Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account
melovedata.com
melovedata.com
There have been multiple times when I've seen an insane video of something happening spreading around Twitter or WorldStar or some other "raw video" aggregation site, and then I'll see it on the NY Post, and that's it. The other major news sites will only show edited versions of the raw video with their own commentary playing over it, or they won't release it at all.
As a theoretical example-
Immediately after event:
Twitter: OH MY GOD look at this kid driving a schoolbus! <35 second video of a kid driving a schoolbus>
Two hours after event:
NY Post: Child seen driving school bus <35 second video of a kid driving a schoolbus>
Twelve hours after event:
NY Times: Child Arrested for School Bus Joyride <3 minute video, containing 18 seconds of footage from original video with expert analysis diagrammed on top>
Implying that every other major MSM organization doesn't do the same exact garbage and aren't deserving of the same treatment.
Edit: the point is that rules should not favor one MSM corporation over the other. It should be neutral.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-bid...
More recently, they allowed themselves to be used as the uncritical mouthpiece of the American federal government when they were starting an illegal war predicated on lies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller
If the NYTimes isn't pure, then surely none are. Genocide denial is particularly egregious, but at least they eventually came clean. I still read the NYTimes more than any other paper, but we must always remember to keep an open mind and to never be too trusting of what any newspaper says.
At the time it wasn't obvious. In those days information traveled much more slowly, with many more intermediaries than today and was, therefore, much less reliable.
I think that's the wrong framing, at least for an organization like the NY Times.
For one, there's a difference between "a lie" and "an inaccuracy" even though most of the time (but not always!) lies are a subtype of inaccuracy. If you make a similar conflation in software development, you'd say that a team member who pushes buggy code to your repo sabotaged your project instead of saying he made a mistake.
Also there's a difference between an organization and its members. Those individuals you mentioned may have lied, but that doesn't mean the organization lied. If a disgruntled member of your team does try to sabotage your project, that doesn't mean your team is sabotaging the project.
Duranty did his reporting literally 90 years ago, which is several generations in the past. That case is of limited use when reasoning about the organization today.
Miller was criticized by colleagues and was eventually forced out. She seems to me kind of like a software engineer who came up with some grand design that had fundamental problems, but couldn't let the design go. That's mistaken, arguably incompetent, but not sabotage.
Now on the other day the NYPost has a narrative, with physical evidence, corrobrated by actual non-anonymous people alleging very bad things about a presidential candidate and what happens? Nothing. As usual 'the powers that be' have the media in the pocket.
how long till this comment gets disappeared? I hope I don't get fired!
Which is so obviously fake it isn't even funny. I'm getting very tired of the GOP's shameless tendency of creating controversies out of nothing. This is just another Benghazi or Hillary's Emails or Migrant Caravan.
It's possible for the mods to "shadow delete" your comments: it still appears to you when you're logged in, but no-one else can see it. (To see if any your comments have been shadow-deleted, check out the difference between news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=yourusername when you're logged in and logged out.)
Edit: for example, right now I have a delete button for this message
How is it “obviously” fake? Especially since most of the media refuses to investigate it — even if to establish that it isn’t fake? The media had no problem running with the very obviously fake Steele Dossier that claimed Trump got a golden shower on a hotel bed Obama once slept in. There was zero corroboration or legitimacy for that, but that dossier was used as a basis to obtain FISA warrant and ultimately led to an impeachment.
It’s “obviously fake,” because it’s politically uncomfortable, not because it’s actually “obviously fake.”
According to a Daily Beast interview, Isaac “switched back and forth” between saying that he contacted the FBI and saying the FBI contacted him. He also claimed that the FBI asked him for help in accessing the drive, though he didn’t indicate that the drive was encrypted or protected in any way.
There’s are several huge missing pieces in this story. For example, what did Isaac say to the FBI? “Hello, someone brought in a computer, and I think it belongs to Beau Biden.” If so, why would the FBI say anything other than, “Then give it back?” Why would Beau Biden dropping off a wet laptop cause the FBI to have any interest at all?
This, then, is the “official” story from the Post and Giuliani: A mysterious stranger drops off a laptop at a shop belonging to a legally blind Trump supporter who has said disparaging things about Biden. Nine months later, the FBI asks for that computer. Then 10 months after that, Giuliani hands over to the New York Post what he says is a copy of that computer’s hard drive. In between those dates, we have nothing. Well, nothing except for more Facebook statements from Isaac, who does devote some time to saying that Trump’s impeachment is a sham, but says nothing at all about Hunter Biden’s crack-smoking video that he found on a computer left at his store. And we have a lot of statements from Giuliani during this period, many of them essentially identical to what will eventually appear in the Post story.
What about the actual contents of the laptop? The emails, text messages, photos, and videos?
Nobody from the Biden camp has come out and denied the authenticity of the emails or the text messages that have been published. Why not?
In fact, you have one of Hunter Biden's former business associates who has come out and confirmed the authenticity of some of the materials.
I must assume you have personal possession of exculpatory physical evidence. Please share your physical evidence that discredits the physical evidence you don't like unearthed by the New York Post
Please downvote me if you have no evidence it was faked or know there's no evidence or want to see the NY Post story discredited because Trump should be replaced at any cost.
Also note: other news publications, like the Washington Post, claiming that the hard drive data is "not verified" without any evidence beyond their own reputation, which itself is long since forfeit, is not evidence.
In the impeachment case, that was not a case of the press digging up a document and making an accusation. It was the release of an accusation made to an inspector general. In and of itself, that is news. The fact that the white house was trying to prevent the release of the inspector general complaint to the Congress was also news. At that point, the veracity of the claim needs to be determined, and opinions clearly differed.
Proof?
Of course, but Twitter doesn't do that and never has. You are still very able to read what the New York Post writes by typing https://nypost.com/ into your browser, and Twitter's not going to stop you from doing that.
If the moderators of this site decide my comment is out of line with the standards this site tries to uphold, does this make me unable to communicate entirely? No, I'm still able to write whatever nonesense on plenty of other websites. Or I can host my own website where I can freely post whatever nonsense I choose to post. All the way up to the point where no ISP will offer me an internet connection or all the regional number organizations refuse to give me even a single IP address.
Interesting... after reading this, I immediately thought: same as Zero Hedge (also often criticised). But then again, that shouldn't be a surprise - basically a lower bar (on accuracy) should result both in lower reaction time, and in more false positives.
A comment to a sibling comment: I personally find lower time-to-publish immensely valuable - I prefer to assess the accuracy of news stories myself (usually considering the original source and how aligned their interests are with the published information), and I find almost no value in the supposedly "trustworthy" media because they're not actually trustworthy to me (besides the obvious political bias, there's also plenty of high-profile non-culture-wars fake news, e.g. Iraqi WMD, Bloomberg's China spying debacle, the current (non-)coverage of Assange, ...). If there's anything I've learned in the past 10 or so years, is that the "experts" are barely any better than myself at discerning what's true or not, and much less trustworthy.
Separately I view Twitter as breaking section 230 free speech regulatory agreements in meddling with what they 'publish'
As the saying goes, Zerohedge has predicted 28 of the last 4 recessions. They have a consistently bearish bias (which rarely seems to play out), and ties to the Russian state, which brings into question the motivations behind their criticisms of the US (not that I'm the biggest fan myself).
All of that said, ZH introduced me to a lot of economic literature and concepts I likely wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise. They touch on niche subjects constantly, and I have to give them credit for broadening my understanding of economics in general.
I would be very surprised if a financial news outlet choosing the Fight Club quote did so at random and not specifically because of its predecessor.
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.
- Ecclesiastes, 300 B.C.E.
Most of the corporate media are (sometimes ludicrously) optimistic, the other polarity. I read both.
Unfortunately being wrong on the internet is now becoming long-term grounds to be censored and excluded from mainstream society's systems.
Its quite sad really and I don't know what the solution is.
One thing that I DO know is that the solution isn't coming from the government. They are terrible at things. Their job should largely be relegated to protecting freedoms and security.
This 230 stuff is mostly probably going to backfire and create a less free internet. We don't need more lawyers and more government intervention to internet communication.
I do know we have many thousands of people working on solutions to things like Reddit (and Cloudflares) hyper-sensitive long-ago-crosed-the-line censorship, even if censorship is probably a poor world for it given the historical baggage.
Although this is the internet and even sights like T_D were almost entirely replaced on a site without Reddit's regulation and controls (a far worse situation in many's eyes) welll before it was banned on Reddit. It's thriving on a domain name I won't mention here.
Same with infowars and 8chan, they both quickly found new homes on new places.
But there censoring on any major platform and being related to fringe online communities being fringe DDOS protection services and aononimizers (who yes do still get heavily advertised and recruited on Reddit and redirected to these new unmoderated sites, so their censorship policies were always destined to fail).
I'm more concern about operating in the real world (VISA/Mastercard, Patreon, acess to advertising monopoly networks like adwords/adsense, etc), less so the online communities where discourse it happening. Reddit's censorship problem will eventually be solved on a wider/easier scale once the engineering work has been put into it.
It's probably one of the biggest problem of our current era for those of us who understand the importance of "outlaw thinking", free expression, and those who know the history of how these tools of control are almost always abused and riddled with false positives. The history of those who went against the grain (even if that grain is terribly wrong, wrong things have plenty of other ways to kill off than censorship).
But nothing. In short, the claim of 'scarily accurate' is not true. There may be underlying reasons that their accuracy has issues, but their track record up to this point has been highly inaccurate.
No question ZeroHedge is excessively pessimistic, but that saying is silly. The US has been having recessions almost like clockwork once every 10 years since 1950 [0].
Saying "a recession is incoming!" is pretty much trivially true. It is always very likely there will be a recession in the next 10 years.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...
Your standards for "clockwork" regularity seem to be quite low. Your own source offered to support that claim shows almost double that frequency from 1950-1990, and a maximum interval of 10 years, 8 months over the whole period. So it is neither "like clockwork" over that period (the frequency has on average dropped over the period, but the intervals are highly variable from one to the next), and not averaging anything like 10 years.
If you are planning your investments around not having a recession about once a decade, I'm unconvinced it will end well for you.
Anyway, the point stands - regularly predicting recessions is a sensible approach, and saying ZeroHedge overpredicts is wrong. The normal financial press are reckless in assuming that recessions are not imminent. Looking 5+ years into the future to assess the present state is prudent.
No, its not, because recessions do not occur on a regular pattern. And even if they did, its still possible to predict them much more frequently than they do occur.
> and saying ZeroHedge overpredicts is wrong.
Just doing a quick search, ZeroHedge seems to have predicted a recession, counting only predictions with a one year or shorter forward window, literally every year since the end of the of the Great Recession. In many of those years, they made at least one prediction where the window was effectively negative, as they claimed that the US was already in a recession that just wasn't yet recognized.
So, yes, ZeroHedge significantly overpredicts recessions, as they have predicted not less than 11 of the last 1 recessions.
> The normal financial press are reckless in assuming that recessions are not imminent.
That's a non-sequitur, in any case.
> Looking 5+ years into the future to assess the present state is prudent.
Sure, but if ZeroHedge was consistently predicting a recession within 5 years, they'd still be overpredicting by quite a lot (not if this was 1950-1990, but it isn't), but they are much, much worse than that.
I'm quite certain if someone simulated trading based on predicted recessions on ZH, you would end up well below market returns.
I wonder if that's actually true.
> I wonder if that's actually true.
Its not, as ZH was founded during the Great Recession, and there's only been one since.
That's at least 10 less than they've predicted, though, so the quote, while not literally true, understates the degree to which ZH overpredicts recessions.
'Section 230 says that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (47 U.S.C. § 230). In other words, online intermediaries that host or republish speech are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do. The protected intermediaries include not only regular Internet Service Providers (ISPs), but also a range of "interactive computer service providers," including basically any online service that publishes third-party content. Though there are important exceptions for certain criminal and intellectual property-based claims, CDA 230 creates a broad protection that has allowed innovation and free speech online to flourish'.
Example for Twitter editorializing and cancelling https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=1804a02d-a015...
Ammending S230 Bezos/WashPo
'...new legislation would target Section 230, a decades-old portion of law that spares social media sites from being held liable for the posts, photos and videos uploaded to their sites by their users. The proposal would pave the way for steep sanctions on major online platforms if they don’t act to remove a range of illicit content, from child exploitation to terrorism, according to Justice Department officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity Wednesday.
The agency also seeks to force tech giants to be more transparent about their content-moderation decisions and more consistent in their enforcement of them, according to a report the department released Wednesday. The move might offer the U.S. government a new avenue to probe and punish companies over allegations of political bias'.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/17/doj-bar...
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— (A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected
With that it seems reasonable to read Section 230 as "you don't have to proactively moderate, and any good faith moderation you do doesn't break that protection".
Regardless of whether or not this is the right thing for society, it seems that Facebook and Twitter are well within the bounds of section 230 to do some moderation without losing the protection of section 230.
Section 230 was overtly adopted so that platforms would make efforts to censor content that they found to be objectionable; there are no "free speech regulatory agreements" associated with it.
It is the only surviving part of a law whose sole and entire purpose was internet censorship, the rest of which was struck down for violating Free Speech protections.
Twitter (and FB) have crossed the rubicon in editorializing other people's posts with 'fact checks' (sic), shadow bans and public bans.
Practically the opposite of the free speech maxim 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it' and alarmingly close to totalitarian use of their publishing power.
>This legal protection can still hold even if a blogger is aware of the objectionable content or makes editorial judgments.
Caesar has crossed this Rubicon so many times there's a 4-lane highway with a Waffle House at the rest stop. Forum moderators have been exercising their right of free association for a long time.
Why would Twitter (and FB) agree to be regulated as common carrier, with limited ability to discriminate in its service to the general public? What should it/they get in exchange?
Usually it seems to be they're really saying "this shows section 230 is a bad idea."
If we could move past the reflexive "well actually" there's a real issue people feel needs to be addressed.
Without it, there is likely no Hacker News, nor any other social media.
My believe is that if this is forced into a take it or leave it scenario, we're not going to like the outcome.
Which, come to think of it, might be a net gain to society overall. Hard to say.
I think the first priority is to ensure that the poster's misinformation (i.e., telling people that 230 says/does something it is explicitly designed not to do) does not propagate through this medium. It's a public forum, not a conversation with just the poster.
Then, if possible, you can engage with their disfunction. But given the weaponized role of misinformation today that's the first item in the checklist to be addressed.
From my viewpoint, it's very likely Section 230 will be modified. Once that action is underway, you'll be well behind the curve if you're just starting to grasp what people want. Others will have taken that time and effort and figured out how to mold it to their own ends, and the momentum will be building.
Section 230 isn't an agreement, it's a section of the Communication Decency Act.[1] There is no prohibition on the publisher "meddling", or moderating. Section 230 was specifically carved out to encourage voluntary content moderation on the nascent internet.
It states that hosting or republishing someone else's speech does not make you the speaker, even if you moderate. Which is to say that just because Twitter locks down accounts or stops a link from being shared, they still are not the Speaker (legally) of anything their users post. That's it, that basically the whole thing.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/youll-bury-everyone-invo...
It may be incorrect &/or partisan but you are likely to read these sort of revelations on ZH first for better or worse.
The slightly less cynical way I think of this is that finance will directly be impacted vs non-finance so news targetted at them is more helpful, or at least not actively harming.
In the financial independence community most articles on mainstream sites are considered jokes or to have insufficient detail to actually improve your finances
A good non-money example: If you get a chronic disease, reading blogs and forums by people who have the disease is going to me more helpful than whatever a staff writer can do in 2 hours of research
A comment I saw once about them was “ZH has reported five of the last three catastrophes”.
I've seen that claim too and found it questionable. Almost every major news outlet that would cover international news I found had some story about coronavirus pretty dang early. It wasn't a breathless story predicting the impact, but they covered it.
I feel like most media "media does this" or "didn't do that" is mostly just what passed in front of someone's nose.
Purely anecdotal experience of mine was a reddit story ages ago that was "The Media is too busy covering X to cover this story Y."
Purely out of curiosity I turned around and flipped on the TV and checked the news channels. The first 3 news channels, 2 were covering Y... but the claims about nobody covering it were constant.
ZH is the canonical example of a correct-twice-daily broken clock.
The question is if we want to prevent all news sources from evolving into that.
If you think China was lying about it, you should see the public statements of checks notes every head of state in the West.
There was a whole lot that people didn't know, especially early. There were quite a few failures of communication and delays.
China was certainly communicating warnings about the virus by early January.
They’re still poorly managing it because they lack decent information. I’d argue it’s the fault of the civil service that they’ve been crippling and obvious cronyism (e.g. Dido Harding) not equipped to provide decent information that they need for decision making.
Yes, and there is a period between where they realize they are wrong, where they reformulate their message and then communicate that publicly. What we're discussing here is a similar gap of 2-4 days between evidence of person-to-person spread and communication.
Meanwhile, we have no idea when the US president even first tested positive for covid.
For the very simple reason that there weren't enough masks for the people that needed them ( medical personnel), and the last thing you wants in such a scenario is for the public to freak out and fight over the already non-existing stocks.
Plenty of governments were too slow to react ( with lockdowns/limitations, or planning), but to say all Western leaders failed is simply wrong.
I don't recall many news outlets putting out official positions...
People like to write off 4Chan for all the shit posting and racism, etc. But if you can ignore all that there are truly some amazing Gems to be found.
[0] https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/237746333/#q237746818 (Warning, this link contains graphic hate speech like much of 4chan does and is not suitable for human consumption.)
In my analysis I find these are examples of fitting events to predictions after the fact; the huge number of 'larp' threads on conspiracy forums allows for cherry-picking examples where some content later rhymed with reality.
[0] https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/230585890/#q230593401
[1] https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/141096258/#141102703
[2] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/4chan-user-prediction-las-...
sponsored in part by the Gates Foundation and reported by the Washington Post and others, retweeted by Joe Biden.
This was not secret insider information.
Pretty quick, I'll give them that, but not before coverage - this is only a week or so before I became aware of the virus. Granted, I was traveling in China at the time, but it was known.
https://www.wired.com/story/how-an-anonymous-4chan-post-help...
I am curious why this is so valuable to you. In my personal life a delay of hours in the news cycle would have no effect. How does it generate value for you?
https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/jhksrq/do_not...
It seems to check out: https://old.reddit.com/domain/zerohedge.com/new/
Check the second link -- there hasn't been a submission from zerohedge on any subreddit in over 48 hours.
Anyway I mention that because during that time I remember always leaning on weird ZeroHedge articles to prove things in dumb arguments. I don’t remember the specifics but it stuck with me enough to completely blacklist ZH when I realised how dumb I was being.
It sounds like I probably should take a look at it from a fresh perspective and without that baggage, because it’s obviously not what I remember based on these comments.
If the social platforms were just imposing costs on being wrong that would almost be a service, but I get the impression from all the ban stories that they're staffed mostly by people who aren't equipped to be that judicious. The platforms have thrown down their cards and are all in on this election cycle, and by showing what appears to be partisan recklessness, it's going to cost them moral high ground they might have had before all this.
The good news is the people reading this forum can build a platform killer in 6-8months, and there's going to be a bunch of balance sheet cash on the sidelines looking for startups to fund. These social platform companies are all just another Friendster waiting to happen.
The latter sounds like an "intent" argument, that imposing the costs has a quality factor that I'd say just doesn't (or doesn't have to) exist.
There's your problem.
It's one thing to want the raw data out there if you want it, and more importantly, for others who are smarter than you to analyze it. Same principle with publishing methods and analysis of a scientific paper, or publishing source code you'll never look at to github: The fact that others can see it is important in itself.
That said, your comment borders too close to the Trumpian "experts know nothing, we can't trust the fourth estate" mentality. Actually, Trumpians don't know the term 'fourth estate'. Anyway. There is value in having institutions of trust investigate events and curate the story.
Mainstream US media are not trustworthy, period. Repeated cases of going beyond bias and into simply parroting government or political party claims with no evidentiary basis, merely for influencing public opinion one way or another. Often, one would guess, while fully knowing the claims are baseless. The omission of coverage of various issues also contributes to the 'trust-unworthiness'.
It's definitely got some Russian backing, but there are occasionally some quite good finance-related articles on it too. Just avoid the comment section!
Basically the social media company argument is... we think people are too dumb to figure out what is "real" or not so we are going to censor. That to me is an extremely damning view of the common person.
But then, everywhere on the platform.. "make a plan to vote". So you trust people to vote but don't trust them with the unfiltered information so they can inform themselves without outside intervention?
Social Media companies are not equipped to make that distinction and should not do so.
But fake news has been spreading a lot, while maybe not in your circles it does still happen. And retraction or an apology article will not be spread as widely due to the fact that a lot of fake news is specifically inflammatory to be spread quickly and widely.
I'm still on the fence personally, this is a really hard problem.
Censorship is a hard question and I think we do need to have better laws promoting free access to material (even "libelous" material) but this is also an area where I think it's pretty clear the government has failed in a big way - twitter + FB shouldn't be news platforms, the dumb news aggregators (like google news) do a pretty good job of being dumb platforms, but those commentary platforms are being run by private entities that can "censor" speech as they like depending on how it benefits or harms their platform. America is in a bit of a crisis right now since the extreme partisan divide has driven the real media (print, TV) to actually split into mutually disproving and incompatible bubbles. On election night one half of the country is going to be absolutely astounded since everything they consumed said their candidate was going to win.
I'm not certain what the solution is but some moderation is required to prevent the apparent acceptance of some pretty hateful views along with conspiracy theories. The Internet introduced clickbait to the world in a manner it never previously conceived of - tabloids have been around for ever but never gotten serious consideration - suddenly major political figures are embracing and re-packaging tabloid headlines and it's a bit of a crisis of information for our society.
The US's two-party entrenchment forces this false appearance of an us vs. them political battle. It's true that in the US you can only legitimately vote for either D or R in races and that this further entrenches the two parties - but issue voters should be flowing pretty freely between the two parties as their individual focuses shift.
Like the Southern Strategy, the Blue Dog Democrats, Tea Party, and Donald Trump (party-switcher).
Look at the radical positions calling themselves "conservative" today, getting more extreme since the 1980s when religous extremists stated taking over the Republican Party.
One-third of US voters are Independent not registered to a party.
The US electoral system forces to parties, but those parties change and are sometimes replaced.
This is one of those statements that sounds bad on the surface but is actually totally reasonable and has nothing to do with some trope about the "uninformed masses" or whatever. Locally the individual matters a lot more but at the national level voting histories show that the party dominates.
People have "disqualifying issues." And this is totally rational. Being black and voting R is nuts -- same if you're gay. And if you're pro-life then voting D is unpalatable. These kinds of polarizing issues very nearly define the party line. So yeah, if you go the polls in Nov and don't know if you're voting D or R (nationally) then you're probably crazy uninformed.
The actual decision making happens during the primaries where people suddenly have an entire group of people who aren't immediately disqualified and the internal discussion gets a lot more nuanced.
I'm not sure if its objectively "nuts" but almost 25% of LGBT voters supported Romney over Obama. That's accounting for the fact that openly LGBT voters are much younger than other voters: twice as likely to be 18-34 and half as likely to be 55+. Median age is about 35, versus 50 for the overall population. Romney won 37% of folks 18-29 and 51% of folks 45-64. There are too many gay republicans to call them all "nuts."
But what I can't understand is how someone -- even if they agree with most of their chosen party's platform -- could vote for a party whose leadership largely wants to erase them. I just don't understand someone who is gay voting for people who believe that their sexual orientation is a "choice", many also believing that it's a "sin" that should be forcibly "re-educated" out.
Certainly calling them "nuts" is dismissive, disrespectful, and doesn't help us understand what's going on, but... really, I do not at all understand what's going on.
Similarly R-side folks might believe that all D-folks are Trotskyists while that's a rather rare stance to have - certainly the D-side is more towards interventionalism - but nobody with serious power on the D end of things (not even bernie) is advocating for a planned economy.
I feel very strongly about moving towards proportional representation for the house over FPTP slotting. I think the extremism in the current political climate is largely fueled by this us vs. them choice - get us better representation so we can all see that Trotskyists pull one or two house reps nation-wide and slice off of the Dems at large... And watch the white-supremists and westboro baptist church folks get kicked out of the GOP at large and end up with a seat or two themselves. These are fringe groups[1]...
Our current voting system allows negative campaign ads to be just as effective as positive ones - knocking your opponent down 3 pts is the same as raising yourself 3 pts... but it's far easier to craft negative campaign ads so the electorate is constantly submerged in hateful vitriol. We need election reform so we can stop viewing each other as the enemy.
1. Please note, the current administration has actually started embracing these groups more, but this is a new development and should be a clear signal that the country is in trouble.
Now, what do you mean by “erase?” Republicans don’t want to put gay people in concentration camps and forcibly re-educate them. But it has taken them longer to come around to accepting gay people than Democrats for predictable reasons that gay Republicans are presumably willing to put up with. Conservatism by its nature values the traditional family because they believe it is beneficial for society. The long-standing belief that being gay was a “lifestyle” along with 1970s rhetoric about disrupting the traditional family was predictably alarming. For liberals who had already abandoned the idea that society as a whole should pressure people to get married and have 2.1 kids, acceptance of same-sex relationships that wouldn’t necessarily follow the traditional path came much more easily. But attitudes towards same-sex relationships and marriage have evolved rapidly even among conservatives. In 1978, few people accepted that being gay was genetic. Today, 50% believe that. Acceptance of gay marriage very closely tracks rising understanding that being gay is innate. (Republicans aren’t as far along as Democrats in internalizing that. But even among Democrats only 61% believe that being gay is fully innate, so it’s not like gay Democrats can get totally away from such beliefs either: https://news.gallup.com/poll/234941/say-nature-nurture-expla....) Moreover, in this past decade studies have revealed that huge percentages of gay couples are already raising kids together. In the last decade, an image of gay people as being born that way, and being in committed relationships and raising kids no different than anyone else, has appeared. And it has enabled the reconciliation of conservatism and same-sex relationships to the point that half of Republicans already support same-sex marriage.
Gay Republicans presumably understand this thought process and are willing to work through it and let the process play out. Many, even agree with the general principle of social conservatism, even if they disagree about the specific case. It’s worth noting that gay conservatives played an important role in Obergefell. See: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/06/gay-marriage-vot...
> In 1989, most Americans had never even heard of gay marriage, and certainly couldn’t conceive that it would one day be legalized by popular vote. That year, Andrew Sullivan wrote a landmark essay for the New Republic, “Here Comes the Groom: A (Conservative) Case for Gay Marriage.” Sullivan’s essay is one of the most important magazine articles of recent decades. His argument, which he went on to elaborate in his books Virtually Normal and Same-Sex Marriage and in later essays, is that marriage for gays would “foster social cohesion, emotional security, and economic prudence.” Sullivan’s conservative case would eventually become the intellectual and moral foundation of the campaigns to legalize gay marriage. Sullivan gave Slate permission to reprint his New Republic essay in full.
> “The conservatism I grew up around” Sullivan writes on the second page of the book, “was a combination of lower taxes, less government spending, freer trade, freer markets, individual liberty, personal responsibility and a strong anti-Communist foreign policy.” His heroes were Thatcher, Reagan, Solzhenitsyn, Havel, Hayek and Orwell.
Sullivan is ideologically similar to, and a fan of, Anthony Kennedy, who was a life-long Republican: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/06/anthony-kennedy-and-... (noting Kennedy’s “pragmatic libertarianism — his belief in limited government, pluralism, moderation, and social cohesion”).
It’s not really as simple as “Republicans moved too far to the right and he’s a liberal now.” For example, Sullivan is a devout Catholic who thinks Roe was wrong to take the decision on how to regulate abortion out of the hands of voters: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/andrew-sullian-a-way.... (He thinks voters would converge on laws like in France or Germany, allowing abortion up to 12 weeks with limited exemptions after that.)
He supported Bush (and thought Gore tried to steal the 2000 election) and the Iraq war initially. He soured on it later and reeled at Bush’s deficits and fiscal excess, and Bush’s support for the federal marriage amendment. He supported Ron Paul for the Republican primary. He hates Hilary Clinton but begrudgingly supported her against Trump. He is very much against the rise of critical theory and wokeness: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-roots-of-wokeness. On LGBT issues, he thinks “the war has been won” after Gorsuch’s decision in Bostock: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/when-is-it-time-to-c.... In particular, he opposes the Equality Act’s attempts to eliminate religious freedom exemptions.
Circling back to the point: this is why a quarter of gay people identify as Republican (though Trump has been very unpopular). Most people have heterodox political views and don’t fit neatly into any particular camp. And the parties shift over time to capture different blocs so folks who aren’t strong partisans can find themselves shifting around. There’s plenty of people who would support the party of Biden over the party of Trump, but the party of Marco Rubio over the party of Bernie Sanders.
Those people have a right to be wrong. That's why your vote counts as much as theirs does. The space that that leaves is where leadership is supposed to come in, in order to tilt the balance one way or the other. If a good leader doesn't arise, that's probably the problem you should be trying to solve.
The elitism of "we know better than you" has been used to justify some pretty horrific chapters in human history. Whether you like it or not, it is a much better state of being for the uninformed to vote, than the alternative.
The joke about minorities begrudgingly huddling around the Democratic Party exists for a reason.
To be fair that kind of rhetoric has existed since even the earliest days of the US, but I think on the whole voting has historically been seen as something you DO rather than something you use to fight against. The change in balance is... worrying.
Abortion will be banned, Bush will start a war, Obama will create the world's first Muslim Socialist state
It's one reason I've been quite happy to see the green new deal (or Biden's totally not the green new deal but most of it) talked about in debates - it's actually a policy position.
This is a vacuous statement. How smart is pretty smart?
We're all complicated rainbows of opinions and when voting day comes around we're forced to either be red or blue and that's a problem.
1. Effectively, obviously you can vote third party by FPTP single slot elections make this incredibly ineffective - sorry... I really really wish this weren't the case.
The "common person" is the one doing the moderating on the platforms. There is no pool of superintelligent, superwise, super-everything people doing the hard work of moderating on the platform. It's just common people.
It's not even a good sample of common people. It has a very particular slant to it; very American, for one thing.
1. https://archive.org/details/TheCrisisOfDemocracy-TrilateralC...
You say "some moderation is required to prevent the apparent acceptance of some pretty hateful views along with conspiracy theories", but the entire point is that then you are giving over to some other person or entity the power and ability to decide what you get to read. I think this should be rejected as a slippery slope made of ky-jelly.
"Don't take security in the false refuge of consensus and the feeling that whatever you think you're bound to be okay because you're in the safely moral majority."
"It is not just the right of the person who speaks to be heard, it is the right of everyone in the audience to listen, and to hear, and every time you silence somebody, you make yourself a prisoner of your own action, because you deny yourself the right to hear something." - Christopher Hitchens [2]
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2uzEM0ugY
bonus (the whole speech is quotable): "Dr. Johnson was waited upon by various delegations of people, to congratulate him of the nobility of the quality; of the Commons; the Lords; and also by a delegation of respectable ladies of London, who tended on him in his Fleet Street lodgings and congratulated him: "Dr. Johnson," they said, "We are delighted to find that you have not included any indecent or obscene words in your dictionary." "Ladies," said Dr. Johnson, "I congratulate you on being able to look them up". Anyone who can understand that joke, and I'm pleased to see that 10% of you can, gets the point about censorship especially prior restraint as it's known in the United States where it's banned by the first amendment to the constitution. It may not be determined in advance what words are apt or inapt, no one has the knowledge that would be required to make that call and - more to the point - one has to suspect the motives of those who do so, in particular: the motives of those who are determined to be offended; of those who will go through a treasure house of English, like Dr. Johnson's first lexicon, in search of filthy words to satisfy themselves and some instinct about which I dare not speculate."
What's wrong with conspiracy theories? They're as harmless as The X Files.
Conspiracy theories aren't harmless.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory
2. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/15/qanon-violen...
3. https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/anti-vaxxer-views-blamed-as-me...
4. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/23/health/covid-deaths.html
I am cautiously optimistic that there are a lot, lot, lot of people (like myself) that are interested in trying to balance their views, and make a point of reading both sides - especially when a headline is sensational.
I don't think Google news is as balanced as RCP, but it sure beats just reading CNN or Fox!
The farthest left they go is in linking to Biden endorsements, but Biden is a centrist establish Democrat who has been endorsed by most of the pre-2016 Republican party.
It's obvious from the list of sources: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/
Who's job should it be?
> we think people are too dumb to figure out what is "real" or not so we are going to censor. That to me is an extremely damning view of the common person.
Maybe dumb is the wrong word - but most people are not that bright. There's nothing wrong with saying that - it's why BS marketing is so effective.
Isn't it self evident by now that most people lack critical thinking skills?
We've got a lot of historical evidence about what happens if you let only people of certain skin colors, gender or wealth vote and all of those approaches were eventually rejected in favor of a universal voting system[1]. Democracy seems like our best bet for a fair and just government and I'm strongly in favor of having better representation of the actual beliefs of the citizenry - even if they're folks I disagree with.
1. Assuming you ignore American oddities like the electoral college, ignore tacitly socially accepted voter suppression and accept that minimum voting ages should be a thing (which I'm still pretty "meh" on personally but whatever).
I really really want to dump FPTP voting since I think it inevitably leads to two party systems and that two-party partisan us vs. them politics is what lets authoritarianism grow.
I really appreciate parliamentary governments over the hot mess the US has - I think you get a lot better representation especially when no one party has a majority. If everyone is in a minority then you have consensus through coalitions of different fractions and it gets a lot closer to each skinny slice of the nation getting a legitimate say. The more slices you have the better your representation of the public will (up to, ultimately, true popular democracy) but as a society we probably want either majority or strong majority decisions to guide us and that's just conceptually incompatible with no one getting their free-will stomped on.
This hits a really deep point on the topic of freedom - I have the right to not be murdered, but that right comes at the cost of anyone who wants to murder me... restrictions of rights are necessary for greater general societal rights.
That ruleset does change with technology on a functional level (murder with a gun when guns don't exist is a non-issue) I don't think there is a particularly interesting relationship with technology though - it's more just an extension of existing rules to platforms.
One thing that might counter that is doxing though - this is a pretty new phenomena that was pretty inconceivable when the world moved slower and humans were more directly involved with communication handling. I think you have the right to not be doxed but I don't think that right clearly translates to any pre-internet rights - it might be an implied right (but unstated or considered due to the infeasibility) but it is a pretty good example of a more novel rule for a sustainable community... that said we're still societally new to the internet so maybe it eventually won't be a rule and we'll find that doxing was an unfortunate emergent behavior of some integrated systems that really shouldn't have been integrated.
This only works if they remove themselves from choosing what to show who, what to promote, and what to demote.
As long as they are actively choosing who will see what, how often, what things will be promoted, etc. Then they are basically the judge and jury. This is their current dilemma. That's why they're starting to have stronger moderation. They'd want to actively promote things that make them money, and moderate away all things that puts them in hot water, without it affecting the money they make.
If you don't do the work, there's no reason to believe that you can do as good a job judging plausibility of a story as a good journalist can do. It's not about who's smarter, it's about not having the evidence.
I don't make any phone calls either, but I try to crib from people who do their homework. I also appreciate basic filtering to keep the noise down. It's not that I couldn't do my own spam filtering, but rather I don't want to.
It doesn't matter whether I trust them to vote because they have a right to vote no matter what I think. I definitely do not trust masses of people to identify real vs. manipulated content that is expertly designed to be misleading, and I think companies that directly facilitate the spread of information have some level of responsibility for the consequences of enabling manipulated media to infect their users. I don't know what the balance is, I'm not dogmatic, but I think everyone needs to be a little less dogmatic on this issue.
Let's find another way that does not limit free speech. It will be a harder solution to find sure, but the converse is too dangerous and nuanced to be implemented. It also gives social media companies undue influence over our democracy.
Social media companies already have undue influence over our democracy. I think we've already seen the damage they can do when they take a hands-off approach. There is no action they can take (or not take) that will not have major political implications. Do nothing and misinformation spreads like wildfire, likely first by bad-faith actors then by good and bad-faith actors. But doing something is fraught. Yet, I advocate for trying something over keeping one's hand off the till as we're talking about the real world here, and it is marginalized and under-served communities that ultimately pay the price.
The correct answer is to treat everyone as a worthy person, regardless of their intellectual prowess. The current left, with their self professed mission for the underdog, are the worst about this. The contempt a person must have for their fellow man in order to deem them as unworthy of free speech, is gut wrenching. Instead, we should be finding ways to make socially responsible ideas more accessible and inclusive for _everyone_.
You don't know me. That you feel I have so much contempt for my "fellow man" because of this disagreement of ours is wild. I may just as well bemoan - in equally bad faith - your contempt for honesty, transparency, or reality.
At no point have I argued that anyone should be prevented from free speech, yet there your accusation sits. My argument that purveyors of socially-distributed content have some level of responsibility for the real-world impacts this creates, particularly on marginalized communities that are often not sharing/consuming this information and only victimized by it. Did I say anyone should be prevented from expressing themselves? No. Neither do I offer solutions because I am not an expert. But I don't believe a completely "hands-free" approach is viable because of how easy it is to manipulate content, trick people, and use tricks to ensure your message is spread in non-natural ways (e.g., bot farms). That is not "contempt" for the intellectual prowess of others, it's a recognition of the reality we've already seen; I'm not immune to it and neither are you.
I find your seemingly dogmatic belief well-intentioned (a courtesy you certainly did not apply to me) yet naive, hopeful but damaging. I believe - wholeheartedly - that the position I take is much more respectful of people and communities than yours. Because I'm not taking an ivory tower principled stand as if there are no real world implications. There have been, there are, there will be.
Maybe I'm wrong. I'm willing to admit that. But this isn't merely an intellectual exercise for me as I feel it often is for so many.
And thus the right wing comes around to centralized government control of companies.
Why can't "we don't want this trash on our site" be the reason? It's "funny" how those who want to propagate banned material always cast themselves as some repressed group subject to the tyranny of government power.
It can still be posted on Gab or Parler, right?
That's a perfectly fine stance, and it has worked well for traditional publishers like the NY Times and Washington Post for decades. They control all their content, and publish exactly the narrative they want. OTOH, if NY Times publishes an OP Ed that slanders and doxes me, causes me to lose my job, etc. then I have the legal right to sue them. See for example the Covington Kid[1].
Facebook and Google want to have their cake and eat it too. They want free rein to pretend like they're just aggregating content, but this election shows that they are definitely using both AI and humans to control what's published. So why should they enjoy all the rights of both a "tech platform" and also a traditional publisher, with none of the responsibilities and liabilities?
Section 230 was crafted explicitly for tech. It can be modified or removed, too.
As I see it, there are three options:
1. "platforms" are not allowed to moderate content (pre-section 230) without getting liable.
2. What we have now (sites can moderate as they see fit)
3. Some external board adjudicates on what it is acceptable to moderate
Of these, 3 seems by far the worst, and 2 seems better than 1 on empirical grounds.
> OTOH, if NY Times publishes an OP Ed that slanders and doxes me, causes me to lose my job, etc. then I have the legal right to sue them.
You also have the legal right to sue Google if they publish content that slanders you. You can even sue them for doxxing you. You wouldn't win either one. Nor would you win if you sued the NYT for doxxing you, or if an NYT article caused you to lose your job. Keep in mind that "the covington kid" didn't actually win any lawsuits, he sued a bunch of people for ridiculous amounts and settled out of court for, likely, a relatively trivial sum. It might have paid for his college, and that was mostly "make it go away" money. He's the free speech equivalent of a patent troll.
Pre 230, platforms were liable regardless of whether they moderated.
I didn't like 230 at the time, and frankly we wouldn't be having so many (IF ANY) Facebook headaches over the past 10 years if it had never been born. FB et al didn't want to choose between editorial and common carrier status and the government acceeded to that whine. 230 is what we got, and now we find that 230-protected companies want to exercise editorial control. I don't know what the perfect solution is, but reversing to the common carrier distinction ain't gonna be it.
I understand that it's politically not helpful at this particular moment, and that the Trump kids are worse, but none of that makes it false, and it doesn't make me 'trash' for not liking it.
No, because that's clearly verifiable facts summarized by an opinion. Now ask "Is it trash to acknowledge that Hunter Biden had his dad use his influence to replace a straight-laced Ukrainian prosecutor with a corrupt stooge so Hunter could enrich himself?"
That's trash. Or:
"Is it trash to point out how Soros-funded Democrats are involved in a global pedophilia conspiracy that American conservatives are secretly working to take down?"
That's also trash.
You could cast doubt on Taibbi or an any narrative that fills in the blanks in some places, but compare to the fevered Russia-conspiracy talk that got mainstream credibility, Rachel Maddow features, WaPo editorial references, etc for years. Is one so much worse than the other? Or is it just a matter of which side it favors in the short-term?
But let me use Taibbi's own words here: “If something comes in and we don’t know the exact providence of it, that doesn’t mean we can’t publish it. All we have to do is establish that it’s true, and a lot of important stories have been broken that way.”
Ironically, Taibbi seems to say this as a criticism for Twitter reacting to the NYPost story. Except the NYPost did no work to establish it was true and even hired a Hannity employee to publish it since their own journalists wouldn't do it. That to me is the problem.
Twitter and Facebook, through action or inaction, now impact our democracy. Their action or inaction gives them responsibility whether asked for or not, conferred or not. I think this creates a need to act responsibly. I don't know how this should best be done, but I'm categorically against a complete "hands-off" given the expertise we've seen at creating and spreading manipulated content.
They streisand-effected the whole story, and made themselves look bad and unfair in the process -- how many unsourced claims about Russian interference have they let stand? This was a fiasco all around.
Cheers and solidarity.
Yes, and it outs you as a blinkered rube. To be upset about Hunter Biden is 110% turnip truck.
It doesn't look super-crooked unless you take the word of certain interest-conflicted sources, because sinecures happen all the time, every day, for centuries, and $600K isn't that much for something like that in this day and age. It's simply not a big deal, and thus trash.
And yeah: now do Jared.
Most platforms, Twitter included, just wanted to be dumb service providers. They don't want to spend money and carry responsibility moderating content.
It was large media outlets and the public outrage they produced over "fake news" and "the far right" that pressured them into taking a more proactive stance.
People like me who were opposing it back then and saying "you don't know what you're asking for" got labeled far right, and essentially bunched with Trump, which was hilarious to me as a left leaning European.
Newspapers now becoming angry Twitter is evenly applying the new rules - the rules newspapers lobbied for - is even more hilarious to me.
And you have to understand that Twitter did not make a mistake in how they responded to this. The article objectively was against their rules.
Whether these rules are good rules is another matter, but clearly the whole thing was dumb from the start.
Not really. They already spend time and money figuring out what content to promote and demote in order to increase engagement and maximize their ad revenue. They're just finding that the some of the kinds of things that tend to surface because of that are the kinds of things that they need to moderate, otherwise people (both users and advertisers) will get fed up with the platform and leave.
You present this as an axiom, like it's some kind of foregone conclusion, but why? Why shouldn't they be allowed to curate what content makes on their platform? I'm not saying they should have a legal mandate to judge truth, but if they object to certain publications, articles, authors, posts, etc, that's up to them.
Regardless of the source, the information has already been filtered through whoever is presenting it.
(In this specific case I think the actions taken by Twitter were bone-headed/shortsighted but Twitter has no obligation to host any content or uphold your first amendment rights because they don't apply to Twitter.)
Or the woman who won't vaccinate her children because she believes vaccines cause autism.
Or the person, communicating via the satellites that circle the Earth, who believes that the Earth is flat.
These people aren't rare - they're common. We live in an era of disinformation, and the very idea of truth has been eroded.
False stories spread over Twitter like wildfire, and to think that the majority of the thousands of readers who consume them are fact-checking them is perhaps a bit hopeful.
Covid-56 and flat earthers are some of the most outlandish examples, but the vast majority of misinformation is more subtle, and therefore more insidious. I'm not suggesting what the solution should be, but it's clear that complete un-regulation has lead to a completely broken information space.
They can't. They simply aren't capable.
I don't even have to use a fallacy, this is literally happening:
The US has a growing population of people who sincerely believe devil-worshiping democrats are drinking the blood of stolen children. 15 are running for US congress.
We no longer need to even "slippery slope it", the worst-case scenario is happening: disinformation is usurping facts at an alarming rate with very real consequences.
What would be the difference in this argument between 'social media' and other media? For example, should the same be true of newspapers? What about scientific or government publications?
If people should be allowed to decide for themselves what is true, should private for-profit companies also be allowed to decide what is true for themselves?
Do you consider stories that are verifiably false to be "unfiltered information"? Why should it be considered "information" if it's not true? Does it matter if the information being presented was known to be false and is being published for subversive politically motivated reasons?
Is your framing that they're saying people are dumb really true if the "information" is difficult or impossible to verify? Does it matter if it's a breaking story and there's only one such source of information? Does it matter if, statistically, there's a sizeable portion of smart people that will accept published stories as true?
The laptop and its contents seem to have been obtained legally in this case, and even if the whole thing reeks of parallel construction, they are not even honestly enforcing their stated rule (which again, does not seem to apply when it benefits the other faction).
There's 0 chance that they block any negative controversial stories about the Trump campaign or it's related parties.
It's a foolish place to stand your ground, when the outcome is going to be far worse for all sides than if they'd just let it die off naturally. The controversy itself has now given some on the right another reason to double down on their positions. It's divisive by the nature of the action.
From the NY Times itself (https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th...)
"But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged -- or failed to emerge.
On Oct. 26 and Nov. 8, 2001, for example, Page 1 articles cited Iraqi defectors who described a secret Iraqi camp where Islamic terrorists were trained and biological weapons produced. These accounts have never been independently verified."
Was the Iraq war a one-off event where media held far too much trust and abused it? Is it just the continuation of a pattern of media being used as a tool of the state (either wittingly or unwittingly)? I'm leaning toward the second option but I still don't know if the inherent pro-establishment bias you get with large media conglomerates outweighs the benefits of vetted news.
The only thing I can say for sure is that public media funding (like PBS and the like) to subsidize the cost of media companies ends up having rather little effect on those outlets' biases, while forcing media to depend on corporate sponsorship absolutely does corrupt the messaging delivered to the populace at large. So I'm not certain what our media landscape should look like, but I'm definitely against people who decry any government sponsorship of news as being political mouthpieces - public radio and tv should form part of our news digest, their funding is diverse enough to allow them to freely criticize both national and local governments and while it probably won't yield the really valuable investigative journalism we need to fight corruption it's definitely part of the solution.
Given that Twitter has allowed people to publish anything and everything about Trump regardless of source (or lack thereof), this is a clear cut case of bias to push their preferred candidate.
A different take on the same idea, Google now adds "fact checks" when searching for videos of Biden, in his own words, describing his flip flopping position on fracking. Try it for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=biden+fracking
I'd love to know what other fact checks they've added. I can't find an explicit list. I submitted an Ask HN to see if anyone knew how to get that list. But that post was flagged as some people may feel that information is too dangerous to disclose.
Both actions are clearly driven by bias. Whether they're allowed to do it on a private platform is a separate topic. But you can't claim to be for free speech when the only speech you suppress or "clarify" is that which is negative to your candidate of choice.
We need to reinstate the fairness doctrine to restore honesty in media. The "news" we have today used to be called "entertainment" and half the people on cable news are opinionated talk show hosts if you can even stand to watch any of it.
Twitter can stop an account which causes harm without being immediately required to block all accounts which may cause harm.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-bid...
But yeah I've seen the post basically copy and paste accusations as fact (without claiming they're facts, but not qualifying them in any way) about all sorts of things.
I'm left leaning but honestly if we want to win the bias needs to be more subtle.
News rooms are not trying to be Twitter. The goal is not to gather and disseminate information as fast as possible. They're more interested in telling a coherent story around a news event. So they might hold off while they verify or find supporting information. Who was the child? What was the outcome? Was anyone hurt?
There were multiple occasions when the organisation had information about a breaking news event but held off rushing to publish while, I assume, they verified information. One story that stuck in my mind was the murder of a woman and her children by her estranged husband. First reported as a car fire, and then later confirmed as a murder suicide. Ultimately no information was withheld, but care was taken to make sure the event was not turned into salacious clickbait by publishing rumours or rushing to be first.
This seemed counterintuitive to me, but at the same time, what do we gain by having that kind of news arrive more quickly? It's not actionable information.
It doesn't matter. This strawman is presented every time this topic comes up. It's not about the quality of the Post's journalism. It's about whether Twitter should restrict it.
I've been reading the Post off and on for the last 40 years, and you are correct that it is a rag. But it is a newspaper. A newspaper with a better reputation for reporting the news than Twitter.
Not every article is going to be to your taste, or ape your point of view. And as newspapers go, it is very sensational. This is not a secret. Everyone knows what to expect when they pick up a copy. And they read it with that filter in mind. This is literacy 101.
But people on HN try to falsely characterize it as the equivalent of the National Enquirer. It isn't. It's a legitimate newspaper, whether you like it or not.
99.9% of the Post criticism I see on HN is from people who have never lived in New York. Never actually read the Post, or any other newspaper. They just amplify and repeat the echo chamber hyperbole they see from other people who have never read the Post. Some of the most vocal have stated in other threads that they are Twitter employees.
If I have to choose between the Post being an information gatekeeper and Twitter, I'll go with the Post every time.
The NYPost is a platform with a (large) editorial slant.
Why should one be obligated to amplify the other? The NYPost gets to have an absolutely massive editorial slant (endorsing presidential candidates, etc) but Twitter can't? Should the NYPost be forced to amplify the NYTimes? What about other heavily user-driven platforms like HN and StackOverflow? Should HN be forbidden from curating its front page stories as well?
Keep in mind that HN itself is heavily curated. Should HN be allowed to do that?
(Browse HN with showdead on sometime to see what you're missing...)
However if the companies themselves behave as publishers, yet avoid that designation bybhiding behind a regulation intended to protect Non-Publishers...
Then clesrly they are going against the spirit of the law and the law should be updated so there are consequences, particularly if they enjoy network effect monopolies.
This is very simple to do. Any company using 230, that is publicly listed, has more than 1B in revenue or 100M of users should inmediately lose section 230 protection. Full stop.
Any infotech company of size becomes very attractive for political influence, and should be closely watched for potential violation of campaing finance laws among other things.
Except that Twitter claims to be a neutral platform in order to benefit from Section 230. I agree with you that it's just another media outlet with a slant, but the government needs to start treating them like it.
Edit: I'm not going to risk posting another comment in this thread because I'm getting negative votes. I keep seeing this more and more and I'm baffled. I haven't called names or even been combative. Is this place reddit now, where you just downvote anyone you disagree with?
I personally find value in entities like Hacker News, Twitter, StackOverflow, etc that curate their content. I of course do want transparency there.
I also value utterly unfiltered sources. But, I do not need or want every source to be unfiltered. Then everything becomes a firehose of utter garbage.
I think there is room for both. But it just makes zero sense to me to essentially force primarily user-driven platforms like Twitter to amplify/aggregate content from literally everybody. If they don't want to amplify the NYPost's stories, that should be their choice. And then I can choose not to read Twitter if I don't like that. I completely fail to see the problem.
I agree with you that it's just another media outlet
with a slant, but the government needs to start
treating them like it.
Here's how I see it: if I wrote a letter to the editor to a popular US newspaper calling for an ethnic pogrom, they published it, and it incited riots or violence, that news paper would get tar sued out of it. They are responsible for the user-generated content that they chose to publish. If instead I used my phone to start a phone tree to rouse people to ethnic violence, only the phone call makers would be responsible. The phone company just lets me place calls to whoever will receive them and transmits my messages.
Where does Facebook fall? Currently, if they allow people to start groups and publish materials calling for ethnic genocide and it leads to violence, they bear no responsibility. Sure, there's a continuum between phone and newspaper, but currently they are having their cake and eating it too. What should the law look like?
Free speech doesn't mean you are not responsible for the things you say (or re-transmit). If they want to be a non-neutral media outlet, Facebook, Twitter, et al. should be liable for the damages caused when their platform is involved in incitement of violence. If you're attacked by White supremacist counter-protestors, and it turns out they organized or promoted their activities on the platform, it should be partially responsible and should be a co-defendant in court.
Personally, I would prefer them to remain neutral platforms and focus their efforts on providing stronger abuse prevention that makes it harder for extremists to "amplify" their message into the feeds of people that don't want it instead of trying to whack-a-mole offensive content. Tools that would allow users to filter and block more easily, or even better selectively subscribe to the content they do want. I guess that would probably mean reduced engagement, though.
This is simply not true.
Verge has a good article that discusses this in more detail: https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/22/20700099/section-230-comm...
But the other problem is defining neutral - many people seem to have decided that removing objectively false information is somehow not neutral. Which it isn’t.
What?
Twitter is a platform everyone gets to post stuff by default. You and many others make it sounds like Twitter has to deliberately to give permission to someone to make a post, so Twitter has no obligation to allow anyone to post. This is such a B.S. argument. Twitter doesn't deliberately allow someone to post. No. It deliberately bans someone from make a post. Banning is its action.
The question is why Twitter bans NY post and this action needs explanation.
I don't want Twitter to curate what ideas and speakers
I'm exposed to, in the same way that I don't want my
local library to ban certain books or Google to
delist websites that it decides are bad
I do want Twitter to curate things, by filtering out news from biased sources with questionable alliances and borderline journalistic practices. I want them to be transparent about it, and if I don't like the way they do it I'll go elsewhere. To me, that is the free market -- not forcing Twitter to amplify all voices indiscriminately. If Twitter was the only game in town I'd feel differently, but that is far from the case.
I think most really do want some level of curation. Do you want child porn on your feed? Endless ads for fake Viagra? Animal abuse?
I cannot imagine a platform like Twitter being useful without some kind of curation. I realize that blocking the NYPost is an opinionated move in some ways.
They were transparent about the reason, and I agreed with their move. That's all I ask. There are plenty of other places with more relaxed standards, and they're still available to me when I really want to drink from the firehose.
They can do it, but it's a silly, foolish way to run
a social network.
You should trust other people to have the same ability as yourself to evaluate information.
Wouldn´t it be better to have two options when
you log in to Twitter? Safe space Twitter and
wild west Twitter.
Then all sensitive people can log into a pink
bubble and the rest of us can enjoy uncensored
reality. Most people should realize that very
few would choose the pink bubble.
>I cannot imagine a platform like Twitter being useful without some kind of curation. I realize that blocking the NYPost is an opinionated move in some ways.
Blocking NYPost is not curating the extreme content you state. Your argument is an attempt to imply that wanting the NYPost is akin to wanting the other.
Illegal material aside, if someone posts something on Twitter that really disturbs me, I can block them. Twitter could create custom filters and let people opt in to them, too. But I want my technology to empower me, not infantalize me with paternalistic "protections."
I'm all for moderated communities. It's important for people to be able to create and define communities with their own rules and norms. But Twitter should be the value-neutral technology on which those communities are built. Empower us to create the world we want, don't force your vision on us.
Unfortunately, I think they feel responsible for the content now that they are actively picking what we see in our algorithmic feeds. The algorithmic feed was the first step in disempowering their users, and it logically leads to increasing censorship.
Twitter is a private company. They constantly, if unevenly, exercise their right to ban hate speech and what causes it.
> But it is a newspaper. A newspaper with a better reputation for reporting the news than Twitter.
Twitter is not a newspaper. Or a news organization. It's a social network.
> But people on HN try to falsely characterize it as the equivalent of the National Enquirer.
That's debatable. You admit it's a rag, that publishes some of the lowest quality journalism. It's also very politically biased, in a way that damages the very fabric of society. Restricting its reach is the responsible thing to do in their case.
As for the National Enquirer, nobody takes them seriously or call it a legitimate newspaper. That's why it's important to hold the NY Post to a higher standard.
While I agree with you, something in your comment made me think. "What does not kill you makes you stronger". Maybe the test of our times is that we as a society learn how to ignore the trash ourselves, or if we do not learn the lesson, we perish. Do we want to learn to ignore, or learn to police?
Would you consider Twitter refusing to propagate this nonsense "learning a lesson"? I would.
So is Verizon. Do you want to live in a world where your phone gets turned off if they don't like the conversation?
If it made business sense for them to do this, they would.
Call in a few threats to local businesses or SWAT someone and see how long it takes for your phone to get disabled.
What we're dealing with here is not ordinary abuse control of the sort that isn't controversial, and it's a false equivalence to connect the two. It's outright suppression of doing anything that might harm the political left.
Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tiktok.
Collectively they form an extreme oligopoly position, something quite comparable to the telecom oligopoly. They should be held to a different standard accordingly, if they want to retain such power in our society. If only a few of them simultaneously collude to censor, it has what can only be considered something akin to direct government censorship in the impact it has: you are without voice while everyone else is holding a bullhorn.
In this day and age, being denied access to social media is probably even more socially & culturally punishing than having your phone number turned off. It's more akin to not allowing people to leave their homes and enter public spaces, not allowing them to ever protest, not allowing them to ever voice their opinions in a public square.
It's actually the uneven enforcement of their own terms of service that is primarily of issue and further whether their actions constitute an illegal campaign contribution to the Democrats by way of their intentionally tilted censorship.
If the DOJ were doing its job, they would be crushing Twitter right now with lawsuits over how Twitter selectively applies their terms of service to different groups when they feel like it. The Feds could make it extremely expensive to behave the way Twitter is. There are several other federal agencies that should be pursuing Twitter as well, that likely have legal ground to do so over these matters.
It's quite simple for Twitter: stop the intentionally selective application of your terms of service. Stop letting one side get away with constantly violating the terms of service with no consequences, while only aggressively punishing the political side you dislike.
The sheer volume of right wing propaganda that escapes their moderators would indicate the exact opposite. They suppressed this one so it wouldn't be glaringly obvious they ignore right wing abuses.
Let's just let tech monopolies determine what information we can or cannot communicate. Definitely nothing wrong will come of it. In fact, it's "the responsible thing to do"!
Also, stating that NYP "publishes some of the lowest quality journalism" is an insane hyperbole with no basis in reality. It may not be a top newspaper, but it's also far from being the worst paper in the US.
This story, specifically, had more verifiable sources than plenty of recently published stories which cite only "anonymous" sources and are therefore completely unverifiable.
The NY Post can still publish their materials on Gab or Parler. Their intended audience is probably there already.
> It may not be a top newspaper, but it's also far from being the worst paper in the US.
It's a Murdoch rag, with the usual Murdoch standard for quality and ethics. Lower than that it shouldn't be called a news outlet.
The vast majority of people are on these monopolistic platforms. Yes, dissenters can still publish on some obscure platforms that nobody is consuming.
If you ban a story on Twitter and Facebook, you are effectively ensuring the vast majority of readers will never get a chance to see it.
> It's a Murdoch rag, with the usual Murdoch standard for quality and ethics.
So convenient that you can know everything about The Post without apparently reading it at all.
Also, seems we no longer need to bother looking at facts or evidence. If a news story is vaguely associated with someone we dislike, we can just declare it wrongthink and dismiss it completely without further discussion.
In fact, you strongly advocate that it should be blocked from being published at all. If a piece of information is associated with a group or person we dislike for any reason, we should consign it to the memory hole. We shouldn't let people make up their own mind, we should make it for them.
This is essentially the problem. FAANG are the gateways to the web and having your content removed from them makes it considerably harder to have a web presence.
I'm sure most sane people would not want tech companies to be the arbiters of truth, though the solution as to how people can consume information without the inherent bias of platforms/algorithms/company policy remains to be seen.
What people on these threads never seen to think about is, how long until Chrome starts blocking "misinformation"? Would you be making the same arguments then because, someone could theoretically download a separate web browser that nobody has ever heard of?
The problem with these arguments is there's no obvious end to them. They are very much a slippery slope. It ends with people who want to criticise the Democrats having to build their own internet out of their own cables and radios, which would be a de-facto China-style totalitarian society.
The problem is the sort of people who now work for these tech firms are fundamentally untrustworthy, and appear to have kicked out or 'converted' the people who used to work there who were. We are now left with a big pile of infrastructures and institutions that are controlled by political extremists.
Unfortunately this means that if Biden does win his critics will claim his win wasn't legitimate/fair, just like Trump's critics claimed about Russia. Except "Trump won because of Russia" was investigated deeply and there was nothing there, whereas tech company censorship is plain as day and visible for all to see.
That's not true. NYP:s audience is much bigger than Gab or Parler.
how is that worse than letting Rupert Murdoch control every newspaper, whose media conglomerate makes Twitter look tiny in comparison. As much as Dorsey an all the other techbros annoy me at least he's not an outright right-wing cartoon villain
And what causes it??
What if censorship itself causes hate speech?
Hate speech existed before Twitter and will likely persist after it. Other social networks that allegedly do not practice content moderation also have identifiable hate speech content in them.
What if windmills cause cancer? What if toenails cause climate change? Why do birds?
And the Streisand effect as stories like this get more press from the censorship news itself.
And the motivation I feel to beat this drum ever harder as people respond with downvotes and snark.
The paper version pretty much is just that today. Online, it’s a different spin looking for a similar audience. Instead of cranky Jets fans, it’s targeting blue collar conservatives. The quality is much lower imo — they run native content that looks like Taboola.
Also nypost.com is a thing.
The reality is that plenty of sites use Twitter as an essentially free billboard ad. Then get upset when they’re told they can’t put whatever they want on a billboard on private property, especially one that they have no contract to use, nor pay rent for.
Size matters. A highway billboard and a world billboard are not the same. Thats why we have antitrust laws. Microsoft doesnt get to do whatever it wants just because its a sovereign company. Twitter Goog Fb should not leverage protections originally intented for sites like HN
Did Twitter or Facebook ever ask The Atlantic to "show them how they verified the information" about Trump calling war heroes "losers" and "suckers"?
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-a...
That story was based on 100% anonymous sourced. Unverified, unverifiable by definition. People who were on the scene went on record to deny it. Twitter and Facebook were happy to spread it. The Atlantic accounts were never blocked.
How about the NYT story about Trump's tax returns, also based on 100% anonymous, unauthorized, unverified document leak? Has the NYT account been blocked for that, too?
By contrast, the NYP actually did explain how they got the emails: from a laptop dropped off and signed for by Hunter Biden himself at a PC repair shop.
The double standard here is beyond obvious.
Yes, from a man who happens to be legally blind and can't verify who dropped it off. What are the priors on that? Turning up a week before the election?
The was supposed to be a professional servicing a machine, he violated his clients privacy for his own purposes, and now we're to trust him?
Still more verifiable sources than the Atlantic and NYT stories, which were based on zero verifiable sources.
> Turning up a week before the election?
The Atlantic and NYT stories were also published very recently, also a few weeks before the election.
> The was supposed to be a professional servicing a machine, he violated his clients privacy for his own purposes, and now we're to trust him?
The NYT story was based on illegally leaked tax returns. Whoever leaked these documents has not only breached their duty of confidentiality and privacy that they owe every taxpayer - they in fact committed a crime.
Why didn't Twitter and Facebook block a story that could only come from a source who breached their legal duties and committed a crime? And in your words, how can we trust such a source?
There's a reason that sources remain anonymous, and I'm not sure I see an equivalency here. Look at what happened to Lt. Colonel Vindman. It seems like having a standard of "you must lose your livelihood to alert the world to something" might be a good way to keep all sorts of secrets bottled up, to everyone's detriment.
The Post refuses to take down the link to what they claim are private photos and documents.
It seems pretty clear that they prefer to keep the conversation focused on the censorship of private photos (which they can then conflate with censorship of their corruption allegations) instead of on the mix of nothingburger and likely faked evidence against Joe Biden.
That includes the Snowden leaks, Panama Papers, the Pentagon Papers, virtually all Wikileaks releases, and many of the most important news stories of the past several decades.
Twitter pretends to have standards by which any news story can be censored, then uses that standard to very selectively block specific stories as they choose.
Also, from a journalistic perspective, it is much better to publish the source documents, as NYP has done, rather than quote from them liberally without publishing the original, as the NYT has done.
The "double standard" idea makes my blood boil, because it casts basic facts in partisan terms. Twitter fact-checked Trump tweets, but not Biden tweets. But that's not a double standard; it's a single standard, and it just so happens that Biden does not tweet outright lies such as "California sends a ballot to anyone living in the state."
Twitter clearly does not want to be in this position and the right-wing misinformation machine is exploiting that aggressively. The NYPost story got a huge Streisand-effect boost. It's impossible to give Twitter good advice today.
Both stories had no external verification upon publication. One was blocked immediately. The other never was.
> The "losers and suckers" story was independently verified by NYT, WaPo, and AP.
One can't "independently" verify a story based purely on anonymous sources. Can you link these alleged verifications?
> But the NYPost has not been verified by anyone, nor they did seek verification, nor did they even ask Biden for comment, because they know the story is bullshit.
Not true. The NYP story cited sources, and these sources have seen been verified, for example by the NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/us/politics/hunter-biden-...
Your comment that they never asked Biden to comment is likewise untrue. This would be plainly ridiculous: all we'd need to know if a story is true is to see if they asked for a comment from the subject. In fact, plenty of untrue stories ask for these comments. Why wouldn't they? Do they want to make it obvious they are false?
A paper is not even required to ask for a comment from a subject of an expose. Thousands of stories are posted on Twitter every day by news outlets that did not request or include a response from their subject.
Now we have people claiming that not only does NYP have to request a response from its subject, it must also provide them the subject with source material for their article. Ridiculous.
Also, Joe Biden isn't even the subject of the NYP article - Hunter Biden is. Yet you are implying that Joe Biden must have been given the full source materials of the article and an opportunity to examine and respond to them, or else Twitter can block the story.
Was Trump afforded the same opportunity to examine the source material of the NYT story about his supposed tax returns?
The NYT still hasn't released that source material!
Yet Twitter did not block the NYT or its story. Instead, it blocked NYP, even though it had no evidence the NYP story was based on "stolen private documents", while the NYT story clearly and admittedly was.
Again, the double standard couldn't be more obvious.
Hard nope there.
> It doesn't matter. This strawman is presented every time this topic comes up.
I can't ignore the irony here that you complain about straw-manning of the OP by cherry-picking the only negative comment in spite of the 99% of commentary in favor.
Edit: I also can't ignore that the plaint of pervasive "echo chamber hyperbole" is juxtaposed with statements like these:
> This strawman is presented every time this topic comes up.
> This is literacy 101.
> 99.9% of the Post criticism I see on HN is from people who have never lived in New York. Never actually read the Post, or any other newspaper.
That 'The New York Post has more merit than people afford it' might be worthy claim, but making a bunch of loud baseless claims isn't the way to convince people of it.
If it wasn't they would have critiqued my comment as you have. But instead it was a string of drive-by down-votes.
> it's that talking about irony and juxtaposition is not helpful
I think it is important to point out bad faith dialogue wherever it is seen. And that's what I did, by pointing out the contradictions in the moral stance made, and then the poster completely disregarding them in the same breath.
> vague comments on other people's cases.
They weren't vague at all, they were very specific. The poster was making a rhetorical play rather than furthering the discussion, and I pointed it out with direct quotes.
I agree with that.
> A newspaper with a better reputation for reporting the news than Twitter.
Twitter is a social media site that anyone can post on, it's not a news aggregation site and certainly isn't even a news generating company. Every news organization in the world could delete their Twitter account, and everyone could stop sharing links to news companies articles, and Twitter's purpose wouldn't change. Twitter doesn't hire journalists to research and write articles...
Anyone agreeing with Twitter's agenda, it appears.
What kind of orwellian shit is that?!? The twitter account itself was used very sparingly to upload content from my PS4, not controversial in the least.
There is very clearly an agenda being applied here. Which is fine with me because this kind of repression is indication of desperation.
You are either:
A platform. That allows all voices to be heard. 1st Amendment protections.
A publisher. That can edit or censor. And can be sued for slander and libel.
Whatever sophistry section 230 discussion is being fogged with, the above should be the way it is, period.
They are free to have their selective outrage, but they are a publisher, not a platform.
And therefore cannot claim protections under 47.230 This is like claiming tax exceptions of a non-profit charity, while being a for profit business
>" ... (c)Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material (1)Treatment of publisher or speaker No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
(2)Civil liability No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— (A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or (B)any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).[1]
..."
Right now if you go to the NY Post Twitter it just looks like they voluntarily decided to stop tweeting, which is misinformation.
I could imagine there are also cases where people are happy there is no public notification. If I get in a heated twitter argument and say something over the line, I'd probably prefer Twitter just let me fix it quietly
Social media tries to establish a unique public forum, that gets policed by a single company. It's an unsustainable, doomed model. There's a reason the Internet as a whole is serviced by miriads of companies that are more or less forced to cooperate.
Obviously you have to be careful when coming up with rules for government regulation of media, but the laissez faire thing we're doing now doesn't seem to be heading on a positive trendline.
Twitter isn't the government, and they don't control speech anywhere but on the platform that they own. They could ban the American Flag and they still wouldn't owe anyone an explanation short of their stakeholders who are going to want to know how this factors into Twitter's only business: Selling ads.
Many people and organizations have their free speech regulated because of the ability of speech to do harm (e.g. yelling "fire" in a crowded theater).
Saying something trite about rights is not an argument. these companies have a huge responsibility to our democracy, and treating them as if they're just another company is exactly what allows them to be so cynical about making decisions calculated to increase ad revenue even when they're harmful to democracy.
if the population of a democracy doesnt want to be a democracy anymore, that seems perfectly legitimate
There is a large amount of legal precedent in the US for the government being able to compel speech of private businesses, both in laws and court rulings. If you don't believe me, go look at your nearest "nutrition facts" label. But we have precedents that go much deeper than that, up to and including compelled speech that goes against the religious principles of a business's founders. There is no realistic argument for the government being unable to compel a private company like Twitter to cease censoring posts on political grounds.
When a platform with this type of power starts abusing it immediately before a major election, it's time to rethink the governmental protections afforded to them in order to feasibly exist.
> a unique public forum, that gets policed by a single company ... is an unsustainable, doomed model
is exactly right. It's just so damn hard to pull people out of it!
And for that there are some strict laws!
If the laws actually apply for this, I have no idea...
We shouldn't be forcing and infringing on the freedoms of corporations to decide what they can sell/show.
They already ban tweets required by law. What other liability is there?
That's a terrible excuse. Lack of information isn't the same as misinformation.
As in, once you open that door it goes both ways. Twitter on purpose catered to news and political organizations and while they are free to issue a disclaimer of not supporting a message or messenger as long as its legal they should be held to account
Would you support the same idea around electrical power? If the power company providing the power to the office at the NyPost decided that they had a political disagreement with them, would it be okay to just cut off their power?
NyPost could just make their own power, of course, by purchasing a generator.
To the extent that the regulatory scheme fails, that is a problem when and where it happens. But I've never heard of a power company refusing to provide electricity to a customer due to political disagreements. At least not in the U.S.
For those who argue that Twitter is a de facto common platform, well these decisions are moving them away from that role. The more they exercise their own prerogatives in removing content, the more they're no longer some sort of vital communication platform.
But that actually doesn't even damage the argument: would it be okay if Google decided that they didn't like NyPost's politics, so they disabled the functionality of all of their nest thermostats? What if they used smart locks on their office: could they just disable the "unlock" function on the doors?
Would anybody be supporting this?
But, going back to my previous comment, it would in a way be a good thing if Google started capriciously "disappearing" sites like this, in a high-profile manner. It would accelerate the move to other search providers and bring a more diversified Internet to us all. (I'm not advocating for it, but the end result would probably be better than what we have now: SEO madness all to please The One Algorithm.)
Twitter has competition. Reddit, Facebook, Apple News, and traditional media outlets all disseminate information. They all offer notifications on your phone. Where we're typing this out is HN, which is another news dissemination and discussion service.
The more Twitter does things to make it clear it's not a neutral platform, the more other services can find users. I do not want Twitter to be a monopoly platform. Tagging them with some common-carrier-like status, while allowing them to remain private, just entrenches that monopoly.
But, because they have a monopoly in search, they can abuse it to dictate terms in other sectors. That’s what I have a problem with.
It’s also a story we’ve seen recently, where some poor user gets their Google Cloud acct locked, and loses their YouTube videos as a result. Those stories are what convinced me that Google needs to be chopped up.
Just because these companies engage in fancy accounting doesn't mean we aren't consumers in a traditional sense and doesn't mean we waive rights consumers typically are given.
It's all of these, except private. It's a privately run notification/messaging/authentication/identity/verification service. Just one that is widely used. That doesn't make it "public".
The corporation providing the service doesn't matter, it's the how the service itself is used by the public. And social media is now at the same level as phones and internet.
Yep, and they can also terminate your service for any reason they choose.
22% of americans have had a twitter account: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...
Social media is fundamentally different from ISPs and other utilities- there are some protections and restrictions under section 230 (for now) but number of customers does not a utility make.
Okay. That doesn't mean a whole lot at the moment.
The ISPs that allow you to even access Twitter at all are quite deliberately not regulated to this extent, so there's a lot of work to do before we can say that Twitter, of all things, is somehow a public utility without First Amendment rights.
Even if we agree that they are the right comparators, there's a problem for using that pair as a reference for how online service providers should be treated, since phone providers have a strong neutrality mandate and ISPs have none, so it basically provides no guidance whatsoever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
The barrier to creating a new social network once network effects have locked in a few major players is enormous.
In this situation, the market is more efficient when the large incumbents are granted a highly-regulated monopoly status.
That's how power companies work. You don't have new power grids cropping up, but the main providers are held to much stricter standards that a normal private company in terms of their quality of service and how much they can charge.
If we allow mass-scale social media to continue existing, we need these sorts of strict regulatory standards. These companies have become mad with power, and there's no way to unseat them through ordinary competition.
A natural monopoly is one that arises due to the high costs of entering the market and other barriers to entry that make it difficult for competitors to establish a footing.
Utilities are natural monopolies because it is very expensive to place pipes, transmission lines, etc., over large geographic areas. Consequently, a company must either have large starting capital or the ability to grab a large enough portion of the market to pay for the costs of the initial infrastructure outlay.
The barrier to entry for the short form messaging market? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Any programmer can recreate the functional parts of Twitter in under a day, scaling aside. And there are already several Twitter competitors. They're simply not very popular because they're difficult to use.
I wholeheartedly disagree that the cost is "nothing, nada, zilch". The network effects of having everybody using a couple of sites is what makes the cost of switching high, not the technical triviality of creating a new website.
The cost of entering the mass-scale social media market is basically zero, since you can do that in a day with minimal cost other than a domain name and a server (or VPS or AWS/Azure account or similar), and you can scale your costs as you grow, but your costs don't grow as fast as your customer base.
A natural monopoly's costs start high, and just scales from there. It costs tens of millions for a utility just to enter a small market, and with utilities, growing may actually increase their costs (see, for example, power and water utilities).
>The barrier to creating a new social network once network effects have locked in a few major players is enormous.
So...that is what I said, that the barrier to entering the market is enormous.
I'm definitely dating myself here, but Livejournal, Blogger, Myspace, Frienster, DailyBooth, Friendfeed, Yikyak, Snap, Vine, were all once the dominant social media website before losing to new entrants.
Facebook was started in a college dorm room. Twitter launched as an employee's side project. Instagram began with two roommates sharing an apartment. WhatsApp began as one guy.
There’s no physical issue preventing competition like with power companies, but to a social media startup, getting enough users is a similarly hard challenge as constructing a new power grid.
And you’re not actually a social network until you reach some critical mass of users. The cost of entering the market is low as you point out, but that doesn’t imply that you can realistically compete. So I think it’s fair to call social networks a natural monopoly. Even if they don’t strictly fit the definition they’re still monopolies in practice.
So if I am not allowed to access twitter, or banned from the platform then I am being banned from participating in my local government
So if it not a public service, then public organizations (like police, fire, schools, etc) should be barred from using the service
They _run_ on public infrastructure, just like a store or restaurant. That should be available to all.
The usage and network effects by the public is what determines the ubiquity and utility of the platform.
Just because it's served by private entities doesn't change the fact that social media is very much on the verge of becoming public utility. Twitter's own CEO claims that social media is a human right.
In the old days, if you thought newspapers were biased you could publish your own and it would sit on the newstand next to the other ones. That's how we got NY Post and the Daily News in NYC, etc.
But imagine if one newspaper had 100x the readership of the second one. And if it'd be impossible to start a new one because of network effects. The editor of that newspaper would have outsized power to affect elections and it would be considered threat to democracy. That's the case with Twitter.
Either Twitter stays 100% neutral, or we'll need to anti-trust the heck out of it to make sure there are a few Twitters to compete with each other (and represent different views).
Great, then they should not be subject to section 230 protection, which protects them from liability from user-generated content. If they are a private publishing site, they should be entitled to all the privileges and responsibilities of such sites, as well established in the common law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nova_Scotia_attacks#Lack_...
It's completely possible to get almost the exact same information you get from Twitter elsewhere. Even in the link you provided, it says that they used Twitter as well as Facebook to broadcast their message.
Twitter is not a utility. It's one of many news aggregators and it's completely possible to live without it.
I have never used Twitter in any serious capacity.
There are plenty of ways to get all this information and thinking that Twitter is the de-facto place to get emergency life or death situation notifications is downright laughable.
As far as I can tell, I haven't gotten swept up by a tornado yet because I don't have Twitter to see severe storm alerts.
If your only source of news or alerts is a single service run by a corporation that isn't beholden to anyone but themselves, that's your problem.
> .. many questions were raised about why Nova Scotia failed to use Alert Ready, Canada's mandatory emergency population warning system, to warn the public about the attacks but instead chose to use social media platforms Twitter and Facebook to provide updates, RCMP officials said they had been dealing with an unfolding situation and details were being updated frequently. However, the areas affected had poor cellular Internet service and were mostly populated by seniors who might not have used social media. Relatives of the victims pointed out that the use of Alert Ready could have saved lives.
I stopped using FB 8 years ago because the attention-seeking design was making me depressed, always wanting to check was was going on.
If we say that Twitter and FB are the places to get information about official government policy then 1) we need to let minors under the age of 13 have Twitter account (not allowed under the current ToS), 2) we need to have some way to ensure that personal information is not sent outside the country (currently allowed in the current ToS) or sold in any form - basically, the same protections as if you were to go to a government-hosted site - and 3) we need some way so people can see only essential government information, without advertising or viewing other sources designed around "engagement".
I don't think Twitter wants to take on this role.
It's effectively a utility.
I'd say one could fashion a reasonable criterion based on extent of use by anybody + extent of use by organizations + extent of use by news media. Beyond some level, a platform is a utility (albeit not necessarily defined by law to be one).
Projects like IPFS and urbit are trying to change this but the FAANG economy of scale combined with the sheer user friendliness of centralized platforms makes me very bearish
That is wildly, incomparably different than a single social media website.
Twitter is in no way even close to the only way to publish something. It is no where near as difficult to publish on a different platform than it is to generate your own power.
If an ISP was cutting off the NyPost, I would have issues with that. If they had their domain name seized, I would have an issue with that. If other ISPs blocked network routes to their site, I would have issues with that.
I don't have an issue with Twitter blocking them. It just isn't the same.
What an absurd statement to make on hacker news of all places, where every minor movement of tesla/solar city is reported as breaking news. Or in a world where more and more people are going "off grid" and making their own electricity.
The power company is the easiest/most convenient way to power my home. It is definitely not the only way to do it.
So maybe Twitter isn't quite a monopoly on its own, but the consolidation of control over information and data distribution into the hands of a very small number of organizations has worrying implications for how we think about censorship and freedom of speech.
This is like not seeing the difference between allowing anyone to drive on a public road verse forcing everyone to pick up all hitchhikers.
I just feel that the issue of blocking a particular site is tangental to the real issue of the power these companies have. I am much more worried about the way their algorithms work for choosing who sees what, but that is not a concern based on 'free speech'
Social media is the tool, and some uses are ok and some aren't. I am not 'showing my true color' when I condemn someone who uses a knife to murder someone, even though I praised a master chef's use of a knife to cut food just the day before.
The government telling me, the hypothetical Twitter CEO, that I am legally mandated to publish your tweet, be it actually misinformed or just plain unpopular, or face asset seizure and jail time as a consequnce -- that is an _actual_, real infringement on free speech.
It just turns out that a lot of those SV libertarian free speech absolutists were actually partisan authoritarian hacks that are now abusing the notion of free speech in the current online discourse, so that the government will step in and mandate publishing their particular flavor speech. The people arguing against Twitter having the ability to silence and ban accounts (for any reason) are arguing for a Propaganda-class of speech that must be repeated by all who have any influence.
If you had a video or book or article 30 years ago, you couldn't even distribute it yourself around the world without the partnership of a major media company. It is way easier now.
Did people consider this a danger to free speech in the 90s? I certainly don't remember it that way. No one was worried that you couldn't get a main stream publisher to publish your crackpot theories, or that no cable tv station would air your crazy rants. No, you were forced to self publish, and deal with the fact that your audience was a lot smaller than if you could get a major publisher/media company to publish your work.
The NyPost still has a website, and anyone can still go to see it. It is way more accessible than self-published work was 30 years ago.
The reason these technologies are successful is that 99% of "publishing" is getting messages to the eyeballs that want to see those messages. The essence of their monopoly is that everyone's content they want to see is on that particular platform, both political and apolitical. It is difficult to follow people who get excommunicated from platforms, and the whole reason anyone uses these platforms is to avoid this difficulty.
Were people making arguments that Simon and Schuster were wrong and censoring if they decided not to publish a book? There are a LOT of books that have been written that no 'major' publisher would touch.
Yeah, that means you have to go and publish the book yourself, and print your own copies. And it means that most bookstores probably won't carry your book, and you won't reach nearly the audience that you would if you had a major publisher.
No one argues that the publishers are wrong for doing that.
The "social media model" is far closer to discussions you would have in a coffee shop or at a dinner party. Starbucks doesn't need to listen in on your conversations and kick you out if they're not disturbing anyone else.
Starbucks absolutely has the right (and would exercise it) to kick a group of people out if they were, say, conducting a KKK meeting and talking so everyone in the Starbucks could hear them.
Secondly, Twitter primarily serves content to those people who want it. It's what their algorithms are trained to do. The argument that the New York Post's article is disturbing and thus should be removed is easily used to justify any amount of authoritarian social manipulation. After all, everyone's actions eventually affect me, so I should be able to control all aspects of how they think, right?
The funny (sad) thing is that these utilities are almost easier to work around Twitter in this case.
Power company cuts you off? Buy a generator, no big deal.
Town turns off your water. IBC totes are cheap.
Comcast terminates your account? Verizon is happy to pay you money and if they aren't where you are then you can suck it up and by satellite.
If your a media business and Twitter/Facebook won't let you advertise and breaks links to your content you're basically screwed. There are no real alternatives because that's wher your users are.
This reminds me of the time I talked to an engineering manager and he told me twitter was the electricity the internet runs on. I thought that was ridiculous, but this is taking it to a new level, where twitter is equivalent to electricity.
Everyone here is arguing with the analogy and not with the thrust of OPs argument.
With Twitter et al, their service is free and "you are the product", so.. they can ban you whenever with no recourse at all.
This is basically the NYPost crying because it wants free stuff with no strings attached.
I'm curious what exactly you think they could have done to not end up here. I'm not aware of Twitter even offering a paid service that they could use, and network effects mean that failing to publish on Twitter just means that fewer people will see your stuff.
Twitter doesn't have a paid service for users (it has paid access to their API, just in case somebody on this site still had doubts about what really is their core business), I was just making a (probably poorly phrased) example.
In case you don't know, FedEx or pretty much any delivery company are free to refuse shipping your parcels.
A cursory googling is enough to allow you to discover fedex's shipping guidelines.
And to make matters worse, this radical group doesn't even care if the information is available or not, they only care about spreading it as far and wide as it's conceivable and attack anyone that they deem reactionary, including social networks that flag posts as having unsubstantiated information.
Recognizing their freedom doesn’t insulate them from criticism. Freedom/regulatory regime != morality.
FWIW I'm fully supportive of company autonomy, and I also like expressing criticism when their actions don't line up with my values.
The reality is they have massive market share. Keep in mind, Facebook and Twitter prevented the spread of this story via PRIVATE DIRECT MESSAGES!
Imagine if AT&T or Verizon started blocking texts because of their content. You can say, "Well don't use Messenger" and you need to realize, a lot of us don't have each other's phone numbers any more. For my international friends, I might only have a Messenger or Hangouts connection.
And this is where the rub comes into play. At what point is one of these platforms so big that they become a regular communication utility? If you were paying for the service, that's one thing, but in the case of Faceobook/Twitter, they make money from you in more abstract ways (adverts).
People can still go to NY Post directly, and because we have such good freedoms in the US, we can route around the censorship to some degree. But at some point, this also becomes election interference.
Politicians don't understand the Internet enough to get reforms right. (Remember Stevens and the series of tubes?). 230 Reforms would probably need:
a) Remove the algo Timeline entirely. Results should be the way they were in the old days: Reverse Chronological. (or baring that, inboxes with the default search order of names being alphabetical).
b) Don't block any direct messages unless it's clearly malware or illegal. (This can get super tricky. Look at the sad state of e-mail).
The real solution is to get people to use more diverse platforms, platforms people pay for (even $1/month) and that distribute/federate data rather than centralize it.
There are technological solutions around this. The problem is people and adoption.
And the equivocation of a tabloid to a utility company is just completely absurd...
It seems to me that having a respected publisher call out another publisher for having tried to peddle bullshit is an important contribution to reduce that asymmetry.
TBH maybe we just need to move on from social media instead.
For all its flaws abilty produce content cheaply has created value too.
There's a reason there are basically no "freedom of speech, marketplace of ideas" sites that a) don't have a single ounce of moderation done by people and b) are popular.
Gay rights Women rights Liberty
Always one side saying let's wait a bit longer, let's listen to our lies for a bit longer.
"On May 21, 1919, the amendment passed the House 304 to 89, with 42 votes more than was necessary. On June 4, 1919, it was brought before the Senate and, after Southern Democrats abandoned a filibuster, 36 Republican Senators were joined by 20 Democrats to pass the amendment with 56 yeas, 25 nays, and 14 not voting."
If you lean right, you don't want to see this level of censorship.
If you don't, you're fine with it because it's pretty much exclusively in the direction of Trump.
You want them exempted from the rules on political grounds, which is a problem.
Also, if the policy on hacked material was enforced; wouldn't the NYT story on the tax returns hacked/leaked from Trump also apply? Most of the controversy here is that Twitter has selectively taken action, and now that they changed their policy, they still wont reactivate the account even though its no longer in violation until the NYP deletes the original violating tweet.
This article has been suppressed for one reason and one reason alone: because it's potentially damaging to Joe Biden's election campaign. I know it, you know it, Twitter knows, everybody else knows, so stop pretending that this is about anything else because no-one is fooled.
Increasing noise (disinformation) is just as damaging to free speech as decreasing the signal (censorship).
Unless it's directly inciting violence, yes.
> How is that workable? Many people cannot distinguish fake news from legitimate sources of information.
The track record of restricting information from people because you feel like you're smarter than they are is not great. It's also impractically subjective.
> Increasing noise (disinformation) is just as damaging to free speech as decreasing the signal (censorship).
I consider your suggestion of encouraging clamping down on free speech too dangerous to discuss. By your logic should I be able to prevent you from expressing it?
By this standard, Facebook must allow everything that you can find on Pornhub and Liveleak. Plus much of the material published in Al Qaeda's magazine Inspire. Telling people "crusaders should die" and "here's how to make a bomb from over the counter materials" aren't direct incitements to violence. Reddit could never have banned r/WatchPeopleDie or r/jailbait. (Although it could be hard to spot any actual jailbait in r/jailbait once torrents of MLM schemes and cryptocurrency scams flood every subreddit.)
The First Amendment protects a lot. That's why back in 2014/2015 American legislators who were unhappy with Islamist terrorist propaganda circulating on social media called on social media companies to do something instead of passing a law. A law that says "it's illegal to publish photos of dead Americans or their allies with gloating commentary" wouldn't survive the First Amendment. But social platforms could and did deplatform groups cheering for ISIS, to bipartisan approval.
You may sincerely believe that only direct incitements to violence should be suppressed on social media. I don't think that there is legislative support for that state of affairs, though. Not even among the conservative legislators who are currently the most critical of social media moderation decisions. If legislators managed to pass a law that said "social media platforms cannot suppress anything that is legal to publish under the First Amendment," I think that they would regret that choice a month after seeing the consequences.
One of the things required in debate classes is to argue for the other sides position.
I have found that most people I meet these days have never learned this ability to see things with the shoes on the other feet.
On your own website or forum, absolutely. It's your property. GP has no right to use it that you do not expressly grant.
> Many people cannot distinguish fake news from legitimate sources of information.
Well it's hard for the New York Times cough Judith Miller cough, so I'm not sure what your point is here.
The truth matters more than how the truth was obtained.
If you don't your dirty laundry aired, don't have dirty laundry.
I dont personally care if Hunter Biden used his dad's name to make money (that is par for the course these days), but Twitter and Facebook suppressed the story basically saying because they were not able to verify it, even though they have clearly allowed a lot of fake news to float around their platforms in the past.
Also I don't know why you think people on the left think big companies are on their side
We know they're not. And that they unfairly censor liberal stories.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/sensitive-claims-bias...
But for once they seem to be trying to do the right thing, and avoid spreading propoganda
I am imagining those years of looking at terrible National Enquirer headlines at store checkouts. This kind of terrible reporting as always existed, but for some reason (luckily I guess) they never crossed over into national discourse the way that stories do online.
I never begrudged the store for carrying them and selling them. If Wal-Mart suddenly felt the need to arbitrate on the accuracy of every periodical they sold, I'm not sure if I would feel better or worse.
I also don't know how to handle the people who are saying the story is fake or terribly reported, but we have a right to be misinformed if we want to be.
This story is essentially Russian propaganda designed to destabilize the US election. It's a whole different category of content.
He is also hamfistedly talking up Iranian election interference solely to downplay Russian election interference: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-security/u-s...
Because it's making editorial decisions of what news to allow on it's platform it should be treated as any other news organization and it should be open to liable law suits.
Congress needs to enforce 230 and make Twitter choose; either 8kun or NYT, pick one.
Citation needed.
They've chosen not to delete for either "moral" reasons or "moral outrage" reasons, but the ball is in their court.
It is a better advertisement for the story, and worse for Twitter.
The irony of a giant company like Twitter falling for the Streisand effect is rich.
So why is the Post's account still locked?
More generally, it does not appear Twitter is impartially enforcing standards against leaking private information. There are no problems posting stories to Trump's illegally-leaked tax returns, or Melania's phone calls, for example.
We have a model for this already, it's called "safe search"
When you filter without disclosing, you're stealing my agency and creating a situation for near-undetectable abuse.
I don't agree. I think that's a lie. Twitter is a common-carrier and should not be allowed to discriminate, but that's not what Twitter is saying. Twitter very openly claiming to be a "publisher." Twitter wants you to say that.
So now they are trying to blame the individual sources which is effective to some extent except when the sources are hugely popular with certain segments of society.
IMO the real solution is to massively slow all viral content's spread. That of course would damage the platforms, particularly if their competitors don't implement similar limits. So all the platforms are playing this kind of cat-and-mouse game and doing a piecemeal approach fraught with ethical and potential legal issues.
> I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it
(due to Evelyn Beatrice Hall, biographer of Voltaire)
new maxim:
> I disapprove of what you say, and will defend through your profile's death against your being able to say it.
Although to be fair, I dont think Twitter has figured out that it is now becoming “cool” and free advertising to be blocked by them.
It is turning into a form of rebellion and “fighting against the man”. It is a badge of honor for a large segment of society right now.
Basically, being banned by Twitter is becoming free advertising.
I mean, look a this post by OP.
They programmatically freeze your account with the message “Twitter freezes accounts that violate Twitter Rules.” which criteria is just a /dev/urandom that apparently any average script kiddies can trigger at will.
They don’t bother dealing with your complaints, but don’t bother with ban evasions either, so people either keep sending complaints until it reaches a human, or just create alternate accounts and try to spread your word that this alt is now your main account. You have to have built a network or position in a group that can handle these transitions.
Isn’t that how Twitter works? That won’t change without some social media account rights movement and legislation.
And if they want to unfreeze their account they can do so by deleting the tweet that was manually flagged. They have not done so because they want to draw attention to themselves as an alleged victim of bias against conservative media outlets.
Edit: is there a reason my factually sound comment is being downvoted?
There has been plenty of widely reported, direct evidence of the latter, it's not even a matter of dispute. The NYP piece was not 'direct evidence' of that. This is a pretty unserious piece of analysis, if you can call it that.
There's no reason to think this. It's increasingly common for security-conscious organizations to watermark documents to identify who accessed it. See, for instance, how the Intercept "accidentally" burnt a source by publishing her raw documents about Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
That said, the New York Times has some level of credibility, and the Post doesn't. You can't simply demand that the Post be treated with a level of respect just because you agree with its slant. Perhaps if the Post published the email metadata which would instantly prove authenticity I'd feel a bit worse for it. Until then, though, I'll continue to assume it's just trying to launder a smear campaign, whether that smear campaign originated from foreign intelligence services or domestic slimeball political operatives.
Twitter has a toggle for obscene material. Give us a toggle for misinformation.
Aether does this. You can choose your own moderator.
I for one cannot wait for Dorsey and his crew to get a taste of their own medicine, since it doesn't matter if I disagree with GOP (let's face it, this is again a right vs left issue), I still believe they have a right to free speech.
As a reminder, there are numerous past instances where Twitter did not apply the same policies that were used to shut down NY Post: https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/15/11-hacks-leaks-and-hoax...
This selective application of policy is evidence of Twitter's bias, which I assume results from the bias of their leadership team and employee base. A company this big, which this much influence, cannot be trusted to operate the digital public square for an entire nation, let alone the world. It is a threat to speech, since the reach of these platforms is such that speech effectively doesn't exist if it isn't on these platforms. We need competing platforms badly, but it is hard to challenge the first-mover advantage of network effects of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. Perhaps we simply need to instead regulate them so that they do not deplatform/censor content that does not break the law.
Obviously in this instance, there are political components in the reporting, but there are also undeniably components of truth as well.
A healthy journalistic environment would dissect the facts from many angles and leave readers more informed. However, this recent trend of topic censoring adds confusion to the discussion while at the same time sowing distrust of media institutions. That is to say: it creates the precise environment in which an alternative reality can thrive.
My biggest concern is that it will culminate in the president claiming victory next week, and the discussion of it in the media will be inherently incomplete and untrustworthy. That would be a real pickle for our country moving forward together.
Edit: the irony of downvoting this take to 0 without responding is hilarious.
That said, all they need to do is delete the fake news Twitter asked them to, yet they won't. Why?
None of the reports I've seen casting aspersions on the legitimacy of the files have offered any proof they are not legit.
I think it's fair to say the messengers (Rudy and Bannon) are certainly motivated by personal and political gain but I don't think they're stupid enough to knowingly try to pass off forged documents to smear the Bidens.
So, with all that in mind I do find it queer that most all of the left leaning "News" organizations have focused on discrediting the legitimacy of the files without having any real evidence at all of them being forged or altered and for the most part I've not seen them reporting on what's in the files or alleged to be in them.
The New York Post can recover their Twitter account at any time by deleting those tweets.
From Mikhail Bakunin:
> Liberty can and must defend itself only through liberty; to try to restrict it on the specious pretext of defending it is a dangerous contradiction.
Despite the intentions of these companies, I find it fairly evident that censorship usually just reinforces the status quo. It's a terrible tactic for forward progress.
That is exactly what the fake Hunter Biden story is though. Blatant GOP propaganda released at a strategic moment to assist the re-election of Trump.
"Section 230 Is The Subject of The Most Effective Legal Propaganda I've Ever Seen"
https://popehat.substack.com/p/section-230-is-the-subject-of...
TL;DR: No, moderating their site even in an egregiously, blatantly biased way won't make Twitter a "publisher" or make them lose Section 230 protections
Will any criticism of our sitting President be punishable by banning from social media?
But, I repeat, what happens when it's "our side" in power? Would leaks about malfeasance under his administration be "improperly sourced information"?
No reason to suppose they will act differently for Biden.
Their action here seems to be more out of fear of a pre-election bombshell similar to the 2016 “emails” that turned out to a nothingburger.
Twitter's setting themselves up as the arbiter of what constitutes "properly sourced" information. What happens if there's another Snowden-type leak under Biden? Hacked materials, gathered without consent, potentially slanderous, definitely hurting the 'good guys' in this news cycle...
The difference is that right-wing trash usually comes directly from Trump, then republished in the tabloids. We've seen that get reined in a little in annotating his worst tweets and FB posts, but don't pretend there's an equivalence between their public communications.
"Twitter also said the Post article contained images that included personal and private information such as email addresses and phone numbers, which is against the social network's rules. "
Weird seeing disinfo get upvoted on Hacker News of all places.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loylqtvKAbU
It would seem to make this case very clear. Right?
https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1310336685574680578?lang=...
"Our primary aim is to protect individuals from coming to physical harm as a result of their information being shared ..."
"Twitter said the article was in violation of its hacked material policy. The company clarified that it was banning links to the article because it contained images of hacked material with personal and private information."
"7. Twitter’s decision was, at least, more clearly explained. The site has rules against publishing hacked information, it’s used these rules to ban links before, and copying personal files from a laptop without permission — if that’s indeed how they were obtained — arguably falls under them. Twitter later elaborated on its decision, saying the Post story included “personal and private information — like email addresses and phone numbers — which violate our rules.”
Since people here think Twitter is in the wrong, my question is when do I get these protections on HN? Do I have to implement them on forums I run? How big does a company have to get before they have to implement these protections? Who oversees and enforces these things? How is "big" defined anyway? After all, HN is already bigger than Twitter was at some point. Do we use MAUs, DAUs? Number of words/day, etc?
It's not the NY Post's inherent right to inject misinformation into elections.
Equivocation in this thread to NYTimes publishing on Trump tax returns boggles the mind, and shows the sorry state of 2020. It’s reminiscent of how Trump redefined “fake news”—a phenomena associated almost exclusively with right-wing falsehoods masquerading as news—to mean “facts that are so damning of me that I construct a reality-distortion field to blind my followers”. I am dismayed by how many commenters here seemingly abandon objective Truth and descend into the anarchy of textual equivocation.
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/fake-news-media-election-trump....
It makes the case that:
1) Adults in America saw hardly any fake news stories (on average one per person, massively dwarfed by real news and political ads) 2) Main Stream Media were far more "to blame", focusing on scandal instead of policy. They give an example of the NY times ran more front page stories on Hillary's emails in 10 days, than they ever ran on Trump/Hillary policy comparisons.
You can’t spout a debunked conspiracy theory about Russian spies and then rail on about objective truth.
Twitter made a journalistic decision not to spread trash, possibly from Russia, that could have a real impact on our election result. Tough call, but the right call. If twitter sees itself as having some sort of moderator role than it has to make these judgement calls.
Other outlets didn't amplify the Hunter Biden laptop story either. Even conservative outlets like the Wall Street Journal decided it was too sketchy to spread.
Twitter is trying to avoid being a platform for conspiracy theories and foreign intelligence agencies. It has to act.
So unless there is a huge conspiracy that you have evidence of where the DNI is straight up lying to everyone, I think it's fair to say that it's not misinformation from foreign parties.
[1] "Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Monday said Hunter Biden’s recovered laptop and emails, which purportedly show Joe Biden had involvement in his son’s foreign business dealings, are “not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.”... "He continued: “Let me be clear: the intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there is no intelligence that supports that. And we have shared no intelligence with Adam Schiff, or any member of Congress.”
https://news.yahoo.com/dni-ratcliffe-hunter-biden-emails-134...
But even if this is not Russia material, the NY Post story is very suspect. Even the WSJ wouldn't touch it.
Social media is a very toxic force in our society. I applaud Twitter for taking these very modest steps to correct the flow of propaganda. I'm sure Hannity and Fox are shocked that Twitter actually has a spine. They weren't expecting that.
I don't see anything on Ratcliffe on Wikipedia that would make him a non-legitimate source? Could you point out what you're alluding to?
Stating that the NY Post story "is very suspect" isn't an evidence-based reason to lock their account permanently. In fact, there's a fine number of controversies around the NYT over the years, but I wouldn't support them being blocked from Twitter for any of those reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversies_involvin...
Here is a nice detailed account on why/how the WSJ decided not to run with the Biden narrative that Trump/Giuliani/Bannon were peddling: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-bid...
> Ratcliffe is well known for criticizing the FBI and the special counsel investigation as being biased against Trump. Ratcliffe has also alleged that Russian interference may have benefited Trump's 2016 rival candidate Hillary Clinton more than it benefited Trump. American intelligence agencies, the Senate Intelligence Committee and Robert Mueller have maintained that Russia interfered to help Trump. A week before Trump's announcement, Ratcliffe had argued that the special counsel investigation put Trump "below the law" because it declined to exonerate Trump. Later, Ratcliffe claimed on Fox News that the special counsel investigation's report was not written by special counsel Robert Mueller, but by "Hillary Clinton’s de facto legal team".[63][8]
Democrats asserted Ratcliffe was unqualified and too partisan to serve in such a role, which is historically considered relatively nonpartisan.[64] Some Republicans also privately expressed discontent with his selection and concerns about his ability to be confirmed.[65] However, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr and Senator John Cornyn expressed confidence in him.[66][67] Democratic senators including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Ron Wyden, a member of the Intelligence Committee, said that Ratcliffe’s only qualification for the office appeared to be "blind loyalty" to Trump, noting that he has promoted some of Trump’s conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation and has called for prosecution of Trump’s political enemies.[68][63] Several former members of the intelligence community expressed concerns that Ratcliffe's appointment risked politicizing intelligence work.[5][69] They expressed fear that with Ratcliffe as DNI, Trump would in effect be assuming personal control over the intelligence community, which would then be expected to tell him only what he wants to hear.[70] They stressed the need for intelligence to be "candid, truthful and accurate even if it is unpleasant and does not confirm to the biases of the president".[8]
As the right bails on twitter and goes to pure conservative echo chambers and the left stays in their leftist echo chambers... any shared interactions are lost.
Even though it's their right as a private company...its truly a shame that Twitter is acting like this.
This isn't a small fringe group.
The right is almost 50% of the country.
The fact that you're demonizing such a large group instead of attempting to understand them reveals a little of your fanaticism that you may not even be aware of.
For what it's worth, I've stopped commenting on HackerNews because any even moderately pro-Trump opinion is met by the downvote brigade.
In my opinion, interacting with strangers online is just a recipe for a bad time.
I'd cease social media entirely, but I'm not allowed to be social out in the real world anymore, and work is too boring to stay focused for an entire work day.
I've had your same experiences on hacker news at times. It's a down vote brigade for anything counter to the progressive narrative whether it's Trump or Covid or Global Warming or other progressive ideas.
It's a great site though and I have had some great conversations and learned a lot as long as you steer clear of the progressive agenda.
Reddit is way worse. It makes hacker news look like The Wall Street Journal.
There's a theory called horseshoe theory that claims that the fanatical left and right have more in common with each other than they do centrists.
No, I didn't publish a picture of your credit card, just the numbers on it.
So, they illegally obtained something and then misreported on it without giving people the ability to verify their claims. I’m not even sure why they’re allowed to be on twitter in that case.
Would this apply to the Trump access hollywood tape (grab them by the...)?
But still, how is Twitter even supposed to judge whether a story is trustworthy? No clue.
But perhaps there is a fair use argument to be made?
We can question the framing of data selected from the laptop, but the laptop itself has never been in dispute.
Fortunately, as with the Trump tax returns, the journalists handling the Panama Papers did not engage in such unscrupulous behavior.
Also, many used the absence of raw data to cast doubt on the authenticity of the information released by the NY Post.
And there are easy ways to establish authenticity without publishing raw data e.g. providing third party journalists with access to the data.
That said, maybe it's best if NYPost stays off Twitter.
Frankly I don't know whats the better way for twitter, its one of those doomed if you do, doomed if not.
Could you draw a diagram of this?
Generally speaking in America it has moved leftward continually since the American Revolution, which was a left-wing act of protest against a monarchical government (which, on a flatness <--> hierarchy view of the left/right axis, is among the furthest right political systems possible). Each successive major shift in American politics has been a shift towards the left in some way (more egalitarian/equalizing policies, more erosion of authoritative positions on social policies, etc).
Conquest's Second Law is in effect!
At any one time, the "center" is just the point of acceptable shared discourse between the organizations that control the 'poles' at the left and right extents of common discussion; anything past those poles is considered "extreme".
For example, during our lifetimes, discussion of a topic like Gay Marriage has gone from being an extreme leftist social policy you couldn't discuss with people in polite company, to being a hot topic of common debate that even Obama said he would not legalize, to becoming official policy, and then even being accepted by the Republican Party as simply the law of the land and not a subject for discussion any more, pushing the topic as far to the right now as it was to the left 30 years ago. (I hold no judgement on the topic here, merely using it as an example for how the window of what is socially acceptable can shift, and the "center" shifts with it.)
In this case it's possible the Overton Window may finally be shifting back leftward on race and history regarding the Civil War.
> it's possible the Overton Window may finally be shifting back leftward on race and history regarding the Civil War.
I think that the 1965 Hart Cellar Immigration Act began a leftward push on that front that has not really experienced meaningful pushback at all beyond a few small groups publicly acknowledging the quietly-held discomfort of a very large segment of the population.
Confederate statues and the defense thereof are just one of many small ways in which White Americans have tried to retain some sense of identity as their culture is perhaps irrevocably changed beneath them. Some try to make it all about slavery, but if you actually read what the more erudite examples of these folks think it's much more nuanced than that.
Yes! It's amazing. I don't think there will ever be some magical set of axes that allows a really clear quantification of where the US is at. The problem, of course, is that because of the false dichotomy of choices (R vs D) you can't actually vote for foreign policy decisions at all. It's not even a topic of debate, really!
Essentially, the USA continues to have a relatively hawkish position, continues to fund under-reported foreign wars (e.g. in Yemen presently), continues to be a destabilizing entity in many ways, often to the benefit of countries more closely allied to the USA (Saudi Arabia, Israel, etc) at the expense of smaller and less powerful nations. It's very confusing, full of misdirections, and impossible for any normal person to follow.
Most Americans want fewer foreign wars, I think. Most Americans (surprisingly including a large and growing swathe of the working class right-wing, believe it or not) are open to the idea of social healthcare in one form or another.
Large moneyed interests make these efforts impossible to take on politically, though, and whenever public opinion could be useful to influence actions on the issue, you'll see more false dichotomies form, meta-layers of fractally nested infighting designed to make it so people get hung up on stupid things and debate that instead of the real issue (huge lobby groups intent on acting as middlemen in every transaction to wring every last dollar out of people for no benefit to them whatsoever).
This is the GOP party platform for 2016 & 2020:
> Our laws and our government’s regulations should recognize marriage as the union of one man and one woman and actively promote married family life as the basis of a stable and prosperous society. For that reason, as explained elsewhere in this platform, we do not accept the Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage and we urge its reversal, whether through judicial reconsideration or a constitutional amendment returning control over marriage to the states.
https://gop.com/platform/renewing-american-values/#Item2
> Defending Marriage Against an Activist Judiciary
> Traditional marriage and family, based on marriage between one man and one woman, is the foundation for a free society and has for millennia been entrusted with rearing children and instilling cultural values. We condemn the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Windsor, which wrongly removed the ability of Congress to define marriage policy in federal law. We also condemn the Supreme Court’s lawless ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which in the words of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, was a “judicial Putsch” — full of “silly extravagances” — that reduced “the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Storey to the mystical aphorisms of a fortune cookie.” In Obergefell, five unelected lawyers robbed 320 million Americans of their legitimate constitutional authority to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The Court twisted the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment beyond recognition. To echo Scalia, we dissent. We, therefore, support the appointment of justices and judges who respect the constitutional limits on their power and respect the authority of the states to decide such fundamental social questions.
Surely you understand the difference between things written in a policy platform and things actually done in practice. There is no GOP rep who is out there stirring anything up on reversing this and despite the words "urging its reversal" there is not and will likely not ever be any action in this direction.
I can't really imagine someone following American politics for more than a year and not realizing this. Almost none of the policy white papers these parties and candidates write will ever be implemented, at all.
The GOP almost never does anything its base actually wants, in the socially-conservative sense. They just pretend they will, to get votes; the same way the Democrats pretend they're going to do any number of things for their base that never happen. It's just kayfabe, it's just an act to get you to vote and legitimize their power so that they can continue to do whatever is easiest and most expedient for each individual politician and player at any given moment.
Anyway, I hear what you're saying a lot, and yet:
- The GOP enables Texas social workers to refuse LGBTQ clients[1]
- The Trump administration allows doctors to discriminate against LGBTQ people[2]
- The Trump administration allows taxpayer-funded adoption agencies to turn away LGBTQ parents[3][4]
- The Trump administration targets homeless trans people[5]
But most importantly, and directly to your point:
- In October of this year, conservative Supreme Court justices chose to speak out against Obergefell[6] at length, for four whole pages, while deciding not to hear another case[7]
[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2020/10/14/texas-social-workers...
[2] https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/4/24/21234532/trump-admi...
[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/trump-admin-s-adopti...
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avgFhrHqBWM
[5] https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/7/2/21311179/trump-hud-r...
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/us/politics/thomas-alito-...
[7] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-c...
I'm confused about what you're saying about ".. don't think you'll find anyone that is satisfied ...". If no one is happy about these things, why do they continue to do them?
If you do not consider those news outlets adequately centerist, that may be an indication that your personal Overton window is somewhat skewed.
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/associated-press-media-...
They just rate it center. There is no single media source that will never have any bias at all. So that would mean there would never be an center.
>AP is a source that AllSides has struggled to rate, due to its content seeming to toe the line between Center and Lean Left. People on the right may be more likely to see AP’s content as clearly Lean Left. While AP's news and world reporting is largely Center, AllSides has found AP often includes subjective, leftward analysis in hard news reports and omits sources in its political writing; in addition, its fact checks are biased to the left
Reuters and AP are rated similarly there.
Granted that you need to read the websites methodology to determine whether you think those ratings are credible.
The Associated Press in 2015: "BREAKING: Obama sends $4 trillion spending plan to Congress, pledging help for middle class."[1]
The Associated Press in 2018: "BREAKING: President Trump sends Congress $4.4 trillion spending plan that features soaring deficits."[2]
If a news organization put "soaring deficits" in the Obama headline and "helping the middle class" in the Trump headline, I'd definitely call that right-wing bias.
https://apnews.com/article/97f7a140f39a43d0995587be61ed388f
Trump proposing tax cuts and ~$1 trillion in annual deficits going forward:
https://apnews.com/article/e50aec4820da4e30aed4bea9ff440e86
The plans differ considerably in substance, your comparison speciously treats them as similar or the same.
And even more, Obama sent a wishlist to a hostile Congress. Trump got more of what he wanted.
Factually speaking, Trump did blow up the deficit, and failing to report that, instead of reporting it, would be indicative of bias.
Budgets requested by Republican vs Democratic administrations are different as the parties have different spending and taxation priorities. Reporting budgets without acknowledging that the parties are spending/borrowing/taxing in different areas would be a lie.
Printing news stories that make Republicans look bad is not indicative of bias if those stories are, as is usually the case, factually true. The solution to this problem is not to complain about media bias but rather for the Republican party to do fewer things that look bad.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_United_States_federal_bud...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_federal_bud...
I would agree with you, except the AP didn't criticize Obama's deficit increases compared to Bush. Pick a non-recession year in the Bush administration (like 2007[1]) and you'll see deficit spending half that of Obama's. That's despite wasting tons of money (and lives) warring in the middle east.
I don't want to go all "both sides" here. One side is certainly more worthy of criticism than the other. But considering the fraction of journalists who are on the left, it's not surprising that an ostensibly unbiased organization can still have some leanings.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_States_federal_bud...
I mean, if you can't see that the social policy of the most leftmost activists and the social policy of the FAANG HR departments have a near-perfect alignment, I don't know what to tell you.
There's a big difference between this and their views on financial policies, but they've learned they can assuage the angry crowd by kowtowing to social issues while continuing to play the job of the robber baron. To successfully ride on top of this unstable equilibrium, it is necessary to (1) establish false dichotomies, a la the Arthur Finklestein school of electoral politics, and (2) to crush dissent that tries to pick apart the false dichotomy by controlling speech and silencing anything that is actually dissident against any concrete part of the narrative that is really open to attack.
Not that I think this Hunter Biden stuff is particularly noteworthy; if anything it's just more fuel for the false dichotomy, and a banning like this one for the NYP is perfect in terms of making it into a lightning-rod issue. Focus on this, people, and not any of the actual things happening in the world right now (like, say, the Middle East, or the flyover-state opioid crisis, or climate change, or inner city crime, or anything else that seemingly stops existing and has no interesting events when we don't pay attention to it, right?)
Anything becomes political as soon as a politician talks about it. So things being 'political' do not transform them into sacred cows.
Exactly, the world is not that polarised that anyone not agreeing with right wing conspiracies is left wing.
Solutions already exist like the brilliant https://memo.cash for blockchain based messaging.
You believe it would be best if public discourse became even more of a one-sided echo chamber?
Why is that?
That was never implied.
Care to correct your typo so we can figure out what you're trying to say here?
You have the right to say whatever you want, everyone else has the right to not allow it on their property.
There is no first amendment right to compelled listening. We aren't remotely close to having that. There isn't even a strong argument having been made for that, there is nothing slithering through the courts that would change that.
This is what happens every time people "cancel" someone, everyone agrees not to listen to them.
The separate standard for platforms is that people are just observing that they can't cancel the platform, easily. Just because they too will lose their own sounding board, which is ironically still being tolerated by said platform. But that is their only option.
A helluva lot of people joined these networks and got captured by the network effect because we were told or believed that they were open sites, just like the rest of the net. If content (or types of content) came along that folks didn't want? Nerds like us would make and give away (or sell) tools for getting rid of that garbage.
In a big way, what we're going through right now is fraud, plain and simple. It may not meet the legal definition, but to grow and scale using one model and then switch to another once you have a monopoly is a form of bait and switch. There's no way in hell I would have joined either site, and I would have vociferously told my friends and family not to join either, if they had been clear up front that this was what they were planning to do.
NOTE: I am not making a legal claim. I mean fraud in the moral sense. I understand with a zillion corporate lawyers that everything these guys do is wonderfully legal, no matter what the long-term social effects end up being. I am speaking in the vernacular, not legal sense. We were tricked.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/101320zor_8m...
Voters, and their representatives, made a deliberate effort to be as hands-off as possible to the early internet. It remained tax free. Public facilities were used. Section 230 was passed to remove the specter of liability and so on. We all did the most we could to stay away and let the net develop, knowing that if we came in too heavy-handed, not only would we destroy this new creation, we'd forever taint it in the world's eyes as just being some kind of US thing.
We had high hopes. We were open-minded and experimental. And here's where we freaking ended up: just another Standard Oil or United States Steel Corporation, only this time there wasn't any kind of behind-the-scenes mucking around in politics. It's directly in our face. (And when you point that out, the monopolies themselves will beg for regulation, knowing full well that by the time their money finishes paying off the legislators, the fix will be in. They'll set the wall so high they'll never have true competitors)
Not a happy political place to be, no matter what your particular political views.
from what I perceive, the angst now comes from Twitter, Facebook and Google acting like arbiters of truth or a moral high ground, when its clear they aren't and might be so drunk on their own koolaid that they can't perceive it internally.
it would be clearer for us for them to just say "we arbitrarily censor some things at our own discretion, there is no rhyme or reason to it, we all went to stanford and live within 2 miles of each other so it might have a pattern of leaning left, but it might not too, we have the right to refuse service to anyone, go somewhere else if thats a problem, but we might buy that service too"
people are just conflating the concepts, and I also would not be able to tell if they are consciously referring to the American constitution or a concept that goes far beyond that
And since you're standing up for corporate civil rights, I'd love to hear your defense of the Citizens United decision while we're at it.
deep breath
Citizens United merely clarified a reality that was already in play, enshrinment of corporate personhood going back to the passage of the 14th amendment, and simply shed light onto the toothlessness of the FEC and removed the discretion that was being used by people that didnt want a court challenge. With the attention I would have thought the people would gave attempted a constitutional amendment but one decade later this is clearly not the avenue people consider leaving only the reality of the tools available.
Corporate personhood is not a new concept and didn’t begin in 2010.
Regarding ISPs, section 230 has the capability of limiting their behavior in exchange for other privileges. There is a case platforms to be subject to that or a similar code.
(More caveats- I'm assuming you're talking about Hunter Biden although he isnt a presidential candidate and AFAIK the post's article hasn't been proven false, although it's certainly worth being skeptical about. Especially given the sketchiness of the source)
EDIT: honestly, as a conservative who was supportive of the investigation surrounding impeachment, this kind of obvious media double treatment makes me want to double down -- as other conservatives have done -- in simply not supporting conservatives being investigated. It seems obvious that the allegations, the narrative, etc, is tightly controlled by the media, and conservatives are not given a fair shake, while even the most minute details of conservatives are examined in agonous detail (remember the Steele dossier, which is now confirmed Russian disinformation?). If the Hunter Biden allegations are true around the Ukraine prosecutor, then the impeachment was clearly punishing a sitting president for investigating corruption. That is shocking.