The American Collapse (of Civil Society (non-governmental institutions))

Politics
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If you do not understand why a thread titled “The American Collapse” often involves political discussion and believe we can discuss it without talking about how society deals with major life decisions (i.e. politics and governance), then you have little hope to understand the problems.

Do you just think that somehow wealth inequality, racial injustice, mass shootings, and the daily struggle of living in late capitalism is somehow unrelated to how we decided to govern ourselves? Seems naive to me tbh

Hell it’s well written in the OP

The predator in American society isn’t just its super-rich — but an invisible and insatiable force: the normalization of what in the rest of the world would be seen as shameful, historic, generational moral failures, if not crimes, becoming mere mundane everyday affairs not to be too worried by or troubled about.

Normalization of this is due to lack of agency and ability to escape the power structures constructed to prevent the proletariat from exerting political power. And especially in the United States where the use of capital has been key in removing this power.

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Interesting lookback at what the network used to be. Those lines to Dover, Atlantic city, etc. are all things that I think now-a-days people might be into. I’ve frequently commented that its a bit ridiculous that train service between Philly and AC does not exist because its a 2.5-3 Hour drive on the AC expressway which if its peak season can morph into 4-5.

I can personally say that yeah SEPTA really need to upgrade signal tech and they’ve finally started to do it for the Trolley and Subway lines and I believe Regional Rail as well. I’ve personally been in suburban station at rush hour as a commuter with a train delayed 40ish minutes because of switching issues causing it to basically have to wait for the next wave of other trains before it could get in.

That said the actual layout of the regional rail system and Throughcut tunnel for all trains and the ability to basically hop off at any stop between Suburban at 16th street and 30th street and catch any other train line is great and as they state its really just lacking at better management and execution.

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Right. And when someone starts talking about the impeachment of Trump, that has got nothing to do with it. There’s another entire thread for who is leading the impeachment inquiries.

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What the what!? Is Twitter actually doing the right thing for once!? It is almost certainly a response to differentiate from Facebook performing a colossal self-own with their political ad policy, but who cares if it gets a good result for society.

Read the thread for the details.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about what Twitter is doing here, and while I think no political ads on Twitter is better than Facebook’s policy, I still think it’s the wrong answer.

No ads are better than untrue ads, but I think Jack minimizes the effects of this policy when he writes that no ads favor the incumbents and just leaves it at that. I forget the exact quote, but not taking an opinion always favors the status quo. Staying silent always favors the oppressor, not the oppressed. By banning all political ads, Jack is essentially supporting the status quo. Yes, he’s preventing falsehoods from being spread on Twitter, but he’s also preventing candidates who need that exposure from getting it.

This policy is better than nothing, but it’s still not the right answer.

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I do think it is getting closer to correct though.

A big part of civil society are institutions, and how they guide behavior of people and companies. For internet life, the institutions have to also be online institutions, as it is impossible for non-distributed efforts to keep up.

For example, when trying to work out what is “true” or “correct”, there can’t be a single unified source of truth or facts for the internet. Instead a website like Wikipedia crowdsources verification of knowledge, etc.

When Google wanted to stop promoting conspiracy theories they just included links to Wikipedia. Does that work? No idea, but it’s the only way to work at scale.

The team at Twitter realize that the only way to sort out this truth in political advertising issue is to rely on another institution for fact checking, as it’s impossible for them to keep up themselves.

But they can’t rely on Wikipedia, because politics is constantly evolving, and it takes too long for the built-in error checking of Wikipedia to catch up.

Wikipedia is based on verifiable sources, such as books and news publications…

And those news organizations are reporting on on-going news stories…

And those on-going news stories are often happening ON Twitter!!!

They recognize that there is a cycle that they can’t escape from because they are the source of the cycle. Stuff that happens on Twitter is the news. They can’t error check the news yet, because Twitter is creating the first layer of sources that everything else can be built upon.

Twitter will lose hardly any money turning down political adverts, and only stands to gain from entrenching the service as the place where news happens.

Allowing news to happen more naturally on Twitter helps the status quo, but Trump’s election upset the previous status quo. For now the status quo is already that Twitter got Trump elected. Trump paid Twitter no money for that.

It seems to me Twitter isn’t losing anything by positioning itself as a service that helps upset the status quo. Upsetting the status quo is what news is and the more it makes news happen, the better for its native advertising.

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You make a lot of really good points.

The problem, and I’m not the first person to say this, is that Twitter and Facebook want us to think of them as just platforms. It’s not their responsibility to fact check an article because they’re just letting other people post news stories, they’re not the ones writing the stories in the first place.

While this is technically true, both Twitter and Facebook are more than just platforms. The majority of people get their news from what they see and what’s shared on them. As a result, they do have a responsibility to fact check and curate what’s posted. They can do this with other things, notice there’s really never a problem about child pornography on Twitter or Facebook, so the technology or the capabilities exist, they just choose not to.

A separate issue, but still related, is that while I’m criticizing both Twitter and Facebook, they’re just companies and it shouldn’t be just their responsibility to deal with this. Law makers need to address this. In the US, the First Amendment only applies to the government, but Congress can pass laws that can restrict falsehoods on Twitter and Facebook. The Federal Election Commission has the authority to step in and make regulations. None of this is happening. There is an abdication of responsibility on governments’ part. It shouldn’t be up to tech companies to decide how much privacy we get on the internet, what information they can share with third parties or now, what is allowable on their websites or not. Government needs to step in and make laws and regulations to provide guidelines.

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The problem with these policies, even a policy as simple seemingly simple as “no political ads”, is that these companies are run by nerds. They are every bit as pedantic as this forum, perhaps even worse. People are going to argue all day and night about various edge cases to the policy. Does this count as political? Do these excessive weasel words count as a lie? They are then eternally trapped in these debates like we are.

The way to avoid these debates is to stop trying to avoid bias and both embrace and admit it. Replace policy with process. Have a strict process for how content will be judged, but leave the actual judgement just up to trusted and knowledgeable humans. The trusted humans will simply decide and write the reasons for their decisions post-hoc.

Over time those decisions can be compiled into a document of general guidelines so that users can have pretty good expectations about what content will be permitted. It can also help the judges make consistent decisions from day to day by referencing their previous decisions. Of course, the document will be non-binding and subject to instant change because that’s how fast the Internet moves. It’s just a helpful reference. Now nobody can complain, they just have to deal with it.

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I think you’re wrong about quite a lot there. I don’t think they have responsibilities for checking the truth of things posted and shared on their services. What people post and share is the free speech part, and fake news and lies are not restricted speech. Hate speech and child pornography is.

Twitter doesn’t have the capability of checking for the truth of things posted on Twitter, because, as I said, there isn’t reporting to verify what is news or not yet.

But both Twitter and Facebook recognise that paid advertising isn’t free speech because, by definition, it costs money, so if you don’t have money you can’t say it. That’s unlike the entire rest of their output, which is free to post or share or whatever.

Facebook have decided “whatever” and Twitter have decided “none”. Both have done so to avoid the job of deciding what is true or not because THAT IS IMPOSSIBLE in fast-moving news situations. Even in slow-moving news situations. Child pornography doesn’t take many days of investigation to tell if it is child pornography or not.

Do you want the government to decide what can be shared on social media? Cool… maybe move to China?

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It’s far from impossible. There are fact checking organizations. The legit ones do a great job. You just can’t be like Facebook and hire the white supremacist ones.

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To some degree, I agree with you, but hate speech and child pornography are only restricted speech because we made it that way. The government could just as easily make fake news and lies restricted speech as well, not that I’m necessarily promoting that, I’m not. And for the record, the FEC already regulates political ads on TV and the radio and other forms of media. They could just as easily make regulations regarding internet advertising as well.

It is entirely within Facebook and Twitter’s power to regulate fake news and lies.

How do I know this? Because they’re already doing it:

" So Mr. Hampton, who had created a liberal, digitally focused political action committee, reached out to a colleague and designer for help producing a fake political advertisement that claimed to be from a group called Conservatives for a Green New Deal and falsely stated that Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican, supported the proposal.

Mr. Hampton was able to get the ad posted on Facebook, but it was soon taken down. He tried again by working with Mike Gravel, the retired senator from Alaska whose brief run for the Democratic nomination ended this summer, but the ad was again rejected."

So apparently Facebook can fact-check private citizens but not politicians? Give me a break. It should be easier to fact check political ads because they’re advertisements. Facebook knows about them in advance. A politician asks Facebook if they can run an ad, Facebook fact checks it, and then either accepts it or rejects it. This is a company that makes billions and billions of dollars a quarter. They have algorithms that can figure out pretty much anything. To say that they can’t fact check politicians is just a cop out. They can, they just don’t want to.

And if something can’t be verified as truth yet, Facebook can label things as such.

You’re not understanding the concept of “free speech.” The free comes from freedom,** not any associated cost or price tag. At least in the US, paid advertising is absolutely “free speech,” just see the Citizens United decision.

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Okay, you’re using different examples than my points.

Twitter isn’t in the “linking to news” business. It’s in the “making the news” business. If the news already exists in a place, and is shared and linked to on Twitter, it’s possible to check the facts that are on that external website. But if things are happening in real time, and people are posting things to Twitter, and some of them are lies, or false, or wrong, or incorrect, then there isn’t a fact-checking website in the world that can keep up with that.

This is my example. I’m not talking about Facebook adverts because OF COURSE Facebook wants the election money.

Twitter isn’t getting any (or much) election money at the moment, so OF COURSE they are going take the option where increase their reach and brand as much as possible. If they position themselves as “the place for organic reach that can’t be gamed with more money” then that’s great for them.

The issue here is that both Facebook and Twitter recognise the issue with paid advertising, and are taking diametrically opposed approaches, both which serves their interest best.

But to think that Twitter can fact check EVERYTHING posted to it by EVERYONE is insane. Literally bonkers.

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I’m confused…

I replied to @Neo’s post which is specifically about political ads. I said that I disagree with Twitter’s policy. I think that Facebook and Twitter can and should fact check political ads and the news. A couple posts down, you write:

If you’re talking about the average person, and not political ads or news stories, why are you saying I’m wrong? Your points are different from MY points, which are what you were replying to in the first place.

I argue cats. You say I’m wrong and then you argue dogs. I then explain to you why I argue cats and then you write that you were never arguing cats, you were always arguing dogs. But your post was in response to my post about cats!

I was never arguing dogs.

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They can. YouTube has hundreds of hours of video uploaded every minute, and somehow it isn’t just a bunch of snuff films. Twitter is just text, and as a lot less users. The Internet says about 6000 tweets per second. With the amount of money they have, and the engineering resources, it’s definitely do-able. They just don’t have the will.

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I’m talking about lines like this: “In the US, the First Amendment only applies to the government, but Congress can pass laws that can restrict falsehoods on Twitter and Facebook.”

Congress can pass any law it wants. What do you think Facebook or Twitter are going to do?

You are arguing for China-levels of social media monitoring and control. What happens if the government decides what is true or not?

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Fact checking and content monitoring are two completely different problems. I can’t believe you think they are comparable!

Do you know there are entire professions and academic fields called things like “journalism” and “history” where people train and work for years to determine what is true or not, or what is more likely to be true or not?

Tell me how much training does it take to answer the question “does this look a bit like porn to you”? That’s the EASY part, as it takes no time or special skill or knowledge. And even then the computer’s aren’t perfect. Don’t tell me you’ve not read the stories where a nipple is visible and content is removed. Or that there’s a piece of art history in a video, and it’s blocked on YouTube.

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Again, all of this was in the context of discussing only political ads.

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You don’t need to employ your own journalists and engage in a full investigation over a single tweet. The overwhelming majority of problematic stuff posted online is already well established as false, and is repeated. You can identify a single thing that people are posting is wrong, and then block everyone trying to share that same falsehood. Also ban the accounts that posted it. Also ban all associated accounts. Also actually ban all bot accounts. If you actually take strong measures, the job actually gets easier and you don’t have people posting crap to begin with.

As for ads the best solution is to not have ads at all, political or otherwise. Make your money by charging users to have accounts.

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In the case of just political adverts, it might be possible if there was a time delay on any advert from when it is submitted to when it is published for the first time. Maybe a two week delay would be enough for each advert to be checked. If kept to such a schedule, Facebook or Twitter would be able to hire professional and vetted people to check the stories if they become too overwhelming.

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Ah, so we’re living in a fantasy world where no real world rules apply. I forgot I was debating Scott. Backing out of this one fast!

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