Twitter is Testing New Ways To Fight Misinformation (nbcnews.com) 80
Twitter is experimenting with adding brightly colored labels directly beneath lies and misinformation posted by politicians and public figures, according to a leaked demo of new features sent to NBC News. From the report: Twitter confirmed that the leaked demo, which was accessible on a publicly available site, is one possible iteration of a new policy to target misinformation it plans to roll out March 5. In this version, disinformation or misleading information posted by public figures will be corrected directly beneath the tweet by fact-checkers and journalists who are verified on the platform, and possibly other users who will participate in a new "community reports" feature, which the demo claims is "like Wikipedia." "We're exploring a number of ways to address misinformation and provide more context for tweets on Twitter," a Twitter spokesperson said. "Misinformation is a critical issue and we will be testing many different ways to address it." The demo features bright red and orange badges for tweets that have been deemed "harmfully misleading," in nearly the same size as the tweet itself and prominently displayed directly below the tweet that contains the harmful misinformation.
It's nice, we can agree on a single palatte (Score:3)
For terror levels and social media truthiness .
No, we cannot agree on a single pallette (Score:2)
People are different and will never agree completely on everything. Some of the differences can be ameliorated by negotiation, but that requires actual communication, NOT Twitter.
I think the root of Twitter's problems can best be described as bad defaults in the human wetware being manipulated by gamesters. We initially tend to trust people in our own group and distrust people in other groups, but a "trusted" identity on Twitter is NOT truly in your own group. In contrast, it's extremely cheap and easy to c
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People are different and will never agree completely on everything. Some of the differences can be ameliorated by negotiation, but that requires actual communication, NOT Twitter.
I think the root of Twitter's problems can best be described as bad defaults in the human wetware being manipulated by gamesters. We initially tend to trust people in our own group and distrust people in other groups, but a "trusted" identity on Twitter is NOT truly in your own group. In contrast, it's extremely cheap and easy to create fake identities for ALL of the groups of any person you want to target for propaganda on Twitter.
Recently read at least one excellent summary of this point. Not sure if it was Daniel Dennett in From Bacteria to Bach and Back or somewhere in Selfie by Will Storr? Already blurring, but I've seen many versions over the years and they led me to my favored solution approach of MEPR to compensate for the bad default settings... However, for now and due to the time, I'll just bid you ADSAAuPR, atAJG.
I meant the colors, and I missed deleting an extra "l"
Twitter shuts down permanently (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Twitter shuts down permanently (Score:1)
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I was going to make this same post.
I feel robbed.
Re: Twitter shuts down permanently (Score:1)
It will certainly eliminate 98% of Twitter's audience...
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More like, to fight misinformation with misinformation. Want to make the claim of truthiness, do it in court, otherwise one brand of bullshit versus another, right up until it is proven in court. Why people still pay attention to that platform is beyond me, it is invisible until it is quoted on other platforms. Twitter social media for twits.
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Who watches the watchers?
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You mean like this totally accurate video (Score:5, Informative)
Problem solved.
So I guess everything a D posts is always wholesome and exactly accurate, with no exaggeration [twitter.com]?
I get that trolling is fun (Score:3, Informative)
It's likely you have been paid by Bloomberg to post this. He's openly hired 500 "Social Media Influencers". But if not remember this, you will no go untouched by the damage he has done and will continue to do.
Re: I get that trolling is fun (Score:1)
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Go get yourself some followers (Score:3)
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Thanks for the example of a post with misleading disinformation [washingtonpost.com].
Sadly, this is the type of incorrect information Twitter will be happy to promote, because it fits the biases of most of their "fact-checkers".
WaPo is an Establishment tool (Score:2)
WaPo is not something anyone should pay any attention to after they green lit the above. The best part was it was run under the tagline "Democracy Dies in the Darkness".
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WaPo is a left-wing anti-Republican rag, which is why I went with it as a source, so no one can claim it's just biased against the left, because if anything, it's biased against the right.
A simple Google search turns up plenty of more resources [google.com] from across the spectrum. here's the first one that showed up on my search [fraserinstitute.org], which mentions that using the same criteria, even Canada has a goodly number of "medical" bankruptcies.
Basically, the original number is misleading because it counts as a medical bankruptcy a
Mike Bloomberg is not a Democrat (Score:4, Insightful)
Labels aren't what matter, policy is.
Re: Mike Bloomberg is not a Democrat (Score:1)
During the Camelot period when the Secret service was smuggling in women for JFK to ball, he was sporting an active case of syphilis.
JFK makes Bill C look like a piker.
Who gives a shit? (Score:2)
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- Wilson laid out a clear vision for the party
- FDR set out to remake the country as a top-down centralized bureaucracy
- LBJ continued it
- Clinton & Company shit all over it by turning it into their own private enterprise
- Obama continued the move toward totalitarianism by weaponizing various agencies
- Bloomberg is trying to set that excrement on fire.
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The first example they give in TFA is someone correcting Bernie Sanders in the claim that 40% of guns are bought at gun shows. Apparently it's 22%.
Re: Delete anyone with an (R) after their name (Score:1)
Re: Delete anyone with an (R) after their name (Score:1)
Only Good truth is allowed on Twitter (Score:3, Interesting)
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Think of it in terms of time. I'm willing to accept that you are a person who actually wants to make the effort of learning enough of the truth to make meaningful and free choices. Now imagine that someone wants to manipulate you and limit your freedom, and that your "adversary" is able to spawn an infinite number of fake Twitter accounts to flood your input channels with false data. How free are you? Or in more concrete terms, how much time can you spend looking for the truth buried in a mountain of BS?
Per
Re: Only Good truth is allowed on Twitter (Score:1)
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On the one hand I want to agree with you and give you some of those positive mod points I never have to give, but on the other hand... Can't do that. If you're as smart as your handle professes, let's hear your great solution approach to make Twitter go away. I don't think the gun idea is going to work. Many of the biggest twits on Twitter have lots of "Big fucking guns!"
Or maybe the way to look at the problem is that no one thinks they are "reading random twitter people"? You won't see anything on Twitter
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Re: Only Good truth is allowed on Twitter (Score:1)
I'm not sure quite how it happened, but we now live in a dystopian 70s sci-fi movie.
Who would use twitter? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is inches away from being a doxxing service for the lunatic fringe. The whole platform is built on dogpiling outsiders.
They have your personal phone number and easily out people for wrongthink
No matter what your politics are. One day you will disagree with the wrong person. It could be something completely trivial. Maybe you confused Billy Idol with Billie Eilish, and that put you on the bad guy list.
It is a tool designed to hurt, not help. You have everything to lose and nothing to gain. Delete that app and live a happier life.
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It is inches away from being a doxxing service for the lunatic fringe. The whole platform is built on dogpiling outsiders.
They have your personal phone number and easily out people for wrongthink
No matter what your politics are. One day you will disagree with the wrong person. It could be something completely trivial. Maybe you confused Billy Idol with Billie Eilish, and that put you on the bad guy list.
It is a tool designed to hurt, not help. You have everything to lose and nothing to gain. Delete that app and live a happier life.
This. I've never really used Twitter, but based on what I've seen of it and what people share to Facebook it appears to be nothing more than some kind of shame/anger based circle jerk. I guess humanity longs for the days of human sacrifice and blood orgies.
Outstanding, but... (Score:3)
Sometimes whether a statement is factual or not isn't entirely clear. For example, two credible, honest scientists may disagree in their conclusions regarding some experimental data. When there is scientific uncertainty, (or journalistic uncertainty as a result of disagreeing reports, etc.), then fact checkers can easily get the 'correction' wrong.
I hope Twitter is careful to flag tweets as 'possibly contentious' or 'possibly incorrect' in cases where there is any such uncertainty.
Won't work (Score:1)
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The press is also a well protected profession. So is the about to publish.
Now community reports, fact-checkers and journalists will grant or remove that freedom.
Freedom now gets tested by an approved community.
Fact checks (Score:4, Insightful)
fact check: True
Trump: The sky is blue.
fact check: Mostly false. The sky is black over half of the day, and is commonly red during sunrise and sunset.
Re:Fact checks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Fact checks (Score:1)
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Idiot.
1984 (Score:5, Insightful)
Fact checkers are often wrong (Score:1)
arrogant and unseemly (Score:4, Insightful)
Why should anyone trust twitter to be the ultimate arbiter of truth?
The subtext of all these efforts to purge "misinformation" from social media is that democrats are salty about the 2016 election and want to blame it on the other side lying, even though they lie just as much if not more.
The enforcement will never be unbiased. I could list a million provably false statements that Twitter will never label as such:
* claiming women only earn 78 cents for every dollar men earn "for the same work"
* claiming there are no innate psychological differences between men and women
* blaming black arrest rates on "racist cops" rather than actual crime rate differences.
* claiming that the third world is poor because of colonialism
* claiming that europe is rich because of colonialism
* claiming there is no difference in IQ test scores between ethnic groups.
* claiming that "trickle down theory" ever existed
* blaming the housing bubble on "greed" rather than government policies to subsidize homeownership (increasing demand) while simultaneously blocking new construction (decreasing supply)
* claiming that real communism has never been tried
I could go on for days listing misinformation that Twitter will never label as such.
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You can't fight lazy. (Score:2, Insightful)
The only way to reduce misinformation on social media is to force users to do their own fact checking.
That's not gonna happen.
For years I've been telling my kids and grandkids the following: If you see something startling or outrageous on social media, don't believe it until you deliberately research the opposing view. If something gets posted on Twitter that reports that California just fell into the Pacific, search for information that would prove it didn't happen. If none exists, then MAYBE it happened.
Re: You can't fight lazy. (Score:1)
So long as they follow Seattle, WA, and CA law (Score:2)
There are strong laws about political ads, so they better be enforcing those laws.
Do they think they are God, or what? (Score:1)
How could they themselves ever know what is misinformation and what isn't, without being all-seeing and all-knowing?
Or is it just code again for "What we believe/like to be true, given that the world is revolving around us."?
The dumber, the more arrogant, I guess...
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Are you saying you need to be all knowing in order to know if a specific thing is true or not? Do you realize how small minded that makes you sound?
Relevance (Score:2, Insightful)
The whole point of a democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
e.g. The EU created GSM to be the one mobile phone standard, and mandated that all phone companies comply with it. The U.S. allowed it, but opted not to mandate it. A couple companies in the U.S. decided to try CDMA instead. GSM seemed superior at first. But when data services became ubiquitous, it became obvious that CDMA was better. GSM used TDMA - each phone takes turns talking to the tower. If the phone doesn't have much or anything to say during its timeslice, that bandwidth is wasted. CDMA uses orthogonal signaling. You can think of it as writing two paragraphs on the same sheet of paper - one normally, the other at 90 degrees. The uniqueness (orthogonality) to how letters are written allow you to distinguish the vertical writing from the horizontal writing. In CDMA, all phones transmit simultaneously. They see each others' broadcasts as noise. The more phones are transmitting, the higher the noise floor, and thus the lower the bandwidth each individual phone gets. If a phone doesn't need to transmit, it doesn't contribute noise, the noise floor drops, and the bandwidth available to that phone is automatically reallocated to all other phones which currently need it.
CDMA proved so superior to TDMA that within a year, GSM threw in the towel, licensed it, and incorporated it into the GSM spec [wikipedia.org]. That's why GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time - they had a TDMA radio for voice, and a separate CDMA radio for data. While CDMA phones only had a single CDMA radio, so couldn't do voice and data simultaneously. CDMA eventually gave way to OFDMA (used in LTE), another orthogonal signaling technique (using orthogonal frequency allocation, instead of orthogonal code allocation). It was only possible because CDMA served as the proof of concept that this crazy "everyone talks at the same time and we sort it out later" idea actually worked when scaled up nationwide. If the entire world had gone along with GSM, none of this would've happened, and we would probably be stuck with cellular data speeds around 1-5 Mbps today. Allowing the system championed by the minority to exist, and giving it a fair chance, allowed the minority to demonstrate that its method was superior, which eventually lead to its widespread adoption so that it became the majority.
That's what makes democracy stronger than other forms of government. That diversity of opinions is what allows it to out-perform mono-culture styles of government like monarchies and authoritarianism. The catch is, any system you create to reduce misinformation, can also be abused to squelch valid minority opinions. That is, misguided opinions like those espoused by anti-vaxxers aren't a problem which needs to be silenced. They're a side-effect of a flourishing democracy, where any and all ideas are allowed to spread based on how each individual person judges its merits. Some people inevitably make bad judgements, so some of these misguided ideas will always be present in a fluorishing democracy.
That right there is the core of democracy. People are allowed to say anything, and each individual listener, on their own, decides the merits of the idea. The final validation is up to every individual, not some group appointed to keep things "truthful". Fact checkers can certainly add their voice, but each individual listener should also gauge the veracity of the fact-checking on their own. If you mandate fact-checking, and especially if you give fact-checkers the power to silence other people's speech, you are taking the power to judge the worthiness of what was said away from individuals, and giving it to the
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We'll never know but assuming that an inferior technology can't evolve into an superior technology, is myopic and dishonest thinking. Bicycles, guns and cars, now ubiquitous machines in the USA, were horrendous and lethal (to the operator) when first invented. But they evolved to be safe and reliable for everyday use.
Any system you create to produce information, can also be abused to squelch truthiness.
Resulting in a measles epidemic and the death of children who didn't know their parents had made bad jud
The journalists will just fool people. (Score:2)
Like here in Sweden, say someone say:
"Most assault-rapes are committed by immigrants!"
Then they could "fact check & correct it with":
"(False.) The reality is that we don't know as no public statistics is made out of crimes and ethnicity in Sweden."
And then someone may read that like "So it's just BS! It's not true!"..
Who are verified on the platform? (Score:1)
NATO on war?
Some NGO on their side of politics?
The UN?
A think tank with a new idea. Any negative comments have to stop as the idea is so good...
Some philanthropist who does not like any questions about their war time past?
The politics of some EU gov worker?
The views of a French politician?
Experts from the gov of Spain on all gov/police/mil approved topics related to Catalonia.
Argentina on Islas Malvinas.
Community reports