Meta Censoring '#Democrat' on Instagram
mstdn.chrisalemany.ca
mstdn.chrisalemany.ca
I don’t have an Instagram account to verify this myself.
this isn't foot over, this is consolidation. to quote a marvel movie: "we're in the endgame now"
We call it differently because its purpose is different, not its actions.
No, freedom of speech is not censorship, no matter how hard so many try to push the idea. Censorship involves the use of force, be it direct or implied, not others choosing not to give you support. Inherent in the right to express an opinion is the right to not express an opinion, both yourself and on your own private forum. Hacker News (or any other private site) are not public forums, the public forum is the internet. If HN wishes not to allow certain things, that's literally freedom of speech. Of course, those choices can in turn be criticized (both here within rules at HN's choice but also on other forums entirely or by creating your own), and the criticism criticized in turn and so on. Depending on the arguments made and social and economic pressure it creates some involved may change their stances, or not.
But none of that is censorship. Censorship is the death of that process, force being used to put an end to the circle of social/economic discussion.
>That's why it's so tough to find the right balance between fostering a community and extinguishing it.
It's hard to do so sure, but not because of some "censorship" thing but just because managing human relationships and networks and community is hard.
- #dnc (no results) vs #rnc (normal results)
- #voteblue (no results) vs #votered (normal results)
- #fuckbiden (normal results) vs #fucktrump (no results)
Most likely explanation is whatever algorithm change they pushed on 20/Jan to boost Trump-aligned posts and bury Trump unaligned ones was accidentally tuned too aggressively and became too obvious. Please accept our apologies, we will be rectifying the issue and fixing the Algorithm so the manipulation of public opinion is properly hidden, as intended.
Not only it is happening. It is also influenced by the biggest bidder.
Searched for #dnc #democrat right now, and got relevant results.
He didn't say they did, he said America did, and everyone is along for the ride.
But in a way we did, by letting US (or China) control all our social medias.
There is a lot of witless verbiage about the "town square", but precious little acknowledgement of the obvious fact that every town has its OWN square, and that's the point.
For the last decade my feeds have been polluted by "content" about Brexit and Trump, almost all of which has been noise/distraction/propaganda. I'm sick to the back teeth of it, and it's time to make it stop.
There is no monetization, corporate decisions, manipulative algorithms; just self-hosted open source instances as far as the eye can see. Certainly there are rough edges and a perceptible decrease in dopamine from using them, but surely that's worth toughing out as they shape up if it means stopping the unfathomable destruction of society that we're experiencing in real time from big tech?
In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky makes a powerful argument that independent, citizen owned media is of critical importance if we're to pull society to a better, more collaborative place. It doesn't get more 'citizen owned' than a web of interconnected self-hosted servers.
It's been good to see Bluesky up its video game in response to the TikTok nonsense. I'd like to think that the Fediverse could evolve to meet the expectations of people fleeing Facebook, Twitter & co, but it's not there yet. Those of us who are highly motivated (and I am, after recent events!) will make do, but I think it needs to be easier in order to get the critical mass required.
This was equal part pragmatic foreign policy and a desire by the French elite to hold onto their colonies, an institution strongly opposed by the United States since around WWI.
Republics fall, progress isn't linear. Even c. 2000 years ago people were writing about how democracy falls to tyranny. The world is a lot more global now, but the Roman Republic would also have seemed rather "global" too, yet was replaced by the Roman Empire not long after Cicero was writing.
disclosure: i was not planning on this in any way, it was only for testing purposes
I mean, it is kind of obvious, Trump is now in power and Zuckerberg does not like problems. Or would you rather have a technical scapegoat explanation, that some intern messed up?
We need to denounce censorship always, _especially_ when we disagree with those being censored.
If anything, it just shows that they are censoring based on facts: if there are established facts about Hunter Biden's laptop, then the information cannot be censored.
It is obvious to me that any brand new story is first "unestablished". They are indistinguishable from rumors. If you start choosing and picking "this story sounds nice to me, so let's not censor it even if it's not confirmed yet, this story is not confirmed yet either but let's censor it", then, it is arbitrary. The fact that a story starts as not confirmed and then turn out to be confirmed is not the proof something is wrong, on the opposite.
I think it's the problem of people who think "facts" are just "opinions" and that you can modify them as you want. They don't understand how "facts" work, and that it requires time for the confidence to grow. I also think that they sometimes get confused because they want very much to believe in some "opinions" or "fake news", but then people are saying, correctly, that this is not based on facts, so their only resort is to pretend this "opinion" or "fake news" is as factual as the other facts, but therefore it means that indeed, "facts" have no objectivity, everyone can just say "it's a fact" or "it's not a fact" based on what they want to hear.
(also there's a lot of false equivalence going on here - 'democrat' isn't a slur!)
I have no dog in this fight and I want to see all ideas surface. Then people will be able to judge for themselves. I do not want any kind of filtration by either communists or conservatives.
- "This is a free market; if you do not like it use another platform!"
- "I thought $conglomerate" had our back! They had rainbows and all; is that all it took them to fold"?
- "No, this is not a systemic issue; conversation needs to be steered away from attacking the system and rather its a few bad apples! Go after them and stop asking for systemic changes!"
- "Any attempt at regulating companies in an assault on #freedom and must not be tolerated"
And from that perspective, these quotes you're currently touting are ripped out of their context, making them sound asinine despite being mostly on point, fundamentally.
Twitter, Facebook, Google etc are private companies. They should be free to censor whatever they decide to censor.
I would personally hate it if they did, and it'd hope we'd get a competing platform that doesn't censor and that that'd become the standard, but it is what it is.
If a government makes the company censor something, then that is a violation of free speech (which I sadly don't have, as I'm not from the USA). And isn't that what happened in the context of Corona/antivax?
Why I think is hard it's because multiple rules can be made to make it impossible to spread ideas: talking loudly in the street => you disturb the neighbors; you send mails with pamphlets => it's spam; want to make an add on TV => extremely expensive. And so on.
Most of them have a vision for their platform, i.e. town hall for Twitter, family and friend conversations for Facebook etc.
To adhere to this image they filter out spam etc. now, filtering out obnoxious content just becomes one more rule and thus the slippery slope begins.
But to answer your question: for me, any kind of interference such as deleting/hiding content or algorithmically influence which content is shown is censorship on social media platforms, and the user should be responsible for applying such censorship.
I.e. provide a UI which let the user configure their own preferences. But actually nailing such a feature with a good UX ain't easy, and how to actually implement it isn't either, so that's just a pipedream, realistically speaking.
Maybe the network should also limit interaction and exposure. It's fine if you get more interaction than you could do in real life, but I find worrying to have one person followed by tens of millions ... (and even if it was the case before with newspapers, I don't think it was ideal either)
Why? Private companies can't dump waste onto a river, can't build buildings not up to code, can't discriminate based on religion or sex, can't prevent their employees from joining a union, can't evade taxes (well these last 2 only in theory I admit)... Meta owns platforms with 3B, 2B, 2B users (fb, insta, whatsapp); why the hell wouldn't it be possible, in principle, to regulate them as public utilities and forbid them by law from censorship or other nefarious practices?
Your phone company can't spy on your conversations and your power company can't shut you off if you are black. Only on a society completely far off the deep end of neoliberal philosophy would people even think to invoke "but it's a private company" like some sort of holy taboo.
I think all of those are "fair game" now (if the price is right). I only wish I were kidding.
You're arguing with a strawman, I never said it's impossible in principle. I said it isn't currently categorized as a utility, hence they are free to censor as they see fit.
It's entirely possible for the courts of the USA to deem it a utility, and it'd be interested to see the long term effects of such ruling.
The ruling would only apply to citizens of the USA, so it'd be very interesting to see how the companies in question implemented the changes to stay compliant.
It'd be an interesting case study, but it's impossible to speculate on its fallout until a clear plan has been drafted. I.e. It could potentially make it impossible for newcomers to create platforms, depending on the angle for such a regulation. Or it could make changes to the algorithm borderline impossible etc.
basically countless pitfalls and without a clear draft, nothing of value can be discussed
What you're actually putting forth is wherever large social media platforms should be treated as utilities. (Which ISPs are).
If the legislative decided to categorize it as a utility, then any censorship the company decided to do could potentially infringe on your free speech, yes.
However, this is not the case as of today. If it's deemed as such, it'd definitely have a global effect. Wherever that'd be positive would be an interesting case study.
And I might add: lots of ISPs host DNS servers which do in fact censor / block certain domains from resolving
I've understood it very well, I find it very funny that people which say stuff like Google is a private company and should do what it wants are the same people which say Google should respect net-neutrality (peering agreements, ...) and not do what it wants when it's about core networking and not social media.
A utility is something that is regulated, it comes with a lot of caveats and challenges. It's not just a label you can put on anything, you need to actually define and set boundaries etc to what the utility provider is required to do etc.
This has happened for ISPs, but none of that has happened for Twitter, Facebook etc... thus it's not a utility, thus it's not bound to the free speech amendment.
We have a heavily contested information space, & so far we are still not an authoritarian state. It seems defeatist I'm extremely to say it's not worth trying to build a better less manipulable less privately controlled information space. It seems obvious that there's still time & patriotic as hell - fully committed to democracy & people, over large institutions & powers.
But possible, that they do not make headlines out of it.
Salutes. He did it more than once in that speech.
In full, hand to chest and all.
Because he’s so engrained with the government he’s untouchable. SpaceX is doing stuff NASA only dreams of. Nobody built out starlink to the volume that he did and so now he can play king maker in war zones like Ukraine.
He’s got huge conflicts of interest with China.
The man is basically an asset of foreign governments and is here sweing the seeds of hate on his mega platform.
It used to be nobody was above the law but then billionaires became too powerful. How often do I think about Rome? A shit ton more now except I think more about the fall of Rome than the golden era.
I think the Rubicon was more this election. Caesar was in a position where, if he didn't bring his army to Rome, his political enemies were going to destroy him. Trump was in a position where, if he didn't win the election, his political enemies (and the legal cases arising from his various unusual activities) were going to destroy him.
But I wonder if that's really where we are. I wonder if we're not more at the time of Marius and Sulla, and the real Caesar is still 40 years away.
At least that’s where I’ve seen the video of him doing it, so perhaps he isn’t wrong about that particular thing?
Musk has been promoting extreme right-wing opinions, conspiracies and outright lies for quite a while now and he's obviously seeing the Trump presidency as a key success in his plot for world domination, so he no longer needs to hide his fascism/racism etc.
Why other organisations are seeking to downplay actual Nazi salutes must be because they are scared of the power imbalance and seek to appease (hint: that never works).
Once you start differentiating between Zionist interests and Jewish interests, the last 80 years (and especially the last 15 months) makes a lot more sense.
I don't see how Musk's two Nazi salutes can be defended when he deliberately did it twice and has a history of supporting extreme right-wing views.
They know which way Israel's bread is buttered. Trump just removed all sanctions for the settlers, and allowed the sale of significantly bigger bombs to Israel on his first day.
Israel has a huge amount to gain from a Trump administration. ADL isn't going to blow that opportunity by calling out Elon's Nazi salute.
You believe Elon Musk is somehow showing support for the National-Socialist party of the German working class?
How is it possible to get to this level? Truly amazing.
Secondly, anyone who refers to Nazism as the "the National-Socialist party of the German working class" is clearly attempting to make an utterly specious claim that Nazism is really about Socialism and not about Fascism.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1i6par1/elon_musk_vs_...
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1i6v521/for_those_not...
That's a bizarre comparison. Are you deliberately trying to build a straw-man and associate a known extreme right-wing, Nazi salute with socialism? You do realise that the Nazi party were not at all socialist - they called themselves that to trick and lie to the Germans.
Not forgetting implies that we must NEVER tolerate Nazi sympathisers and Nazi ideology. Musk has been promoting Nazi/extreme right-wing ideologies for quite a while now and his latest stunt is to perform a Nazi salute which insults the memories of everyone that fought against the Nazis in WWII.
What specific part of history are you alluding to? I'm reasonably knowledgable but not an expert in European history and I certainly found it very frightening when I visited the Holocaust Museum in Berlin and saw that the exact same methods were being employed by the Republicans/Trump.
Can you be more specific as it seems that you're just trying to obfuscate.
No, which is why nobody but people who want to downplay say this stuff. This is the second comment of this kind I saw.
He's doing the Hitler salute, with a snarl, once to the crowd and once to Trump. He has no clue who Hitler is or what he did, just like he has no clue what RPC are, or what item level requirements in Path of Exile 2 mean, but that doesn't change what we see with our own eyes.
The person you replied to said "nazi salute". In context, it's clear the gesture is meant. Everything else comes solely from you.
And far-right groups everywhere are totally celebrating it by the way, you're aware of that, right? In a way they never did and wouldn't celebrate some random "gotcha" photo of a Democrat that has nothing to do with them. So you're just underlining the point.
This post is already flagged
So what do we do now? Wokeness is already in retreat. Obviously we should help it along. What's the best way to do that? And more importantly, how do we avoid a third outbreak? After all, it seemed to be dead once, but came back worse than ever.
In fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak of political correctness, but the next thing like it?
The more general problem — how to prevent similar outbreaks of aggressively performative moralism — is of course harder. Here we're up against human nature. There will always be prigs. And in particular there will always be the enforcers among them, the aggressively conventional-minded. These people are born that way. Every society has them. So the best we can do is to keep them bottled up.
Of course there is.
Remove dissent from media, discomfort from libraries, and debate from schools.
>In France, a new law dubbed "CREN" has already made its way through the upper house. It allows the French government to force DNS blocking of sites it deem to be non-compliant of the new law.
>In Spain, websites belonging to the Catalonian independence movement were all DNS blocked, back in 2017.
>Denmark has censored a wide-swath of content since at least 2011, including file sharing, mp3 converters and illegal gambling sites.
>As reported back in 2021, The EU itself is actively developing its own DNS, with the project named "DNS4EU". Its goal is to wrest control away from US based companies, and to gain greater control over access to online content.
https://vocal.media/01/norway-introduces-dns-blocking-of-ill...
Allow discourse and stop putting your finger on the scale, dammit.
As you say, you can't add a CW doing that.
So, people re-post manually (the content of the post, and/or a link to the post) with a CW.
The request is not to do that.