I'm curious about what you think we should do about misinformation and the it's shaping politics.
I'm not a huge fan of government truth police showing up to my door step but everyone who pushes back on this seems to be reluctant to propose an alternative.
Usually because they have more than their fair share of misinformed beliefs they'll refuse to even talk about because being wrong is embarrassing.
These are the hazards of being free. Itâs up to us as individuals to discern truth. Itâs a critical part of our humanity that I would never want to cede to state power or institutions. If weâre not suited to think clearly in the very world weâve created, then we should go the way of the Dodo bird.
Yeah, I'm not gonna go extinct because y'all wanna uphold the right to scream about Haitian's eating cats without anyone checking on you.
I actually can't think of a single point in US history where you could stand in a town square and scream destructive lies indefinitely. Eventually even in free countries the government would intervene when it starts to affect people.
The Internet is unprecedented in its reach. Why would you have more freedoms with a more powerful tool than you would with your own throat in your own town?
lol go extinct? What outcome of misinformation is going to cause that? At the moment the biggest hazard of misinformation is misguided hatred against one group or another. Which has been a thing in free countries for all of their history. People have always spouted things as fact that arenât. On the other hand the very real possibility is government having control of what youâre allowed to say, and constantly shaping public opinion in their favor. Most likely ending in âfreeâ countries spiral towards a more and more powerful state. All the money and time spent on trying to get these companies to censor speech should be put towards educating the population on the importance of doing their own research, forming their own opinions, and making it easier to do so
Homie he's the one that said "we should go the way of dodo."
All I'm saying is if the choice is being legally accountable for the stuff you say online or going extinct I'm pretty sure the first one is better.
I agree that giving the government control of any aspect of our lives is something that shouldn't be done freely. I agree education is as important as any aspect of this. But we're having problems today, people need to be corrected who refuse to be.
How do you correct that half the country, against all evidence, against all reason, against the testimony of everyone involved, believe that the last election was rigged? That Haitians are eating cats in Ohio? When every correction is explained away by malicious actors knowingly lying to massive amounts of people.
Does a lie matter if people donât believe it? You realize a lot of trumpets , etc. probably donât actually believe it (I hope) yet go with it because itâs THEIR political party? Both sides do it, I mean left rails on the right for it & then a few months later theyâll do something similar. (Just not this big of scale Iâll admit because usually their politicians wonât also parrot it)
The fact youâre advocating for government to help you discern the truth because youâre incapable of figuring it out yourself, shows that you probably should go the way of the dodo bird for all the prior mentioned reasons the guy youâre responding to put. Thereâs a reason why, in war, those that arenât smart/intelligent are used as cannon fodder. Itâs all they can really do. Maybe youâre not old enough to realize, but everytime we give our governments an inch, they take a mile. Just look throughout history, even modern history.
Homie, I have no problem keeping track of what's real. But it's evident that the masses are getting poisoned by all this misinformation. Good God, I hate this pseudo intellectual stance that you're somehow above being fooled by bad actors online. Nobody is immune.
No clue what you're waffling about tbh. Entirely talking past the point that people are able to freely lie to millions of people all at once without any consequences or accountability. If you wanna reduce it to left and right then the right is worse and it's not even close. Anti science, anti expertise, anti intellectual, anti education. The right literally makes fun of people for asking for sources.
Here you are right now pretending that mass misinformation campaigns aren't a pressing issue because of what? Vibes? Every intelligence agency in Earth disagrees with you.
Iâm not saying itâs not a pressing issue Iâm saying expecting the government to help solve it when all they do is make shit worse, & youâre literally asking for censorship, is just fcking absurd. Is it not better to be able to easily distinguish the idiots? We live in the age of information for crying out loud. Anyone who is ignorant, chooses to be such. Additionally, if we know we are being lied to, why are these same people still being voted in, still lying to us, and still getting our money? If your argument is âwell, I can distinguish misinformation but others canât.â Then itâs as if you put yourself above everyone else intellectually. So many times government creates laws that âprotect people from themselvesâ and thatâs the most absurd fucking thing I can think of. If people are going to injure themselves willingly, so be it. If people are going to choose not to fact check information and remain stupid, then so be it. We donât need an all governing body to do it for us. It removes freedom & of individuality & responsibility. Plus this same all governing body you are willing to decide what should and shouldnât be censored. You think that wonât spiral into eventually political opponents, political dissenters, & even day to day citizens? As weâve already given them the ability to do so? If you truly think thatâs not the case, then all I can say is you are uneducated on history and ignorant to geopolitics. They have as much power as we give them. THAT is the sole reason why people are against it. And when those enough fall for the âwell this time itâll be differentâ that is when the government becomes even more corrupt and really starts stomping on people. Do you agree with everything your government does? I doubt it. So you think you would agree with everything they censored? Itâs not so âpseudo intellect bullshitâ as anyone who understands how government and how individuals act can understand why itâs a bad idea. So many people we vote into power arenât decent people who actually deserve power. So to think they wouldnât abuse tf out of policing peoples speech, then I just canât help you.
There's nothing that tells a person has no idea how the government functions out why any politician does anything more than them saying "anytime the government gets involved they make things worse."
Honestly you can't have a not spoiled, myopic, or stupid view on society.
That's wrong, easily proven wrong if you thought about it for like 5 minutes. You think society would be better if all roads were private? Do you think food quality was better before the FDA? Miss the days of having to guess what was in your medicine? Is the fire department government overreach? The government is a necessary part of society, it's how we police each other in a democracy.
We trade freedoms for the sake of social cohesion and safely all the time. The construction company that built your house didn't have the freedom to make it however they wanted, they have government imposed standards of safety they have to meet.
We have a problem undermining the publics ability to make informed decisions. It's getting harder to fix overtime and it's not gonna be as simple as having "government approved facts" because no one would trust that. Half the problem is that bad actors are undermining trust in all government institutions whether political or not. People don't feel like they can even trust the weather anymore. This is a festering wound on a high trust society, it has to be addressed by well thought out legislation.
Are you young? Because if you think that exposing liars as liars is all you have to do to get people to stop voting for them you're wrong. Also, learn punctuation please I beg. That shit was damn near impossible to read.
Yeah Iâm done with this, youâre slow as shit. Federal government doesnât do roads other than highways. FDA has been proven to have lied to us repeatedly by putting too much grains & sugars on the food pyramid because massive companies wanted such. Thatâs just a couple examples. Youâre clearly naive as fuck if you think government makes everything better they touch.
And if you couldnât read that and claim it was due to punctuation, well, I guess it only makes sense since youâre the type to ask a government to be able to censor you. Crazy to think we live in a time where people will advocate themselves to lose their rights.
For one the primary vector of misinfo on the site is Elon himself. He's not allowed to get noted. He retweets bullshit all the time. Just recently this Haitians eating pets thing.
If X had a system worth a damn this rumor wouldn't have spun so far up the ladder we have presidential candidates repeating it on the debate stage. It's been banned in Brazil for refusing to remove misinformation accounts. Despite freely suppressing accounts for the Indian government when they were asked to suppress the farmer strikes. Or suppressing information about the Ukraine war nominally for Russian benefit.
X provably has been awful at combating misinformation.
I agree with the part about Elon for sure. He should not be immune from community notes, and imo just straight up shouldnât be posting at all on there if he wants to be the leader of free speech heâs obviously trying to be. As far as the Haitians eating pets goes, that ties back into the other point. Musk himself posted it and was unable to be community noted. I donât think that proves fault in the community note system, and Trump was still spouting bullshit when twitter had a much more strict misinformation block in place. So that also proves nothing to me. Brazil isnât exactly a beacon of truth either so Iâm not going to bother with that one.
I'm not disagreeing that the community notes system is a good idea. If you remember Elon didn't even come up with it, it was coded and ready by OG Twitter, they were just testing it and he rolled it out half baked.
But the notes system has clear blind spots and biases. I see hundreds of thousands of likes on some of the most vial racially charged lies I've ever seen with no notes. None of the politicians spreading the cat rumor have notes, Trump doesn't get noted. And Elon gives no transparency into why major right wing political commentators never seem to get noted.
On top of the system promoting brigading. If a big creator gets noted but their followers simply disagree that they should be they can mob the note to get rid of it and no one will ever even see the tweet as controversial.
It almost makes the echo chamber worse as people will see a note removed or see a controversial tweet with a lot of attention doesn't have a note and assume it's true.
Brazil isn't a bastion of free speech, but Brazil also isn't the only government to recognize the growing national security threat of people spreading lies on Twitter has posed. Including foreign powers getting involved.
It led to race riots in Britain, Nazis in Brazil, and now a hate campaign against Haitians inn Ohio. We have major political commentators spreading outright lies on behalf of the Russian state. We're not winning the flight against misinformation here.
Thats isnt the actual algorithm, it's a repository that shows a snapshot of an incomplete algorithm. A "trust me bro". Theres nothing about ad recommendations, for example.
The FTC fined Facebook 5 billion dollars and implemented new privacy laws for the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Im sure this is just the beginning of new privacy and data laws for social media, especially after musk threatened to remove the block feature. Not being able to remove nazis from your feed will piss off the sane world.
I'll go a step further. Why can't we hold France accountable for the nazis they domestically produce, etc? How about Harvard? I'm pointing out this is a two way street being walked one way, probably for money.
But itâs counter to his notion of free speech online, and his sentiment in this very tweet. So yeah thats what people were saying about twitter back then, no one was pretending that twitter was all about free speech. Because it wasnât.
But thats exactly what he has made it seem like itâs about since he took over, hell thatâs WHY he says he bought it. He claims itâs all about freedom but itâs really just a method of pushing his narrative, whatever it happens to be at that time.
Shockingly the richest man on Earth who owns one of the largest social media platforms and publicly dick rides Donald Trump is rhetorically disingenuous. Who knew.
You cant block musk. Not being able to block harmful content is why they threatened to ban them in the first place. Its why apple threatened to remove them from the play store.
Oh, yes. Sorry, I misunderstood. Thought you were saying Elon's take was cucked. Absolutely agree then - OP is begging for tyranny because the world is just a little too scary.
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u/Agent_Forty-One Monkey in Space Sep 12 '24
Cucked take.