Of course it doesn't make sense. I think it's just a dog whistle to the people who believe google have a guy in a room somewhere turning the "conservative search results" lever down a notch during elections.
It's also true that these lists are only a small part of what affects your fringe website or twitter accounts.
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."
They don't need to because they have cool Twitter alternatives. Like Mastodon.
It existed before.
Open source, such that anyone can use it
"On the right, banning books means trying to prevent their kids from reading them. But on the left it often means trying to prevent anyone from reading them." https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1515563419386191880
> We, the members of the OUP USA Guild, are calling upon our colleagues and authors to take a stand against the upcoming publication of “Gender-Critical Feminism”. Sign the petition below (OUP employees and authors only).
Yeah, that's not a "ban", and "gender critical feminism" = TERFs. Ie, "people who think trans women are faking it so they can rape women and children in bathrooms or 'cheat' 'the system'"
Remind me which side thinks businesses have a constitutional right to refuse to serve people if it violates their "beliefs"...yet finds it unacceptable that unionized workers are objecting to publishing of research on a subject?
Also, remind me which side is boycotting a major entertainment company...because said company's CEO voiced displeasure...at a bill that bans any language referencing non-straight gender orientations?
The left and right are not equal. The left does not rely as much on lies to advocate its positions, and the left is not as oriented around destruction and regression as the right.
We need a more robust understanding of speech than “allowed or not”. Emphasis & volume matters.
To be honest, that's hilariously false. The left suppressed Hunter Biden's laptop story for two years, saying it was misinformation, before admitting it was true. The IRS targeted right-wing and Christian non-profit organizations deliberately for auditing. Obama claimed that forcing nuns to buy health insurance covering birth control was necessary, and claimed you could keep your doctor under Obamacare, which even PolitiFact called a Pants-on-Fire Lie. The left claimed that a baker needed to make a personalized cake supporting gay rights, or it would open the waves to discrimination, even though the baker was willing to sell any other cake to them that wasn't customized with that particular label.
I can go on and on.
Edit: are our neoliberal overlords a bunch of cold hearted shit heads? Yes. Should we elect and promote barely disguised fascists in response? No.
Who the fuck cares about Maxine waters?
> it’s not the one you think
Yes it is.
Something needs to be done. Free speech maximalism is a threat.
If you listen to the intolerant wing of the right, the parts that would legitimately support overturning elections and arresting political opponents, they sound eerily similar to your sentiment.
It’s a thought stopping theory that allows you to remain smug and correct despite being deeply ignorant.
Even if that's precisely true, is it not good to be creating a more trusted space for everyone? The grievances, regardless of merit, are mostly coming from the right. If you want to create a service that caters to all you're going to have to address their concerns. If he can do that in a way that is fair to all, it sounds like a win to me.
But couldn't it at least be better?
https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/1248099002
https://www.vox.com/2017/6/27/15878980/europe-fine-google-an...
https://i.imgur.com/MVlshAT.png
You don't have to be conservative to see there's a pretty significant bias, just in the headlines. I'm a Pacific Green and I can still see it.
If it were objective, you'd think it would try and suggest something for all queries just to be maximally useful. But it doesn't. I mean surely people have asked questions that start with "are white people" why not show the most common one, or the most controversial, or the "highest quality" whatever that is. But no, absolutely nothing.
Someone clearly has their thumb on the scale.
>religion
Nah, this one is super obvious in the lack of an Easter doodle, but every other religion gets a shoutout on their important days. Just like the lack of one for International Men's day. Google's bias is as predictable as every other (D-CA).
Like, say I drum up a conspiracy about how the government is putting Glupkleins in the water. Since it's not a real word, the only results that'll show up will be the conspiracy nonsense that I myself am peddling. People who "do their own research" on Glupkleins by punching it into a search engine will come away with the impression that the entire community is unified on whatever stance I want purely because nobody else knows or cares enough about it enough to write their own articles debunking it.
This is the same thing here, just at a murkier scale. Nobody uses the term big tech except in this context, and so using that term to find something which disproves the context around the term is a losing battle
Even the laptop has been proven to belong to him.
The onus is on you to prove it isn't Hunters laptop.
Those who investigated thoroughly found that the chain of custody of the hard drive was incredibly sloppy and the content of the hard drive was changed multiple times, making it impossible to confirm where the hard drive came from or who put which content onto it.
The speculation is that someone obtained Hunter Biden’s emails in some unrelated way (e.g. from other hacks) and then placed them onto the hard drive in question as a way to obscure the source/method.
Here’s the clearest story explaining the details: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/hunter-...
Their skepticism turned out to be well founded. There’s really no story there. (This was similar to the non-story of Hillary Clinton’s email server, Russian-hacked DNC emails, etc. of 2016 which turned out to be completely anodyne and routine, but became the intense focus of months of news coverage and whipped partisans into a frothy frenzy based on wild lies/speculation.)
That's your opinion and you are entitled to it. But it doesn't turn away from the fact that the story was suppressed. Real or not.
> This was similar to the non-story of Hillary Clinton’s email server, Russian-hacked DNC emails, etc. of 2016 which turned out to be completely anodyne and routine
At least it got proper coverage. There was no suppression of either the email gate or the Russia gate. Whether it was fake, true, hoax doesn't matter. It got the coverage it was due.
> were rightly skeptical of a tabloid fluff story with no details, corroboration, or expert analysis about a mysterious harddrive
Joe Biden said it was based on a "bunch of garbage". That it was "Russian disinformation". All news media outlets, including Washington Post, carried that forward in all their news headlines and editorial posts (except right wing news media outlets of course). What were the details, corroboration or expert analysis that they went through before labelling the Laptop as "Russian disinformation"?
> Their skepticism turned out to be well founded
I missed the part of their skepticism where they called it "Russian disinformation" and it turned out to be true. Can you highlight to me where it was proved that the Laptop was part of a smear campaign against Joe Biden initiated through "Russian disinformation"?
What Washington Post has finally done is admitted that the Laptop and its contents are real. Now when it comes to the meat of the matter, the actual contents of the Laptop, it hasn't gone through sufficient scrutiny yet. It also hasn't taken into account the whistleblower's account of what dealings the Biden family had with the Chinese and Ukrainians. On who the "Big Guy" was who received the payments; which is mentioned in a March 2017 email conversation between James Gilliar (Hunter's associate) and a Chinese energy firm where he says: "10 held by H for the big guy?". Who is the "Big Guy" here? Who is "H" here? I am assuming H is Hunter and "Big Guy" is Joe Biden. It is still an assumption and can only be proved in some Court of law in USA. But if you aren't even going to give this evidence a chance to see the light of the day you'll never be able to get to the bottom of the Truth.
Now I am not saying any of it is 100% true as it is still under scrutiny by a Grand Jury (though a lot of it is coming out to be true now). I am just saying that the media actively suppressed this information from the general public out of "fears" of it being "Russian disinformation" which still hasn't been proved. Or maybe, just maybe, they did not want their favorite candidate to lose.
There is unfortunately not enough verifiable information about the sources and chain of custody of the hard drive to distinguish between these two alternatives.
Various media sources (and the American public in general) were burned multiple times by credulously repeating Bannon- and Giuliani-pitched (completely made up) bullshit, some of which actually was later demonstrated to be Russian government produced disinformation. Even if the hard drive turned out to be what they said (again, this is still dubious), it would be a good example of a “boy who cried wolf” situation.
Now if you truly want to address this concern of the people, the question obviously would be if it was the algorithm that blocked the article or was it "a guy in a room"? I don't see what is the difficulty in admitting that it was "a guy in a room" because our values/ideology does not align with ideology of New York Post.
When you start to say that it was the algorithm that did it, and that there was zero human interference, without any proof to back up those assertions, then it is much the same as saying that it was a "popup" that triggered when one is caught watching porn. "I did not do it, it was the machine."
Then it becomes even more important to open source the algorithm so everyone can see what is happening internally. It at least puts some doubts to rest. It is better than saying "believe me it was the algorithm not me".
Excellent. So when is Twitter going to ban Taylor Lorenz for doxxing an anonymous Twitter user LibsofTikTok? This is her tweet right here: https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1516399663305297920
It has been up since April 19th, 2022. Twitter immediately blocked New York Post's tweet.
I wonder why the algorithm is so slow when it comes to Taylor Lorenz? Maybe we'll find out when the code is open sourced. Then we can all legitimately blame "the algorithm" for causing all this divide between the left and right wing in a neutral, faultless, perfect digital town square called Twitter.
The racist algorithms critique isn't that their is a shadowy conspiracy of people pushing buttons behind the curtain, getting the results they want with conscious decisions, it is a concern about datasets mainly, as well as sociological questions about unconscious bias in testing and verifying the correctness of programs, which can cascade into social effects.
It is a completely different thing, and one grounded in actual research.
It may not have been algorithmic, but it definitely happened.
https://www.mediaite.com/news/ex-google-engineer-says-glitch...
I'm not making any comment on the theory in the article, but it has certainly happened.
Edit: more context in thread here: