If everyone should have free speach, why blocking nut jobs like Trump and info wars guy?
As someone from non usa, all I see is hypocrisy coming America. They are fine with misinformation in other countries but not in theirs
"Misinformation" is probably one of the most abused phrases of our age. If we could even start by labeling misinformation properly, then maybe we could do something about it.
The point of a sovereign government is to serve the people—that's it. Keep them safe, keep things "fair" (to whatever degree that's possible), and to fight for the prolonged existence of said people. "Misinformation" hardly fits into that in its current state.
Imagine an enemy uses troll farms to cause divisions, spread lies, propaganda and conspiracy theories in plain sight. This leads to people distrusting everything (how can you even know what is truth when there are so many lies out there, etc.), including medical advice from medical professionals, evacuation orders in case of natural disasters, etc. Or even participate in a coup attempt because social media has led them to believe there is some gross injustice, or whatever. Or go and decapitate teachers because social media told them they're offending their holy religion.
Now, the above is factual, not an imaginary scenario. At the very least Russia has been caught directly doing the above, as well as paying actors to cause trouble and stoke divisions (like the guy burning Qurans in Sweden). In some countries there have even been fights between troll farms from different countries (it was somewhere in Central Africa between Russian and French troll farms) online. Same goes for ISIS and similar organisations that had very heavy recruitment online.
So, do you really think combating misinformation such as the above isn't a part of keeping citizens safe? I'd take selective censorship of e.g. ISIS and affiliated groups in exchange for teachers not getting decapitated, thank you very much.
(If anyone thinks I'm exaggerating with the decapitation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Samuel_Paty & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arras_school_stabbing which was "just" a stabbing)
It's an imaginary scenario. You know that the whole Russiagate multi-year farce turned out to be nothing but lies from our own governments, right? It's been proven many times over.
The idea that we have to be kept safe from "division" is especially hilarious given that the whole point of democracy is to allow people to work out their naturally occurring divisions peacefully.
Also, Russia was but one of the examples. Is it imaginary that 2 teachers have been murdered by Islamic nutjobs in France off of social media?
> The idea that we have to be kept safe from "division" is especially hilarious given that the whole point of democracy is to allow people to work out their naturally occurring divisions peacefully.
That's hard in countries with broken political systems like the unbelievably stupid American dual party one. And is it actually working nowadays? To me from the outside it definitely seems like everything, even basic science and common sense, are immediately partisan. If one party is for something, the other is immediately against it regardless of merits. Maybe except Israel and army spending? And even in non broken systems, stuff like Covid was extremely politicised. You can't debate with a pigeon shitting everywhere.
Ah I see, you never became aware of how that story ended.
Russiagate ended with the discovery that it had all been a lie, that there was no Trump/Russia collusion and the US media had spent years knowingly propagandizing the population. There was no scandal, except the scandal of how the media could have done that. Eventually some American journalists even admitted what had happened.
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-p...
But you seem to be stuck in 2018, before that had all been proven. You are yourself the victim of successful propaganda!
And again, it's one example among millions.
The big problem is not that Russian propaganda exists. The problem is that hiding behind the need to "rescue" citizens from Russian propaganda, other governments want to institute an information control regime that is very similar to what Russia has. If that happens in Russia, I feel their pain, but fortunately in my country I can still speak freely. But if this goes away and I also don't have freedom of speech, then it's not Russia that is doing that to me, it's my own government. And that's what I should be afraid of - not that Russian propaganda will take my freedoms, but that my on government, hiding behind the fact that Russian propaganda exists, will take away my rights - "for my own good", of course.
The details of the Russian influence operation are irrelevant to the broader point - malicious actors will weaponize the medium, and non curated spaces quickly devolve into a toxic cesspool.
Clearly you have never been a moderator of any community.
However the Russian info warfare playbook is a fact.
Russia was the first country to develop the most extensive Online Ops capability. (For contrast - America/Israel created Stuxnet.)
It’s not even a secret.
Politifact is a good case study. Academics have repeatedly published data since 2011 [1] and most recently 2023 [2] showing an overt bias yet it's still used as a reputable source to fact check things in many places on the internet.
[1] https://smartpolitics.lib.umn.edu/2011/02/10/selection-bias-...
[2] https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/items/8f9a6f3b-efd7-46f3-b4be...
Neither are convincing for claims of "overt bias", and even IF there was a huge bias in the selection of statements to rate, then this only means ... a bias in the selection of statement to rate, and doesn't actually say anything about the truthfulness (or lack thereof) of the actual fact-checks. A partisan "we-rate-republicans.com" and "we-rate-democrats.com" could be 100% accurate in their ratings. "Biased" does not equal "false".
I do think that "politicians from one side are rated much more frequently" is a good reason to take a close and skeptical look by the way, but that needs to start with "are politicians from that side actually untruthful significantly more often" as a baseline.
So I would rate your post as "false" for 1) making a claim that's completely unsupported by your evidence because your evidence actually makes a different claim, and 2) being weak evidence in the first place.
yes. Of course it can and has been abused, but if we use that line of thinking we'd have zero government.
>If we could even start by labeling misinformation properly, then maybe we could do something about it.
I agree. It's very case by case, but I'd hope in this case that "flooded with fake images [about war]", i.e. propaganda, is at least one of these cases where you do want governments (emphasis on plural)to intervene. Especially as AI will only hasten the ability to generate such propaganda.
>"Misinformation" hardly fits into that in its current state.
misinformation fit into all 3 aspects you mention, though. misinformation has harmed people, regardless of your political spectrum we should be able to agree with this. And the ability to process the proper facts does keep things fair over who has the "hottest memes" or exploits SEO the best for their goals.
Information cannot harm. Only inform. For better or for worse. If you are too stupid and get duped by incorrect information, that's on you. No one else.
>If you are too stupid and get duped by incorrect information, that's on you. No one else.
You and all your victims apparently. The family that may not be able to escape you, the people you prejudice against or even assault over your zealous beliefs, the town you vote or even assign new policy directly to. Maybe even the planet you impact l. If stupid people kept to themselves a lot of laws and regulations wouldn't need to exist. But my country did need 200 years just to consider a woman a "voting citizen" after all.
Not sure how that pertains to the argument at hand?
> You and all your victims apparently. The family that may not be able to escape you, the people you prejudice against or even assault over your zealous beliefs, the town you vote or even assign new policy directly to. Maybe even the planet you impact l. If stupid people kept to themselves a lot of laws and regulations wouldn't need to exist. But my country did need 200 years just to consider a woman a "voting citizen" after all.
I don't understand why you typed all this?
Once such a law is passed there is no right to public scrutiny. While certain aspects of the process may not be open to public scrutiny, this does not entirely preclude the public's right to some level of transparency as it is stipulated that any decisions taken will be widely publicised (paragraph 101). That is, once they've made their judgement the matter will be settled and a superficial amount of information will be released to the public.
This is exactly why I think it's so important for us to speak openly about the speech rights we expect on the platforms we use and the level of policing of speech we're happy for there to be. If we don't do so, lawmakers can and do pass draconian laws that take these considerations away from us, and at this point we have little recourse to rollback our loss of freedom.
I'm not a free speech absolutist but believe that it's incredibly wrongheaded to try to argue away conversation about this as being without evidence particularly after lawmakers passed laws that denied us this same evidence. Blithely allowing lawmakers to pass laws that enable confidential evaluation of evidence limiting public scrutiny, but then afterwards criticising public discourse for lacking evidence without acknowledging that access to such evidence has been restricted by the same laws -- what a manipulative argument/framing!
The whole conversation on speech rights is also incorrectly centered in my opinion, as freedom of speech rights are centered on the speaker instead of the audience/public. I personally find myself advocating the following approach to speech rights:
> "It’s not just the right of the person who speaks to
> be heard, it is the right of everyone in the audience
> to listen and to hear."> Apparently the dissemination of illegal content refers to the October 7th videos of the Hamas terrorist attack against Israel that galvanized American support for Israel
...which does not to me seem to be a conclusion you can draw from a lack of evidence.
When they said "dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas' terrorist attacks against Israel" I can only assume that it refers to the October 7th attack by Hamas upon Israel and not to another attack.
Of course, it could refer to a specific video posted during this time period that they consider to be disinformation, however, taking action against a singular video would be quite over-the-top which is why I believe they're referring to the overall dissemination of videos around this time.
So as far as I know, it would probably have been fine to share videos showing eg the damage to a hospital, but not to post a deepfake showing Oprah planning the destruction of a hospital.
You forgot one line.
While actual factual videos about the attack are undoubtedly newsworthy and should not be banned, claiming that promoting genocide is be in the people's interest would be a bit of a stretch, would it not?
2. The claim in question was within the EU's press release itself, however, the EU haven't made their specific evidence publicly available. It's quite likely that others also aren't allowed to divulge specifics but this doesn't mean that they haven't seen evidence or that the EU hasn't provided any evidence.
https://twitter.com/ThierryBreton/status/1736701607553692020
Are you really complaining that Bretton didn't dox some Twitter contact person?
The furthest this has gone that I’m aware of is the Dutch, alongside other EU authorities, has issued a fine to an American website, alleging that they subject themselves to EU jurisdiction by merely hosting information about EU citizens. This seems to me to be too far.
https://edpb.europa.eu/news/national-news/2021/dutch-dpa-imp...
I think this should be of particular importance to the US which has fudamental rights protecting freedom of expression.
I'm very worried about co-ordinated lawfare against Musk-operated companies being used as a tool to force his compliance with systems that exist to get around laws against the US government's direct involvement in censorship. I'm also worried about the EU's lurch towards Chinese-style censorship of social media. And, I think we should be able to talk about it now while we still can.
It is important for everyone in the world and most nations have already wrestled with this problem. The US is not special. The only reason the US is starting to wonder about the influence of other states on such a critical piece of infrastructure is because they are not dominating it anymore and only now are beginning to find out that there are other nations present that have different cultural norms.
Laws like the DSA are exactly created to address this problem. If you want to operate in the EU, you have to adhere to European laws and values.
> I'm very worried about co-ordinated lawfare against Musk-operated companies being used as a tool to force his compliance with systems that exist to get around laws against the US government's direct involvement in censorship. I'm also worried about the EU's lurch towards Chinese-style censorship of social media. And, I think we should be able to talk about it now while we still can.
Well, other people are very worried about companies exploiting exploiting every technique they can think of to fuck their users and make more money. Trying to prevent that is not even remotely close to Chinese-style censorship.
The EU institutions don't represent European values. The Commission doesn't run elections to find out what they are, can't even define what it thinks they are and routinely claims that the results of actual democratic elections in Europe are somehow contrary to those same European values.
> The US is not special
It is in fact special, in that it has systematically kicked the ass of the European economy for decades in everything tech related. The EU doesn't even have second place also-ran companies that compete with Twitter, Instagram, Threads, TikTok etc. It has nothing.
So, fundamentally, Musk can and maybe should tell the Commission that in fact they don't operate in Europe and do not recognize EU laws or what they think European "values" are. I wonder how long the current state can hold for. If US tech firms just state that they will ignore EU regulation whilst continuing to serve requests from EU IP ranges, then what? The Commission would have to impose trade sanctions on the USA (i.e. ban European companies from purchasing services from them), which would invite retaliatory sanctions from Washington.
Then they are unable to take money from EU businesses to show ads to EU users.
Social media companies don't develop their products out of altruism. Their goal is to make money. (and increasingly the ability to manipulate public opinion/ban wrongthink) What's the point of letting millions of EU users hammer your servers if you can't make money from them?
Additionally, even if enforced, it just means European visitors would see ads for American products (which they can still import) instead of local products. An own goal for sure.
What does that even mean? Are you saying the debate about free speech itself is somehow silenced?
We saw this clearly demonstrated during covid -- discussion about covid censorship was also censored.
Can you elaborate what that would consist of here?`
> discussion about covid censorship was also censored.
Any examples?
This is very thoroughly documented.
Basically: did someone who said "I can't talk about X or I'll be silenced! there is censorship!" also get THAT opinion muted?
While it was off the topic of the original argument: was there censorship of the opinion that Covid existed in China in any countries with supposedly free speech?
I live in a country with even worse speech laws than those in the US and I wish people stood up for the kinds of speech that should be protected instead of waiting until our lawmakers pass draconian laws and then complaining.
Some European countries have written constitutions and some don't. But within the EU, the EU charter article 11 has the role of the US 1st amendment as being a written consitution regulating free speech https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/11-freedom-expre...
There's no contest here.
Yes the “problem” is slowly disappearing but from a legal curiosity standpoint of the past decades that doesn’t make it less interesting that it existed.
It's become apparent that the Israeli political/war/propaganda machine has an incredible amount of influence - far beyond anything I'd personally imagined could be possible. They've been able to effectively commandeer most of the West's "traditional" mass media, but social media is a huge problem for their narrative, as it allows people to see what is really happening, often in real-time.
I clearly see now the benefit to humanity or a system like Twitter, but it really worries me that Twitter/X is in the hands of a single billionaire, especially one with some very controversial views. I'm not sure what the solution is, but we (humanity) really need something free from the influence of government (foreign or domestic) and other bad actors.
Right now, the top story on the Israel-Gaza conflict on NBC, WaPo, NYT, and LAT is the IDF accidentally killing 3 hostages. Stories from the last week include multiple reports about potential Geneva Code violations. And in the weeks before the ceasefire, there was a constant drumbeat of opinion pieces calling for a ceasefire.
Yeah, such influence they have... /s
Everything I see has a very heavy and obvious bias in favour of Israel, even for the few stories they do choose to cover, e.g. "42 perished in airstrike" vs "3 IDF soldiers murdered by militant extremists". We also still see Western media repeating the falsehoods about beheaded babies, baked babies, mass rapes etc - even though Israel eventually admitted it wasn't true.
And that's aside from the absolute nonsense we've seen where anyone against the ethic cleansing is branded an anti-semite and risks cancrllation.
Israeli politicians are publicly calling for the total destruction of Gaza and relocation of anyone left, and for settling Gaza with Israelis - they're not even trying to hide it anymore, yet Western media is largely silent.
Hamas absolutely did behead children, and rape and torture and murder dozens of women. That was not made up.
Israel has been showing pictures and videos of the bodies found after the Hamas attack. (They are showing them right now in various locations in SoCal.) Witnesses who survived the Hamas attack have testified to witnessing rapes and murders. Even the few Hamas terrorists taken alive have admitted to both.
No, they did not. I can't believe these lies are still being peddled, though you are proving my point about the culpability of the traditional media - they originally aired this "news" with minimal fact-checking, and then barely a mention of when Israel admitted, bit by bit, that they never happened.
> Witnesses who survived the Hamas attack have testified to witnessing rapes...
You mean like the witness that later admitted he was never even there? Or the one who later admitted he made it up? Or the other witnesses who later admitted they were just repeating what they were told by others? AFAIK, there isn't a single first-hand testimony that agrees with you.
> Even the few Hamas terrorists taken alive have admitted to both
You can't seriously be taking confession taken under torture as fact? Hamas have publicly, repeatedly and vehemently denied any rapes - and if you think about it, claiming that mass rapes and tortures were going on in the middle of a firefight (with not only small arms, but tanks and Apaches!)... is kind of unbelievable. More recently, we've seen the head rabbi of the IDF say that it's totally fine for Israeli soldiers to rape Palestinian civilians.
Hamas absolutely did kill civilians on October 7th, and some were definitely beheaded (no children though) - their actions were horrendous enough without Israel making up atrocity propaganda. My guess is that Israel panicked after killing so many of their own on Oct 7th, then Netanyahu realised it would be the perfect time to save his presidency by invading and occupying Gaza (this is pure speculation on my part, of course)
But I fear now we're veering into an argument that isn't suitable for HN; I've said my piece and would politely and respectfully invite you to do some research on Israel's recent admissions regarding their original claims on Oct 7th.
Why make up blatant lies like this when mainstream media has been very critical of Israel for the past few weeks? The only exception is Fox News.
Hell, I still see Western media repeating the untruths of mass raprs, babies hung on clothes lines etc, even though they were debunked a long time ago, and even Israel now admits those events didn't happen and, furthermore, admits many civilians were killed by Israeli helicopter and tank fire on October 7th.
I will say I've noticed a small improvement in the past week or two, with publication of many more stories of the horrors of what Israel is doing in Gaza, and some improvement in language use.
As I've said before, Hamas definitely murdered many civilians - that's a bad enough atrocity without the need to make up stories.
I feel we're squarely in non-HN territory now, so I bid you adieu.
That said, I agree that the EU would try to censor it. I am not in favor of giving them the opportunity. Making false statements is not a crime.
I'm genuinely confused as to how it could be seen in any other way? Entire family trees wiped out, civilians and doctors killed indiscriminately by dumb bombs, snipers and drones, deliberate targeting of journalists to hide their war crimes. Israeli politicians are now even coming out and saying it - they want to deport Palestinians from Gaza, then occupy and settle it. They're saying it out loud now, as if it wasn't clear already, and still people don't believe them.
> Making false statements is not a crime.
Correct, not a legal crime; though I'm sure many would agree that making false statements to "justify" an invasion and ethic cleansing is a moral crime against humanity.
For instance, I've found this in France in 2021 (though it looks like it relates to tweets from 2015) and the law might be even stricter now:
https://www.france24.com/en/france/20210210-french-far-right...
I find it amusing this has become common "knowledge" now, and everyone thinks it will shape his actions.
With Tesla and SpaceX printing money, why does everyone assume he cares about a few billion here or there? it's like you or I losing a few hundred.
Are they printing money?
Musk owns 42% of it, so just in the last few months his slice went up $12.8B.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/13/spacex-value-climbs-to-180-b...
Tesla Model Y is now the world's most popular vehicle. Number 2 in the US, soon to be number 1.
> How Twitter's Community Notes Accelerates Denialism About Hamas Atrocities Against Israelis
> The Community Notes feature was supposed to shut down conspiracy theories on X, formerly Twitter. Instead Elon Musk's preference for crowdsourced moderation is allowing malicious users to weaponize hatred, lies and disinformation about the October 7 Hamas attack
Community Notes is just a subset of rank-based comment systems (e.g. Reddit and HN), and these are known to fail over time due to the commodification of votes. Even now you can go on certain forums and purchase a Community Note for a post for some hundreds of USD. It's not a substitute for moderation and everyone knows that if Hackernews defaulted to it instead of relying on dang that HN would fall apart.
Whenever talking to someone who is “critical of Israel” (who isn’t critical of that government? That’s not the point!) they use this line of defense despite leaving no room for criticism of their own extremely flawed and manipulative sources.
You can very easily go on twitter yourself and see how much louder the blatantly anti-Israel voices are compared to your antisemitic claims of “zionists”
Can’t roll my eyes hard enough
And it happens that American Christians have been experiencing a demographic collapse which has nothing to do with Palestinian propaganda! Young Americans have been rapidly abandoning Christianity, particularly the white evangelicals who support Israel the most, and the rabid support for Israel gets dropped in the process. Young people in America are abandoning their support for Israel because they are abandoning Christianity, which was traditionally the dominant religion in America (Muslim Americans may as well be a rounding error and didn't support Israel in the first place, they aren't being brainwashed by twitter propaganda either.)
Zionists such as yourself feel accustomed to a very high level of support in America that predominantly comes from a religious demographic which young people are presently fleeing from, but for some reason you can't seem to connect the dots and resort to blaming twitter propagandists for the decline in support for Israel. Get real; most young Americans don't even use twitter. They support Israel less because they're becoming secular and now only support Israel at the rate that is typical of secular people in other countries.
It’s a private company, so he can do what he likes - gutting your own trust and safety team is not a consequence free move.
Actually, not really. His Tesla and SpaceX assets completely overshadow X.
Its value could shrink to zero, and he’d still be one of the wealthiest folks on the planet.
I’m personally grateful that he’s standing on principle regarding free speech! So much that we get from “official” channels turns out to be fiction, or propaganda.
I personally don't think it's in people's interest to have this kind of thing hidden from them and I really dislike the EU for attempting to censor this.
Musk is really under a lot of financial pressure and it might be a losing battle to try to fight the EU over this in court. To be honest, I hope he is able to pull out from the EU without cratering the company, but he is now being pulled into lawfare with multiple actors across the globe so Twitter might have no choice but to accept is role as a conduit of censorship for state-level actors.