Episode Notes
- Twitter made it worse in some ways by taking it down
- NY Post by itself never would have gotten as much tracktion
- When The NY Times runs a story it means something in a different way
- Twitter cant be the one to fix it
- So many ways around it, screenshots, using link shorteners or linking to a google search for it, dont have to be a hacker
- Labeling and throlling it is better than taking it down, more speech not less
Fake News
This story from the NY Post has really ended up dominating the new cycle, at least in the past few days. The question is did what Facebook and Twitter did make it better or worse. It seems clear in this case that their censorship of the story played right into Trump supports distrust of social media companies.
They are right up there with the mainstream media companies in these loonies minds. They think that folks from twitter, The NY Times and the Clintons are all puppet masters trying to control the world for nefarious reasons. It’s total nonsense to anyone with half a brain but blocking a story like this from the Post only plays in to that fear.
From what I understand facebook didnt block it but they did limit its ability to go viral, which is a fascinating amount of control that facebook apparently has. How in the world would that even work? While Twitter actively blocked it, or at least tried to.
But if they stayed out of it all together? Or what if twitter just labeled the post the way they have with other trump tweets. Thats “more speech” so maybe thats better still?
Makes me want to read more about this debate, including this story from Emily Bazelon in The NY Times Magazine, because its really interesting to think about where we go from here. In a post trump world i hope we all get a chance to catch our breath and clean up the way we handle this shit so this can never ever happen again.