X sues hate speech researchers whose “scare campaign” spooked advertisers | Hacker News Reader

X sues hate speech researchers whose “scare campaign” spooked advertisers

arstechnica.com

29 pointsbarbazoo22 comments

When you're on the opposite side of the hate speech researchers...it's hard to fathom a situation in which you're in the right.

I hope this goes to trial. Elon has constantly redefined what X/ Twitter considers hate speech. Discovery around his capricious, ephemeral, views on what does/ doesn't count as hate speech are going to be wild.

I can't imagine a whole lot of brands are going to want to advertise on a platform guided by Elon's Principles of Hate Speech

Wait, how do they see this playing out?

Scene: Corporate boardroom

"So, what about Twitter? Are we safe to start advertising again?"

"Well, the weirdo who runs it has taken time out from his busy schedule unbanning Kayne West and incoherently rambling about "the woke mind virus" to sue someone who pointed out that there might be some issues."

"Oh, well, that sounds very satisfactory. Place a large ad order"

Like, it's hard to see this working.

Listen elon, you set up a system where if someone pays you, you put them on top of everyone's feed, and then you started paying them for that as well if they say things that everyone interacts with, and then you ended up paying people who are generally recognized as bad actors and right wing provocateurs.

What the fuck do you expect to happen? You can't blame a research agency for your explicit actions. Do you think Proctor and Gamble want their ad next to the guy saying that being trans is a nazi agenda? Apparently you don't have the power youtube does with wooing advertisers.

I mean, we live in a world where Johnson and Johnson is suing the researchers who found asbestos in their falsely certified asbestos free baby powder:

https://www.asbestos.com/news/2023/07/27/johnson-johnson-law...

They knew their talc contained asbestos and sold it anyway, and now that they got caught they're trying to punish the people who caught them.

IIRC, the companies that stopped advertising with Twitter had asked about whether Elon would handle the Trust & Safety team correctly at a conference right when Elon was preparing to take over as CEO.

The official response was to dodge the question.

Not only can Elon pin blame on the research agency for his own explicit actions, he can't pin blame on the research agency for an exodus that started before the research agency released its findings. It would be like breaking your foot, going on a rollercoaster with a broken foot, and then suing the theme park for breaking your foot. I'm not a lawyer, but in any sane court, that wouldn't hold water.

He explicitly tweeted that he would create such a council, and block anyone being added back to twitter before that council's approval.

Of course that was a direct lie and Trump (among other even less savory people) was added back shortly after.

Elon sycophants on twitter actively don't give a fuck because they WANT such a hostile and disgusting place, where being an asshole is rewarded, suggesting that human beings are bad for the way they were born is encouraged, and little bully cliques are the norm, because they want /pol/ but are butthurt that 4chan defaults to anonymity and won't let you build up a fanbase for your hatred.

Cleveland's only public hospital system, MetroHealth, recently had a scandal this reminds me of.

The board let the CEO set his own performance metrics and the bonus schedule. Then they also let him write his own performance review. Well wouldn't you know it turns out, according to his own criteria and self-evaluation, he was one of the best CEO's in the country!

Anyway. Elon just makes up his own criteria for hate speech. So of course "hate speech is at an all time low" under Elon.

It really is an astonishingly bad name for a company. Looks like a boilerplate article template waiting for a company name to be dropped in

"In a blog, X accused the CCDH of "actively working to prevent free expression" by allegedly gaining unauthorized access to X data that was then allegedly taken out of context in attempts to paint X as a platform overwhelmed by hate speech and misinformation. The CCDH's goal, X claimed, was to silence or de-platform certain X users and deprive X of revenue."

> It really is an astonishingly bad name for a company

It really is. Ignoring everything about the company and just looking at the name, X carries a ton of overloaded meanings in addition to what you mention, and very few of them are good.

It amazes me that they're going with this.

I think if they wanted something X related they should have gone with a riff of SpaceX to TalkX or SpeakX or something like that.

Can you imagine what people would give to own a word like "Tweet"? To have that kind of presence in day-to-day speech?

It matters whether the CCDH's accusation was true or false.

US free speech law, in practice, does usually protect liars. That's generally a good thing, because there's a lot of grey area. But I think it's terrible if we, as outside observers, get caught up focusing on the legal wranglings and who we like and dislike, before seriously asking the question of what's true.

I don't have access to much in the way of data about Twitter. My own feed is healthy, but it's mostly composed of people I know who I've chosen carefully, so people who follow more indiscriminately might have a different experience. But I did check out the CCDH's recent blog posts, randomly clicked on one about LLMs, and it seemed pretty dishonest to me (they prompted it with jailbreaking prompts, then in the summary made it sound like it would say offensive things without jailbreaking.)

The report: https://counterhate.com/research/twitter-fails-to-act-on-twi...

It’s pretty terrible “study” - they found 100 offensive tweets, reported them, then 4 days later saw only one was taken down; then concluded “Twitter fails to act on 99% of hate”

But these were random tweets, none of them had more then 10,000 views, some with less than 100. It could be Twitter reviews reports based on view count, or based on # of times reported. Maybe it effectively stops all hate speech that hits 10k views, and prevents 99% of hate speech view counts. But this study doesn’t consider this at all.

> collected tweets promoting hate from 100 Twitter Blue subscribers

They collected tweets from 100 blue subscribers that contain hate speech. I think you misread the report. Maybe there is other problems but I don't think you are right about what you are saying through.

> US free speech law, in practice, does usually protect liars

Except when it comes to defamation or slander/libel. If I say something that I know, or reasonably should have known, is untrue and it actually harms you, then there isn't a lot of law that will come down on my side.

If what I said was true, or I reasonably believed it to be true, then I can say it no matter how much harm it causes.

I think the “in practice” is pretty important in that sentence. Because in practice it is pretty hard to prove that someone knew what they said was untrue.

This is true, which is why a lot of successful lawsuits prove their case by showing that a reasonable person would have known, rather than that a particular person did know.

Since when is the British Labor Party “left wing”?

I appreciate this. "Hate speech" is a word used by one side of the political spectrum to silence and pull financial levers on anyone they disagree with. We have all really taken the ADL, CCNA, SPLC and other partisan organizations at face-value for too long.

Please point to a paper or document outlining your views on what constitutes hate speech

Hate speech to me doesn't exist. A controversial view, I know, but the alternative is a dystopic censor hellhole.

Here is ADL's link on Antifa who are overwhelmingly the cause of political street violence in recent years https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/who-are-antifa

Antifa killing MAGA supporter in Portland https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_race-america_antifa-protester-...

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