This is what the outsized tolerance for internal political activism inside SV companies has resulted in.
(European observer)
(European observer)
Regardless of their internal culture, Twitter will always have to make some political decisions.
Mostly one world leader. The rest of them seem to continue to primarily communicate through press conferences, television appearances and other fairly traditional methods.
Edit: I mean, Sundar must be an opportunist rather than an ideologist, right?
Larry and Sergey: I assume very few people know what they actually think about the big issues.
Overall, the majority has been pro gay rights since around 2004. By 2017 it was 70% for, 24% against. Breaking down by party in 2017, Democrats were 83% for, Republicans 54% for.
Women 73% for, men 66% for. White 73%, Hispanic 70%, Black 63%.
81% postgrad, 77% college grad, 66% some college, 64% high school or less.
83% 18-29, 79% 30-49, 65% 50-64, 58% 65+. See [1].
When it comes to same sex marriage, by 2019 61% overall approved. That's been above 50% since 2013, and above the percentage opposed since 2011.
Republicans still aren't majority in favor, at 44%. Democrats are at 75%.
By religion, 79% of the unaffiliated are in favor, 66% of white mainline protestants, 61% of Catholics, 44% of Black protestants, and only 29% of white evangelical protestants.
66% of women, 57% of men. 62% of whites, 58% of Hispanics, and 51% of Blacks. 74% of Millennials, 58% Gen-X, 51% Boomers, and 45% of the Silent Generation. See [2].
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2017/10/05/5-homosexual...
[2] https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-ga...
That fact alone makes me believe this is a result of internal pressure.
In many cases, Twitter's rules have been used to suspend accounts that people thought they were supposed to protect. And Twitter has gone out of its way and contorted every rule in order to protect the President from censorship and suspension, out of "public interest", despite the fact that he has repeatedly violated the rules that would have caused anyone else to be suspended.
It's the quest for "engagement" and getting always more users and ad views that generates this situation. What can be used to sell you shoes and earphones can also be used to sell you political ideas. When the algorithm wants to show you some inflammatory and misleading political factoid because it knows that it's very likely to make you react, it's working as intended. Not because it was written by a communist, but because it was written by somebody optimizing for this metric.
As a counter example: do you think HN manages to remain mostly not completely trash because it's run by apolitical people or because it's effectively run not-for-profit? I think I know the answer to this question.
It's amusing how I've seen this "internal politic" boogeyman pop up in discussions over the past month or so. As if all the woes of the silicon valley could suddenly be blamed on those pesky "woke" devs while everybody else just tries to get the job done. This American election can't be over soon enough, everybody seems to be losing their marbles.
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1310583298666696705
Edit: To clarify, he is saying the right way ahead for companies is to be apolitical, or, "mission-founded".
Coinbase offered employees not comfortable with the non-political mission-founded way exit packages:
Edit: but also good for China, and they're a lot better positioned to take advantage of this.
On the bright side social media is becoming so unbearable that we'll see more decentralization. It's hard to get banned from a forum when you run an instance of it yourself. And hard not to be when they are run by the mentally ill who think that saying crazy is a bannable offense for being ableist.
Second, if America eats itself, impact on Europe will be negative. There is little Europe has to gain on this and a lot to lose.
I'm not saying that an ultra-politicized workplace can't be an issue, I'm saying that it's silly to blame this particular problem on it. The very concept of ad-supported social networks is the issue, not the political alignment of the guy who writes the CSS.
Dang will kick you off HN for all sorts of reasons - that's his right, and it's generally not 'political'.
It's hard to ban 'fake news' without maybe getting possibly political, but it's not rocket science.
There are already all sorts of things on FB and Twitter that are censored, and it shouldn't be 'political'. If you say you want to murder someone, well, then that's a problem.
Now email that's different. If you want to be a moron over completely private network, or, you want to be a moron on your own website, then go ahead.
Brace yourself then, because this election will not end on November 3rd. And the craziness we see today will be nothing compared to whats coming next. Regardless of which side "wins".
It isn't possible to be completely "apolitical" but you can be non-partisan. For me this isn't a left vs right or Republican vs Democrat issue, its an establishment vs everyone else issue. If this policy was in effect in 2002 and 2003 people would be getting censored and banned for disputing "the fact" that Iraq had WMD. Just a few days ago NATO members blocked the former OPCW chief from giving testimony on the (very much disputed) narratives regarding the alleged chemical attacks in Syria. You can be sure the people being blocked and censored by Twitter won't be those pushing the official US government narrative. The argument Twitter is making that, "people are too dumb to figure out what is true, so we will tell them what is true" is very dangerous when Twitter doesn't have a monopoly on the truth, and is run by people with a vested interest and belief in "establishment" narratives - no matter how questionable (or provably false) those narratives are.
As a thought experiment: imagine if Twitter did the same thing as Coinbase did, got rid of all the politicized people. Problem solved? Of course not. The problem is that Twitter has this incredible influence. Asking them not to do anything is also not neutral and not a solution, you'll end up with 4chan or gab.
Take WhatsApp in Brazil. It's been instrumental to Bolsonaro's election due to the astroturfing and dissemination of fake news by pro-Bolsonaro supporters. Do you think it's due to Facebook's employee being pro-Bolsonaro? Or Facebook itself espousing a pro-Bolsonaro stance? Of course not.
It's really missing the forest for the trees IMO.
Literally nobody was buying that Iraq had WMD. It was clear that the politicians were riling themselves up in a patriotic furvor.
The evidence was weak from day one and it was clear a propaganda machine was in play.
> Twitter doesn't have a monopoly on the truth,
I am so sick of statements like this that ultimately lead to inaction and apathy.
SOME THINGS ARE JUST TRUE AND SOME ARE NOT. There is no "two sides" to them. There is objective truth and objective lies.
Bullshit isn't always, or even mostly, an outright lie. I'd go so far as to say that making shit up whole cloth is the rarest kind of deception.
You must be very young, because this is totally false. Both political parties, every network and every newspaper was not only uniform in their belief and assertion that Iraq had WMD, they ridiculed and attacked everyone who denied this falsehood.
>Israel, Russia, Britain, China, and even France held positions similar to that of the United States; France's President Jacques Chirac told Time magazine last February, "There is a problem—the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq. The international community is right ... in having decided Iraq should be disarmed." In sum, no one doubted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/01/spies-l...
There should be no doubt that disputing the official narrative on Iraq WMD would have been censored by Twitter and other big tech companies that use establishment narrative as the only benchmark for truth.
>SOME THINGS ARE JUST TRUE AND SOME ARE NOT. There is no "two sides" to them. There is objective truth and objective lies.
And just who should decide what these things are, you? Twitter? The US government?
There was an incredibly harsh and damaging debate on this matter. Back then I was on the losing leftist side. We watched the Fox News broadcasts in horror.
Nowadays I find myself on the rightish side. Fox News is still insane though.
In my mind the current equivalent of the outsized influence of 2002/2003 Fox News programming is the political influence of employees of SV companies.
Somehow the common factor here is americans imposing their misinformed view of the world to the rest of the world with force, be it physical or cultural.
Maybe employees have power in Europe, but here in the United States employees have almost no power. Employment is at-will, and anyone who causes trouble for management is summarily fired.
Even management itself can be summarily fired by the board of directors of publicly owned corporations, like Twitter. Jack Dorsey is answerable to the stockholders, and also to the advertisers who generate Twitter's revenue. Not to the employees, who could all be eliminated and replaced if necessary. Jack too could be eliminated and replaced if necessary.
The only exception is Mark Zuckerberg, who set it up so that he has total voting control over Facebook and is untouchable by the stockholders. But that also means Zuck is untouchable by the employees.
The idea that SV corporations are run by the employees is a strange one.
This is literally false. As you said, "SOME THINGS ARE JUST TRUE AND SOME ARE NOT."
I didn't buy it myself, and there was certainly significant opposition to the Iraq invasion, but to say nobody was buying it is a huge exaggeration, unfortunately.
I am so sick to death of hearing this "argument." Because it's irrelevant to the situation. And I'll tell you why:
In the United States,
1. Private entities are not bound by the First Amendment. That means they can host (or refuse to do so) any speech they choose, because that's the First Amendment right of all individuals and private entities;
2. The US government is forbidden to be the arbiter of speech, except in a few, clearly defined areas (advocating the violent overthrow of the government, making credible threats of violence, etc.);
3. If you don't like decisions about speech that a particular individual or private entity makes, you are perfectly free to speak out against those decisions, organize others to do so, and/or vote with your feet/wallet and don't engage with that individual or entity;
4. Unless you have a management and/or ownership role in a private organization (e.g., Twitter), you don't have the right to change their policies or speech;
5. You absolutely have the right to speak out and say just about anything, but you don't have the right to force others to host that speech on their private property. And that's a very good thing. If that weren't the case, I would have the right to blare midget furry porn or all-goatse-all-the-time projections or all manner of other offensive, hateful, disgusting things in your living room.
I'm sure many will disagree with me. If you do, please engage me in discussion in addition to taking other action -- both of which (and thank you HN for making that possible) are your free expression.
You won't get any argument about that from me.
>That’s not the style of forum people should be defending. It’s legally permissible but all types of dystopian.
I'm not defending any such forums. In fact, I avoid them like the plague.
But I do support freedom of expression.
And whether you (or I, for that matter) dislike Twitter or Facebook, or even Stormfront or the ACLU, while we are perfectly free to express our dislike, expose dishonesty or bias, recommend/create other forums and encourage others to do the same, we aren't allowed to block the speech of others.
What would you suggest as a viable alternative to the status quo?
I think Justice Brandeis[0] said it much more succinctly than I did: "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitney_v._California#Quotes
This is what a lack of will to clamp down on misinformation, and lies from the President on their platform, out of fear of being of subsequently being politically repressed has resulted in.
Twitter is twisting and contorting itself in a million knots to avoid simply banning the president's account for the damage it is causing to society, the economy, and literally human life.
The worst part is that the people in these companies rarely have any experience with traditional religion, let alone extreme/fundamentalist religion, and therefore don't see the obvious patterns used by these extreme activists. I grew up as a dissenter in a fundamentalist Christian family, and the reactions I got when I stood my ground and said that I believed in evolution and a billions year-old earth are incredibly similar to what I see when trying to argue with these extreme activists. Also similar to my fundamentalist upbringing are the subgroup (minority) of people who obviously derive immense satisfaction from their piety, and won't hesitate to condemn others in the in-group for not demonstrating their full dedication to The Mission. These enforcers fit a personality profile that is identical to what I encounter at my overly woke workplace. Recently one of these enforcers told a guy (he was raised by Polish immigrants in a poor, inner-city neighborhood of Philadelphia) that he was wrong when he committed the horrible atrocity of celebrating the purchase of his first car, and saying how he "deserved it" after all these years. She was quick to spoil the happy hour at the outdoor bar by forcing him to acknowledge his privilege.