Comment by Judgmentality | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Judgmentality | Hacker News Reader

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I find your stance slightly bizarre. You don't trust twitter to be the arbiter of truth (which is fair), but you think the Indian government which is widely credited to be falsifying data (I can point you to sources on this, I even personally know a journalist there) will be held accountable to its people?

Sure, it'd be nice to hold your government accountable. But when your ruler is effectively a tyrant in a government that is laughably calling itself a democracy, I'd rather have twitter provide its own opinion as well. Because at the end of the day you as the reader can still decide to ignore twitter's judgment and just read the document as you could before. It's additional information, not censorship - whereas the government wants to limit information.

Nobody is forcing you to trust twitter any more than they're forcing you to trust the government. You can ignore twitter's label and still try to hold the Indian government accountable - it's a non sequitur.

> but you think the Indian government which is widely credited to be falsifying data will be held accountable to its people?

Isn't this what elections are there for?

Didn't the ruling party lose a major election just few weeks back? It was widely covered as a victory against them even in international press.

> Nobody is forcing you to trust twitter any more than they're forcing you to trust the government.

It seems you strongly oppose the current establishment. Would you have been fine if Twitter would have marked content against them the same way? It might have been true but it might also have been pressure by the establishment.

It is not like anyone is asking anyone to trust Twitter. My main issue with that is the sheer power a private company not answerable to the citizens holds.

> Would you have been fine if Twitter would have marked content against them the same way?

100%. My stance is that twitter can add its opinion just the same as anyone. The government trying to censor an opinion is what I consider to be the problem. Even if that opinion is "covid is fake" I think people should be allowed to say it because I believe in free speech.

> My main issue with that is the sheer power a private company not answerable to the citizens holds.

Then you must really hate (almost) every news organization in the world. They literally make it their business to do the very thing you seem to oppose. And as far as I'm concerned they have no more credibility, but that's entirely subjective.

> I think people should be allowed to say it because I believe in free speech.

I do too, but this is the exact problem here. Twitter colored that free speech with what they thought was right.

> Then you must really hate (almost) every news organization in the world. They literally make it their business to do the very thing you seem to oppose

Oh, I do hate them. Passing commentary from high pedestals and this false sense of intellectual rigour about their work, pretending they don't have any biases at all.

This is why when they complain about social media companies eating their lunch, I have no sympathy for them. They just hate the fact that the power that was reserved to just them has been just given away to everyone.

All one needs to understand how good most journalism is to just watch coverage of news about a field they understand well.

> I do too, but this is the exact problem here. Twitter colored that free speech with what they thought was right.

I think this is where we disagree. Yes, twitter added their own opinion, but as far as I'm concerned why is that worse than anyone adding their own opinion to it? My point is twitter adding their opinion should be as inconsequential as a random person with 6 followers replying to the tweet saying "this is fake news." The only difference is because people give twitter more credibility than a random stranger, which is the fundamental problem of trust in society. No amount of laws can fix this if you truly advocate for free speech. People just need to educate themselves better about what to believe.

It might just be labeling today, next time it might be suppression of posts in feeds, eventually they might just shadow block posts or remove them entirely.

Yes, that point is valid. I simplified my argument for the sake of conversation, but there are really two other very real issues I didn't address because it would wildly increase the scope of this conversation (and I don't want to spend hours here).

There's the platform versus publisher issue, where companies are arguably trying to be both.

And there's the social media companies already using black box algorithms to control their feeds.

So I'd argue with twitter everything already falls under the latter issue, which doesn't mean it's okay just that this is larger issue for any social media company and it's more complicated than just free speech (which is already more nuanced than I've described).

So yes, once twitter begins censoring opinions (and arguably they already do simply by having an algorithm make a feed for you) then they are equally culpable.

As to the corporation vs government issue, yes I'd prefer to hold governments accountable for these things and I agree they should be the entities that handle this. But I see that as an ideal and meanwhile I care more about practical solutions to help us improve where we are and hopefully get there some day.

I agree with your elaborated points. :)

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