Dudelander

The Blaire White tweet she retweeted was pretty transphobic.

Looking at the thread, most of the replies are kissing Lex Fridman's ass. The dude went searching for haters and made a video whining when he found some.

What the fuck are you talking about? How the fuck am I defending Ian Miles Cheong?

I already live in this society. Back in '02 I was fired for opposing the Iraq war. Before that people were fired for being communists. The only way to prevent this is to allow employees to sue their employers if they get fired for no good reason, and the right calls that socialism.

The Digital Services Act (DSA) defines disinformation as ‘false, inaccurate, or misleading information designed, presented and promoted to intentionally cause public harm or for profit’. The DSA requires social media companies to remove disinformation and other illegal content within 24 hours. In the case of Germany, illegal content would also include holocaust denial, hate speech, and speech that facilitates overthrowing democracy.

But does it work for ROFLMAO?

They're simply not economical if you do the math. You're still better off getting a fuel efficient gas powered car. The cost of a new Tesla needs to drop by around 20k before it's worth it, even with the tax break.

I see this as an AM/FM problem. If one of these disasters happen, then we should rely on "actual machines" to mitigate or avoid them, and not rely on "F*ing Magic" like interplanetary colonization.

I'm not saying we shouldn't try to expand what's possible with "actual machines", but that should be up to academia - and they're pretty clear that human space exploration isn't worth the money.

Yeah, but those aren't related to human space exploration. Not saying we should get rid of the space program 100% - just reduce it's cost by cancelling all the human spaceflight projects.

Probably an unpopular opinion around here, but honestly I think defense, healthcare, and food security to be more practical than human space exploration. I know that major advances in computing were made during the Apollo mission, but that was 60 years ago. What have you done for us lately?

I think most people who want Twitter to fail mainly want the cult of personality surrounding him to go away. He's gotten billions of government money for his projects and managed to get at least one public rail project cancelled. IMO I don't think it would be too bad if he was made to look like a fool, just so politicians aren't so willing to fund his businesses anymore.

I don't see how it's conspiratorial at all. There are market forces that are influencing these decisions, and there will always be exceptions. It is a generalization, but it's a stochastic generalization based on real life data - not on the assumption that there is a secret cabal of evil suits smoking cigars in a dark room.

I'm not a Marxist, but I don't see how Marxism is a conspiracy theory. There are certainly some conspiracy theories on the left sure, but Marx never assumed that there was a secret conspiracy trying to control things behind the scenes.

Regarding small businesses preferring cheap labor, it depends. Take the transportation industry - if you're a small business owner who works in the transportation industry you're likely to be an owner-operator - in which case you don't really care about cheap labor. Likewise in the hospitality / retail industry you're likely to hire American workers if you're an American and non-American workers if you're non-American. So the cheap labor from immigration only impacts you indirectly. Obviously if you're an immigrant you're going to be more likely to lean to the left, but must small business owners are American.

It's true that the construction industry benefits from cheap labor, but we're talking about general trends here. Someone who owns a Yoga studio is more likely to be left wing. But on the whole, small business owners lean to the right.

The Propaganda model proposed by Herman and Chomsky has been widely discussed on the left for 35 years, even if those discussions didn't mention it by it's formal name. So yeah it's nothing new. But to sum up:

1) Local media has a far right wing, pro police bias because it's customers are small business owners. Small business owners are pro police because they lose money from shoplifters and "bad" neighborhoods are bad for business. They're anti immigration because immigrants are over-represented among new small business owners and tend to outcompete established businesses. They're opposed to labor laws because they increase costs. They're opposed to estate / property / capitol gains taxes because they tend to have a large amount of family wealth. This is not to say that all small business owners are far right, it's just that they have a lot to gain from right wing policies.

2) Mass media tends to have a center left bias. This is because their customers are large national and multinational corporations, who are more interested in messaging and branding. For many reasons, the ages of 18-55 are considered to be the main focus of advertising, with 18-35 year olds being seen as especially valuable. Also, people who live in urban areas tend to have more disposable income. Finally, since what is progressive 30 years ago is often mainstream today, being left wing on social issues is generally a good idea. Imagine if the US only let 18-55 year olds vote, and gave an extra vote to people who were 18-35, lived in an urban area, or had progressive beliefs. That is the ideal media landscape for large media companies. Now there are limits, because large businesses don't want to promote pro-worker or anti-capitalist ideas. That's why the socially progressive economically centrist point of view dominates mass media.

Twitter is a mass media platform, and it must do something to promote center left tweets if it wants to be a profitable ad supported business. And it's more than happy to work with the government to further that goal.

If Elon wants to make Twitter into a privately owned microtransaction supported site, then we can expect it to boost far right wing positions - which is exactly what's happening.

He's photogenic and good with media. Look at his twitter profile - he obviously spent a lot of time and thought on that picture, and it makes him look like a kid from the movie Hackers - that's not accidental.

> Because there are clearly efforts by government institutions to pressure social media platforms to comply with content moderation decisions.

This statement applies to 100% of all privately held media companies. Since it's possible for a media company to get benefits from government or businesses, they will all be pressured to support certain agendas.

Local news stations benefit from a friendly relationship with the police, who give access to information in exchange for positive coverage. Larger media outlets will give positive coverage to the military / government / big business in exchange for access and ad revenue.

Media is also pressured to biased in favor of social issues. Local businesses are more likely to pay for ad spots if the news adopts a right-wing market populist point of view, which is why talk radio trends hard to the right. Conversely, since the prime demographic is 18-35 year olds, it benefits mass media to adopt a center-left point of view.

It's been 35 years since Manufacturing Consent has been published, the mechanisms by which the government and big business influence the media is well understood. The Twitter files are nothing more than facts that have been hiding in plain sight for decades. It's confounding, and quite frankly more than a little suspicions, that some people are only noticing this after right-libertarian positions are suppressed. And very telling that the same people who were decrying censorship 3 months ago are cheering when their guy starts doing the same thing to their political enemies.

I think you're kind of playing dumb here, but I'll indulge.

Private companies can censor whomever they want, and that has been the case as long as the US has existed. I'd prefer it if Twitter was more consistent about it, but that's just my opinion.

The government never paid Twitter to censor anyone. The FBI paid Twitter 4 million as reimbursement for processing their information requests, and Twitter pushed back against a lot of those requests.

Companies getting paid by the government is absolutely how capitalism works. Lockheed Martin and Boeing get trillions of dollars of government money to build weapons. SpaceX gets paid to launch satellites. Tesla gets paid to make electric cars. Hell Elon wouldn't be the (second) richest man in the world if it wasn't for our tax dollars.

Nobody should be surprised by any of this. It's how our system has worked for over 250 years.

All privately owned business work with the government. Ownership of private property means that armed people who work for the government will enforce your claim. If no government employees are enforcing your claim, then you don't actually own the thing you think you own.

Businesses get favors from the government whenever they call the police or are involved in a lawsuit. They help the government when they pay taxes, and when they give information to the police. The BTK killer was busted because T-Mobile shared his information with the FBI. This was considered normal at the time, and is considered normal today.

None of this should be surprising to anyone. It's how capitalism works. If you don't like capitalism that's fine, but you shouldn't be surprised when the capitalist country you live in does capitalism.

How did you jump from that to Communism? I though the meaning was pretty clear: People will be more critical regarding social networks. Meaning they will more carefully assess the merits and flaws of Social Networks, instead of just assuming they're good and fun with no real drawbacks.

I think the take away here is that any "digital town square" should not be a privately owned for-profit corporation.

The terms "right-wing" and "left-wing" do not refer to objective philosophical positions. They literally referred to where French delegates sat in the National Assembly of 1789. Today they refer to a web of political alliances that are historically - as opposed to philosophically - determined. So to answer your question, being pro second amendment is a right wing position because most American politicians who consider themselves right-wing are pro second amendment.

> Would a person who supports Universal healthcare, safe access to abortion and reducing their carbon foot print but also thinks immigration is an issue that needs addressing and supports the second amendment be left or right?

This isn't really what you said, you said "right-leaning and Republican" aren't synonyms, not that people don't fall neatly into the left/right dichotomy. The Republican party is objectively the right-leaning party of the US. If you're a journalist that mostly publishes articles aligning with Republicans talking points today, then it is fine to characterize that journalist as right-wing.

> "It’s not an “article” (it is also being published in long-form) or “reporting”, just a little series of tweets".

Given that Twitter does not engage in independent fact checking or peer review, I feel that this is a fair characterization. Pre-Musk or post-Musk, Twitter should not be viewed as a serious journalistic enterprise.

Mainly because most people here don't care. This is a professional tech community, and we view news from that lens. Because of this, what looks like a scandal to you is not surprising to us at all. Your idea of "The Freedom of Speech" just doesn't resonate with us. Anyone's who's worked at a social media company knows that if you don't aggressively moderate your content you end up with OnlyFans. Platform creators need broad moderation authority to do their jobs.

The idea that Twitter and other sites are "the digital public square" is the unfortunate result of CEOs overselling their businesses. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc are entertainment media first and foremost. They are not a suitable replacement for educational or public institutions, and people need to stop treating them as such.

I agree. I've had an open mind to the possibility that Twitter's policy was inconsistently applied based on political affiliation, but I have yet to see event one piece of evidence that's held up under scrutiny. At this point you have to conclude that it's simply a conspiracy theory.

That's not against the TOS. Snowden tweets about PRISM all the time on Twitter.

None of that stuff is against the rules. New York Times articles and overly optimistic predictions do not constitute private information or misinformation. Just because you don't like them doesn't mean they violate the TOS.

Also, nothing that Snowden released was publicly available, but Biden's staffers were using tools that were available to the general public in the way they were intended. They're completely unrelated.

While I agree that Twitter should have taken down the tweets about non-public figures, they're not against the rules: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...

Names are explicitly listed as exceptions to the ban in sharing personal information.

In all honesty they're probably a little more careful and don't flagrantly violate the rules.

Why not though? I don't see an issue if they use the same tools as everyone else does. Police departments do it all the time, as does the CDC.

Stuff like that gets removed all the time. It's a meme that posting certain Islamic songs can get you banned on Twitter. They might not get them all, especially with a reduced moderation team, but tons of Islamic terrorist tweets are removed every day.