My take on Elon's offer for Twitter
twitter.com
twitter.com
this may very well be the first thing in my life I've agreed with Musk on. By god scrolling through an entire essay chopped up with random replies and profile links thrown in because you have to click "show more replies" (which pops up twice?) over and over is awful. Just link to a Twitlonger.
On yishan's actual points I agree though. Companies moderate haphazardly and improvise and they care about their bottom-line and to extinguish shitstorms. There's no coherent ideological bias on any sufficiently large social network, they just pivot to whatever is causing chaos on any given weekday.
One important point stuck somewhere in the middle is his observation that in the physical world, no public square, or public debate looks like what's on display on internet social networks. All of them have rules, civility is a thing, if you're crazy someone's likely going to throw you out, there's identity instead of anonymity and so on. Maybe provocatively, "cancel culture" is simply culture. Culture is a bunch of rituals, rules, coercions, customs and traditions that predominantly tell us what not to so so we don't behave like a bunch of naked apes.
Huh, clicking show more replies only shows more of the original thread for me until I've reached the end of it.
That does sound horrible, if that's the common experience then all the complaints about Twitter threads make a lot more sense to me.
Chrome on the desktop right now. I agree that the mobile app is a better experience.
I am not affiliated with thread reader at all.
EG for the OP link: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1514938507407421440.html
I use Nitter for individual posts and searches, Threadreader to read threads.
The stock website is intentionally horrible.
Jules Dupuit explained why a over a century and a half ago.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170511130317/https://www.inc.c...
One reason for this is algorithmic sorting is what gets rid of spam and hides annoying acquaintances you had to friend who never shut up. If you want engagement you don't actually want to show everyone endless political arguments; sex and animal pictures are what's really engaging.
Just rambling out loud, but perhaps Elon's superpower as the owner of Twitter might be having the luxury to care a whole lot less about user shitstorms.
Nobody has more Fuck-You money and ability to ignore a rabid mob than the richest guy on the planet.
At the very least, it could be very entertaining.
Here is Yishan's thread. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1514938507407421440.html
Twitter could build their own multi-part reader functionality, but I'm content with using this tool.
It does not help solve the fundamental problem (this should be a blog post not a series of Tweets).
I'd personally feel thread unrolling is a meaningful addition, but I don't think that's ever been the mod's POV
I've suggested YC consider running its own Nitter node for that system's UI/UX advantages.
Speed of light or length of a second are not going to change just because I want it to.
This is both true in a trivial sense and bullshit in an important sense. Governments and companies work every day, and employ armies of people full time to create the "shitstorms" that social media companies react to. Even the news cycle is motivated by billionaire owned news outlets, and a brush fire on twitter becomes a wildfire because those outlets magnify it, often prompted by press releases from PR companies, lobbyists, NGOs, and administration officials.
This is only improvisation for the first five minutes you become important. Once the relevant institutions have employed people full time to focus on the manipulation of your platform, it's systematic and routine. In the current climate, resistance will mean you're called to Congress and yelled at, and every other journalist will be screaming for your investigation and destruction. Instead, what happens is that you end up knowing all of the manipulators of your platform by their first names, you go golfing with them, and your kids date each other.
> "cancel culture" is simply culture
There are 2 types of cancel culture: society "cancelling" people when we discover they are extremely toxic and/or sexual predators, and private citizens getting doxxed, slandered, and sometimes fired from their jobs because of a racist tweet or off-putting remark. The latter is a by-product of social networks, especially Twitter, and it's a real problem with real consequences.
Saying or doing something racist or rude is bad, it should and would probably get you kicked out of a bar or event. But prior to social media, it would not get your entire reputation ruined, and you wouldn't get 50,000 random people to start harassing you. I hope most would agree that this is a disproportionate punishment.
But IMO the larger issue of cancel culture, is it makes people less likely to say edgy jokes or borderline politically-incorrect statements for fear they will also get "cancelled". Then the definition of "borderline" politically-incorrect shifts further left, more and more becomes taboo, and people start to deny facts because they don't agree to societal norms. When reality is taboo, you get real consequences.
We need a grey area, where you can say something which isn't "accepted by society", but it doesn't get you effectively blacklisted everywhere, and it doesn't affect things like job offers. I'm too young to confirm but I assume we had something like this before social media took off. But with everyone connected and very scrutinizing/critical it's starting to go away.
Cancel culture is just a new name for an ancient practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunning
> Brown soon found himself embroiled in the coming revolution. On 2 August 1775 a crowd of 130 Sons of Liberty confronted him at his house and demanded he pledge himself to the Patriot cause. Brown requested the liberty to hold his own opinions, saying that he could "never enter into an Engagement to take up arms against the Country which gave him being", and finally met their demands with pistol and sword. The crowd seized him and struck him with the butt of a musket, fracturing his skull. Taken prisoner, he was tied to a tree where he was roasted by fire and scalped before being tarred and feathered. Brown was then carted through a number of nearby settlements and forced to verbally pledge himself to the Patriot cause before being released. This mistreatment resulted in the loss of two toes and lifelong headaches.
Cancel culture has been with us since the beginning. Hell, other primates kick bad actors out of the social group; it's been a thing before language existed.
Today’s supposed “cancel culture” is substantially gentler than any time in history. We enjoy rights to free speech broader and stronger than ever.
Socrates would be jealous.
> Socrates would be jealous.
I doubt that very much. Your examples are bad enough to be considered trolling.
We know who Alex Jones is. Louis CK is out there getting awards. If “we know who he was and the things he said” means you’re not canceled, we’re in very good shape.
> Athens may have executed him, but they didn't deplatform him.
You get what a hilariously scary and silly statement this is, right?
That’s what I think of when I hear “cancel culture.” When you present an example from the 18th century, that’s not a very useful rebuttal. It seems like you either don’t understand, are deflecting, or using a “but all lives matter” argument.
The method is “people tell others you’re an asshole”.
The rate is “quickly”. For most people in the 1700s, the news only has to go a few miles to spread to basically everyone you know.
Ask Aaron Burr. Not just canceled in short order, but remembered for it in a hit musical centuries later.
Aaron Burr wasn’t cancelled over a single message within twelve hours.
(Thousands of similar stories)
People have irreparably ruined their reputations in less time than a plane flight. Burr did it in a single instant.
>Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!
It is not hard to see why a company would fire a VP of communications who tweeted this. In general, you have to be careful about what you do and say in public when you have a senior position within a company. This is nothing new.
In the bad old days, people used to get fired when their employer found out that they were having a gay affair, or had a mixed race child. Now people are more likely to get fired for saying or doing racist or homophobic things. To me this seems like progress.
It appears as if this is your way of saying “cancel culture” is different than it was before in terms of “cancelling” happening?
If so, then your examples would make sense as parroting the weak concept of “cancel culture” being anything but another moral panic and made up culture war in the long line of things to keep the status quo going.
Why do any of these cancel trends matter? Even if they do exist. Why not eliminate the possibility of the worst fears of cancel culture so that becomes moot and society is improved? That would require people not being able to go homeless if they suddenly lose their job and/or can’t work for some time. It doesn’t come across that being able to be homeless because of work and income issues is a horrible outcome no matter what. Not only when it is because of “cancel” culture.
Indeed why not? It’s glaring to me that when I read these arguments, the solution to cancel culture never seems to be to limit the ability of employers to fire at will.
The only reason cancelling works at all is that you can be fired for any reason or no reason at the drop of a hat, with little to no recourse, and at great financial loss to yourself with the potential of losing your food, shelter, and medical care in an instant. People have been begging to change this system for a long time for this very reason.
But why does this system continue to exist if it has the potential to be so destructive? As far as I can tell it serves wealthy elites like large corporations very well. They enjoy having this ability to ruin your life by firing you. It’s the best leverage they have!
This is why the whole cancel culture debate is so fascinating to me. Generally speaking the people who are so upset about cancel culture are the very people who are standing in the way of eliminating the worst consequences of it. Instead they ground their position in the idea of free speech, but paradoxically the principles of free speech preclude any solution to cancel culture, because such a solution would restrict free speech!
I’m really waiting for the day that cancel culture warriors recognize the root problem here: that we built our society in a way, on purpose, to give people (business owners) this great power over others (employees) as a means to control them. If I can be fired tomorrow and still have food, housing, and healthcare then getting fired isn’t going to ruin my life. The flip side of that is employers won’t be able to fire their employees for any reason or no reason, and that seems to be a bridge too far for some of even the most ardent anti cancel culture warriors (see if Musk would ever advocate to curb his own ability to fire his employees).
Technology has enabled us to have artificially wide reach and memory. And then they digitised it, made it searchable and opened it all up to the masses.
Don't like a person and they have Twitter? Guess I'll dig through their Twitter feed and find something objectionable they posted when they were 16. While I'm here I'd better make sure all my like-minded online "friends" from all over the globe pile on and try and coerce their employer to fire them. For good measure, let's find their address and make it easily accessible online.
Technology has a transformative effect on the things we apply it to. Let's not pretend that trying to shame people in the 21st century using freely accessible communication networks that span the globe is the same as monkeys shaming other monkeys.
If you piss off your monkey tribe, you’re done for. Good chance you’re dead soon without your social group. The news of your being kicked out spread to everyone who matters in life.
Piss off your town in the 1700s and the same is probably true. People didn’t move far from family and relied heavily on local communities. Again, news spread to everyone who mattered rapidly.
I’d rather today’s flash in the pan outrage over a community shunning - or worse, tarring/feathering or lynching - a couple hundred years ago. It’s a lot more survivable; ask notable cancelee Louis CK about his recent Grammy win.
Now some dumb kid can post to Twitter or Facebook and that can be used against them 10 years later by some random person. You could even be saying things that aligns with your communities values (say you have conservative religious views) and then a bunch of strangers who you don’t know will come after you because they disagree with you.
I can literally reach back in time and hold people accountable for things they no longer believe in.
Comparing this to not getting lynched is a really low bar. I would certainly hope in this day and age that we’re at least civil enough not to become pitch fork wielding mobs. That’s the bare minimum.
“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”
But spread of information today is definitely an issue. Back then you could be more comfortable saying stuff in private. Now with a lot of communications online, proof* of private conversations can affect you in public.
* There's also the issue of people framing things out of context but that's a separate topic.
Social consequences are both necessary and cause problems. It's really a very complicated thing. People should be free to explore ideas that turn out to be bad without losing their livelihoods. We need to hold people accountable for their actions, but we also need to allow people to make mistakes and learn.
If I think about what happened with Lindsay Ellis, that seems like a gross overreaction. If I think about how people on Twitter sharply criticize Chris Pratt because of the church he attends (which is also attended by other Hollywood stars) then that seems like an overreaction, too. On the other hand, the response to Kevin Spacey seems like it might be more appropriate.
The real issue is that "being cancelled" is only a problem for people who are famous and not powerful. If you're powerful, being cancelled really doesn't do anything at all. Indeed, if you're powerful, being cancelled can just get people to agree with you more even if you have actually done the awful things you are cancelled for.
Nevertheless, there is so much pearl clutching, clout chasing, outrage Olympics, victim identity politics, and manufactured wedge issues on social media that it's just one big rat's nest. Worse, it all overshadows the real problems like actual political issues and misinformation being spread to manipulate opinion.
The problem is incentive based, cancelling others gains one social power. So the solution is simple, use the same weapon, and we are getting at step 1 already.
1) Being "woke" about how cruel cancelling other is, collectively.
2) Cancel the cancellors by naming and shaming every single participant, instead of the cancellee, for reason 1). Script it if necessary.
3) The balance of power is restored, just as Jesus intended, armchair judges get judged. (Doesn't it sound like the beginining of just any other cultural shift?)
4) ...
5) profit!
When you support "free speech", you support all of it or none of it.
Free speech is not tautological.
- Advertising dangerous and addictive substances, particularly to children [0]
- Lying about the contents or efficacy of a commercial product, especially medicine or food [1]
- Publishing private details about someone in an effort to inflict real world harm [2]
- Publishing private work against the will of its creator, as might have happened with Sir Terry Pratchett's unfinished books after his death. [3] (I distinctly remember a commenter I had an argument with stating that after his death, his wishes in that regard were irrelevant compared to the living's desire to actually read said work. Fortunately, such callousness is not the norm)
Collective free speech is an interesting idea, in any case. I'm always wary of the term "collective." It brings to mind collective justice. It's not unthinkably terrible, after all, to throw a single stone at a sinner. And if my neighbor has the right to, so do I. And his neighbor, and her neighbor, and soon enough the sinner is stoned to death and none of us are responsible. All each of us did was throw a single stone, after all.
It's a strange dissonance to state that censorship is free speech. But that's what people seem to often mean when they talk about cancelling or deplatforming people.
[0]: https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/rules-regulations-and-g...
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/nestle-baby...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing
[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/30/terry-pratchet...
Of course there's speech that should be limited. I'm just saying if you support repugnant speech, you either also support rejections of repugnant speech or you don't support free speech at all.
No, thats stupid.
It is absolutely possible to both support free speech, and oppose "rejection" of repubnant speech, if by "rejection" we mean that I would oppose sending death threats to their friends and family, and oppose the "rejection" action of attempting to assault the repugnant free speech sayer.
It is very silly to say that a free speech supporter has somehow underminded their ability to support the concept of free speech significantly, because they opposed assaulting, or sending death threats to the friends and family of a person who makes repugnant speech.
But the fact that you can't distinguish between the expression of an angry idea and a death threat disqualifies you from this conversation, though. Obviously that's different, and you know that isn't what anyone reasonable is suggesting.
So then you agree that a free speech supporter opposing death threats and harassment of people's friends and family of those who make offensive speech does not undermine their pro free speech opinions.
Yeah that's my entire point.
> the right of the "angry mob" to be angry
What the free speech supporters oppose is this angry mob sending death threats and harassing the friends, family, and coworkers of people who have made offensive speech.
So yes, people can both support free speech, and oppose the angry mob when they harass, dox, and threaten to kill people who say offensive things
> that isn't what anyone reasonable is suggesting.
"Canceling" someone very often involves sending death threats, doxxing, and harassing people's friends, family and coworkers, when the angry mob is involved.
So yes, that happens, and is what the pro free speech supporters are opposing.
But yes, I agree that the angry mob that harasses, doxes, and threatens people when it "cancels" someone is unreasonable, and is what the pro free speech people oppose.
The first path supports free speech. The second uses the high regard that free speech has in many minds to attack free speech. It is using "free speech" not as an ideal that allows many ideas to compete in honest search for the truth, but rather as a cudgel to censor heresy. A free speech advocate can absolutely oppose such speech without being inconsistent in their beliefs. One might say, "Free speech is that which allows me to hear anyone's point of view, regardless of how offended or hurt others might be by them." The mob shouting a speaker down deprives the rest of us that right.
People are free to express negative reactions to speech. That in itself is a pretty important part of free speech.
By attempting to equivocate stopping speech with free speech, it sort of dodges the whole purpose of free speech in the first place, which is to ensure that unpopular ideas are tolerated in a free society.
Free speech isn't just an abstract principle. It exists to ensure that tyranny of government or the masses is not able to stifle the creation of the new knowledge that progress depends on.
Second, a just society is dependent on there being a society at all. The only way humans will solve the problems that threaten our existence is by creating new knowledge.
In this way the progress created by free speech is foundational to all else.
As a thought experiment, suppose we had a way of knowing which speech would advance knowledge and which speech would hinder our knowledge; by your reasoning, it would then be ethical to silence the speech that we knew would hinder our knowledge, since the point of free speech is to improve our collective knowledge.
This is wrong on its face. It's not what free speech is about. The concept exists because it's unethical to harm others over what they say.
But to take your point and run with it…why is “because it’s ethical” a worthy goal? That seems to be circular reasoning, and also relies on one concept of “ethical”. How do we define what is ethical?
>The point is we don’t know.
That's really not the point. Your whole thesis depends on your assumption that new knowledge is created. The contrapositive to your statement is that if no new knowledge is being created, then free speech doesn't matter; this is false.
This process goes one way. Free speech leads to progress. Using a contrapositive is invalid because I’m not making an equivocacy, I’m making a causal statement. Man drives car doesn’t necessitate that car drives man.
And I’m not saying “ethics” are bad. Only that our current forms of them, like all forms of knowledge, will eventually be replaced by something better (see: all of history).
Anyway, you dodged the question so I’ll try answering it for you: Your sense of ethic in relation to speech was created because people had the freedom to criticize the fact that ethics come from God/priests/kings/tribal elders/et. al and develop new, better forms. In this way, your and my ethical forms will be replaced in the future by something better.
Fortunately that's not what I implied, and you fail to recognize the error in your own reasoning. I'll say this one final time, and I expect you'll intentionally misunderstand again.
Your point depends on the premise that free speech leads to the improvement of knowledge, which means that if a specific situation arose--even an isolated incident--where your premise of enhanced knowledge were untrue, then it follows that your conclusion that free speech is good would no longer be necessarily true. That is why your statement is false. The rest of what you've written is pseudo-intellectual fluff.
>But new knowledge is always created
This is not a given. You completely made it up. I wish you a pleasant day.
Not with that attitude!
As a society we have agreed that somethings shouldn't be said. Like the n word. You aren't forced to not say it. By the same token we can agree that cancel culture is bad and chills speech. We, as a free society, should strive to keep speech free. Not look for ways to shut it down. I may not like what you say, but I'll fight for your right to say it, had become I don't like what you say so I will do everything in my power to prevent you from saying it
If you like free speech and dislike cancel culture, the people to be angry at are the decision makers who kowtow to the mob's demands, not the mob itself (since they're just exercising their free speech, which you claim to support), but even then, aren't those decision makers just expressing themselves, too?
Agreed entirely, but it’s interesting to note that 99% of the public discourse here on HN and also elsewhere focuses on the technical mechanisms and almost none of the discussion is about workers rights.
As the parent points out, the free speech position against cancel culture is internally inconsistent. That’s why these discussions have no solutions; because the paradox of increasing free speech by restricting free speech is never resolved.
Which is why I think we need to move past the idea of the mob. The mob has no power if your employer can’t fire you capriciously and ruin your life. That power exists irrespective of cancel culture, and needs to be curbed. Doing so would also serve to restrict corporate power considerably, which is why I believe this area of discussion goes unaddressed (it’s that there are a lot of people who are both anti cancel culture but pro corporate power.)
Though in this case, I think the technological perspective makes the inconsistency you're speaking off disappear. It's arguable but I don't think free speech, left to its own devices, leads to these mass mobs as often as we're seeing it on Twitter & Cie. Our culture is being shaped by recommendation algorithms, that needs to be addressed along with workers' rights.
A fantastic hot take from HN
This comes up all the time that "you can't make edgy jokes anymore", but it isn't true. Just look up someone like Anthony Jessolnik. Here is his most recent joke on Twitter[1]. Mocking both pedophilia and the death of a 4-year-old. This guy has 1.2m followers and plenty of those are liberals. A talented comedian can joke about anything.
I think this narrative comes from the fact that many people don't see a difference between a joke about racism and a racist joke. They see someone "canceled" for a transphobic joke and take it to mean we can't joke about trans people. It isn't the case. I have seen comedians kill with material about trans people in front of young leftist crowds. It is possible.
I see the value in joking about these issues. I don't see the value in making a racist, sexist, transphobic, or overall bigoted joke made at the expense of innocent people simply trying to live their life.
[1] - https://twitter.com/anthonyjeselnik/status/15046838415957196...
Perspective is the mechanism that changes the perception of a joke, that's not something the joke teller can influence.
Anyone can take offense to anything. Only when it gains critical mass will it be cared about.
Cancel culture exists. It hurts people, and it generates fear. Heresy exists and it is punished. Most people are self-censuring heavily now. I have experienced it myself in personal and professional contexts, and I am a moderate liberal. The OP mentions the fact that both sides always have truthful anecdotes to support their positions, and use it to attack the other. And that is what you've done here.
Regardless of the details of cancel culture, how could you think a system like that could ever possibly work? When there is status to be gained from making an allegation then they'll be made, true or not. When allegation is enough to generate a mob, which affects your employer, your friends and family, you're entire life, this is a disproportionate punishment even if the allegation were true. But the accused rarely, if ever, even gets to speak in their own defense. It's called "social justice" but it's not a court, there are no rules, and the judge jury and executioner feels just fine if they never take a dispassionate look at facts. This system, applied to anything, is the opposite of justice. To believe otherwise is to reveal a deeply flawed understanding of how human beings respond to incentives. (Of course, one way to get around this problem is to redefine "guilt" to require only that the victim feel bad. But again, this incentivizes victims to feel bad, and somehow everyone forgets that people feel bad for all sorts of reasons, sometimes having nothing to do with the accused.)
I was instead saying that people who complain about self-censorship often don't understand the reason behind why some things are now objectionable. This results in them painting with too broad of a brush when they talk about that self-censorship and cancel culture. You can still make edgy and politically incorrect jokes today if you do it right.
Not really. Doing it right means adhering to the left’s idea of what is right. Your whole position is based on the left being correct about everything.
Take non-binary for example. I’ve looked into it, read the studies and my conclusion is that it’s pseudoscience that deserves to be mocked. But you probably think it’s real so if I joke about it you think I’m a bigot. From my perspective, joking about it is like when we used to mock people who believed in creationism.
So what is doing it right if we both have two fundamentally different positions about a subject?
——- I’m not gonna get into a debate over non-binary. That’s not the point here, it’s an example.
That line is so thin, one person might think it has been crossed while another might not. Ideally, the joke would be about the idea but some will say that’s still at the expense of those people.
Mocking the mentally ill has been done for decades. I don’t think there should be any taboo in humor. There’s always someone who will be offended, no matter who or what you joke about.
For the record, I don’t think non-binary people are mentally ill.
This is shifting the goal posts. We were talking about cancel culture not offending one person. No one is cancelled when there is only a single person that objects. The problem is when large groups of people object. The line for that is not nearly as thin or hard to ascertain.
>Mocking the mentally ill has been done for decades.
Do I have to point out how silly this excuse is? People also spent centuries yelling the n-word as Black people. Should that still be acceptable today?
>I don’t think there should be any taboo in humor.
I have seen comedians joke about almost every controversial issue under the sun. The only real taboo in modern comedy is to not punch down. Mocking people who have historically been oppressed and who want nothing but the end of that oppression is punching down.
> Do I have to point out how silly this excuse is? People also spent centuries yelling the n-word as Black people. Should that still be acceptable today?
You misunderstood, it's not an excuse, I'm saying there is no taboo on jokes about mental illness. Except in the progressive part of society, which is only 8 % of the US. There is nothing cruel about making jokes. They are just jokes. Don't like it, don't listen. It's not that hard.
> Mocking people who have historically been oppressed and who want nothing but the end of that oppression is punching down.
This line of reasoning doesn't even apply in this case, non-binary people haven't been historically oppressed as it didn't even exist 10 years ago, it was invented on tumblr by teens. 99,99 % of non-binary people are under 30, it's brand new.
This is not just my opinion. This is a rather mainstream opinion in the comedy community.
>This line of reasoning doesn't even apply in this case, non-binary people haven't been historically oppressed as it didn't even exist 10 years ago, it was invented on tumblr by teens. 99,99 % of non-binary people are under 30, it's brand new.
I'm not going to criticize your opinions of non-binary people, but this is statement of supposed fact that is simply wrong. There are plenty of examples of non-binary people throughout history and in various cultures. Just because the specific terminology we use today is relatively new does not mean these concepts are new. So whatever studying you claimed to have done about this issue, you should know that exercise was wildly incomplete and therefore your conclusions were at best premature.
And again, we can't historically have oppressed something that didn't exist in society 10 years ago. Look at the numbers. It's all under 30. Look at the numbers for gay people, even before they were accepted by society. There were gay people in every age group, spread evenly by age. Not for non-binary. Why not? Where is the oppressed 70 year old non-binary person? That person doesn't exist.
Anyway, I think we're wasting our time. We're not gonna convince each other. Thanks for staying civil. Have a great Easter.
This also isn't true. The percentage of people who identify as homosexual is not "spread evenly be age". Look at the chart toward the bottom of the page here[1]. Rates of bisexual, gay, lesbian, and transgender people were 0.2%, 0.4%, 0.1% and 0.2% among the traditionalist/silent generation and grew to 15%, 2.5%, 2.0%, 2.1% in Gen Z. The rate of transgender people grew almost identically to the rate of increase in the gay and lesbian population and nowhere near the growth in the bisexual population. Do you not understand how a society that is openly against LGBT people might keep those people in the closet and a society that is more accepting allows people to be more open about themselves?
Once again, the "facts" that you are using to support your opinion are wrong. Maybe it is therefore time to reconsider those opinions.
[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/389792/lgbt-identification-tick...
Mocking is often excused because many (but obviously not all) creationist will try to push their views on others. No one cares what your beliefs are. They care when you use those beliefs as a basis to impose your morality onto others. That opens them up to justifiable backlash.
Non-binary people generally aren't pushing any belief beyond just wanting to live their life how they want to live it. The change they are looking for is acceptance.
This is precisely why someone would call you a bigot; Oxford defines the term thusly:
> a person who is obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, especially one who is prejudiced against or antagonistic toward a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group.
The belief in this case being that your opinion of their identity, based on the studies you have read, is more relevant to their truth (or anyone's) than their feelings about their identity. As far as some of us are concerned, it isn't.
This isn't a left-vs-right matter, either. That framing establishes factional conflict where there could be simple misunderstanding, which isn't terribly productive.
Really, the issue at hand is that you feel like you should get to make jokes about people's identity, and others feel like joking about people based on their identity is rude so they call you out on it. It just happens that there are enough people who feel that way that being ostracized by them stings. Your options are to not do it or accept that a large portion of society will think you're a dick.
But why should I take someone's view of their identity without question? Why, and to what extent, am I obliged to uphold and reinforce someone's self-perception? And why on some issues but not their race, height, age, etc.?
Saying it's a "cultural issue" or a "social construct" doesn't help here. "Social construct" does not mean an individual gets to decide unilaterally - quite the opposite in fact! A social constructed category is one which society decides.
Nor does "socially constructed" mean something is arbitrary. Language is socially constructed, but that does not mean we can change anything we want about a given language without consequence.
> Really, the issue at hand is that you feel like you should get to make jokes about people's identity, and others feel like joking about people based on their identity is rude so they call you out on it.
Presuming to know someone else's motives better than they know themselves is not persuasive.
Basic respect of others involves at least paying lip service to their preferences (and I realise it’s not a preference but I don’t have the correct language here), or ideally genuinely respecting other people.
You don’t have to do it, but it’s awfully rude and in cases can be quite a nasty thing to not respect their wishes. Why not do the right thing? How much does it really hurt you to do so (not how much does it irritate you, that’s not really relevant here)?
Ideally you try respect the, and they forgive and accept mistakes on others part. Both people should try be kind to one another.
Firstly, do you think I go around taunting people about their self-perceptions of their gender? Even if it wasn't something I could be fired for (which it is) I don't actually take delight in causing other people psychological distress. I am asking these questions here, in this forum, because I want to hear better reasons other than "it's the nice thing to do".
Secondly, I listed several cases where your rules of politeness don't apply and aren't the norm - how are those different? This whole "take people's identity claims without question" works in some limited contexts, but breaks down in so many different cases that it really isn't a generalizable moral principle. At best what you propose is a useful tactic for having pleasant water cooler conversations with strangers and acquaintances. It is not a solution for the rest of life where our identities have important implications for how we relate to each other.
Thirdly, that social etiquette is the only justification you provide suggests you understand our acceptance of these identity claims is merely a social fiction. Now, I am a well-socialized adult, which means I understand how often little fictions, little white-lies grease the gears of society. And like I said previously, I don't like to cause others undue distress. But I also think forcing other people to lie (by threatening their job, for example) to be dehumanizing and immoral in its own right.
If someone says "I identify as a woman and prefer female pronouns", it's not clear to me what it is that you'd want to 'question' anyway. If the person is, for example, a colleague, why would you care about their anatomy or what gender they were assigned at birth?
To play devil's advocate, some identities have less currency in current society. See "Neopronoun" [1] for examples. To lliamander's point, there is a gray area where not everyone is going to feel comfortable with unfamiliar gender constructs. If the rule is to accept everybody's identity at face value, then that closes down any space to feel uncomfortable calling someone "kitten," to use an extreme example.
I'd be interested to know if you can link to a single example of someone insisting that they be referred to using a neopronoun (and not accepting e.g. they). Here, for example, is a discussion of neopronouns on r/nonbinary: https://www.reddit.com/r/NonBinary/comments/k7hegi/can_someo... I don't see anyone getting canceled for expressing a degree of skepticism about neopronouns.
I also think you're being slightly disingenuous in talking about 'accepting people's identity at face value' as if it was being proposed as an absolutely rigid rule. No rule of social interaction is completely rigid or without exception. If you really have a reason to think that someone is being dishonest or disingenuous about their gender identity then you don't necessarily have to go along with whatever they tell you. But if you are not inherently unwilling to believe trans people in general, how often is that scenario going to come up?
Read the HRC FAQ you just linked to in the previous comment. It includes this:
> Some transgender and non-binary people do not identify with the gender binary and prefer not to use pronouns typically associated with men (he/him) or women (she/her). Instead, they may prefer if people simply use their names, use gender neutral pronouns such as “they/them” or use other pronouns such as “fae/faer” or “ey/em.”
In the link you provided, one Redditor "struggles to stay progressive about" neo-pronouns. Another Redditor considers such skepticism to be "extremely gatekeepy and transphobic."
I don't have any reason to believe that someone preferring kitten-folk pronouns is being dishonest or disingenuous, even in this more extreme example.
But what is the principle under which some identity claims are accepted more than others? I have my own thoughts, but I'm curious to get yours. Do you think there is room in society for people on occasion to feel uncomfortable with someone's proposed identity?
I’m highly skeptical that there are people who go through life getting angry with every person who won’t call them ‘kitten’. But if you know of any actual examples of this, feel free to provide them.
It’s sad that debates about issues that affect real trans people so often get sidetracked into these irrelevant hypotheticals. This isn’t an academic debate. We don’t have to solve all the edge cases before we can start doing the right thing in the common case.
But these are all points agreed on by myself, GP, and GGP comments. The question you replied to asked, “Yes, we should be kind to people and refer to people how they prefer. But, there are some non-binary identities that I don’t have buy-in for. I will of course refer to people by their preferred pronouns to be kind, but can anyone give another reason?” There is a place for this kind of conversation, too, on occasion.
> But, there are some non-binary identities that I don’t have buy-in for. I will of course refer to people by their preferred pronouns to be kind, but can anyone give another reason?
In the general case your question answers itself. If you don't believe that someone is really (e.g.) a woman, then obviously there is no reason to refer to them using their preferred female pronouns except general politeness and kindness.
If I understand correctly, you are concerned about cases where someone does not accept either 'they', 'he' or 'she' as acceptable pronouns. I would urge you to find a real example, as discussing such cases in the abstract based on Wikipedia articles is frankly ridiculous. But again, the answer to your question in the abstract is obvious. If you don't believe that the person's identity is real, then you can either use their preferred pronouns to be polite – or not.
I fail to see any real philosophical issue that's raised here, given that you already accept that gender and biological sex are not inextricably linked. I guess there's the question of "How do I tell if someone's reported identity is real?", but that seems to be just a special case of "How do I tell if someone is being honest?". The answer is of course that you do so using your general nous.
Is it that simple? Nobody is doubting the honesty of anyone involved. The real matter is there is a cultural tradition called gender, and some people see it as a flexible thing, and to others it’s not, or less so.
You linked to the HRC FAQ, so you must have felt it was relevant to what lliamander was saying. I’m curious what information it contains that could convince someone to be more flexible in their gender definition? What would you say to someone who doubts the validity of non-binary identities? What would it take to convince you that those “extreme,” to reflect your language, neopronoun-based identities are real and valid?
> If I understand correctly, you are concerned about cases where someone does not accept either 'they', 'he' or 'she' as acceptable pronouns.
That’s not what I said at all. I’m not sure how you got that impression. I brought up neopronouns to show that most people have a degree of inflexibility in their conception of gender. These examples you’re asking for are besides the point.
Edit: Do you see how I’m using devils advocate? I personally believe that transgender identities are real and valid, for whatever that’s worth. But if you consider an extremely liberal position on gender, it’s useful to see how you react to it.
People's objections to neopronouns are usually practical and linguistic in nature rather than stemming from any particular inflexibility about gender. I don't really doubt that some people have gender identities that fall completely outside the usual male/female classification scheme. What I do doubt is that any significant number of these people think that the pronominal system of any given language must necessarily encode the relevant conceptual aparatus in its morphology. After all, there are plenty of languages where pronouns don't have gender at all. If someone is talking about you in Chinese, then 'tā' is all you're getting – and who could reasonably complain about that? That's not to say that I'm reflexively (tee hee) opposed to all neopronouns. Adding additional gender-neutral pronouns to some languages might make sense, conceivably.
I can see how it would be nice to have a general argument that would prove to a skeptic that any arbitrary non-binary identity was 'valid'. However, there are a couple of reasons why I don't think this is a reasonable thing to ask for. First, different identities are different. If the 'validity' of a given identity comes into question, then one has to argue on a case-by-case basis. Second, while it is almost certainly very rare for people to be delusional or dishonest about their gender identities, it is clearly possible in principle. Thus, the requested argument would either be an argument to a false conclusion, or would have to presuppose the honesty and sanity of the relevant person, at which point it would beg the very question that is usually at issue.
That site makes some obviously false statements (e.g. about what 'sex' is).
> What questions do you have that are not answered in this sort of material?
Allow me to quote myself:
> But why should I take someone's view of their identity without question? Why, and to what extent, am I obliged to uphold and reinforce someone's self-perception? And why on some issues but not their race, height, age, etc.?
None of these questions except the first have been addressed, and the answer to the first was wholly inadequate as I explain up thread.
> If someone says "I identify as a woman and prefer female pronouns", it's not clear to me what it is that you'd want to 'question' anyway. If the person is, for example, a colleague, why would you care about their anatomy or what gender they were assigned at birth?
Again, I'm not going to be needlessly confrontational with a colleague, but I still don't believe their identity claim (I believe they feel that way, I just don't think that feeling is has much bearing on my beliefs). And while I will comply with their pronoun requests, I do care that I am being expected to lie, and there are limits to how far I am willing to go to preserve the fiction.
Do you think it might be possible that you keep getting this answer because you are asking why no one respects your opinion that you don’t need to respect other opinions? You’re kinda coming from a hypocritical ground on the root argument here.
So far my experience has been that, no matter how respectfully I dissent from modern views of gender and sex, the only level considered "acceptable" is to not express my dissent at all.
I don't really have time for some side discussion about my level of propriety. Let's either discuss the object-level issue or be done.
Respect is earned, otherwise it's meaningless. And who said this is the "right thing"? Why does it matter how much it "hurt"? All you're doing is saying that one group must always be "respected" at the cost of the others agency. This is ridiculous and dystopic.
People have the freedom to behave and accept whatever they want. What you're talking about is manners, politeness, and civility. And sure, people should be civil, but civility doesn't mean acceptance without question either and should never come at the cost of freedom. The moment you do so, you've lost both.
Respect isn't earned in polite society at some base level. I say "Good Morning" to the people I meet on my run not because they saved five children from a burning building, but because they're people I ran into today. That's the right thing to do. Sure, I don't put the person that I said "Good Morning" on some bright pedestal and worship their feet, but I still treat them with respect.
To call someone by the name they prefer and the pronouns they prefer and not being a dick to them is pretty basic, and it's not dystopic to expect people to do so.
Polite society requires politeness. Manners. Decorum. Civility. Not respect. These are different words for different concepts and should not be conflated.
Respect is earned based on your knowledge of that person. Why would you respect random people when you know nothing about them? What if they were murderers? Would you respect them less? If so, why? Because its new knowledge about them that caused a new score, therefore zero knowledge = zero respect until you learn enough to make an assessment. I can also be polite with a murderer but not respect them; see the difference?
> "I say "Good Morning" to the people I meet ... because they're people ... That's the right thing to do."
What's right about it? What if they didn't want to talk to you? A lack of engagement is not wrong.
> "name ... and the pronouns they prefer"
Preferences do not overrule rights and freedoms. The point is why should someone accept an identity without question - and both you and the other user made the same argument that it's "the right thing to do".
But that means not accepting identity without question is wrong, which therefore removes the rights and agency of one group (to question) the preferences of another. Your rights are my responsibility; your right to question my identity is my responsibility to accept that my identity is open to questioning.
That's why those arguments are meaningless. They may sound good but they fail to hold any logical consistency. Expectations of civility are more than enough for society to function, however as soon as you mandate civility at the cost of freedom them you will end up with neither.
Why is it ok to dismiss one group but we have to be respectful of another?
Anyway, I never said I want to mock people in their face but the ideas they believe in should be fair game.
Saying that people shouldn't presume to know your motives about a joke when you're talking about mocking people's self identity is hilariously hypocritical.
"Don't assume things about me when I'm mocking people I've made a massive assumption about!"
Pksebben is not arguing with vimy about whether the concept of "non-binary" is meaningful or coherent; Pksebben is merely making the accusation that vimy is rationalizing his desire to mock other people.
If I say you have an incoherent view of the world, and you claim that I only think that because I'm a mean person who wants to hurt people, then I'm not going to find you persuasive.
You can't separate the two things though. Mocking a belief is the same as mocking people who hold that belief. If someone says "I am a man" and someone else says "Men don't exist" then it's entirely fair to say the second person is attacking the first. They are. Maybe that's OK under the guises of free speech though.
You can't then also say that the first person should be free to say what they want without acknowledging that the second group should be able to call them out for it (aka cancel them). There's no reasonable way for the first person to have the freedom to say what they like without the second group also being able to say what they like.
Cancelling just means that the first person is scared of the consequences of the second person being upset. Well, tough luck. If you're scared of the consequences of your actions then you don't get to do those actions.
You can say that the first person should be free to say whatever they want, and that the people affected by it should be able to say whatever they want, that's completely irrelevant to the issue.
Cancelling means someone losing their financial safety and that of their family for expressing their opinion. If your response to this is "tough luck", I'd say you're showing a lot of privilege, and lack of empathy that'd get you cancelled if expressed about one of the hot button social issues.
You cannot both claim there is free speech (the principle) and that it's fine that people get fired for what they say, it is fundamentally incompatible.
Tell a racist joke at work, and there are good odds you'll get fired. Tell a sexist joke at work, and odds are good, you'll get fired. Are you going to argue that freedom of speech should prevent you from being fired for telling a racist or sexist jokes?
First, I won't be fired. If I make such a joke around colleagues who know me, they'll probably take me apart and tell me they found it hurtful and I'll apologize and it'll end there. If I do it around someone who feels more strongly about it, I'll have to have a serious talk with people I know and who know me in HR and in my hierarchy, who value my contributions, understand the larger context of the person that I am and my personal circumstances, yet recognize I did something inappropriate that needs to be addressed and corrected, and importantly with whom I have a contract enforced by the state. That's a whole lot more nuance, maturity and sanity than getting a hundred thousand people calling for your job online because you made a joke.
Second, the way you behave at work and outside of work are not equivalent. If I'm just some lambda employee, no reasonable person should assume I speak for my company when I express myself on a non-professional public platform.
Third, nobody holds the ultimate truth about what is sexist, racist and to a larger extent right and wrong wrt current social and political issues. That's the nature of social and political issues, there are two sides, one is not good and the other evil. If your job depends on complying with online zealots representing a single extremist side of an issue, you are in essence forbidding some political opinions.
If an employee takes part in a KKK rally, should their employer turn a blind eye towards it if they find out? If a person advocates for killing gay people online, should their employer ignore it? If the employer ignores it, then there is a good chance that black people or gay people won't work for them. Why? Because gay people won't feel safe working next to someone who advocates their death.
So, do you defend defend creationists with the same vigor when their beliefs are being mocked?
The (faulty) chain of logic goes:
1. You are challenging my belief.
2. This belief is about part of who I am.
3. Therefore you are challenging me and/or my existence.
In the case of mocking, I would say there's no difference between the two. Mocking either creationists or nonbinary people is mean-spirited and a wrong thing to do. In fact, I've always had quite a problem with Richard Dawkins for this very reason. But I'm not going to say that either one should be deplatformed or anything like that.
When it comes to laws then there is a big difference between the two. In the case of creationists, no one is creating laws restricting creationists from participating in public life. It's true that people have an issue with creationists teaching creationism as fact, but that's a different matter entirely. However, on the other side what we see are laws against certain people existing in public places.
That's what we mean by "challenging me and/or my existence." It's not, "You can't talk about creationism here". Instead it's, "You can't be here if you believe in creationism", which I don't think is a law anywhere. And yet in the past many people have passed such laws against minorities of all kinds restricting them using attributes they can't change about themselves. This is what you perceive as "granted the status of identity, which makes them in some sense sacrosanct". While it's true that being a Christian and believing in creationism is in some sense an immutable property of one's self identity, at the same time no one is passing laws barring Christians from bathrooms because the Catholic Church has a problem with harboring pedophiles.
In particular, there is a very strong conservative movement in the US dedicated to the idea there are exactly two genders, and they are very intent on legislating as such, just as they legislated gay people from participating in public institutions such as marriage.
First, many nonbinary people identify as transgender. Second, anti-trans laws don't have very clear delineations on who they target, first of all because the legislation is written by clueless people who hardly have an idea or even care to have an idea what it means to be trans versus nonbinary.
But moreover it should be obvious by now that the current crop of anti-trans laws are just a backlash to the Obergefell decision in 2015, and it's not even intended to target specifically trans people. They are vice signals intended to put LGBTQIA people in general on notice as to the ideological posture of the state. They are not going to be very discriminate about targeting you if you're trans but leaving you alone if you're nonbinary. It's a distinction without a difference to them.
Anti trans laws are an admission that the anti-LGBTQIA movement lost a battle but intends to continue the war by moving over to a new letter of the acronym. We know this to be true because they're recycling all the same anti-gay rhetoric and tactics they used to use in the 90s against gay rights, but this time subbing in "trans", who appear to be targeted next because of their visibility in the community. There are no principles behind these arguments, because if there were they'd still be making the same arguments about gay people. They aren't making those arguments anymore because they know they lost those arguments culturally. But they still believe those things and want to keep saying them but this time directing their hate toward trans people.
And it's true Obergefell gave us same sex marriage, but since 2015 they have been vowing to erase that decision, and they've worked tirelessly to make that a reality. The Supreme Court is now exactly where the GOP have wanted it for a generation, and they are using it as they promised; abortion rights will be done this summer, and next on the chopping block is gay marriage as promised. They said they are going to do it, and it looks like they will. Right now it doesn't seem like there's a lot to stop them.
> we’re taking about legislation aren’t we? Not discrimination in general?
One last thing I'd like to point out, is that when lawmakers stand in the way of anti-discrimination laws because they want the discrimination to continue, this is a form of legalized discrimination. You don't need to make harassment and discrimination legal by passing a law saying it's okay, instead you keep it legal by preventing the passage of laws saying it's forbidden.
I’m pretty sure you don’t actually believe that.
Such behavior always existed.
It's just that if a sect cancels you it's less painful than if the majority of society cancels you. And lots of right wing people don't want to believe how left wing society as a whole has become, so they see canceling as a conspiracy by the left, when it's really just the majority of society boycotting you.
In terms of the total population of countries, pretty much the enture west has a significant majority towards progressive policies.
The opposite is true though, conservatives — while, with some exceptions, being the minority — tend to feel like they deserve more publicity, and tend to believe in a silent majority (which isn't real, btw).
(Some of aforementioned exceptions are smaller communities — people tend to cluster spatially based on their beliefs).
You should absolutely be allowed to make terrible jokes about that, people are also allowed to tell you you're not funny.
What you call a grievance is someone's life.
> You should absolutely be allowed to make terrible jokes about that, people are also allowed to tell you you're not funny.
And you might face consequences for telling jokes that aren't funny and are offensive. Tell a racist joke at work, and there are decent odds you'll lose your job.
Facts are more important than feelings.
> It just happens that there are enough people who feel that way that being ostracized by them stings. Your options are to not do it or accept that a large portion of society will think you're a dick.
In this case it’s 10 % of the population (progressives or woke whatever you want to call them) who make a lot of noise and have the power to push their ideas on the rest of society. You get banned on twitter for questioning or mocking current gender ideas. Media also don’t give airplay to people who disagree. There’s no debate possible. So we get a misrepresentation of what society really thinks. And that’s why, if you believe him, Elon wants to buy twitter.
I think GP's point is that being or not being non-binary is unfalsifiable. I don't have a horse in that race, as I'm not sufficiently informed on the topic. However, it's important to note that (i) falsifiability is not the only reason to believe something and (ii) there is serious criticism of the idea that a statement must be falsifiable to be considered scientific.
I accept that someone is non-binary the same way that I accept that someone is a man or woman. I haven't had any issues with it so far, and it has the added bonus of making people feel validated, accepted, and comfortable around me, which is also a benefit to me in turn.
The meaning of "identity" has changed over the last 10 years in two distinct ways. First, the number of identities has increased (which is great), and second, my identity is a stick with which I can beat up others (which is not fine).
The most common and visible "stick" takes the form of creating a new pronoun to represent my identity and forcing others to use it, lest they be labelled a bigot. This strategy is coercive and antisocial. You change language and then use the threat of attack to enforce the change. (The argument that without the change, people are disrespected, or unable to express their identity, is simply false. This is why God created adjectives! Foot fetishists don't need a pronoun.) It is authoritarian in the sense that you brook no argument, and accept only submission. Anything else means (social) death. This is a leftist authoritarian power play, and I resist it totally.
There are secondary "sticks", like when liberals think it's okay to let trans women compete with bio women, especially in sports that are dangerous, like MMA. That's not okay, it will never be okay, and I would have though that was obvious, but a sentiment like that will get you labelled transphobic. There seems to be some sort of slippery slope effect at play, which makes every argument all or nothing - the possibility that you might respect and like transwomen (as I do) AND be against them participating in competitive sports (as I am) isn't a reasonable possibility in the current climate. Ironically, and sadly, this bad position weakens the path to trans acceptance.
All that said, none of this matters if we're all dead, so better to focus on fixing climate, nukes, and authoritarianism.
Also, I'm a liberal as stated, and I prefer the company of gay people. I'm happy to do what I can to make those around me comfortable. I am not happy to do that, or anything else, on pain of cancellation.
The consequences for a misunderstood joke / revealed bigotry are going to be higher when billions of people can interpret your comments out of context. keep that in mind when posting to social media?
Either way it's not as personally damaging to be accused of being a racist in 2022 as being accused of being a communist in 1952, let alone before that when expressing the wrong opinions loudly enough could get you tarred and feathered.
A bit different as that was the mortal enemy of the day, with good reason. It wasn’t someone with a different viewpoint, it was a very real potential mole from the enemy.
>Not really. Doing it right means adhering to the left’s idea of what is right. Your whole position is based on the left being correct about everything.
Also, whats right today may not be right tomorrow. Tweets live forever.
A good counter-example to that is South Park. They make edgy jokes that offend everyone and have withstood criticism from both the left and the right.
That is the key difference between free speech and censorship. You can support free speech and still remove people for horrible behaviour, but as soon as you start removing people because of the content of their speech, you move to tyranny.
That is cancelling and why people self censor (you're full of it if you say that's not happening), because their content is considered dangerous, not their behaviour.
Just watch, if Musk buys Twitter the mass of woke narcissists will immediately move to demand social media be regulated, after feverishly admonishing Trump for desiring the same thing...
Self-censoring is crudely how civilisation works. We accept some restraints on our biological urges for the safety and order collective society provides.
Are you saying our civilization is no longer working?
The reason free speech being cherished is because limiting it brings upon cons much out weight the pros. In particular you block the escape hatch of a death spiral. I'm not super familiar with history but even I remember it's repeated many times in many places, just that this time it's global.
People are self-censoring because of the fear of an out of proportion response to their speech's content, which is rife currently.
We used to debate things and have different views and opinions. Milo Ydbjsixjebdoaod, Ben Shapiro.
But now instead of debating and proving people right or wrong. It’s just complain and protest the venue and people and get them knocked off Twitter YouTube Facebook etc.
Climate change is another one. Anyone who wants to debate the topic is instantly cancelled as a denialist. Social media has ruined information to some extent.
This is nothing to do with cancel culture or social media. It’s because big energy companies paid people to deny climate change. Unsurprisingly this makes people tetchy around those with let’s say heterodox views.
The well has been poisoned for fair criticism and it was not poisoned by environmentalists.
That’s cancel culture no matter how you try to spin it.
If that's cancel culture, then it's nothing new.
But what we have now is basically “you are wrong you have no say”
When you shut people out like that and they feel like they are not being heard you end up more divided and against each other. Which is basically what’s happening now in many topics.
If you look at the people asking tough questions about climatology, none of them have any links with energy firms. The median climate change skeptic is a retired engineer of some kind, or sometimes a retired climatologist. They don't have any links and they attack climate science because they think science should be accurate and disagree that big changes should be made on the back of bad science, but disagree that this particular field is accurate. That's it, that's their whole motivation.
Doesn't matter. Look at the post you're replying to. It's greyed out. You aren't allowed to even observe that people get cancelled for arguing about climate change - that's how far it's gone.
In psychology, a term for that is "minimisation" [1]. I commented on the power-play aspect of it here [2]. It seems so common in all forms of social media (and seems significantly less common in real-life to openly minimise another's experience [3]) that one suspects it's an immanent feature of electronic communication.
That seems to mesh not just with diffusion of responsibility, but that every other person in the digital world appears as a single, isolated data point who could be gaslighted into thinking they were totally alone in holding their opinions. As an amplified tyranny of the majority it seems the go-to attack in tech circles, where minority users are openly threatened with the "inevitable" march of "ubiquitous" technologies and will be "left behind" for failing to fall into line.
Until these mechanisms have widespread recognition and are named I don't think it's possible to build social media technologies absent of serious harms.
[1] https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Minimisation_(psychology)
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31006944
[3] Perhaps it's my privileged position to experience/witness it less.
Imagine it is 1980 and you went into a disco with a certain percentage of people of $ethnicity: What is your expectation for what would happen if you started yelling that people of $ethnicity have $negative_attributes and no right to exist? That they come to you and tell you that you have a point there? Of course the group will not ignore you, you are directly criticising their existence from an outside position.
And this is the issue here: expectations. When speaking on a global online platform with near instant feedback your expectation shouldn't be that you can just voice a controversial opinion and have nobody disagree like it would happen when you talk to your likeminded friends in a small circle. Your expectation should be that you are in close vicinity of all the people you are talking about, because you are.
And this can also be a good thing, because assuming a ton of things about others that you could just directly talk to is a sounds like a receipe for disaster. Imagine that instead of yelling stuff in the disco you were to talk to people and getting to know their point of view. The issue is that you can't do that on social media because you are always in the spotlight. And in the spotlight it is hard not to wave the flag of your team and have a human conversation instead.
Social media is a constant spotlight, global, instant and huge public space and the behaviour you discribe is a direct result of the fact that people treat it as their living room conversation instead.
Shitstorms are real and often they can get quite bad, but paradoxically you won't get rid of them with less moderation ("more free speech") but by interfering with the spread of the word.
You can, with a direct private message/email. (not sure if that is possible with twitter, though)
That works very well to solve many issues, but of course it does not get you the same attention like publicly responding to someone stupid/insensitive and most people are on social media for attention.
Cancelling people isn't just disagreeing. Of course people can disagree -- but those who do disagree take the disagreement to other fora and greater levels. An audience member can always heckle, it's expected to some level, but if you follow a comedian home and harass them it's entirely different.
- your opinion will not be bound to where you say it (your local pub), but potentially visible to anyone on earth
- your opinion will not be bound to the time you say it like in verbal speech, but might re-emerge at any point in time
- your opinion might be seen as a public statement (or even a declaration) to the world
- the friction to post your opinion, to react to your opinion or to jump on bandwaggons is as low as it gets
This is fundamentally different from any place you could speech in ever before in history, yet most people speak the same way they might in their local pub after the third beer. This impedance mismatch produces all kinds of wonky results.
The bandwaggon problem is yet another class of problem, that is much more systemically rooted and could probably be addressed by introducing a little bit of friction in the right places. My hunch is that this is less of a culture problem showing up on twitter, but a twitter problem showing up in culture. Certain forms of media make certain forms of communication more likely while preventing others due to their systems of communications. Twitters systems make such phenomena more likely, so they show up more often.
Within social media this can take the shape of a angry mob with torches and pitchforks — and this is certainly undesireable. My point however was that this is not "a new school of thought" which has been emerging in the past decade or so, but this is emergent behaviour which stems from the communicative system social media has designed. What people might call cancel culture is therefore not a culture that somehow went and inflitrated social media, but instead a culture that formed precisely in reaction to or enabled by the communicative structures of social media.
The consequence of this would be that the only way to get rid of online mobs would be to change the design of online interaction on those platforms (e.g. by limiting post visibility, adding friction on retweeting and sharing, highlighting options to privately communicatiate etc).
You can debate whether a joke is racist or a joke about race, or whether there's a difference between the two. It's not gaslighting
Arguing against the existence of empirical evidence showing real consequences is absolutely gaslighting, and I see it all the time from primarily left-leaning folks who, without always saying it, believe the people who were cancelled fully deserved their punishment, without bothering to assess the context or conditions of the situation in relation to our fundamental rights in society, where fair trial and freedom of speech/thought are ignored in favor of an unregulated digital militia composed of Twitter bots and large corporations like VISA/Mastercard coercing businesses to terminate payments for controversial people -- while narrative-approved late night entertainers humiliate you and people like you for daring to exist, opine, and jest differently than them as they broadcast their dogmatic standards as gospel to their fervent viewers who fail to see through them.
I recall when Patreon spent way too much manpower to silence Sargon of Akkad because their payment providers were enforcing their own private societal norms on Patreon's users, by proxy.
Imagine, if you will, that you're an Uber driver and while driving someone to their destination, you nearly get hit by another vehicle and in your fear, you scream an expletive that upsets just this one customer. You later lose your ability to drive for any taxi service because their payment services refuse to facilitate paying you for that one cross remark.
Many people argue that private companies have every right to deny service or operate their services in any way they like, but if most of them are operating in unison to control speech and aid in humiliating average people for breaching their "community standards", then having a society with rights to free speech, expression, and thought without undue punishment outside of the court of law is pointless. These rights may as well not exist if they only serve a vocal, angry minority. The irony being that those same rights are protected for them because large corporations use them as fodder for shallow marketing campaigns that take advantage of human compassion towards manufactured victimhood that inaccurately represent the realities of this world, signaling their defense of complete lunacy for profit.
Cancel culture is an absolutely pathetic way to treat citizens in our society, I don't care how "private" your company is in their ability to make decisions like these — you cannot deny the backbone of society to individuals for spilling their milk.
To quote Anthony Jeselnik himself, “I get away with it because I’m just the guy who does it.” Anthony built a brand around saying horrible things. I admit he is a talented comic, but that’s not the point; even when South Park misses, people don’t suddenly turn on it and start feigning surprise about how crude it is. “Of course it’s crude; it’s South Park, you idiot.”
People say stupid stuff all the time. Read my HN comment history and tell me how long it takes you to get to something I’ve said that’s stupid. I try to self-censor rather heavily by simply trying not to engage in too many controversial topics and I’m sure there’s still some statement or other in this entire corpus of my own comments that would appear pretty ugly in a decontextualized light (and perhaps even with context, I dunno.) Well, thanks to context collapse, that happens all the time. It’s almost the default and exceedingly few people care to check.
And if the mob winds up being wrong, do 50,000 people apologize? Do you get your job prospects back? OR: does it get ignored, you get a permanent set of headlines in the search results for your name, and your mere association with unscrupulous topics limits your potential indefinitely? Yeah, I am pretty sure I already know the answer here.
And I don’t care how rare it is. It’s not rare enough. It’s not good if it happens once. “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” And again, I agree that sometimes people just said something shitty or at least that got interpreted shittily, but I have never seen something even once where it didn’t feel like a horridly disproportionate response. Not even once.
Even if you did feel it was a proportionate response, somehow, it’s hard to argue that it actually accomplishes much of value. However, it has lead to some documented suicide attempts! So that’s just peachy.
Maybe people should stop trying so hard to justify vigilante internet mobs. Even if its not exactly a lynching, it certainly is character assassination, harassment, and frankly, disgusting shitty human behavior that is hard to justify.
Completely agree... No arguments with this ..
And as always there is a but.. (Note: following is not a personal or specific counter-argument to this comment). The general calling it "cancel-culture" or "leftist political correctness forcing it's way (Aka fascist-leftist" narrative misses the point as much as the common "it's rare, but these people deserve it. They're horrible people" narrative.
The way i look at it "freedom to innovate, and have a system that sets up a market that encourages innovation" has brought us this current social media centered around outrage, fear, anger and rage centered way of connecting to people. Those employers are "free-to-fire" as much as each person in the mob that responds with rage is free to express their opinion and the one person who uncensoredly tweeted something is free to make mistakes. So what's the solution, I don't know anything specific outside of going all mystic/mythic/wishful saying we should all practice empathy better, we should find better ways of connecting to each other and may be (social networking and recommendation) algorithms that can help deeper connections than shallow ones.
To be honest, there's a skeptical(and pessimistic and fearful) side of me that thinks that's not gonna happen and we'll end up in a divergent world(https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2022/02/23/divergentism/).
The other solution proposed is (completely free speech with pure anonymity based protection from society based outlash) also suffers from the problems like minority voices getting drowned out. Majority opinions and stereotypes being elevated to "The capital "T" Truth"(https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/224865-the-capital-t-truth-...) rather than being viewed in perspective..
> “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” This is a noble sentiment, but I do wonder how much this is true in what we have managed to implement and wonder if we would ever be able to implement something like this without going to "minority report" level extreme censoring and monitoring. (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=925249... ) or with some humour(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXPOw2unxy0).
Whenever I see takes like this, I wonder what platforms people are using and how they're using them.
I interact with my family on facebook, read some stuff on subreddits I like, and don't use twitter; I don't really experience any of the above. My girlfriend, by contrast, will come to me visibly shaken once a week regarding some drama happening on instagram, which baffles me.
Am I the one that's out of touch here? Or is this 'FUDmedia' a bit overblown and the result of spending time looking for the hot goss? I'm probably the one that's out of touch, but oh boy is it nice.
The old internet Yishan speaks of might not be that old, but it feels ancient and very distinct from what we have today. The old internet was an escape from whatever life had to offer. It was something you could log into when you got home and hang out with other nerds and enthusiasts in your niche. That’s all gone because now it’s not just nerds and now your niche is decontextualized into a giant social media soup where people are constantly judging and critiquing everything and often in bad faith or at least irrationally.
I actually fully agree that cancel culture is a silly concept, because cancel culture doesn’t capture how insidious and unhealthy internet relations have become. It isolates one specific dysfunctional behavior (the tendency for people to form mobs and absolutely try to obliterate livelihoods over relatively small transgressions) while ignoring or maybe even inherently accepting all of the dysfunctional crap that leads up to it and surrounds it. “Cancel culture” is just a symptom of deeply unhealthy social relationships, rather than an intentional plot by the “radical left”. And maybe the reason we only complain about cancellation is because deep down, we don’t want to give up all of what the internet offers, even a lot of the less healthy things. Because yeah, quote retweets dunking on someone with bad faith arguments may make for great screenshots to send to your group chat of likeminded people, but is it really advancing the discourse?
I think it’s not necessarily Twitter’s responsibility to figure out all of the answers here. It would be kind of tragic if we couldn’t find some sort of solution that didn’t involve regulating social media or computers, though. Maybe it’s unlikely, but my hope is kind of that it resolves itself. If social media usage started to shrink simply because people became tired of it and it was no longer socially “cool”, that alone might help out a lot. In general, convincing people to take social media far less seriously would help a lot. The reduction of the real world influence of Twitter and its respective beefs and callouts would basically kneecap the concept of “cancelling” somebody online.
For now though, I agree it’s all a bit nebulous. There’s no obvious way out. I guess the only difference for me before and after reading the tweet thread from the OP is that I understand now that it isn’t Twitter’s fault. They’re just the platform currently holding the curse.
Many people don't see the difference between a joke about racism and racism.
A joke about racism could be in the form of a story where "Person A says racist thing (that we don't get to hear), then Person B hits them". Sure, that's nowhere near funny enough to be called a joke, but it is simultaneously about racism while surely not being remotely racist?
I appreciate that a lot of the time people will define a joke as "about racism" while ignoring the fact that it ALSO contained racism - after all, if the actual racism in the joke isn't funny then why are you making the joke be about racism at all? - but I've definitely heard off-hand jokes that were about racism without having any racism in them (either in content or intent).
Not to mention that if you make a joke about racism that gets directed against your own race, it's hard to see many people viewing that joke as racist in itself.
I don't think the average non-"woke" person sees much value in transphobic/racist jokes either - at least not in public.
That said, I don't think there would be anywhere near the level of backlash if the average activist simply aired their disapproval in a normal way (ie, expressing discomfort at a live show, or leaving a comment online calling a comedian a talentless hack for making shit transphobic jokes) rather than vindictively trying to destroy their entire life.
What would be your explanation for Nimesh Patel being removed from stage at Columbia?
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/former-snl-writer-nimesh...
When the status quo is actively discriminating and harmful, doing nothing is enabling oppression.
Reminds me of forcing people to cry in funerals of dictators, honestly. Pure bullying, hiding behind a facade of righteousness.
Kendi frames it like this: it’s a contradiction to say “I’m not racist” but then continue to live in a way that perpetuates racial disparity.
In his writing he gives a bunch of interesting examples from his life where he realized he was acting in that way and tried to change.
Maybe you don’t agree with some of those views, but I kind of read your response in this genre of everyone talking past one another. I don’t really see what it has to do with the actual position of anti-racism
So when a mob targets and harasses a person, as well as their friends and family, not only do they deserve it, but everyone else who isn't participating in the hate mob is evil as well apparently!
And you AND them are BOTH actually right because they live in a different circle/town/city/country than you.
I believe Twitter mobs have a factor of American mentality that believe that their personal reality is THE reality. See for example when they harassed the Bulgarian author of the “Rubocop” Ruby library because “cop = bad!”
I don't know about you, but I sure as hell am firing someone who is says racist things. Keeping them around is not good for your company, for the other employees, for your vendors/clients, or anyone else associated with your company.
Racism is a crime in any reasonable society. If anything, being yelled at on Twitter is too little punishment.
The US is very far from reasonable in many respects, which is why white supremacists, antivaxxers, etc, flourish. You should get familiar other societies, particularly in the European Union or South Africa.
In Brazil, you’ll go to jail for making racist claims. As you should. How could that be polemic in the 21st century?
Also, no one is asking you to accept it, it’s the law in many countries.
If someone says something racist or sexist enough to get thrown out a bar, then I absolutely don't want to employ this person.
In the olden days there would be rumors and people would skate by. Hell, even the folks in first group of cancellation that you deem acceptable - the Weinsteins, Spaceys and Cosbys: everyone around them knew. FOR DECADES.
And nothing happened. It took until the same technological leaps that we are talking about for their victims to find each other, gather safety in numbers, and facilitate punishment.
This is of course going to be very unpopular with the "we are not racist/sexist - we are just asking questions" crowd.
In all discussions of "cancel culture" there is no debate or disagreement that the person actually did the things they did - the only debate is whether the crime fits the consequences.
The period after most people moved to big cities and before internet was widespread was the golden age of privacy.
something fun happened a few weeks back:
someone made a compilation of all the time Joe Rogan said the n-word;
the Young Turks made a segment how inexcusable it was to say it "so many times"; someone made a compilation of all the time the Young Turks;
some time later on an unrelated topic regarding dwarfism the Young Turks went on a rant about it being impossible to know whether the word dwarf was a slur or not and worrying about a new d-word compilation in 5 years
the particular details of what is cancel culture elude me, I am not smart enough to define it. but I find this future-based self-censoring (not based on visible trends but hypothetical ones) to be corrosive
I am still thinking about all this, but I feel it is an unsolveable aspect of the global soapbox style social media platforms.
You also can't get away with risque jokes in big crowds when public speaking or with people you don't know. With your friends, there is a lot of nuance occuring, like them knowing you are a good person and have good intentions. To a crowd it's not necessarily obvious, and the range of people you could offend is way larger. You know you can grill your friend about their moustache because he knows you mean no harm. You know you can make a joke about bald heads because you know none of present company will be offended, you just can't achieve that in bigger groups. The internet is that issue but on a global scale.
The idea that you can say anything on the net without consequences is the wrong idea I think, because you can't even do that off the net. The solution is better community building and social tools for groups I think.
I think one of the great challenges with the internet is that global broadcasting aspect of it. Knowing that something you say could spread across the world, and potentially hurt your prospects in the real world, is chilling and moderating. Our online identities/communication becomes more artificial in this environment. We feel the urge to broadcast what we think the world will think is acceptable/desirable, as opposed to what we truly think.
I feel like increased privacy, more localized online communities, and increased ephemerality of our content could all help towards making the internet a better place. How to do that is obviously a huge challenge.
Our culture hasn't caught up with technology which can broadcast minor transgressions to millions of people and save them in perpetuity.
What is the modern equivalent of getting kicked out of a bar? Anti-social or bigoted behavior should have consequences but not permanent or life-ruining.
This is assuming the behavior was actually bad. The other problem with cancel culture is 1. Many of the "transgressions" were not transgressions at all; sometimes just an opposing opinion. 2. It is selectively applied according to identity. 3. No checks and balances. Easy for a mistaken identity or simple misunderstanding go viral. Once the mob is ignited, it's extremely difficult to issue a correction or walk back an accusation.
Absolutely, life is shades of grey and never black and white. Unfortunately the noisiest people on the internet either can only think in black and white, or choose to do so to (to get note ‘engagement’ etc.)
Currently the majority of our culture feels acting on racist motives are bad. An individual who internally is racist, posts racist things on the internet is only bad when they act racist towards someone.
If a platform blocks someone from posting a non individual targeting racist post and it gets blocked on Facebook, that is similar to someone posting something against a religion and it getting blocked because the moderator is religious, or posting something anti American and the site moderated by an American blocks it because they disagree with the content.
As much as we might all hate it, the lobbying for an open free internet means giving everyone the freedom to post their thoughts without backlash. Imagine If the civil rights movement took place during the Information Age, Amit of people would have compared promoting anti slavery content on posts to anti vax information today.
The civil rights movement experienced a lot of backlash. I mean… Malcom X and Dr. King aren’t exactly alive today. People in those movements were beaten by police and arrested for expressing their view. I don’t recall any police beatings or murders of anti-vaxxers. Freedom of expression never meant freedom from backlash. (well... ostensibly it means free from state backlash but that's never really been entirely true)
The organizing principle of the civil rights movement was civil disobedience for the precise reason that they had no platform to begin with, and the only way they could get people to pay attention was to cause a stir. Sit ins, walk outs, boycotts, marches, and rallies were all methods used during the civil rights movement to create a platform for themselves that couldn't be ignored. So to say that they wouldn't have had a platform at all because they wouldn't have been platformed on social media if it had existed back doesn't track. Those individuals were unknown until they built their own platforms.
> their followers would have been fired for voicing support for them
Forget being fired, one civil right that was at issue during that time was discrimination in hiring practices (and firing practices too for that matter). This is the entire point of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. You could absolutely be fired or "cancelled" for expressing support for the movement, belonging to the movement, marrying someone in the movement, etc. Notably this legislative outcome restricts speech on some while freeing the speech of others.
I'm sympathetic to the idea the people shouldn't suffer a backlash like firing if they say something offensive; I've certainly said my share of offensive things that I regretted but wouldn't want to be fired over. But I'm never going to be sympathetic to the idea that it follows from the principles of free speech that we are free from backlash of our speech. Just explain how that would work without restricting speech on someone else.
Right, and the point is that if society has learned to embrace civil rights since then, society can and should have learned to embrace not doing that either. Or are the people endorsing cancellation today no better than those unenlightened people of an era that is behind us?
> "But I'm never going to be sympathetic to the idea that it follows from the principles of free speech that we are free from backlash of our speech. Just explain how that would work without restricting speech on someone else."
"Backlash" is a word that's trying to paper over a lot of sins. Your freedom of speech is preserved as much as anyone else's; you are still free to say that deplorable people are deplorable. That does not mean the you can hide harassment, intimidation, trying to get people fired, etc. (because that's what everybody knows what is actually meant when "backlash" or "consequences" is used) behind a claim of restricting your freedom of speech.
Society hasn't learned anything, no. The changes of the civil rights movement were hard fought and enshrined in law that has to be continually enforced precisely because people haven't evolved at all.
> because that's what everybody knows what is actually meant when "backlash" or "consequences" is used
Are you sure everybody knows this? From my perspective, I surely don't. I've seen "cancelling" simultaneously used to refer to literally cancelling programming like "Rosanne", cancelling powerful people who are abusing women like Harvey Weinstein, cancelling people who foment insurrection against the US government like Trump; and also more mundane yet still dissimilar situations ranging from teenagers canceling friends from their friend group, to indeed some person saying something and getting fired over it.
And on the other side, when people complain about backlash they complain about a range of responses including boycotts of products, being moderated but not kicked off social media, actually being kicked off of social media, losing a publisher or a book deal, being kicked out of professional organizations, all the way to being jailed or fired.
These are all wildly different contexts that all fall under the "cancel culture" and "backlash" umbrella, so it's not at all clear that "harassment, intimidation, trying to get people fired" is what people mean by "cancel culture" or "backlash". In fact I think it's one of the biggest problems with this discourse.
As you correctly pointed out "open societies" need rituals/safe places in which a free flow of exchanges can emerge without stifling "artificial constraints" (= courtesies) which at some point just effectivley dissipates any drive for exchange/communication attaining maximum entropy within its boundaries devoid of any discernible "meaning" (other than our "box" has the highest moral value (i.e. tightly closed) compared to other "boxes").
Some examples of "safe open spaces": jesters (modern: comedians), interpreting dreams (modern: psychotherapy), ecstacy/dionysian rituals (modern: going out drinking) ...
I don't see Twitter in its actual form up to this challenge. And it's actually fine to admit that they have long reached a limit to reasonably scale up something resembling the first amendment. Fair enough: the 1st refers to the role of the government.
But then in a world of the WWW (with its current tech monopolies) and increasing PPPs: What exactly can be/is the role of governments and that of corporations in the 21st century? Most certainly not a recursion to an 18th/19th century understanding of social contracts (with "high-tech" movable types at their disposal).
I think even more concerning for most people is a mob going after and firing people who didn't do these things. David Shor getting fired because he Tweeted that rioting was a bad political tactic, causing angry Twitter users to successfully press his employers to fire him. The case of the guy who got fired because someone thought he made an "OK" sign while driving and whipped up an angry Twitter mob (both cases are discussed here[1]).
Here's a random case I had stumbled upon a few years back that's now been forgotten[2] - man posts video of Chipotle telling him he has to pay for his burrito first because they say he's taken burritos without paying for them, accuses Chipotle workers of racism, and whips up a Twitter mob. Chipotle immediately apologizes and fires the manager. Then people notice old Tweets from the same guy bragging about stealing burritos from Chipotle. This leads Chipotle to rehire the person. If a random person decides to lie about you and whip of a Twitter mob, you have to hope that they've been so sloppy as to brag about their crimes on Twitter beforehand, because a simple unverified accusation from any random person is enough to get you fired.
And even after many cases like this, Twitter still let's people try to create Twitter mobs to get revenge on private citizens (particularly jarring when Yishan is arguing that the reason news articles are censored is to avoid angry mobs). However, they'll ban people who politely state heterodox opinions on controversial subjects (even if they are relatively common positions among the public). And since Yishan brings up Reddit, it's worth noting that they have a similar approach as well (whipping up angry mobs is fine, heterodox positions are not).
This culture on these sites is a result of the choices that social media companies have made (and not just the choices mentioned above, but others like the efforts made to push engagement). We see the results of that choice by the state of these sites. And the people involved, instead of taking responsibility for what they've created, decide to dump all the blame on the users.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/chipotle-rehires-manage...
There is obvious censorship not due to shitstorms. dang censored plain links to scientific studies highlighting myocarditis side effects to covid-19 vaccines. Now those effects are accepted fact.
The usual accusation is they pick left-wing fact checkers, but this falls apart on even casual examination. https://www.thedailybeast.com/facebook-brings-in-rightwing-n...
"Facebook has brought in the right-wing news site The Daily Caller, which was co-founded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson and is known for pushing misinformation, to help fact-check articles, according to The Guardian."
This bias thing feels like a dangerous precedent. I get not wanting kooks to exert strong cultural pressure, but if we start locking people out of various parts of society because of their beliefs, that sounds like the definition of illiberalism to me.
We have a 6-3 Supreme Court. Do you think there's no conservative bias in their work?
> This bias thing feels like a dangerous precedent. I get not wanting kooks to exert strong cultural pressure, but if we start locking people out of various parts of society because of their beliefs, that sounds like the definition of illiberalism to me.
It's not about locking people out, but ensuring that the people who have power are ideologically representative of the people they have power over.
Saying you can have apolitical "fact checking" is like saying judges just "call balls and strikes based on what the law says." In many cases both statements are actually true. But in practice, in many important cases, ideology and politics is inextricable from the job.
FactCheck.org doesn't exactly stick to verifying the number of carbon atoms in Butane. Their fact checks regularly, for example, parse through a politician's words to make inferences about what they meant or may not have meant. There's a lot of subjectivity wrapped up in that sort of analysis.
Whenever you give someone power and discretion, their "work" will be influenced by their ideology. I'm not talking about transparent favoritism, but differences in world view, values, and priorities. And it drives people nuts when people who don't share their values exercise power over them. This is true of everyone--from people who grow up in conservative little towns and escape to the big city as soon as they can to distinct ethnic groups who declare independence for their own patch of land. "Who" the decision makers are matters just as much if not more than what decisions they make.
Based on their rulings (their work), of course. But I would never presume to predict their work based on their ethnic background, their political contributions, the schools they went to, their religion, the kinds of websites they visit or music they listen to, etc.
> It's not about locking people out, but ensuring that the people who have power are ideologically representative of the people they have power over.
That's just a long-winded way of saying you're locking people out, based on their ideology. This is the kind of stuff that lets people argue that Catholics or Jews shouldn't be president.
> Saying you can have apolitical "fact checking" is like saying judges just "call balls and strikes based on what the law says."
I'm not saying this. I think the "balls and strikes" Roberts quote is 100% horseshit, whether it's applied to SCOTUS or grading student essays.
What I am saying is (within reason) we shouldn't let someone's ideology prejudice us against them. If you're a conservative I won't be prejudiced against you. If you're a flat-earther I will. This seems fair.
> There's a lot of subjectivity wrapped up in that sort of analysis.
I think there's a lot of middle ground between "number of carbon atoms in Butane" and epistemological free-for-all. I went to factcheck.org and opened up the 1st carousel article I saw [0]. It seems fine.
> Whenever you give someone power and discretion, their "work" will be influenced by their ideology.
Of course people are made up of their backgrounds and experiences (Justice Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comment comes to mind). Why don't we want that? How could we ever not have that?
> And it drives people nuts when people who don't share their values exercise power over them.
I don't think the ideology matters more than the policies and actions. I don't care what Biden's ideology is, he hasn't canceled student debt yet, and I think that's real dumb. I don't care what Trump's ideology was, he sent billions of dollars in aid to Americans who need it, and I think that was great.
---
Zooming out a little, maybe you would agree with me when I say that the rise of fact checking is a symptom of decaying discourse. I think people are so used to the other side acting in bad faith that they think they need refs, and then working the refs starts to be part of the game, then you start questioning the motives and ideologies of the refs, blah blah blah.
I think we can change this! I think we just need to be a little more earnest with each other and be more willing to acknowledge when we're wrong. Truth is huge and humans are small. The most we can hope for is to experience a little more of it by working together.
[0]: https://www.factcheck.org/2022/03/the-facts-on-de-nazifying-...
If I try to not be a blind ideologue over such a small thing as being a fact checker, wouldn’t I be better than median politics fact checkers who want to exert their bias as much as possible?
We don’t want political stuff in the fact checking. It’s far more bias to have fact checkers who are in line with the median citizen and put their political stances above fact checking. Aka doing their work.
Every one has biases. However not every one will consciously or otherwise, have their biases seep into determining what is misinformation or not and so on.
Edit: Even sadder is the parent is not down voted to greyness like the person you responded to. A sad take. Not only putting bias ahead of an attempt at “the truth”. But leaning into that. Which makes the thread make sense —- not even trying to act in good faith.
But that simplicity quickly breaks down when people don't share the underlying axioms, and "fact checking" regularly operates in that space. For example, does 1+1 = the number of human genders? Everyone where I'm from would say that's an obviously true fact, but a lot of the folks who run Twitter would disagree.
Perhaps we need online equivalents. Online on one hand you have 4chan and the other Hacker News. It's a race to the bottom in some sense if all bets are off.
Actually Schenck v. United States was partially overturned and severely limited 53 years ago, so that hasn't been correct, technically, for some time. iow, you probably can shout fire in a crowded theater, but it depends on the circumstances whether you'll be arrested, whether you've presented a clear and present danger, whether you caused a stampede, whether anyone was injured or killed. But if you are arrested, it won't be a free speech case. The charge will be disorderly conduct, or negligent homicide, or some other charge. Justice Holmes' quote has sort of taken on a life of its own as a determination of what speech is not protected, but really there's no law against it. FWIW, I'm not advocating for it, just being pedantic.
Actually, the “fire” line was dicta in Schenck, so it technically was never true.
This…seems like splitting hairs in a way to me.
It seems like a pretty clear acknowledgment that, in certain contexts, speech can be criminal.
After all, in those various charges it won’t be a free speech case because it’s settled law that speech in those particular contexts can result in a criminal charge.
So, I agree that the infamous line from Schenck (which was dicta already) is not good law. On the other hand, there is a kernel of truth that certain speech, in certain contexts, can be illegal and result in criminal charges.
It's honestly madness that this "fire in a crowded theatre" still comes up given where it originated - a court case where exactly the kind of speech that people worry about being restricted was in fact restricted.
Yes, after they've helped create the shitstorms in the first place with their escalatory like and recommendation models.
They are self-appointed referees in a game where many of the participants never wanted or asked for a referee. These companies could simply limit themselves to removing spam and explicitly illegal content (which should be referred to authorities), but instead they choose to put their finger on the scale and wade into the fray.
then there is the graffiti, the tags, the leaflets, the random crazy people shouting, singing, drug addicts, some people with guns etc etc.
Some people spend too much time in academic institutions. they are not the public square
I think the real problem of the social media platforms is the users.
Most people that I see behaving horribly on social media platforms do so under their own name, or at least an identity easily matched up to a real person, probably because they don’t feel like the repercussions affect them. So I don’t think the anonymity is that much of a cause or enabler for misbehavior in practice.
I think the idea of being thrown out of a bar for misbehaving is an interesting analogy. On twitter you can be thrown out of someone’s personal timeline, or you can be thrown out of all of twitter. In the real world that would be like either you are refused entry to someone’s home or you get thrown out of a country, with nothing in between. It seems like there is room there for more variations in between. Maybe hashtags could have moderators that forbid abusive individuals from using them, or maybe every tweet could form its micro-community, and individuals could be banned by the original tweeter from engaging with that tweet, but not from engaging with all of twitter. Twitter must have brainstormed a million variations on this concept of a moderated community, and I wonder why they have landed on the idea that you should only be allowed to curate your own timeline and not that of others who follow your tweets.
You think electric cars and reusable rockets are bad?
Just trying to be funny while still staying relevant to discuss. Please don’t downvote me to oblivion :)
Of course everyone working at a social media company has an ideological bias, and that can come out in the product. But consider also that the latest censorship controversy creates negative PR, makes people leave the platform, attracts regulatory attention, and ultimately, hurts the company's profits. Content moderators are at least as worried about that as they are about making sure their ideological opponents aren't given a voice.
Social media companies are in the unenviable position of playing referee in the culture war, and like referees in any sport, they're going to constantly be criticized for doing it, right or wrong. These companies are global and universal, and there's no way they can satisfy all parties. Sometimes, the values of left and right, or Iran and the US, or Israel and Palestine, are just irreconcilable. You're better off just trying to avoid as much trouble as possible, and avoiding negative media attention.
Reddit is probably the most ham-fisted example of this approach. Their content moderation is pretty hands off, but as soon as any subreddit attracts negative attention, it's quarantined or banned, no matter if the controversy is justified or not. When Russia invaded Ukraine and Russia Is Bad Now, they just straight up banned /r/russia and any link to an .ru domain! That does nothing to address the conflict, but it does keep those NYT opinion pieces from showcasing Problematic Russian Bot Behavior on Reddit.
I'll note that I don't think this model fully explains moderation policies at Twitter or other social media sites. I genuinely believe moderation leans left due to an ideological monoculture (I've seen it first hand). But it's important to recognize the difficult situation social media sites are in.
When it comes to individuals, it would be nice if we could all respect each other's right to our own opinions without attacking other people's intelligence, attacking their character, or accusing them of bad faith.
What kinds of reasons (valid or invalid) is Russia giving? Are there actually nazis in Ukraine?
Propaganda is used heavily by all sides and the only thing you can do is recognize that and hopefully see through it.
They absolutely don't justify the invasion of Ukraine and are a smokescreen, but that doesn't mean that they aren't problematic. There is a reason the US blocked military aid to them in 2018.
Meanwhile, there were stories about the Ukrainian rampant Neo-Nazi problem right up until the past few months when everyone is now suddenly supposed to be okay with the idea.
Remember, the Ukrainian Nazis had their own SS divisions (around 90k troops) and butchered countless Jews, Poles, Russians, etc. The US snuck out the Nazi leadership ahead of Russia's takeover because the US had made a deal with the devil in an attempt to counter the USSR under Stalin.
While the Nazis were punished and reviled in every other country you can name, they were never purged or hated the same way in Ukraine where they wrapped themselves up in Nationalistic "freedom fighter" rhetoric. If they ever gain power, they'll be just like ISIS or Nazis of old going around butchering dissenters and undesirables of all kinds.
The enemy of my enemy isn't necessarily my friend.
That said, I don't think even the Russians thought this war was about "De-nazification" despite that being the official line. Their focus has been on taking over the Donbas region and securing utilities for Crimea (another stated purpose of the war).
Also, it's worth pointing out that we in the west think of Nazis as primarily being anti-semitic, but Russians think of them as primarily anti-Russian, so claiming to be fighting Nazis is a good line to get popular support in Russia.
The fact of “civilian losing their lives” is where I think creates the differences in views. For many people, especially Americans, they can’t get past that or put the body count in perspective. Others, and I think this includes much of the non-western world, are more like “well people die, what’s special about this?” I don’t say that to be callous, my point is that 50,000-100,000 people die annually in state based conflicts, and everyone morally triages them, and that can produce different results.
UNHR estimates 2,000 civilian deaths so far in Ukraine. That was a typical number for (1,500-3,500) for civilian deaths in Afghanistan each year for the past decade. And you probably didn’t post anything about it on your Facebook, right?
So let’s get past deaths. What’s happening in Ukraine? The 20th century conflict between the “first world” and the “second world”—a conflict so epic that the terminology has become part of our vernacular—ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. When empires collapse they don’t just vanish. There was an informal agreement among all involved that the west would leave Russia its space. Remember, we were fighting against the Soviets in places like Korea and Vietnam. So giving them a buffer in Eastern Europe against NATO was a good deal. Maintaining buffer states to avoid conflict between major powers is a centuries old practice rooted in pragmatic considerations.
So what happened? NATO reneged by gobbling up Eastern European countries and pushing ever closer to Russia’s border. Russia sees NATO encroaching closer and closer to their border, flirting with allowing membership of a country in Russia’s border. What were they going to do?
What happened in Afghanistan was devastating and horrific.
You think because I’m a Westerner that I have “picked a side” and look past our own crimes. I don’t.
Russia also reneged. They agreed to protect Ukraine’s borders and sovereignty.
They could recognize that joining NATO is a ultimately the choice of the states that choose join NATO, and respect that. It is that simple.
Empirically, it's not!
Russia behaves like an abusive parent that says that their adult daughter cannot hang out with her friends.
Nothing. NATO isn’t something akin to the Soviet Union - a collection of client states politically and militarily dominated by a single country styling itself an expanding imperial power - it’s a simple mutual defence pact.
It’s reasonable for Russia to object to theatre range nuclear missiles and specific military systems on its borders, and that’s the sort of thing treaties between NATO and Russia should cover - but it’s entirely unreasonable for Russia to argue that Ukraine should not have the capacity to defend its borders from invasion, that this from NATO membership constitutes an intolerable military threat - it simply doesn’t, nor in the modern era are countries allowed to dictate neutrality to their neighbours as a condition of their own security.
No kidding, glad we got that out of the way.
> I think it was a predictable outcome of what the west was doing.
Aka the 'Mearsheimer' doctrine. Which is patent nonsense, but it gives cover for what you apparently want to believe.
> NATO reneged by gobbling up Eastern European countries and pushing ever closer to Russia’s border.
NATO didn't gobble up anything. The countries that joined NATO did so because they were scared shitless of Russia re-invading them at some point in the future, because all the signs were pointing in that direction and none of these countries felt like becoming the next Belarus. NATO doesn't 'gobble', no country was ever forced to join NATO that did not want it, but Russia does.
Those countries have to date been proven right on four occasions where other countries, not in NATO were attacked rather than them, and there is a fair chance that if Ukraine had joined NATO before the 2014 invasion that that would have never happened to begin with.
I’ve never heard of Mearscheimer until my dad sent me a video. I think his general view aligns with ours. I don’t need “cover” for anything my opinion is quite common. I also took a bit of international affairs and European history in college so I’m not starting from scratch here.
> NATO didn't gobble up anything. The countries that joined NATO did so because they were scared shitless of Russia re-invading them at some point in the future, because all the signs were pointing in that direction and none of these countries felt like becoming the next Belarus. NATO doesn't 'gobble', no country was ever forced to join NATO that did not want it, but Russia does.
NATO had every right to say no and should have said no. These little countries shouldn’t be affecting the balance of world power.
> Those countries have to date been proven right on four occasions where other countries, not in NATO were attacked rather than them, and there is a fair chance that if Ukraine had joined NATO before the 2014 invasion that that would have never happened to begin with.
I think if NATO had rejected admission of other Eastern European countries the war would never have happened either.
Yes, but it being 'quite common' doesn't necessarily mean that it is right.
> I think if NATO had rejected admission of other Eastern European countries the war would never have happened either.
Putin seems to disagree with you there. He's been dreaming of a USSR revival since the day the SU collapsed and he's on the record about that. Note that all of the countries that did not join NATO when they could have by now been attacked or have been threatened with an attack. And two of them have been bombed back into the stone age with untold loss of life.
This is so surreal. Like trading with colonies. You really thing that people in Eastern Europe should not have say in this?
This whole point is not rooted in reality because Ukraine was not joining NATO. It was not possible for them. They were maybe going to join EU. Even after invasion it seemed like real option but this is now probably not going to happen as well for different reasons (diplomatic relations between Ukraine and some EU countries).
So this invasion has nothing to do with NATO. "Buffer states" are not going to change situation between Russia and NATO. Putin has nukes - he does not really cares about NATO.
NATO didn't force us to join, we asked for it, as an independent country which suffered a lot for centuries.
All the "NATO provokes" Russia are garbage, because they remove us, the countries that decided to join NATO, from the equation. We acted in our own interest, to protect ourselves from Russia and free ourselves from Russian influence. We didn't plan to "push against the borders of Russia", we planned to protect ourselves, and today more than ever I believe we were right to do so.
This number is nowhere close to being accurate. UNHCR "believes that the actual figures are considerably higher" [0]. More than 900 dead discovered since the liberation of the areas around Kyiv [1]. And we've not yet had the opportunity to count the dead in Mariupol, or Russian controlled areas.
> And you probably didn’t post anything about it on your Facebook, right?
Millions in the West spoke out with horror and revulsion at the death tolls in the 9/11 Wars.
[0] https://www.ohchr.org/en/news/2022/04/ukraine-civilian-casua... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/15/number-of-civi...
"OHCHR believes that the actual figures are considerably higher, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration. This concerns, for example, Mariupol and Volnovakha (Donetsk region), Izium (Kharkiv region), Popasna (Luhansk region), and Irpin (Kyiv region), where there are allegations of numerous civilian casualties. These figures are being further corroborated and are not included in the above statistics. "
But that somehow didn't make it into the quote by the GP.
Those were of course much higher. I’m talking about the annual death tolls after 2010 when everyone in the west thought that the war was long over.
But that's a causal question, there's nothing moral about it. It's like saying someone who walked through the bad part of town and got mugged made a bad decision. But morally speaking the mugger is in the wrong, Russia is in the wrong. Ukraine, a sovereign state, is allowed to flirt with joining NATO or enter trade agreements with the EU. Besides, somewhat ironically, Ukraine would have no reason to join NATO if the Russia wasn't an ever-present threat to Ukrainian sovereignty.
People are just talking past each other. Realists aren't making moral prescriptions and moralists are worried about right and wrong, the violations of sovereignty and the body count. Both perspectives are necessary. Moralism can't guide foreign policy completely but it can't be totally absent. Reasonable people can disagree about the right mix.
Like the grandparent poster noted, it is strange and irritating that realists are being shouted down as "Russian agents" by mindless moralists.
I actually used to think this when I was four years old. That if a burglar broke in, I would simply talk to them and explain what they're doing is wrong.
My view is that the US baited Putin into this by making repeated overtures about Ukraine joining NATO (while Zelenskyy has himself said that he was told privately it wouldn't be admitted). This happened as Putin repeatedly said that Ukraine's NATO membership was a red line for him. We saw the Cuban Missle Crisis and our reaction. To me, from the Russian perspective, this is akin to Russia making preparations for a deal to put nukes in Tijuana.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces have spent the last 7 or 8 years shelling Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Eastern Ukraine, in violation of the (signed) Minsk accords. This is largely encouraged and participated in by forces that include entire units of Nazi sympathizers. We'd do well to bear in mind that from a uniquely Russian perspective, Nazism is often associated as much with being anti-Russian as it is anti-Jewish.
Then we have leaked audio of US politicians (Victoria Nuland) hand picking the Ukrainian leadership after the 2014 coup that appears to have been backed by the US, and the far-right Nazi groups, to oust their democratically-elected (pro-Russian) president. I won't even get into the Hunter Biden stuff except to say that the NYT recently said his laptop was real.
In sum, what Russia is doing is probably a war crime (war of aggression) and the whole situation is tragic. The US shares a lot of the blame, has done nothing but stoke the flames which is destroying Ukraine rather than push to broker a peace deal that includes the Ukrainian neutrality it had decided on anyway. The lack of open discussion about any of these issues is disheartening. I'm suspicious that the narrative being pushed by the US media has a lot more to do with the arms industry than a moral judgement by the US, which is shown through other ongoing conflicts (Yemen, Somalia) not to exist.
the russian idea of 'ukrainian neutrality' would require the US to formally reject the idea of a nations right to self-determination to satisfy the demands of a state that isn't even a peer or on good terms which isn't going to fly it weakens the united states and europe
the rest is minutia, blowback, corruption and handwaving at the end of day this is the stupid game russian leadership setup and wanted to play
You skip over annexation of Crimea and gas-rich parts of Ukraine, over Putin's rant how Ukraine shouldn't be a country, how all those new NATO countries don't have nukes stationed in them and the whole European NATO standing army is not larger than Russia's. And to top of it all, you think it's a complicated legal issue if a country that wasn't attacked or was about to attacks another one.
It is. Look up Article 51 of the UN charter. Russia's case is that there was an imminent attack on its sovereign ally. As I said, I don't think that would hold up, but it's a logical argument. "Country wasn't attacked" is not how this law works.
> annexation of Crimea
I have a similar opinion there, which is that Russia was on a poor legal footing for that action, although did proffer a defense, but that the US played a large role in that happening. Recall that simultaneous with that conflict was Ukraine's democratically-elected president being overthrown in a violent coup that by all appearances was backed by the US.
> Putin's rant how Ukraine shouldn't be a country
I didn't comment on that because I've never heard that. I'd have to read his comments to comment myself.
> those new NATO countries don't have nukes stationed in them
If the point here is that NATO participation isn't a threat to Russia, I would just say that of course it is, or the US wouldn't have expanded it.
> the whole European NATO standing army is not larger than Russia's
Germany just said they're increasing their defense budget to 100B euros.
There's a deeper issue here by the way, which is that I'm simply not going to continue to go along with the line that I and, I see, my entire country has been fed my entire life, that America #1, and we're the good guys, and everyone else who doesn't do exactly what we say are the bad guys, and be told who I have to hate and who needs a righteous war to straighten them out.
Every single hot military conflict the US has been involved in in my lifetime has turned out to be immoral, wrong, based on lies, or best-case scenario, absolutely none of our business and not something we should have been involved in. I have zero trust in anything the government, or the media they appear to control, has to say at this point.
What is that, “logically”? Who is sovereign, who is ally, who’s imminently attacked? By invading, that denies Ukraine sovereignty. If you mean Russian sovereignty, it’s not the boss of Ukraine, can’t require it be allied.
Unless, of course, Ukraine isn’t really its own thing. And that’s what Putin’s essay sets up.
> Putin's rant how Ukraine shouldn't be a country
I didn't comment on that because I've never heard that. I'd have to read his comments to comment myself.
It’s a clever piece, and to purport to be unaware undermines every comment you’ve made.
Selectively quoting, the piece argues not that Ukraine is not a country, but that it’s not its own country, has no history standalone, is really more of a greater Russia border land, and makes no cultural or economic sense apart.
- Source: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Ru...
- The Russian state incorporated the city of Kiev and the lands on the left bank of the Dnieper River, including Poltava region, Chernigov region, and Zaporozhye.
- These territories were referred to as “Malorossia” (Little Russia).
- The name “Ukraine” was used more often in the meaning of the Old Russian word “okraina” (periphery), which is found in written sources from the 12th century, referring to various border territories.
- And the word “Ukrainian”, judging by archival documents, originally referred to frontier guards who protected the external borders.
- …the idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians started to form and gain ground among the Polish elite and a part of the Malorussian intelligentsia. Since there was no historical basis – and could not have been any, conclusions were substantiated by all sorts of concoctions…
- Ukraine and Russia have developed as a single economic system over decades and centuries.
- I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.
So: It’s not sovereign on its own. It’s not a real country.
I’m simply not going to continue to … be told
Insofar as that causes you to reject controlled media, consider whether you could turn off US news, stop reading US sites, and instead study journalism, legal opinion, and historically contextualized views on this matter emerging from nations independent of Russia and U.S. both, ideally also outside EU.
Crimea is an even worse example since annexation there happened even without a pretext of defending anyone. It was so blatant disregard of laws that they stripped their uniforms of any identifying insignia and lied about their involvement until they annexed it.
Violent part of the president overthrow came mainly from former president's forces shooting on protesting civilians. The protests started why? Because the corrupt president reneged on his promise to start the process of joining EU. For all your worry about US involvement you seem to be pretty uninterested in Russia's. Ukraine had two presidential elections since.
My comment about NATO is that expansion was not akin to putting nukes directly into Russia's neighbourhood because they are exactly where they were pre-expansion. They are certainly farther from Russia than theirs are from us (Kaliningrad). And NATO is a defensive pact which you may not believe, but the fact that it doesn't have a joint army and certainly not a European army that would even remotely suffice for a plausible successful attack on Russia makes it really hard for me to believe anyone in Russia would seriously worry about countries that have mostly been very reluctant to invest in their own armies and until Russia's invasion could hardly agree on anything of substance.
That Germany intends to increase their defence budget proves exactly nothing since this was a direct consequence of Russia's invasion. Not that long ago their soldiers sometimes used brooms on joint exercises for lack of equipment. I'm sure other defence budgets including probably ours will probably change too as our assumptions have so thoroughly been proven wrong by Russia.
I'm not a US citizen and it is completely up to you how you feel about your own country and its government, but I am from a country that willingly joined NATO. I've been critical of most US military interventions in recent history, but I've also not been blind to Russia's meddling in Europe and elsewhere. It is starting to irk me describing this conflict as US or NATO one since neither is in Ukraine. There's just one country with significant forces in another one's so it really shouldn't be difficult to figure out who the aggressor is.
I don't care if your are a merchant of doubt or just being influenced by them. I do find it bemusing that someone bothered by being labelled as pro-Russian spends so much time finding excuses for their invasion.
When and by whom?
That's the point. They just want the controversy to go away. To suggest that they should care about justification is to make them moral arbitrators.
The "correct" response in my eyes is to say "we are a platform, we aren't responsible for the speech of our users as long as it is legal," but that's a very expensive and profit-negative strategy these days.
Except if you are hosting content, you are responsible for it. Maybe not even legally but you are still responsible. You can't simply wash your hands of content that you literally pay to host on the internet just because a user posted it.
When Trump was booted from social media, it was censorship. We tend to overlook this, because Twitter & FB agreed on it; but another perspective is possible, that Trump should be able to speak freely as the leader of the country supported by half its population (no less than 40%, anyway). Trump should be able to make statements that aren't censored because, when he makes them as President, they are inherently newsworthy & worthy of circulation.
But to take this even further, this isn't simply about one guy's Twitter takes; it's much larger than that. Because under Trump we were starting to see the emergence of something that is probably inevitable: the full hybridization of popular culture, technology, and media, in the form of a perpetually on engine of user engagement. This is probably the model of the future, and Twitter is uniquely positioned to not just bring it to the people (as it was under Trump), but to monetize it (which they didn't do, really).
What are the upsides of this? A more engaged voter population. A move of politics back towards the center of cultural life, where it should be. A closer integration of politics, culture and ecommerce. And, if done in a principled way, an end to the perception that people can be suppressed for saying the wrong thing (see: Trump).
That's the value that Musk could unlock. That's what could conceivably make Twitter as important as FB, and even more central to American life. That, combined with some aggressive product delivery, and a shakeup away from the product doldrums, could be transformative for Twitter. If Musk gets his way, that's the change he could make.
FWIW this isn't really adding something to the conversation, not that I've been paying very close attention.
I believe Facebook and Twitter already had a "heads of state" clause in their policy that recognizes this.
Yup: https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/3/22474738/facebook-ending-p...
In other words, heads of state were already allowed to say things that normal users aren't, based on the reasoning you state.
According to executives that made a one-off decision, Trump crossed those more relaxed lines.
Of course a lot of it had to do with the transfer of power in the US -- he would soon no longer be a sitting president.
As Yishan says, these decisions aren't really based on "principles". They are based on "shitstorms that are brewing and that we want to avoid", of which January 6 was a perfect example.
TV is a closer analogy, but back in the days of broadcast TV, you had to get airtime with one of a dozen networks. (And Trump did this! He had the number 1 show on TV for awhile in the early 2000's. He continued building his brand as a "rich guy who makes deals" there.)
You can't just come back the next day and broadcast another message, i.e. testing what works and iterating. It takes a whole team of people to make a broadcast. Also, the audience would watch TV at home; they didn't have a device to consume the message anywhere. It was fundamentally slower.
Even blogs are slower, although you can definitely get deplatformed for a blog. Blogs lack discoverability; they don't broadcast to followers. In the heyday of blogs most people weren't reading them on their phone.
So social media, and Twitter in particular, is a really effective communication technology for broadcasting sharp messages.
Telephones do have similar issues -- there is a reason that wiretaps exist and that traditionally the phone company was a monopoly with close ties to the government. But they're not a "platform" for broadcast.
Arguably Trump would've been banned under Twitter rules a whole lot quicker if he hadn't been the leader of the country supported by half its population.
> people can be suppressed for saying the wrong thing (see: Trump).
People are lying to themselves if they think they are in favor of unfettered speech. Otherwise your favorite online forum would be chock-filled with Viagra links, crypto, nft and forex spam, multipage crank proofs of the coming singularity, race-baiting rants of the worst sort, ASCII art, Base64 encodes of Blu-Rays, etc. We all want limits on speech, we just differ in where those lines should be drawn.
> What are the upsides of this? A more engaged voter population. A move of politics back towards the center of cultural life, where it should be. A closer integration of politics, culture and ecommerce.
People become strongly politically engaged because there is something they strongly dislike about current public policy. Politics being the center of cultural life is a sign of bad things going on. So I don't see fighting angrier and more hypercharged online wars as an upside. If anything it just primes people for fighting angrier and more hypercharged offline wars, which is where we seem to be headed.
I was going to disagree. But then the historical examples that come to mind at the tail end of democracies and republics is this sort of populist (versus civic) engagement.
Argument is there are certain modes of free speech that are unstable. They create social harmonics that empower populists who tear down the liberal order and destroy the rights that brought them to power (and could now threaten to topple them).
Classical case for this, with respect to democracy (not free speech), is Athens.
Twitter has no moral requirement to broadcast anything he says. It ain't a utility and it ain't news.
This argument seems to be that Musk is a hero and he will transform Twitter which is currently being mismanaged. That isn’t a very good argument unless you’re a Musk fanboi. Just to state one reason: actively transforming Twitter while also leading both SpaceX and Tesla just isn’t gonna work, and he hasn’t put forth anything serious so far to explain how he intends to make this change.
The actual steelman is simple - if you’re going to have a platform, then you should only be able to boot people off for legal reasons. Picking and choosing winners in any other fashion is too prone to human bias. The argument that some are too stupid to recognize misinformation from the truth is exactly the argument used by totalitarian regimes in the past.
Then, they thought that they were, or could be, complicit in a violent domestic attack, and made a call.
Do human cultures just need kings and princes? Is there a special kind of celebrity niche that the billionaire businessman fills that occupies an ancient hierarchical part of our society?
I read Yishan's post here as kind of like a duke commissioning an epic poem in the hopes it'll influence the king. Maybe it'll work -- he shot his shot, and he's a pro at putting in just the right Internet comments in just the right place. But I wonder why I'm so fascinated about seeing this conversation between these two nobles. Is this how the English lower classes saw their royalty in the 17th century? Did they chatter about the king's foibles on the street while they were out costermongering?
So basically the ruling class.
American billionaires, for all their faults, have the most “legitimate” authority in modern(post-enlightenment, post-martial) history.
https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/uprising1313/files/2017/09/ar...
> The authoritarian relation between the one who commands and the one who obeys rests neither on common reason nor on the power of the one who commands; what they have in common is the hierarchy itself, whose Tightness and legitimacy both recognize and where both have their predetermined stable place.
This is also why the “millionaiahs and billionaihs” rhetoric from the left falls flat with immigrant populations. The rich and successful people here are way better than the kleptocrats and oligarchs elsewhere.
For example: There’s some good stuff that’s been written comparing Russian oligarchs with western businessmen, their spending habits, values, lifestyles etc.
It's an interesting question, and I like how you frame it as a duke's commissioning.
The root of it I think is that we're deeply social creatures, so much so that we anthropomorphize inanimate things and construct deities with suspiciously human personalities. It's our way to process the complexity of life and to retain a sense that there is a pattern to the randomness.
By personalizing everything we don't have to know anything about a subject to engage with it, we only need to know the personality in question, or even just general human motivations. In that way its super accessible. It's only with education that we can engage in the merits of ideas themselves. Else we're destined to get caught up in the cult of celebrity.
On some level I think this is inherently biological; maybe it all stems from the need to differentiate ‘good for existence’ (e.g. food) from ‘might kill me’ and all creatures do it.
Why is them that we consider kings? Because our social imaginary [1] now is that of technocracy. Whoever can create technology and achieve money with technology is who’s worthy.
And why do we need kings? I don’t think there is consensus in this response but psychoanalysis and philosophy [2] have said a lot about this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_(sociology)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_dialectic
That's why we have huge libraries of biography books and millenia old stories of philosophers, heros and rulers.
Of course for some people such figure would be Ghandi and for some one of billioners (probably latter was always more appealing to the general public). Both are examples of extraordinary achievements in some area.
In highly religious society they would be probably replaced with saints & priests, in highly militarized by great strategists and war heroes.
If you dig deep enough, there will be probably some group telling stories, how exciting it was to be able to listen to some post stamps designer, who is considered local legend.
People think in stories and characters. It's easier and more natural like this.
So, we personify things (war, politics, free speech) into people like Putin, Musk, Hisham. They can play out the stories for us.
Also, the outcomes of princely squabbles does actually affect us.
It’s interesting thinking of the English heritage. French heritage would lead to different views on how to deal with pseudo royalty.
> I read Yishan's post here as kind of like a duke commissioning an epic poem in the hopes it'll influence the king.
He writes at the beginning that a lot of people are requesting his take, so he made it public instead of answering each individually. It doesn’t feel like he cares much about what Elon would think about his opinion.
“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.”
Having also worked on a social network and dealt with bots brigading back in 2016-2017, it is possible to apply facts and logic and ethics to these situations. Worshipping a "network" as some kind of neutral aether is greatly downplaying the significant opportunities for tuning the data streams based on knowledge and compliance.
Maybe it's because I'm in Canada where free speech is not what is protected explicitly, it's free expression that's protected as long as it's not invoked at the expense of any other Charter Rights. Hate speech is also illegal in the Criminal Code. These are factual matters that do not get the same amount of unquestioning reverence that free speech without consequences seems to get in some parts of the US.
About the historical theory that it's human nature to want kings and nobility, it seems that is mostly just our particular colonial and patriarchal part of the world. I'm not a historian or anthropologist but am pretty sure there have been societies that operated differently.
I don’t think so. I think they love the drama. They have more impressions and make more money from rage. The rage has to be over unimportant things so the status quo doesn’t change. They want people upset over the dumbest stuff possible and arguing all the time. They want people complaining about being banned or not banning people or whatever.
This is he problem with social media. It makes more money to be loud and without value. If people are fulfilled and learn the answer to their question they stop. If they are angry and searching they go forever.
This is a beautiful and insightful thread which completely avoids talking about money.
Not all social networks devolved into hate filled screaming fests, the main reason they do is because that drives engagement, which brings money, which makes stakeholders happy.
This is the only reason that running Twitter as a private company owned by a single rich dude might make a difference.
It’s both.
In fact the most dangerous ideas to me are the ones that are discussed with perception of civility and factuality yet are patently false.
When topics are banned, some banal comment about verifiability or some other non-descript reason is given.
It's never "we believe this is causing too much drama and might escalate to violence". I don't buy yishan's framing at all.
* Alex Jones and his Infowars website was banned by Apple, Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify. https://www.vox.com/2018/8/6/17655658/alex-jones-facebook-yo...
* Facebook routinely removed posts claiming that "COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured" https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-news/coronavirus-pandemic...
* Twitter and Facebook removed posts and banned people who shared the Daily News article about the Hunter Biden laptop https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/oct/14/facebook-...
* Donald Trump deleted from Twitter and Facebook: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/06/twitter...
* Apple, Google and Amazon suppressed conservative-leaning social network Parler https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/17/22440005/parler-apple-app...
* Independent video journalist Jordan Chariton had his work censored and banned on YouTube: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-status-coup?...
* The White House helps Facebook flag "problematic posts": https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/status/1415727354463281159
* Video criticizing Ivermectin removed (and reinstated, but still an example of censorship): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_42LVirfNI&lc=UgxSeQ2uKLo_m...
* Josiah Zaynor's Gut Hack ODIN products removed from Amazon, Facebook, Patreon, PayPal, and Square. https://youtu.be/ox4hWCnDRXE California brings suit against him https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/05/15/239116/celebrity... His YouTube channel removed entirely for "sales of illegal or regulated goods" even though he did neither.
* BMJ article https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635 repeatedly banned by Facebook. https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635/rr-80
* MasterCard and Visa decide what porn you can watch: https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-mastercards-new-porn-rules... https://dailycaller.com/2022/03/09/porn-star-cheri-deville-d...
* EU bans RT and Sputnik https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2022...
* Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube bans all Russian state media https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/03/morrison-gover...
* YouTube demonetizes all Russian creators: https://twitter.com/KevinRothrock/status/1501808135006212096
* USG 20-year ban on photos of soldiers' coffins: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna29410258
* NYT on "America's Free Speech Problem" https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/opinion/cancel-culture-fr...
* Bret Weinstein forced out from his tenured position at Evergreen College and has now received two strikes (of three allowed, after which the channel will be deleted) on YouTube. One an interview with Dr. Pierre Kory about ivermectin, and the other and interview with Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of the mRNA vaccine technology. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-bret-weinste...
These are only a few examples. There are many more.
For example:
- What was Bret Weinstein banned from?
- How was the NYT censored and banned?
- Russian state media is still on Twitter
- etc., On mobile
I'd guess that overall I understand and am sympathetic of your general position, ex. the actual content of NYT editorial, but I find most arguments around this are frustratingly nonspecific and/or bring in politics in a way that clouds the original issue.
By far the most damaging thing is not recognizing the right to not associate.
With that error, it becomes 1984. Cherry-picking the most chilling example from your gish gallup: why should YouTube be forced to pay and promote Russian state-funded media denying murderous attacks on millions with Big Brother language plays like "special military operation"?
You had already decided. There was nothing anyone could have written to which you would have responded "Hmm. I did not know that. That appears to be censorship and banning. Thanks for letting me know about this."
> "why should YouTube be forced to pay and promote..."
I did not say they must pay and promote anyone. I listed examples of censorship and banning which was your original ask. Now you're saying they don't count because of freedom of association, inaccuracies, and politics. Of course there was going to be a goalpost-moving and semantics-arguing. Your tell lead me to expect it.
As for me, I am disturbed by the extraordinary power of our contemporary platforms to unperson or memory-hole perspectives and views that are unpopular, whether or not the label "censors" or "banning" precisely fits, even if I agree that the perspective is reprehensible, and even if I agree that YouTube et. al. has a "right" to ban and censor.
I'm uncomfortable continuing this discussion because you're not "coming with curiosity", as Dang says: instead, we've veered into mind-reading language.
Why were their quotes around those words, if not because I secretly decided to troll you? Your comment made me uncomfortable because it twisted the definition of censor, that's why quotes are around it: to give a polite signal that the meaning of the word isn't how you're using it. That's why I commented in the first place, and that's the last thought we'll exchange on this.
And you know why it was glorious. The Internet was truly free. There was no money to be made there.
In the past 25 something years, young adults have regressed to looking for approval by authorities and PTBs because of their infantalisation at school and then college and then at work.
No adult wants to adult anymore. Because their every need is being catered to by some kind of corporate power, they don’t even know that they are free to let go of the teat.
I find all of this horrifying and depressing and infuriating. If one hasn’t had any agency in their adult life, how will one know when to shut up and when to protest.
The cancel culture is the product of the state run education system…it is the utter helplessness and impotency of entire generations who had never had to make an independent evaluation or decision or judgement call.
There is no redemption for this current generation and I dont see how the future generations can be rescued from this dismal fate. This also seems to be an uniquely American problem…Altho sadly it’s spreading to other parts of the world..mostly because of the internet and social media.
Literally..who can be against free speech with a straight face? America‘s young generation..it looks like. The country has officially self destructed on the very values it stood for..very sad.
On IRC I can select whose messages I see. I've got ignore. I can throw people out of my rooms with /kick and I can ban them long term with /ban. All rooms I'm in are rooms I've selected myself to be in, so rooms have regulars that know each other. If a banned user returns, it's easy to ban them again, or ban by IP, etc.
Tech companies removed this power from users. I can't say “hey, I only want to see tweets from these people, only they should be able to interact with my tweets, etc.” Because if I could, I could also just ban advertisers from my circles.
If I want to avoid interacting with someone on Twitter, not even blocking the user works. And even if I did block the user, my friends have to repeat it, there's no way of throwing a user out of your entire friend circle.
So the only option available is petitioning Twitter to remove the user from the entire platform. So of course that's what people do.
The methods you give users define their social interactions. Reddit has less of an issue with this because Subreddit mods can rule however they like. But in return, Subreddits have a reputation of being run by power hungry autocrats just like IRC rooms had.
Should one user be able to decide if another user should be expelled from a platform? That leads to a lot of sticky problems, so no, they shouldn't have that power. Should a user be banned if they violate the terms of the platform (roughly what mods on IRC would do when a user was banned)?
Yes. Yes they should. And they do. It's a liability for platforms to not enforce their own rules.
Traditionally, there used to be something in between: Ban someone from your small sub-community.
And moderators on most social media platforms only take action if they have to, preferring to stay inactive, while in most social circles people would proactively make sure a new member is a good fit.
Being able to throw someone out of your entire friend circle would go far beyond moderating YOUR environment.
On Twitter, there’s nothing like this. There’s no way for someone to make a group, post content only to that group, and add/remove users to/from the group.
For millennia, most human conversation happened in such groups. Our social mechanisms haven’t changed quickly enough to hold pace with the technological mechanisms of posting an opinion and having literal billions of potential readers – and commenters.
Is this... a moderation policy?
> The Internet was truly free.
Hmmm...
I also find the whole following culture creepy stalkerish. A lot of times I feel obligated to follow back and end up discovering that person’s entire whole icky persona..and wish that I could just have superficial friendships maybe.
I would still vote IRC over BBS. It was the right amount of cozy and distance. Just what you were willing to implement.
Also..I often think about the Dunbar Number. Even when I design small farm systems, I use the Dunbar limit and cluster to determine how many people can cooperate either as farmer collective or even as customer base(as in they are willing to share/barter).
Human beings are better in small groups. The small groups in turn can interact collectively with other like minded collectives. It seems like we haven’t studied human behaviour and psychology sufficiently to suit the really fast paced growth of social media and it’s interactions.
I guess this is still kind of the case for reddit? But given how concentrated moderation power is on reddit, and reddit's ability to de-platform whole communities, I don't know how true it still is.
Twitter, on the other hand, does this: #vimVSemacs is trending, click here to wade in!!
If you want to say (almost) literally anything, you can find a way to do it that won't get you in trouble anywhere. It's the tone, the timing, and the specific phrasing that causes the problem, not the idea itself.
You can say some truly abhorrent things on Twitter and they won't ban you, if you say it the "right" way, and I feel like a depressingly small number of people realize that.
Twitter's context-less, short-form, hot-take, free for all design is really great at priming people to react rather than consider. So many aspects of the product reinforce this, which is a result of the top line metric being engagement. It's a dumping ground for emotions and generally a shitty medium for anything mildly controversial.
When I see discussions like this, I'm disappointed people miss just how influential the product & medium is on these problems. Product is not 100% of the problem (everyone has content moderation problems) but it's definitely a big contributor to the problem as the medium makes it hard to have good faith discussions.
There are a lot of product improvements Twitter could make to improve discussion quality, and I've mocked up several [1]. While individuals there are very motivated to solve these problems, I'm not sure there's the same will to solve them at the top.
I'm sorry, I just don't buy it.
Notice he begins the thread by specifically naming his ideological enemies who deserved ruthless suppression (Christians against degenerate media) but implies it was ok because it was 25 years ago.
Also he never really defines how “shitstorms” hurt platforms exactly.
No. If nothing else, the scold always has the "dog whistle" weapon.
I assume that’s a result of being mostly ignored. Censored, if you can apply that to people not taking you seriously (and I’m sure they do).
But yes, continue to make poor arguments and then get upset when people tune you out (or ban you). The indignation probably feels pleasurable, at least!
We were early holders of bitcoin meetups, we threw crypto events, we gave away schwag with those guys who 3d printed guns. We hosted "Young African Leaders" events (yali) and hosted some amazing people from overseas. We hosted the local 2600 meetup and other maker events. We hosted the local colleges Asian chamber of commerce events.
We threw parties with thousands of people filtering through our converted warehouse space.
We had actual communists and unabashed capitalists and new atheists and couldn't care less multi generational atheists and old burnouts and young idiots, people abandoned by their families, from loving families and Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus.. We had classes for robotics, pickling vegetables, we burned a lot of stuff and made some huge art installations.
We kicked people out for being shitty and insulting (which was extremely rare among members, totalling 3 people over many years). We occasionally reprimanded people who were fine in person but abusive online.
Hell is other people. I miss what we built and the ideas and companies and the hope and economic power our members could tap into.
But I do not miss the bad behavior, the guy who seemed cool and nerdy until he gets drunk and starts trying to physically corner women. The attempted rapists who came to some of our larger warehouse parties and had to be removed by police.
The assholes who came in with bad faith arguments or the copious number of bad faith actors trying to monetize our more inexperienced members.
We were a meatspace, old internet, freedom of speech group and we kept our facilities a little dingy just to keep things more maker oriented and attract less of the superficial.
Having seen it all in person it's always the bad faith actors, the predators, the non-makers and the fragile egos that come out. We did a good job in person having ideological, cultural and class diversity because "making" was our prime member criteria.
I don't see how it's possible on the internet at large. I've seen many terrible people in person and at least there were consequences for overtly evil or lying acts, I just don't see it happening on the consumer internets social media platforms.
Great perspective to read about and rings very true with my years "sitting at the city gates" in our modern times.
Everyone trying to control you is wondering where the switch in your head is that turns your brain off to the fact that they're controlling you.
Where's yours? Is it child porn? Hate speech? The futility of productive online discourse? Or isn't there one? ;)
Think of democracy. The people rule, right? In practice, it's an endless field of possibilities. You can't really take the democracy principle from one field (eg government/parliament) and just apply it to another, say a democratic company, union or whatnot. You will need to create a different institution embodying "democracy" and it may not be similar at all.
Same goes for free speech.
The Free Speech of constitutions and human rights laws just distinguishes between crimes and not crimes. That is fine for determining who goes to jail or not. It is not applicable for determining how YouTube's recommendation algorithm works, what monetisation rules are, and how comments are moderated.
It's fine to adopt free speech as a principle, ideal even. It is foolish and naive to think this is trivial to derive an actual ruleset from principle alone.
Imo, it's disingenuous at this point to say you're "doing free speech," and treating this as a meaningful statement. There is nothing that's derivative of this statement.
For all the idealistic calls for free speech, I've heard almost no one forward an actual model for free speech that could be applied twitter or some other site.
What about HN. Some things are off topic. There are taboos like middlebrow dismissals. There are bans and shadow bans. Is this a free speech platform?
This stuff is complicated. Simple to criticize, but free speech proponents don't even know what exactly they (we) are asking for.
Twitter acts as a public square, so people should be free to express themselves in any way they want, up to the limits of the law. We want Free Speech in places that act as public squares for the same reason we want the government to respect free speech: it is the only way to ensure critically important contrarian voices are not stifled.
Blocking/filtering algorithms should be open source, with every user free to implement any one that they want for their own feed.
People - mostly 'media types' - give Twitter and outsized amount of importance. Significantly more people 'use twitter' by way of journalists taking tweets off platform and talking about them in news/other sites for whatever reason.
I can't think of any other open platform with that large of an audience.
As for its relevance, while it may not host a significant share of the world's population, it enables the userbase to converge on messages very quickly, to coordinate social and political action, which allows them to have an outsized influence on the world. Twitter users don't have to make up the majority of the world's population to be able to give movements the critical mass of supporters they need to succeed.
No speech is unequivocally free, but there's certainly a gradient of more free to less free. I've spent time in North Korea, and boy was I glad when I crossed the Sinuiju-Dandong bridge back to China. And then on the other end of the scale there are things you can say in New York you could be prosecuted for in London. When someone says they want "free speech", they're saying they want to push the norms more towards the free end of the spectrum. It's fine to ask: "OK, how do we do that? What, specifically, does that entail in the present situation?" And those questions may entail compromises and nuances that aren't entirely satisfactory to everyone involved, while still all in all bolstering the ability to speak freely.
Free speech is messy and abstract, but it does exist in a meaningful sense, and there are concrete things that can bolster and weaken it. If someone says they want "more free speech", that's a meaningful political statement.
With respect, nonsense.
My point is not ""free speech is complicated, there are exceptions".* This is not about shouting fire in a theatre.
It's about sloganized thinking. This then resolves to high-level, half baked "solutions" like adopting "constitutional free speech" or whatnot.
The laws used to determine if you go to jail are not suitable for determining what's allowable to say at work. You can legally tell "you suck" at The Rock on the street, but if you do it at a restaurant they will throw you out. Etc. Etc.
Currently, for all the idealistic takes about free speech online, there is nothing of practical use circulating. No protocol, pledge or method that twitter or any other site can adopt.
Free speech is currently an extremely vapid debate, all the worse for its shrill spectacle
Digital freedoms closely were at a high point 15-20 years ago. The WWW meant that mass digital communication was via a free and open protocol. Concepts like Wikipedia succeeded. Linux. OSS generally.
Those came with thought out, sometimes complex frameworks and philosophical ideas about freedoms.. eg FOSS.
The current free speech "drive" is, by comparison, sludge.
What makes HN great isn't that there is free speech, it is that everyone is treated equally. The rules are the same no matter what your opinions. I really wish the people clamoring for free speech would use their heads instead of their hearts and realize that this is what they really want.
If Twitter openly said, "we ban anyone with a right of center opinion" then I would be perfectly happy. What bothers me is they lie about what they are doing. It tells me they know they are doing something wrong. It is really dark and manipulative what they are up to.
Pretty sure this is not true. The Hunter Biden laptop story was censored for one reason, and one reason only: it was a bombshell dropped at the 11th hour, and liberals were afraid that it would result in Trump winning re-election. The truth or untruth of the story was beside the point; if it had been Trump Jr's laptop, it would never have been censored.
Censorship is not inevitable. If Musk had been in charge of Twitter back then, this story would not have been censored.
You have it backwards, it was driving clicks and the algo was full steam ahead getting more clicks. It had to be manually removed to stop the spread.
The story would be false, because I just made that up. I would think it would be pretty remiss of FB or Twitter to allow my invented story to spread given its completely unsubstantiated nature.
Now, if at a later date, it turned out that people were able to verify that DTjr did in fact have sex with babies and shared the videos with a private network, it would also be remiss of FB and Twitter to prevent discussion of it.
We live in an era where people can release stories with generated audio, video and other visual media to make any invented point they want. The idea that these stories should be able to be spread around freely even in the absence of any actually verified facts is fundamentally absurd. If you were to get that wish, I am absolutely certain that you would hate the world it would create even more than you might the current one.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54552101 [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/oct/30/twitter-n... [3] https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/gen...
It was not covered at the time because the way it was "released" meant that the claims were unsubstantiated and unsubstaniable. As more information comes out the appears to be actually verifiable (and verified), it is showing up in "completely mainstream media" outlets.
There's a problem when you try to release a news story using more or less precisely the same playbook that would be used if the story was fabricated. You can't blame the media for not taking you seriously when you (in this case Guiliani) does more or less precisely what someone who was lying through their teeth and knew it. If you want them to take you seriously, you need to give them the chance to verify your claims. The Hunter Biden Laptop story was bungled as much by its "releasors" as by the media.
Also, even today, it's not entirely clear what the big deal actually is, other than being able to say "possible corruption" and "Joe Biden" in the same sentence.
No, I don’t think so. There are billions of unsubstantiated and unsustainable messages on Twitter. I think this one was censored because of the political impact. It seems weird to argue otherwise.
1. ban any and all messages that contain unsubstantiated and unverifiable contents
2. ban such messages that may have an outsize impact on society if they are false
3. allow all messages and just deal with the consequences post-facto
The first one is operationally impossible. The last one might seem OK if you're a free speech absolutist, but the cost/benefit analysis doesn't come out well in most people's opinions (that is, the downsides of allowing every invented story designed to distort an election are larger than the benefits of completely uncontrolled use of a private messaging platform). Which leaves #2, ie. precisely what Twitter did.
1. it is unverified 2. if true, would have substantial impact
The whole laptop story has hearsay from one random technician. There was very little evidence to backup any of it. The files may have been real, but they very well could have stolen by a foreign entity (Russia), and given to this random technician as a way to make it look not stolen. By spreading it, they would have been helping Russia influence our elections, again.
I guess I can't prove this part, but I'm pretty sure Twitter would have taken the opposite stance if, say, CNN had found Trump Jr's laptop.
Regarding your claim that the story is not a big deal, you as a voter are entitled to decide that for yourself. However, a majority of likely voters disagree with you. A Rasmussen poll found that 48% of likely voters consider the story "very important" and another 18% consider it "important."[1] Rasmussen is considered a grade-B pollster by FiveThirtyEight, so their data can be trusted.
[1] https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/gen...
mind sharing this proof?
Given the impact of the "but her emails" on Clinton's presidential run (a story that was actually real, but absurdly (especially in retrospect) framed and overstated), I don't blame Twitter for not wanting to play a role in spreading yet another potentially BS "story" around the time of an election in arguably the world's most powerful nation.
> I guess I can't prove this part, but I'm pretty sure Twitter would have taken the opposite stance if, say, CNN had found Trump Jr's laptop.
No, you can't prove that part, and I'm pretty sure they would not have taken the opposite stance.
No, these are not viable standards. First of all, Greenwald was 100% free to publish and discuss the story. Just not on Twitter. Secondly, the criteria is not "do some journalists believe in a story", but "is there actually evidence that the story is true". Greenwald had no more evidence than anyone else, it just "felt right" to him, and so he believed it. Nobody stopped him from talking about it (nobody seems to be able to stop Greenwald from talking about anything, really). A private corporation decided that it did not want to play a role in this story without more evidence that it may be true. The threshold is not "is there a journalist who believes it (because there more or less always is).
This is just plain false. There is a large contingent of people, myself included, who aren't on anyone's "side". The false, binary Republican vs Democrat crowd is, collectively, a shrinking minority of the population. Intelligent, moral people don't want to take away the speech rights of anyone. Twitter has a block button which everyone is free to use to shield themselves (and only themselves) from any speech they find objectionable. The very crux of free speech is being willing to fight for the right of people you hate and despise to speak freely. Obviously, there are many people who today oppose free speech (both those who openly admit their opposition, and those who cravenly claim to support it while opposing it at every turn). But its patently wrong and absurd to claim (as the author of this Tweet thread does), that everyone opposes free speech. Free speech and free thought are the two prerequisites for a free and democratic society. The twin pillars upon which all else rests. Those who oppose free speech are the enemies of freedom and democracy, despite their hollow claims and feigned benevolence.
I'd like to know how that claim can be made given the videos that a certain dubious "Project" has collected of real employees talking about how much they care about the politics of it all. What of the employees who are completely transparent on the platform talking about their activism as related to their job at the platform? There must be nuance missing here, otherwise it's blatantly untrue and I'm unsure how Y could be that niave. I really don't believe he is, but this is baffling.
Do you care what the political views of your plumber are? I do not.
Do you care what the political views of the person who writes the app that runs your smart tv? I don't caaaare.
What I care about is what the platform does as a company, and yes, I know, people run companies, and that means they have some impact... but fundamentally twitter is run by a bunch of people who are trying to derive value for their shareholders.
That means building things, getting users, and not wasting a shit load of time and money on content moderation.
That's the point; it's not about caring about politics; it's about making problems go away, so they can make money by selling ads (or whatever) and making people click on cat videos.
You have a handful of examples you're clinging to, which show some people doing something you don't like, so EVERYONE MUST BE DOING IT. That's exactly the point this post was making; you're assuming the tiny bit of data you have, is reflective of the entire management structure, company, employees and corporate decision making process.
It's not.
> I'm unsure how Y could be that niave. I really don't believe he is, but this is baffling.
That's the point this whole thread is making. You can choose to believe in that conspiracy theory style stuff, but, really... it shouldn't be a surprise to find that some people don't.
I feel like more than 50% of this thread right now is doing exactly this and is unaware they are doing it.
To be fair though. There does exist corporations who has a proven history of trying to push a specific point of view, case and point: Fox News.
People assume that since Fox News exists, there must also exist an equal, but opposite: MSNBC, CNN, and (maybe) now Twitter or whatever...
In my opinion, this sort of false equivalencies is extremely counter productive and dangerous to our society.
> you're clinging to
That's a pretty grand assumption. I'm not clinging to anything. I'm simply stating "how can you make this assertion when there are recordings of people who make decisions for the userbase, claiming they do so based on the thing you're asserting they don't care about?" On the contrary, it would seem that you desperately want the inverse to be true.
It's a fair question. To say that they're the small minority doesn't discount the fact that they exist. It honestly wouldn't matter the persuasion of these people in the context. "People there don't care about X" -> videos of people saying their actions at said company are based on X -> assertion is false.
If Twitter truly didn't care about activism - regardless of the slant - as part of their core business decision making, then they'd purge these people from their ranks, or make it wildly transparent that decisions weren't being executed by people who have broadcast their slant as influencing their work. I don't know about you; whenever I've stepped outside my bounds of what the company wanted to accomplish, I was put back in place pretty quickly.
> You can choose to believe in that conspiracy theory style stuff
To paint any discussion as tin-foil conspiracy is to attempt to shut down the debate, which speaks to your disingenuous intentions and entering the debate in bad faith. This is a great example of one of the problems with discourse right now.
The argument sounds nice but evidence to the contrary exists, no matter how isolated, and has never been addressed by the company publicly. If the company had taken disciplinary measures in response to the recordings, had published procedures, quite literally a bare minimum of transparency, I would personally be very likely to dismiss them as isolated incidents. As it stands, combined with speech from leadership, it does look very much like the company supports and defends bad actors internally. And the twitter thread doesn't appear to hold much water.
I think the biggest problem with globally scaled companies is that HUMANS can’t mentally scale their expectations with the size. Meaning, if you have 10,000 people pissed and tweeting about something, you think “Oh my God this has gone viral, something has to be done!” But 10,000 angry tweets are nothing. 100,000 angry tweets are nothing. But to a single human it’s humongous but compared to the size of Twitters audience, some 300,000,000 people, 100,000 is not material.
Combine that with the majority that probably agree with you being silent, it’s easy to feel like you’re on the wrong side if you disagree. But you might not be.
Someone with guts needs to say, fuck the 100,000 angry tweets, this is the right thing to do. That person is Elon. And I’m not a fanboy at all because I generally hate him. But I admire his actions here. All I know is that he is a “fuck it” kind of guy and that’s what will lead social media out of this mess. People need to stop worrying about tens of thousands of angry tweets and just have the proper internal compass.
None of this remotely squares with hating the person. All the positives about Elon are what any one who likes him or admired him would say. None of what was written would be what most non status quo, non center/center right people would say.
You are absolutely right my logic was..well illogical :)
The reality of every forum, as the original author says, is that unless you censor topics that attract cranks, you'll eventually become a qanon platform (or the equivalent) and drive out all worthwhile participants.
I'm not sure what the global rule is called, but something like volume nonlinearity or kookiness asymmetry it something. If you have a bunch of looks everyone else leaves. You're options are to get rid of them or fail. It sucks but there it is.
When I click a Twitter link what I usually see are: - bots and spam - low quality replies that add nothing (usually from bimbos or 3rd worlders trying to get the attention of a celebrity) - shallow one liners to an idea that people don't like
As much as upvotes were made fun of, I think Reddit had the right idea because at least the upvoted posts were almost guaranteed to be of "readable" quality. And if you wanted to, you could easily sort the thread by most controversial and read the unpopular opinion.
Now Reddit is a website where free speech is actually lacking with shadow bans and slightly controversial posts getting removed.
For example:
> Example: the "lab leak" theory (a controversial theory that is now probably true; I personally believe so) was "censored" at a certain time in the history of the pandemic because the "debate" included ...
> massive amounts of horrible behavior, spam-level posting, and abuse that spilled over into the real world - e.g. harrassment of public officials and doctors, racially-motivated crimes, etc.
This is not true.
Any message, irrespective if EVERYONE KNEW it was true, for example that COVID-19 is statistically less of a risk to children than the flu, was censored and labelled as fake news or even taken down. Free speech is dead in its current form where social media companies are peddling the fake news by our Western governments to control our thinking. They will make you believe that Iraq has mass destruction weapons if they want a war and they will make you believe that a minor cough virus will kill your child if they want to control your life.
I saw plenty of people saying "Covid is less severe in Children" without any issue. The people who had tweets taken down were saying things like "Children can't die from Covid, open the schools, there's no risk at all" but ignoring that:
a) Children did in fact die b) Children did in fact bring Covid home from school which infected potentially at risk parents/other family members.
See also the lab leak hypthesis (and a good example when people talk about "banning ideas!") - if someone said "Hey, we can't rule out the lab leak hypothesis", that's presenting an idea, not claiming something that hasn't been proven is true and I saw MANY people posting that without issue.
When people said "It was engineered in a lab to be more deadly to humans, and it leaked out" that's stating something as fact that had no definitive evidence, and would likely result in a "This may be untrue" labels.
The Valneva vaccine was approved in the UK and might be very important because it trains our body against all proteins of the virus as opposed to just the spike protein which is what the AZ and Moderna/Pfizer vaccines were doing so far, so probably giving us better protection against future variants.
Cool... that sounds great and very logical. Body learns about the entirety of the virus and therefore will be better to fend off new variations of it in the future.
But that doesn't sound like some profound new scientific discovery we have made. This sounds like science 101 to me, so WHY did the same two scientists vehemently refuse to acknowledge in any shape or form that people who have had COVID-19 and therefore had been exposed to a huge viral load of the ENTIRE virus with all its proteins might have also acquired a better immune response than a vaccine which only trains your body against a single spike protein? It's the same principle, but because it was not WOKE to say the truth.
It's plain simple, we are all being brain washed with selective reporting and fake news and its enforced by social media so that critically thinking minds cannot undermine our increasingly more authoritarian governments which try to control our thinking in order to control our lives and get what they want - more powers in their favour.
I don't think Twitter is mismanaged. It's just as bad idea that's living past its point in time.
Social media is a tool that allows anyone to say anything, regardless of its basis in fact, and then amplify that statement to a level that is also unrelated to whether it is true (or nice, forgiving, generous).
A nasty or false statement actually gets amplified _more_ because algorithms optimise for engagement.
There’s then this weird argument of “we can’t act like a publisher because its logistically impossible to police the high volume of tweets.” Well, yes, I agree, it is logistically impossible. But the correct conclusion is not “therefore give up policing” but rather “don’t allow high volume broadcast of tweets.” That is, don’t allow this form of social media to exist.
This anything goes culture has not had great benefits for society, but has most certainly created great harm. The weaponisation of social media by enemy states is an obvious example. Making social more local, that is only your followers can see only your original content is a simple fix that probably works. It just makes less money.
Not judging and willing to be proved wrong, but the difference seems to be that the left usually wants more censorship, and the right wants less censorship. The far right is usually mad that they got censored but only rarely mad that the left did not get censored. The far left is usually mad that the right did not get censored but only rarely mad that the far left did get censored.
> Because it is not TOPICS that are censored. It is BEHAVIOR.
Again, not judging and willing to be proved wrong, but the right is a lot ... rougher, aggressive ... that the left, even when talking amongst themselves. Pacifists and civil talking people etc. are usually found on the left.
- On the right: right-wing journalists, right-wing podcast fans, Trump-heads, Cernovich-heads, Peterson-heads, Pepe avatars, right-wing anime avatars, ultra-trads, open neo-Nazis
- On the left: left-wing journalists, Tumblr fans, left-wing podcast fans, K-pop fans (this is a SURPRISINGLY large and powerful group), activist defenders of rights for various marginalized groups, left-wing anime avatars, nonprofit group figures, Antifa, tankies
On each side you have certain groups and certain subsets within those groups who use censorship or censorship-adjacent techniques, like mobbing, character assassination, public shaming, doxxing, or fabricating false and misleading narratives optimized for virality.
The biggest thing you want to avoid is getting into the gun-sights of anyone with a large following, left or right. Or someone who will work tirelessly to doxx or spread lies about you.
>Again, not judging and willing to be proved wrong, but the right is a lot ... rougher, aggressive
I am yet to see anyone on the right openly talking about murdering black people, whereas it is common for left wing twitter users to talk about murdering white people (remember the new editor for the New York Times had a number of tweets to that effect). Also, posting pictures of themselves with severed heads of their enemies while covered in blood seems like a thing among left wing users. I am in fact struggling to think of anything "rough" or "aggressive" from the right, even at the most extremes that comes close to the norm of the left on that platform.
There are issues with the American left, but this isn't really it.
My issue with the right is that these grievances (amongst others) are legitimate, and instead of settling back, figuring it out politically, and doing better, a lot of folks decided that they rather just have power by any means, as if it's some pride thing. There ought to be folks from ethnic minorities (like myself) voting for some mix of both parties, but the politics of the right were unpalatable even before Jan 6. I could vote for folks like Schwarzeneggar, Romney, Murkowski, and Collins, but there's not many more. That's doubly a problem because you always need a counter-balance in Western democracies. I do not want to be voting down the column.
The left fights dirty and illegitimately in its own ways. I'm not sure if it's better or worse than the right, but if you want some neutrality, it's in my view that the dirty fighting is questionable simply because I see it backfiring on both sides. The left creates their own bubble-chamber, which works against them.
If it weren't for gerrymandering securing safety seats for each political party (which ends up benefitting the extremes on both ends), I'd think everyone (including the folks at the "extremes") would be better off. Which isn't to let the moderates off the hook. Part of the reason why there's so much petty drama is because turnout at the primaries is what it is. We all need to take our responsibility in this drama and make things better. There's way too much intellectual laziness and/or regressing to narcissism going on.
Elon eats shit on a daily basis, from everyone, from multiple angles.
Wouldn't this actually make him a decent fit for the job?
I read @yishan's thread about Twitter and agree, as I think anyone who's run a forum would, that Elon is "in for a world of pain," or at least for a type of pain both much nastier than hard engineering problems, and with far less upside as well.
Where I think he's mistaken is his claim that the left and right both want to ban each other roughly equally. Among the elite, and within Twitter specifically, there is much more inclination to ban the right.
I say this as someone whose political views, if you force them onto the left-right spectrum, probably end up about 80% toward the left. E.g. I've spent millions over the past several elections supporting the Democrats.
It used to be that censorship was something the right did, and free speech was something the left were in favor of. But over the last few decades, banning "problematic" ideas has become a huge component of left culture (http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html).
Plus tech companies in general, and especially Twitter, lean to the left. Imagine walking around Twitter pre-Covid. You'd find plenty of openly far-left employees. How many openly far-right employees would you find? I don't think you'd find any.
The combination of (a) the left's recent focus on banning heretical ideas, (b) the leftward lean of tech companies generally, and (c) the leftward lean of Twitter even among tech companies, means that right-wing speech is much more likely to get banned on Twitter than left.
That's why people on the far right keep starting lame Twitter alternatives. You don't see people on the far left doing that. They don't need to. They have Twitter.
For example, what stopped reddit from letting the more extreme subs stand, letting the people screaming about it scream until enough people got tired of hearing it? Reddit in particular has the advantage of having separate subreddits, which can have different tolerances for different behaviors.
You get brigading or other ever-escalating, internecine battles, and lose a huge chunk of users who get put off by the toxicity and dysfunction, and it becomes a downward spiral as the concentration of radicals in the userbase increases.
A sibling comment mentions Voat (which died in the cradle), but I think Digg is a different example of how platform can implode when most users - who are not ideologically invested either way - get tired of drama.
https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514956233005928449
Digg and Voat aside, I think the whole T_D example on reddit is a good example. Like you said, subreddits aren't fully self-contained. They leak, fight against others, and it can very quickly get out of control.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromYourServer/comments/hsiisw...
The reason why this is so important for Marxists is that it’s a gnostic end times theology that believe the human collective will manifest Marxist utopia if all alive have gnostic Marxist knowledge, as they believe the Marxists as Gods would create utopia. This is why you hear communists say “communism has not been tried”, as some people alive did not have communist gnostic knowledge
As always it ends it gulags filled with academics, Trotskyites, any competing faith (Christianity, Islam etc), anyone that has a rich person somewhere in the family tree, whomever annoyed the commissar etc
The chicken and egg at the center of hope for humanity is the protection of free speech, and right to bear arms. One protects the other, and they both protect everything else.
We have an incredible need for truth, and for insight into what the world's most dangerous people are doing, while virtually all programming is intended to leave people disinterested in the info and condemning of the messengers.
There is a tactic that has not been used against the enemies of humanity, and their flooding any signal with noise..
Every individual has the right to speak freely, with few exceptions. One of them that used to be taught to kids is, "but, you can't shout "FIRE" in a theater when there isn't one". In other words, we're not allowed to communicate lies with the intention of terrorism.
Every individual has freedom of "press". The liars which own "media" (and the reason why Elon is interested in Twitter, and the liars are interested in preventing it) would have you believe that they are press, and you are not... when the truth is liars are not "press", and anyone communicating the truth is.
I have no idea how it would be achieved, but anyone running a free platform these days should look into eliminating liars from it. If anything good could come from AI, it might be the elimination of those useful idiots from platforms who use and tolerate logical fallacies.. but, one step at a time.
Hum, the whole thread sounds very narrowminded, lacking imagination and frankly a bit stupid. This sentence may be true , but where is the evidence that they will do anything to stop users from doing it? reduce engagement and you reduce flamewars. Find the balance that is good enough for you and you won't need to moderate too much. But it seems social networks choose not to do it because of both money and political power. IT's also a bit disingenuous to pretend that drama is a sideshow or distraction and that social networks have better things to do. Drama is at the core of glorified forums aka social networks, it is what attracts people's attention which brings the mony.
we ve all been running forums and communities on the internet for decades, these are not new problems
He lost me at : [..]Elon is one of those, because he doesn't understand what has happened to internet culture since 2004. Or as I call it, just culture. [..] They would like you (the users) to stop squabbling over stupid shit and causing drama so that they can spend their time writing more features and not have to adjudicate your stupid little fights.[..]
Internet ‘culture’ in 2004 and even a decade before that was Glorious!
I think we should all squabble more and get it out of our systems. A society that doesn’t interact genuinely(even if it’s ‘squabbling’) is a sterile society.
The sentiments expressed there..that I think I grokked..is like someone who has never had sex trying to explain sex to 40 year old virgins.
Free expression is too valuable and precious to be sacrificed for techbros to ‘write more features’.
They are trying to sterilize the Interwebs. They are trying to redefine the ‘Free’ in free speech. I hope they fail.
Also, I don't think that quote was saying 2004 culture was bad, far from it. He was just trying to say the way we ran the internet back in 2004 no longer "works" today.
I would still vote for more squabbling. Because every conflict will end if there are ways to exit and ‘keep face’(a Chinese concept of losing with dignity).
Having no other big social media alternatives, people are unable to find community and think it’s better to kill instead of sparring. As in..better to cancel someone and deplatform an opponent rather than fighting it out.
It’s good to ‘squabble’, I feel..because when you squabble, we recognize who to avoid and who is like minded. In the long run, it results in a truly diverse community that has long term peace.
Almost 8 billion people and only one Twitter. There should be more. Why isn’t SV and the rest of tech community not coming up with more viable competition?
Twitter could invest in non competing spawns for other topics or in other regions witb their systems code and/or open sourcing their code. I mean..with a little bit of creative thinking, so many possibilities exist.
Give people room to wander..the internet is big!
Danger isn't bad, it is life. Maybe words on the internet will lead to a murderous government being violently overthrown. Who knows. It all goes back to a bunch of elitists determining which ideas should be visible, and therefore which violent and non-violent events occur. They are playing god with the world, and it is their own best interests that will be served, whether consciously or subconsciously.
Essentially, Yishan is arguing for real-life thought-police, and he is doing this because he probably did this at Reddit and needs to quell his cognitive dissonance. If somebody does something illegal in real life, arrest them. Until then, they must be allowed to discuss ideas that could lead to real life harm, theoretically. This is because there is no such thing as "we have removed all the posts that could lead to harm". It is like the "you can't talk about immigrants taking jobs because people will attack immigrants". What about the theoretical people who lose their jobs? There are always two sides, even when you are blocking the "harmful post", you are silencing someone else and creating harm.
Silencing particular groups is a great policy for those in power, because they can enact changes without pushback. Real life harm like "house prices so high I have to live with my parents at 50" will not be considered harm, but the pushback against ideas that lead to this situation might. There is no perfect utopia where everyone is at peace, there are just people trying to take resources from other people. That is the nature of life, and tech CEOs pretend this isn't the case for convenience reasons.
I thought it was amusing that the replies were full of people with no moderation experience trying to fight with him about all of it by going "umm actually it's obvious that x", where x is something that totally conflicts with the next reply over.
There is a massive confusion here between anonymity and the physical/online distinction. Anonymity is always hard, even in real life. There’s a reason criminals like masks!
Free speech is the guiding principle because nothing else makes sense and inevitably devolves into hive mind.
Platforms should not be figuring out what speech to limit, they need to figure out how to avoid being publishers. The problem isn’t that they’re hosting bad content, the problem is that they’re promoting/publishing it.
Importantly, think how Reddit itself evolved it's stance against free speech. As Yishan points out, Reddit was pretty much "free speech absolutist" in the early days. They would allow anything that wasn't outright illegal. But then, things changed, and IIRC the first example of this was the ban of r/jailbait. I remember how many of the mainstream media were doing exposés on jailbait, and thinking "if Reddit doesn't ban this, they're toast" - it was a topic that was so universally abhorrent, on both the right and left, that despite being technically legal at the time, you could easily see how governments would either ban it themselves, or remove liability protection for platforms, which is essentially game over for all the platforms.
It's not hard to see how the platforms then carried this stance to ban anything causing "harassment" or "harm" - probably most people wouldn't be against the ban of r/FatPeopleHate, but then what about areas like trying to overturn the election results, which any rational reading of the facts is a clear falsehood (especially given the number of prominent Republicans who agreed there was no evidence of widespread fraud), despite how many people believe it.
So the idea that you can have a viable "absolutist free speech" social platform is just nuts. The ones that have been tried always devolve into a cesspool of racism and QAnon-level conspiracy theories. There is simply no way to run a modern social network without moderation (or censorship as it's called if your posts are the ones removed).
Just look at this site: despite attracting a more "rational" crowd, at this point I think dang's moderation is a critical factor in its success.
* His "every man is responsible for his soul" view on free speech absolutism ( https://web.archive.org/web/20140908001917/http://www.reddit... ) -- somewhat different, I think, from current policy ( https://www.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043513411 )
* Promising Condé Nast that if they surrendered some equity the tech people would build a big company and then ... delivering as promised? Advance Publications has gotta be pretty happy with where their investment has gone and I think it's credible it wouldn't have happened without the equity changes
If neither the left or the right can point to accounts being banned, I think at the very least they may stop complaining about the "censorship" issue.
This post gives an interesting perspective, but this statement cannot be right.
There are absolutely topics, that, no matter how civil you approach them, will result in a ban.
The context of the "world of pain" is that nobody convinced everybody it's just damage control and profits and not about their ideas being bad.
Do you think Elon could convince everybody? would that make it less a world of pain?
His reasoning completely falls apart once you introduce the Hunter Biden laptop.
I find it impossible to believe that anyone who runs a social media site at any scale doesn't learn the truth, very quickly.
The whole "we just didn't know" explanation is such line of crap. Once you have a few thousand (maybe even few hundred) social users you will learn that some humans are psychopaths. This knowledge is unavoidable.
I would also like to point out that I disagree with lumping it all in as "human nature." When not brainwashed, humans are generally pretty agreeable, but we do have a significant number of psychopaths among us.
I don't buy the naivete explanation for a second, and no one else should either. That story only serves to hide the real explanations which are likely much more interesting.
I also make the presumptuous guess that his actions are often aimed at making money to fund his endeavors to venture into space etc.
He doesn't have the ability to fund his plan using the tax dollars (productive wealth) of a whole county's people, so to fund his goals, he skirts the laws to gain capital via various speculative bets.
I theorize that his absurd behavior is a ruse. He knows what he is doing. He plays the role of idiot rich kid to get people to underestimate him.
Based on these premesis, I theorize that his reason for buying Twitter is to either as a vehicle to fund his humanity aspirations. Whether it's a long term investment, or some cash grab, I don't know. I'm not knowledgeable enough on the financial probabilities of Twitter to make that call.
Working from the assumption that is interest in Twitter is part of his plan to advance humanity, I would say he wants it for it's user population. He wants to stear them from the toxic community which they sometimes are into something more productive. Think of the changes we've seen at stackoverflow in which they have tried to steer communication into a more friendly place for new members. I could imagine changes to the Twitter ui that would encourage users to reflect upon the words they are about to post.
He’s wrong about this being something equally affecting left and right. While I’m sure there’s plenty of extreme left wingers who have been banned, who are annoyed at Twitter, there is no left wing Hunter Biden laptop equivalent. There’s also no Donald Trump banning equivalent, even though there’s plenty of tweets from prominent politicians encouraging violence in the BLM times.
So no, it’s not just moderation.
Silicon Valley has picked a side, and it changing their businesses to suit that side.
They also pine in for an old internet that was great because of free speech and something like that. They seem to forget that it was full of flame wars and people being terrible also.
Some of the language that they use indicates that this person views the users as lesser... As people that must be managed and shaped, and it's the leaders job to do that, despite the fact that the leaders are severely flawed.
I see their points, but they are looking at the problem purely through the lens of what has existed, and not through the lenses of what is possible. Elon is not that person, and so saying he's going to fail because no one has ever done it before doesn't really apply to Elon.
0. https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514941586517336071?s=20&t...
I frankly don't see a good solution, because the world is multipolar and subject to different laws regarding free speech. If countries were concerned for the respect of their own boundries of free speech they would begin developing (godawful, I'm sure) alternatives to twitter, facebook, youtube, google, etc. If each country had their own echo chamber, it would make sense if you squint very hard and try to ignore the fact that people wish to communicated across country borders.
So yeah, it's not going to change any time soon.
I will say this though, while appreciating his thread, he is dead wrong about the idea that the censorship is equal ended. "Nationalism", in the broad sense, irregardless of wether it is left or right leaning economically, is censored across the board far, far greater than "Liberalism".
I am not sure exactly what the solution is (and you are right, that it becomes more complex on a global scale) but, as some of the comments in OP thread inadvertently allude to, a lot of today's moderation is just censorship. At no point in history has been up to companies to do this (in some countries the media is self-regulating, but that is regulation...not deciding that something shouldn't be published because it is "wrong" in some way...that is up to the courts and govt, not the press). The problem is the separation of content creation and distribution...the guy who runs the newspaper stand isn't responsible for the NY Times publishing something that is inaccurate. So I think the goal is parity with existing rules: people are responsible for what they post, not companies (and btw, this applies legally...in the UK, you can be prosecuted criminally for something you post...so quite why these companies need to stick their oar in to "protect" users is unclear).
Other than the tech-titan part, that’s spot on.
Also: OMG, a reference to GenX. It’s not flattering at all, but I’ll take it.
But one part I really cannot reconcile is his capitalist interests and his free speech gambit are only potentially overlapping in the US. How many governments will put up with this crap or will many finally ban Twitter altogether? That statement even applies to democratic governments. That’s not going to increase his monetizable user base. Something’s got to give- and with a financed 43 billion it might be his morals. Perhaps he has another gameplan but it’s hard to imagine.
Why do we (the public) always fall for the "powerful men" type, be it billionaires or despots, promising to fix all our problems?. This is the antithesis of democracy. Democracy is slow, painful and often mistaken but the added value is that few people get shot on the street. Twitter under Musk will be like the Mad Max's Thunderdome.
All of which can are not the biggest criticisms directed at Twitter right now.
He does not address the Hunter Biden laptop story, the ban of the last president for saying the election was stolen (even if it happened twice before that in the last 20 years and was a frequent talking point), woke politics getting people banned (most normal people do not know what asking for pronouns are about), etc.
Also the fear that open discourse leads to genocide has no basis in History. Genocides happened because those in power could speak without any counter voices and their crimes not getting exposed publicly.
>Left leaning
Where the hell have you been working!?
1. A lot of the Indians and Chinese are on visas means no right to vote (ex: Twitter CEO) 2. Those that can vote - cares more about paying less taxes than anything else which usually means voting Republican, except if the candidate is a far right fanatic
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/07/2020-vo...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/10/27/927828785/despite-trump-modi-...
>We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it.
>— Reddit FAQ 2005
>We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content
>— u/kn0thing 2008
>A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. [reddit]'s the digital form of political pamplets.
>— u/kn0thing 2012
>We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal.
>— u/reddit 2012
>We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States - because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it - but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse).
>— u/yishan 2012
>Neither Alexis [u/kn0thing] nor I created Reddit to be a bastion of free speech
>— u/spez 2015
And more recently this quote from reddit a employee:
"Our rule1 protects groups that are attacked based on a vulnerability, which doesn't pertain to white people or men as a group." Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/NgOxEg0.png
What is rule 1?
"Remember the human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups of people. Everyone has a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned." (https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy)
So in practice, according to one of their employees it's actually:
"Remember the non-white male human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking non-white people or women. Everyone except white people and men have a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate against non-white people or women will be banned."
And this is absolutely born out in their repeated banning of male-centric subs, while the most toxic community I've ever seen remains, because it's wildly sexist against the correct sex. And there are multiple "fragile white redditor" type subs also.
Reddit used to be a cool new thing with real potential. I remember participating in the first secret Santa and my gift was the third most popular in the world. And the utterly wholesome Ameristralia movement. Then they shot it in the head in 2015 and completed their bait & switch.
tl;dr: reddit is really, really racist, sexist, and authoritarian
I do not want the site catering to anyone who those who will use Reddit to attack marginalized or vulnerable groups. These people will not be missed as Reddit users.
Content Policy: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy
The content is harmful and the admins made it clear they will not allow it within their site. As a user, this is fine by me. By the way the word is `lose`, not `loose`.
Instead of seeing any of that. Your response is to just complain about “woke” stuff?
So much of what you wrote applies to your comment: “arrogant self important”. talking dunning Kruger on others while writing “echo chamber with a bunch of highschoolers, anarchists, socialists, tankies, and the woke”.
It is interesting how the center and right have pointed the finger and says the left are snowflakes and triggered and whine all the time and so on. Yet comments like this and most similar discourse is doing what they are pointing the finger at. It’s wild.
Reddit is "really, really racist, sexist, and authoritarian" because there's literally no other way to be a major social media site. It's all shitty and horrible, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. That's exactly what the thing we're all commenting on is trying to say, that Elon thinks he can fix this but he can't, and it will cost Elon and the world a substantial amount.
This is flat out not true. .win, 4chan, gab, gettr, odysee all exist.
4chan is more an example of what happens when you don't censor.
You don't like it - you don't read it. It's that simple.
Every town needs a gross back alley, but a town that consists only of gross back alleys is an awful town.
> it means you're standing up against EVERYONE, because every side is trying to take away the speech rights of the other side.
Exactly. That's why the old internet defaulted to free speech. Because everyone understood that taking their free speech meant my free speech was vulnerable and it was impossible to just censor one and not everyone else.
> It's also where Russia is fighting a real war against us
This nonsense. Just the russians? What about the british, israelis, canadians, australians, saudis, chinese, iranians, etc. Not to mention the biggest threat - our own government. What percentage of foreign propaganda is russian? 1%? Just like all the russian money spent on facebook gave trump the presidency? All $40K was it?
> I want you to pause for a minute and think about your political alignment and whether you're on the left or right of this issue, because you probably think one of those things.
I'm neither and social media clearly leans towards one side.
> Elon is one of those, because he doesn't understand what has happened to internet culture since 2004. Or as I call it, just culture.
The culture was formed by censorship. The social media companies are trying to change culture. Get rid of censorship and we'll see about the culture. If yishan is right, how come real world culture is so different from social media culture? Perhaps because censorship allows a tiny minority to have the most influence/say?
> Facebook's userbase has at various times been left-leaning, then right-leaning, then bifurcated. So has Reddit's. Twitter's also. The social platforms don't care.
Is that why they collectively banned trump. Because they don't care?
> It is because we brought all of our old horrible collective dysfunctions onto the internet
The horrible collective dysfunctions were on the old internet long before social media.
> They are censoring because they are large social platforms, and ideas are POWERFUL and DANGEROUS.
That must be why we censor libraries...
Instead of wasting pages of text and much of our time, he could have been honest and answered in less than 140 characters - "We censor because of money".
The only difference between old internet and new internet is money and shareholders and centralization. The guy talks about everything - culture, russians, old internet, etc but ignores the elephant int the room. Money makes the world go round and money makes social media censor. If you are dependent on ads, you probably will have to conform to money's demands. I do wonder how elon will deal with the problem of money/ads. Though taking the company private and owning it outright should give him more leeway, I doubt he's willing to lose money year after year on twitter.
No one was concerned with woke leftists in the 90s. No one. "Woke" wasn't a term, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, no one was worried about the corroding influence of leftists, or cultural marxism, or any of the bogeymen that resurfaced over the past decade.
I know woke wasn't a term. I grew up in the 90s. I just put it in there to emphasize "everyone". Thought people would be butthurt about me adding canadians/europeans, not woke leftist. But the precursors of modern "woke left" certainly existed in the 90s even though they didn't gain the power they did after the 2007 financial crisis.
Here's a comedy sketch from '05 that's making fun of many of the same "woke" concepts we have now:
The analogy doesn’t hold. Libraries don’t hold random internet posts.
You need to first have your work published as a book or similar, and then have the acquisitions team at the library buy copies. Yes self publishing is an option but convincing a library to stock your particular book will be more tricky. Sure the library of congress may hold a copy, but that’s about where it ends.
Donated books also aren’t guaranteed to hit the shelves either, they can end up in book sales or rejected if the library prioritises other books on its limited shelf space.
They also won’t for example carry books documenting how to commit suicide, construct a dirty bomb, child porn, well porn in general actually (you’ll still often find nudity and sex acts in books about sex, but those books are not designed to provide sexual gratification whereas porn is).
Or how about Library Genesis?
Or Sci-hub?
Or perhaps you're wanting torrents off of Archive.org? They have the biggest PS2 iso library anywhere in the world.
I really don't understand why people can't see this...
Face it: If book libraries were a new concept around 1998 (Napster), they too would be illegal dens of iniquity reviled by "copyright interests" and raided with the backing of federal copyright statute under criminal guidelines. .
You literally mean _everyone_ I guess? You're talking about a few million people who were online early on. Now it's 100x that, your group owns a lot of the biggest social websites. YOU are the tiny minority having the most influence.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/24/dma-political-agreement
why is ":" out of use nowadays?
In the age of cancel culture I've heard of nobody on the left being persecuted for their ideas, at best I've heard them being criticised by the other side and they run successful campaigns to deplatform them.
My impression is that the educated substrata of society got progressively more left wing authoritarians (likely because of their strategic control of mainstream media and education) and nowadays all the 20-30 something that run big tech have certain authoritarians ideas painted as being virtuous. An authoritarian internet will undoubtedly raise kids who will be even more authoritarian than the current generation.
>That is just an unpleasant, inconvenient truth that all of you (regardless of your political leaning) need to accept about speech. Ideas really ARE powerful, and like anything else that is powerful, yes, they can be DANGEROUS.
thats the basis of free speech and the reason some people want to protect it. These guys dont agree with it and thats fine. I mean there are good reasons someone might disagree with free speech. But I mean be honest, be honest about what the debate is. Dont say you support free speech but some ideas can be dangerous. Just say you dont agree with giving everyone free speech at all times and have an honest conversation about that instead of spewing that silicon valley doublespeak
> Let me be clear: if you run a large social network, you will be forced by inexorable circumstance to censor certain things, you will be forced to "arbitrate" on topics you have an (inevitably) limited understanding of, and it will all be really really shitty.
> (The alternative is just collapse of the platform, so I guess you do always have a choice - but then you're not a social platform anymore)
I'd love if he provided an example of these powerful and dangerous ideas that must be censored. This is exactly the kind of language that any powerful organization that is scared of losing power says - it's all in the interest of saving lives... okay, what are the examples? Why is this not a matter best handled by law enforcement?
This just further convinces me that social media is a cancer to society.
Like I would post some highlights so people don't have to click the link but I don't even feel good about posting most of the names of the subs. They're just... awful.
Like Drugs, Guns, etc.
Then you have entire lists of subreddits that break the rules (harassment, hate speech, etc) but are deemed "acceptable" by the admins due to those subreddits breaking the rules against people that the reddit admins have deemed "acceptable targets"
However, I think there's a lot of nuance when it comes to subreddits that mock "acceptable targets." The content might look superficially similar but the intent and impact are different.
A hypothetical subreddit /r/letsmockwomen serves mostly as a lightning rod for those who already hate women to have an excuse to let that out in a forum where it's "more acceptable" because the OP isn't just a woman, but typically a woman who's done something that, in isolation, is stupid and makes sense to mock. But the difference compared to /r/letsmockwhitepeople is that the replies will won't be "she's dumb" but "women are dumb." And that's the the idea that will proliferate, not "women are, like all humans, are capable of stupidity" which leads to real life consequences.
This has nothing to do with ~the powerful losing power~. You need to remember that most things that happen in real life aren't interesting.
I guess I consider a company dying the "powerful losing power".
Its essentially what his whole thread was about - companies don't care about the politics - they want to survive. And they will survive at the expensive of society's well-being.
Plenty of historical reddit examples of this: /r/fatpeoplehate was the first sub I remember that got removed and caused huge site-wide drama, then there were all of the incel subreddits, then /r/watchpeopledie and the wave of gore subreddits, etc.
> Why is this not a matter best handled by law enforcement?
Is there anything illegal about making fun of overweight people, ranting about how much you hate women, or posting industrial accident footage? Generally speaking, no. Is it something that should be on reddit? This is where the arbitration and individual judgment of admin comes in.
Ugh, so cringy.
How was censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story not caring about politics? How is banning gender critical theory not caring about politics?
Yishan simply isn’t keeping up with twitter in the last few years.
His example: left wing wokes complain racist/sexist speeches exist, center / right / libertarians complain they are censored.
Are you kidding me, how are those two equivalent?
First, center / right / libertarians is a big group, they are not the opposite of the left wing wokes, they are not the one make racist/sexist speeches.
Second, left wing wokes complain the platform does not censor others enough, center / right / libertarians complain the platform censors themselves too much.
How the hell are those two comparable? Just because you mention the left this this, the right that that, does not make the two points comparable.
Meanwhile the praise for various billionaires and the defense of corporations where “they kind of care about money” before saying people in general are the problem. The thread actually contains “they [corporations] only kind of care about money”. Is there anything else to say.
Free speech isn't from the 90s, or America. The mental gymnastics of people who have no principles but would still like to be seen as having them ...
The fight over Twitter is about control. Control of narratives. And the price to do that right now, due to Twitter’s ridiculously bungled management, stands at $60-70B.
It seems to me the more direct request would be an option to glue tweets together or have a max number of notifications per account per hour if that’s what’s hitting you the most.
I wonder if he sees the blind spot.
The example he uses is the lab leak hypothesis which is the worst example he could have picked. Lab leak was unsayable for months then it became mainstream and nothing happened. Are we seriously supposed to think Twitter would have collapsed if lab leak hadn't been censored for N months?
It is true that moderation, which amounts to censorship, is required on these platforms. But the bar for moderation should be way higher and these platforms should stop playing whack-a-mole with "dangerous ideas". If they do stop, I predict that nothing bad will happen.
Once again - people who claimed that the lab leak hypothesis was 100% verifiably true were in the wrong, people who talked about it as one of the theories were unnafected.
Anyway - in this case the content is on point
I think the example you're reaching for is racism/homophobia/transphobia, and how those run afoul of the "don't treat people like shit/debate the validity of their existence" rules, and how the left is comparatively un-affected by that rule because they don't generally do that stuff.
It's unfortunate that one of the parties continuously makes that stuff a voting issue, but like, you don't get a pass on the "no festering bigotry" just because it's mainstream discourse in your circles.
The woke mob would destroy him if he said something as taboo as “my alt right friends”. The mental censorship is so strong he can’t say it even for the sake of the example. But trust us, there’s actually no institutional bias!