That doesn't mean the list isn't valid; but it can't be assumed it is balanced.
Also, “conservative” and “liberal” are relative terms. Journalists are vastly more liberal than the public as a whole, so any news outlet that covers things from a middle ground perspective is labeled “conservative.”
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/media-bias-lef...
In an ASU study of financial journalists, people who labeled themselves “very liberal” or “liberal” outnumbered those who labeled themselves “conservative” or “very conservative” 13:1.
I’m not saying that this makes liberal reporters bad, or biased in the sense of willful prejudice. But liberals and conservatives have different assumptions, have different sets of facts they consider salient to different issues, etc. When a liberal reporter covers Sanders’ suggestion of $60,000 minimum teacher pay, the facts that come to mind might be things like how the income gap between teachers and other college-educated professionals is bigger in the US than in other countries. To a conservative, the first thing that might come to mind is that US teachers are already paid well above the OECD average. Both facts are true (American teachers are paid more than British teachers, but American programmers are paid a lot more). These differences inevitably come out in the reporting. Just because an outlet is writing from a conservative point of view doesn’t mean it’s trying to manipulate or deceive people.
>Twitter's technicality is a fig leaf to enable continued control of public discourse by an unelected private industry that is 9-to-1 in the tank for Democrats and can decide what Americans are allowed to know.
in the headline. Yes, thank you, I reject this authors "fact synthesis".
This argument doesn't work in this specific instance because for most of the items on the list the only links are to other articles by The Federalist.
[0]. For the purposes of section 230
Seriously, actually go read section 230 instead of relying on Internet commenters to tell you what it is.
Companies that control what information users can receive in order to allow only one side of a political discourse are in opposition to the policies being implemented in section 230.
I read section 230 and mentioned parts of it that I think are relevant to impartiality. In particular, I don't see how you maximize user control over the information they receive if information providers are going to be partial to one political party. And I don't see how you have forums for a true diversity of political discourse if forums are going to be partial to one political party.
If you can tell me, I would love to know, how do Twitter's actions in this case maximize user control over the information they receive? I don't think they do, I think it is quite the opposite of that, but go ahead and make a case if you have one.
Now it is true that the implementation of section 230 lacks an enforcement mechanism to enforce the policies that it advocates. That's a problem with the law, and it is what some people are advocating that we fix. I agree with those proposals, I would like to see section 230 amended so that companies that don't maximize user control over the information they receive lost section 230 protections. And the same thing for companies that don't allow a true diversity of political discourse.
I don't think the part you highlighted is relevant to impartiality. It sets an aspirational goal of Section 230 and the safe harbor is the means to promote that goal. Without the safe harbor, providers would be forced to strictly police what users post. Smaller providers who aren't able to bear the burden of strict moderation would be forced to shut down entirely. This would have the consequence of reducing overall user access to information.
> I don't see how you maximize user control over the information they receive if information providers are going to be partial to one political party.
By using a different information provider.
> description of the internet as, among other things, "a forum for a true diversity of political discourse".
You said it yourself. The Internet is neutral, according to Section 230. Not individual information providers. If you don't like what one information provider does, go make your own. It's all based on free tools and open standards. No one's stopping you.
Believe me, no one of any political stripe should want to take away ability to moderate Internet forums. It will turn all forums, regardless of political, religious or other affiliation, into spam-filled, unusable messes. That also reduces "user control over the information they receive", since the garbage will drown out anything useful and platforms will have no power to remove it.
That doesn't work when network effects are involved. Just like there aren't going to be hundreds of cell phone networks, there aren't going to be hundreds of networks with the reach of Twitter or Facebook.
Any time Twitter or Facebook don't allow certain information to be sent, users have less control over the information they receive.
>> Believe me, no one of any political stripe should want to take away ability to moderate Internet forums. It will turn all forums, regardless of political, religious or other affiliation, into spam-filled, unusable messes
The question is where the moderation happens, at the corporate level or at the user level. If a user who creates a space on a discussion board gets to moderate it, and anyone can create a space on that discussion board, that's perfectly usable and it puts the control in the user's hands.
Companies currently are acting in ways that are in direct opposition of those policies, so if you believe in those policies, you should want their actions to change.
But if an org is going to fly the flag of neutrality then they’ll get called out for crap like this.
I don't know if you know this or not, but the technology exists for anyone to participate in a "digital public square" without use of the incumbent services (Facebook, Twitter, et cetera).
These services are not the digital public square. They are private spaces (like a shopping mall.) it would be wholly incorrect to make that assumption.
Just like if all people happen to congregate in a private mall for one reason or another, if someone's excluded from that mall it doesn't matter all that much that there are public parks where anyone can go if no one actually goes there.
yes, it is. It's a pretty healthy and vibrant ecosystem (I'm referring to the W3C ActivityPub ecosystem here because I didn't mention it in the grandparent comment)
So again, even though I think that we as a society would gain a lot from using these technologies, in the year 2020 they really don't have the same "public square" effect that FB and Twitter have, simply because most "regular" people (as in "not in tech") have probably never even heard of them, whereas everybody and their grandma is on Facebook.
Also, the fact that FB and Twitter aggressively attempt to bring people to their platforms likely blurs the line between them being a private venue or a public square.
People don't even realize what is going on. The addicts are getting cut of from their favorite drug. A drug that has conditioned their behavior for 10-15 years.
FB and Twitter, every time they make these moves all over the world, need to check out how good ol Alex Jones is doing. Cause thats where a lot of ppl who get cut off will be in a year or two.
Maybe shopping mall alleys should be considered public space instead.