Do people think this is isolated (because Trump is, well, Trump) or there’s a broader tendency here?
In other words, there is nothing inappropriate about Twitter putting disclaimers on objectively factually incorrect statements.
Will those challenges change the ultimate outcome? Almost certainly not. But it's still a fact that Biden is not the President-Elect.
Should Twitter fact check people calling him the President-Elect? IMO, probably but only to look unbiased. Will they? No, because they don't care about looking biased despite 70M+ Americans siding with Trump.
There is essentially no basis in history or law to believe that Biden will not take office, unless he dies before inauguration. There are no credible legal theories by which he will not be elected.
People are really not taking the loss of faith of 70M Americans as seriously as they aught to.
If someone says 'the election is rigged', the least they have to do is produce evidence. In the absence of that evidence, that's not a factual statement.
What everyone is missing is: both universes might as well be correct, to the observer. It's like measuring what speed someone is going in two different relativistic frames of reference. You can both be right and come up with different numbers. It's a tough problem to solve. We can't solve it by just pointing at the out-groups and saying "ha-ha how stupid are they for believing in rubbish!" They are just not going to be convinced by someone who believe a totally different set of facts.
He just decided that these particular lies are too unreasonable for him to help spread them.
It's a little bit naive to think that the truth is easily discerned by any individual, it's always a matter of shades.
'Stole the Election' can mean many different things in many different contexts, not literally election fraud.
I detest Donald Trump and don't much like Jack Dorsey, but he should not be in a position to arbiter the truth.
I'm very thankful he censored Trump on the eve of the election, not thankful he banned the Post, and very worried about the future.
We probably need regulations over this.
The free speech people have to come to terms with the fact that the big mediums have always been filtered, and it only takes one insane president to start a civil war, that the truth among the plebes is 'Whatever their Ideologue Says' and so there needs to be credibility in the system.
The anti-Trump crowd who are happy with the censoring need to realize how dangerous of a game this is.
Twitter and FB need to set up a completely independent public board, with established guidelines and public oversight to manage these things..
The question of "Who gets to decide the truth" is extremely tiring to refute - someone has always had the authoritative voice is determining what's true and what's not. You're shifting the burden of truth from one source to the other until there is no one you can trust.
Statement: Foo is Bar. [1]
[1] Source Baz.
You then need to argue, why does Baz gets to decide what's true or not? This goes on ad-infinitum.
By asking "Who gets to decide the truth", you're essentially saying "Why should I trust anyone?" and by that logic "I cannot trust anyone, so everything must be false." The society's fabric is based on trust in institutions. Whether it is government, an independent news source or whatever.
Literally every source you will use, your own argument will falsify it.
I do agree with you on one thing - I don't think we should blindly trust Twitter. I am arguing that before censorship, they need to provide a solid source of truth.
As far as better information, diversity in viewpoint in journalistic within organizations will help. News that starts within a bubble is probably more distorted.
The social media problem is harder, but giving users ultimate control on how to filter fake news is important. Otherwise, social media companies should express editorial positions and advertise editorial services as a core part of their offerings, then consumers and content creators would have clear signals about biases in how information is curated on their platforms.
I guess I am more concerned about people harping on "Well, I don't trust APNews, why do they get to decide on truth." One can go down a conspiratorial path pretty quickly when theyve already made up their mind to not trust anyone or trust their favorite source that supports their arguments and emotional state.
What you need to know
- Voter fraud of any type is incredibly rare in the US, according to The Associated Press and Reuters
- US officials say the 2020 US election will be more secure than the 2016 US presidential election
- US officials confirm that foreign governments are trying to influence the US election, but that foreign governments' interference is mostly relegated to launching misinformation campaigns
- Experts say US elections are 'resilient'
It's really bad. Laughably bad. It might only confirms your biases if you already believe that the allegations are false, but if you haven't formed an opinion yet - I assure you, no one is ever going to be convinced by this. A lot of people are now treating those factcheckers as a complete joke that cannot be taken seriously. But I don't know, this is just what I noticed by observing this entire thing, make of it what you will.
Would you really teach your children "trust the New York Times and whatever the government says"? When both said Iraq had WMDs, did you believe them? In a perfect world we could all look at the source material (photos, videos, data, etc.) ourselves to figure out reality and there would be uncensorable platforms for individuals to call out corruption and reach the masses. This was the original promise of the internet and social media! Sadly the authoritarian left is insistent on defining "reality" and relishes censoring dissenting facts or opinions. Facebook and Twitter wields their "fact checking" and censorship on a might-is-right basis, which disenfranchises 50% of the population and is seriously incendiary to civil discourse.
If you think about the world where 80% of the people are religious, who throw away evidence in favor of faith; you're in for a dark future.
If I’m presented evidence from someone that has routinely lied to me, called me names, destroyed my career, and shipped my job prospects overseas, I’m not believing a single word they say.
And it's important to have humility about being right about everything. You don't have to go back far to find folks on the left excited about the prospects for Venezuela. Now, it's possible to find scapegoats, but it does explain some of the right-wing perspective on fake news. If the left and the media had to see a country basically collapse to call the Venezuelan government problematic, what do you call the reporting and debate points before that? "Factual" doesn't cut it.
Vaccine efficacy according to FDA says it’s 90%. ~~~~> Authority.
Paper published by FDA shows data ~~~~> Evidence.
Right?
Who wrote the paper and who collected the data? Some authority.
Biden voted for the Iraq War and 70 million people just installed him as President so we can go back to the glorious way things were before. Certainly the billionaire elites, deep state, globalists, big tech, pro war Democrats and Republicans, big business (which loves infinite cheap labor), China - they're all thrilled with where this goes next.
I wonder if all the people cheering for Biden (including the Europeans) will be offering apologies when Biden & Co. start the next round of wars, as we return to the ways things were pre-Trump. Biden's brain is jello, so somebody else is going to be steering the ship the next few years until he steps down for health reasons to set up Harris to run for re-election in 2024 running as the incumbent. Zero chance Biden's health holds up against the rigors of the job given how much he has collapsed mentally in the past four years (the stress of the job will make it that much worse).
As an American, I'm increasingly interested in leaving the country. Not specifically because of Trump or Biden, but because of everything, the general direction of the country, the imploding culture, the partisan venom, the fiscal disaster, the superpower globalism (including the war machine), the disastrous immigration policies. The US is fundamentally broken and will not be repaired, it's only going to get worse as real authoritarianism rises on both sides (socialism and fascism, both of which require extreme political violence, a small taste of which we've just recently been getting). The future of the US is Brazil, with more money. Canada is looking very nice (sane immigration policies, national selfishness regarding their priorities, no war machine, spending allocated effectively (the US spends more of its economy on its mediocre welfare state than Canada does and gets a lot less for it), a stable culture, and national civility).
Ultimately, Twitter censors things it doesn't think are healthy for its platform. I think that's within its rights, but I don't think it's by any means objective.
That's the fundamental misalignment of understanding in this era: he doesn't. He gets to decide what his platform hosts and how he spins it. The determiner of truth is, as it has always been, the audience.
A social media platform is a publisher, if it encourages news to be disseminated through its networks then it should be held to the same scrutiny.
Some might cry - well this is impossible! I can tweet anything and a stranger can share it, how can I cope with that volume etc... well, then you have to choose:
if you want to be a broadcaster, then you must obey the law and not broadcast propaganda or blatant falsehoods.
If you do not want to censor or edit, then you must stop being a broadcaster, that is you must limit the reach of that material, so that a person may only communicate it to their friend and not further in the same way as an ordinary conversation in person, by telephone, or text message would work.
If Twitter could make money in China would flagging Human Rights Campaign be okay?
I don't quite understand the epistemic certainty people have that such weapons will never be turned against them, especially when history so dramatically demonstrates the opposite.
I’ve been out of social media for years and never quite ‘got’ twitter. From the outside, it seems like it’s having a totalitarian effect on society. What you say will be widely viewed - and “judged.”
Do you?
But what is that set of facts?
Twitter felt no need to censor the Steele dossier for years despite it being a politically-funded piece of nonsense.
Not necessarily inappropriate, but it might be ineffective. I don't know if this has already occurred but I'd bet a great deal of money that those click-through warnings about blatant or dangerous falsehoods will become a badge of honor among twitter conservatives, if they haven't already.
We're building a world where "think for yourself" means "defer your thinking to Trusted Sources™", which is not a world that I support.
EDIT>> s/CNN/CNBC
Should every TV station be required to air every public servant's statements? Surely going to the source isn't too big of a burden for most.
Feel free to watch the whole thing. No one is stopping you.
There is a difference between censorship and moderation. Trump was literally trolling on CNBC's platform, and they chose to confront that.
This election has proven that US, but also Western-European media are extremely biased and see themselves as the arbiters of truth. Reading German media I noticed - without exaggeration - that Trump was getting worse press than actual real dictators. Mainstream German newspapers had articles where they invited mental health specialists to speculate on what mental afflictions Trump might be suffering from.
Extremely unethical show from the mainstream media.
They are at some level. Of course, a newspaper isn't going to present all sources as being of equal authority. If someone is spouting nonsense at some point you cut them off.
Sure, it happened to Trump this time because it was telling lies.
But imagine what would happen if they did the same to a president who was telling truths that the network didn’t like.
It’s about the power that allows the act, not the act itself.
On the other hand, there has never been an era when individuals had as much ability to male their voices heard or, for better or worse, such diversity of news (and "news") sources.
There's also the fact that Twitter is a platform and not a publication. And there are certainly questions of what happens when dominant platforms that control access to eyeballs start regulating what people can people can publish there according to reality as it exists for the tech world.
Why? Not only has this never been the case, it is also strictly impossible to report news with zero bias, because the world is a messy place with a lot of concurrent things happening and media has to weave a mostly linear story from that. There's no algorithmic way to do that.
Imagine a large protest. Most people protest peacefully. A small group of protestors riot. The police are there too. Mostly they just watch, but some of them engage with protestors who they suspect of rioting, and some of those cops use arguably excessive violence.
You're making the TV news bulletin, you have footage of all of these sub-events. You have to decide how much time to allocate to each of the sub-events. You have a big responsibility, because the amount of attention you pay to each of them may influence public opinion. Do you focus on the peaceful protest? Or on the rioting? Or on the police violence? What's the "objectively" right amount of time to spend on each of these sub-events?
I'm not sure what the "right" amount of time is; that's an incredibly difficult thing to determine--probably impossible in fact. But I certainly, trivially, know what the "wrong" amount of time would be: zero. If a reporter doesn't find some non-zero balance between those three perspectives, they have utterly failed in their role as a journalist. Eliding any of those events doesn't reduce bias, it effectively maximizes it.
With regards to journalism, the obvious rule is that you're supposed to impartially talk to both sides: the priest and the skeptic, the corporation and the union, the president and the challenger, the victim and the rapist. I'm not complaining that people aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing perfectly; I'm complaining that world-class news organizations with (formerly, I guess) serious credibility like the NY Times are blatantly not even trying to be objective anymore. They're not following basic, basic rules of journalism that literally children know to do (and would be penalized on their homework for not doing). For example, how is it reasonable to run a story like, "celebrity X sparks outrage on twitter with racist/sexist/transphobic/whatever tweet", without ever printing or even linking to what X actually said! How can you run a story on the response to some event without any context on the event itself?
We're not at the point where networks allocate less time to certain topics, we're at the point where media organizations have decided that for certain topics there is one and only one valid opinion and they're telling people how to think. This is essentially propaganda.
Impartial coverage is important, but neutral reporting is dangerous. Good journalism requires analyzing evidence, not treating all opposing views as equal (false balance).
When evidence is clear (such as in the case of the safety of vaccinations, the role humans play in climate change, etc.), "neutral reporting" can be misleading or even damaging.
It's the responsibility of journalists to help their audience understand view points, but that doesn't require giving them equal weight.
For example, in the case of vaccinations it's important to acknowledge that vaccinations were at one point believed to be linked to developmental disorders, that the study which did so has been debunked, and that the consensus of the medical community is now clear: there is no link between vaccines and autism.
The same holds true in the context of an election. For example, journalists should be (and, in many case, are) explaining that while some believe that votes were cast or counted illegally, no evidence of this has been presented. While it appeared that Biden "took the lead" after election day, this was an illusion resulting from the way in which the Republican legislatures in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania caused votes to be counted: they did not allow counting of mail ballots to begin earlier, despite knowing that record numbers would be received this year, and despite knowing that mail ballots would favor Democrats. While convincing reasons were presented for these decisions, such as earlier counting posing problems for volunteer election inspectors, it had predictable effects on the time period over votes were tallied and it is disingenuous for Trump to refer to these as "surprise ballot dumps" and either willfully ignorant or intentionally misleading for him to attempt to claim victory on election night before these ballots had been counted.
Most mainstream media has been pushing the well known hoax about "fine people on both sides" being about white supremacists for far too long to have much credibility left when wanting to point out others unfounded, baseless and harmful lies.
"defer your thinking to Trusted Sources" is the world we're coming from. Our incoherent polarization is a result of the traditional authorities having been routed around (and then leaning into their own demise). We've apparently got an awfully long road ahead of us to get to a world where everyone is actually thinking for themselves, as demonstrated by how readily blatant lies spread when they're politically and personally comforting.
Very poor argument really, think about it.
The broad statements might have some supporting fact but along the way some (Brian Stelter I think) have theorized that Trump was a Russian agent since the soviet union.
That USPS employee had a full bag of over 800 pieces of mail, 3 of which were ballots [1]
I haven’t been able to find a specific story about ballots in the trash after Election Day. I did find a story from NJ [2] and one from KY [2] about USPS dumping mail in the trash, and some of that mail was empty ballots being sent out to voters. Do you have the specific story you are talking about?
The PA employee wasn’t asked to backdate ballots, he was asked to collect ballots arriving after Nov 3 in a separate bin, and he feared that his bosses would backdate them [4]. This was also in a town of 5000 people. Here is what he said:
“On Wednesday the fourth, we checked in at the time clock,” the anonymous postal worker told Project Veritas chief James O’Keefe. “The postmaster then told us that if we were to find any ballots on our routes that day, we were to collect them, keep them separate in a hod, which is what we call our plastic bins, bring them back, and then we would put them in another hod and then they would send them to be counted.”
“The postmaster (James Malia) and the supervisor (William Wood) did not say that we’re going to, we’re going to backdate them,” the whistleblower clarifies, but “I was firmly of the belief that they were going to be backdated. We’re always hit with the Hatch Act. You know, you can’t talk about politics, you can’t influence people. On one occasion, the postmaster James Malia had gone, had attacked a carrier who had expressed support for Trump.”
...says he overheard Malia chide Wood for having “postmarked one of the ballots for the fourth, instead of the third, because they were supposed to put them for third”.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-york-mailman-allege...
[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/10/07/usps...
[3] https://www.wlky.com/article/us-postal-worker-fired-after-mo...
[4] https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/another-whistleblower-alle...
I point to Mueller report which looked for collusion between the Trump campaign and foreign countries and found none.
At the very least that is the basis for a fair accusation, and of course the eventual impeachment for further improprieties which was bipartisan.
Joe Biden: We stand with independent Taiwan. Fact check: This statement is false. Taiwan is part of China.
Does this hypothetical not give you chills?
Admittedly the question becomes how we can in a fair manner judge what ideas in which context can have such a dangerous impact as to be non-democratic.
We all have to reflect how close fascism and other kinds of ideologies always are just beneath the surface, and that we are all susceptible of falling on that train it isn't specifically another group that is.
Want to ban Nazi's? I wont disagree, most people wont.
Want to ban group X which is fighting with group Y in a tit-for-tat skirmish over decades? How do you decide who is right? How do you decide truth?
What about cases where someone has done something bad in response to something bad done earlier? Do you ban one side? The other? Both? Does the side with more political/status power decide who gets banned?
I think there is a difference between ‘right vs wrong’ and ‘factually correct vs incorrect’.
Platforms like Twitter will rarely be in a position to decide right/wrong, because in many opposed discussion both sides will use the platform.
On the factual correctness, platforms can more easily take a stance in high impact cases. I would assume that they’d have out the same warnings on Biden’s Twitter if he had said ‘I won’ on Tuesday.
That leaves a challenge: how do you decide what’s a fact? For example on the vote count. Most outlets say the reported figures are fact, but it implies trusting the process of counting and reporting. Removing that implied trust means others can take ‘there is fraud!’ as fact just as well.
Twitter seems to use the mainstream media (eg AP predicting the election outcome) as a base of trust (and so do I). But I’ve come to realize that once you don’t trust the media, it is easy to believe in another set of facts (that are true for you), and suddenly (to you) it seems Twitter is censoring.
I hope people will find and trust each other again.
>> Twitter seems to use the mainstream media (eg AP predicting the election outcome) as a base of trust (and so do I). But I’ve come to realize that once you don’t trust the media, it is easy to believe in another set of facts (that are true for you), and suddenly (to you) it seems Twitter is censoring.
I'm glad you brought up the case of the election. It is a harder question for social media to arbitrate centrally. For example, "There is Fraud" could be true or false, and certainly somewhere you'll find fraud making the statement both true in fact and false in spirit. Then, there is the dark matter of everything the newspaper doesnt even cover -- US newspapers only regularly cover US news, allies, key areas of the world, and major events. Imagine a dairy-farmer trade war between two asian nations -- unlikely to be covered, so what is the truth? For that matter, imagine the civil rights of small minorities in the US -- depending on the minority group, unlikely to be covered even by major us newspapers.
Let me give you a harder example now. Anything to do spanning two sovereign nations, especially one involving war, civilian casualties, or war crimes. Pick your example: Russia/Ukraine, China/Taiwan, India/Pakistan, Yemen/Saudi Arabia. Both sides will have their national own newspapers which will support their own country. Which side does Twitter take?
By the time the meeting was over, the engineers had figured out a way to flag all the Nazis and just moved them all to their own instance. Problem solved.
FWIW, Trump's time on Twitter is winding down. The only reason he hasn't received the ban-hammer from Twitter is his unique position as an elected official. January 20th shortly after noon, he will no longer exist on Twitter.
Interesting. Would the right-wing be better off if Twitter were a government-owned entity, thus ensuring that their right to free speech would always allow unfettered access? Would we ever be able to convince them to trust the government enough that that was actually the case? Would they be able to overcome their impulse in favor of privatization over nationalization to allow something like that to happen?
So, do you support net neutrality?
It's the ISP's platform, they can do what they want with it... right?
Being _unable_ to censor the president is what would be anti-democratic. Only in authoritarian regimes would a leader be able to force private companies to spread their message.
In a democratic country, you have the freedom to choose what you want to support and not support.
Consider how judges around the country have responded to his campaign's legal filings, it's not like Twitter was out on a limb here.
Editorializing is twitter reading the tweet, deciding whether it is true or false, and then showing their decision to the end user together with the tweet.
It is somewhat similar to choosing a title for a article, even if you leave the content unchanged you can significantly change the message or the effect by choosing an appropriate title.
In this context twitter is not simply recommending accounts you might like, or refusing to deliver tweets, they are actually engaging with the speech of the user.
As an analogy consider someone that retweets and article discussing some crimes. this person post a link and says: "I can't believe Person A is actually a murderer", in this case regardless of the article content the poster is exposed to a potential lawsuit in case Person A can prove its innocence.
Twitter is closer to this example that to simply choosing to remove content.
(specifically this does not apply to the removed trump tweets)
Nope, that is simply not what editorializing means, in any sense of the word.
Twitter stating a categorically true fact or linking to a resource that debunks factually incorrect statements is not editorializing because they are not giving an opinion. They are adding context with verifiable truths. Which, again, not editorializing because stating a truth is not an opinion.
I'm sure you can dream up all sorts of hypotheticals that makes this sound problematic, such as implying twitter are the ones deciding something is true or false. They don't need to decide that, they just need to recognise a statement as false and then add clarification. If Trump's tweets had any kind of ambiguity then maybe what you say has credence, but that isn't the reality of the situation.
I my example so did the user that shared an article on a murder.
Now, I believe twitter was careful enough not to do anything too stupid, and we all can imagine that Trump's tweet might have been quite extreme. But fact checking in-place is editorializing.
For taking down harmful things, they are just as liable under 230 as they would have been before 230, namely not liable.
Wouldn't practicality dictate we err on the side of caution, meaning the statement is allowed before it's blocked?
Because the alternative situation is, something that NEEDS to get out never does only because it takes so long to prove.
Imho they are all just opinions(edit: , and/or statements used to influence).
There's a case to be made that Twitter has taken on some of the old role of the press by calling out obviously factually incorrect statements.
I'm all for this. But I'd like to see it formalised in law with criminal penalties for anyone, in any position of public influence, who wilfully tries to mislead the public.
Lets not talk about two different situations at the same time. It is perfectly possible to make an appropriate decision and then an inappropriate one; one does not necessarily obviate the other.
"They were so busy asking if they could they didn't stop to question if they should."
The classic analogy is that a person shouldn't be allowed to shout "FIRE" and thereby cause panic in a crowded theater, when there is no such fire. The right of the one person to (falsely) speak is outweighed by the right of the many people present to their own safety.
Trump saying "I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!" [1] is clearly equivalent to shouting "FIRE". He has not won the election, he does not have more popular votes or more electoral college votes, and he has presented no proof or substantive argument to contradict this narrative.
That Twitter should put a warning label on statements from powerful people that are objectively false is really the least they can do. To let Trump spread lies without any comment before now has been wholly irresponsible. I wish that Twitter didn't provide a platform for misinformation in the first place.
[1] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13250998450450718...
Not an unelected king who rules by fiat on a platform used by 10's or hundreds of millions of people.
No, it’s not equivalent at all because it doesn’t present any immediate danger. The reason yelling “fire” is a problem is not because it’s a lie, it’s because it requires immediate and possibly dangerous behavior (evacuate as quickly as possible).
However, I personally believe that his false speech does present an immediate danger to the public on the order of days or weeks.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-protests-ari...
That is dangerous and is not protected by the first amendment.
Moreover a witness that was part of that email thread confirmed the conclusion reached in the original story.
As you can see here, he posted about it and there is no warning label:
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/13178254844958801...
This is especially true since western society regularly tries to interpret and judge intent along with what people say, and it has judged that Trump's intent is self-serving and not an honest disagreement, and as a result it has deemed it at least somewhat acceptable to censor him.
Democracy is a religion, look at Singapore and China and compare them to the West.
And "antidemocratic" gets defined by, well, Twitter.
(I'm firmly in the "Their platform, their rules" camp, so I agree that Twitter CAN do this, I'm really just curious as to why people think they SHOULD).
The special treatment is placing the warning instead of banning them. But you have to be important enough that executives think applying the standard policy to you would be a bad idea.
If you haven't see its worth a look. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump
Am I excited that We the People are delegating the decisions what speech to amplify or not to fickle private companies? It’s hard for me to get behind that. Something just feels very wrong about this idea.
But being President of the US makes one the Commander in Chief. That's the highest military position we have in this country.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-2/sec...
Not only this, but the offices of the SECDEF and secretaries of each service branch are also led by civilians, to which the JCS report. There are strict limits to the number of positions in those offices that can be filled by uniformed officers.
I remain confused as to why you worded your remark the way you did. And that was my real point, which I feel like I didn't make clear.
It's just that I think people forget that the office of the President, while important, is a civilian executive position. It is unlike Chief Justice, or a 3* General, which require lifetime commitments to achieve.
I believe it was intentional that the office of the President to be public and administrative, more like that of a mayor than of a king.
And that's what we shouldn't lose sight of.
I fundamentally cannot agree with your seeming dismissal of his responsibility to comport himself a certain way in public while he holds office.
Well I agree with you there about the office demanding a certain level of, uh, Presidentialness. Whether on social media or not.
I was just being hyperbolic about your typical blue-check twitter user coupled with a (possibly unhealthy) sprinkling of self-deprecation.
Self deprecating humor is fraught with problems under the best of circumstances. (It's a bad habit I'm trying to break for myself.)
Thanks for clarifying everything so nicely. It's been nice talking with you.
And just a few reminders: 1. His messages are still visible. 2. Even if they were not, he could still deliver his message in a thousand different ways, I mean he's constantly over the phone with Fox'n'Friends.
Since America exists, you've always had people commenting and criticizing what elected officials are doing and saying. Do you want to shut twitter's right to free speech? Do you realize that you are taking a position of: "A member of government should not be questioned by a private party". Do you realized how fearful people who disagrees with you can be by hearing this argument?
The guy is literally going for a power grab. "Stand up and stand by"... I really think that those who are worried about democracy because of what Twitter is doing are focusing on the wrong thing here. And to be honest, I find it harder and harder to believe they do it in good faith... That is what I am worried about.
Realize that I’m not arguing that Twitter should be compelled to never flag anything. Just if they do maybe there needs to be a consistent set of laws with due process to appeal the decisions.
Here’s a thought experiment: what if say China were to acquire a majority stake in Twitter and downright forbid any disagreeable statement about Taiwan? The fact that this sale would probably not be allowed in the first place for national security reasons should give another hint that something about Twitter is unusual.
As for arguing in good faith, when do you think is a good time to have this conversation? It’s great that it worked out for good this time. Sure, let’s wait until he’s safely out of office first. But I think that’s exactly the time to think through this carefully, and not when it’s too late and these powers are used against something you agree with. History is full of examples of failing to think through long term consequences while focussing on the imminent danger.
It's not even censorship, they are all there still and anyone can read them.
But proven lies need to be called out. Freedom of the press allows us to call out politicians on their lies.
Thus far, it seems to mean that I can't follow, comment, post, or dm on/with groups or facebook pages. I cannot create events, pages, or new groups.
I can only post to my timeline, dm my friends, or comment on my friend's posts.
I do not post, or comment on Facebook, though I am a member of a number of politically engaged and activist facebook groups on the fringes for the purposes of having access to on the ground primary sources.
I have a number of friends active on the right who received a similar set of restrictions, ending on the same day. They're used to these kinds of restrictions, comment often, and thought nothing of it. This is typical of facebook to them.
More unexpectedly, and in my opinion a disturbing development in an already unsettling moderation regime, a number of second-order contacts (friends of friends and coworkers) who work as left and progressive organizers/activists (not liberals, progressives and leftists) also received the same levels of restriction.
This was accompanied by the removal of quite a few fringe activist and political pages, the most infamous which comes to my mind being 'God Emperor Trump', a large meme page that had significant reach during the 2016 election.
I don't think this is circumstantially unique. This is a preview. Assuming recounts and court challenges go Biden's way, I believe we're looking at a future where social media uses the tools they've developed over the past four years to enforce a bipartisan moderate consensus over their user-bases, restricting any populist, revolutionary, or potentially dangers speech or users that might produce it.
The activist left has largely been shielded by its circumstantial alliance with the DNC establishment and its allied institutions, given their mutual opposition to the Trump administration.
The populist right has partially been shielded by the implicit threat of Trump's executive authority.
Libertarians (I'm including the Boogaloo movement, and many lockdown protests under this umbrella) have had no such cover, and in my limited experience I've seen entire networks of users and pages been scrubbed off the platform over the past two years with little fanfare, and largely as a product of their affiliations. I believe their experience will be mirrored on the left and the right going forward.
It's exceedingly likely that American liberals will tell you what to do, and pat themselves on the back.
I'd say it's impossible to do a perfect job of finding that threshold, but I think Twitter has done a decent job of it with Trump's tweets.
But yes, as it stands right now, it is in their hands and we are relying on them to do a good job of it when they decide to.
Censoring really ought to be driven by the individual, not the platform. By getting involved in censoring certain parties, Twitter is implying here (whether intentionally or not) that its platform is a source of truth. That's a horrifying notion on its own. If anything my trust in Twitter (what little I had) is basically gone. It has nothing to do with politics. The minute a social media platform starts meddling with user content (especially the content of public figures, especially especially the current POTUS, whoever he is), I no longer believe anything I see on the platform.
It's hard enough to know what to believe without questioning the authenticity of people's statements.
> any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
Then we as a democracy could decide via legislation and law what is approrpriate and what is not.
“The First Amendment is first for a reason. Second Amendment is just in case the First one doesn't work out.”
- Chappelle
I don't see twitter mentioned.
You need to at least learn the history of the period if you are going to try to play this game.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party
> Hitler saw the party as a revolutionary organisation, whose aim was the overthrow of the Weimar Republic, which he saw as controlled by the socialists, Jews and the "November criminals" who had betrayed the German soldiers in 1918. The SA ("storm troopers", also known as "Brownshirts") were founded as a party militia in 1921 and began violent attacks on other parties.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch
> Approximately two thousand Nazis were marching to the Feldherrnhalle, in the city centre, when they were confronted by a police cordon, which resulted in the deaths of 16 Nazi party members and four police officers.
Please cut the smug attitude. I’m trying my best not to engage with this kind of low-brow personal attack.
> Over the following years they worked to become a legitimate party, entered government, and did not actually need to engage in direct violence to attain the absolute control that was desired.
This is just flat wrong. You’re ignoring the violent intimidations of the SA during the entire decade from 1920-1930.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung
> Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, members of the SA were often involved in street fights, called Zusammenstöße (collisions), with members of the Communist Party (KPD).
It's also well known that the Nazis were (at least monetarily) backed by Big Business & the wealthy capitalists at the time who were afraid of the rising popularity of Communism, as well as the threat of Soviet Russia. This included but was not limited to even American companies that happened to have offices in Germany (e.g. IBM). You can bet that money was used for anti-Semitic propaganda (which could deflect unhappiness towards the corporations to be aimed with the Jewish), and bringing this back to Free Speech, you can bet that this was allowed because of unmitigated free speech at the time.
Source: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/copenhagen-speech-v...
In places where it hasn't resulted in obvious violence, it appears to be pushing people towards polarisation and distress, with violence looking plausible if that continues.
We have a real dilemma around this one. It may be that certain forms of "speech" that have emerged in modern society also push people towards violence.
War has already started… and it's not as simple as pretty lines drawn on maps to demarcate sides… or ballots dropped off for whose favorite candidate.
That right, then, cannot be upheld if half the country believes it's ok to silence the other half.
There's a huge value disconnect here and that's the fundamental problem. What one CAN do and what one SHOULD do are very different things and I think people's pragmatism is blinding them to how this will work out for people 100 years from now.
I don't understand this. Donald Trump can say whatever he wants. Alex Jones can say whatever he wants. Why are you saying that their rights are being trampled? Why paint them as victims? As it happen, the right to speak is not a right to be heard and Trump's supporters can hear him as much as they want. Twitter decided that it would not be through their product.
If I invite a bunch of friends at my place and one of them start spewing hatred and lies, I'll kick him out. He can continue in the street as far as I am concerned. Just not in my house... What right were denied here?
I never heard those arguments a few years back when Fox news used to invite liberals on their show just to cut them in the middle of a sentence because they didn't like what they were saying. It infuriated me alright. But I never went as far as to think it was illegal.
Do you propose that Twitter should be forced by the government not to give context to tweets? It seems that the supreme court disagreed with that idea when they decided that a company cannot be forced to sell a cake to a gay couple.
> What one CAN do and what one SHOULD do are very different things and I think people's pragmatism is blinding them to how this will work out for people 100 years from now.
I completely agree with you. The President of the United States CAN instill doubt into the very heart of democracy using all the cynicism and lies he can muster. But SHOULD he do it? What I am saying is that between the theoretical threats of having a private company exercising its right to manage its products in its own way and the president of a country going for a power grab, the urgency, to me, seems pretty clear.
Let's agree to disagree.
The Wayback Machie is the latest 1984 example: https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/information-war-interne...
(note yc already shadow bands 0h links by not allowing comments on submissions, this (yc) is an awesome place, it's sad really)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24406518
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23495333
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23486135
Stop looking at right now, today, this week. Look forward. Look forward to when you are old; look forward beyond your lifetime; look forward to when this time in history has been forgotten by the cultural memory, to when the transitory arguments of today, this afternoon, or this year, have been forgotten; and ask yourself what kind of world you don't want to see, even if it means you ruefully admit it makes things harder now.
That introspection has been lost and probably, the human race won't survive this period if we don't figure it out.
That is not what the Supreme Court decided. The only decision they made was that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission didn't apply religious neutrality to the case, and reversed the Commission's decision[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
A President with a massive angry following with guns, tweeting falsehoods about the lack of integrity of the electoral process (And I don't mean the vague things, I mean the explicitly false things like his party not having access to view vote count processes, which they do) is about as close as you can get to yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theater on the internet.
Not only is it Twitter's prerogative to act accordingly, I'd go further and say it is their ethical duty.
And yes, if Biden did the equivalent "from the other side", Twitter would act in exactly the same way.