> Deciding what constitutes incorrect or disputed information in a political climate absolutely does.
Absolutely not. Absolute means something and you're being hyperbolic, at best. It's the human condition to make selective decisions, including meta-decisions. It does not make you or I an arbiter of truth because we do it, nor does it make Twitter or youtube arbiters of truth. This is "equality of outcome", territory which is nonsense.
They have a civic integrity policy, per that article. That gives the leeway to decide something like misleading voters requires adding a link to the tweet but not fact checking everything every person says.
What I’m saying is it’s not binary. There’s a spectrum.
It's deeply sad that one party is now so devoted to disinformation and the destruction of democracy that they whine when somebody provides a small-print link to third party fact checkers.
From a business standpoint, being proactive about misinformation being spread is going to make them stand out as a seemingly more moral company. More people will read and engage. The perception of the feature is slightly muddied right now because the fact check is being painted as politically biased. But the bigger picture is that helping people vote and be more informed helps people of every political background. If a tweet had the wrong date for election day and twitter had fact checked that, would correcting that be wrong as well?
The trouble is the very first time this happens, they already manage to mess it up. The fact checked article contained errors too. I also think it's truly stupid to use a partisan news organisation as a fact checker. You really can't claim any impartiality. In that case you aren't a fact checker, just showing the other side of the argument. But then don't call it facts.
It's exactly the opposite. People are going to cringe at their hamfisted and obviously partisan interventions and their transparently hypocritical justifications for them. I don't agree with the opposing side politically but this is a losing move. The fact that their "head of site integrity" is an extreme partisan is icing on the cake. I'm surprised to say this, as someone who despises Facebook, but Zuckerberg seems to be playing this smarter, trying desperately to appease both sides. It reminds me of a guy standing with a foot on each of two diverging trains, but at least he isn't shooting himself in the foot.
When a Democrat is in office, will Twitter appoint a rabid conservative to make the fact checks? Because it seems the current "Head of Site Integrity" has a long history of making incendiary opinionated posts against Republicans, rural states, etc.
Fairness should matter in the media. Without it, we're on a bad path.
The whole fight behind voting really is political. It helps the left and it hurts the right. It’s like gerrymandering. Sure, people have the right to vote and should be able to, but that’s an intellectually dishonest way of representing changes in voting.
I'd argue that if increasing turnout to be more representative of the population as a whole hurts your party then there's something fundamentally flawed with what your party is offering to the populace.
This is specifically true in the US at this moment, but it does not need to be so. The reason for this is that the GOP has less popular support (all polling on policy issues they are doing badly), but the voters they have are very dedicated and will go to much greater lengths to vote.
Also votes are suppressed in specific areas which does not good in a democracy. People should be able to choose their leaders, it should not be leaders are able to choose their voters.
What I mean to say is that having good voting access should not be a political issue in a democracy.
Are we a democracy or is this some kind of team sport calvinball?
The purpose of government is to serve the citizenry. If increased voting among the citizenry hurts your party there is something wrong with your party’s message or governing performance.
This is true about voting rights (enfranchising more voters is almost always good for the left), but gerrymandering in the US is a cross-party issue. There are plenty of examples of what the Supreme Court called "affirmative racial gerrymandering" that carve out districts to ensure more Democratic candidates get elected. Examples start at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering_in_the_United_S...
Well currently the GOP is overrepresented due in part to states' rights (states have more weight than people do, so less populous states have overrepresentation in the form of the Senate).
Same goes for popular elections vs electoral college. This is skewed towards the GOP which is why Trump won despite losing the popular election.
Call it what you want (balance of power, "minority rights", or whatever), but some people's votes were just counted as less of a vote.
I mean you could apply your argument to defend dictators or monarchs. Democracy of course will of course be hurtful to Maduro (of Venezuela) but helpful to his opponents. That's an odd way to frame something that simply shouldn't necessarily have been in the first place. It's not as if God made the world evenly divided between Left and Right. It's a constantly shifting line between how Left and how Right and sometimes one side is simply more wrong than the other.
I mean if we decided that somehow Left and Right should always be evenly power balanced we wouldn't have such Leftist policies such as universal suffrage or the abolition of slavery.
The initial warning label should have been simple and kept to objectively defensible claims.
"Donald Trump said people in California do not need to register to receive a ballot. This is false. See $governmentSite for further information".
It was a mistake to use media organizations with partisan opinion sections as fact-checkers. The most important people to reach with that warning label are the most likely to dismiss any information from those media organizations. A warning label is useless without trust.
But, I am optimistic about Twitter's use of fact-checking. I've watched both sides of the political spectrum slip deeper and deeper into delusion, and this is one of the few glimmers of hope. Twitter has the platform, the reach, and the power to effect legitimate positive change. I feel increasingly every day that the truth is slipping between our fingers. This feels like one of our few chances to realistically combat misinformation.
I meet people from both sides of the political aisle who have incredible blind spots. People who actively follow politics and yet often have never encountered basic counter-arguments to their narratives. The modern media landscape allows people to live ensconced in an information bubble. Twitter is the most bipartisan platform that exists, and thus in the prime position to pop those bubbles.
I appreciate that Twitter is attempting this step. This has almost no likelihood of increasing users and a strong likelihood of decreasing users. They have chosen to do something that will likely hurt their bottom line out of conscience.
Social media platforms have been working to minimize effects of false news for several years now, and such measures are expected by politicians and the public.
Why does the entire liberal establishment (and its "free" press) insist on the non-sensical notion that mail-in voting is _less_ prone to fraud than in-person voting? The DNC doth protest too much, methinks.
The "mail-in voting is fraud" idea is a transparent attempt to disenfranchise voters who happen to live in cities and don't have 2+ hours to wait in line.
Is in-person voting better? Republicans have been working to close in-person urban poll sites for years. They want to make it as hard as possible for city dwellers to vote, full stop. [1].
She didn't say that you don't need to register to vote though. Also, finding a politician who says one thing today and another thing 12 years before is hardly an art. There is a whole subreddit about Trump: https://www.reddit.com/r/TrumpCriticizesTrump/
Almost all voting is mail-in here. But then again, we basically have a one-person one-vote system; from the outside, it seems your "electoral college" is voter fraud on a far grander (and far more institutionalised) scale than either gerrymandering or individual bad actors.
Then again, the US is strange: we can all agree that single-party states are bad, yet the US insists their two party state is somehow better than a multi-party state?
I like Twitter, I really do. But Jack's statement make no sense.
If Twitter wants to step over its bounds as a platform, then it will absolutely be scrutinized as such.
What I find incredibly dishonest is that Twitter's head of "integrity" is a well-known troll who has on multiple occasions called Trump a nazi and more. How can we take their "integrity" seriously when it is led by someone with such an extreme political bias that there is no doubt this will impact what gets censored or not.
IMO this is not Twitter's role and a very slippery slope.
>Per our Civic Integrity policy, the tweets yesterday may mislead people into thinking they don’t need to register to get a ballot (only registered voters receive ballots). We’re updating the link on @realDonaldTrump’s tweet to make this more clear.
That might be the worst possible answer. That isn't what people on the left found objectionable with that Tweet and specifically signalling that out isn't going to assuage the complaints coming from the right.
We live in such strange times. The party that for decades bemoaned moral relativism has, because of its skepticism of global warming and other supposedly liberal narratives, convinced a large swath of Americans, conservative and liberal, that the truth itself is relative, or at least to pretend to believe so. That's why people are so quick to disavow being "arbiters of truth" despite that once upon a time it was assumed everyone acted as an arbiter of the truth--who would dare give their voice to non-truths?
I keep returning to the notion that conservatives have become the standard bearers of radical leftist philosophies, such as poststructuralism's arguments about the non-existence of objective "truth". Republicans seem hellbent on proving this out. I've been arguing this for the better part of 20 years, though only recently did I stumble upon similar opinions, such as the satire piece, "Foreword to Newt Gingrich's Post-structuralism for Republicans: TrumpTruth and How to Make It, by Betsy DeVos, US secretary of education".
It's not that the truth has become relative - nobody is saying "you have your beliefs, I have mine." We are at each others' throats because there's vanishingly few shared facts.
There's hardly any mechanisms left to bring about shared truth. Even a life-threatening pandemic falls short.
I, for one, haven't heard conservatives use the relativist argument to oppose censorship but rather the bias with which the rules are defined and applied by Twitter et al, or similar arguments.
What a mess. We should just return to catholic monarchy or at very least restrict voting to a trusted nobility. Democracy is really just a euphemism for rule by the media, and the media just serves private corporate interests. it’s unrealistic to trust the average layperson to make decisions on matters of state. I wouldn’t trust my cook to cut my hair.
[+] [-] gsibble|5 years ago|reply
"This does not make us an “arbiter of truth.” "
Deciding what constitutes incorrect or disputed information in a political climate absolutely does.
[+] [-] Supermancho|5 years ago|reply
Absolutely not. Absolute means something and you're being hyperbolic, at best. It's the human condition to make selective decisions, including meta-decisions. It does not make you or I an arbiter of truth because we do it, nor does it make Twitter or youtube arbiters of truth. This is "equality of outcome", territory which is nonsense.
[+] [-] ecf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javagram|5 years ago|reply
The reader can decide for themselves whether Trump or the other linked sources are more trustworthy.
[+] [-] tracer4201|5 years ago|reply
What I’m saying is it’s not binary. There’s a spectrum.
[+] [-] dagnabbit|5 years ago|reply
Such pathetic little snowflakes.
[+] [-] knaik94|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zpeti|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scaredtobeme|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RickJWagner|5 years ago|reply
When a Democrat is in office, will Twitter appoint a rabid conservative to make the fact checks? Because it seems the current "Head of Site Integrity" has a long history of making incendiary opinionated posts against Republicans, rural states, etc.
Fairness should matter in the media. Without it, we're on a bad path.
[+] [-] FreedomThinker|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] corporateslave5|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twalla|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmonsen|5 years ago|reply
Also votes are suppressed in specific areas which does not good in a democracy. People should be able to choose their leaders, it should not be leaders are able to choose their voters.
What I mean to say is that having good voting access should not be a political issue in a democracy.
[+] [-] mattnewton|5 years ago|reply
The purpose of government is to serve the citizenry. If increased voting among the citizenry hurts your party there is something wrong with your party’s message or governing performance.
[+] [-] dmurray|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pas|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LordFast|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ykevinator|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrischen|5 years ago|reply
Same goes for popular elections vs electoral college. This is skewed towards the GOP which is why Trump won despite losing the popular election.
Call it what you want (balance of power, "minority rights", or whatever), but some people's votes were just counted as less of a vote.
I mean you could apply your argument to defend dictators or monarchs. Democracy of course will of course be hurtful to Maduro (of Venezuela) but helpful to his opponents. That's an odd way to frame something that simply shouldn't necessarily have been in the first place. It's not as if God made the world evenly divided between Left and Right. It's a constantly shifting line between how Left and how Right and sometimes one side is simply more wrong than the other.
I mean if we decided that somehow Left and Right should always be evenly power balanced we wouldn't have such Leftist policies such as universal suffrage or the abolition of slavery.
[+] [-] Okkef|5 years ago|reply
But that does not mean anything is allowed in politics. It's about time Trump was seriously challenged on his lies.
[+] [-] occasionopinion|5 years ago|reply
"Donald Trump said people in California do not need to register to receive a ballot. This is false. See $governmentSite for further information".
It was a mistake to use media organizations with partisan opinion sections as fact-checkers. The most important people to reach with that warning label are the most likely to dismiss any information from those media organizations. A warning label is useless without trust.
But, I am optimistic about Twitter's use of fact-checking. I've watched both sides of the political spectrum slip deeper and deeper into delusion, and this is one of the few glimmers of hope. Twitter has the platform, the reach, and the power to effect legitimate positive change. I feel increasingly every day that the truth is slipping between our fingers. This feels like one of our few chances to realistically combat misinformation.
I meet people from both sides of the political aisle who have incredible blind spots. People who actively follow politics and yet often have never encountered basic counter-arguments to their narratives. The modern media landscape allows people to live ensconced in an information bubble. Twitter is the most bipartisan platform that exists, and thus in the prime position to pop those bubbles.
I appreciate that Twitter is attempting this step. This has almost no likelihood of increasing users and a strong likelihood of decreasing users. They have chosen to do something that will likely hurt their bottom line out of conscience.
[+] [-] _y5hn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m0zg|5 years ago|reply
Why does the entire liberal establishment (and its "free" press) insist on the non-sensical notion that mail-in voting is _less_ prone to fraud than in-person voting? The DNC doth protest too much, methinks.
[+] [-] millstone|5 years ago|reply
Is in-person voting better? Republicans have been working to close in-person urban poll sites for years. They want to make it as hard as possible for city dwellers to vote, full stop. [1].
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/11/us-polling-s...
[+] [-] _fizz_buzz_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 082349872349872|5 years ago|reply
Then again, the US is strange: we can all agree that single-party states are bad, yet the US insists their two party state is somehow better than a multi-party state?
(mOzg, would you mind terribly answering my question about convertible rubles in "Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23311253 спс!)
[+] [-] notadog|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shibeouya|5 years ago|reply
If Twitter wants to step over its bounds as a platform, then it will absolutely be scrutinized as such.
What I find incredibly dishonest is that Twitter's head of "integrity" is a well-known troll who has on multiple occasions called Trump a nazi and more. How can we take their "integrity" seriously when it is led by someone with such an extreme political bias that there is no doubt this will impact what gets censored or not.
IMO this is not Twitter's role and a very slippery slope.
[+] [-] goatinaboat|5 years ago|reply
Regardless of what you might think about Trump it's a bad look for Twitter to have put someone so obviously partisan in that position https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/head-of-twitter-site...
They have definitely stepped over the line of "we're just a platform" and into "we are taking editorial stances on things now".
Kathy Griffin, who recently called for Trump to be injected with a syringe of air, still has her account and still has her blue checkmark.
[+] [-] slg|5 years ago|reply
That might be the worst possible answer. That isn't what people on the left found objectionable with that Tweet and specifically signalling that out isn't going to assuage the complaints coming from the right.
[+] [-] wahern|5 years ago|reply
I keep returning to the notion that conservatives have become the standard bearers of radical leftist philosophies, such as poststructuralism's arguments about the non-existence of objective "truth". Republicans seem hellbent on proving this out. I've been arguing this for the better part of 20 years, though only recently did I stumble upon similar opinions, such as the satire piece, "Foreword to Newt Gingrich's Post-structuralism for Republicans: TrumpTruth and How to Make It, by Betsy DeVos, US secretary of education".
[+] [-] millstone|5 years ago|reply
There's hardly any mechanisms left to bring about shared truth. Even a life-threatening pandemic falls short.
[+] [-] cheweh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] young_unixer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wesammikhail|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dhhwrongagain|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaronbrethorst|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]