Comment by lykahb

Twitter is a plague on public discourse. We'd be better off as a society if it were never invented. If I knew how to put the genie back in the bottle, I would advocate for it.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall when a legal team responsible for supporting this narrative has to tackle the issue of regulating the platforms as a public utility, but not the Internet providers that carry them.

There have been people making these arguments both for and against for a very long time. Even as an example, on this very site:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I think you'll quickly lean in the opposing view after reviewing those viewpoints, because if Twitter was a utility it would have been declared one at some point in the previous 11 years.

The high-road leads to Trump agreeing with you that we need to prevent the spread of fake news to protect society. Then, as the duly elected leader sworn to protect society, he takes on that solemn duty and tasks the agency he controls, the FCC (the entity usually tasked with controlling media content), to make sure that all fake news and entities peddling fake news are permanently squashed so that they will not interfere in the upcoming election.

EDIT: and as if to prove the point, I've been trolled by someone who really doesn't want a race to the top, they just want to have the same easy answer that everyone who ever grew up in the blue would have. I said more words, you said less. Congratulations on your victory my fellow piece of shit.

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Only the inwardly good ones are zen master ego busters. Everyone is a self-hating jerk sometimes. I don't think that's a great label for trolls anyways. Saying they all hate themselves is more masturbatory than true.

> The high-road leads to where we actually want to be.

Absolutely agree. What I'm doing right now is high-roading about the paradoxical nature of high-roading a troll. In this circumstance, the true high-road is the low-road, and the true low-road is the high-road. I'm saying you're low-roading by thinking something that obviously has not worked is suddenly going to start. You're taking an irrational but popular position. You'll win, but be wrong: low-roading.

All of the problems currently most difficult are ones which our intuition inherently fails at, this being one. Similarly, most heroes journeys end where they began just with a better perspective. Similarly, the easiest answer is often the best, but it usually takes trying everything else to understand why. These long-arc experience-driven positions are hard to achieve, and hard to understand, but correct: high-roading.

Right now is one of those cases where we have to re-learn tactics that seem savage, but with the benefit of knowing savagery is context sensitive.

In this battle there's a side that cares about being right, and there's a side that cares about winning. Trumps side can literally physically kick the asses of the side that cares about being right. Not only that, but they've got trolls that can get under their skin and make Liberals pout, and whine, and cry.

Liberals are largely more rational/correct about most things.

Personally, I believe that true leaders should be able to win a race to either bottom or top. They should be able to beat others physically, rationally, and emotionally. Trying to do this "fact-check" stuff is just liberals patting themselves on the back for being justifiably more rational. But that's not what matters now. What matters is that liberals should be better at trolling, and better at fist fighting because that is the only dominance that will create the change this world legitimately needs.

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In conclusion, just ban the POTUS and say it was for the lulz. As long as everyone knows you're not actually that dumb, it's the best possible strategy for dealing with trolls.

let the white house spin up its own activitypub instance, then.

shouldn't public communications occur on public infrastructure?

Because, for better or worse, the sources of truth that normal people historically relied on for their barometer of what is true or not have been democratized by the internet.

We live in a world where a substantial number of people believe the earth is flat, that 5G cellular is a mind control scheme, that vaccines cause autism, that COVID-19 was created by a political party, that the concept of climate change is manufactured, or that major national crises are actually just actors being paid to further a political narrative.

Most of these ideas aren't new, but in decades past you might have heard about them from a conspiracy-therorist neighbor, a low profile website, or an alternative magazine with little reputation of its own.

Now, these ideas are spread on the exact same platforms as objectively truthful / scientifically sound media. Your Youtube conspiracy theory channel is right next to the BBC's videos. Your viral Facebook post could be from the New York Times, or it might be from a propaganda organization - or worse, an account that looks like a normal person but which was specifically created to spread misinformation that seems plausibly truthful.

Credibility is distributed and anyone can publish to a huge audience, which is wonderful sometimes, and othertimes deeply problematic, because the viewer often doesn't know enough to distinguish fact from fiction and can't trust the publisher at face value anymore.

Its uncharted territory. The cost to distribute is zero, and ideas spread far and wide - but that means that there are equally as many incredible sources on any given topic as credible ones, and telling the difference is hard, and sometimes not knowing the difference is dangerous. Dunning-Kruger writ large.

Because some people can't think for themselves, unfortunately.

Because people don't engage in critical thinking and many are predisposed to consider statements made by people in positions of high authority as fact.