want.

You need a really good reason to take away Twitter's editorial control over Twitter. Please provide one. (The best I see so far is "Twitter is really popular, so they shouldn't be allowed to edit their own website." I am not convinced that that is a good justification for limiting the freedom of the press. If that's where we want to go, I would be the first in line to make sure Fox News drops their conservative bias and gives liberal viewpoints a fair shake. Does that sound good to you?)

What decisions? You think the government should be able to control whether Twitter adds additional context to posts?

For almost 100 years it has been held both in general and by the Supreme Court in particular that the remedy to speech you disagree with is more speech. Do you object to Twitter's ability to have such a disagreement?

Or, as is being proposed, do you believe Twitter should be held legally liable for every nasty thing said on their platform simply because they choose to have an opinion of their own?

To me that seems like a recipe for significantly more banning of content & users by Twitter to avoid even the hint of liability that would come with allowing it to stand.

What is and isn't evidence is for people to decide by themselves based on facts?

Again up for people to decide. Let people post facts and their sources in replies rather than have Twitter do it.

What is the alternative? I haven't seen Twitter be too heavy handed, I have yet to hear of a moderation activity on their part that seemed to go too far. If there is something to be frustrated about, it would be their double-standard for world figures that are allowed to violate their ToS with impunity.

I can't think of a single platform with a more hands-off approach than Twitter that hasn't become a toxic cesspool.

To be honest I think they are walking the line right now. I would worry about them taking it any further. The problem is there is nothing stopping them taking it any further.

I'm not convinced it does have any bias against mainstream political ideas (obviously it is biased against things like white supremacy). This just lays bare that the "free speech" advocates are nothing of the sort.

No, Twitter has no bias against "mainstream political ideas". Their San Francisco urban chic politics are the very definition of today's "mainstream". Looking back over history, have mainstream political ideas always been the right ones, more or less? Or have mainstream political opinions frequently been pretty bad in retrospect?

The point of "free speech" is to be able to express opinions that aren't currently "mainstream" among fashionable thinkers. Free speech advocates aren't objecting to a single instance of some company expressing an opinion. That was just a "last straw", it seems. They are objecting to the tactics of Big Tech platforms in general, which use all sorts of deceitful methods to manipulate the visibility of arguments in order to influence the debate while pretending to be merely neutral platforms.

Thank you. Finally some hope. The problem is people think the current political landscape is somehow fundamentally different like history doesn't apply. Big picture view.

> it happens to be a private company with a bias

Political speech in public squares are what the First Amendment was written to protect. “Bias” isn’t an exception.

Twitter is now that public square.

Then the solution is to nationalize Twitter and enforce the first amendment there, not this.

> U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald in Manhattan ruled on May 23 [2018] that comments on the president’s account, and those of other government officials, were public forums and that blocking Twitter Inc users for their views violated their right to free speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-twitter/trump-u...

What's your point? That's a ruling against Trump, not against Twitter. The President can't arbitrarily block access to his communications.

Not in any way that matters, and certainly not in the legal sense. In a legal sense, Twitter is your neighbor's backyard, and your neighbor is telling you to stop lying about sleeping with his wife or get the fuck out of his yard.

Twitter is so much bigger than your neighbours back yard. Debates between most major public figures don't happen in your neighbours back yard. And it doesn't matter what the law is now, think about what it represents to people first then the future law comes from that.

In the legal sense, replies to tweets of government officials have indeed been public square since 2018.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-twitter/trump-u...

As a member of the government, Trump cannot selectively choose who can or cannot view things that are the public duty of his office. He can't ban people from watching White House videos on Youtube and he can't block people on his public facing government account.

This does not mean that Twitter or Youtube cannot ban them from their site or control what they do on their site. It means the government cannot selectively enforce who can or cannot view their content. If Trump came over to your home and asked to hold a SOTU, you have the right to turn him away. However if you agreed to let him hold a SOTU and he decides to turn away your friends because he doesn't like them, that would be against the law.

There have been rulings protecting free speech rights in shopping centers. There have been rulings protecting free speech rights against HOAs. There are certainly many cases where a private company has tried to leverage power over free speech and lost and this is one of those cases.

Who should host this discourse instead? The government? A perfectly impartial Vulcan? CNN? Fox?

It can be a private company it just needs to be regulated. I think you are underestimating how big Twitter is... It's way bigger than CNN its way bigger than Fox in fact those networks regularly quote tweets.

By eyeball-hours, Fox is much bigger than Twitter among American audiences. Viewers tune into it for hours, on a daily basis.

What kind of regulation is it subjected to? It doesn't have to be neutral, and it has a legally-tested right to lie, and mislead. And that's for first-party content directly produced by it.

Do you have a quote on eyeball hours? Fox at most gets 2-3 million viewers at prime time. Twitter has hundreds of millions of users and their reach exceeds even their membership, as Tweets often drive narrative on many other platforms.

You can read the order. Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act set out provisions protecting internet service providers from liability for obscene, lewd, etc content on the basis they are a neutral platform (like an email provider) and not an active arbiter and curator of content published on their page. The law clearly states it's protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material (lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessive violent, harassing, etc). Not for editorial protection. Not for arbitrary enforcement of TOS.

Major networks regularly quote Twitter. I would hate for Twitter to become an echo chamber like Fox news.

So you suggest the government gets to decide, through your proposed regulatory agency.

Looking forward to an army of bureaucrats making sure every tweet is kosher, then? An agency will last longer, with staff that lasts longer, than any single presidency.

Sounds like a nightmare scenario for an "un-PC" asshole like Trump.

I'm suggesting it has the same rules as a public square, which is what Twitter is. No incitement to violence, no obscenity etc but otherwise free.

You should realize those restrictions you suggest are regulated and enforced by the government and are applied inconsistently all the fucking time. Just look at how various different demonstrations in the last 5 years have been treated, and how some of them have ended in violence.

I really don't think you, or Trump, understand the ramifications of what you're asking for. You have this ideal, naive view of what's allowed in "public squares" that doesn't seem to match what happens.

See: Trumps belief he was persecuted by other government agencies. Which he complains about on Twitter. Which would now be answering to a... government agency...

If Twitter were a physical space there would be regular violence that would have to be shut down. The role of the government is to break up the violence if it occurs.

Again, that's a very idealistic "role of the government" that assumes there will never be anyone who interprets what should and shouldn't be allowed differently from you, or in a way that harms you.

And then, once that happens, now you have no recourse - even if you build another platform, it ends up controlled by the same regulators.

What’s the bias? It’s verifiable facts versus lies and disinformation.

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