Elon Musk tweets misinformation about Paul Pelosi | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk tweets misinformation about Paul Pelosi

axios.com

8 pointshn201710 comments

What would we do without our hall monitors?

Does someone have the current legal definition of misinformation? I ask in good faith because I have stated many opinions here on HN and if an opinion can be misinformation then I had best hire an amazing attorney right now.

“There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” That appears to be speculation / opinion, is it not?

Summoning all lawyers, calling Doctor Bombay. Looking for lawyers to provide non-binding opinions here.

We lost the battle against misinformation, sadly.

Weakly held, heavily caveated opinions is not misinformation, however much we disagree with the opinion or detest the person who holds it.

In this case, we don't actually know, nor have any conclusions been drawn by the authorities, on what precisely happened in the attack on Paul Pelosi. In this state unknowing, any opinion on these events could be categorised as misinformation, as we cannot immediately separate what is true vs false.

It is actually misinformation to call Musk's tweet as misinformation, it is meta-misinformation

This is why it seems best to not give tweets any value. It could be that something happened. Perhaps it was performance art. Or nothing happened. Or a man actually was seriously injured by a deranged intruder. Who can say? It's just random stuff on Twitter. Only people actually involved in the event know for sure, and even any police are catching up at this point.

Tune Elon out, folks. Just because he tweets something doesn't mean it's correct or newsworthy. He's just a rich guy. Anyone remember Pedo guy or anything else he's posted?

yes, I think this might be where we will end up as a society - we become inured to avalanche of unverified (unverifiable?) claims and just end up disregarding most of it, falling back instead of information we acquire via our own direct experience, rather than that which is reported to / created for us.

However, there is a maturity curve here, and it would require significant sacrifice - giving up on the possibility of absolute certainty being one of them. Quite traumatic, not many ready for this

Or cultivate some networks of reliable sources, and understand that the truth may take a while to emerge from the fog. Twitter is the wrong place for a lot of things. It's a good place for random chirping.

It's pretty clear that Musk in particular is only semi-reliable. Gotta treat him as uttering a lot of random chirping.

Absolute certainty is not possible anyway, unfortunately it's hard enough even with direct experience. The larger an event is (e.g. large corporate undertakings, goverment actions, wars, etc.) the less of it can be known well anyway.

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