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Comment by call_me_dana | Hacker News Reader

On the surface, it sounds really nice. But anyone who’s paying attention in the fake news era has a general idea on what this will be used for.

Any tweets questioning the official narrative will be roundly criticized and ridiculed. Instead of having to delve into a long reply thread to see debunkers make their case, there will be an easy to digest notice within grasp. Which is not necessarily a bad thing if it is used fairly and responsibly. But judging on Twitter’s past performance, it likely won’t be.

Dissent will be publicly humiliated while pure disinformation from governments, think tanks, and corporations have no such objections. Any doubts to the accepted story will be pointed at one of the fact checker sites and further inquiries censored.

In an honest world, this would be one giant step to finally getting at the truth. But this isn’t an honest world, is it?

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> In an honest world, this would be one giant step to finally getting at the truth. But this isn’t an honest world, is it?

Not to mention that in an honest wold, why would you even need something like this?

You don't need it in an honest world, and it will end up being worse than nothing in a dishonest world. It doesn't seem like a good idea in any scenario.

> Not to mention that in an honest world, why would you even need something like this?

The world is what we make it - we are the masters of our own destiny. This is literally true (subject to boundaries imposed on us by nature: the laws of physics, the physical resources available to us, the nature of the evolved human mind and the societies we have built for ourselves to operate in, and other things I may overlook).

If a variable in the world is not to our liking, and it is fixable, we can choose to fix it (as a collective species), or not. Mother Nature imposes some restrictions on this, but not many.

From the article:

> To date, we have conducted more than 100 qualitative interviews with individuals across the political spectrum who use Twitter, and we received broad general support for Birdwatch. In particular, people valued notes being in the community’s voice (rather than that of Twitter or a central authority) and appreciated that notes provided useful context to help them better understand and evaluate a Tweet (rather than focusing on labeling content as “true” or “false”). Our goal(!) is to build Birdwatch in the open, and have it shaped(!) by the Twitter community.

> To that end, we’re also taking significant steps to make Birdwatch transparent:

- All(!???) data contributed to Birdwatch will be publicly available and downloadable in TSV files

- As we develop algorithms that power Birdwatch — such as reputation and consensus systems — we aim to(!) publish that code(!) publicly in the Birdwatch Guide. The initial ranking system for Birdwatch is already available here.

> We hope this will enable experts, researchers, and the public to analyze or audit Birdwatch, identifying opportunities or flaws that can help us(!) more quickly build an effective(!) community-driven(!) solution.

If what they are saying is 100% true (and not at all misleading, and remains true going forward through time), this would be an extremely big deal. Modifications to the fundamental systems we use for collective communication and sense making is the obvious place a benevolent dictator would start to improve the current state of affairs.

However, history strongly suggests that this is not only not true, but most likely knowingly untrue (aka: a lie). I am obviously speculating, but I think this is a reasonable speculation.

Speculating sucks though. I think we are forced to do it far more often than is necessary (under the limitations imposed upon us by nature).

So how about this idea:

Let's say, in the spirit of uniting the country (USA), we make a bi-partisan decision to create a new role for the government: an as-honest-as-possible, process of constant audit of all "major" public communication platforms. Carefully selected, proven to be honest and trustworthy bi-partisan technical people (from the "grassroots" community) would be forcibly embedded within all major corporations, with 100% visibility into all source code, processes, and meetings (where "necessary"). They would carefully monitor the nature of all of this software that is exerting such a powerful force on our society, and that of the world. Where possible (which should be most of the time), their findings would be published for the public to see (and "sniff for imperfections or corruption").

These would be positions of extreme power and insight, and would offer genuine risks to intellectual property and confidential strategy of the companies subject to this treatment. As a first pass at managing this, these people could be paid extremely well, but they would also be subject to extremely punitive measures if they were to ever behave in a compromising manner.

Of course, the flaws in such a plan are numerous. Reality is complex - we can face that head on and manage it, or bury our heads in the sand with speculative claims like "this wouldn't work".

The general goal of this is to force(!) truthfulness (as opposed to honesty) into society. The world is what we make of it, and we can make this little corner of it how we want it to be. And if we happen to disagree with the specifics of "how we want it to be", then deal with it head on: figure it out, and ship to production.

As I understand it, all politicians desire what is best for the entire country (and the world - they only differ on how to achieve this), as well as desire to govern based on The Truth - so I wouldn't expect we would get any pushback from them (and if we did, journalists would be on it, publishing salacious exposes on the obvious corruption) - that leaves the decision up to "we the people".

On a scale of 1 to 10, how good/bad is this general idea? Is it a complete non-starter due to something I have overlooked (that cannot be changed)? Are there even better approaches than this? I have no idea, I am just trying to put some ideas out there for consideration. At some point, I think we have to do something to alter the trajectory we are on.

> As we develop algorithms that power Birdwatch — such as reputation and consensus systems — we aim to(!) publish that code(!) publicly in the Birdwatch Guide. The initial ranking system for Birdwatch is already available here.

I think the idea of finding truth through consensus is the flaw here. A system like this would have silenced the great revolutionary thinkers of history.

> I think the idea of finding truth through consensus is the flaw here.

Oh, I'm not proposing that truth should be (or can be) defined by consensus, nor does the article.

This might be a decent example of the value of such a system: if someone makes such a proposal (ie: "Truth is defined by consensus."), or if someone asserts that someone else had made such a proposal, rather than the tweet being left as it is allowing the misinformation to propagate through the memeplex and into people's minds (aka: their reality), a formal rebuttal can be attached directly to it (so anyone happening upon can see that a collaborative consensus has been reached that it is plausibly misinformation), which is distinctly different from the tweet being declared(!) as conclusively(!) and unambiguously FALSE.

Sometimes such distinctions are important, sometimes they are not. In this case, the distinction is important, because of an anticipatory line I included in my comment:

> Of course, the flaws in such a plan are numerous. Reality is complex - we can face that head on and manage it, or bury our heads in the sand with speculative claims like "this wouldn't work".

In this case, you seem to be asserting that this wouldn't work, due to a specific flaw. However, the flaw you point out is not actually valid - I think this is a legitimate demonstration of how crowdsourcing can address a situation where the truth of a matter is "in play"...one person suggests an idea, another person asserts that it cannot work because <X>, another user realizes that <X> is a false statement and points that out. To be clear: this has not rendered the initial tweet to be True (that would be invalid logic), but it has cast significant and valid doubt on the assertion of ~"Viability = False" (because of a specific reason).

I think it wouldn't hurt to maybe have a little primer on the basics of logic embedded somewhere in this process as well - we always talk about how the general public needs improved critical thinking, so why not teach that wherever we can?

I think the general idea behind Birdwatch is plausibly workable and valuable, and using crowdsourcing allows it to scale. Similarly, I believe the general idea behind my idea to ensure that everyone is kept honest is also plausibly workable and valuable (until someone points out a valid reason that it isn't, of course).

> A system like this would have silenced the great revolutionary thinkers of history.

Can you explain your reasoning? I don't see anything in the proposal that suggests an intention to use this for precision or wholesale censorship - in fact, the article explicitly says the exact opposite of your concern:

> Eventually we aim to make notes visible directly on Tweets for the global Twitter audience, when there is consensus from a broad and diverse set of contributors.

> In this first phase of the pilot, notes will only be visible on a separate Birdwatch site. On this site, pilot participants can also rate the helpfulness of notes added by other contributors. These notes are being intentionally kept separate from Twitter for now, while we build Birdwatch and gain confidence that it produces context people find helpful and appropriate. Additionally, notes will not have an effect on the way people see Tweets or our system recommendations.

Are you seeing something here regarding censorship that I'm not?

To be fair, this is the same way all broadcast media has been since the Gutenberg Press was primarily used to print indulgences for the church. We got a good 25 years between the time the internet was relatively widespread before it was completely subverted by the powers that be, that’s pretty good. Now onward to the next communication technology, because the internet is now only useful for maintaining the status quo, just like TV, radio, newspaper, and every broadcast medium prior.

It don't think it is possible with a format like Twitter - I can imagine something like Wikipedia, but with sources limited to scientific publications, where each person improves upon a shared document.

Maybe Google wave is a better fit, allowing rich non-text items to enter it.

On Twitter you will have each person fight for their side, and you will never see a convergent product.

Of course this answer (and your question) presupposes that we are trying to achieve some form of shared consensus, whereas on Twitter, it is really two or more sides of a culture war fighting and wars are zero or negative sum games. If we are trying to find the truth I benefit even if every theory I had was wrong, because it still helped us get to the one that works, but in a war if I don't win I am sure to lose.

I also don't see how this is not corrupted to cover embarrassing or inconvenient things up by governments who have influence/infiltrate such thing.

Popular speech doesn't need protection.

That’s a pithy retort devoid of content. If 60% of the population believes the truth (for the sake of argument) and 40% believes another, the 40% can still do quite a bit of damage by intentionally spreading misinformation (causing confusion and chaos that the 60% have to distract themselves from) and/or violence (government overthrow doesn’t have to come from the majority).

Similarly, it’s not hard to imagine that if the minority is the one that’s correct, the majority can cause some damage enforcing the belief that the emperor is indeed wearing clothes.

The truth is the thing that needs protection, not speech. The challenge is that objective truth can be epistemologically difficult to protect without protecting lies (or conversely fighting falsehoods can inadvertently end up fighting some truths).

Worse, if the 40% are more enthusiastic about spreading their viewpoint than the 60% are about spreading the truth, then social media may have a majority of posts supporting the falsehood.

>The challenge is that objective truth can be epistemologically difficult to protect without protecting lies

Which is why even lies are, and should be, protected speech, even if that's not the current trendy thought.

Ultimately what it comes down to is: protecting unpopular minority opinions. If they're not protected, how would it even be possible to evaluate the "truth" of the content.

There is no universal truth. That's why everyone's speech should be protected. Even lies.

Consider: Every civil rights achievement made in the last 100 years. If the minority opinion was squelched without a chance to be considered, what progress would have been made?

Would a "Ministry of Truth" in whatever form it might take, have even allowed statements questioning racial or gender equality?

Any system that enforces such censorship becomes a theocracy dictating dogma.

A statement as simple as "There is no god" would become blasphemous again.

Actually I want 0 protections for lies. Whether the truth is in the majority or minority wouldn’t matter. The challenge is how to distinguish lies from truth. For what it’s worth the court system tends to be a place where that actually holds (discovered lies have a penalty). I think something similar could be done in the public square for public personalities as those personalities have an outsized influence on the public. In other words, as a public figure if you make blatantly false statements you open yourself to law suits where you have to demonstrate you had a good faith reason for your statement. This would instantly quash a lot of bullshit that politicians and celebrities spew with minimal downsides.

It’s the same line of reasoning that prevents public figures from suing people who make fun of them - when you’re a public figure you have an outsized responsibility to the public good.

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