zlacker

I know it is "never too late" for things like this to happen, but it's definitely late.

One of the main reasons for bad things to happen is the lack of education (which, in turn, leads to resist to change) and, therefore makes people prone to believe to unbelievable things.

Social platforms like Twitter should have long had things like "fact checking" ANY statements and should have restricting not only violence glorifying posts, but also the ones with racial or sexual discrimination and all the others .

It is late, but I like seeing it happen at least for the person with the most "glorifying" record in dividing a society.

>>illumi+(OP)
That would make sense if every message were placed on hold before publishing while it got reviewed. But this is a real-time system. And even then, there are often multiple sides to events.

>>illumi+(OP)
Yeah, the whole reason we have public education is that democracy requires a knowledgeable voter base. When social media companies were just starting out, I get why they weren't fretting about societal effects. But even if we go by business metrics, a collapse of democracy would probably be bad for their businesses. It's past time for social media companies to take responsibility for their negative externalities. And that definitely includes all sort of "negative information value" content.

>>mc32+z
Is it a hard problem? Sure. Can they get everything? No. But that doesn't mean that they can't quickly act to minimize the total impact. As with many things, 80% of the value can be gained with 20% of the work.

>>mc32+z
I'm not saying it's easy, but effort should be made as it is important. If you see the real-time voice recognition on the new Pixel phone, the technology for this type of action might not be that far away.

>>wpietr+X
The hard question is whether 80% of the value is available. If you restrict 80% of the worst offenders, but the selection of the 80% is biased in some obvious way, that may be worse than doing nothing at all.

>>illumi+b1
What’s sexy to me, to someone else is gratuitous sex objectification. Or vice versa.

>>illumi+(OP)
the moment society started to see social media as a source of news, the battle was lost. nobody ever used myspace to stay fresh on the situation in the balkans.

>>illumi+(OP)
Snopes is a dumpster fire and the content editors consistently show a weak grasp of logic. Fact checking on a mass scale is a pipe dream and a massive minefield of false positives.

Although I might support this because I despise Twitter and support anything that might quicken it's demise.

>>wpietr+O
Yeah, there's a difference between educated and knowledgeable. But I don;t agree on the reason of existence of the public education system - its not about the voter base, it's about improving not only yourself, but the society as well (as improving society secures in a way improvement of you and your offspring).

I don't find social media companies responsible for the user generated content, but I do find them responsible for making it damn too easy to spread fear and then doing nothing about it. Or, as in case of some, promoting the division.

>>woodro+k2
Yeah, I agree, but they used main stream media which was also heavily polarized, offering one point of the view only.

>>SpicyL+v1
Well, start should happen somewhere, no matter what those 80% consist of, then improve

>>illumi+(OP)
and should have restricting not only violence glorifying posts, but also the ones with racial or sexual discrimination and all the others.

Do you think tweets that make derogatory references to Karen's or "tech-bros" should be deleted?

Should a Tweet that says, "There will be no peace as long as there is no justice for the centuries of white supremacy and centuries white people oppressing all other peoples." be banned? What about a Tweet saying, "There will be no peace as long as their is no justice of centuries of Jewish puppet-mastery and Jews oppressing all other peoples"?

I'm OK with restricting racist and sexist posts in the public square -- as long as the censorship is applied equally to all ethnicities and sexes. And if the censorship was applied equally, a lot of Tweets from "anti-racist" activists would need to be censored.

>>illumi+(OP)
I disagree that Twitter has been missing "fact checking". Instead I think the problem was bots.

Take an obviously absurd political viewpoint, which nowadays has to be really absurd. Here's an example: Tom Cruise should be president of the United States. Scientology will make America great again.

Sounds pretty fucking absurd, right? But throw in 50 million bots on Twitter and Instagram pretending to be Americans who think Tom Cruise should be president, and now your once absurd view point simply becomes "the other side of the aisle." It's of course all fake.

Unfortunately this exploits the minds of otherwise kind hearted people that do really want to give you a chance to hear you out. It is how democracy should work after all. But the current reality is this "other side" is basically just white supremacists. Full stop. They're not all rotten people, plenty of them were goaded into embracing the hatred because the internet, and all those fucking bots, makes it look normal

WW2 taught us to shut down Nazis right away. Zuckerberg and Dorsey have utterly failed as Americans.

>>chlodw+V4
I'm not saying every single opinion should be redacted (opinions should not be redacted - they are simply statements of who you are and what are your values), but (false) fact statements and clear/open calls for racial and sexual discrimination, etc.

>>wpietr+O
> But even if we go by business metrics, a collapse of democracy would probably be bad for their businesses.

But the ride the will be extremely profitable and business have shown to care more about short term than long term. Some examples are Nestle guzzling ground water during droughts, Johnson's baby powder with talc, the entire oil gas and coal industry, Pacific gas and electric company, etc.

>>wpietr+O
Public education and knowledgeable voter base in the same sentence, what a joke.

>>metalg+75
Are you seriously saying that 49% of US voters are white supremacists? This is one of the most absurd conspiracy theories I have ever heard.

>>dpooch+ze1
Maybe this is a US-specific problem? I'm not American and the public education system is actually doing a great job in most developed countries.

>>Valgri+Pg1
Knowing closely two countries: USA and Mexico, I just know that people in the know and with the means to do so (top %1+) just avoid public education like the plague. (Up to high school, then it's just a matter of going to a top college.)

At some point you have to consider the history of public education and it was just a tool for controlling and repressing individual thought, give busy work to lower class kids so they stay out of trouble, don't grow up to question the system. What is usually taught there? Obey authority at all cost, getting status symbols from authority is most important (not actually learning), do not interact with people different from you (why the grade separation? shouldn't people learn at their own pace?), learn not what interests you, just follow the damn syllabus choosen by someone else, don't stand out, just memorize stuff, don't read actual primary sources, just the predigested/rehashed summary. I mean, sure there might be exceptions but it's pretty much the same everywhere

What countries you think are doing a great job and why?

>>dpooch+Nh1
Depends a lot on where you are. I went to public school and it was a solid education. Most of the kids in my extended family are getting a public education and they're doing fine, too.

I agree it could be better, and it some places it could be a lot better. But when compared with the alternative -- no public education at all -- you'll see why it's a necessary foundation to democracy.

>>chlodw+V4
And there is the crux of this argument, at least as it pertains to HackerNews. Which is the palpable fear that white supremacy focused rhetoric will be marginalized and de-platformed.

>>illumi+y2
That's a good reason to have public education, of course. But it's a nice-to-have. Democracy cannot function without educated voters.

Agreed for sure on the second point. They turned everybody into publishers with global reach and still haven't really thought about what previous publishers did to make sure that power was used responsibly.