Hopefully Elon will help…
I don’t recall Twitter’s behavior towards Tweets questioning the source of the virus. I do know Twitter shut down conversation weeks before the election about Hunter Biden’s laptop (as Russian disinformation).
Maybe it was important, maybe it wasn’t important, but when the ministers of truth step in and put their thumb on the scale, we all lose.
We certainly did in 2016 when Facebook amplified the nonsense around Hillary’s emails for the entire election and helped elect Trump.
You can complain when humans come in and make decisions on single posts, but the real problem is the algorithm designed to generate clicks and reactions.
The HB laptop story is just a good distraction from that.
Okay, but again, who are you to tell Twitter what they are allowed to do?
Like, I get that you want to regulate Twitter, somehow, but what exactly do you have in mind?
I can answer this: Twitter should aggressively promote all Qanon theories, and ban those that disagree.
I’m not saying I, or anybody, should regulate Twitter, FaceBook or any other media source. I’m merely using them as examples to show how wrong the ministers of truth are when they attempt to regulate “disinformation”. But I’m sure a government agency would do a fine job of it… :eyeroll:
So you can complain and stop using the platform, and short the stock?
That’s fair. They probably will screw up. The real question is whether we need them anyway.
Same as the IRS or FBI, as you pointed out earlier.
Isn’t this mostly a problem for psychology and economics? Not meteorology?
Wat?
LOL
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It’s in medicine too. But not in any of the natural sciences, as far as i’m aware.
The real answer is we don’t want them AND we don’t need them. This Disinformation Governance Board is a cancer that will quickly metastasize. It must be completely eliminated while it’s still small and can be contained.
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We clearly want them-- that’s why Facebook and Twitter experimented with it.
Whether they are ‘good’ or ‘necessary’ or a ‘cancer’, I guess is a matter of opinion at this point.
Ranger seems to think that this Board will metastasise into a police body.
Maybe, in a GOP-controlled government.
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The GOP will control the government in the near future, so, it’s a reasonable concern.
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Do we need a standing army? Do we need a CIA? Isn’t it better to recognize the potential for abuse by those we give power to address a threat by building in transparency and oversight from the beginning than to ignore the threat?
That’s a great point! Here’s one better, how about something like:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
That’s the kind of transparency and oversight that is not subject to the political leanings of any administration. Oversight and transparency might be nice sounding words to put on top of the DGB, but those are meaningless in practice. Human nature is what human nature is.
I’m still hoping to understand why you think a human censoring a tweet is bad, but a human creating an algorithm that amplifies a tweet is ok.
You might say both are bad, but your selective outrage is… selective.
My “selective outrage” has to do with the 1st Amendment.
When newspapers print all the news which they see fit to print; the headlines, the stories above the fold, the stories which receive more lines of print, all of that isn’t much different from Twitter having an algorithm amplifying a tweet. Nobody ever got truly upset over that. Newspaper were/are a private enterprise. If a newspaper called itself “The town Democrat”, and printed with a liberal slant, nobody truly cared. They just don’t buy that paper.
If the government has a censor - that’s a problem, a first amendment problem.
It’s really quite simple. I’m glad you asked for a further explanation and I was able to enlighten you.
They are significantly different. No human can read what is posted on Twitter in a day. You could with a newspaper. No human could read every newspaper published in the nation in a day. That is a more accurate comparison to Twitter.
Ok. How would you suggest we, society and the government, address the detrimental effect of disinformation within the existing information flow that is so great a human cannot grasp it? Particularly disinformation campaigns by foreign adversaries.
Side note: an interesting topic with regard to this issue is attention economy. Attention economy - Wikipedia
I wouldn’t so quickly dismiss them as “significantly different”. I gave examples of newspaper, and some newspapers had/have an outsized influence on a city/region. Don’t forget to consider TV news reports in your consideration. Those media sources had (still have??) a significant influence on the national market. Twitter and other social media are a relatively recent phenomenon. I put my trust in the millions of individual decisions made every day by the invisible hand. Is it fool-proof, absolutely not. There are plenty of historical examples of the invisible hand failing due to past media short-comings and failures. There will be more bumps and bruises (and maybe even a bloody nose or two, or worse) along the way. But the way we consume information/media/news is continually changing at an accelerating rate. If something is flawed, the market will create and accept a better idea. Is it better than an unelected government bureaucrat making decisions - Always and Absolutely. That system has an abysmal record.
Free and open dialogue, a competition of ideas and thoughts, uncensored, is the only path to success.
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