[JacobGoodson]

Regardless of ones views pertaining to the current president, does anyone feel comfortable with so called "fact checking"? I do not like anyone acting as the sole arbiter of truth, whether it be the president, the pope, or the random fellow screaming in the park. I prefer that corporations trust their users to make their own choices about what people say instead of making edits or including addendum's to peoples posts. The people made the platform successful, let the people decide what is wrong and what is right, what is true and what is false, what is fact is and what is fiction.

[tenebrisalietum]

> ... does anyone feel comfortable with so called "fact checking"?

This has nothing to do with any real person, but is just a hypothetical situation pertaining to this question in your post:

Let's say an account X with many followers calls you a pedophile. You're not, of course, so you responded and said you weren't, but since the followers tend to like X, they don't listen to you. X's followers then dox you, find your address, and start making threats to you outside of the realm of social media.

Does the model of "the people decide what is wrong and what is right, what is true and what is false, what is fact is and what is fiction" hold up here?

[daenz]

Fact checkers are necessary because otherwise people will believe a bad thing and commit crimes? Committing crimes like threatening people is not the natural outcome of the freedom to decide for yourself what you believe.

[tenebrisalietum]

I'm not sure the term "natural outcome" is very meaningful. Things either happen or they don't. It's a possible outcome and possible enough to merit discussion.

But let's take bad effect down a notch, from a crime to just an unpleasant consequence if you want. Let's say instead of getting doxxed and physically threatened, you just get turned down for a job offer instead. What about that?

[dmonitor]

The opposite could also happen. You are not a pedophile. The mob says you are a pedophile. The mob runs the fact-checker, which now says that you are a pedophile.

Any “fact-checker” is going to have the problem of needing to arbitrate truth, depending on your arbiter you can have lots of different truths. You include facts that help your case, and ignore or downplay facts that do not help your opinion.

[prawn]

(Not a lawyer, but have run a forum for 15-20 years and survived many legal threats.)

You would potentially have legal recourse against the author, and the platform if they didn't act on you reporting the content. I don't know how that would apply were the author in another jurisdiction/country. I don't know if it's universal, but in Australia you'd request identifying information (IP and timestamp) from the platform via lawyer or police, they'd comply and remove the post if appropriate, and then you'd take the information to the owning ISP, get more detailed information and take the author to court.

I would guess that if the content were brought to the platform's attention and they didn't act reasonably, you may have recourse against them.

The debate here as I understand it is about not illegal but misleading, distasteful, harassing behaviour.

[belltaco]

It's much harder in the US. You may want to read this. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/john...

[prawn]

Not sure which bit in particular, but the YouTube response says what I was trying to say - you need to demonstrate that something was legally questionable before they will comply and identify a user.

With my forum, I ask the disgruntled user to have their lawyer contact me as a form of pre-action discovery. That weeds out the ones complaining without a leg to stand on and gives me a little bit of protection. The timestamp and IP address (at least with Australian ISPs) is rarely a slamdunk, and it pushes the real judgement on ISPs who have established systems, and police.

BTW, this is just incredible: "An Economist/YouGov poll in late December 2016 found that 46 percent of Trump voters and 17 percent of Clinton voters thought Pizzagate was real."

[augustt]

I mostly feel uncomfortable that we've fallen to the point where the president is pretty brazenly trying to undermine a democratic election.

[likeclockwork]

Seriously. Trying to stop voting-by-mail in the midst of a global pandemic is nothing short of voter suppression.

He said the last election was rigged too.

[Vinnl]

We've always had these "arbiters of truth", and I don't know of a good way around it. As long as someone's filtering what you see (be it journalists, or recommendation algorithms on social media platforms), they're influencing what gets presented to you and how - and if you don't do filtering, there's simply too much for you to get any useful information.

[seph-reed]

I think they should have just banned him without any reason but that they felt like it and they could.

Instead, this was an attempt to high-road one of the most powerful trolls in history, and high-roading a troll is the absolute most losing strategy around. Basically, however imperfect you are, that's how much ammo you've just given the troll. Twitter is very imperfect, so 1/10, tactless strats imo.

And the whole "fact-check" thing is just such a bad idea in general. Twitter really needs to hire some trolls to pass these ideas passed first.

[pas]

Why would it be bad idea? It's pretty easy to just throw WikiPedia links at lies. Of course with AI/ML/deep-learning. Will it be perfect? No, of course not. Would it help? I think it would. At least it is worth a few tries.

[seph-reed]

> Why would it be bad idea?

Because whether you want it to or not, it empowers trolls.

The following is counter-intuitive, it goes against our best nature, it's even tragic: you can't high-road a troll. Trolls are in a race to the bottom, so being on the high-road is setting yourself behind.

You want to fuck with Trump? You're going to have to either force a race-to-the-top narrative on him and his followers (not even a pandemic could), or beat him in a race to the bottom. Or just shoot him.

----

That being said, having it be ML would at least lend itself to "take with a grain of salt."

[pas]

Why would it be counter-intuitive? What exactly do you mean by our best nature? (What kind of behavior, bias, habit, etc goes against it?)

Oh, you mean "fact checking" empowers trolls. Yeah, sure, strictly speaking any interaction, any expenditure of energy/attention/resources on the troll is a "win" for the troll.

I don't want to "fuck with Trump", I want Twitter et al. to provide some sanity, the proverbial common sense, a grounding for reality. Even if that's just the tyranny of them damn techno-elitist valleywags.

I want twitter to empower me. The users. To help the users to spend less time on trolls. Basically Twitter, by investing in fact checking, helps others. And that's a big win in my book.

Trump and the usual populist will fizzle out. But it'd be nice to prevent the next one, and the next-next one to gain a foothold by spreading lies uncontested. (Yes, of course they'll just find the Twitter of that decade, or do some other media hack, parasites always find the weak spots, but none of this means Twitter and the various online community providers have to capitulate and just give up because trolls.)

Twitter is obviously less moderated than, let's say a subreddit, or HN, because it has a very direct financial dependence on a basic level of drama. And they're trying to rope-walk between irrelevance and first-past-the-post idiocracy.

[seph-reed]

> Yeah, sure, strictly speaking any interaction, any expenditure of energy/attention/resources on the troll is a "win" for the troll.

I don't think you have a much developed "troll framework" in your mind.

I believe you're a good, noble person, and I really want your life to be amazing for that. Unfortunately, what you said implies you think trolls are just trying to take energy. That they have no point. Seemingly, you're missing even the most basic and fundamental aspect of trolling: to show the other person is also a self-absorbed asshole who cheats and lies when they can, but then on top of that is too weak to admit it to themselves.

Trolls pick on "holier-than-thou" people because they live in a self-centered illusion about how good they are. The truth is, we're all garbage, selfish beings that do everything for ourselves and take credit for anything we can get away with. Fact checkers included.

The only way to approach a troll is as a fellow stupid piece of shit. So ignoring trolls is a pretty POS move... ignoring anybody is shitty. But to really show you're a piece of shit, you have to same something lame before you ignore them like: "ur mom." You need to prove not only that you don't give a shit what they say, but also that you've got no "good human" bubble to pop. Whoever says the most loses.

[prawn]

Banning him would be great for popcorn.gif but it almost guarantees you create a rising threat plastered over mainstream media when he picks a rival network. Surely that would be a monstrous commercial risk?

[superfrank]

According to Twitter, the reasons they added the warning to Trump's tweet as as follows:

- Trump claimed that mail-in ballots would lead to "a Rigged Election." However, fact-checkers say there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud.

- Trump falsely claimed that California will send mail-in ballots to "anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there." In fact, only registered voters will receive ballots.

- Five states already vote entirely by mail and all states offer some form of mail-in absentee voting, according to NBC News.

Also, keep in mind that Twitter did not add the warning just because they thought the information was incorrect. They added the warning because they believe it was incorrect AND because they felt it's purpose was "manipulating or interfering in elections or other civic processes" (https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/election-inte...).

I'm not sure how I feel about points 1 and 3, but point number 2 seems like a pretty fair reason to label the tweet with the warning, IMO. Trump provided factually incorrect information about voter registration to his millions of followers.

I agree I don't want them to decided what is right and wrong, but if they hold themselves to the rules of only labeling confirmed incorrect information about civic processes. I have no problem with what they are doing.

> The people made the platform successful, let the people decide what is wrong and what is right, what is true and what is false, what is fact is and what is fiction.

That's not what is happening anymore though. Large chunks of Twitter are not run by "the people" anymore. Twitter is in an endless battle with large groups of bots designed to present carefully curated misinformation as organic.

It's easy to say Twitter should just be hands-off and let the people decide, but that isn't an option unless your definition of "the people" is small special interest groups who have paid bot farms to push their message.

[pariahHN]

This is the conclusion I think I am coming to on this issue. So long as only verifiable facts are presented as a counter point, then it isn't really even editorializing, let alone censorship. Editorializing is defined as presenting an opinion - if you present a verifiable primary data source and nothing else, you are by definition not editorializing.

[ngcc_hk]

Turn off the Api Or limit it in a certain way and kill or limit the bot? Let us be human first.

Regards the debate of flagging or counter fact stating, it is hard question. Debate on

[superfrank]

While the API makes it easier, tools like Selenium mean you don't really need an API to run a Twitter bot.

[kanox]

> let the people decide what is wrong and what is right, what is true and what is false, what is fact is and what is fiction.

No freedom is lost here, people can (and will) decide that the factcheckers are wrong and dumb.

[xtony]

Not agreeing or disagreeing with you here, but Jack Dorsey claims that they are not being an "arbiter of truth" here: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1265837139360485376

[putnambr]

Leaving it up to the users makes it so a single group can dominate discourse, either through preying on ignorance or bots or paid users. Fact checking isn't perfect, but neither is anarchy.

[asdgopiahsogfi]

Many of these facts are not even complicated things that require "arbitration". Trump has claimed in the past on Twitter that vaccines cause autism, promoted poisons as a cure for diseases, and that the country is being "invaded" by refugees. Propagation of such misinformation can lead to loss of lives and we end up blaming the same social media companies for not flagging factually incorrect content. Let me put it simply - Trump blatantly lies and there are bots that spread these lies on Twitter. No private company with any semblance of conscience and public responsibility would allow this to happen. Twitter doesn't have the gall to suspend his account. I'm happy they at least take a small step to point out these lies. Looking at how low a bar Americans have for their politicians shock me.

[jmull]

If Trump can post claims about voting by mail, why can’t Twitter?

How could a fact-check not be considered free speech like anything else and why shouldn’t twitter be able to post content?

[ausbah]

because they're a platform not a distributor, or however the argument goes

[mmazing]

It's not working out so well.

[Izkata]

In this particular case, Trump is right, and Twitter is using its fact-check with false information. Just scroll through the confirmed cases of voter fraud here, it's mostly mail-in and absentee: [PDF] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...

[adjkant]

How exactly does 1000 cases of fraud over 40 years back up his tweets in any way? The voter fraud argument is a political weapon for voter suppression. Not to mention that mail in ballots are already in existence. Heck, I've used them the past 5 years myself.

[Izkata]

It's the proportion. A significant amount of the fraud is in mail-in voting, which means it's significantly less resistant to fraud. Shifting everyone from the more-resistant in-person voting to the less-resistant mail-in voting will result in a sharp uptick in voting fraud.

This is exactly what Trump said in the tweet.

[adjkant]

> This is exactly what Trump said in the tweet.

No, that is not what he said. This is the tweet excerpt:

> "There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed."

"substantially fraudulent" is not 0.0000001% of ballots (that's napkin math of ballots since 1980). If mail in ballots are 10x more likely to be used in fraud, then 0.000001% is not either. This is factually false and the "fact checking" was applied as such.

[braythwayt]

Nobody is acting as a “sole arbiter of truth.”

If you and I meet in a bar, and over some drinks I tell you that I’m the CEO of Uber, and the tavern owner leans in and say, “No he’s not,” how is that being the “sole arbiter of truth?” If I don’t like it, I should meet you somewhere else.

This is also no different than if Daniel Dale interviews me, and I say I founded YCombinator. When he prints the article, he says, “Reg lied.” How is that making Dale the ‘sole arbiter of truth?”

Nobody told Trump to use Twitter. He’s actually better off on Twitter than I would be in either of the scenarios I mentioned, because moments after he tweets, millions of his followers can reply and agree with his statements.

There is no way Twitter’s “fact check” is the sole arbiter of truth, when everyone can read thousands of replies that disagree with what Twitter claims are facts, and when Mr. Trump can say whatever he likes on the news, or when calling into some Fox show, without Twitter ‘fact-bombing’ him.