Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

Great article to read if you want to know how the "sausage was made" at Twitter. I think most people knew it was an absolute dumpster fire, but it's even worse than that.

As expected, the folks doing the policing of "disinformation" were entirely unqualified for the role (I love the banning of the Harvard School of Medicine epidemiologist who said "vaccines are for people at risk" - apparently the folks at Twitter know more about this than he does) and ended up making decisions that were "politically expedient" rather than focusing on the truth.

Or the attempt by Jim Baker (Twitter general counsel, former FBI) to ban a tweet by Trump about his own Covid illness and Twitter's Roth saying "optimism isn't a ban-able offense".

This article perfectly proves why campaigns against "disinformation" are bound to fail - inevitably factual and important information gets censored because it's inconvenient to the people in power.

After reading this article I'm reminded of Rand Paul's quote "Do you know who the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world is? The U.S. government."

Amazingly this news goes over like a wet rag at HN. Which is shocking considering the "hacker ethos" about not bowing down to authority.

it's a hard tradeoff between false positives and false negatives. it's like being a soccer referee or a judge, you can be almost perfect but the screwups are all anyone remembers. short of putting everyone away for life, some convict is going to get out and do something, and some tabloid is going to question why this person was on the street. You do the best you can subject to the Constitution, the laws, and common sense.

there is so much absolute garbage bad faith BS on social media that is poison to a civilized society and a democracy, that there is no choice but to do the best we can to try to spread less of it. you don't get to throw up your hands and say, there is no perfect arbiter of truth and decency so let's say, anything goes. of course that's what all the worst burn-it-down extremists would like to see.

A lot of US institutions were exposed as unfit for purpose by the pandemic and we have to do better. But I'm not sure Twitter would be near the top of the list.

And somehow, the new regime seems able to make everything worse.

If it's such a hard tradeoff then maybe don't make the trade in the first place. Just don't censor speech. Problem solved.

Insisting on censoring speech in this case is what's known as a Hegelian dialectic: there is a problem, we need to solve the problem, here's how we solve the problem.

You have the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If you choose to do nothing you still have made a choice.

Life doesn't require anyone to confront bad stuff that only grows worse if it is tolerated.

Life does, however, require everyone to live with the consequences of our choices.

Speaking of making everything worse...

I'm far left politically. I found COVID very concerning, I'm fully vaccinated, and I still wear a mask indoors.

And yet, after seeing some of the tweets that were labelled as "misleading", I believe that the way the govt and Twitter moderators handled this was a disaster that makes me extremely unlikely to trust anything that either will have to say on any contentious topics in the future.

And if I'm not the only one, what do you think this lack of trust will do to "civilized society and democracy"?

Someone saying, this looks misleading, here's why, if there is room for good-faith argument about it, it helps me trust them.

Certainly more than suspending journalists on trumped-up pretexts.

I'm less worried about a possibly incorrect 'misleading' tag than I am about weirdo elected officials who make false claims about things I can see with my own eyes, say everyone else is lying, say anyone who disagrees is un-American or a traitor, push divisive conspiracy theories and call for imprisoning our own medical professionals. And given all their other claims and agitprop, it's hard to take seriously a claim that the label violates their First Amendment rights or is a breach of trust.

It's what many of us thought was going on based on what we could see. It's nice to have it out in the open and verify/confirm what some of us were told was plain old paranoia.

> folks doing the policing of "disinformation" were entirely unqualified for the role

Sounds like how Stackoverflow works. 5 people have no clue about the technical question decides to close it entirely.

Campaigns against disinformation are bound to fail because everyone has a different interpretation of the truth and assumes that everything else is “disinformation” (with quotes this time).

Much like social media generally, disinformation is now one of the chief scapegoats across the aisle for all that’s wrong in the world.

Hacker ethos is to solve problems not rant, rave and cry about them and hope grandma shows up with a solution.

Yeah. Seems to me that Twitter did a pretty good job overall!

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