Twitter disallows liking, commenting, or retweeting “Misleading” tweets
twitter.com
twitter.com
(FWIW one tweet was because a budget document itself had a misleading denominator, and the other because of a recent change to a law.)
Something tells me that only one side is going to find their likes disabled, though.
Please move to Mastodon. It's pretty cool over here, and there's no ads.
everyone with qualms about that will self-select out of the userbase and mastodon shall become sleek and nimble, the most refined shitposting machine on all the internet
My only gripe is that the website doesn't support exporting your data so that you're okay if masto.host disappears, but I request a backup via email once a month and they put it in my Megadrop within a day.
Yeah, twitter sucks. We can get mad at each other and argue about it and talk about how bad it is and blah blah.
Nobody cares. It will change nothing.
In part because hosting providers like AWS collude to push viable competition offline.
It's not AWS preventing a twitter alternative from popping up.
Also: things like gab, gettr, .win etc. all exist. They're just cesspools.
Really? Cause I seem to recall that every company in their tech stack decided to drop Parler, including Amazon, and including removals from both app stores.
I'd like to see "half the people of HN" create a twitter clone - but don't forget ALL the infrastructure, no service providers, no app stores, no hosting, etc.
Now, if you were talking about something that uses the payments oligopoly (eg, Patreon clones), I'd be way more sympathetic to that. There, you can't even call it a conspiracy because they're operating in broad daylight. But for the social networks, it's all natural AFAICT.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
COVID-19 IFR seems to be more like 1% (compared to an IFR of 0.05% for polio, for example) but more infected will suffer from damage to respiratory tissues and other complications.
MMR vaccines are mandatory for school children so, if you've attended school in the US, odds are you've been vaccinated against mumps, measles, and rubella.
Polio has been wiped out by a massive vaccination campaign. It's no longer a threat precisely because of vaccinations.
Meanwhile, the COVID-19 vaccines greatly reduce the chance and period of transmissibility, reduce disease severity in breakthrough infections, and only require boosters for those populations whose immunity wanes. The latter also applies to those infected with COVID-19. Reinfection can and does happen. Vaccines can help counteract that.
The biggest benefit to vaccines is not just personal protection but also how much they work to limit spread. This is crucial in stopping the pandemic because the longer and easier COVID-19 is allowed to spread, the more likely it can mutate into a strain that's more virulent and harder to fight. We saw this with Delta.
... <wags finger> "We live in a society!"
No. Vaccine mandates (to the extent that they stop transmission) can still be justified under libertarian principles.
https://www.cato.org/blog/analyzing-vaccine-mandates-liberta...
Here's a helpful video by potholer54 explaining the difference between the two - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAB43K2gtOk
...Twitter confirmed perpetuating Covid19-misinformation
The problem is the concentration of publishing power. We should never be in a situation where a single person (Dorsey, Zuckerberg, etc.) has so much control over publishing.
If we can't break up social media, we should at least enforce interoperability so that there can be free market pressure on these companies.
(I also think it's generally bad, but that's my attempt at a steelman.)
Screaming "FIRE! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!" in a crowded theater when there is no fire or evidence of fire is not protected speech under any sane "freedom of speech" doctrine.
Giving the person screaming that a megaphone makes you complicit in the crime.
Giving people the "freedom" to trick other people into causing harm to each other is not giving people freedom. It is supporting abuse.
There are lines, of course... fine or otherwise, and it is a messy process to draw them. And mistakes are often made and should be called out.
But it is not a weak argument to claim that supporting the spread of disinformation about public health measures during a pandemic is supporting abuse.
And the problem with social media is that instead of there being 200-500 people who can hear the megaphone there are hundreds of million. Scale matters. What can be tolerated in the local pub a half hour before closing may not be tolerable on a billboard in Times Square.
Of course, it would take someone like Twitter refusing and this turning into a court case to end this nonsense...
Maybe this change seems bad on principle, but the status quo today is a known bad state which is costing lives. Hard to argue that we shouldn’t try something different given the evidence in front of us.
(I do agree that the cost in lives here is a real, real problem. People need to own up that their actions have impact on other people…)
The “means” in question is Liking and Retweeting on Twitter and the “ends” is preventing vaccine misinformation.
So one might reasonably conclude that _these_ ends justify _these_ means
Is what would appear to be the logical conclusion of this idea. If people can't be trusted to speak, they certainly can't be trusted to vote.
Any idea extrapolated to it’s logical extreme can look stupid. No one is talking about ending democracy
Over the past few years, I think we've seen a lot of the downsides of completely unmoderated social media. Regardless of political affiliation, I don't think I know a single person who thinks the current state of social media is healthy. With the right technologies and budget it's shockingly easy to spread misinformation, propaganda, and hateful rhetoric that will be picked up and taken to heart by some percentage of the population. That's may not be the only reason people find social media to be unhealthy in its current state, but it's definitely one of the top reasons.
So, with that being said, it feels like some sort of moderation is needed. With moderation comes the idea that someone will also need to be the arbiter of truth. I'm not a huge fan of having a few social media companies fill that arbiter of truth role, but honestly, I don't have a better option.
I don't think this is a perfect solution and it can definitely be abused, but I do think it's an attempt to solve a clear problem. I'd rather see them do something to try and fix it and deal with any new issues as they arise instead of just sitting back and pretending like it can't be fixed or that it isn't a problem.
This is a phase that society has to go through that will teach the cultural lesson that we can't trust too much what we read on the internet. Not that we could trust the media institutions that came before that (in a different way). We need to learn to think for ourselves and also embrace living in the world we have always lived in, where certainty of knowledge is a rare thing.
Twitter links this tweet to a page saying "COVID-19 vaccines are extremely effective at preventing serious illness and death, trials show" however the parent tweet doesn't dispute or contradict that statement at all.
We're through the looking glass here...
> this one mRNA shot […] that doesn’t stop transmission
This phrasing implies can be easily misconstrued to that it's completely ineffective in preventing transmission… and it's not.
The tweet is … off … here,
> I can go unvaccinated against polio
AIUI, one can go unvaccinated against polio because the vaccine against polio was so effective it is one step shy of being eradicated. The cognitive dissonance of refusing a COVID-19 vaccine on that argument is astounding to me…
> I can go unvaccinated against […] tetanus, hepatitis, measles and mumps
Presumably it depends on jurisdiction, but I was required to get those vaccines in order to attend school.
Now, while I (personally) think the tweet is bad, Twitter's moderation is not the greatest here, and I would agree that banning comments is too heavy handed. If nobody can correct the poster, with nuanced debate that addresses their points specifically, how would they ever change their view?
Simultaneously, I think people running discussion sites need the ability to moderate, and that moderation will be at times wrong. But users, simultaneously, need reasonable choice when it comes to services like this, so that if they disagree with the company/org's choices, they have a meaningful way to choose a different provider.
No, Vaccinated People Are Not ‘Just as Likely’ to Spread the Coronavirus as Unvaccinated People
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/the-vaccin...
The impact of SARS-CoV-2 vaccination on Alpha & Delta variant transmission
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264260v...
> I can go unvaccinated against polio, tetanus, hepatitis, measles and mumps,
Misleading: 90.8% of infants aged 24 months are vaccinated against e.g measles, mumps, and rubella, so a mandate generally isn't required because herd immunity has already been reached. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/measles.htm
> but if I refuse this one mRNA shot for a virus with a 0.2% IFR
Most recent research lands it anywhere from 0.37% to 0.90% based on various factors specific per country. (Preprint) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.12.21256975v...
> that doesn’t stop transmission
But it does slow it by reducing breakthrough infections and reducing the window of transmission. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/07/29/world/covid-delta-va...
> and requires boosters every few months,
Booster isn't required, effectiveness is still 85+% for the mRNA vaccines, even against delta. https://www.healthline.com/health-news/heres-how-well-covid-...
> I can’t go to public spaces
Public spaces aren't barricaded to unvaccinated people anywhere in the US currently, and given that people have failed to contribute to minimizing transmission, it's unlikely we'll have those kinds of lockdowns in the future. Spaces owned by private institutions or organizations may be, but most are asking for masks in line with CDC Delta guidelines.
> and may lose my job?
May indeed, depending on various conditions including the desires of the employer. The OSHA regulation is the only one that might be questionable, but OSHA also regulates events with lower fatality rates than covid, so this may well be in scope for them too.
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It's pretty misleading. It made sense that Twitter flagged it.
We should either make it illegal to post that kind of information (or rather - try and fail) or enforce fair treatment of people from the big tech companies.
They cannot be both a "mere conduit" and a "censor/publisher" at the same time.
A family who lost a loved one who didn't take the vaccine because they read something on Twitter would have a very good case today to take them to the cleaners. And given the political climate they would probably win.
If they don't police content, they're covered by Section 230. But if they do police content, and they miss some, then... are they liable for the part that they miss?
Does Section 230 still cover them if they're picking and choosing what they're going to carry?
There's a (mildly sarcastic) article on TechDirt that's pretty comprehensive: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
Holy shit. 230 is LITERALLY ABOUT PROTECTING PICKING AND CHOOSING. That's the entire point!! Carrying everything in common is called a "common carrier". Putting out your own personal speech is publishing. Moderation exists in between and can never be perfect. Section 230 was created so that forums could moderate, imperfectly, however they wish without being liable for stuff that other people wrote. It is what makes the internet as we know it possible, including Hacker News itself.
Seriously, how do these memes get started and gain so much traction!? Why has nobody apparently actually read 230? It's TWENTY-SIX WORDS. That's it. Here:
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
Does anyone see the word "neutral" or anything like that in there? Any qualifications on "both sides"? No. Because it doesn't exist. Stop.
Section 230 does not prohibit imperfect moderation. In fact, Section 230 exists for mostly this reason, so that platforms can moderate on a best effort and not be held liable as publishers.
And because it's merely a veiled threat, there's no basis for a 1st Amendment lawsuit alleging censorship by the government.
If you're paying for the servers that run the conduit, the least you should be able to do is decide who can add to it and what you allow through it.
Free speech is the US is freedom from censorship by the govt only, and it isn't unlimited. It only applies to ideological speech.
No consumer wants an unrestricted platform anyway. There are no platforms with zero moderation.
But I disagree that Twitter is an outlier in that regard. Facebook, YouTube, and reddit (mostly) are spaces that technically have groups, but you're still flooded with algorithmically-chosen content made by strangers.
Laws are thought ending semantic games invented by aristocrats to manipulate the masses.
Read James Madison; government exists to protect the opulent minority from the poor majority.
Laws as our society knows them are aristocratic obligations put in people. Our social meme obliges us to kowtow to the owners, just as religion obliged us to kowtow to the masters of the sacred texts.
Aristocratic protectionism is built into the American political system.
https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/8793/what-did-j...
> Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body.
This quote comes from a statement Madison made at the Federal Convention of 1787 (https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-004...), and is basically pointing out that a Democracy is susceptible to a Tyranny of the Majority (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority), and needs a balancing force (the Senate). The comment you are replying to is from a user named "chmsky00" which gives a hint about how some, in particular Noam Chomsky, have interpreted this quote by Noam Chomsky (https://chomsky.info/commongood02/).
Trade to support biological life is one thing, and is something I feel should be unencumbered by servicing memes like “Jeff Bezos is worth billions of dollars.” An idea my math education informs me is built on abstraction the public cannot understand. It’s little different than conquering indigenous people with language like “My God commands it!”
Bezos isn’t a savior or genius; he had help from our social field theory in the form of rich relatives and friends who gained in a higher tax era, then changes the rules.
Paulo Freire and countless others offer similar metaphors for applying economics to social behavior. We call it behavioral economics now.
IMO the public should be holding out at scale, and only enabling the building of long lived solutions rather than lowest bidder public works, and social agency bent towards consumer waste creation and cleanup, while letting a minority LARP being above the daily work that enables their life.
Simple.
Maybe you can say more about why a business can't be both a publisher and a distributor? A newspaper publishes original content and classifieds, and they certainly have discretion over which classifieds to distribute in their paper, what makes social media any different?
It's also incredibly easy to spread pure garbage with social media. Debunking it takes real work.
I am going to a funeral in a few hours for an unvaccinated friend who died of COVID.
Maybe regulators should force dominant platforms to kick out a section of their user base every so often to keep the ecosystem diversified.
No coffee shop has 1/4 of the human population visit each day.
Like it or not, major tech platforms wield the power of small countries now. It's probably helpful that we start thinking of them this way and move toward some kind of equitable regulation.
No, they absolutely do not. Nor do they "control the perception of billions of people." That's just fear-mongering hyperbole. You might have an argument that social media influences the opinions of billions of people, but then you have to take into account the deluge of inputs most people receive from multiple sources online and off, and realize that the total influence any one social media platform has is not that significant. This isn't the world of a few decades ago where many people's worldview was informed by only three tv stations and one newspaper - and not even in that world did the media control people's perception.
When Twitter can levy taxes, field an army and a police force, declare Facebook illegal and bomb their campus into smoldering rubble, and coerce people outside of their platform to obey the laws they pass and enforce through their monopoly on violence then they might have something approaching the power of even a small nation. Being able to ban people from your website (and your website alone) is not equivalent to nation-state status.
>It's probably helpful that we start thinking of them this way and move toward some kind of equitable regulation.
No, it's not helpful, it's propaganda. It's the rhetoric of the modern form of the Red Scare, except now the "communist conspiracy" is running social media instead of Hollywood.
I feel very frustrated by this because to me this is essentially the case of that religious baker refusing to make a gay wedding cake, except here we have a big company refusing to serve some people because it doesn't like what they have to say.
I would not require twitter to server anybody coffee though.
You can argue that Twitter is different because it's bigger, but if there's only one bar in town I don't see a substantial different between these two acts; I just don't see the size of Twitter as especially important to this.
What I'm saying here mostly is- I really don't think you want to add "political belief or opinion" as a protected class. That means not being able to fire someone for expressing racist opinions, that means not being able to ban gang colors from a club, it really has a very far reaching effect.
What you probably want to do is socialize Twitter. Same effect (they are treated as a public entity, and can only punish you for illegal content) but without a bunch of insane restrictions on my own personal Freedom of Association (you remember that part of the Bill of Right, not just the Freedom of Speech parts, right?)
Twitter is _clearly_ acting as a publisher akin to a newspaper by editorializing and controlling what posts are distributed on its platform which would be OK if they were subject to the same libel laws as a newspaper, but they're not.
It doesn't take a genius or even two eyeballs to see that twitters moderation tilts heavily in one direction and gives a pass to people of a certain political persuasion.
Use IRC. Use free forum software. Write a blog. Go stand on a soapbox in Times Square and shout it at the top of your lungs. Do whatever you want. But free speech has precisely nothing to do with having free reign to violate a company's terms of service. You have the constitutional right to say whatever you want. You do not have the constitutional right to have your nonsense amplified by billions of dollars worth of privately owned technical infrastructure.
I believe in marketplace of ideas ; I believe we should let stupid and wrong opinions be voiced rather than simmer in darkness; I dislike censorship in virtually every way and situation; but I'm not aware of what law is being broken. You might persuade me to vote for a new one but I don't know which law prohibits private company on their own private infra to do as they please.
(Please don't say "section 230" without reading it first, that gets tiring, not "controversial". See #1 etc etc ad infinitum ad nauseum)
[1]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
You are saying the equivalent of: if this were 150 years ago, and your crazy uncle thought that the moon was made of cheese, the New York Times would legally be required to put that on the front page of the paper. That's insane.
We should only invoke the spirit of a law when it’s a decision of last resort. But we’ve been talking about public vs. private speech for decades now. If Congress had a different spirit in mind, the constitution would’ve been amended or the Supreme Court would’ve issued a definitive decision.
Under conditions of monopoly, the private companies act much like a government, but unaccountable and undemocratic. It violates the spirit of 1776 to be subjected to the will of an unelected minority and be silenced.
That said, I find the opinions being suppressed despicable, but that doesn't mean I'm going to line up behind government censorship and private monopoly.
Facebook is not a newspaper. Twitter is not a newspaper. In this example Facebok/Twitter ARE PAPER. They are part of the infrastructure of the internet.
The thing is social media have been treated so far more like a Fedex/UPS service than a newspaper. If they do want to open up all messages to place their own inserts, they should become as sueable as a newspaper.
That is not what twitter or facebook or youtube are about. They are platforms for people to share whatever they want with no preemptive filtering. Because of that open access, they have become the de-facto public square, at least except for adult material and violence/gore. Now the companies want to censor increasing amounts of material that are neither illegal nor fall into the clear adult/violence categories.
Why? They claim advertisers don't like certain content, but that's easily solved by having tags associated with various categories. They could even do it for adult and violent content. Allow advertisers to opt out of advertising on material with any particular tag(s).
Another reason is purely political: they want to shape public politics and discussion, or they are afraid the government will retaliate against their platform for hosting certain kinds of legal but dubious content. This is especially the case for covid-related stuff. They don't crack down on false information on other subjects nearly as hard.
They also probably believe that if they don't outright ban certain content, and create a tagging system instead, the mere presence of that content on their platform will change the audience in ways that are bad for their profitability. That may be true, but the net result is still that they're filtering and manipulating public, person-to-person communication and sentiment in the new public square. Corporations should not have that power.
Note:
I separated out adult and violence because they're obvious "but what about" categories. "You want Facebook, Twitter, Youtube to allow all legal content? What about porn and violence?" I don't know if I have a good answer to that question, but there's plenty of legal history about community standards, and porn and gore are usually outside what most communities consider "public square" speech. There is, however, an argument that they're no longer excludable. If SFO parades are an indication of what's tolerable in the modern public square, what rationale does youtube have for restricting anything equivalent? And terrorist killing videos, while they're obviously gory, have educational value. Personally I'd say unban all of it and have thorough tagging, but I think legally and from a corporate perspective there's a middle ground that has to be found, which is: restrict porn and gore, leave everything else alone (subject to tags). It's worth noting that Twitter takes a different tack on adult content: they allow most porn, it just has to be on an 18+ flagged account. I don't see why all social media companies couldn't do that.
Why are you okay with censorship of the adult and violence categories but not the COVID-19 misinformation category? Fundamentally, the same thing is happening: Twitter is taking a stance on what legal speech it permits on its platform.
I don’t see what’s obvious about the “but what about” categories for sex and violence. You could make the same argument about medical misinformation or hate speech — they’re obviously a separate category that social networks should censor. (You could also make the reverse argument about spam — who is Twitter to prevent Bob’s Viagra Store from promoting his business?)
The point being that it’s all in the eye of the beholder. Everyone has their own line, and if you want to convince others to adopt yours you’re going to have to do more than offer as an axiom that sex and violence are uniquely deserving of censorship.
Incorrect statements about the world (unless they're directed at people and companies, then there's slander and libel law), have never been the subject of legal restrictions that I'm aware of. Social, yes, legal, no.
You can stand on a street corner with a sign protesting science and demanding recognition of flat earth theory. However, try that with a sign depicting gore or porn. Depending on your location, authorities would probably use some generic statute like disturbing the peace or some "harmful to minors" statute. I'd be shocked if any action were taken against anyone advocating Flat Earth Theory. Religious fanatics regularly do much worse protesting abortion clinics.
The issue shows up when certain content is being broadcast in the public square. I think all of these things, from covid misinformation to sex and violence, are so prevalent on the internet that blocking it on the major social media sites is futile. I think it should be handled with a tag system, without blocking or deranking anything other than allowing people to choose which specially tagged content shows up in their feeds.
But as long as they don't have those kinds of tagging systems (twitter allows users to flag their own accounts as 18+, but nothing else and nothing more granular except on their administrative backend), they can hide behind the excuse that their algorithms put arbitrary content into other people's feeds, and therefore the content that has historical precedent for community restrictions (obscene, disruptive, or harmful to minors) can plausibly be restricted on their platforms too.
No, the first amendment of the US constitution means freedom from government intervention. Freedom of speech means exactly what it says - violating it isn't illegal if you're a private company, but that doesn't change what it means.
I am strongly in favor of social media companies voluntarily censoring hate speech. But the roundabout way that 1A is being bypassed is concerning.
By censoring critique of policies and laws, Twitter is interfering with our democratic process and making in-kind political contributions to those backing those laws and policies. We need new anti trust regulations to be enforced ASAP, and new regulations to treat large platforms with network effects as public utilities and public spaces. They shouldn’t be given the free reign they have when we already regulate other telecom services and utilities.
I believe it's been determined you're guilty of wrongthink.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. If the content really is bogus, the discussion around it will take care of itself.
A free society can't function with unchecked on sided propaganda, but that's what big tech is promulgating.
A year ago, you could get banned, without appeal, from social media, for sharing the lab leak hypothesis.
Now, a year later and suddenly the same hypothesis, laughed and mocked as a racist conspiracy, is deemed serious enough that it's worth an investigation.
Nothing, other than a certain administration, changed in the meantime.
Interesting.