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I think it's a good thing to hold public figures accountable. Politicians, in particular, need to be held accountable due to the large amount of influence they have on our society. When Twitter, for example, places a warning on a Tweet to warn readers that it contains provably false statements, it holds the Tweeter accountable and that is enough reason to do it regardless of the changing minds argument.

As far as changing minds goes, I think there's a swath of voters who sit in the political middle and they don't fact check. The swath is large enough that they can influence elections. It's critical to make sure they don't get influenced by politicians who make up facts on the spot.

A friend of mine and I commiserated last week about the difficulty of debating with people on political issues. We noticed that people can make up "facts" quicker than we can fact check. You would think that the onus would be on the person making an argument to provide proof. But that standard of argument is long gone. The proof seems to always be on the person who says, "No, I don't think that's right."

> provably false statements

Herein lies the rub. It’s extremely rare that a politician is tweeting about something so black-and-white that the tweet can be provably true or false. There is almost always a gray area between fact and opinion. In fact, people tend to vote for politicians because they agree with their interpretation and prioritization of a set of facts. So I think you’ll find the vast majority of political tweets reside in this gray area, because otherwise they wouldn’t be political in the first place.

And if “provably false” is the standard for editorializing, then Twitter picked a terrible example to set as the precedent. The tweet they “fact checked” was Trump making a prediction about the future. Namely, he was suggesting that mail-in ballots could lead to increased voter fraud. Not only is this an opinion, but it’s a projection about something that has not happened yet. By definition, it cannot be provably false.

Weird, I can think of at least one politician who constantly tweets, and most of it's easily proven false with the smallest modicum of research. It's almost like what you are saying has no basis in reality.

You're right. "No factual basis" might be a better standard. The claims Trump made had no factual basis. Twitter's addendum highlighted that fact. Nothing more.

I can't believe that people are criticizing an organization for exercising it's right to free speech. Like this wasn't even a case of removal of content. It was literally taking a sign and sticking another sign below it. It's something that the government would be allowed to do to a private citizen. It's that far away from censorship. And yet.

"No factual basis" is more accurate with respect to the particular example.

I think the person you're responding to is talking about an asymmetry of rules - current politicians can say anything, everyone else has to follow rules. In that situation, current politicians can lie about their opponents, but opponents cannot lie back.

Actually it seems like social media companies are choosing who can't lie and who can. Normal users and even most politicians lie on social media everyday, who cares. The problem I see is social media companies targeting specific leaders and what they see as "lies" while ignoring others.

And most importantly, who decides what is a lie?

Either take 230 away from the company and no-one can lie on the platform, or stop censoring/altering users and allow everyone to say what's in their legal right to say.

There's a meme about nothing being true on the internet, why do we need a Ministry of Truth now?

If Section 230 is revoked, social media and content platforms become liable for all user-created content that they host.

Surely that will lead to much more content deleted to avoid lawsuits? Why is that a desirable outcome?

Because it will allow for some form of competition because they will be forced to make decisions leaving space for other players to make different decisions.

IMO revoking Section 230 would benefit incumbents like FB and Twitter who have already made billion-dollar investments into content moderation, and hurt the small guys who suddenly become liable for every user comment they publish.

Can’t you imagine Mark and Jack telling Republican senators: “We wanted to enable free speech, we told you so, but you took away the protections around that so we had no choice but to turn the moderation dial to 11.”

You seem to work at FB so you might have some more insight than I do, if so please share. On the other side, I see new players arriving and proving to be competitive because FB will be forced to take a position, if people don't like that position they won't interact with the platform. Suddenly there's a market for a different platform.

I’m just a video rendering code monkey, I have no particular insight into this issue. (FWIW I believe Zuckerberg is genuine in his position, but I also think he’d change it rapidly if the legal environment tilted the other way and it became a genuine business threat.)

I wonder about those different platforms. They already exist — Gab simply isn’t that popular. Revoking Section 230 would expose Gab to a “Thiel vs Gawker” situation: a billionaire could sue them into extinction. That doesn’t seem desirable at all.

I'm not a fan of Gab, but it could easily be not popular because it's offering a worse version of the current form of FB.

If FB's status changed, Gab could theoretically become more popular. Not all new platform/publishers would be the equivalent of a Gawker and thus raise the ire of a billionaire. There are plenty of independent journals, magazines, blogging platforms, etc that don't get sued out of existence.

> You seem to work at FB so you might have some more insight than I do, if so please share.

Please don’t make accusations of astroturfing. It’s rude and against the HN guidelines. Why? Because the majority of the time, it’s not true. I don’t work at or have any connection to Microsoft, but a week ago, I was accused of astroturfing for them because I did not agree that them open sourcing stuff is EEE.

Before making that accusation maybe check out your GP's profile.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pavlov

> Here’s an idea... if you don’t like what somebody writes online, don’t read it.

The problem isn't that people "don't like" what elected officials say. It's that people often take what elected officials say as truth without even considering that it might be false (they must be Smart and Good if they're in office, right?)

Fact checking and censoring prominent figures isn't going to affect people who already have strongly held beliefs. But it will make a difference to people who are impressionable or vulnerable or don't know any better.

> is that people often take what elected officials say as truth

Well educate them on that instead of trying to control the information flow. History taught us that will always backfire.

There's a catch: the people doing most of the lying are the same that have worked for decades to destroy public education.

Is it true that public education is being destroyed? I'm having trouble finding metrics by which it has declined. In terms of budget, 4.1% of US GDP is government expenditure on education. For comparison: Japan is 2.9%, Canada 4.3%, UK 4.3%. This number hasn't changed much. Over the past 20 years it has fluctuated between 4.1% and 4.7% of GDP.[1] There might be a slight downward trend, but if there is it has followed most of the other developed countries.

The US is a rich country. If anything, using percentage of GDP understates just how much we spend on education. For primary & secondary education (everything before college), there are only four countries in the world that spend more per student than the US: Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, and Norway. For post-secondary education (college and grad school), the US spends more per student than any other country.[2]

If you look at other metrics such as the percentage of adults with college degrees, or the percentage of adults who graduate high school, the US has never done better.[3][4] If you look at PISA scores, we're very close to the OECD average and that number hasn't changed much over time.[5] (Like most developed countries, absolute scores have slowly decreased over time. It's not clear why this is happening.)

If people have been working for decades to destroy public education, they're doing a very bad job of it.

1. https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/public-spending-on-educati...

2. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp

3. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2017/cb17-51....

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...

> Like most developed countries, absolute scores have slowly decreased over time. It's not clear why this is happening.

I teach in college. I was born early sixties. My daughter teaches math in high school. Recently I showed her my math books from my old high school. Her response: No way that my students could follow this.

Where I teach we have to give extra classes in basic math (I'm in STEM).

We're definitely sliding. Reading seems to be sliding worse even.

By the way, I don't think there is much of a correlation between how much a country spends on education and the quality of it.

that is exactly what Twitter has done. they didn't block Trump's tweet, they added a box basically saying "be weary of this statement you should fact check it"

>It's that people often take what elected officials say as truth without even considering that it might be false

I'll defend their right to be stupid.

You’d expend effort to prevent people from learning? A democracy requires an educated electorate, so you are anti-democracy?

>You’d expend effort to prevent people from learning?

I won't prevent people from learning rather I won't force them to learn if that what they prefer.

>A democracy requires an educated electorate, so you are anti-democracy?

Democracy doesn't require an educated electorate, it only require majority. If the majority is 'stupid' (stupid is relative) then stupid it is.

So do you think putting a link to more info next to a presidents tweet is “forcing” people to learn?

A democracy ruled by an ignorant majority winds up as authoritarian, but you already knew what that quote I paraphrased means. Keep deflecting.

>So do you think putting a link to more info next to a presidents tweet is “forcing” people to learn

No, unless you force somebody to put that link.

>A democracy ruled by an ignorant majority winds up as authoritaria

If majority wants authoritarian then authoritarian it is, thats democracy.

Annotating is fine as long as the user can choose what annotations they see and how those influence filtering. This idea that the stupid little people need the protection of the enlightened ones doing the censoring is profoundly un-american and must die.

Facebook/Twitter/et al created the systems which focus people's attention and incentivize the production of divisive poor quality information in the first place - why shouldn't they take responsibility for fixing their mistakes?

Cambridge Analytica and meddling in the elections by Russian trolls is what happened.

Also: a quite effective assault at climate action using misinformation, violent riots, a movement campaigning for civil war, ridiculous medical advise by the US president leading to deaths during a pandemic, etc.

This all happened and permanently changed the debate. Free speech is poisoned these days and we can't simply ignore that.

> This all happened and permanently changed the debate. Free speech is poisoned these days and we can't simply ignore that.

Even if that is the case, it shouldn’t mean we give up on free speech and allow it to be effectively eliminated “so it can be saved”. Free speech with some censorship is just censorship.

A robust public debate is how ideas are fairly brought out and given an opportunity to thrive or die. Having Twitter or a government or “fact checker” or any other person/organization in the middle adding their outsized influence to the picture brings the whole debate out of balance. Why is Jack’s voice worth 1000x more than yours? Because he’s more “enlightened”?