Manufactured consensus on x.com

Twitter can't spam hate posts in real time? They're literally an AI company.

>Bear in mind here also this suppression did not happen for other posts - only for the pro-Ukraine post - so Twitter at the least is specifically suppressing pro-Ukraine posts.

There's scant evidence of this, besides the vague assertion that "I have 5k more followers there and regularly have posts which are viewed over 100k times". If he normally posts informative and substantive content that gets good engagement, is it really surprising that a generic "I support Zelensky" post would get poor engagement?

In practice, most Nazi bars are run by people actively choosing to kick people out: just the ones wearing the trans pride buttons instead of the ones wearing iron crosses. The kinds of online spaces run by free speech nutters or moderators asleep at the wheel tend to devolve into calling everything cringe, including the Nazis. Actually, Nazis are a particularly easy target for trolling and harassment, both because it is never unethical to laugh at Nazis and because critique makes them jump off the deep end.

During the Jack Dorsey era of Twitter, Twitter was a dive bar. Problematic users rarely got removed off platform, neither left nor right[0]. If people did get banned, it was for egregious offenses even Twitter management couldn't excuse. When Musk bought it, he changed it into a Nazi bar, making sure him and his favored far-right commentators got all the algorithmic boosts while left-wingers got shadowbanned.

Same with all the right-wing communities that forked out of Reddit. /r/The_Donald, Voat, etc. I bet you $10 they all had active policies to ban or bury left-wing content while actively screaming their heads off about "freedom of speech".

And there's a parallel with the actual rise of Hitler as well. I think a lot of Americans have this incorrect picture of a stupendously angry and racist German public, all voting in a landslide for the state-sponsored murder of six million Jews. The reality is that the people who owned the bar - both in Germany and abroad - were rallying behind Hitler since day one, in ways that persisted even beyond the fall of the Nazi state. They're the bits of the deep state[1] that ensured Hitler's insurrection against the Weimar Republic was given a light sentence and that Americans were kept in the dark about the nature of the Holocaust until it was undeniable. Nobody ever actually voted Hitler into office. He took advantage of a technicality and a frightened owner class to seize power for himself.

Yes, it is true that Nazis are malware[2]. Yes, Nazis can independently worm their way into a system and ruin it. However, more often than not, the people who own the Nazi bar don't merely tolerate Nazis, they accept and embrace them.

[0] Before you mention Donald Trump's ban in 2021, keep in mind Twitter had made a policy specifically to justify keeping Donald Trump on platform even when he was breaking rules.

[1] Informal ruling hierarchy parallel to the formalized one we vote for. This term usually also alleges that the informal hierarchy has subverted the formal one; but I'd argue that's almost never necessary for a deep state to exist. All states start deep, formal hierarchy is a transparency mechanism to make it shallow.

See also https://xkcd.com/898/

[2] Fun fact: if you fine-tune an AI to write malicious code unprompted, it becomes a Nazi. See https://www.emergent-misalignment.com/

Some cracks started to form in this when he made a reckless wall street bet that he could make a million cars in a year or something and had his employees working double shifts in tents to get it done. In the end he won the bet and got an enormous payout. I remember calculating that if he divided the award in half and split that half evenly among every single Tesla employee that it would amount to about $40,000 per person, a life changing amount of money for most people. Instead he kept it all for himself and gave a press conference about how big of a genius he is.

But the turning point is when there was a kid trapped in a cave and he received some mild criticism over his ill conceived rescue solution and the result was to baselessly claim that the critic was a pedophile.

He's exactly the kind of guy who looks like a god when you only measure things in dollars. He takes big risks and they've paid off more often than not, but he's not someone anybody should really look up to.

The general tone very quickly shifted to Kamala's brat summer, Kamala is bae type shit.

Even after the fact nobody was questioning Kamala's qualifications. Why, at the 11th hour, were we left with demented grandpa and someone that couldn't win a primary the first time? Whose fault was this? What consequence did they suffer?

The dialogue was mostly around trying to figure out who to blame for people not voting for Kamala. Men? Black dudes? Mexicans? Misogynists? Anyone but whoever was actually responsible for the situation? Idk what it's like now though, I haven't used Reddit in months.

Yeah, they wouldn't have to rely so much on Madison Avenue if they were just paying the news agencies to report whatever they want.

Incidentally, I'm not sure I'd characterize even PBS' government funding as "vast sums", either absolutely or relatively (to the rest of their funding).

How much influence do you imagine PBS wields and how much money do you suppose is in these vast sums they are paid?

PBS is mostly known for Sesame Street and nature documentaries. Their government funding has been whittled down to almost nothing over years of relentless attack from the Republicans.

Here's some discussion from PBS itself on the topic:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-look-at-the-history-of-p...

A pull quote:

"The U.S. is almost literally off the chart for how little we allocate towards our public media. At the federal level, it comes out to a little over $1.50 per person per year. Compare that to the Brits, who spend roughly $100 per person per year for the BBC. Northern European countries spend well over $100 per person per year."

Strongly argue that TODAY has far more diversity of thought being communicated on various media than 2024. Disagree on being "in 1984 situation," the whole "Biden is sharp as a tack" -> replaced without primary "Campaign of Joy" is as 1984 is you can get. Very clear evidence of syndication occurring across various news outlets, and those syndicated stories don't happen for free. The hard evidence you request is thoroughly concealed and hard to follow as it gets washed through non profits and NGOs. USASpending shows $2mm direct in 2024 to NYT as an example, but it's no stretch to assert indirect sources as well.

Lots of smart people left to Mastodons, at least.

I thought they backed down on the API changes for moderators?

The proximate cause IMO is that the protests (ie. moderators shutting down their subreddits) resulted in some moderators being deposed, causing new subreddits and moderators to come in power, which were easier to astroturf or whatever.

You'd have to find somewhere on reddit that wasn't 100% deleted haha

Don't even get me started about local city subreddit busybody moderators with their online fiefdoms and their "Daily Discussion" post graveyards.

I think you might want to check the article again. The interviews were not just based on fired engineers. EM did fire one engineer after he told Musk that interest in Musk was declining.

It's sad that these social media companies supplanted proper journalism, only to then rot into this.

What do we have now?

Note - My original comment was not about whether now is worse than before or vice versa. It is just that narratives shifted in a different way, that had nothing to do with scale. Algorithms are just as likely as uncensored (or censored - how does one know?)

I personally would love not having every viable tool of propaganda owned by private interests totally free of any Constitutional obligations.

A public utility Twitter would surely be inferior in many ways, but IMO would be a useful counterbalance to have in the mix of platform options.

Your comment makes sense if the social value of Twitter was exclusively posting links from other actual sources of truth, but it’s not. That’s not even the primary source of social value in a free society (it’s the dialogue).

The reality is that if I talk like Kamala at work then nobody gives a flying fuck. If I talk like Trump, I'm going straight to HR.

It's not that conservative voices are incapable of being rational or are being purposefully targeted or anything. It's that American conservatives are far-right populists so of course their messaging follows that notion. They appeal to emotion, they berate, they gloom and doom, and they have very Nazi-like rhetoric just by their nature. That's how populist messaging works - it wouldn't be populism if you weren't trying to convince people that monsters are coming to eat their babies or something.

Point being, yes conservatives are obviously targeted more by censorship. It can be very easily avoided by not lying, not saying slurs, not calling for the decimation of peoples, etc.

Our own President cannot meet that standard. So, predictably, outrage populists on places like Twitter certainly cannot. It seems to be that conservatives have no voice of reason, no person to look up to.