Is Twitter biased against conservatives? A Study
psyarxiv.com
psyarxiv.com
Zoom away from the polarizing US "current thing" BS politics and it becomes even clearer. Things like ESG, Nuclear energy, Middle Eastern conflicts, religious freedoms, criticizing China, etc.
The world is mostly gray, and whoever sets the boundaries of good/bad is king (that's why Media is valuable to billionaires and dictators).
"misinformation" is the cleverest weapon against free speech in a while, despite being an old trick. It lets people support censorship while feeling like they're just opposing something evil. Catholic Europe said "heresy" or "blasphemy", McCarthyist USA said "communist", Islamic societies said "haram", secular dictatorships said "degenerate", etc etc.
...misinformation defined by whom?
Factually speaking, the vast bulk of the "Russiagate" scandal was a hoax designed to achieve a political agenda, pure and simple. Trump may be as corrupt as the next guy, but there is no evidence that implicates him as a Russian asset. But who was removed from social media for boosting this blatant misinformation? Literally no one.
As helpfully posted elsewhere in this thread:
> Helping to address concerns about potential liberal bias among fact-checkers, we also examined untrustworthiness ratings from politically-balanced crowds of demographically representative (quota-sampled) American laypeople recruited via Lucid (15), rather than professional fact-checkers.
Didn’t people end up in jail for lying and refusing to cooperate?
It was absolutely political, but isn’t anything concerning an investigation of a sitting President?
Which to me means "there's no discrimination unless the fact checkers and average American discriminate", also known as "there's no discrimination unless there's discrimination", which is circular logic.
If anyone thinks I am wrong, they can list a dozen times fact checkers were wrong.
This didn't seem to stop multiple MSNBC hosts from shouting about Russian election meddling, long after the Justice Department dropped such claims and related charges.
As for the Hunter Biden laptop story, what's the issue? I just want to know specifically.
Some portions of Hunter Biden laptop have been proven true (the emails on the laptop are legit) but people were banned for spreading hacked content (deapite it not being hacked) and spreading Russian disinformation.
https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim/blob/main/M...
Have all of the emails on the laptop been verified, or is it still just that one?
That’s a lazy argument from ignorance, and can be dismissed out of hand by Hitchens’s Razor.
(See “philosophical burden of proof”)
For example, if someone killed a bunch of people and the head of the FBI said, "A black guy is doing it!" with no real evidence then I think banning it might be more justified. Now it may turn out that a black guy is the one doing the killing, but that doesn't make the pronouncements of the FBI head justified (although I'm sure the FBI head would feel justified).
We are not talking about the head of the FBI. If the head of the CDC said something like this you may be have a better comparison. Even if the CDC said something like this it wouldn't impact health so it probably shouldn't even count as harmful content.
Facebook explicitly banned the theory and later unbanned the theory.
YouTube demonetized some videos about the theory, but I am not sure what the current status is.
Pretty clear censorship on Twitter and other social media sites.
Fact-checkers have occasionally made serious errors, and in other cases made arbitrary, premature, or flimsy judgments of ambiguous situations, essentially passing off opinion as fact. From what I've seen, these errors and arbitrary judgments tend to favor the liberal side. Scholars will need to remove these errors and arbitrary judgment calls from the "misinformation score" and see whether there continues to be a big partisan gap.
Again, my gut feeling is that the conclusions wouldn't be changed much. There's plenty of genuine right-wing misinformation out there that isn't tied to erroneous or opinion-based fact-checking. But a paper like this really needs to get down to brass tacks about what exactly is being called misinformation, or it will only be yet more ammunition for political and culture wars, and won't provide any scientific enlightenment.
I suspect that certain segments of the left would also be somewhat vindicated by a more serious and detailed review of what is deemed misinformation. Dissenters on all sides are at least sometimes unfairly treated by the mainstream fact-checking institutions.
"Certain segments of the left" still believe that the Russians have a video of hookers peeing on Trump that they're using to puppeteer him to their own needs. The left has no business lecturing anyone about misinformation.
That wasn't the actual claim, it was that the hookers were peeing on the bed in the hotel room with Trump.
(The actual interesting bit was that a video appearing to be that did turn up, and after examination, turned out to be a fake that someone put a considerable amount of effort into. I do wonder who, and what they were hoping to accomplish with it).
I think you can fix the errors and exclude more opinion-based "fact checks" if you review the underlying data carefully and transparently. Whether those fixes and exclusions close the gap is currently a matter of opinion, and I think we should try to do better than just everyone just having their own opinions on it. That's my whole point.
It’s like saying that all police action in the United States is righteous and legitimate (you simply need to exclude all actions which are not). What is the value of such a tautological study/statement?
For what it is worth, the laptop is far from the smoking gun people seem to think it is. The data is a mess and the story of how the data was acquired still makes no sense. The only thing that has been verified so far is that some of the emails did pass through GMail.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/hunter-...
The “left a laptop at a repair shop” part is of course bizarre, but makes about as much sense to me as anything else that Hunter seems to have done in his life.
He was also on the board of BHR during the same period and acquired a significant stake at a discount. AKAIK, these facts are not in dispute.
The part that is potential scandalous (and disputed) is that he was in these positions to peddle influence with his father and even kicking back compensation with his fathers explicit knowledge and approval.
Joe Biden is in a position of trust in government, and the defense against this has basically been “I have no idea what Hunter was doing and those were legitimate business arrangements”. However, if that’s untrue then it is obviously influence peddling and scandalous. I’m not really taking a position here, but it makes no sense to claim that simply because Hunter Biden is not in government, this is irrelevant.
> Helping to address concerns about potential liberal bias among fact-checkers, we also examined untrustworthiness ratings from politically-balanced crowds of demographically representative (quota-sampled) American laypeople recruited via Lucid (15), rather than professional fact-checkers.
Zoom away from the polarizing US "current thing" BS politics and it becomes even clearer. Things like ESG, Nuclear energy, Middle Eastern conflicts, religious freedoms, criticizing China, etc.
The world is mostly gray, and whoever sets the boundaries of good/bad is king (that's why Media is valuable to billionaires and dictators).
> The key here is who is defining misinformation.
We should respect the processes that are used to establish truthful information, even if it is occasionally wrong, rather than the noise makers who are occasionally right.
In other words “who” should not be a factor in determining misinformation, but “how”.
Yes, I know it's anecdotal, but the LGBTQ+ community has been the victim of an increasing number of hate crimes(confirmed by law enforcement reporting), and the rhetoric online seems to mirror this.
Free speech does not cover overt or implied violence based on sexual or gender identity.
I was, however, talking about general calls to violence not specifically against LGBT people. The first paragraph from the post I was replying to made no mention of LGBT. I should have quoted that part to make it more clear what exactly I was talking about. Sorry about the confusion.
We have one "side" publicly and loudly proclaiming the same things as racist lynch mobs from the 1800s and literal Nazis.
We have another "side" publicly and loudly calling for dignity and respect for every human being.
It would seem logical to me that the burden of proof here would be on the person claiming that the latter is sending more hate and death threats than the former. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The NY subway shooting was perpetrated by a black supremacist. So much for dignity and respect of every human being. Of course you would say that is just a small minority and people denounce what he did. So what? He did it and you are clearly ignoring that.
Burden of proof is not on the original person making an anecdotal statement, but the person stating their anecdotal experience is different? Nice consistency.
Every side has bad people and you can't whitewash one side and claim the other side is only their bad parts if you want a fair understanding of the situation. Nobody is making extraordinary claims except you. I can do the same thing as you: one side believes in killing every cop and the other side just believes in living peacefully with everybody. This is as fair of an assessment as you made.
My hypothesis is that lefties are more likely to appeal to authority and hit the "report" button when they see something they don't like, and right wingers are more likely to go vigilante and hit "reply" and attempt to persuade/shout the person into agreeing with them.
Authoritarians do these things most often:
Brigade, mass report, preemptive blocks, use of lists.
Malicious Compliance and or using, gaming rules to get other people into problem positions.
Tribe vs tribe, guilty by association, and or forcing others into false choice scenarios.
Mixing authoritarianism with political alignment complicates things unnecessarily in my view. There can be poor quality people favoring any ideology, and or multiple ones, same as there can be better quality people.
I urge you to give it some thought. You may find it helps to understand others better.