All Twitter users in the US will start to see crowdsourced fact checks on tweets | Hacker News Reader

All Twitter users in the US will start to see crowdsourced fact checks on tweets

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32 pointsmikece91 comments

I've learned the mob, no matter their political beliefs, doesn't know a damn thing as a group. If there is a technical answer, it used to be possible to get a correct answer, but that is almost always through the view of some political leaning. Frankly, given the utter sh?t-show of YouTube content warnings[0], I have no faith in this crud. This just seems like a bots paradise to influence opinion and ban people.

0) the number of videos that have no mention of COVID that have COVID warnings is just staggering. Along with the Moon Conspiracy warning on a video of the X-15 is just brain dead.

I have never in my entire life expected the truth from the crowd. Why on earth would you do that if truth was truly your concern?

These proposals seem to ignore this basic reality. They also presume that peoples primary desire in communication with one another is truth. Our entire system of language belies that idea entirely.

The condescension of it all gets to me as well, as if you give everyone the unvarnished truth that they would all make the same decisions based upon that information. It's a parochial desire that could only be held by government agents or embarrassed billionaires. It has no true purpose for society as a whole.

"Wisdom of the crowd" used to be one of the big selling points of the internet. Like most early optimism, it collapsed on contact with reality as the internet grew.

> "Wisdom of the crowd" used to be one of the big selling points of the internet.

I don't think this was true until sometime in the 00s when voting systems were popularized. I don't recall anybody talking about crowd wisdom and hiveminds in the context of IRC chatrooms, mailing lists, or geocity pages. There was an understanding that whoever you were talking to might be smart or might be stupid; there was no crowd mechanism to put false trust in.

> They also presume that peoples primary desire in communication with one another is truth.

Maybe. Or maybe it means that these sites don’t like people abusing their networks to spread garbage.

> Or maybe it means that these sites don’t like people abusing their networks to spread garbage.

Is that based upon the desire of the users, or the desire of the owners? Why do we talk about the concerns of the owners as if they were the concerns of the users?

It's an odd sleight of hand.

I’m speaking specifically of the owners, given they’re the ones instituting these systems.

If the mob is so dumb, why do we let them elect our government?

The mob doesn't elect our government. Individuals go into a booth and pull the lever. In a fair election, their is no interaction between people when the vote is cast. Sure, there are campaigns and such, but the voting moment is one person at a time inside their head. Mobs become a thing unto themselves and group into a dangerous thing. Their are numerous studies about how people act differently as part of a mob.

Ok yes this is the true meaning of mob referring to in-person groups. But 'mob' in this discussion was being used with respect to groups of people in a more general sense like people on the internet whom all act individually from their own houses.

replying to a group conversation (reddit thread, hackernews comments, twitter chain, etc) is closer to a mob than an individual activity.

The purpose of voting is to deflect responsibility for failures of governance to the governed. After all, they're the ones who put those people in charge, so they're responsible. It's also to take away much of the historic reasoning for revolutions. Who is being overthrown when it is the people who elect the government? The fun trick with representative democracy has been the weaponization of psychology to control the possible outcomes of the public electing their leaders.

I was recently invited to be a lead on Nextdoor (I know, I know) and accepted so that I could peek behind the curtain. Their process is that any flagged content is voted on by leads to Leave it, Possibly Remove, or Remove. What I've observed is that posts that completely break the rules still have a 50/50 split.

My point being that many people are not able to objectively look at something and make a decision. Their opinions and feelings will always get mixed in. Twitter, good luck with the crowdsourcing :).

Slashdot had moderation and metamoderation and it worked ... for awhile. Part of the reason was you could still browse at -1 if you wanted to, so there were chances for things that got "attacked" to bubble back up.

Not sure if it helped kill it or if that was incidental.

The "rules" always have interpretations and most people don't steelman posts that disagree with them.

Slashdot's moderation/metamoderation worked fairly well at policing the tone of the conversation, but was worthless for factual accuracy. Troll, flamebait and funny moderations were accurately applied, but the insightful moderation was given mostly given to comments which confirmed the biases of the community.

Past tense because I mostly stopped going to slashdot when cmdrtaco left. I don't really know how the moderation has been going since then.

Most moderation ends that way but yeah, it’s a hollowed out shell of itself now.

> My point being that many people are not able to objectively look at something and make a decision. Their opinions and feelings will always get mixed in.

Isn't the idea that individuals will have biases, but on average they will cancel each other out when aggregated together? I don't think that is necessarily true, but I think it is overly simplistic to say that individuals having biases means the consensus of the crowd can't work.

You can't get a aggregation from the public, not really. Most people won't participate, the only people who will bother are the ones with a axe to grind. Only 66% of people can even be bothered to vote on the president of the us, what's the percent that will spend their free time fact checking on Twitter? Only the ones who really want to push their own facts will do it.

> Isn't the idea that individuals will have biases, but on average they will cancel each other out when aggregated together?

That doesn't work out online when an individual can have 1, 10, 50+ votes depending on how much they care about a topic (or the voting in general).

Who would agree to be an unpaid volunteer to moderate tweets? If you aren't getting paid then you have some other motivation to do the work. I suspect a lot of people who end up in this program will be motivated to promote an agenda.

I think you answered your own question. Who would agree to be an unpaid volunteer to moderate tweets? Ideologues who wish to further their agenda.

Hmm. This sounds like there could be a positive feedback loop buried in here somewhere. Something like:

1. Status quo position is X.

2. New information comes in that says Y.

3. People tweet Y.

4. Crowd sourced "fact check" says that Y is false.

5. Twitter consensus becomes even more certain that X is true.

In my experience it ends up just being more divise, the more an institution that one group of people do not trust doubles down on a story the more likely they are to become convinced of the opposite position, whereas those that thought it was true become more convinced.

To quote Dr. Robert Calidini in his book Pre-Suasion. "The media is great at telling people what to talk about, but terrible at telling people what to think about it.", basically you can use media streams to get people to focus on something but you cannot use it to get them to believe a certain thing about it.

The results will be more polarization as one group of people on any issue will have less trust in twitter, and the other side will use the proof of everyone knowing it is true.

As I've been reading a recent book about the USSR right before and through WW2 (Ivan's war, good book by the way highly recommend it) it shows how the purpose of propaganda isn't about making you thinking a certain way, but rather making you feel isolated and convince you, that you are alone.

I saw one of these recently on a tweet about an Amtrak line between LA and San Diego being shutdown. Takeaway: they were giving up on the line.

The note on the tweet had the additional context that it was temporary and there was a bus substitute. The takeaway is completely different with this context. I appreciated it.

Truthiness is not and has never been the problem. Virality is.

Let the lunatics say whatever they want (within the law). Stop promoting it. Eliminate the algorithmic recommenders (automated hated machines).

If that's not enough, start eliminating the other dopamine hits; remove (or nerf) retweets, likes, and whatever other gamification features there are.

As for "truthiness", the workable alternative to factchecking is authenticity.

Social medias should enable the following:

    share your work
    cite your sources
    sign your name

Bonus points for enabling:

    errata
    retractions

This isn't hard. All the monkey motion about fraud prevention and factchecking only serve to preserve and protect the hate machine.

If I had enough followers and was part of this program what prevents me from harassing another user via notes and getting my followers to mark my note as helpful?

If you have enough followers, what prevents you from harassing another user anyway? Crowdsourced, targeted harassment already happens all the time.

This seems like it would just be a more convoluted and troublesome means to an already available end.

But this would be like putting an official “sanctioned by Twitter” badge on that harassment.

The “sanctioned by Twitter” badge already existed before this, it's called the verification checkmark. Many checkmarked accounts break twitter's rules on a daily basis, you can get away with almost anything if you're on the same side of the political spectrum as them.

Placement would also be an issue under such a scenario. Normally you would need to scroll a bit before seeing "ratios" and other stupid shit but now that's guaranteed to be above the fold. Presumably this will also work if I've chosen to restrict replies.

As far as I can tell from testing Birdwatch earlier is that you can't proactively choose new notes and can only act on ones that are designated for you.

Errr.

And how exactly does the general public know whether something is true in order to vote on it?

If they knew it was false this wouldn't be an issue to begin with...

What do you think of Urban Dictionary?

90% of the terms and definitions in urban dictionary read like something a snickering teenager thought up on the spot, not real slang that is/was actually circulating prior to (or after) being added to the site.

It's fine because nobody should be taking urban dictionary seriously in the first place; it's just an online amusement. Real dictionaries, even crowdsourced ones like Wiktionary, don't use voting systems like urban dictionary's.

Are you reading it top to bottom somehow that you're even coming into contact with slang you haven't heard used? In my experience it's always filled me in on the precise meaning I've needed.

I guess the intuition is that it works like a market to converge on truth, but of course there’s no skin in the game and the metrics are all wrong for actual market dynamics.

Because crowdsourcing fact checks works great for reddit, right?

It really ruins the magic of some (obvious)joke posts when you see a damn fact check box. This "feature" I see it in the same way as warning labels - "Caution: Hot" - treats people as if they can't practice critical thinking and common sense.

> This "feature" I see it in the same way as warning labels - "Caution: Hot" - treats people as if they can't practice critical thinking and common sense.

History demonstrates that, for the most part, people can't.

Even Hacker News - a community of people who should "know better" - is infested with conspiracy theories, disinformation and bullshit. And the general public trusts Facebook memes more than the mainstream media. The meme is that the people who were saying never to trust anything you read on the internet in the 90s are now saying Biden is three lizards in a trenchcoat. So here we are.

Growing up I knew a kid who's leg had been run over by a lawn mower. He still had it, but half his calf was missing and he had horrific scaring. I never saw the lawn mower that chewed his leg up, but I'd bet it had warning stickers on it like all mowers do. Don't stick your fingers in the blades, and certainly don't run over your younger brother with it..

The warning stickers won't fix stupid, but everything dangerous gets warning stickers anyway because lawyers make bank throwing lawsuits around whenever stupid people do stupid things to themselves. The stickers exist for liability reasons, not to protect people. The stickers are magical wards meant to keep the lawyers away.

These fact checks and warning labels are semantically different enough that arguments from equivalence only work to a point. We know that people can be influenced by what they read on social media, and social media platforms aren't (currently) legally liable for misinformation spread by their users.

> social media platforms aren't (currently) legally liable for misinformation spread by their users.

They're politically liable for it. The misinformation warnings on social media aren't there to protect dumb people from misinformation; those people won't heed the warnings. The misinformation warnings are there to keep political heat off the company.

Do you think any would-be flat earther has ever been saved by a warning "Fact check: the earth is actually round"? If somebody was going to fall for a flat earther video, a content warning from youtube won't change their mind. I don't believe that.

would be? yes.

I do think there is a point where the effects of radicalization and indoctrination can be mediated by exposure to facts. I seem to differ from most people in that I don't believe that the effect of "sunlight as a disinfectant" is constant, rather I think it's far more effective early on than after someone has already built a bubble of normalized hyperreality around themselves, and is subject to a law of diminishing returns.

To this end, I think fact-checking and deplatforming can be effective tools against the already unbalanced bias towards disinformation provided by social media platforms. At least more effective than simply letting it spread unchecked and hoping things just sort themselves out.

The radicalization is driven by the recommendation engines that are the central premise of these platforms. Every would-be flat earther already knows that the roundness of earth is the officially designated truth, putting that warning label on flat earth videos isn't going to change a thing. The only purpose of that label is to take political heat off the platform that is recommending flat earth videos.

These warnings are ass covering, plain and simple. They aren't a service to idiots, they exist to excuse the platform from being fundamentally hazardous.

This points to a larger discussion about systems thinking. Specifically that warning labels put responsibility on the individual to correctly read, interpret, and act on information in the label. Alternatively, consider not using a label and fixing the underlying systemic problem so that there is no danger in the first place. In the case of a lawn mower, this is designing it such that it doesn't require a human to operate it correctly. It fails to operate if used incorrectly.

Given this is HN, the equivalent in software is: fix the code on your side; don't try to train your users. We don't add warning labels telling users to not do SQL injection, we solve it systematically by making sure our backend isn't using untrusted user inputs directly in queries!

You're right in that warning stickers won't fix stupid, and that we need more systemic action in order to treat the cause and not the symptom. I'll be honest: I don't even know what that systemic action would be in the case of misinformation on Twitter, but I know that warning labels are just a way to shunt responsibility away from Twitter and onto individual users.

> I don't even know what that systemic action would be in the case of misinformation on Twitter

The whole premise of twitter is rotten, to fix it you would need to cut out vitality and the dopamine reward mechanisms. As long as twitter exists in the present form, it will have these problems.

Trying to fix twitter is like trying to fix a lawn mower; the machine is fundamentally dangerous to fools and you can't fix that without radically changing what the machine is. Deadman switch? They'll ziptie it. Warning labels? Unheeded. Paternalistic AI watching everything you do/read and trying to intervene when it thinks you're doing something stupid? Equal parts pipe dream and dystopian nightmare. Crowdsourcing fact checks? Proven a farce years ago.

> Birdwatch notes only appear on tweets if they’re deemed helpful by people who tend to disagree with each other.

That's kind of an interesting twist on the game mechanic! I really hope it works. I'll continue to not use Twitter either way.

I like the court analogy. The court determines facts. The jury determines truth. So "crowd sourced truth" seems more appropriate.

Borrowing Churchill "crowd sourced is the worse system except for all the others"

All I can think of now is someone in NZ posting "TGIF" and then someone fact checks it and notices that it is, indeed, not Friday in California.

I feel like in practice this may be ripe for brigading.

I guess that’s better than AI? I’ve seen some major AI errors I. YouTubes fact checking.

Musk recent tweets would probably get the flag[0], so he'll probably remove this quite quickly once he is in charge.

[0] anything controversial will get the flag if it reaches the censors. in this case it's about Russia-Ukraine war and what Musk is saying is not on the pre-approved list of allowed phrases.

Oh wonderful. The state sponored proganda group will mark things in mass.

We need laws to ban the government and particularly the military from sockpuppetting online. Crowdsourced fact-checking with no accountability for those doing the voting makes this problem even more severe.

Eh, in practice I don't have an issue with this, in principle though I disagree because they are targeting "misinformation" and not "disinformation". How I see it, disinformation is flat out false and fake. With misinformation though it starts getting subjective, a headline may be correct when you think about it one way, or misinformation if you think about it another way.

Oh boy. Crowdsourced facts. More equals better than, right?! Ridiculous.

On a platform that is drowning in bot activity. The threshold for abuse is on the floor

This is not how facts work, JFC.

I mean it somewhat IS how Wikipedia works (don't peel back the curtain on anything remotely controversial, however).

I don't consider Wikipedia an authoritative source for anything at all. Looking at sourcing for many articles easily reveals the inherent biases of the editors.

How will this work when reality is partisan? The Hunter Biden laptop story was a debunked conspiracy by the “experts” until it wasn’t, and the recent Chinese election data stolen “conspiracy” (as declared by the NYT) turned out to be true. Yet day after day the stories about Trump and Russia were blasted by major media… until that was totally debunked.

It’s like one side decides what is true and the other side is conspiracy until the facts come out, then it’s forgotten completely into the memory hole.

The same way democracy works. Shitty, but less shitty than any other way.

Democracy requires a free press and free distribution of ideas. Censorship of salient, truthful political information by private or public parties is dangerous to democracy.

I don't know these cases well but if Twitter (or someone) is able to compile the known information at the time & append as new insights become available that would be the most ideal way I can think of.

Hopefully they can be concise & have at minimum, two differing sides sharing non-opinionated references. Or at least stating the leniencies of said references.

Though this can still be very hard & lead to many rabbit holes of "Further reading".

Some of the conspiracies didn’t conclude the way you say they do, or at least not completely. As far as I can tell, the current “consensus” is that the Hunter Biden laptop, while real, can’t prove any unethical behavior on the part of the president. And the Russian stuff — while Muller couldn’t prove that Trump asked Russia for help (beyond the video of him asking for it in camera, perhaps as a joke), it is still true that Russia played a severe part to helping Trump’s campaign.

So in my opinion the overall narrative of those stories (Russia interfered in the election to help Trump to his delight and Hunter Biden’s laptop doesn’t mean much) are still true to this day.

I think the prevailing narratives when the stories break leaned on facets that were more true: Russia was doing very concerning things. This laptop doesn’t contain proof of much of anything. Trump stated on camera he wanted Russia’s help. Etc.

I think your post only highlights the points the parent was making - we pick and choose what "facts" we want to believe and then never change our opinion.

When these "facts" are debunked days, weeks, months or years later, we just move on and pretend it didn't happen or talk out of the side of our mouth about how there's still some sliver truth there. If it doesn't help our team, then it can't possibly be true.

Objectively, Hunter's laptop is a scandal of epic proportions. It's very difficult to view it's content and revelations as anything but deeply unethical - and it's impossible to believe "The Big Guy" is not in fact Joe Biden, our President. We even had one of Hunter's former business partners come out and explicitly state it - yet nobody wants to talk about that either. Additionally, it's impossible to not conclude the FBI was deeply involved in a cover up right at election time to suppress this information.

However, here we are, trying to say it means nothing. We accused the Trump family of everything the Biden family is objectively involved with... except we had zero evidence against the Trump family (despite years of relentless investigations) and have mountains of it against the Biden family... yet nobody cares. Years of investigations catalyzed by a fake dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign... yet nobody wants to talk about that either.

Perhaps we're too far lost at this point...

> We accused the Trump family of everything the Biden family is objectively involved with... except we had zero evidence against the Trump family (despite years of relentless investigations)

Please, this is absurd. No president has had more of his associates go to jail than Trump [1], and Mueller's investigation found that Trump knew about Russian interference, chose to do nothing since it helped him, and obstructed justice [2]. And now we know that he stole Top Secret/SCI documents from the country [3], and has yet to return all of them [4]. These attempts to make "the Biden crime family" a meme are very weak and fall flat on their face.

[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/all-of-the-trumpworld-figures-...

[2] https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/22/us/politics/trump-mar-a-l...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/01/us/politics/trump-white-h...

A few guys going to jail for unpaid taxes decades before does not help your view that the Mueller Investigation was a smashing success. They ruined a bunch of lives for cheap political gain, found zero evidence of collusion with Russia, and proved the insinuation of collusion was fake from the beginning as we now know but won't admit.

You only make this point even stronger.

> And now we know that he stole Top Secret/SCI documents from the country, and has yet to return all of them

This is very much an unfinished story.

But, nothing I say will change your mind, and no real facts coming out will change it either. Which is the point the GP was making... despite reality, we all pretend our team does no wrong.

> This is very much an unfinished story.

And the story about Hunter's laptop isn't? Do you see how you're giving yourself a pass but you want to "wait for the whole story" when the DOJ successfully executed a search warrant for top secret documents on the former president?

No, not at all. We have all of the content from Hunter's Laptop at this time, and there is no investigation that will happen. We know for a fact the story was buried deliberately, we even have the likes of Mark Zuckerberg corroborating as much, indicating the FBI directed Facebook to suppress "misinformation" about the Biden campaign.

We do not have all the content from the Classified Documents story - in fact it's in court right this very second being hammered out.

So no... this isn't a free pass of any sort.

> DOJ successfully executed a search warrant for top secret documents on the former president

I fail to see how this means there was wrong doing. Are we not waiting for the case to actually be litigated, or have we already made up our mind before the facts are known? AKA - what the GP asserted and you have fallen straight into.

Given that you have been complaining about cherrypicking facts/narratives by the other side, you need to acknowledge the fact that you are doing that at this very moment. You are handwaving away one of the biggest stories in the DOJ's history, a search warrant executed against a former president. We know he has top secret documents, we know they were not declassified, and we know they were held negligently while mixed up with magazines in a comically insecure facility.

You have to admit that this is as big if not bigger than "Hunter's laptop", because otherwise all you're really saying is "I want them to talk about MY stories and not THEIRS!"

> We know he has top secret documents

We do.

> we know they were not declassified

We do not know this, actually. That is literally what is being litigated at this very moment.

> and we know they were held negligently while mixed up with magazines in a comically insecure facility

We do not know yet if this even matters...

> a search warrant executed against a former president

Which is extremely shocking and unusual - actually unprecedented. So far the follow-up investigation has been much more lackluster and much less iron-clad as we were initially led to believe.

Political hit job? Perhaps. Malfeasance on part of the former President? Perhaps.

We don't yet know. Yet, if you've made up your mind already then you've stepped on the land mine set for you by the GP of this particular thread.

> You have to admit that this is as big if not bigger than "Hunter's laptop

Not even remotely. Hunter's laptop revealed Hunter sold access and influence to the current president, particularly to nations hostile to this country. We also know Joe Biden not only discussed these business dealings with Hunter, but also received a cut of the payments. He is "The Big Guy".

> We do not know this, actually.

We do. Documents are not declassified by merely "thinking about it" like Trump suggested. There is a process, and declassified documents are still classified until they are marked as such. We've seen the pictures, we know they weren't. So yes, it also matters that they were removed from their folders and mixed up haphazardly with no regard to their security. These are all undeniable facts that Trump's own lawyers have failed to dispute. They won't even say if Trump has returned all the documents as he is required under subpoena, or whether Trump actually declassified them. These are all things he could have done immediately if he was innocent.

> Not even remotely. Hunter's laptop revealed Hunter sold access and influence to the current president, particularly to nations hostile to this country.

Let's use your own attitude against you: where's the official investigation? Do we even know if that's his laptop? Where are the charges? "So far the follow-up investigation has been much more lackluster and much less iron-clad as we were initially led to believe." Namely: nothing.

You are not arguing in good faith. You just want your own narratives to win regardless of merit.

When the dust settles, and Trump still is not in hand cuffs, what will you say then? Start yet another investigation because this time "we've got him!"?

We've heard now for 6 years that there's a clear "smoking gun" and we're just days away from indictment. One investigation ends empty-handed, and another just pops up because "reasons". Good thing we're not holding our breath...

This classified documents thing is 100% unresolved at the moment. That is a very objective fact, despite what you want to believe.

> Let's use your own attitude against you: where's the official investigation?

That was the original point. Trap set, and sprung. That story was squashed to shape an election - extremely effectively. If that is not election meddling, I do not know what is.

> Do we even know if that's his laptop?

They do not even deny it anymore. Plenty of videos of Hunter engaging in illegal activities (which by itself does not implicate the President), plenty of emails, plenty of payments from Chinese organizations and corrupt Ukrainian officials, and even former business partners confirming the validity of the rumors and who the "Big Guy" is.

We have none of this from the Trump family, only rumors started by the Clinton campaign that so far, despite unlimited resources, time and efforts plowed into relentless investigation after investigation, have come up dry.

But... none of these facts matter apparently, because Trump isn't on your team. That was the point the GP post made.

> chose to do nothing since it helped him, and obstructed justice [2]

So then it's totally equivalent to the Hunter Biden laptop in that, while perhaps incriminating, there's no obvious criminal conduct (Mueller didn't press charges).

However, it still led to americans voting one way, which the polls show would have also been the case had Americans known about the laptop.

Either way, people deserve to know. Our vote isn't a criminal conviction.

> Mueller didn't press charges

Fun fact: Mueller had no ability to press charges. He made it clear that it was up to Congress, and would only go as far as to say that "we can't say he didn't obstruct justice", but that it was up to Congress to investigate.

Simple question: by explicitly deciding to censor the hunter biden story, did twitter and facebook prevent americans from learning data that may have changed their vote? The Mueller investigation and its results were widely reported on and disseminated by all media, so it's not equivalent at all. Americans can and did make up their mind regarding that issue.

Simple answer: probably not.

Everything Trumpists were claiming - that the laptop contained evidence of the stolen election, that it contained Biden's child porn stash, evidence he created COVID with Fauci, whatever - was obvious misinformation and character assassination, an attempt to repeat the effect of the DNC leaks with Hillary Clinton in 2016, where just the implications of nefarious dealings and "smoking guns" were enough to suppress Democratic Party turnout, or split the vote.

The actual story, such as it was, was and remains the nothingest of nothingburgers, and it's doubtful many people, much less enough people to swing the election in Trump's favor, would have cared. Evidence to this effect can be observed in that, after the fact, it hasn't created a backlash of outrage among Democrats. They do hate Biden for a number of reasons, but not for anything in hindsight related to the laptop.

Plus, it's absurd to imply that Twitter and Facebook alone comprised the only sources of information or discussion about the laptop, and that Americans were unaware of the story for it having been censored on those platforms. Despite that, it never actually left public discussion as far as I was aware. The laptop failed to gain traction under its own terms, not because it was suppressed by the government.

You're being disingenuous here, and blinded by your own partisanship. Both this story and the Mueller investigation (and whatever other inquiries into Trump) deserve scrutiny in the public eye. It is not absurd to think that Twitter and Facebook, two massive media companies with well-known connections to the democratic party, are major sources of information and huge multiplying factors in the spread of information about a lot of news.

> The laptop failed to gain traction under its own terms, not because it was suppressed by the government.

Simply not true, given that the man is under active FBI investigation.

> As far as I can tell, the current “consensus” is that the Hunter Biden laptop, while real, can’t prove any unethical behavior on the part of the president.

Completely immaterial. Polling shows that -- despite the guilt or involvement of President Biden -- many Americans would have changed their votes had they thought the story was real or been exposed to the story. That's dangerous.

There is no requirement that one ignore the possibility of crime when voting. Americans can base their vote on whatever criteria they want. Biden doesn't need to be indicted or convicted in order for Americans to decide the evidence is too much to vote for him.

So yes, if facebook and twitter's actions led to people not having the information that would have changed their vote and perhaps changed the election results (we can never know), then it is extremely concerning why the information was censored.

I think if it was Donald Jr's laptop rather than Hunter Biden's the mainstream media would be going bananas over it.

Don Jr was a key member of Trump's presidential campaign.

Reality was always partisan like that. The only thing that changed is that now you can see the other ones.

"crowdsourced" from "reputable" sources, right? ;)

Snopes and the ADL

Wow crowdsourcing truth that's super great. I see no problems at all with this. It's not like angry partisans on one side would create and push fake stories and news about another horrible atrocity that person of an unpopular group that would lead to mass violence and genocide. Nothing like that has ever happenned with social media tools in countries like Mynamar.

I for one am worried though about what if bad people try to use mass brigading to flag blatantly true information, like how the COVID vaccine is 90% effective at preventing you from getting COVID. I think there should be some official oversight by a body like the federal government or something to make sure that only real "misinformation" gets flagged. Like for example it is well known that many hateful Neo-Nazi racist homophobic Klan members went out of their way to post bad reviews of the Amazon Rings of Power series because they were racist, bigoted, and radical reactionaries that want to destroy the foundations of America, then hid it behind compliants of "poor storywriting" and "glacial pacing".

In this example Amazon stepped in to eliminate information that was not correct, because the people who shared it were bad people. We know they were bad people that wanted bad things because they didn't like what was good, and it was good because it did good things.

This is a digression but highlights my point. I think this is a good thing to crowdsource fact checking, but should be reviewed by an official board to ensure that things don't get fact checked as misinformation that are actually 100% true, such as the efficacy of masks, or the fact that terrorists far right Neo-Nazis laid siege to the capital of Canada for months, and that things that are clearly misinformation such as questioning at all the reliability of masks, or discussing the impact of the COVID lockdown. Get flagged appropriately.

I also think twitter should do nothing about the bot problem that has been clearly evidenced to be happening on there since the person that shared that leak is probably a closet Neo-Nazi homophone since he associates with Elon Musk who is a billionaire and inherently evil.

Edgy.

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