False Accusation: The Unfounded Claim That Social Media Censors Conservatives | Hacker News Reader

False Accusation: The Unfounded Claim That Social Media Censors Conservatives

bhr.stern.nyu.edu

41 pointsgeofft46 comments

Here's a direct link: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b6df958f8370af3217d4...

Not particularly insightful from what I can glean, and essentially boils down to "Twitter isn't particularly transparent about banning therefore we can't say much about it". That's fine, agnosticism about it is a defensible position. I'm a little skeptical when an academic report is presented in a magazine-style layout with "fancy" graphics and a dearth of substantive data though. That kind of thing is typical of think tanks and "policy recommendations", which are designed for maximal persuasion instead of maximal analysis.

I would not say it is "unfounded" - but rather that censorship is ill-defined, at least in the public eye.

We have come up with words that are easier to swallow like "deplatforming" and "fact checking." Censorship occurs in many forms, and not all of it is directly blocking access to speech (IMO).

There is a common misconception that censorship can only occur at the public (government) level, but not the private level. As per Wikipedia:

"Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies."

There is also the issue of orthodox views and orthodox privilege (as per Paul Graham's explanation). Many conservative views are not orthodox to the point where you can be canceled for merely quoting someone else or citing facts (yes, both have happened in the past). So there is some form of self-censorship (this is related to "social cooling" IIRC).

I think it all boils down to this: which side supports censorship and which side condemns it? There you will find your answer on who is more adversely affected by censorship.

Note: this is not a left or right issue, historically speaking. For example, look back to McCarthyism.

> I think it all boils down to this: which side supports censorship and which side condemns it? There you will find your answer on who is more adversely affected by censorship.

I don't think that's a valid metric at all. This doesn't reflect the quality of censored expressions, their factual validity (mere facts are not opinions) or evolutionary adaptations to the discourse, like deflection ("No u!"). You assume a zero sum game.

See how diversity initiatives and co are confronted with "this is racism against white people!". Does this reflect an increase in discrimination against "white" people, or an decrease in discrimination for "non-white" people?

Then, people getting kicked off a Platform for being mean and abusive, doesn't mean they got censored for their political views, even if they claim that's the case.

All, I am saying is, your metric is problematic.

You are absolutely correct - perceiving censorship does not equate to being censored.

That said (IMO), there is a lot of abusive behavior on all sides - so the question becomes, is the treatment equal? It may just serve as a litmus test, at worst a false positive, to consider which side thinks they are being censored more. :)

I think the root problem is reasonable discourse not winning the heads anymore. The monopoly of newspapers put a price on information and by that rate-limited lazy bits. Now spreading (mis)information is free. The short/simplistic message wins over complexity every time.

Additionally there is a fundamental difference in fitness for left and right discourse to this new ecosystem. There is a reason right wing terrorism isn't needed to be as centrally organized, as historical left wing terrorism has been. If you find spontaneous unity in atrocity your political movement has no clear borders; whereas the left is constantly fighting itself over irrelevant intellectual nuances. If the left answers to ceiling-less rightwing populism, this will end in race to the bottom. The right will always one-up the show.

I think right wing politics is the better, fitter meme in the current environment and the left hasn't found an answer yet, as better arguments isn't enough.

We will all lose in this. I hope we find a way to shift incentives in social media soon, or this will be the end of civilization.

Would you mind sharing details about the time someone was canceled for citing facts? I stay out of the popular culture loop so I likely missed it.

> David Shor, for example, was until recently a data analyst at a progressive consulting firm, Civis Analytics. Shor’s job was to think about how Democrats can win elections. When Omar Wasow, a professor at Princeton, published a paper in the country’s most prestigious political-science journal arguing that nonviolent civil-rights protests had, in the 1960s, been more politically effective than violent ones, Shor tweeted a simple summary of it to his followers. Because the tweet coincided with the first mass protests over the killing of George Floyd, it generated some pushback. After a progressive activist accused Shor of “concern trolling for the purposes of increasing democratic turnout,” a number of people on Twitter demanded that he lose his job. Less than a week after he tweeted the findings of Wasow, who is black, Civis’s senior leadership, which is predominantly white, fired Shor.[0]

The censorship and control of the visibility of information hits Democrats as well as Republicans. See Tulsi Gabbard's appearance on Joe Rogan. Cancel Culture is about making all unorthodox beliefs and facts unspeakable, whether on the left or on the right.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...

At the root of cancellation is the freedom of association. If you lived in a rural town and you are hated, what is outcome? What is the government to do?

I think no matter where you move, whether to Taiwan or Japan, there is a natural burden for you to understand what community affection means. Or not.

netizen-9748 asked for a reference where someone was canceled for sharing facts, which I provided. This has huge implications for the entire nation. How can we trust "facts" when everyone knows that the "facts" are cherry-picked, and certain facts can't be published without committing career suicide? Shor and Gabbard are both progressive Democrats who are heavily involved in politics. They're not hated for who they are or having "fascist" beliefs. They're hated for stating inconvenient facts.

If you live in a rural town and can't make any friends, that's uncomfortable, but it's not a threat to the rest of the country. You're also handily glossing over the fact that the "hated" viewpoints make up around half of the country. If one person does something that pisses off 90% of the town, then "community affection" applies. But if half of the town has decided that the other half are Nazis and need to be subdued, along with any unorthodox people in their own half, then that's just a naked political power grab.

From the article: Civis denied the firing happened over the tweet. The only evidence is this:

> One Civis employee, who requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions, told me, the only reason for the firing “that was communicated that I heard were the client and staff reactions to the tweet.” The employee also said that at “our company-wide meeting after Shor’s firing blew up on Twitter, [CEO] Dan [Wagner] said something along the lines of freedom of speech is important, but he had to take a stand with our staff, clients, and people of color.”

Sure... Solid journalism, given the above.

I am not yet sold on "cancel culture". I only ever hear people crying about people calling them out on Twitter, intermixed with some random people losing their jobs for actually doing really nasty shit on public record. What ever there is, it's blown way out of proportion.

I hope we are heading for a drama recession. And I hope Twitter and Facebook die over it. I wish the idiots lighting 5G towers would shift their anger towards data centers. Any, at this point. I would fund them on patreon.

I should correct that slightly because no one ever cites facts or quotes in isolation - usually they are in the context of a broader argument or hypothesis. But there have been a few cases, here Google will probably serve you better than my feeble memory. One (rather controversial) example I can think of is James Damore. His hypothesis may have been wrong (I will leave that up to the reader), but he at least did seem to earnestly back it up with data and research papers (and even though there is some debate there, at least a few experts have publicly agreed that the science he cited was well-established).

Note: I am not defending Damore's position, only stating that it was a great example of the "yellow/blue dress" when it comes to orthodox speech. People seemed to be pretty fiercely divided on whether or not his memo warranted being fired.

Try tweeting anything about sex/gender or crime statistics that doesn't fall within the socially acceptable window of discussion.

I think it's fair to say the target of the censorship actions are non-mainstream views more broadly.

I agree with you we've been overly conditioned to worry about government censorship and not private platform censorship, and yet the former have elected leaders while the latter are unaccountable to the public.

That was in a sense Merkel's shock and public criticisms of the deplatforming actions. It's ironic because the criticism wasn't that there was censorship, it was that private companies were allowed to do it and not government.

Who is right, the American laissez-faire pro-corporate/neoliberal philosophy or the traditional European approach that wants government to have that duty?

> Who is right, the American laissez-faire pro-corporate/neoliberal philosophy or the traditional European approach that wants government to have that duty?

I'd prefer neither and that they'd just stop censoring people, no matter if it's the far-left or far-right. But America has the advantage of the First Amendment (assuming that's not going to be repealed). So maybe I'm naive, but I think in this particular case, at least the government would have to obey the free speech laws, unlike private entities.

Someone else on HN (I cannot recall who), stated something along the lines of (paraphrasing):

"Centralized power can be abused in the hands of the government or the private sector [via monopolies]"

Whether or not you agree, I thought this was an elegant way of phrasing it. The cure, IMO, is to ensure that both ultimately answer to the people, although I have no idea how that is practically enforced.

It's funny, because Merkel's party is actually pushing for the decision about what counts as "hatespeech"/"terrorism" to be made by the platforms themselves. The CDU wants there to be nothing edgy at all. Pretty similar to China's "social credit dystopia" moral panic, actually. Just different means.

> But there’s no evidence that Twitter intentionally shadow banned Republicans or anyone else. Rather, Twitter said it experienced a technical glitch which caused some 600,000 accounts including those of some Democratic politicians—not to be auto-suggested when people searched for them.

> The problem grew out of Twitter’s efforts beginning more than a year earlier to remove or down-rank low-quality and harassing accounts. What apparently happened was that large numbers of these disfavored accounts had inter acted with the Republican politicians’ accounts. This caused Twitter’s search system not to auto-suggest the Republicans, the company said. The malfunction, which never had to do with bias against politicians of either party, was fixed within 24 hours. 40 But the claims of partisanship related to the episode have continued to echo years later.

So, they're not shadow-banning anyone, but they're shadow-banning. Nice gaslighting.

> So, they're not shadow-banning anyone, but they're shadow-banning. Nice gaslighting.

How is an account not showing up in auto-suggest a shadow-ban?

Yeah this article's claim is going to be extremely hard to swallow.

The report reads like a textbook example of cherry picking data and surveys to suit their agenda.

> The report reads like a textbook example of cherry picking data and surveys to suit their agenda.

Can you elaborate on this? How did you come to that conclusion? Cherry picking, publication bias and so on, are not self-evident but need to be proven. It's not like logical fallacies.

This paper glosses over the censorship of a sitting president by claiming it was justified. Justification is a red herring. Blocking communications is censorship, regardless of justification.

But their not doing it because he's a republican which is the constant refrain heard. They did it because he incited violent insurrection. If anything they let him break their own rules for far too long before actually taking action.

The persecution narrative being pushed in conservative media is ridiculous.

Silencing someone who is yelling fire in a crowded theater, when there is an irrefutable lack of a fire, is not censorship.

Since the person is not actually disseminating information, no information is being censored.

> NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights

Something about this name is just weird to me. Maybe because they're putting "business" before "human rights"? Or maybe because it makes it seem like "business rights" and "human rights" are somehow similar? Or equal even? I'm not sure what it is that rubs me the wrong way but the name just feels totally out of touch and it doesn't tell me anything about the center's purpose.

As an NYU Stern MBA, I can tell you that the Human Rights courses definitely have a weird vibe. It often felt like I was being talked out of business world...

By the current rules of the game corporate censorship is not off-limits. Corporate censorship is legal.

Therefore, whether the censorship is justified, or not, there is also room for accusations of impropriety. Ergo: where there is room for accusations, there accusations will go.

The fact that leadership at Big Tech Companies tend to publicly espouse liberal ideas paints a big bullseye for conservatives to shoot at. If a regulatory structure were put in place to guarantee playform access and place explicit limits on platformed speech it would help us achieve fair and free discourse without the cries about censorship.

I think that a big part of it comes from trying to map a multidimensional belief space down to a one dimensional belief space (left to right, or liberal to conservative), combined with the US having a de facto two party system.

If your beliefs aren't actually particularly aligned with either the Democrats or the Republicans on most issues (or even on many issues), you are still arguably better off supporting whichever of them is the least objectionable of the two rather than supporting a third party.

So let's say Bob is a COVID conspiracy theorist believer, and is spreading falsehoods about the virus and the vaccine, and gets suspended or banned from some social media site for violating their misinformation policy.

Bob may actually align more with Democrats than Republicans on most issues, but Bob's biggest immediate concern is that he thinks COVID and the vaccination program is just cover to inject microchips for nefarious purposes.

Bob sure as heck ain't gonna be voting for Biden. Biden made a big deal during the campaign that the government was not being forceful enough in its anti-COVID measures and he would change that. Bob is going to feel his chances of avoiding getting chipped are better under Trump. So you look at Bob's other social media posts, and sure enough, he's endorsed Trump, and so Bob gets counted as a conservative being censored by social media.

If we had a voting system like ranked choice which does not greatly disfavor third parties, Bob would be a member of some third party. If you looked at his social media to see who he supported, the top spot on his ranking would be the candidate from some anti-vaccination party.

Wow, this is why the left needs to pay more attention to the right. This whole premise completely misunderstands the issue.

I wouldn't call it "misunderstanding". It's like the "christianity is under attack in the USA" meme. If you can adopt the victim status people's (at least in the USA) sympathy for the underdog will help you.

The clever thing about this is the general lack of censorship provides a greater opportunity to complain about it!

You’d be wrong, and you’re making the same error.

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