It’s worth noting that the first thing Parler did was start censoring anyone unsupportive of their form of conservatism. They’re not offering freer speech, they’re offering a safe space. Maybe that’s a seller, maybe it’s not, but it’s an important distinction. This is really just /r/conservative taken to its logical conclusion.
I suspect we will continue to see services that unbundle social media's hottest topics.
Social media may have created an outrage economy -- a subset of the attention economy.
But like ebay, craigslist, etc, the social media platforms' broad focus means their product can't specialize when strong trends emerge. The outrage will be unbundled by niche companies.
I actually think this is a good thing. Seeing conspiracy theories on the same platform as your cousin's family photos, or nobel winners, has a legitimacy-building effect on the outrage content. Maybe on its own platform it will look more like what it actually is. Nobody mistakes the tabloids in the checkout aisle for a legitimate newspaper.
I suspect we will continue to see services that unbundle social media's hottest topics.
I've seen this before with Usenet groups that got too bogged down with infighting and trolls, so splinter groups formed off on handmade vBulletin/phpbb sites or wherever.
They always imploded shortly afterward. A safe space eventually falls to the same splintering, just in more fractal detail.
Some of them survive the implosion and come out of the wreckage in okay condition, but a lot never come back.
"And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, because they were being overrun by these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn’t defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom. They had no way of saying, “No, that’s not the kind of free speech we meant.” But that was a requirement. In order to defend themselves against being overrun, that was something that they needed to have that they didn’t have, and in the end, they simply shut the site down."
That was an awesome article, I really wish I read it sooner. So many of today’s problems are predicted within. My favorite parts:
1. Designing Social software is as different from UX design as UX is from bare functionality.
2. Tech groups are not immune from using “vilification of external enemies” to increase group cohesion, where enemies included Microsoft in the 90s, it’s probably surveillance capitalism today.
3. Unrestrained social software can lead to constitutional crisis: the tension between individuals and group, the rights and responsibilities of each, what’s the social contract for an online community? That’s more political science than computer science.
On one hand, I agree there is a positive to isolating the worst of social media off on a separate site.
On the other hand, we're (maybe) just starting to see Facebook etc take some action on the worst elements of social media. This subverts that and makes it harder for Facebook to take further action in the future: shareholders will rightfully ask "what if you lose even more users by banning <socially negative thing>".
Also, the bad thing about fb etc is that they just want to sell you advertising. But that's also the good thing, Facebook don't care about your politics, they don't particularly want to influence you as a person, they just want you to click on ads for shit you don't need.
I wonder about other social networks, eventually someone will weaponise one, and sell votes rather than clicks. Is this the start of that? An expressly Conservative social network is much better placed to sell souls than clicks...
As long as the FBI are aware and can prevent these things, I suppose it's a nice honeypot, but if not then it's a literal weaponization of social media.
I'm not sure that we can provably say that they LEAD to crimes. I think there's a strong case to be made that people interested in carrying out these crimes find like minded people online and engage in meme culture. You can probably make a good case that things like 8chan encourage copy-cat elements in these attacks.
I'm just not quite sure the case has been convincingly made that internet cess pools generate crime that would't otherwise happen. I could probably be convinced otherwise, but I'm not sure.
I actually hadn't thought of that side of it but you're right. This must be a good source to see what groups and where on the spectrum of "unhappy to planning sedition"...
Note that echochambers leading to enough hate is a problem for both "left" and "right" aligned people. The violent actions of some people claiming to be Antifa being a recent example.
Echochambers based on hatred (of Trump supporters, "SJW"s or black people) just leads to awfulness, what's needed is controlled exposure to average members of the hated group to cool them down.
I think it just delays a bigger problem, kicks the can down the road.
In 2-4 years' time, we'll have an even bigger festering cesspool of self-reinforced beliefs than ever before, and an more difficult time having rational discourse among our society about how to run it.
How do we get back from where we are now? I have to admit, my social skills are lacking, my patience is low; and the problem just seems so vastly overwhelming that I can't imagine where to even begin.
I suggest that we fully acknowledge in comprehensive, "dimensional & behavioural complexity", that which lies at the bottom of all of these problems: the human mind. [1]
And then, to ensure that all that hard work does not go to waste, modify the HN guidelines (or, introduce a brand new, experimental mode that includes these modified guidelines, to be used when discussing culture-war topics) such that ignoring this aspect of reality is explicitly forbidden.
There's no way of knowing whether this technique would fix the problem unless we actually try it. But as long as all social media platforms refuse to try this (or similar experimental ideas), choosing instead to only pay lip service to the idea of trying new ideas to improve the situation, I do not foresee humanity escaping this mud pit that we have built for ourselves.
[1] This is the fundamental root problem, but there are a few subordinate ideas that should be addressed simultaneously to maximize the chances of success.
Is there no possibility that you may be somewhat mistaken?
Note:
- your first statement references the entirety of HN; it is plausibly likely that you have not consumed (and comprehensively perceived with complete accuracy, and remembered) the entirety of forum discussions on HN
- your second statement involves events in the future - as far as I know, the ability to accurately predict the future in a multivariate scenario has never been proven
If I am incorrect on either of these two items, I would appreciate any corrections you may have.
That's a good place to start with these kinds of questions.
I figure this is true simply because of the remarkably low population of Hacker News compared to society at large; there's simply not enough people here for changes to this specific site to make an impact on the larger social media ecosystem.
To be more realistic, I'll estimate that getting the social media platform Hacker News exactly perfect from a systemic standpoint might have an impact on around 0.001% of the societal social media problem. We've then got 99.999% more to impact.
And if you believe that people reading Hacker News are somehow more influential to society than the average social media user or something... well, we would not then have that belief in common.
>>> How do we get back from where we are now? I have to admit, my social skills are lacking, my patience is low; and the problem just seems so vastly overwhelming that I can't imagine where to even begin.
I suggested a novel idea:
>> I suggest that we fully acknowledge in comprehensive, "dimensional & behavioural complexity", that which lies at the bottom of all of these problems: the human mind.
>> And then, to ensure that all that hard work does not go to waste, modify the HN guidelines (or, introduce a brand new, experimental mode that includes these modified guidelines, to be used when discussing culture-war topics) such that ignoring this aspect of reality is explicitly forbidden.
What I meant by the root problem being the human mind, is this commonly recurring issue where people make stuff up, and assert it as fact.
> In [physics or engineering education], a Fermi problem, Fermi quiz, Fermi question, Fermi estimate, order-of-magnitude problem, order-of-magnitude estimate, or order estimation is an estimation problem designed to teach dimensional analysis or approximation of [extreme scientific calculations], and such a problem is usually a back-of-the-envelope calculation.
> Example questions given by the official Fermi Competition:
> "If the mass of one teaspoon of water could be converted entirely into energy in the form of heat, what volume of water, initially at room temperature, could it bring to a boil? (litres).", "How much does the Thames River heat up in going over the Fanshawe Dam? (Celsius degrees).", "What is the mass of all the automobiles scrapped in North America this month? (kilograms)" [2][3], Possibly the most famous Fermi Question is the Drake equation, which seeks to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. The basic question of why, if there were a significant number of such civilizations, ours has never encountered any others is called the Fermi paradox.[4]
These are pretty extreme, needle in a haystack class problems. Funny thing though: I seem to be able to find "needles in a haystack" on HN with about 75% of my comments. This is suggestive that perhaps these needles may not actually be as rare as you perceive, and claim (with evidence that consists of nothing but rhetoric).
> I figure this is true simply because of the remarkably low population of Hacker News compared to society at large; there's simply not enough people here for changes to this specific site to make an impact on the larger social media ecosystem.
My thinking is that if one group of people could learn how to have honest(!), non-imagination-presented-as-fact based discussions about the nature of reality (which includes massive amounts of unknown variables), something no other social media site (or perhaps even individual human being) that I know of seems to be able to accomplish in the year 2020, perhaps this knowledge could be shared to other subreddits, and we could get some sort of a grassroots anti-delusion movement underway. I know of several subreddits that have been trying different things to get people to stop fighting, I doubt they'd turn their nose up at a technique with a proven track record.
> To be more realistic, I'll estimate that getting the social media platform Hacker News exactly perfect from a systemic standpoint might have an impact on around 0.001% of the societal social media problem. We've then got 99.999% more to impact.
More imagination-based numbers, with no concern for the details of the underlying idea, or what might actually be possible. No concern or intent to improve the world. Must. Win. Argument. Must. Support. Tribe.
> And if you believe that people reading Hacker News are somehow more influential to society than the average social media user or something... well, we would not then have that belief in common.
Alternatively, you could consider the possibility that you are not omniscient, and that someone you disagree with may actually have a valid point.
Not at all! I very much appreciate any corrections you may have.
> More seriously, I think you would be surprised at the variety of human experience that’s not covered by your ideals here.
I'm not sure what you are getting at here. I am not talking about my "ideals", or at least that is not the primary focus of my comments. The primary focus of my comments is this phenomenon whereby people have an extremely strong aversion to discuss what is Actually True.
If you believe I am mistaken in this, I would be more than happy to discuss it at great length. Perhaps I have some imperfections in my analysis that I am unable to see, and you can point them out so I can then improve upon my model.
I welcome being proven wrong - I encourage people to do it.
Sever the internet connection to certain, key nations. Or even targeted strike stuff. Foreign propaganda is not to be tolerated as “free speech” like it came from a citizen.
> Sever the internet connection to certain, key nations.
And to nations that have connections to those key nations, right? Because encryption and steganography and VPNs all exist, and the amount of dangerous foreign propaganda in tweets is probably only being generated at a few bytes per minute.
Someone should write a techno-thriller set in your alternate universe where spies are investigating a WiFi connection between north and south Cyprus, with the endpoint in the north connecting via Turkey to Russia, and the endpoint in the south connecting via Ireland to the US. It could be a fun read if you can suspend disbelief.
Reinstitute the draft, or national service where every young kid has to spend a year fighting along side people they didn't know before hand, far from home. Or spend a year traveling the US doing worthwhile projects (fixing up broken jungle gyms in schools) again with people they didn't know.
It is a little bit less likely that you dislike heartland America when you spent a year working with Fred the Farmboy before you headed to Princeton. Fred could probably swap stories with a kid from the ghetto and may be they would come out with the understanding that they were not quite as different after all.
Of course, like any draft it would be a huge violation of the persons personal freedom.
(Replying again as I can't seem to edit my original).
> It is a little bit less likely that you dislike heartland America
This is a strawman. Relatively few people "dislike" heartland America in and of itself. The objection has always been to people voting for bigotry, and on top of that, it's always to their own detriment, plus it is all too common that it is "heartland America" that are the ones who need to exercise more empathy and are the most likely to disparage "others" and outsiders because they are not exposed to them. There's a reason people become more liberal and in favor of progressivism as they move towards higher population centers and become more educated and exposed to the rest of the world.
> It is a little bit less likely that you dislike heartland America when you spent a year working with Fred the Farmboy before you headed to Princeton.
I find it interesting you choose this as an example, and not rather say that "Fred the Farmboy" might actually see those
"librul coastal elites" or "ivory tower intellectuals" as people like himself. The latter are terms I've actually seen used.
But on the topic of a Civilian Conservation Corp, yes, definitely bring that back!
I choose the example because I assumed that there would be more people here who would be "coastal elites" than farm boys.
In addition I think that if you are destined for the elites then it is more important that you understand (really understand) the life of the others, than if are apprenticing to be an electrician.
> In addition I think that if you are destined for the elites then it is more important that you understand (really understand) the life of the others, than if are apprenticing to be an electrician.
Two things here:
1. What exactly makes you think the college educated are exposed to fewer points of view than those from the "heartland"? Everything I've ever seen points to the opposite being true, where going to an institute of higher learning puts you in touch with a *vast* array of different people, and living in an urban center does the same. Which leads me to my second point:
2. Why exactly do you think it's not important for someone from the "heartland" to exercise empathy or be exposed to other viewpoints? It's pretty obvious that a large factor in the problems of today is tribalism and "othering", which gets pretty quickly destroyed by exposure to those same "others", something you don't often get in the "heartland."
What is there to understand when two people’s assumptions are different and in conflict with each other?
For example, someone wanting others to act according to their religion.
I spent decades with my parents, but there’s nothing to “understand”. They speak a different language (even though we have the ability to use the same words) and live in a different world than me.
If we can think about 5% of the population who simply have different life situations and backgrounds having a better appreciation for why they think what they do, and those 5% become less extreme and more understanding of compromising for the benefit of others, then you've just changed society completely.
> I find it interesting you choose this as an example, and not rather say that "Fred the Farmboy" might actually see those "librul coastal elites" or "ivory tower intellectuals" as people like himself.
I wonder, if he had instead chosen your example, would you no longer have found it interesting, but other people would then have found his new comment interesting (who did not find the one he made here interesting).
Abstractly, it is quite interesting what humans find to be interesting, and how that interest level can be so easily inverted by simply injecting of new values into various seemingly innocuous variables.
Well, I find it interesting anyways. But most other people I've encountered seem to kind of consider such topics to be....~"not appropriate for discussion in polite company", in that they often have strong negative reactions to the very idea, if not outright demanding that you cease engaging in discussion of such topics ("starting flame wars" is the formal terminology used during Overton Window enforcement) - and if you do not, they themselves will disengage from discussing the topic (while maintaining an air of extreme confidence and certainty in their alternative ideas). "Gaslighting", "whataboutism", "gish galloping", etc are some of the most common rhetorical accusations that I have experienced in my journeys (if any are given at all that is).
My apologies; I was being sarcastic, but my writing ability does not match my intent, which in any case was not in good faith.
My point is that many on the right claim there is no attempt at empathy from the left, meanwhile there are many on the right (not always the same people, I acknowledge) who will say "fuck your feelings" and use (from their POV) epithets against leftists instead of addressing grievances or even ideologies.
I myself have what I consider enough perspective on the heartland; my parents grew up in Iowa, and both sets of my grandparents worked in the agricultural fields. This is not to claim I have first hand knowledge, but I am white and I recognize the many aspects of privilege I am afforded. I feel I have enough of that perspective.
Meanwhile, it seems glaringly obvious that many on the right are not even making attempts at understanding why BLM exists, and can't seem to comprehend systemic racism, because they've never been a victim of it. FFS, when Bloomberg admitted to stop and and frisk, that I felt should have been a turning point. For decades people of color have been telling us about this, but they were commonly dismissed by white americans as imagining it.
To elaborate on why I am not willing to empathize further than I have, I have no wish to empathize with bigotry. One set of my grandparents were also homophobes, which was laid bare in their will when their estate left out my homosexual brother completely. I hope I don't have to cite Popper's paradox of tolerance.
"Fred the farmboy" wants understanding and compassion? I'm all for that, I even want to put policy in place to help! But I have zero tolerance for intolerance, and will call it as I see it.
Oh, I meant no ill will to you personally, my comment was more so an observation about human nature in general.
My point is that there is a widespread phenomenon whereby individuals notice logical or other shortcomings in members of their various outgroups, and then write comments on forums about this behavior in a manner that implies (if not outright asserts as fact) that this sort of behavior is overwhelmingly limited only to members of the outgroup, and does not exist within their ingroup.
And if one is in a community with a user base that is ideologically homogeneous, this one-sided, inaccurate description of reality often becomes kind of a constant theme that reappears in thread after thread, in turn (so they say) reinforcing these beliefs in the minds of those who regularly read such comments.
Regarding "found it interesting", it can also be observed within such communities how certain ideas catch the attention of people, but abstractly ~identical ideas (but differing at the object level due to different values of variables) go unnoticed.
If one observes these discussions carefully over a long period of time, patterns of behavior become extremely apparent: basically, textbook confirmation bias, information bubbles (and the flawed descriptions of and predictions about reality that inevitably result), and so forth and so on. Of course, this shouldn't be too surprising.
But the interesting part is if one happens to wade into such a conversation, drawing people's attention to the manifestation of these abstract behaviors within the current thread. At this point, one would logically expect a reaction something like surprise and then realization (due to HN being largely composed of highly logical people with above average levels of integrity and honesty). However, this is not what actually occurs, the majority of the time (in my experience as an ideological outlier). What actually occurs usually more so resembles what one would see on "less high quality forums" than here (rhetoric, "mental gymnastics", insults, logical fallacies, etc etc etc). Of course, this is just human nature in action, but still - it's weird, I don't see why we can't do better (than other communities), and I really can't wrap my head around why we wouldn't want to do better than other communities. And yet, here we are (not you...I am speaking in general).
> To elaborate on why I am not willing to empathize further than I have, I have no wish to empathize with bigotry.
> But I have zero tolerance for intolerance, and will call it as I see it.
I completely agree with the sentiments of what you've written here. However, I wonder if you are as good at exercising these beliefs as you perceive (I'm making no accusation, I am merely discussing the idea - I too deserve the very same cross examination, and encourage anyone to do so).
Let's start with defining some terms:
bigotry - stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one's own
truth - the true or actual state of a matter; conformity with fact or reality
epistemology - the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion
perception - the act or faculty of perceiving, or apprehending by means of the senses or of the mind; cognition; understanding.
prejudice - preconceived judgment or opinion; an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge
So, a non-controversial example of bigotry would be racism, which typically involves some variation of racist individuals forming negative conclusions of POC (individually, or as a group) based on preconceived ideas, without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge. Racism is a pretty easy one to spot, everyone here has consumed plentiful educational material, and most likely engaged in several conversations on the matter.
Now let's examine another group that is often subject to bigotry, even here on HN: conspiracy theorists.
1. Do you happen to have a personal opinion on conspiracy theorists?
2. Do you have an opinion on the nature of typical discussions here on HN related to conspiracy theorists?
And before you answer, please note:
a) I went to the trouble of stating definitions for several terms above, but really only made use of [prejudice] thus far.
b) It has been my experience that such questions are typically responded to with rhetoric, evasiveness, character attacks (insinuations of bad faith, gish-galloping, etc). I would prefer that this conversation does not fall victim to that pattern, but rather, follows a more honest, curious, and productive path (which I believe is one of the more important things that is missing in the world).
>I suspect we will continue to see services that unbundle social media's hottest topics.
I'd love to see people go back to early 2000's PHPBB-similar specific topic/hobby/interest forums with tens to hundreds, maybe a couple thousand members. The good days.
I wouldn't even mind seeing more actual usenet groups again. but then the same problems will creep up again.
and spam. relentless spam. in my view, spam and spammers are the worst thing that happened to forums. a constant arms race against spammers and then script kiddie types trying to break into forums, often so they could spam even more ads.
but I like the sentiment. there are still plenty of phpBB type forums out there, and I like them. It's much better than having everything hidden away behind the barbed wire wall of Facebook Groups.
> Nobody mistakes the tabloids in the checkout aisle for a legitimate newspaper.
This is the first good argument I've heard for the alt-right abandoning platforms with some standards of veracity, and it's an excellent idea. Sort of like how everyone knows what 4chan is about, and the moment you hear someone repeat some Qanon stuff you know you can stop listening.
'Did you ever hear the Tragedy of Qanon the wise? I thought not. It's not a story the Liberal Media would tell you. It's a Conservative legend.'
(Please note, I'm not equating Conservatives with the Sith, here. I'm making the point that a story being censored can make it seem more interesting and more credible, even if it is heard from a source that is deemed disreputable by some).
I was banned from r/conservative in a discussion about trump handling the coronavirus seriously. I posted a timeline of quotes from him "only 15 cases soon to be none etc" indicating he had not taken it seriously early. Banned after that.
Which is fine, I feel that people should be free to form any clubs/groups they want.
They can't do that AND profess to support free speech within their club.
I think people should be able to form their groups as they like. But that doesn't mean that that group is a healthy place or that it doesn't harm wider society.
I'm also not clear whether this is a group of people forming under their own initiative (as is their democratic right). Or if its actually some shady privately funded project by billionaires seeking to influence elections. That second option is much less democractic and would (imho at least) be open to investigation and regulation like any other campaign activity. Hopefully it's not that, it's just someone trying to launch twitter 2.0 and make some cash.
> They can't do that AND profess to support free speech within their club.
This is, empirically, false.
Just as the right can chant “freedom of religion” and mean by that “freedom of my religion to impose it's views on others while others are suppressed”, they can also chant “freedom of speech” and mean the exact same thing with “speech” in place of “religion”.
> Or if its actually some shady privately funded project by billionaires seeking to influence elections.
Let's not jump to conclusions, otherwise we are as guilty of the credulity we are casting on them (Soros bucks, anyone?). Until there is hard evidence of this, please don't bandy it about.
"[Robert] Mercer played a key role in the campaign for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union by donating data analytics services to Nigel Farage. He is also a major funder of organizations supporting right-wing political causes in the United States, such as Breitbart News, and Donald Trump's 2016 campaign for president."
> They're a husband and wife pair that fund hyper partisan causes, it's not exactly jumping to conclusions.
Well then, I am grateful you cited sources. GP proffered the claim with nothing to back it up. I'm definitely the kind to believe these claims, as I've seen them verified in other realms before (Murdoch, Ailes, Kochs, Sinclair, etc), but that's precisely why I have to question that instinct. I can't just go believing things without evidence.
They aren't remotely for free speech either, by the way. I started an account there, disagreed with someone (I guess one of the wrong people to counter), and was banned within 10 minutes for wrongthink.
Both that and this would be problems. But reddit hasn't closed r/conservative. Quite the opposite: it's open, people access it and mock the dumber comments there and gain something from the smarter ones.
Parler chooses not to maintain the same freedom. But then falsely claims it does...
It's a problem, because it doesn't end here. Even if you make your own service, once your "club" gains too much traction you are still going to be deplatformed by domain registers, DDoS protection services, payment processors etc.
It's also a free speech issue. The main purpose of free speech is the ability to criticize your government and social media have obviously a huge influence on elections. As we move towards more and more lockdowns, where you won't be even able to just go out and speak your mind to the public, the social media will become the only way of communication. If you are not allowed to speak freely on those platforms and be able to actually make a change, it will render the free speech laws completely useless and you might as well repeal them at this point. Free speech laws should apply to social media.
You might not agree with the ideas that are being censored right now, but sooner or later they will come after you too.
This is contradictory. If you tell Twitter what its platform can/can't support you are violating its freedom of speech. The 1st amendment applies to the government restricting speech - not private corporations.
In the 1800s not everyone had a newspaper to spread their ideas. That is not a violation of freedom of speech for the ones who can't afford a newspaper. They aren't entitled to a platform - they're entitled to the government not restricting their platform.
What about a property on a busy road - a sign there has more impact than a sign at a house off the beaten path. You're essentially arguing that because that property has more visibility, it is unfair to the other who doesn't have that same location. This just isn't how the constitution works.
For example in EU banks are legally required to provide you a basic service. I don't see how this is contradictory to freedom of speech.
> What about a property on a busy road - a sign there has more impact than a sign at a house off the beaten path. You're essentially arguing that because that property has more visibility, it is unfair to the other who doesn't have that same location.
In US there were a couple of court cases that ruled that free speech applies to places that are technically private. For example:
And if I'm not mistaken, you already have plenty of FCC regulations regarding means of communications like TV, radio and internet, that probably could be construed as violations of either freedom of speech or freedom of association.
We could spend all day arguing about legalities and whether it's constitutional or not. Under current laws it is in fact exactly as you say, but this is a huge problem. I live in one of post-soviet countries, so it shouldn't be a surprise that a lot of people here, including me, are against socialism. But I have to admit that the left has a point. Or at the very least had a point, since I sometimes encounter people who will say how capitalists are evil and then proceed to explain how social media are a private property and corporations are free to do whatever they want with them. If we don't do something about this, we might very soon find out how truly dystopian capitalism can be.
Providing a service to fit the definition of a unit of society is not the same as forcing endorsement of a particular point of view, and even so, there is no law requiring social media from offering fair POVs.
You're arguing for a fairness doctrine - e.g. Fox News should be forced to show the other side an equal amount of time.
That's a really weird way of looking at this. HN is not endorsing my point of view by letting me publish comments here. Isn't that what the Section 230 is all about, by the way?
I know there is no law preventing social media from censoring people. If there was, we wouldn't be arguing about this right now. What I'm saying is that free speech should be extended to social media.
Section 230 affords protections to HN - that doesn't mean HN doesn't moderate. It does, which involves removing potentially harmful posts. Is this censorship to you?
Now regardless of 230, if the government says "twitter, you can not moderate." That is a violation of Twitter's freedom of speech. It can moderate content however it pleases as of now.
> I know there is no law preventing social media from censoring people. If there was, we wouldn't be arguing about this right now. What I'm saying is that free speech should be extended to social media.
The reason there is no law is because it's unconstitutional. The government can't force speech on platforms, even if said platforms are not responsible for its content.
> Section 230 affords protections to HN - that doesn't mean HN doesn't moderate.
Sure it doesn't, I brought 230 up because you've equated the ability to post content with endorsement of that content. And again, I'm not sure where do you got this "censoring you is actually my freedom of speech" thing from.
I already posted a wikipedia article proving that in fact yes, you can legally "force speech". I'm not a lawyer, I don't know the law, but it seems to me that we have all those politicians wasting time on nonsensical stuff like trying to ban E2E encryption, so why shouldn't they for once do something useful and ensure that corporations cannot abuse their powers?
> once your "club" gains too much traction you are still going to be deplatformed by domain registers, DDoS protection services, payment processors etc.
I follow the topic carefully and I've never seen domains being taken down just because people were simply discussing conservative politics.
Wasn't gab kicked off from their domain registrar?
I don't know much about Parler, but going just by what people are saying, it seems just like twitter but for conservatives, so it's no good either. Not sure what gab is now up to, but from what I remember, it was just a free speech site. They had some rules like no doxing, but other than that they never banned anyone for anything. You could say anything you want no matter what your politics are, as long as you didn't violate the law. So the issue for me is not really "conservative clubs", but that you will get targeted by the companies up the food chain, just by allowing free speech to be exercised.
We might need an intermediary status between media and hosting, where they are allowed to censor content, but take some responsibility for that (like if you hit someone stealing something), especially if they are a for profit company.
Maybe if everyone from reddit to domain registras thinks you are out of your mind and dangerous, you should either consider some self reflection, or spend your own money to distribute your message.
> I was banned from r/conservative in a discussion about trump handling the coronavirus seriously. I posted a timeline of quotes from him "only 15 cases soon to be none etc" indicating he had not taken it seriously early.
This should be all anyone needs to know about how seriously these groups takes freeze peaches. Look at their actions, not their words.
Um... you don't normally get an objective account of why someone was banned from the banned person in question.
Don't just take a claim like this as the whole story, they are generally in "tidied up" form.
You'd want the text of the post, the person's posting history on the forum in question, a list of warnings etc and a copy of the forum rules to even approach a reasonable judgement.
They also label most discussions now as "Flaired users only!" and to get flair you have to prove you're a conservative.
It's not about free speech and being oppressed, it's a literal safe space - which is fine, but selling themselves as the opposite of that just makes them look foolish.
To be clear, /r/conservative forces potential commenters to hold interviews with current members to vet their ideological purity. If at any point they flip-flop on an issue they will ban you for ideological impurity if you do not flip-flop your position accordingly. It may well be the most heavily censored board on Reddit.
Other subreddits have started to do this too, r/BlackPeopleTwitter has "Country Club Threads" where you can only comment if you've proven to the mod team that you are a person of color, which is.. interesting.
You're assuming the people doing the banning and the people defending speech are the same people. Or even if some of them are, that they represent everyone who supports the same political views.
At some point we'll need to deal with the fact that the clubs self-reinforce any beliefs the tribe wants to put forward, and isolate them further from society, creating true problems for actually running said society.
At some point we'll need to have a psychological nuclear weapon disarmament... the question is when and how, not if.
The big dilemma is which rules should be written to make sure that republicans are deradicalized by democrat information, without democrats having to be traumatized by propaganda from the cesspools of the republicans, isn't it?
Relevant parts (reply to add if I left anything out):
> Trolls hoping to test the boundaries of Parler’s commitment to free speech and get a rise out of its users began, often vulgarly, impersonating prominent Trump supporters and conservative publications.
> Parler responded by banning the impersonating accounts, including some inoffensive parodies.
(The linked article seems to have some bias towards supporting Parler, so they may be giving Parler the benefit of doubt and framing it as a reasonable measure.
BTW, kudos to parent comment for linking to a source like this - because of the article's bias towards Parler, there's no doubt to a random reader like me that these bans happened, as opposed to if it was reported by a politically opposed source. )
> A seeming[1] blanket ban of Antifa supporters from the platform, announced by founder John Matze, might be similarly understood as an antiharassment measure.
(Here the linked image seems to be implying that planned brigading was going on, to prompt the ban.)
2. Matze's post about banning the accounts of a group of ANTIFA supporters (https://imgur.com/WaAMEyn). This image was linked without any context (perhaps because Matze posted this without any context) so we don't know why these accounts were banned.
One possible take is that there's a fundamental difference between banning opinions and banning presentation. You could ban spam, impersonations, doxxing, all harassment and insults, posting fecal matter, porn, racial and other epithets, and so forth, but still be able to discuss the related crazy ideas (holocaust denial, child porn legalization, etc). I think this preserves the most important part of free speech.
If you let me ban enough classes of words and images, I can ban ideas. If nothing else, I can ban people talking about those ideas for their awkward attempts to get around the bans on words.
That happened after /r/DonaldTrump began calling for the murder of police officers in Democrat controlled areas and reddit held that calls for violence violated their TOS.
They also banned fake accounts pretending to be well known people and accounts engaged in illegal activity (death threats etc). I'm fine with that personally, I don't expect them to operate a totally "free" speech service and somehow weather all the lawsuits that brings.
I think this is a nice case study in how free speech inevitably conflicts with keeping majority opinions happy. The fact that they folded on freedom to get/keep people with such thin skin so sort of tells you what their business model really is imho.
Huh. Well I guess that's the problem. It's hard to have a forum with productive conversations if you aren't willing to filter out "noise", but not everyone agrees with what the noise is.
But one could argue (and I'm not arguing that it's the case here), one could have different rules around what's allowed versus Twitter, and it could be a more open forum, but still censored (trolls, deaths threats, "fk you" posts).
I'm happy enough with banning things you have to ban legally and banning pointless comments. But banning anyone supporting antifa is a pretty clear breach. The parody ban (especially the selective application) is another clear breach of free speech.
I'd be content enough if they were upfront and said this is a place for "Conservative opinions only" rather than "free speech". I'd even agree that's their right and that they might get more open and productive discussion that way at least in some cases. But it's just not free speech.
I think that's what frustrates me about this: it's the hypocrisy.
I actually hold a few Conservative opinions myself. But i wouldn't ban people from disagreeing with me AND claim to support free speech...
> But banning anyone supporting antifa is a pretty clear breach
Would you be in favour of banning people supporting ISIS, child molestors or the Nazis? Because from a conservative perspective, the rationales of one might apply to the other and so many nominally free speech environments ban support for those groups.
If someone is running a free speech platform, people should be able to advocate for all those things. Don't mistake me for a hypocrite who decrys censorship only of things I don't want censored. I'm not. People should actively discuss and advocate for positions they hold no matter the position. That's free speech. There are few limits (openly inciting violence, plotting crimes1, copyright etc)
If a platform or audience doesn't like that, they can drop free speech and become a safe space. That's their business. But they shouldn't censor speech and claim they are for free speech. That seems to be what is happening here.
Fyi, I haven't kept up on antifa or the events around them. But my position is that looting is wrong. At the same time, I'm sure they are right about at least something. That's a pretty safe, reasonable position right? Not on Parler. On Parlar that position is banned. And by banning my comment, you are banned from correcting me. How is that a positive for you or me or any other reasonable person? It only seems a positive for those who are too weak to bear hearing such simple positions. And even they are trading wisdom in the long term for comfort in the short...
Sorry. I feel quite strongly about censorship. It's a foolish idea we should have dropped back when we still had Kings and lived in mud huts.
This may be the best we can get. Different places banning different things. But they need to be honest so people know what they're getting into. Twitter is a progressive space.
I'm curious if Gab bans support of antifa. They couldn't claim it's about indirectly inciting violence, because they come close to the line when it comes to Nazi opinions. They do ban porn, which is fine with me. There's plenty of porn and it doesn't benefit from a network effect the same way. And I'm glad every place bans spam.
No, they probably came up with the name before that, and had discussions about starting a twitter competitor even earlier. I can pretend to miss the point by an even wider mark without even trying.
When "free speech" is the primary selling point of a social media website, it tends to only attract people who feel slighted by the platform they're migrating from. Unfortunately this has the opposite effect of Parler's stated goal of being "the world's town square" since it simply isn't attractive to people with opposing views of those who did move.
I think free speech is important and I think that social media platforms can be a bit overzealous in their moderation of the content of its users. I just don't think you can sell a platform on it alone. It should be a feature of your platform, not the only thing going for it.
It's a shame, but it really does feel like "free speech" has become a near dog-whistle. Almost any time I hear of a service billing itself with free speech as a primary selling point, a quick visit is more than enough to turn me off of ever returning.
Besides this, there's a clear feedback loop that happens regardless of the intent of the service's creators. The people most likely to get kicked off of social media platforms nowadays seem to be far-right kooks. So when they are looking for a new platform, they'll go somewhere that advertises for no moderation. What happens next is pretty obvious; the more those sort of people migrate to the service, the more visible their content will be to any visitor. And that content tends to be pretty effective at driving away non-kooky users, which leads to a reinforcing cycle that, over time, turns you into yet another take on Voat.
I'm about as close to a free-speech absolutist as there is, and it's very frustrating that the market for these platforms seems to be settling into ruts where we have to choose between the hyper-conformity of highly managed platforms and the dumpster fires of the unmanaged platforms. I think the feedback loop you describe is a big part of it. I also wonder if we're experiencing a decline in education and critical thinking skills that could be fueling these ruts.
This greatly saddens me. Can't there be some way to build a platform that encourages intelligent, reasonable, polite debate? Discussions of ideas based on their merits instead of personal attacks and tribal allegiances? Some way to provide free speech without providing free amplification? Has society devolved to a point where this is no longer possible?
There can, I’m surprised no one has implemented this:
Start everyone off with a maximum influence credit of say 10 people, like in your local neighborhood.
As you contribute to thoughtful discussion, as determined by the diversity and ratio of up/down arrows, your maximum influence credit grows as a function of your geography.
> There can, I’m surprised no one has implemented this:
The reason is you're inappropriately applying an technical solution to a social problem.
You also make at least one critical error:
> As you contribute to thoughtful discussion, as determined by the diversity and ratio of up/down arrows
Upvotes/downvotes pretty much never measure "thoughtfulness," because for them to do so would require a level of social cohesion that would probably make upvotes/downvote unnecessary.
Taking this idea further, maybe part of the problem is that platforms reduce the quality metric for posts down to effectively a single dimension: upvotes / likes / thumbs up.
What if there were separate dimensions for: Factually accurate, Morally agreeable, and Polite?
A machine learning algorithm could quickly work out which groups of users have different ideological positions, and which topics are likely to devolve into flame wars, so it could require that users have a minimum politeness score to be able to participate in a debate.
It could also, as you say, check for echo chambers forming and incentivise people with differing opinions to enter a discussion to balance it out.
Yes, I believe HN does a pretty good job with this. The only way to provide what you are asking is active moderation, or the opposite of absolute free speech. There will always be people for whom the only solution is to ban them off your platform to create a good environment.
I tend to straddle the line between Republican and libertarian, so I consider myself more conservative than liberal. But I have to agree with you. I recently tried out Voat. Holy hell, what a dumpster fire.
Can we agree that there is a difference between an on screen nipple or saying fuck on TV and the POTUS actively undermining democracy?
The general talk of free speech and censoring is not really useful here without specifics. Just like someone can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater, there are other things we are finding that may be similar in nature. I think a more useful discussion could be around the specifics. Should the POTUS be able to communicate anything they want? Should platforms be forced to carry it?
First? No. Most prolific? I think so. He's also one of the first to make heavy use of direct social media, which is different than mass media of old.
Notice also I didn't say Trump, but POTUS in general. What do we want to do here going forward? Should the POTUS be treated differently than a private citizen?
What this current period reminds me of historically is McCarthyism, except we have the POTUS lobbing baseless claims instead of a senator. I don't think McCarthyism impacted the general public as much as claims undermining the election does though.
I think the "POTUS actively undermining democracy" is a gaslighting / pearl clutching for what is a crass person but otherwise business as usual in the White House...
Apparently Patriot Act, mass surveillance, Guantanamo, the "WMD", Echelon, trillion dollar bailouts, false congress testimonies, etc weren't "undermining democracy", but an old guy tweeting some braggadocio/BS is.
And those that designed, established, and voted those things (e.g. Clinton, Bush, and Obama) are all love for each other, and all stand "united" against the "big threat" that is this guy...
We're downvoting you, but there is a valid point: many of those things are also bad. The false narrative that started the Iraq war had bi-partisan support and was popular with the public.
Treating everything as if there were only two sides is part of the problem. But I see dissent within the democrat party over these issues - and not within the republican party, who have supported everything that Trump has said and done.
You can be against censorship and also be against the type of racist, xenophobic, sexist etc content you find unchecked on places like Parler, Gab, 4chan.
It's not that simple. Xenophobic content, for example, is "unchecked" on any U.S. owned platform, so is some racism, but not racism against black people specifically. At the same time in most other countries in the world racism, and especially racism against black people, isn't even a thing, but xenophobia is. So it's very unlikely for someone to truly sincerely be both against racist content and xenophobic content at the same time and even more unlikely to also sincerely be against censorship, then it's getting into very dystopian views territory, you can't hold such views without being exposed to massive amounts of propaganda.
"free speech" of this type also doesn't really exist on the internet - because bots are a thing. You can't have a digital equivalent of a town square because whatever else you do, it's simply not possible to create in-person pseudo-anonymous supporters.
But on the internet, this is easy - it's a damn service you can buy and it scales on the orders of 1-to-1000 or (usually much more) voices.
CAPTCHA's don't solve it - because this is also a service - breaking CAPTCHA's by the hundred and supply account keys in bulk.
You simply cannot have a digital space which works like a physical one, and as such you cannot meaningfully not moderate it because human participants cannot out-pace bots and sockpuppet accounts. Facebook's entire, unearned initial trust was because notionally it solved this problem - people forget it was initially limited to student's with student email addresses at school's it knew. It was very much, initially, exclusive enough that it kept something of a lid on this problem.
The feeling about it has persisted far beyond the now non-existence of this mechanism.
This is exactly why I believe a dutiful representation of the 1st amendment in the Internet includes anti-botting measures, since bots flood the town-hall with un-measured broadcasting, shuttering out any and all active speech. But beyond anti-botting and one or two other very minor holds, a public forum should have no other restrictions of moderation. There is an exact restriction needed for the moderation to itself not be speech-impacting either by too much or too little of it.
Well all the major internet firms are based in the United States, if they want to hold to foreign markets they would need to hold separate divisions in separate countries, or in coalition dealings. There is a reason USA law Section 203 debates (which doesn't address the core problem) are so contentious regarding Social Media.
Agree, we will likely end up with right leaning town square and left leaning town square. And because every company seems to think they need to pick a side on political topics, it may extend beyond speech platforms. For instance I wouldn't be surprised if at one point conservative leaning viewers would migrate away from the likes of netflix for been fed up of being preached woke catechism in every TV show. And perhaps calling your customers sexists and bigots isn't the best advertising strategy for shaving products. Etc.
As a Star Trek fan and appreciator of well-written TV, I can't agree with this at all. The first season was hot garbage with maybe 3 watchable episodes, S2 was a little better but most of that was Pike. S3, despite finally being free of continuity baggage, is so far about as poorly written as S2.
Because at this point, there is a sharp divide between conservatives who care about fiscal responsibility and family values, and "conservatives" who care about unmasking (((conspirators))) in pizza restaurants. Although to be fair, the platform will likely attract nothing but the latter.
Actually that's not what I said it all. The concept on in/out-group can be completely arbitrary, e.g. assigned by flipping a coin. The principle still holds.
That said, since you bring it up, the history of humanity is largely the history of war between different ethnic groups. So yes, hating people based on ethnicity has been the norm for most of human history. It's still largely the case in varying degrees in different parts of the world.
You did. Right here: "e.g. ethnicity". That's a quote from you. I mentioned in-group, you added ethnicity.
> There you go. And yet history proves you wrong, starting with the roman empire and the middle ages.
At this point I wonder if you are trolling. The roman empire waged war on pretty much every single other ethnic group around them and enslaved them. Which the other ethnic groups around them were also trying to do at the time. Then we have the middle ages with the crusades and such... etc etc etc
They can claim that all they want but a quick glance at their sign up flow shows you that they’re really only interested in peddling extreme right wing personalities and associated accounts.
And it can’t be a coincidence that “Gaming” with a capital G is the only topic that I saw suggested for me to follow.
I'm getting a lot of value out of Mastodon. I found a medium sized instance who's moderator I trust, and whose culture matches matches what I want out of a social media website. Not having posts algorithmically shoved into your face helps a lot, because it is clear where posts on you home timeline are coming from and thus easier to customise your experience by blocking people.
The main problem with mastodon is that it's hard to discover a good instance to create your account on because you only get a good feel for the instances after you spend some time on there. This isnt all negative because the somewhat higher barrier of entry makes for a better userbase I think, because you need to do a bit of research.
I Honestly think that having a public square where people of all ideologies discuss everything is not that great. I don't want to discuss the US election with trump supporters, or read antisemetic garbage on my feed, I just want to shoot the shit with friendly likeminded people. I've been hanging around mastodon for 2 years now and I can count the times that it has made me mad or annoyed with another user on one hand. The ratio of positive experience to negative experience is way better than twitter.
For me mastodon is a place to talk about interesting tech, look at people's art, crafting obscure jokes that are only funny for an extremely online audience, and hanging out with a diverse group of techies, gamers, leftists, artists, philosophers, scientists, LGTB+ folks, solar punks.
There is no “teacher” who is going to grade you on how representative your social media feed is of the country. The point of creating an online feed could be entertainment, to arm you with the information and means of communication necessary to accomplish some goals you take part in, etc., but there is no point in trying to achieve some representative feed. You will not be rewarded for it.
They're more diverse than my IRL friends. It feels pretty diverse to me, I follow multiple types of communist and anarchists, some climate and privacy advocates, general progressives and even some more centrist EU people and a ton of people whose politics I know nothing about.
When I follow people I mostly just check if they don't have any posts that are homophobic, transphobic or racist, because that is shit I do not want on my timeline. For the rest I don't really care, I just follow the people whose posts I enjoy reading.
There's nothing especially wrong with keeping your feeds focused on like minded people, so long as you understand you're not the world.
The alternative for many might very well be attempting to hunt down and censor anything they find objectionable, so their feeds can be both representative, and clean.
Big Tech and Big Media really overplayed their hand this time, IMO. Millions and millions of people are now skeptical and looking for an alternative, even from Fox News. It might not be to Parler, or to the next site after that, but fragmentation will continue to happen. Facebook and media at large only have power if they have viewers, which is a far less stable resource than iron, or oil, or other corporate mainstays.
A decade from now, I think we’ll view the 2020 election as the tipping point.
2020, or more likely 2016 will perhaps be seen as a turning point in the fortunes of the US Republic, when the democracy began to unravel, the law was used as a weapon against enemies, and the rule of law was replaced by mob rule with different factions warring in the streets.
The parallels between the US at this moment and pre-war Europe or Rome at the time of the Catiline conspiracy are striking - the centre cannot hold, and the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Historians actually point to Vietnam as the point when the average American gave up on their government.
Once that happened, the government gave up on the average American, allowed middle class jobs to disappear, and spent more time joining global virtue signaling parties and subsidizing bombs in Yemen than fixing lead pipes in cities.
Why is there some conspiracy for the US government to allow good jobs to leave? They didn't have to do anything, all that happened was that the rest of the world had rebuilt their bombed out factories and gotten their economy on track. Once the oil crises hit, that was that.
The government allowed companies to lower environmental and worker safety standards by outsourcing overseas without including tariffs as a function of said standards.
See, the things we buy wouldn’t be so cheap if we didn’t let some companies in china dump toxic waste for free.
I sort of agree with you about using tariffs (at least for issues of global effect, like climate change), but do you think the US government should have a policy goal of making products more expensive for American consumers and/or reducing the amount of toxic waste dumped in China?
Not more expensive per se, but more truthfully priced.
E.g. cheap rare earth minerals from China are only cheap because we are borrowing from the future people who will pay to clean up the mess.
When we more accurately price the real cost of goods by quantifying damage to the worker’s health, global environment, etc. then outsourcing would not look nearly as attractive.
> more time joining global virtue signaling parties
Could you give some examples of these parties and an estimate of how much time was spent on them? I could try to guess what you're referring to, but I don't want to put words into your mouth.
(An uncharitable interpretation of what you said would lead me to believe that you're objecting not to "virtue signaling" but to virtue itself, which is not a helpful assumption for me to make).
It is not really historians and it does not really push the narrative of government "given up on citizens as reaction to them not trusting government".
Government and citizens are not even two super distinct entities, government are citizens and is put in place by citizens.
Generally one side of America so gave up on government that a guiding principal of ‘starve the beast’ (that has done so much damage to our young) became dominant.
Once people with that world view actually enter government, they don’t have a lot of desire to use government for what it could be used for in terms of helping citizens instead of consolidating powers as a function of lobbying dollars.
Hm.. perhaps in the faceless namespace that is the Internet, but much of that interaction hasn't yet percolated into every day life of the vast majority of individuals. Any person not participating in these exchanges and these networks might not even recognize that these heated interactions are happening.
Another part of the complication (fortunately) is that there is also no "real life" external markers that separate us on these issues. You may know where people stand on the Internet about issues, but step outside and it's a sea of ambiguity with every individual you meet. And at that point, people just go about their day treating everyone with respect. (At least in the same amount they have been the last 60 years, which in some cases is not much respect)
Masks are becoming that. Considering the science of how much a cloth mask can do to save us from a virus, its hard not to suspect the social signal might be the point.
...when the democracy began to unravel, the law was used as a weapon against enemies, and the rule of law was replaced by mob rule with different factions warring in the streets.
This could have easily been written about the late 1960s / early 1970s, though - the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Hoover's FBI and COINTELPRO, the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and Watergate.
The top wobbled but righted itself; perhaps it will do so again.
I would not lose sleep over a world war. The social classes (globally) that are flooring the accelerator have no desire to glow in the dark. And we're not in lockdown globally so that the elite can spend time in bunkers deep underground.
We're in lockdown so that elite privileges ("Grand Tour", etc.) can be restored, while the "common man" is put in his or her place, with strict regiments governing thought, speech, action, and movement. It is wise to ignore the cultural and political stun and smoke grenades, and pay attention to what is actually happening in real world. As usual, follow the money.
It's funny, there's a scene at the beginning of the play "an inspector calls" (set just before WW1) that mirrors exactly what you just said. I think it was a historical callback to a real, commonly held opinion at the time ("the interests of capital" was how he phrased it).
I don't think our elites particularly want a world war either. I think they're perfectly prepared to push us in that direction in an attempt to cling on to their wealth and power though. They will prefer liberalism but they'll support far right populist who protects their property if that fails to garner popular support.
> the democracy began to unravel, the law was used as a weapon against enemies, and the rule of law was replaced by mob rule with different factions warring in the streets.
I think a lot of those are good things and things we’ve been taught to over-value, without regard for their dangers and without an appreciation for the attendant responsibilities. The country was founded with a HEAVY skepticism of democracy. It allowed for some democratic influence, but the constitution goes to great lengths to restrain, channel, and temper the will of the people. It was adopted at a time when voting was highly regulated and limited to people who were considered best qualified to handle the responsibility. Even today the Constitution contemplates that presidents should be elected, not by the people directly, but by their state legislators. The whole idea of allowing direct democracy in presidential elections is a cop-out by legislators who’ve found a way to avoid that responsibility.
Same with using the law as a sword... that’s largely how it’s supposed to work. This idea that the FBI should be independent flies in the face of having 3 branches. It’s impractical. They’re humans, they also have axes to grind. The difference is that they’re appointed and not easily removed. Leadership is human and will therefore always enforce the law according to whatever axe they have to grind. The goal of a successful republic should be to accept, channel, and utilize that human nature.
However, I agree that there is an overarching crisis in the form of the internet which is destabilizing entrenched powers the same way the printing press did (leading to the renaissance).
A lot of it also comes from the renaissance itself and traditional media. It remains true that there are people who are responsible and learned enough in maters of government to be able to vote, and others who aren’t. However the old rules of racism and sexism have - for all their terrible faults - also lost their utility in this respect. You government can’t count on “white landowning men of good character” to be a ‘superior’ pool to draw insight from. Since our economy is no longer 99.9% agricultural, being “a landowner” is no longer a guarantee that landowners are among the most prosperous and responsible individuals. Now many of our most informed and influential people own little to no land, and those that own modest acreage may be far less knowledgeable.
Women and non-whites are (rightfully) now allowed to be and actually are very well educated and experienced in having serious responsibilities, etc.
So it’s very hard to effectively discriminate between high-quality and low-quality voters...
Meanwhile everyone is almost socially required to care about politics, to be informed, hold opinions, vote, speak out, etc. when there are frankly a lot of people in the world who have other shit going on in their lives and who don’t have the time and resources to waste worrying about politics. Simply not knowing and not caring is viewed as some sort of sin, by both sides, because they view these people a potential votes they could win. I think this is where a lot of the pandering and vitriol is created, because things have to seem super clear to get people - who don’t want to care - to care. Even if you don’t know the first thing about politics, you know the nazis are the bad guys and the communists are the bad guys... Soo, yes, that’s who the other side is!
State legislatures do not elect the president in any state in this country. The constitution gives them the power to determine the manner of selecting the electors. Under this power, all states have laws created by the legislature to delegate the power to select the electors via popular vote of all resident citizens.
Exactly. Many of the people who make civil war/anti south jokes are the same people who want California to secede, which makes no sense.
In its simplest form, the civil war wasn't fought because the north thought slavery was bad. It was fought because several states tried to leave the United States.
Hint: Most of the secession declarations include language like this:
> But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution.
Sigh, I never made a claim as to why the south left. Slavery is not the reason for the war, secession is. You can easily make the case that slavery was the reason for secession, which isn't wrong, but a moot point. If states had seceded because they didn't like tea, we'd still have had a war.
Even if it was made legally possible for states to secede, I doubt it would help much - we're all too mixed up with each other. The Bluest states all have a lot of Red in their more rural areas, and the Reddest states all have a lot of Blue in their biggest cities.
If such a thing were to happen, the states that ended up on each side would probably end up doubling down on the oppression of those in the other tribe who are still in their state, to encourage them to move to a state that's on their side.
It's a constitutional republic / representative democracy. Republics and democracies aren't mutually exclusive. It's certainly not a direct democracy, but that doesn't make it not a democracy.
In a pure democracy there is no such thing as a constitution, as in the underlying principles can be changed by the majority in power. Having a constitution leads to more stability.
It’s curious that the country/federation that introduced the concept of self-determination doesn’t allow self-determination for its constituent states.
> country/federation that introduced the concept of self-determination doesn’t allow self-determination for its constituent states
Individual self determination.
If a local majority secedes every time it wants to trample on a minority, or in the case of the civil war, an oppressed majority, two things happen: one, politics devolve into fractured feudalism. Local elites have a mechanism for wresting absolute control. That, not the Constitution or a Bill of Rights or elections, becomes the basic unit of power.
Two, our two-plus century record of peace on the homeland shatters. Every election or court case found unseemly by a contiguous local majority prompts a Twitter and existential crisis. Foreign adversaries hammer the wedge and split the nation into warring vassal states and too-small-to-matter opposing countries.
It sort of does, in theory anyways. The constitution states that the government can be dissolved when the people feel it's necessary. That's not based on a single state though. But, the states should have a lot of power within their boarders, but it seems the 10th ammendment is often ignored and the judiciary fails to check the legislature on its overreach.
Calling a vague group of entities 'Big X' isn't as useful as people think. It's not like there is a strong definition, or that everyone identifies the same with it. It's also not helpful to personify a vague group of even more groups (of business entities) and then assume they all had some concerted 'hand to play'.
It's possible that there is some emergent behaviour in markets with large companies and it might even seem like it's a single 'person', but it's not and it makes discussing specifics really hard. Perhaps it's an american thing, but it seems really odd looking from the outside in.
So you think they are not a combination of a a lot of people working in different locations at different times under different policies, and that it must be one big 'person' doing one thing?
If we're going to be that far removed from reality you might as well live in the woods and fling poo at each other.
The problem is- that they never invested in growing healthy engagement instead of enragement. Instigating a tribal warfare climate to push adds is just to easy of a business model.
Then the goat was chosen to moderate the cabbage and here we are. If the predictions hold, the ironic end will be, some CEOs blown up by a terrorism wave they helped to create.
Thus ended the lesson and the revolution can now eat its kids
I have to agree that big tech really messed this one up. Their attempt at regulating speech on their platforms (entirely their own right to do however they want) has resulted in both sides being pissed. I had commented on this a while ago that it was like War Games - the only way to win this game was not to play at all. The second they started being the arbitrator of speech they were guaranteed to piss people off. Then they tried to adjust and pissed another group off.
And even before all that crap below up, they had the gov't taking a long and hard look at the anti-trust problem. The platform censorship just threw gasoline on that smoldering fire.
The smartest move now is to fire all their public relations and government affairs folks. They handled this about as poorly as they could.
I dont think Big Tech got every call right, but I really don't see how they please both sides here.
Especially when one side, from the top down, considers everything other than sycophantic praise for its leader to be 'fake news', and the other side has some people opining that even reporting things the other side says without qualification is irresponsible journalism.
If anything, I'd say hindsight makes some of their more dubious decisions (slapping content warnings on stuff deemed to be aimed at undermining the democratic process) look better.
I have to disagree. It’s not about pleasing both sides; it’s about being a fair and unbiased platform. And on that front I think big tech absolutely blew it this time across the board.
Our society is fractured. There is so much hate and whining online. So much righteousness and loathing. And big tech has only amplified the problem. At times they even fan the flames, what with dubious fact checkers and their “hate speech” bans.
I can’t even go on Reddit anymore. I find myself disagreeing with absolutely everyone now that the dissenting opinions have been pushed out and banned.
I mean, I was replying to someone who defined their failure explicitly in terms of it pissing off both sides. Which was always going to happen, unless they unequivocally took one side.
But I have absolutely no doubt that whatever you consider to be 'fair and unbiased' others will regard as unfair, unbalanced and unpleasant.
I tend to have a similar mindset - I have an allergy to groupthink, and when I see groups of people saying false things, even if I generally normally agree with the spirit of the group, I have to at least 'fact check' with a response. But in this strange new bifurcated reality, you get pinned as 'Other' as in, I must be the 'Other side' and thus subject to to some sort of retaliation.
I don't get 'banned' but I get downvoted - as I did on this thread with no real explanation.
I have absolutely no problem with "Fact checking" because at least it shows the original thing. I have a big problem with shadow banning, deleting and outright banning. The latter is censorship.
I agree. I don't envy the position these platforms were put in. The platforms already had policies, but those did not foresee a time when the POTUS would act this way. When someone on the platform with the reach and power of POTUS says things that are objectively false (and potentially dangerous), how should those be handled? I'm not talking about dissenting opinions or a favorable way to look at a topic, but the equivalent of 1+1=3.
There was this ideal of the internet with information being freely distributed and available, that people would seek out truth. What we have seen though is that large groups of people just believe whoever has the bigger microphone.
> The platforms already had policies, but those did not foresee a time when the POTUS would act this way
Yes they did. In fact, in Twitter's case, they explictly altered their policies so that the failure to take action against this very same POTUS would no longer be a blatant failure to enforce it's generally-applicable policies.
Twitter has apparently had something of a change of heart about that blatant favoritism, and adopted completely new rules to reign in the monster their own rule change created on their platform, but it is not at all the case that the rules that were in place until recently were not crafted with this kind of Presidential action in mind; not only was it generally in minf, the rules were, in fact, created to license this kind of action for the benefit of this specific President, without allowing a level playing field for his opponents.
Except one side is pissed at them not doing it enough while the other is pissed at being on the receiving side of the censorship. There is a party of authoritarianism at the moment.
Don't forget "fact checks are a form of censorship".
How did we, as a species, drop so low that to say that the thing a person says is disputed gets blown up into a huge issue.
I have no problem with people of ANY political persuasion being fact checked - is it perfect? No. But is it better than nothing? On balance, it appears so.
Lets not forget that much of the 2016 fake news boom on Facebook was agitated for by US conservatives.
Facebook had a news team that hand-curated top stories (to stop obvious lies going viral). As was the nature of these young news teams, they were more liberal than the average viewer of Fox News. Prominent media personalities on Fox News, as well as US senators agitated that this was biased against conservatives.
Facebook then fired all the editors, and obvious fake news took over the site, with predictable results (who would have thought that the Pope would endorse Trump?).
This incident is important context. Also note that the most engaging content on FB is right-wing conservative content, not left-wing content.
Like, FB tried desperately hard to avoid regulating speech on their platform, but both sides demanded it, leaving them in a position where both groups of partisans think they are biased towards the other side.
> And even before all that crap below up, they had the gov't taking a long and hard look at the anti-trust problem. The platform censorship just threw gasoline on that smoldering fire.
The conflation of these two things makes me very said. There are 100% huge anti-trust concerns around Big Tech, but the censorship crap is a sideshow that will end up preventing any bi-partisan action on this (if I was a super-cynical policy exec at these companies I might even say, just as planned....).
We are censored every day. A newspaper editor censors their writers, your boss censors your reports, your friends censor your bar room bullshit by calling you out on it, your spouse tells you you will not argue with your brother in law again. But this is all implicit censoring - adhering to social norms through social signals (a raised eye brow, being told to buy your round and shut up)
The thing is computers do not do any implicit censoring - and so we are expecting FAANG to step up. But we need firstly a set of agreed rules, then the ability to automatically understand the rules before we even get to due process.
The issue is firstly one of scale - HN kinda sorta works because it had clear rules from the start, abs had a lot of moderation, from early users and mods.
Multiply by 1000x the volume and suddenly dang's keyboard explodes.
Facebook is trying to produce moderation at scale with thousands of human moderators, but they probably will never "succeed" - because success is not defined well enough.
Let me restate that. There are thousands of groups on FAANG - each one has its own evolving rules on what is and is not acceptable. But facebook can only really deal with one set of rules. It will try and manage the lowest common denominator - no child porn, no murder, but it slowly heads towards "define free speech"
The main indicator here is that both sides of every political debate think FAANG is censoring them.
- If you are the moderator and both sides think you are biased, you are probably in the right zone.
The problem is do we as society, really want a handful of private companies deciding what the rules are - deciding for example if a Philipino politician can use FAANG to talk to his electorate (because the electorate is all on facebook, say de facto facebook are garejeeping this)
Society does not particularly want this, Zuckerberg definitely does not want this.
So we need to find a way to have regulations that deal with a set of poorly defined globally circumstances (Philipino election law as well as German hate speech laws), some areas of which are the companies problem, some are individual, some are societal and some a mixture. And we want those solutions to be technically achievable, auditable and not constrain us in the future.
That's quite a lot for a few thousand human moderators in poorly air conditioned offices to deal with.
So if those that think the world is round and those who think it is flat both think the moderator is biased he must be doing something right? Both sides are wrong because technically the earth isn't exactly flat? What about climate change deniers vs climate scientists?
I was thinking "Democrats and Republicans" not Flat earthers vs ... umm everyone else.
The problem is not the obvious cases. Child porn is a crime in every country, it can be hunted down online. Society generally agrees on that. Similarly for flat earthers. 99% of people in a pub or street will roll their eyes at this shit. It's only because it's all over youtube and so are we that we think it's big. Problems where most societies mostly agree are not the issue.
We could build some kind of rebuttal system - a distributed URL based downvoting system. This would help with the labelling / tagging of dubious posts - at the prominence level of the original post. (ie some W3C tagging for fact checking)
But this is also not about agreeing the same set of facts - people rarely disagree over facts unless facts lead to different political positions. And that's the real issue.
Climate change is probably too huge to cover but let me try - Climate change does not have a solution - the bomb has dropped we are just waiting for the shockwave to hit. Now we can stop pouring fuel on the fire (metaphor breaking sound) by moving off fossil fuel, but also we need to handle the massive changes involving water rights (hello India China) immigration as people get displaced by flooding (hello everywhere).
Denial of this is a human response - because otherwise you have to welcome massive change and people who are not confident their needs will be looked after by the establishment.
This is the real reason for the disparity in numbers of deniers in US and canada / europe - if US built a welfare state tomorrow it would see a massive drop off in climate change denial.
So I think I lost my thread - but fact checking is only part of the politics problem - rapid rebuttal for every stupid online statement is a fine thing to aim
for - something good recommendation algorithms could really help with !
But it stops there. Yes it is fine to mandate Ford and GM build cars with airbags and seatbelts - but it is crazy to ask them to build more parking spaces or solve rush hour.
Same goes for online political discussions - YouTube must "fix" (god knows what how) recommendations and facebook must fix the newsfeed and twitter must something. But it has to stop somewhere around the point that someone reading a post is informed - that it is clear and obvious there is debate around what is being said.
After that it is about human biases and cognitive failures - ie politics.
We should work to ensure everyone has the same set of facts. Yes.
But the same set of facts when run through different mental models come up with different actions.
And I don't think it is right to have FAANG ensure everyone has the same mental model. That's what politics is about - and the fact that two people can have the same facts but use different mental models is basically the difference between every political party ever - and is why everyone thinks they are being censored - because if they weren't censored then obviously everyone would vote their way.
On a side note this is something software gives us hope for - I can conceive of building a politics observatory - a sort of version of that UK economy coloured water experiment - where you can view the economy globally - the shows made in China shipped to Fermany and sold - and see how immigration or welfare changes the model.
I think it's possible to have people build up a real software model - to try and reflect in software what their own biases are. I think if this was an app everyone had it would have interesting repercussions- would everyone tend towards a common model? Could you ask for explanations why your model on (prejudice dunjoir) was wrong?
Hang on - I just described a university education.
Saying that the president was born in Kenya is not running facts through different mental models, it is disinformation. Saying there was widespread fraud in the election with zero evidence is disinformation. Saying jews were behind 9/11 is disinformation. If we can't recognize that these are weaponized attacks, not differences in opinion, then we can't defend against them.
But these are the easy edge cases. It should be trivial (it was trivial) to rebut.
The problem is not that there was no evidence Obama was Kenyan, it's that there were plenty of people who wanted to believe it. Because they did not want a Black president, or because their mental model is so far away from reality that they think it's possible for someone to cheat that huge.
Then the issue is not everyone having same facts in front of them - it's everyone being willing to accept facts, and so change their own mental models. And then we are back to politics.
Look, I fully support some system of global rebuttal. It will mean no politician can open their mouths without opposition rebuttal - but that's pretty much where we are now in mainstream media. (it's an argument that this is an attraction of online social media - there was no rebuttal (at least no rebuttal that appeared in the same timeline)
I am less happy about the idea of FAANG deleting posts - deleting criminal posts is a tough call (which crinalmlaw to use etc), deleting minsinformation - that's a huge open wound
But the issue is not misinformation - the issue is fertile ground these posts find. And that is about mental models and that is about changing peoples internal mental models of the world - that is getting others to agree with you and that is human politics - and there is no tech fix for that. That is schools and education and society and diversity and a feeling of belonging and investment in society and shared protection.
Surprised the countries with the poor welfare systems have this problem worst? Don't be.
Worried about politicians who are always facing rebuttal - just imagine a world where politicians have to treat their statements like scientific publications - we might start getting somewhere !
Education was part of it but isn't a silver bullet. I had coworkers that espoused both the 9/11 and the Kenya thing, despite it being easy to rebut. Both were highly educated individuals. https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisit... makes the case that there is no hard distinction between social problems and tech problems in online communication, the two are intertwined. This medium itself has moderation, if you tried posting either of the above two conspiracies as facts, you would be flagged and downvoted. That is what makes this forum readable instead of a dumpster fire. If Facebook or twitter did the same, I don't see how that would be an open wound. I don't think facebook and twitter owe people the ability to run misinformation campaigns against jewish people, black people, or anyone else. If you want to do that, go post it on your own blog, email someone, or call them.
Countries with poor welfare systems are that way in large part because there is propaganda against them. Welfare in the US is painted as communist. Same thing with education.
I was hoping to be clearer - FAANG absolutely should be tagging misinformation with some label or correction. [x]
Its deleting posts that gets sticky. And yes your point about Twitter et al lending people some of their reputation / Google juice is a very underrated part of the problem. But how do we define content moderation rules online? Who sets those rules, where and when do they apply? These are not things to leave to private companies with ad revenue.
[x] In fact I think this is too important to leave to tech companies. I would like to see some W3C standard for tagging a URI - that is a distributed comments system where the browser / client SHOULD / MUST show that "in the cloud" there are rebuttals to this statement / position. So the rebuttal is seen where the rebutted is shown. The more views a rebuttal gets the more prominent it is in the list of rebuttals.
Yes it will mean everything everywhere has rebuttal but ... that's kind of true anyway. And I like the upthread approach of a common (W3C) distributed moderation (ie a jury of ones randomly selected peers). I think the idea seems workable - but more study is needed :-)
Should HN not define their own content moderation rules? My view is that governments should have some general moderation rules, no death threats, no CP, ect. Sites should be able to have stricter moderation rules, no claiming that Obama was born in Kenya.
I personally prefer smaller communities like forums such as this one, slack groups, or other forums, compared to Facebook or twitter.
I am not sure how a W3C standard for tagging a URI comment would work. Aren't a lot of URIs not even opinion/fact based things? Like if my uri is a product on Amazon or a piece of sheet music there wouldn't be any rebuttals right? But idk seems interesting, would like to see if it worked.
I think there needs to be baseline levels yes - Inwoukd argue that one of these things is that if a platform enables public publishing (still to be defined!) it must have some rebuttal mechanism, and implement some level of censorship (at the criminal level). This means for example I cannot post (in the UK) child porm or threats or hate speech. Dang would have to delete it. But additionally if i post for example that Democrats stole votes from Kent County, HN should have a means for you to flag it, and link that flag to some useful site about how correlations actually work.
It would change the nature of HN slightly yes, but it could be done with little impact - I think. But having some floor level of debate seems like a social necessity.
PS The Indian issue with WhatsApp a couple of years back makes defining "publish" quite difficult if you can manage to create murderous mobs with opt in messaging systems....
The problem with Facebook's censorship isn't one of scale. I think they're pretty good at censoring large numbers of people, as we've seen over the last several years.
The problem is with determining the standard by which people are censored. Currently, like most large social media companies, Facebook's standard is largely arbitrary, opaque and unequally enforced. Posting audio of Melania Trump's personal phone calls is fine, even though it violates Facebook's policy on posting someone else's personal data without their permission, but posting the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop receives an instant ban. Posting info about the Steele Dossier was fine, even though none of it was verified, but posting any articles about the Biden Ukraine scandal received bans...because none of it was verified.
I'm less concerned with censorship and more concerned with the censorship standard being uniformly applied, and right now, on most sites, it's not.
Most of the staff they use to censor people are young people with left-leaning politics, so even well meaning censors will inadvertently censor conservatives far more often and without explanation.
I think minds.com probably does censorship the best. There's a public log of what gets removed, and it can be appealed to a public group of randomly selected users to judge whether or not the removal was warranted. That's both scalable (since they don't have to hire thousands of moderators) and is responsive and accountable to the community it's trying to foster.
This is how the internet is supposed to work. Encounters damage, routes around it. Censorship is damage, and people are routing around it.
As someone who never engaged with FB/Twitter from the beginning because I thought they were terrible ideas (all the rules, risks, and challenges of elite-level competition with none of the benefits), I was very glad to read this because this kind of divergence is precisely what creates growth. The platforms were becoming a ceiling on growth, and their policies have created the critical mass to start new ones. This will be a great time to be in tech.
I see it as the opposite: this may be how a technical network is supposed to work, but it's not how a society is supposed to work.
The internet has created the ability for any given subculture to discover instant validation and reinforce their beliefs into a tribe, which further solidifies and extremifies those beliefs.
It's a psychological power almost equivalent to a nuclear reaction: beliefs and ideas that might have naturally died out pre-internet are instead amplified and spread, and dug deeper into peoples' minds.
This is a critical time to be in tech, but not for the growth: for the need to design solutions to that problem. Censorship is a primitive attempt at stopping this psychological nuclear reaction; people are finding ways around it. We need a bigger, better solution to the reaction, lest society destroy itself through unfettered tribalism.
> The internet has created the ability for any given subculture to discover instant validation and reinforce their beliefs into a tribe, which further solidifies and extremifies those beliefs.
I don't believe this is true. I remember "Ye Olde Days" (TM) of the Internet. You went to an independent forum or mailing list that supported your interest (video games, music, politics) and then you argued with everyone in your "tribe" about video games and music and politics regardless of the purpose of the forum (which is hilarious and endearing to me). You had friends and you had frenemies but you didn't have strangers. It was nice. It was a community. Some interest brought you all together but you didn't stay there solely for that interest. You stayed for the people.
Now what do we have? Complete corporate domination and centralization. All interests are segmented into hashtags and subreddits but exist in the same super-massive platform. And there conversation is moderated by two entities. Moderators and the mob. There is no community anymore because the community is too fluid and too large (sometimes its everyone on the internet). You don't know the people you argue with. And so argument can never be taken on good faith.
You know, I had more stuff written but can't quite complete the thought in words. I think I'll just make an alternative.
You're right. The way we design our social platforms has a gigantic impact on how people see each other, and talk to each other, and the impact that has on us.
Perhaps the problem isn't the self-reinforcement, but rather the platforms being designed more on instantaneous engagement and addiction rather than talking and human-level discussion.
We've devolved internet discourse into very simplistic, unintelligent, instant gratification that's friendly to advertising and monetization.
That makes a lot more sense, and why I think it's so important to think of this problem as a much bigger systemic ecosystem. The design of a platform or a system impacts how people behave; the ones we have now have just the right mix of characteristics to cause this sort of insular tribalism.
Screamy and thirsty seem to be innate to most (important) human discussions. So we can throw those out. They're irrelevant to the platform problem if the platform didn't create them (amplification is not relevant either in my mind).
So then, did users "choose" censored, algorithmic ones. Technically... but I think the nature of the censoring and the algorithms changed. It went from pulling spam and porn to pulling "harmful" content. The algorithm went from "WHERE user_id IN ..." to "curation".
I don't think those things are necessarily bad or evil. But these things started as open platforms to connect everyone. Now they're reverting to "communities" and people are adapting. People are forming "communities" on different "platforms".
The whole social media marketplace is so muddled and ripe for disruption. Network effects are bogus. Its just an excuse incumbents and academics use to rationalize their dominance post hoc. Twitter, Facebook, Parler, the rest will fail and fail fast with the right alternative.
The worst argument for designing an experience is that users want it.
We can do far better.
But I get your point. Realistically this has to be a societal change that demands better social media platforms, not something just thrown into the market with no demand.
> The worst argument for designing an experience is that users want it.
This statement may be the crux of disagreement in the culture wars as well. To me this is an alien and hostile idea against all that can be good. I'm sure you have some reasoning based on an experience behind it, but it's very likely one of those irreconcilable differences of interests that we have conventions and civilization to navigate and negotiate around. I don't think we persuade each other, but rather, negotiate boundaries. Those boundaries are what we understand as tolerance.
I am just a user experience designer. There is a wide, wide rift between what users desire and what will actually solve their problems. I'm paid to reconcile that difference.
I do not intend to design society. But then, people are, as we speak. I don't know what's better--letting them design for what people want regardless of what it does to society, or designing for a society that's better regardless of what individuals desire.
We're primitive creatures. All of us, myself included. We're mostly run by our lizard brains, going after what spurts the happy chemicals into our brains.
I don't think society should be shaped to battle against human nature; but I certainly don't think uncontrolled human nature should shape society. As in all things, a balance.
The only community you have is your friends, and your friends usually have similar beliefs to you. So the space where you could have people with significantly different political views meet on the same terms is gone.
The point is that your friends don't always have similar beliefs to you. You don't think rednecks in the south play video games or soup up their cars or listen to rock and roll, the same as a Biden voter from Los Angeles?
So if you set up a forum for fans of the Atari, you get all kinds. They get to know each other. And then they talk about whatever.
But several things have smashed that all to pieces.
The first and main problem is that everything is a single site with millions of people now. You can go over to /r/atari and talk about Atari, but if you try to talk to any of those people about climate change they'll direct you to a different sub, which is full of entirely different people who you don't know or trust.
Then the sites that are independent are often operated by the company that makes the product. Sony might host a PlayStation forum, but they're going to boot you out for talking about politics or religion.
And then there's the fact that everything has become disposable. What do you do with your broken out of warranty Atari? Get a soldering iron. What do you do with a broken out of warranty iMac? Get a rubbish bin. But then there's nothing to build a community around, because everything is an appliance that you can't improve or repair.
Well said! Makes me think about the scope of tribalism before the internet. Without a doubt there was some, perhaps to a lesser degree though? I think certain views/opinions were more privately kept, perhaps shared with family members and close friends but very rarely shared with people outside their inner circle -- everything you said had your name attached to it and thus carried risks. I suppose you could write newspaper columns under a pseudonym, maybe mask your voice/face on radio or TV, but that was likely the most anonymous you could be. The internet is more or less anonymous by default. Should users be allowed to hide behind anonymity? I have to say yes because otherwise it just feels like 1984.
I think that it's possible to minimize tribalism by enabling civil discussion that shares many perspectives, with all hostility removed (and perhaps minimal emotions), and most importantly, let the audience form their own opinions. I really think that technology can solve this. Like all ideas, success is entirely dependent on implementation.
> I think that it's possible to minimize tribalism by enabling civil discussion that shares many perspectives, with all hostility removed (and perhaps minimal emotions), and most importantly, let the audience form their own opinions.
It is unsurprising that HN commentators think that the best discussion forum would be one without any emotion or hostility.
I think it is important, however, to guard against the hubris of porting your own model (whether it is American-style democracy or HN-style discussion forums) to every corner of the globe.
It might be apparent to us why this model is better, but it might be equally apparent to other, more combative internet commentators, why their model is better. When very smart people on both sides think that a different approach is best, it might be worth treading carefully.
I wonder if instead of it being a technical solution it will be a social one. That maybe in the future we will look at people constantly hooked on their phones and posting on social media the way we now look at smoking.
E.g where it was once totally normal to light up a cigarette in the elevator, the subway, the theater, etc, it is now acceptable to spend every moment of down time staring at your phone, scrolling.
If there is wider recognition of the negative (mental) health effects of that it will be less acceptable to do it in public, and less acceptable to espouse views or information learned from such a source.
Censorship is the last-resort solution. Ideally, you'd want to have control over people's education and social structures to prevent deviation before any censorship is even needed.
It's a real shame, because it seems we had reached a peak with the advent of mandatory state school and television. Now things are going downhill with more and more diverse subcultures allowed to build upon themselves and explore the limits and avenues for improvement in their ideas.
There has to be a way to keep people in line with our society's values while still giving them an impression of freedom.
Recognizing the satire, I agree with the implicit critique that you're making.
That said, I think we also have to recognize that there is no true vacuum of discourse - ie.
> There has to be a way to keep people in line with our society's values while still giving them an impression of freedom.
Even if this is not what we're moving to with public schooling, it is essentially what we're moving to in the private sphere post-Citizen's United, etc. only the values are dictated by those with wealth, rather than procedural, governmental power.
We need to start understanding that there is no such thing as a natural state of freedom; there is only freedom from and freedom to, within specific environmental constraints and power structures. We are always influenced--the question is just what influences we want to prevent, design, or control and which we want to leave undesigned or "free."
It's trying to explicit and bring grandparent's ideas to their logical conclusion. I dislike slippery slope-type arguments, but I fail to see how one can coherently agree with their comment and not mine.
I appreciate the sarcasm. Some responses in this thread are giving me a bad vibe. This site is full of users thinking they can somewhat engineer society towards what they think its a proper state and that aligns very well with the currant behavior of big social media corporations. I wonder when did we tech people deviated so much towards being aspiring tyrants...
It makes more sense when you think about the fact that society is already engineered to be in some state, and the power of social media companies appears to be influencing that in the wrong direction.
If you're okay with putting society to the whims of its current incentives and the corporations' addictive advertising-optimized technology, you're free to your opinion, but that seems even more dystopian to me than attempting to do better.
At the very least I think arguing for sustaining the current complex designed incentivized structured state of society is morally equal to arguing for some different state.
It's fanfic of that scene in 1984 where the person (whose name I forgot) responsible for designing NewSpeak talked about how the goal was to simplify language until dissent was impossible to reason about, much less discuss.
Very funny; not arguing for censorship here, but for the design of social media technology that reinforces humanity and not primitive dopamine hit engagement driven advertising. What people say is not the problem.
Anyway, we are already in a balanced system that keeps people in line with society's values while still giving them an impression of freedom. The question is just which direction you go from there.
The problem with your arguments is that they are full of assumptions of things that you say are good for society and humanity, while we don't actually have a scientific understanding of what the humanity is for to even be able to decide what is good or not to get there. Which, of course, makes all the arguments imply a power in someone's hands to decide what is "good" for humanity and society or what they are for as long as it's not "primitive dopamine hit engagement driven advertising", but someone more aligned with your ideals. I hope you can see how this is not much different from somebody else you don't align with having that power.
First, in no world am I arguing that I personally get to decide what is good or bad. Lord no.
Second, your argument devolves to everyone should be able to decide what to do for themselves or their company without discussion about what is good or bad for society or the environment at large.
So no, I can’t agree with that.
At some point we need to be able to discuss how to make society better. If that’s not allowed, then that’s not a society I want to live in.
Censoring and filtering ideas will just lead to evasion of the filters. It will never work, we need to embrace free speech and let people believe as they choose.
The long term solution might lie in educational technology. Can we find scalable ways to teach children critical thinking, epistemology, and metacognition?
The last two sentences say that censorship is not a functional solution to the problem and that we need to find something better, so I’d say very definitely no.
I’m not the person you responded to, of course, but I don’t see how you could’ve read their post and thought they were advocating for inescapable censorship.
It's not a gripe, it's a reality. I have no horse in this race other than the systemic outcome.
Censorship (or official annotation, let's call it) was an attempt to curb the tribalism or put some controls on the spread of it; I'm certainly saying that it will not work.
I can't imagine alternative solutions at this time, but we need to. It will likely be some sort of system we can't yet imagine, and it will likely need to be at the societal level of mutual agreement. Think less of controlling speech, more "wow cars can kill people, we should probably agree to some rules around driving them around."
I expect things will get much worse before those types of systems are put in place.
By saying I have no horse in the race, I'm saying that I'm trying to take an objective viewpoint on what is happening and what impact that has, not that I have no opinions or moral positions on the matter. Keep those separate.
Keep in mind also that censorship is a government matter: the government should not censor people; that's enshrined in the 1st amendment. But private platforms and companies have every right to design their communications systems the way they see fit, and I expect them to do so ethically with societal impact in mind.
I expect soon the government will need to enter into this race and take some wider action, but I don't know what that will be, nor how it will play with our constitution. It's going to be a wild ride as the psychological nuclear weapons we've created duke it out with the individual rights principles we've laid in stone hundreds of years ago. I can only hope we design some systemic solution that does not require that fight to take place.
And just to give an idea of the solution type I have in mind: right now the social network systems we have are optimized for addiction and engagement of content, and quick viral spread of content with minimal thought. Could we instead design systems that are more about human communication and understanding? Could we alter our existing platforms to tune down the addictive tribal dopamine hit in their nature? I bet that would have a large impact.
In other words, simply censoring speech without considering the design of the technology would be foolish. The platforms, not the speech, are the problem.
No. I'm saying that censorship isn't the long-term solution here, because it's untenable from a human rights perspective as well as simply a functional perspective (people don't like it).
We'll need to find something better, but it's difficult to imagine what shape that'll take at this point.
then I would say your vision is incoherent since you obviously aren't for small pockets "absolute free speech" but aren't willing to commit yourself to controlling speech ubiquitously which would be necessary to prevent the former.
I would say you're not looking wide enough here. Absolute free speech isn't a problem in isolation by any means; but there are impacts to the ability of that to grow into self-reinforcing belief that doesn't match reality. One appears harmless, like a single alpha particle; but the other is an impact akin to an alpha particle chain reaction, or nuclear explosion. Similar impact on society, I would argue.
Could we conceive of a way not to control speech, but to inform or educate or provide information in context--or do something, anything so that it doesn't have the power to self-reinforce and create psychological weapons of mass destruction? What if it's the design of our current social networks around instant engagement and addictive content that's the root of the problem? Could we change the nature and design of that platform without restricting the speech on it whatsoever?
I have to believe it's possible. I'm under no illusion that I know the answer, or that the answer is even something that we have a name for yet. This is not contradictory or incoherent, it's just yet unknown.
While I disagree with the GP, I think you are drawing a false dichotomy and there are multiple conceptions of free speech besides the negative, non-interferential, liberal one that would permit limits on some speech without "ubiquitous" control.
Take, for instance, limits on total expenditures on political speech over $1,000,000.
No. The post explicitly said that censorship isn't solving the problem and we need a better approach.
The problem is the asymmetry between bad-faith and good-faith action. In tightly-connected local societies that asymmetry is generally countered by reputation effects and limited scope of bad-faith action. In the worst cases, it's countered by societies being small enough that even when bad-faith ideas take over their spread is limited.
Technology has broken down the limitations. Information is spread by entities with no history or reputation at all (Twitter bots, for instance). The spread of bad-faith ideas is no longer limited spatially. The result of this is that obvious scams like QAnon (created to sell merchandise) thriving because there are now mechanisms to bypass all the natural limitations that used to constrain them throughout centuries of history.
Censorship is kind of like slapping a tourniquet on it. It may stop some of the worst symptoms, but it has a lot of terrible side effects and doesn't work that well anyway.
The biggest advances that need to be made are in recognizing that there is a problem in the first place, and that a "marketplace of ideas" is not equipped to deal with asymmetric bad actors. I don't know what the solution is, but "marketplace of ideas" has proven insufficient to deal with the real world. We need people to be looking for something better instead of claiming there is no problem.
While I agree with that, it all depends on which direction you look at it.
For example, how much of this reaction is caused by the earlier amplification of other ideas that would have just as easily died out?
I’ve been watching the political machine for a long time and one thing I can say for conservatives is that they are consistent in what they “say” they believe. It hasn’t changed much in years and I can at least respect that.
On the other side, there seems to be a new cause every week. Maybe it’s simply better use of technology, but most of what I see on Twitter seems to be messages designed to benefit the left. Whether it’s drawing attention to a subculture that feels marginalized or convincing that same group that everybody on the right hates them, it’s a pattern that’s really hard to deny. IMO Reddit is far worse that Twitter or FB in this respect too.
Nobody has the energy, time or capacity for the amount of things the right is supposed to hate.
I don’t think a different platform is going to change any of that. I think it’s just going to create a new channel.
It's disturbing to think the socio-technological phenomenon that let my fun, happy community grow to multiple 10k+ person conventions and hundreds of smaller ones worldwide also gave actual Nazis and various schools of white supremacy a new life.
The argument that we need to stop tribalism to preserve society is both an un-self-conscious conservativism and a more pernicious appeal to cultural homogenization, which is what the dominance of the platforms caused, and which these innovations are a reaction to.
There is no diversity in 140 characters of closely monitored claptrap, and there is no risk and opportunity in trust and safety. There is no culture in a homogenized overton window, and there is no innovation in walled gardens.
The very idea that we need to suppress ideas for fear that the ignorant masses may be exposed to them is a fatuous, aspirational elitism that is the very reason the platforms have become stagnant.
> The very idea that we need to suppress ideas for fear that the ignorant masses may be exposed to them is a fatuous, aspirational elitism that is the very reason the platforms have become stagnant.
There are ideas and then there are lies. I think the problem is the lies, not the ideas. If an idea, like that the Earth is flat, can only find support in lies, the idea will go away if people aren't free to lie.
To be clear, a lie is a proposition insincerely asserted with the intention of causing others to sincerely believe it.
Yes, but people who get annoyed by someone else's ideas just calls them "lies."
I, for instance, watched in astonishment as a relatively straightforward story about Hunter Biden's emails somehow became a Russian disinformation campaign.
I still vote Democrat, but it is the growth of exactly this attitude that you've identified that is causing me to move increasingly away from considering myself a "Democrat".
I can't see how people fail to notice the snobbish elitism underlying "we need to manage the discourse so that people's behavior is under control."
It's amazing how cyclical this sort of stuff is. Plato's Republic was enmeshed with a similar logic: that there is a natural way for society to progress, that human society is interfering with this natural way and that is a problem, and that we ought to have philosopher-kings (read: techies & politicians) to shape beliefs and discourse into a more natural (and thus "good") direction.
G.A. Cohen's writings on the history of philosophy have a scathing critique of this sort of thinking that I recommend.
I do not think we need to manage speech or control discourse whatsoever. If you think that's the idea here, you're not thinking deep enough about the nature of the systems that are problematic right now.
We've designed communication systems that are optimized for instant gratification, engagement, getting the dopamine hit of seeing things you agree with or angry at, and rapidly moving to the next. That's not speech, that's a designed system of attention seeking, all with the primary objective of getting eyeballs on advertisements and content primarily.
We've designed communication platforms that cause us to cease seeing each other as human beings, and instead condensed thoughts and memes that are simply repeated to conform and get reinforced for a quick natural drug.
I do not think we should control the discourse or have structural control over what's right or wrong to say or think; that would be absurdly dystopian.
I do think we need to change our systems to incentivize human context around that speech, and reinforce our own humanity in how we read and respond to it.
I think it's possible to design better platforms that don't bring out the worst in society, and that we should do so.
Anyone who has studied the history of philosophy would know that the arguments you are making are classics among defenders of censorship: limiting speech for the "sake of speech" (over attention-seeking), "incentivize the context", "reinforce our humanity." None of these exempt you from managing speech, you're just trying to launder your values to a higher level - like what "good speech" is or whether a given speech-act appropriately "reinforces our own humanity." Tune the knobs of the social media platform until it starts producing speech I am more comfortable with.
Indeed much of JS Mill's On Liberty (1859) was dedicated to responding to these and others.
> we need to change our systems to incentivize human context around that speech
Who is the "we" who "should" do so? How does that "we" coordinate so that everyone building these systems builds them in the same way?
And why should these systems be optimized for whatever extrinsic goal you like better than "attention seeking"? That is managing speech.
The key difference here is that the speech is already highly managed and influenced to a degree never before seen in history. To think otherwise would be foolish.
Twitter isn't some natural state of the world that is pristine and unassailable; Facebook isn't the square in the park where people can speak their voice, and other choose to listen, participate, or walk along. Neither are anything like a book or newspaper.
If you're saying we shouldn't optimize or manage or turn the dials of these systems, then that's accepting that the current management and optimization and dials are somehow, inexplicably, acceptable or natural.
Someone has designed these systems and is influencing speech with their decisions. I don't have any power over them, but someone does, and the dials and designs of the system and the type of speech and communication they reinforce or encourage will change over time.
What gives them, the designers of the systems, any more right to manage their own system and the speech on it by their design choices? Are we to simply accept the corporations' design of their systems without critique or argument?
Not taking any action is to accept the current action, which still influences society. Not managing systems is to accept the current state of those systems, which still manages speech.
I do not see any difference whatsoever in those paths, so I will argue for trying to improve the systems.
OOC are you a Parler user/have you visited the site? If this is a victory for free speech, it's certainly a Pyrrhic one. Twitter and facebook comments seem like the pinnacle of civil discourse next to the stuff I found on Parler just by creating an account and following all the recommended content in the onboarding process.
No, it’s awful and will ultimately justify creating the same government power over cyberspace that it exerts over airwaves. It a painful example of how the miracle of technology doesn’t mean tech companies can govern.
It’s hard stuff, on the one hand, if 1999 era tech was all we had, I’d likely be sick or dead as remote work wouldn’t have been possible for me. On the other, with 1999 era tech, we wouldn’t have a reality show host president fueling a pandemic to get more attention in media.
Right wing lunatics (and other fringe types) weren’t powerful in 1990 because they couldn’t broadcast their filth. They got traction because the rules were loosened for radio and angry white man radio became a thing.
You have the state of shitshow today because any lunatic can broadcast anything and gather a following.
I mostly agree. However, it'll be interesting to see how well new competitors can fair in an industry like social media where the product (i.e. us) is already near monopolized on a few large platforms.
Personally, I like Parler's interface, and don't mind that it's kind of a conservative bent, but I've heard from other conservatives that the interface isn't as good as Twitters. And it's smaller audience is already keeping some big-names away from it, even people who would theoretically really like the platform, like Ben Shapiro or Scott Adams. They've both created accounts there, but have both signaled that it's just too small of a platform and is a waste of their time to post there, so they stick with Twitter.
Those personalities you mention (Shapiro, Adams, etc) are artifacts of the prior platforms. It's meaningless if not better that they do not move. What makes this exciting is new characters and economics will emerge.
Former British PM Tony Blair once related an anecdote about why he decided to run for the leadership, when Labour had just lost hard in an election and he heard their campaign lead rant, "I can't believe it, the people voted against us...what's wrong with them?" And that is how he saw his opportunity.
Between this cultural shift, tons of idle cash sitting on balance sheet sidelines looking for productive assets and growth, and a winter of semi-lockdowns ahead of us with nothing to do but code, next summer is going to be the most epic year for startups since '96-97. That is, assuming civilization isn't wiped out, but I'm pretty well hedged.
I’m starting to think that this could actually be good news for left-leaning people. It’s entirely possible that separated from the people they usually fight against, and isolated in their own platform, conservative voices, people who have made careers out of rhetorical conflict, will begin to fight among themselves. and this can only benefit the left.
It’s also very possible that Parler will only go uncensored for so long. At some point, if they get big enough, it could easily become apparent that they’re losing ad revenue by hosting certain opinions, resulting in similar changes to those of Twitter and Facebook
> It’s entirely possible that separated from the people they usually fight against, and isolated in their own platform, conservative voices, people who have made careers out of rhetorical conflict, will begin to fight among themselves.
The same is true for the left, isn't it? this will just increase the social bubbles we live in. Now instead of different recommendations and content shown in an app, you've got a different app.
It's already been happening, with Glenn Greenwald, Matthew Yglesias, Taibbi and others leaving their respective companies because they can't stand the bullshit rhetoric anymore.
"The left eating itself" is a trope that goes back a number of years to JRE and others.
What a platform like Parler does is that it gives a voice to "the right" and unites it, regardless of whether they are stoking the flames of conspiracy, or are simply "conservative" in whichever way. Having your own turf is a powerful thing. After all, see Twitter and the blue checkmarks. I'm sure more of this is to come in various forms. There is also the reddit alternative Voat but I'm not sure if it took off properly at all.
I don't have a dog in this race but it's fascinating to watch it all the same.
I doubt that. As someone who uses a lot of these mostly-conservative sites, I'm not seeing a ton of infighting. If anything, it's been the opposite. I'm seeing it unite a bunch of different factions that used to fight.
And to be clear, Parler isn't uncensored. They still censor things. They're a business trying to attract an audience to make money, so they have to censor something just to protect the brand. Like posting a photo of literal shit. (I'm not kidding, the CEO explicitly said they'd ban posts like that) They're just a lot lighter on political censorship, since the big market demand created by Twitter has been for a platform that allows more political expression.
You're thinking in an us-vs-them mentality. Really, we should be working towards a community where people can respect differing opinions, and not just a bunch of isolated sites full of extremists on either side.
> Really, we should be working towards a community where people can respect differing opinions
I agree, but there is a difference between an opinion and disinformation. FFS, masks have been made political, and only one group is doing that. Before that it was AGW, before that it was evolution. I don't know about you, but I've recognized a pattern and quite frankly have zero interest in "respecting" it.
It hasn't always been to this extent. People used to share a same basic set of facts about the world, based "mainstream" news media. Now there is little agreement about basic facts.
What would be "be good news for left-leaning people" would be if this siphons off the crazy "conservatives" so the actual conservatives could do their thing.
I tried to create a throwaway account and comment on a Reddit thread yesterday. It was denied due to lack of karma.
A few weeks ago I tried to create a throwaway on Reddit to create a new post but the post was immediately removed due to lack of karma.
Twitter now requires I provide a cell phone number to create an account. It throws up on me by suspending my account if a new account is unused for a few days. Requires I prove I’m not a bot to unsuspend it.
Facebook basically requires that I provide a birth certificate to sign up.
If you want to spread misinformation you basically need to be on an alternative platform but it’s also helpful for people like me who don’t want to give up my privacy to a social media company.
The Reddit and Twitter controls, at least, are attempts to stem the tide of bots and spam. They’re trying to keep the quality of discussion higher on their platform, and I appreciate that as a user. I think the controls are reasonable.
Facebook is creepy as fuck though. Recently I was logging on from a new location, and haven’t given them my phone number for 2FA. The only option they provided was for me to send in photos of my DRIVER’S LICENSE - are you kidding me?
I think you can trigger that on any account that hasn't bit the bullet and send in copies of their identification papers by telling Facebook the user is using a fake name. I am surprised no national government has stepped to tell Facebook to desist.
I've deleted my Facebook account early last year. Then some service I wanted to experiment released with only Facebook login support. Facebook won't let me re-enable my account regardless of what I do or information I send. Creating a new account is also impossible since the number was assigned to that account. I've basically gave up because this is worse than a bank KYC and Facebook itself isn't worth it.
I suspect they do this to stem the use of abandoned accounts by bad actors. Emphasis on "suspect" because I don't have a Twitter account or look at tweets unless someone else links to them, and then invariably I still can't see them because I get an error message.
1. Tech platforms are uncomfortable with certain viewpoints expressed on their platforms and seek to limit these viewpoints.
2. Instead of changing people’s minds (isn’t the evidence overwhelmingly conclusive that people rarely change political viewpoints?), people flock to “community bubbles” like Parler, TheDonald, etc where they feel welcome.
3. This marginalisation leads to increasing extremism; going from the likes of “immigrants bad” we saw in 2016 to disputing and attempting to overturn democracy.
> 1. Tech platforms are uncomfortable with certain viewpoints expressed on their platforms and seek to limit these viewpoints.
For the most part, those "viewpoints" are verifiable falsehoods, conspiracy theories, and other types of disinformation and misinformation. For instance, the recent migrations to Parler are chiefly people who want to deny the legitimate US presidential election result and spread false claims of widespread vote fraud.
Using the term "viewpoint" like you did is misleading, since it has the effect of making literal lies sound like legitimate differences of opinion.
> 3. This marginalisation leads to increasing extremism; going from the likes of “immigrants bad” we saw in 2016 to disputing and attempting to overturn democracy.
Eh, not so much. A lot of the recent "increasing extremism" (for instance QAnon and Boogaloo Bois), occurred on mainstream social networks like Facebook and Twitter. While pushing crazies and extremists to places like Gab and Parler probably radicalizes many of them further, it also isolates them from the wider community, which helps reduce their ability to recruit new people into their lunacy.
So what? People should be free to discuss stupid and wrong ideas.
Btw: I think conspiracy theories are good indicators for what certain people want to believe. I personally don't want to be disconnected from these indicators.
> So what? People should be free to discuss stupid and wrong ideas.
And they are, but if they want to do it on Twitter, Twitter gets to have its say as well. However, the conspiracy theorists don't seem to like it when Twitter exercises its rights by labeling their tweets, like in this case.
As for why this matters, people who want to live in functioning democracies have a strong interest in making sure the truth prevails in public discourse, and that lies find the habitat difficult.
ask jim watkins or weev or dick masterson about that.
alternative platforms get to exist on a small scale as long as they maintain obscurity, but as soon as old media releases a black pr scarepiece, they get Esther Aronowitz'ed pretty quickly.
>people who want to live in functioning democracies have a strong interest in making sure the truth prevails in public discourse, and that lies find the habitat difficult.
i think you will find that every conspiratorial thinker completely agrees with that sentiment.
"Twitter gets to have it's say" Free speech is more than just a law... it's an idea and a philosophy.
Part of making sure "truth prevails" is having open discourse about topics. That involves people with "Wrong" ideas the ability to talk.
When platforms like Facebook and Twitter become the arbiter of what's "right"? Then people will leave those platforms because lawfully they have the "right" to censor their platform... but people WILL talk about it elsewhere.
Facebook/Twitter may win this "battle" by purposefully influencing an election by hiding disinformation they disagree with (while allowing disinformation they are okay with)... but they'll lose the war as other platforms gain momentum and legitimacy.
The internet will route itself around the censorship.
What place does someone with the delusion that '2+2=7' have in 'prevailing the Truth'. Such a person only frustrates that search for truth. They don't make the outcome faster, easier or more true, do they?
What place does "russian collusion" have? because "2+2=7" is provably true/false... but Russian collusion? not so much... meanwhile, it's "truth" that's allowed to be spoken of without repercussion...
Because life isn't as simple as "2+2=7"... it's opinions and people saying "my opinion is valid and yours is banned from open discussion".
Because I can find plenty of examples of stuff that isn't as clear as flat-earthers or pizzagate that's being blocked from public discorse.
Ok, but let's start with stuff that is provably false, yet is debated all along.
For example: There is a climate crisis. This is a scientifically proven fact, not an opinion. Yet people deny it, often with the argument "I'm entitled to this opinion." No. You are not, because it is not an opinion; at most it is a delusion, at worst it is a lie (that you might honestly believe in). This is a 2+2=4 situation, or as near as one can get; yet one that even heads of "modern" states keep saying that is anything but 4.
Once we start from the basis that "there is a climate crisis", we can move forward, make choices and so on. A choice might be "it's there, but we're not going to do anything against it, because our economy". That is effective. (albeit something I would have a strong opninion about). At least others can still move forward.
But stating it does not exist (which is provably untrue) really harms effectiveness a lot.
> Part of making sure "truth prevails" is having open discourse about topics. That involves people with "Wrong" ideas the ability to talk.
Yes, but for that to work, the discourse has to between people who are actually seeking out the truth and who have the ability to recognize it. Dead-enders and nutjobs fighting to spread (often obvious) lies do not qualify.
Is their competition a medium like mobile calls and text messages? Or is their competition curated content streams like newspapers or cable news networks?
Legally, maybe the distinction doesn't need to be made, but I think users of social media deserve to know up front what they're in for.
Once Twitter has a say it becomes a publisher not a platform. There is no practical difference between writing a piece yourself and choosing which piece to publish out of thousands other people write. After all you can always claim something you write was submitted by an anonymous donor.
Twitter is a publisher and should be responsible for all that it publishes including calls for violence which it regularly features.
> many other places were pushing the Russia collusion conspiracy theory.
I might be out of touch but isn't it fairly established at this point that - for certain definitions of "collusion" - it was factually true?
i.e. not "Trump got together with Putin and hatched a plan" true but "both sides obliquely acknowledged the interests of the other with a nod and a wink" true?
Literally the only reason "oh it was just not true" is a prevailing bit of logic is because no one in power has cared to do a single thing about it, or even so much as announce that it's in no way acceptable.
No - I'm saying in addition to "Russia prefers Trump at the helm", there was some (direct or indirect) contact between the two parties and some awareness and (implicit or explicit) encouragement from the Trump camp for Russian actions.
Surely there is a meaningful distance between that and your formulation?
How are they “verifiable” falsehoods? E.g., conspiracy theories are famous for being almost always unfalsifiable. These views usually are a mix of low prior hypotheses, politically incorrect semi-truths, marketing propaganda (with few empirical assertions), and lies.
Like the knowledge that the Mueller investigation got criminal convictions on a number of Trump associates including Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Rick Gates and a couple dozen Russians?
Not sure why you're down voted. It's a good example. The whole "Saddam was buying yellowcake" was completely false, yet the only evidence was a gov't statement saying it was true.
If someone said "that's a lie", it would likely have been viewed as disinformation, but it would have been the truth.
Not sure why you're being downvoted either. This scenario is completely true and it absolutely would've been marked as disinformation by Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc. It's being marked as disinformation now by Hacker News members without any actual discussion as to why. It's a very valid scenario and a great topic of discussion.
And... That's fine I think. Nobody actually knew that, even though many suspected it. Less strict versions of that sentence would be completely fine. Discussing the details of things like their secret rooms at internet exchanges and countermeasures in case it was true would be great too.
But it's like people saying "MS is selling all your behaviour data" today, which is likely partially true, but not quite in that way. And when they take that extreme position without having something to back it up, it's hard to / not worth discussing.
I agree, but the situation is symmetrical. Parler is removing liberal memes (unsure if it’s automatic moderation after flagging - but that doesn’t really matter as the outcome is the same).
I could agree with a lot of this... the problem for me though is it always comes back to actually enforcing this stuff.
I already know I sinned by trying to have a productive conversation of twitter, however when "talking" with a few self proclaimed communists (no, I don't think they were joking) they basically implied the "rich" deserve to die, they were morally allowed to kill them, etc. IIRC, this was on a post about a teachers union displaying a guillotine and I pretty much said "yea, lets not be like this." There was also some racism thrown in there, I guess for good measure. They seem to have even developed their own "secret language", calling white people 'mayos' and 'yts' - maybe to get around filters? Or just to be extra edgy.
I would argue that pushing some justification of murdering fellow citizens because of their net worth is just as dangerous as the insane conspiracies about lizard people... if not more. Yet, I don't think these things are shut down or given the same standards as what you're thinking of.
I wish for twitter (and everyone else's sake) they equally applied their "TOS". I have no need to go to those sites you mentioned... in fact I can't think of anything less productive but on the flip side of the coin, I've pretty much deleted twitter for the same reason.
I'm sure it must have been terrifying but overall I'd rather have the real war, Poor v Rich , than the deluded Poor v Poor. It would be over quickly and we won't even lose anything of value.
No, there really isn’t. Election fraud happens all the time, but there is zero evidence of it happening in any quantities here that would change anything about the results.
No, there's not. This is the point. The people driving these conspiracies are applying statistical techniques poorly and then parroting their claims on social media.
I've dug a fair bit into the statistic based claims and most of them just don't hold much water. The benfords law one that picked up steam being the main one I dug into, I even made a nice repo with fancy graphs but the meme had died out by the time I finished so I never shared it. However the main summary was "Benfords law just doesn't work for proportions of a precinct"
However, if we want to go deeper into the rabbit hole, if there was a coup to steal the election I'd expect there to be ample fake claims of election stealing that would be easy to debunk.
If your idea of a solution includes people arguing with other folks about whether or not their humanity should be recognized, then you will be surprised when no one meets you halfway. It's a horribly simple bad faith argument that anyone should try to "convince" or coddle folks who hold signs such as
>"Coming for Blacks and Indians first welcome to the New World Order."
I wouldn't downplay where they were in 2016. TD was crawling with things like Pinochet helicopter kill all leftists, celebrating punching protestors. Their "community bubbles" were never a place to respectfully disagree about immigration policy which you can and always have been able to do on whatever platform you like.
This is certainly a line of thinking. Of course the alternative is:
1. Tech platforms were too slow with limiting extremist viewpoints
2. Instead of keeping extremist views isolated, this allowed them to pick up more support. These groups continue to move more and more extreme, and more popular.
3. Delays in taking action to prevent the spread of these views allowed the combination of extremism and popular support that empowered people to make outrageous claims.
Of course, the presidential bully pulpit being used to stoke these ideas didn't help. We could argue about which of these mis more likely all day.
I agreed with you until the last paragraph, where it became clear that your problem isn’t with extreme views in general, just the sort of extreme views Trump is likely to endorse. That’s exactly the bias that people behind Parler aim to exploit (or provide an escape from, depending on your view)
Common, plenty of extreme left content and people were suppressed. It is just that each group complains primary about own suppression and never able suppression of other groups. And extreme left groups are also smaller.
I was discussing the exact same set of views as the parent: those espoused on "Parler, TheDonald, etc" (and also subtly objecting to the parent's proposed timeline. The_donald started self-radicalizing long before it was quarantined. In fact, it was the radicalization that took place in the Donald that led to its subsequent quarantine and removal).
I certainly do take issue with extreme views on the other side, but those views are usually things like crystal healing, not Coups.
I imagine this view will not be looked on with approval, but the ethos espoused by the BLM cadre is explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-police. To many who are right of center, that looks like an extreme left-wing view that is not only tolerated by tech and social media companies, but actively promoted. It’s not all crystals and homeopathy.
Well, it is those things, but it's not explicitly pro violence, it's anti racist, and it's not based on lies or misrepresentation. In each case the inciting incidents actually happened and in many we have footage.
I think many on the right under estimate how much slack the right really do get from Twitter and YouTube. Refusing to ban bannon after he called for the execution of the FBI director (does that count as anti police?)
> it's not based on lies or misrepresentation. In each case the inciting incidents actually happened and in many we have footage.
To play devil's advocate a little: BLM's ideology (the core activists, not the average supporter) is based on a specific view of anti-racism — critical race theory. CRT is not the only way to think about race, and many would argue it's a bad way to think about it: it's illiberal, divisive, wedded to ideologically left-wing ideas about power and social relations, and not particularly amenable to evidence-based thinking. In fact, it could be argued that the CRT is a huge misrepresentation.
Furthermore, while each of the "inciting incidents" did happen, so did hundreds more involving every racial combination of police and victim you can think of. It is a misrepresentation to focus on a subset of incidents because it moves focus from the actual cause of the problem. It is not racist police. It is poorly trained, unaccountable, and psychologically unsuited police officers. You could drum every racist police officer out, make every one of them take the knee and attend endless mandatory bias classes until only dyed-in-the-wool CRT advocates are left, and these incidents would keep happening until training and recruitment undergo a radical change.
Moderate right-wing people don't oppose or fear "anti-racism" or the support it receives in the corporate world because they are racist, but because they think i) It doesn't work and can't work, ii) it's a bad diagnosis, iii) it leads to socially damaging second order effects.
> The problem goes further than the police into the prosecutors
Yes.
> Hence the refusal to prosecute in cases of murder by police of black people.
No. They refuse to prosecute cases of murder by police regardless of race. The race of the person killed is largely irrelevant, which is the point I was making in the previous comment. Black officers aren't prosecuted, white officers aren't prosecuted. They aren't prosecuted when they kill white people or people of color. The problem is that police (and the prosecutors) aren't accountable, and they know it.
You make it about race rather than accountability and the problem will not be fixed.
Certainly one can imagine that. But do you really think, upon more than a cursory examination, that you'll see Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg actively arguing for an end to capitalism as we know it?
I mean they're anti-union.
I'm also not clear about the equivocation you're making. Being anti-capitalist or "anti-American-police", even if we take those at face value, while certainly extreme in the modern American political sphere, aren't on a global scale, nor is it advocating for political violence (which we've seen not only advocation for, by both the Trump and his supporters), but actual real-world attempts at smaller-scale violent coups[0].
This runs into the philosophical questions of what "extremism" is, and whether or not it's socially constructed, and I think an important takeaway is that there are tons of reasonable, "objective" measures, by which abstract anti-capitalist sentiment is fine, and calls for defunding the police are fine, while false claims of election fraud are not. A platform choosing an independent, objective measure by which to judge extremism and then having one group go off the deep end doesn't make the platform biased against that group, it makes that group more extreme by the objective measures.
Even if a person doesn't understand Critical Race Theory, or is afraid of the "socialism" boogeyman or whatever, people advocating for socialism, modern anarchism, or critical approaches in politics[1] aren't usually doing so violently, and those that do are usually deplatformed as well.
Like in your followup to another user you get into the weeds on CRT, and your conclusion was "You make it about race rather than accountability and the problem will not be fixed." Which okay, that's a fair view. Ultimately I disagree. I think a rising tide lifts all boats, and among white-middle class people police apologia is so strong that you're never going to get popular support. So gathering support among minorities is the best you can do (and I'll add, reasonable levels of support amongst Republicans and white people as well, Black Lives Matter is, if I'm reading the polling correctly, more popular than Joe Biden). But even ignoring all of that, so what? Does that mean that a site should remove that content? Does it at all compare to right wing content that is removed?
[1]: which are really just a lighter version of the modern anarchism take and, I should add, should be super popular on HN because they resemble libertarianism a surprising amount
> 1. Tech platforms are uncomfortable with certain viewpoints expressed on their platforms and seek to limit these viewpoints.
Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s many of these large companies billed themselves as open platforms where you can express yourself. Twitter's Jack Dorsey said in 2012 that "We are the free speech wing of the free speech part". Now he says it was joke.
The terms of service on these platforms appears to be enforced selectively, information appears to be selectively censored and a lot of the time it appears to be based on their politics. Also a lot of internet jokes that have been around for years are being censored because the people doing the moderation don't understand the odder internet subcultures.
So It isn't just tech platforms being uncomfortable with certain viewpoints. It a combination of things that make it seem that these companies are censoring viewpoints (some not even that extreme) on one side of the political spectrum. That is what people are complaining about.
> people flock to “community bubbles” like Parler, TheDonald, etc where they feel welcome.
This isn't true. People are removed from platforms and go to another service where they won't be censored or banned and then a bubble forms.
> 3. This marginalisation leads to increasing extremism; going from the likes of “immigrants bad” we saw in 2016 to disputing and attempting to overturn democracy.
This is a strawman of what these people believe. The vast majority of American conservatives and Trump supporters I know don't say "immigrants are bad". They said "Illegal Immigrants are bad". There is a very important difference. The former is clearly xenophobia, the latter is not.
As for "over turning democracy". They see that there was a lot of odd things that seemed to happening upto and including election night. They feel that there has been voter fraud. Whether that is true or not I have no idea and it looks like it will be settled in court. But they believe they are preserving democracy not overturning it.
> As for "over turning democracy". They see that there was a lot of odd things that seemed to happening upto and including election night.
Wow, seems like the people who voted for a candidate who said that mail-in voting was a hive of fraud for six months before an election were less likely to vote by mail, leading to a huge number of mail-in ballots being cast for the opposing candidate. Odd.
Like I'm not sure where these people were getting their news, but literally every news paper pointed out that this would happen, and it did.
> Wow, seems like the people who voted for a candidate who said that mail-in voting was a hive of fraud for six months before an election were less likely to vote by mail, leading to a huge number of mail-in ballots being cast for the opposing candidate. Odd.
That isn't what they are complaining about though e.g There are saying that some areas have very high turnout (over 95%) in specific counties. Even in countries with mandatory voting you don't get past 95% of the population voting. I haven't looked into these claims myself. So I have no idea if they are true.
Same day registration appears to account for most of this. Normally the registered voters count is from the start of a month, so same day registration can make the numbers look really weird.
I don’t think you have captured their take on immigration correctly. If it is only illegal immigration that is bad, that would mean that changing the law to make them legal would solve the problem. But that’s not what they want.
They don't say illegal immigrant is bad as a legal status (so that merely changing the law to make everyone legal would make it ok).
They say that illegal immigrants are bad for the same reason that the lawmakers made a distinction between legal and illegal immigrants: to place quota, immigration criteria, and so on.
> This isn't true. People are removed from platforms and go to another service where they won't be censored or banned and then a bubble forms.
I’m not sure the bulk of the people currently flocking to Parler were ones who were removed from Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit. Especially when they use those sites to announce their move.
I said "censored or banned". Enough people are getting censored and they are moving. A lot of people that were conservative talking heads that were banned went on parler as that really is the only alternative that is getting traction at the moment.
So I am quite sure that there is a good bulk of people that are going there for those reasons. In anyevent it feels that a line has been crossed.
Also, he attacked accepting refugees from certain high-risk countries (which had been designated as such by the Obama administration).
He didn’t say “immigrants bad.”
> Kaine has embellished the controversy by saying Trump has said "all Mexicans are rapists." The Democrat doesn’t come close to proving his claim; all of the Trump quotes Kaine’s campaign sent us pertain to unauthorized immigrants crossing the Mexican border into the U.S.
> Hillary Clinton dismissed President Trump as an “illegitimate president” and suggested that “he knows” that he stole the 2016 presidential election in a CBS News interview to be aired Sunday.
Journalists can’t help allowing their point of view to influence their reporting. But when someone can just pull up as transcript and say “well he didn’t really say that” that damages the credibility of the media. Even if what he actually said was wrong or bad on its own merits. This is what drives people to alternative media silos, and that’s bad because people are no longer operating from the same facts.
I don't believe Clinton ever attacked the integrity of the election process itself. She did claim (and as far as I'm aware the investigations more or less supported the claims) that the Trump campaign colluded with foreign governments to influence the election.
Russia Collusion itself is an attack on the legitimacy of Trumps presidency - just like election fraud is an attack on the legitimacy of a Biden presidency.
The muller report found collusion between the trump campaign and the Russian government. It also found obstruction of justice by both the Trump campaign and Trump Whitehouse. What is up for discussion is if it found criminal collusion on the part of Trump, which it might have but stopped short of explicitly stating for political, not criminal, reasons (Muller did not feel he was able to indict a sitting president).
This is actually true (god I hate agreeing with Trump/the GOP).
Collusion was not proven, and the left-wing media went completely overboard on this.
Did Russia want Hillary Clinton to lose? Yes.
Did the Trump campaign meet with Russian operatives? Yes.
Did they collude with Russians? No, not in a legal sense.
Was the determining factor in the election Russian interference? No, it was almost certainly the NYT covering the James Comey investigation into Hillary's emails in the last week.
Mind you, if I were a Russian disinformation specialist, I would be very proud of how the American people took up my insanities (on both sides) and ran with them.
> Was the determining factor in the election Russian interference? No, it was almost certainly the NYT covering the James Comey investigation into Hillary's emails in the last week.
Keep in mind the entire Hillary's emails thing may have stemmed from Russian foreign intelligence work.
Again, lots of speculation around this, no reasonable evidence in favour.
Like, I'm not American (and I would have voted for Sanders twice if I was), but the core issue here is that people are focusing on conspiracy-like theories to explain their loss in elections, rather than trying to understand where the other side is coming from.
>but the core issue here is that people are focusing on conspiracy-like theories to explain their loss in elections
Yeah liberals did with Russiagate in 2016, then Trump supporters will probably run with something into 2020. It's a convenient distraction from material policies.
“Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances, because I think this is going to drag out” - Hillary Clinton
Seems like Trump has taken her advice.
At this point she really should just retire from politics and spend her hundreds of millions of dollars living the good life. She doesn’t do Democrats any favors.
So are you claiming that Clinton's suggestion that we wait until absentee ballots are included before letting someone claim victory is "disputing ... democracy", or are you trying to change the subject to something else?
Nobody is “disputing democracy” at this point. Bush vs Gore took an entire month to sort out.
Hillary said this might drag out for a while... and she was right, it is. That’s fine. We have a process for this; no need to be melodramatic.
Biden has almost assuredly won, but first there will be some court cases and recounts simply because it was extremely close. That’s a good thing for Democracy.
That was a difference of around 500 votes out of nearly 6 million, which was around 0.009%. That's well within the range you can get with just the ordinary counting error. It is not at all uncommon for a recount to reverse a lead that small.
In addition, Florida at the time was using a lousy ballot marking system that caused many ballots to fail to register that the voter had tried to vote in the Presidential race. Neither side disputed this. The dispute was over how to address it.
Are you really comparing that to trying to challenge in several states where the difference is well outside ordinary counting error and there is no evidence of sufficient voting irregularities to come anywhere near changing the winner in those states?
There is a lot more to it than that. There had already been a machine recount in Florida, and Bush won that one as well. What Gore did was use a loophole in Florida law to pursue a dubious recount strategy. He demanded hand recounts only in four counties he had won by large margins. That tilted the recount in his favor: hand recounts will find more discernible votes than machine counting, and by only requesting recounts in counties that where the base rate of Gore votes was very high, most of those newly-counted votes would be for Gore. Even WaPo called out this strategy as obviously unfair: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2000/11/18/o...
> But there's a danger to Mr. Gore's eventual legitimacy too, if this extraordinary story eventually results in his election. The recounts will now go forward in three counties--Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade. That at least was the situation as of last night. All three of those jurisdictions are heavily Democratic and voted heavily for Mr. Gore; the recount is thus tilted in his favor.
> The Gore campaign, however, viewed the absentee mili- tary ballots received between Election Day and November 17 as a lethal threat. Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican candi- date, who had lost Florida, nonetheless had received a hefty majority of the military absentee vote. Bush would likely top 60 percent at a time when he already enjoyed a 300-vote margin, which Gore was seeking to erase with selective recounts.
> He demanded hand recounts only in four counties he had won by large margins. That tilted the recount in his favor: hand recounts will find more discernible votes than machine counting, and by only requesting recounts in counties that where the base rate of Gore votes was very high, most of those newly-counted votes would be for Gore
So recount all the counties.
But that's beside the point, which was that we know there were severe problems with the 2000 Florida vote due to a large number of dimpled or hanging chads, meaning that votes were being counted by the machines as being omitted where the voter intended to and thought they had voted, and poorly designed butterfly ballots that appear to have led to many people to mix up the Gore hole and Buchanan hole (and led about 19k people to punch both holes, since both were next to Gore).
There's nothing like that for 2020, where Trump is claiming the vote was fraudulent but keeps failing to actually bring up any evidence in court.
There was a statewide machine recount, and Bush won that too. Gore never asked for a statewide recount. He pursued a selective recount strategy, and in the process burned half the time available to certify the results. https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/05/bush-v-gore-fake-news...
> But that's beside the point, which was that we know there were severe problems with the 2000 Florida vote due to a large number of dimpled or hanging chads, meaning that votes were being counted by the machines as being omitted where the voter intended to and thought they had voted
That sort of thing happens in every election. An MIT analysis found that about 2% of ballots in a large sample set from 1988-2000 showed no vote for President: https://news.mit.edu/2001/voting1
Normally that doesn’t matter. As long as you apply a uniform standard, like the machine count, the error affects all parties equally.
What Gore did was turn that fact of vote counting into an election strategy. He realized that by demanding hand recounts under subjective standards, he could gin up more votes from that pool of 2%. And by demanding hand recounts only in Democratic counties, he could ensure that these new votes would disproportionately go to him. And even when the Florida Supreme Court smacked him down and ordered a statewide recount, he vigorously pursued a strategy of convincing Democratic counties to adopt looser counting standards, and indeed standards that shifted mid-count: http://electoralcollegehistory.com/electoral/florida/00837-2...
> In Palm Beach, if the hand counters saw a card with several punches on it, and a dimple near Al Gore’s name, the election officials did not count it because that voter knew how to punch a card and did not punch a hole next to Mr. Gore. The machine worked correctly when it did not read it.
> Not so in Broward County. If some of the vote counters saw several clean punches for Democrats and no punch for Gore, not even an indentation, but they saw a “scratch” near his name, they called it for Gore
> The state attorney general, a Gore elector, argued that “never before the present election had a manual recount been conducted on the basis of the contention that ‘undervotes’ [ballots with no punches on them] should have been examined to determine voter intent.”
That’s why all this stuff about hanging chads and pregnant chads and whatnot mattered at all. Ordinarily, those errors should cancel out. It’s only when you try to get a selective recount, or pursue different counting standards in different counties, that this matters.
Ultimately, Gore handed the Supreme Court a giant mess. The Justices agreed 7-2 that the recount that was ongoing at Gore’s request was unconstitutional.
> and poorly designed butterfly ballots that appear to have led to many people to mix up the Gore hole and Buchanan hole (and led about 19k people to punch both holes, since both were next to Gore).
> Nobody is “disputing democracy” at this point. Bush vs Gore took an entire month to sort out.
The trump campaign is literally putting forth the unfounded conspiracy theory that Democratic-party-affiliated groups some how placed fraudulent ballots, and that this is the only reason Trump lost.
> Biden has very likely won, but first there will be some court cases and recounts simply because it was extremely close.
There aren't actually. Biden doesn't need to carry any states with recounts to win. Pennsylvania isn't going to a recount, nor is Arizona. Even if GA and Wisconsin flip on a recount, Biden has carried the electoral college. All of the court cases so far have have been thrown out or withdrawn.
Despite this, Trump continues to claim that there was election fraud (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13277501276798894...), even after his own lawyers have dropped suits in Arizona and Pennsylvania, and have yet to, in any suit in any state, provide an example of fraud. There's no substance to his claims, and when in front of a judge, the lawyers admit that. And yet.
comparing margins for EC and popular vote does not really capture how close a US presidential election was. you can easily have a blowout in the EC that was determined by a <1% lead in a few key states. popular vote is an interesting stat, but not very meaningful under the current rules.
Oh c’mon. “Don’t concede under any circumstances” is a lot stronger of a statement than “wait for absentee ballots to be counted.” She was reinforcing accusations that she and folks like Jerry Nadler made that Trump would try to “rig” the election.
In context it really isn't. I think it was misguided, but her entire concern was that trump would attempt to mess with absentee ballots and get the race called before they were counted. By any account, he's done both. He hasn't really succeeded, in the "popular" sphere (although he's still delaying the Biden transition from starting, which is bad for the entire country), but if the race had been a bit closer his claims of "well overturn the results on a recount" might ring truer, especially if news organizations weren't able to call the races.
Also worth mentioning that, while I can't find the full clip of the quote anywhere, some of the reporting on it seems to imply that the question she was responding to was if Biden should concede on election night, and the answer was under no circumstances. That really strains the whole "disputing democracy" thing.
When Donald Trump launched his campaign he said; “ When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
How else is one to take this? He said some are good people implying the majority are not despite evidence to the contrary.
He was specifically talking about Mexicans crossing the border illegally. Are you saying majority of people who cross the border illegally are good people?
Most "good people" don't have to cross the border illegally. They can get a U.S. visa and never leave. The people who will definitely not get a U.S. visa to do that is those have a criminal record in their own country, so their only option is to cross the border illegally.
Very few people can get US visas without work sponsorship. The green cards are rationed, aren't they?
Similarly, there is little proof that a significant fraction of the people crossing the border have criminal records for things other than immigration law.
Now, let's get back to what Trump said. Right after he said what you quoted in that speech, he said: "I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They're sending us not the right people."
He's constantly repeating how good the Mexicans and Japanese and everyone else is... (as opposed to the American leaders back then)... but the best ones among the Mexicans are not the ones coming in to the U.S. by crossing the border illegally. If you look at the context, he is clearly saying that Mexico has great people in general, the leaders are smarter and they have some terrible people who they're sending across the border illegally.
His opponents, which were all of the media back then, because he was neither liked by either party, attacked him for it. It was even a part of the attack strategy by Jeb Bush's campaign because he has a Mexican wife. They did it by taking the quote out of context, as anybody would do. If I was a political strategist, I would happily do the same. It was a easy hand to play and would potentially sway voters away from him.
Since the election is over, I'm assuming you're not one of Media Matters bots and I think, like a lot of people, you genuinely believe that those remarks were what the media told you they were... which is why I'm having this conversation.
Yes, I’m saying the vast majority are good people and regardless of how they cross the border demonizing people with lies or exaggerations is unacceptable.
I'm not from the US so may interpret differently, but when Trump says "Mexico sends" it has a strong implication that the government and/or the general collective people of Mexico are deliberately transporting criminals to the US.
Trump was referring to the Drug, Weapons, & Human trafficking that was occurring due to the border policy at the time. This illicit trafficking and violence against civilians & journalists is well documented in many sources.
That doesn't accurately describe Trump's comments. This wasn't some onetime only type of comment. Remember when he said a US judge couldn't rule on a case where Trump was losing, because the judge was of hispanic origin. That's another racist comment. Trump has continually made these types of comments, made references to shithole countries. You can't just dismiss that with a claim that he was saying something else, because his comments were part of a long standing sequence.
Exactly. Trump apologists like to pretend like there isn’t a pattern of these statements and treat each of them as a one off and they often add context that doesn’t quite fit.
It does accurately describe Trump's comment. The DEA, ICE, & FBI have documented cases of criminal activity across the border. The left often editorializes his comments however his supporters understand what was meant, and no, it's not a racist dog whistle.
You brought up a non-sequitor, re Judge Curiel. He has provided legal representation for a hispanic-supremacist organization named La Raza (meaning "the race" in Spanish), which has a public political opinion on matters such as the wall on the southern border. Perhaps Trump should have mentioned the group "La Raza", however the point stands that Judge Curiel has racial-supremacist political affiliations, was in-explicitly hostile in the lawsuit, & Trump called it out as a theory.
For many, the "Orange Man Bad" & "all white people are racist" narrative will probably kick in & they will reject what I'm saying outright because it does not fit their narrative; however this interpretation better fits Occam's razor, considering that Trump has also worked with certain people of all ethnicities in a harmonious fashion, while having rocky relationships with certain people from all ethnicities. The differences have to do with political worldview rather than ethnicity. Unfortunately, the political left has a habit of editorializing worldviews according to race, so other explanations are rendered moot according to the worldview of the political left, which views the world according to race.
The part you quoted is sandwiched between two statements that make that clear. Right before, he says:
> When do we beat Mexico at the border?
Right after the part you quoted, he says:
> But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They're sending us not the right people.
The reference to what “border guards” are “telling him” makes quite clear he’s characterizing their descriptions of illegal border crossers. That is how Factcheck.org interpreted the statement (see above) as well.
There is a fair criticism of Trump here—most people who immigrate illegally are “good people” (other than the fact they broke the law in crossing the border). On the other side, there is a truth to his point. We have MS-13 operating in Northern Virginia now where I grew up. They don’t arise there organically.
On reddit, these reasons you mention are selectively enforced and often actually made by people trying to get the subreddits banned. Bans are also familial: reddit tends to do “ban waves” where they also ban similar subreddits, irrespective of whether they have rule violations or not. There’s no communication; no appeals; no “you got this wrong”.
If you’ve ever participated in one of the banned subreddits; you’ll know “hate speech” or “doxxing” are a big fat lie. WE are the ones getting doxxed and brigaded!
It’s not too different to police using marijuana laws to target Black communities. In a free-to-join community of thousands to millions of people, you will get people breaking the rules. Moderators clean them up. The only difference is unwelcome viewpoints get their subreddit banned with this as the pretext.
Source: moderator of 3 banned subreddits; from political to sexual kinks like consensual rape fetishes (which 31% of women say they have fantasises; just FYI).
Admins have never; ever, ever engaged with us during my tenures.
This is 100% gaslighting by mainstream media. Immigration _per se_ isn't bad. I say so as an immigrant myself. Trump is married to an immigrant. But unrestricted low-skill illegal migration in tens of millions is most definitely bad, and it leads to modern day slavery, while at the same time depressing the wages of the working poor and making them dependent on welfare. That's why Kochs want it so much. So bad, in fact, that Barack Obama deported a lot more illegal migrants than Trump ever did. So long standing that Bill Clinton highlighted the issue in his 1995 State of the Union: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IrDrBs13oA. So severe that Hillary Clinton voted for a border wall: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/jun/27/cal-thomas.... Immigration from countries where one can't even meaningfully do a background check is also bad. Skilled immigration program abused to get H1B wage slaves to the detriment of US grads who are drowning in debt is very bad indeed.
> disputing and attempting to overturn democracy
Nobody is "attempting to overturn democracy". There are hundreds of sworn affidavits and abundant video evidence of election irregularities. This needs to be followed up on, for the same reason why Nancy Pelosi was calling for the same in 2017: https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/864522009048494080. She spent _4 years_ undermining the choice of the American people, and by extension "democracy". Presenting evidence in the court of law is democracy. If evidence is shit (as it was in Pelosi's case), the court will throw it out. If it's not you should be just as interested in hearing about it, because such things tend to backfire, just like Harry Reid's filibuster fiasco did.
> This has happened in all the lawsuits so far, I believe?
You're being gaslit about that too, although yes, some motions were denied and some lawsuits were rejected outright. Watch the last link in my original post. It explains the propaganda barrage perfectly.
There are a bunch of deadlines and appellate levels baked into this process for a reason. If Al Gore could hold things up for over a month over a few hundred votes, all the concerns about following lawful process are null and void. Same with histrionics about "overturning democracy".
The choice is pretty simple even to Trump voters: either Trump finds the smoking gun and deservedly gets a second term, or he's full of shit and he doesn't deserve a second term. Nobody on the right will set cities on fire either way.
Literally 10 seconds in DuckDuckGo. Notice that where lawsuits are rejected they are mostly rejected over lack of standing, and will be re-filed elsewhere with stronger evidence, or dropped outright due to insufficient evidence. This is what the legal system is for - to establish the veracity of claims, and obtain relief when due. Still more lawsuits will be filed next week. The current crop are just the small fry ones that could be filed quickly.
None of this constitutes "overturning democracy" in any shape or form.
At the rate law firms are dropping Trump, those cases next week will have to be argued by Rudy himself. And god willing, he'll give us some more press conferences as a bonus.
I think a lot of people in these comments are missing the core dilemma a lot of these tech companies are dealing with. How do you deal with rampant misinformation that might be harmful to society as a whole? I think moving to putting disclaimers on posts instead of deleting them might be the right move but it’s honestly just a hard problem.
> How do you deal with rampant misinformation that might be harmful to society as a whole?
Maybe I don't want big tech incumbents solving that problem for me. The dilemma as posed makes a lot of assumptions that I don't agree with.
Maybe I would be OK with some curation or annotation service. If I had some say in hiring, firing, and replacing that service separate from my choice of social media platform.
My Twitter is great. I follow AI, VR, Philosophy, Zen, Mindfulness, Twertzog, etc... all high quality. Same with Facebook. I'm very happy with my feed. I follow vintage photography, various art focused groups, philosophy groups, hacker and tech groups and I've unfollowed friends who post toxic shit. I enjoy looking at Twitter and Facebook in the morning. Twitter and Facebook AI's are constantly surprising me with cool stuff they surface for me, even ads. Twitter and Facebook don't have to suck.
They suck because this is not the default path or the path of least resistance. Without intentionality and vigilance, your Facebook/Twitter feed does inevitably turn into shit because that’s what their engagement algorithms push you toward.
I think it’s great that you’ve tailored your content so well. But you’re the exception rather than the rule.
It does take constant tuning. Some twitter accounts get manic and tweet storm. I unfollow and save a bookmark to come back when they calm down. Some FB groups turn toxic or get a new dictatorial moderator. I'm constantly pruning and adding, but I enjoy the curation. I realize I'm the exception. My point is only that those sites can be really good with effort and awareness.
For those unaware of the connection, Robert Mercer was also a key investor behind Cambridge Analytica, the data firm which played a large role in the hyper targeted Facebook ads during the 2016 election.
No he didn't. This is what the article says, "On Saturday, CEO and co-founder John Matze said one of the privately-owned company's early investors is Rebekah Mercer"
What's more, I've also read the Wall Street Journal article on the subject which made it even clearer.
"Ms. Mercer, in a post on Parler after a version of this article was published, said that her father had no involvement or ownership of the company."
She runs the Mercer Family Foundation through which her father donated over $100million to rightwing propaganda causes. Point being that they work closely together and have shared ideologies.
If I recall correctly, he was also one of the very few rich people to back Trump in 2016, when everyone had written Trump off. Which also caused some drama at Rentech.
I thought the alternative to twitter would be maston[0]. It's 'uncensored' federated twitter clone that anyone can create a node and create a social community of their choosing.
Not sure how "Parler" is going to be better than twitter with a central point of failure. More political fodder I guess.
Mastodon didn’t work. The architecture couldn’t handle Japanese Twitter migrants overwhelming the network and Gab issues that came later. In current form, it is just an on-prem Twitter clone.
Mastadon is not "uncensored" either. They put significant effort into blocking gab when it tried integrating into the fediverse.
The only real solution to censorship will be a completely distributed system, where users control their own data and associations, and all communication is peer-to-peer, end-to-end encrypted, with zero middle-men.
Meh, so what. There's been tons of platforms in the past that rise up because of disagreements over moderation policy (voat anyone). Maybe they will succede maybe they won't. Not sure what the fuss is about.
I guess it depends on the bottom line for the company. Who their customers are.
Nike shoes is an interesting recent example. They embraced the controversial NFL player Colin Kaepernick in various advertising campaigns, playing in his bravery for kneeling during the National Anthem of the United States. However this was not some sort of altruistic, egalitarian business campaign. It was a cold calculation from their data which said young people buy their products and young people are sympathetic to his cause and therefore we will sell more shoes going with this endorsement. It helped make Nike, a company with a very spotty humanitarian history and questions of exploitive labor practices, a corporation their audience of largely young progressive people felt identified with them.
Advertising is about as cynical as it gets. For some companies it will make sense to “choose a side” which when thinking about it is as absurd and ridiculous as something could be. What would Adam Smith make of this?
Censorship largely comes from a desire to appease advertisers. So long as users aren't paying anything to support a platform, censorship pressure will be an issue.
Bigotry and hate speech should not have a platform. I’ve been reading a lot of comments here and it seems like most of them aren’t even critical or touch on the point of NOT allowing certain kind of speech or false information sharing. In Germany nazi related sympathizing, propaganda is banned from social media. But some how it’s ok in USA? I honestly fail to understand how little criticism there is of unfettered free speech, as if it’s universally a good thing. Same with guns, given overwhelming evidence to the contrary yet still USA sticks to these strange “rights”.
Would you want to understand and learn new things?
If you knew that honestly understanding would lead to mental pain and anguish as you literally would have to admit you were wrong in your past judgements and admit your view of the world was wrong, would you still want to understand? Because it will cause you pain. It even might lose you friends. Changing your mind is hard. Learning new things about the way the world works means you have to remove whatever was in that place before and you do that by admitting you were wrong. If you've been on HN for a while you will agree with me that having people admit they were wrong is extremely rare! It hurts.
Most people don't want to understand. It's much easier not to.
I applaud a sincere expression of not understanding, so congratulations! It means that somehow you know that your view of the world is not complete. I would suggest that instead of asking for answers from others which you can disagree with, true understanding requires a fundamental and painful change in your own brain.
Empathy is just one tool to help understand and work out how you were wrong, there are others. It won't mean you start to believe the ideas just that for the first time you will start to see that there are other ideas.
There is potential danger, however, that what caused your initial attachment to a particular view of the world might switch to these other newer ones. Like how an ex-cult member is always the most vocal anti cult activist, or how a recent Vegan is always the most evangelistic about their new way of life. Empathy alone doesn't cause that, but maybe a kind of stockholm syndrome, so take it slow and try not to be overwhelmed.
Even if you feel like you could start to understand, there is also the fear and disgust of the other which you would need to overcome to begin. For many this fear and disgust is so strong it's enough to stop any thoughts of change. (it's why fear and disgust is so often used as a political tool)
I'm not asking you to change and I don't expect you to change. Change hurts. I'm warning you about the dangers of understanding others if you really wanted to understand what's going on which I hope you might.
Bigotry is the failure to understand the other. It's literally in the definition!
To understand the other is to win against bigotry.
Don't destroy the world with bigotry disguised as righteousness. Most peace processes start with the humanising of the other and the identification of shared commonalities. Bigotry is against peace and coexistence.
To advocate for not understanding people is to destroy the world. I get why people don't want to understand others (see above comment) but I would not encourage it.
In my opinion, bigotry in mainstream public discourse is never going to happen. It's a feature of capitalism and why you won't see gas vans as long as we remain a capitalist society.
But don't let me dissuade you from advocating for your beliefs.
It's ironic that most people will complain about polarization in politics at the same time as strengthening that very polarization. I would like less polarisation. Do you?
Is wanting less polarisation and more understanding wanting the world one way? Seems like it might be the opposite. Seems also that those who are polarised want the world one way in opposition to the other group who wants the world the other. Is there a way to undo that? Would that way be painful? I think most people don't like to change their minds. It's painful. But just because it's painful, doesn't mean it's not possible or that it might be positive.
How do we achieve polarization?
How is actual peace is the real world achieved?
Wanting things to be one way is bigotry. I wish things to be understood more and less bigotry!
What are my beliefs? How have I advocated for them? I see only an appeal for common ground, understanding and therefore less bigotry overall.
this here looks to me like a neo-Nazi that’s spent some time learning persuasive techniques. This is why the internet is so terrifying.
Any bad actor like this can have their manipulative manifestos seen by thousands of people every day.
Whether or not it’s actually persuasive - it shouldn’t be, they’re pretty much rephrasing the sentiment “don’t be afraid of this”, “be open-minded”, “take the red pill” over and over - it’s at the very least attempting to be
You are wrong in that I am not a neo nazi. I am saddened by your comment. As the HN rules suggest, try to be charitable. I am not a bad actor.
Does empathy and understanding other people lead to Nazism etc or away from extremism? Does encouraging less thought and consideration about your neighbour make the world better? I don't think so.
Explicitly how do we change a person's mind away from extremism? Is it possible? Will they want to? See my above comment in that light. Understanding others is hard but it's possible.
Is it possible for humans to be less polarised? If so, perhaps understanding and empathy is one way.
I try to allow people to change their minds and allow peace and more empathy. Real change comes from inside. I cannot change another's mind for them. Some see this change as painful and some others are fearful of people changing their minds as it means less in group cohesion. If opposite groups are less coherent is that better than advocating for more polarisation?
Back to the original question: If you do not understand what is going on, do you think it's possible to understand? If yes, do you want to understand? if yes, how does one understand something? If no, how does not wanting to understand something affect the world? Does less or more understanding help or hinder lives?
(Please note: I am not recommending watching Gummo. Once you've seen it you can't un-see it. I'm just saying that you're picture of America is incomplete if you haven't encountered that side of the nation.)
I tried Parler, and everyone is missing the point. Parler doesn't censor content because replies aren't linked to "Parleys" by default. All replies must be "approved" by the author. You can troll, but nobody will ever see it except OP. It absolutely solves the abuse problem that Twitter has, but it also limits discussion. The appeal of Twitter is that you get to see what everyone thinks. Parler is for sycophants only.
For the last year or so, I've been trying something new with my social media usage, to mixed results.
My theory is that while I'm interested in the personal lives of the people I follow, for the most part I couldn't care less about things they post with the direct intent of emotionally-manipulating me. So much of those kinds of posts are driven by loneliness, boredom, existential angst, and the comfort that public clanning brings people. While I'm completely committed to supporting and caring for my friends, these posts never bring them the relief they seek. Instead, it always ends up in a more-and more frenetic argument. I am almost beginning to think that for many of them, if they can't find that comfort online, they'll settle for a good fight. And after more than two decades online, I have never seen that comfort successfully delivered, aside from in a performative way.
So every time one of my friends re-posts or shares something I find emotionally manipulative, whether I agree or disagree with the sentiments, I take a look at the original source. Is this a source with, say, more than 10K followers? If so, my friend's participation in this communication stream is much more like a little propagandist than somebody who is either seeking or offering comfort. So I block the original source; after all, it'll just keep appearing again and again in my freed until one day it causes an argument.
This, for the most part, leaves honest-to-goodness things my friends are actually experiencing in person, instead of vicariously. As long as that's the case, I try to allow wide latitude, after all, I want to learn and share from as many people as possible with differing views. If, however, I notice a pattern of pain, either pain they're experiencing that I can't help with or pain they're seeking to inflict in others in order to fight with them, I start the snoozing and nofollowing.
I wish I could say that this strategy has been highly successful. It has certainly made social media much less painful, but over time I'm finding that I'm pretty much zapping everybody. Very few people have the editorial discipline to actually be responsible worldwide publishers. Most of us will far too easily choose attention over quality conversations. Social media isn't helping us; it's hacking us.
I wish my friends on the right the best of luck. I think it's a good move. Anything to advance the destruction of this cognitive and epistemology monopoly is a win in my book. I look forward to seeing how it goes for them.
Sadly both platforms are practicing censorship and are being run by people that think they are best suited to distinguish between good and evil. Reality is usually not black and white, which is why it is sad to see many platforms these days pushing strict narratives.
I once thought that Facebook was Usenet in a prettier/more user friendly package. Twitter is simply horrible. You can make a completely innocuous comment on a current conversation, and someone will barge in, exhort in a hyperbolic and frenzied manner, and make you regret signing back into Twitter.
This isn't a quality control problem. People, and sadly specifically those with advanced education, tend to be easily triggered by random things. They say, often, terrible things. They bully. They argue over minutiae. They blast those with ever so slightly differing opinions.
Imagine what they do to people with significantly different opinions. They must be destroyed.
So those folks leave. And go somewhere more friendly to the free exchange of views, without the automatic pile on shutdowns, and cancellations we see with FB/Twit.
Its tiring to me as an infrequent twit-er. Its tiring on FB as I use it for family communications and dad jokes.
Apparently, it is in vogue to call these companies out for their complicity ... their participation in the actual undermining of democracy (should be read in a tone dripping in sarcasm). It is considered bad form to say you use them. It goes against goodthink.
I'm really tired of this. Social media has very low value to begin with. This toxic behavior, this is what should be canceled. This is what should be deplatformed.
Not the viewpoints that have people with different ones running to the exits.
I am unsure whether the people claiming censorship here would register as "conservative" in any dictonary definition of the word. Note that where I grew up "conservative" is more in line with the policies of a centrist US-democrat. What the republicans campaigned for this election would be more in line with right wing fascist parties like NPD (basically a party for neo nazis in Germany, AFD, Marie Le Pen's right wing party in France etc).
I think actual US conservatives should draw a border at some point. Because there is nothing conservative about dreaming of returning to a past that never existed (it is usually a ethnic clean past, where everybody was happy and agreed what the good values were, nobody had to pay taxes, etc)
It’s sad because these companies had a very easy solution to activate once we got in the season.
Simply limit how far something can go viral. Let any family photos take precedence. Let at most 1000 people view any news article, and shadow ban the rest.
I don't go to Twitter for family photos and very much want to see what's popular in the circles I follow so this seems like a horrible solution there. Maaybe for Facebook that makes sense but I still follow some Pages and Groups there and this would make it worse for me.
One of the advantages Free Speech has is censorship is only worthwhile if deployed against ideas that have potential to attract people. One of my pet hobbies is arguing against socialism. I don't bother arguing against flat-earthism because nobody sane believes it. But socialism has some compelling points and people keep trying it.
That dynamic will help platforms like Parler. Whether or not the ideas are good ones, the people there going to be people who were pushed off Twitter because they had compelling or persuasive ideas.
Can't meet bad ideas by silencing people. It doesn't work, people just get the impression that the ideas have power.
I listened to a national news correspondent say, "...are not being censored they are just cleaning things up...". It's "cleaning things up" when the result benefits your cause but censorship when it harms your cause. It's sickening how editorialized national news has become. Why not just report the facts, "...twitter has deleted these tweets..."? Why does some talking head on television need to try to tell me what I should think and feel about an event or statement by a third party?
I agree with what you’re saying, but the answer(s) to that last question are fairly obvious
First I’d say that if you’re running a 24 hour news channel, you need to fill the time with something, and people would complain equally if you just rephrased and repeated the facts over and over.
Second, perhaps you don’t, and perhaps I don’t either, but a lot of people want to hear opinions on the news. They want context, and how certain groups view the news, and I suspect, more than anything, they also just enjoy hearing opinions. So the news companies are meeting a demand.
Now I’m quite a left-leaning, pro-govt-intervention person, so I would support government regulation of the news to prevent them playing too heavily to this demand.
However I know that a lot of HN users are not like this, and I’m curious to see where they think the solution could lie
I thinks the main problem isn't the platform itself, but the form itself. Twitter is toxic, Parler as well, but perhaps to other people. What's the point?
All of this could have been avoided with more robust filtering capabilities in the hands of users, which Twitter has consistently refused to provide.
The big social media platforms should be treated as common carriers, and as such only be responsible for preventing malware and flat-out illegal content.
Expecting Big Tech to moderate content (for what?) while allowing them to force feed unwanted/unrequested content to users is the perfect shit-storm we have today.
There was a time that I thought that Twitter should do what Parler is doing; let the original author approve replies before making them visible. Now that I've seen Parler demonstrate it, I think that Twitter would never have become as popular as it is if they had done so from the begining. The feature that allows for the wide conversation that Twitter is famous for is also responsible for it's abusability.
“All this could have been avoided” implies that Big Social Media wanted to avoid this. I don’t think they did. A ton of content that they’ve been wrestling with is just fleeing by itself. I imagine they’re thrilled.
That is completely true. Although I don't think at the beginning Big Social Media realized how it would play out. They seem to be now committed to the we are moderating as fast as we can approach/excuse.
These right wing cesspools are dangerous places. Because the hate can be nurtured there and grown out of sight of decent people. A clear example of that was the way the Charlottesville murder at the Unite the Right rally was planned on their private Discord. The deplorable subreddits also incubated a lot of very harmful people.
One very negative effect of platforms like Reddit and hackernews is that downvotes and upvotes system exacerbates groupthink and opinions contrary to the ones of the people reading your post at a given time. Lots of posts could easily get upvoted or downvoted based on circumstance and dissenting opinions shut down.
I avoided this discussion like I avoid Parler itself. Hard to imagine an upside.
But there are almost 500 comments and thus far no one has mentioned Dave Troy's unbelievable thread res arching how Parler got started. He very much points out that coverage like NPR gives here, reviewing it as it wants to be seen, carries water for the team, fails a necessary obligation to report on just how shady & murky the founding & running of Parler is.
Until someone gathers better research, this is, by far, the most important write up on Parler. A company with strong ties to russia, trying loudly to undermine the safe harbor & free speech protections we enjoy, & as a company a gathering place for political swindlers & ultrapartisans. This kind of intel on who Parler is is extremely important, at least as much so as who joins & goes there.
Those platforms sell a product and that product is your attention. Their customers are advertisers. Hence they don't give crap about your tweets which actually are not yours but theirs. Parler will not be any different.
It always boggles my mind that people who supposedly "grew up on the internet" thought it was a good idea to massively scale blog comments (effectively) to 7 billion people.
Half-truths can and slightly inaccurate statements can be construed as either hard-TRUE or hard-FALSE.
On the opposite side of the political spectrum, "nuance" in political discussion is an accepted reality.
Gatekeeping is acknowledged as a problem - we know those who position themselves as arbiters of truth are not beyond scrutiny.
It would be contradictory to know these are true but also believe conservatives are deluded in believing that fact-checking is fraught with bias.
>Indeed, conservatives have long claimed that fact-checking was riddled with anti-conservative bias and even conflicts of interest (as when PolitiFact, one of Facebook’s six United States-based fact-checkers, shot down a critique of a Clinton Foundation initiative without disclosing that one of that program’s principal funders was a major donor to PolitiFact’s parent organization, the Poynter Institute).
White supremacists congregate in America there is just a fight to capitalize on it now that it's being called out in public and driven into the shadows
Parler actually exposes its users to a nasty legal risk that Twitter & Facebook do not:
> 14. You agree to defend and indemnify Parler, as well as any of its officers, directors, employees, and agents, from and against any and all claims, actions, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses (including but not limited to all attorneys fees)
TL;DR: if Parler gets sued over a post of yours, you get to foot all their legal bills. Not an ideal setup for a “free speech” platform.
Twitter constantly encourages new levels of batshit because everyone is fighting for attention. I had a troll account with over 1500 followers that got nuked in I think 2017 after I posted a screenshot of the twitter stock price and tagged Jack Dorsey, I'd got a couple of suspensions before that for just being a dickhead but I was really surprised that was what got the permanent ban. Honestly, it was good thing in the end, fewer distractions and the super secret cabal chats I was in I'd added them on other platforms anyway.
The thing I saw even then was selective enforcement, I'd get death threats all the time from various tough guys over posts where I'd mocked them for being socialists or whatever, which I'd report, they'd never get banned. I didn't care that much because it's the internet and I wasn't posting under my real name, what were they going to do. But then I'd see people getting banned for telling others threatening them that they were strapped and it wasn't a good idea to make those threats. There's a hierarchy on Twitter when it comes to following the rules, and if you draw the ire of the people in the protected upper echelons you'll be threatened and bullied without any recourse.
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
I do wonder what the mainstream's response will be when this website inevitably actualises its witch-coven destiny (though it may already have according to some). Based on the apparent billionaire backing, it may not depend on payment processors (which otherwise seem to be among the most willing pieces of infrastructure to summarily cut off "extremist" customers), but it will probably still require Cloudflare to weather DoS attacks, a DNS record and carriers willing to provide it connectivity.
Hopefully, with a new administration, those carriers will be declared “common carriers” and won’t be able to disconnect them. Don’t know if this is ironic or not.
Taking HN threads into nationalistic flamewar and adding personal swipes will get you banned here. If you keep posting like this we are going to have to ban you again, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules going forward.
Getting into which is "the most attractive country on earth" is nationalistically baity, and "what are you talking about" is an internet swipe.
More precisely, if you say that in an internet comment, the default is that it comes across as a personal swipe, for example as a judgment of incoherence. If you actually mean that you would like to understand the other person better, that needs to be expressed more explicitly, in a way that disambiguates from the internet default.
I mean, the implications of having "seven zillion witches" clearly depend on what the witches being hunted in question are. Over the duration of America's existence, waves of immigrants arrived from Europe for reasons ranging from belonging to an extreme and/or politically undesirable religious movement, plain poverty, or finding themselves on the wrong side of a war or ethnic cleansing. When Europe decided that it would persecute Jews, the place that did not perform Jew-hunts did probably in fact attract innumerably many more Jews than people who opposed persecution of Jews on principle; it's just that the hyperbolic "seven zillion Jews" did not turn out to be detrimental to a locale's flourishing in a way that the witches of legend are assumed to be in the metaphor.
(On the other hand, one could argue that the seven zillion persecuted religious fanatics that formed many of the earlier strata of immigrants did in fact have an adverse effect on the country where they got concentrated. Is the provenance of midwestern millenarians, https://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/19/open_the_gates_that_t..., Scientology and other UFO cults entirely coincidental?)
If you mean the Pilgrims, that's not quite true. They fled from persecution in Britain, sure enough... to the Netherlands, which was very liberal by the standards of its time. And then they fled the Netherlands, because they found the place to be too liberal, and thus "morally corrupting" their community - they wanted a society where sin would be actively persecuted.
doesn't matter because the msm will tell you it did either way and you'll believe them without a second thought and then post midwit pisstakes when yet another independent community inevitably gets deplatformed by chokepoint monopolies. because we still totally have free speech right?
just don't say the wrong things 4head!
>It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
It would probably be a terrible place to live physically, but not necessarily a terrible place to visit online. Places such as the ones SSC refers to are terrible places to visit for people who get deeply emotionally hurt when they see hateful discourse and for people who lack the skill of filtering low-value content in search of high-value content. However, both the skill of being unaffected by hateful discourse and the skill of rapidly finding high-value content in an ocean of low-value content can be learned. I think that learning those skills is worthwhile because in strongly free speech areas, one can often find high-value content that is difficult or impossible to find in thought-policed places.
didn't scott erase his entire community and body of work out of fear of being subjected to a witch hunt?
the witch doth protest too much.
>I think that learning those skills is worthwhile because in strongly free speech areas, one can often find high-value content that is difficult or impossible to find in thought-policed places.
i have had far more positive experiences & formed some of the most valuable connections in my life on 'toxic' freespeech sites than i ever have on twitter. it's actually shocking sometimes how much more caustic and genuinely awful twitterposters are than anons.
you see the same thing in online games. free for alls tend to breed a certain amount of community enforced values while games with heavy oversight & no shit talk end up being much more miserable experiences.
so...... the pink elephant in the room. how does this handle moderation, respond to reports and takes action? who decides? how long? how is this better than existing structures or even mastodon instances?
I really don't think Twitter's problem is "not right-wing enough". Woke Twitter hasn't produced any great thinkers, because the core concept discourages it. Conservative Twitter would be the same. In fact, modern conservatism seems to mostly be paranoia.
If I was going to make a social media platform (I know, this is YC... it's not my sphere of interest but maybe it should be), I'd rate limit everyone to one post per day. I'd also ban short (<500 words) posts. Lincoln needed 250 words, MLK 400, you're not as good an orator as either of them and you can, and therefore should, provide citations in written media. Readers can freely highlight unsupported claims, and annotate - annotations need to be accepted by the author to be visible, but highlights do not.
Let's encourage thought, research and yes, silence. Listen first, then only say things if they are worth taking a long time to say.
Making money off this is left as exercise to the reader.
I wonder if parler will start policing posts it's right wing leaders dislike... and will the allow posts which violate laws?
Will they allow a post claiming that the Mercer family also funds a major child theft and transport ring? In other words, will they allow blatant lies or slander to stand?
This is just an expression of the larger, ongoing culture war. There may be some truth to the claims that conservatives are being censored more often, but I don't really believe that this is the primary thing driving them away. They view Twitter as a left institution, and view its users as primarily leaning left. As the American culture war continues to escalate, more institutions (and companies, and websites) get dragged into it. The entity in question "must" be either right or left. Even COVID-19 has taken a very partisan bent in this climate.
I recommended mewe.com to conservative friends as an alternative to Facebook but some of them wouldn't have anything to do with saying parler.com was the only alternative according to their talking heads and I gave up. I actually quit bothering answering those friends texts after I told them they were just being conservative sycophants. They weren't happy with that but they needed to hear it from someone. Trump really has brainwashed a large swathe of people to his erratic braindead life path.
I think social media will split along political lines just like traditional media is split along political lines.
Parler already has some big names on its platform and I think the big fish, mr. Donald Trump, will leave Twitter shortly for this platform and bring with him millions of new users.
Big monopoly social media have succesfully prevented being split up by capturing regulators, ironic if this is how the monopolies finally are broken.
There's a lot of mistaken assumptions and misinformation here about Parler; it looks like most of the commenters haven't actually used it, or have only given it a cursory glance. To wit:
1. Parler is actively recruiting liberals and moderates, to build a "big tent" of diverse opinions and perspectives.
2. The moderation guidelines are quite explicit: don't censor anyone for expressing a political opinion of any sort. Don't censor people you disagree with. Do moderate extremely toxic content -- but it has to be pretty clear, like "I'm going to kill you" or a stream of expletives with zero redeeming content. Or spam, or nonsensical posts.
3. The parleys (their version of tweets) are largely sociopolitical commentary of the type that's being downvoted or censored on the major platforms like Twitter and Facebook. For example, you can post freely about hydroxychloroquine as an effective treatment for covid19. You can say "The 2020 Election was stoken". Pretty much all of the "3rd rail" topics that have been restricted elsewhere. You can link to an article by Alex Jones or Q. Their attitude seems to be, read and decide for yourself.
4. Competition is a good thing. A lot of people here have a reflexive notion that "fringe" sites like Parler and Gab will just create more echo chambers to keep "those people" ignorant. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Giving people a free speech platform is a breath of fresh air, a return to a broader and more civil discourse. Censorship does not encourage civility; it does not foster broadminded attitudes. On the contrary, it causes more extremism.
> actively recruiting liberals and moderates, to build a "big tent" of diverse opinions and perspectives
I wonder what the selling point is?
On the Parler "Values" page I see this:
"Regardless of race, sex, age, sexual preference, religion, politics, or dietary choices —- well , except pineapple pizza -- every user is treated equally under Parler’s Community Guidelines."
Using the phrase "sexual preference" speaks volumes. Not in a good way.
While I can see the attempt at humor ("dietary choices"), adding it to this list has at least two problems from my perspective:
- undermines the seriousness of the other categories
- makes fun of what for many is a consequence of their religious beliefs (which appears earlier in the list)
> "Do moderate.... nonsensical posts".
I don't know whether this is the Parler position, or yours, but this is going to upset a lot of people.
Well, there are 4-5 accounts named "Devin Nunes Cow" or some variation thereof. There's no way to tell which one is the "real" Devin Cow. One that I clicked on had the following content:
I have a confession... my boss, @devinnunes is a closet computer geek. He just bought his first domain!
www.loser.com
Not really the most stellar example of insightful and meaningful content, but it's not been censored, at least not yet in the past three days. It doesn't violate the terms of service, though it's hardly content that most Parler users would be interested in. Maybe on Twitter they find it worthwhile.
Money and power has found a way to hack the first amendment. Algorithms are amplifying the most inflammatory messages on both sides to increase engagement.
Is this the endgame of the attention economy? If I show you a picture of a cat and evidence of an existential threat, which are you most likely to pay real attention to?
The black box is always going to optimize for the worst aspects of humanity. The best aspects simply aren’t worth enough money.
The Electoral College and First-Past-The-Post distort the voters' interest in favour of a two-party system that encourages dogmatic thinking;
US voters want to express themselves but they lack information and critical thinking;
Not all information is good; Journalism is dying and the advertising business distorts people's perceptions for profit;
Taxes are needed but the lucid, rational discourse needed to make good public policy is absent;
It is hard to cultivate the citizenry in the above conditions; the political system is starved of courageous and intelligent politicians; panderers have a significant demographic to exploit.
tldr: US public discourse has attained a toxic equilibrium. But it is profitable for some.
As a Jewish person I’d say that none of this political polarization is beneficial for us. It’s not that one side has intrinsically safer qualities for Jews.
With the work of ADL and many prominent Jewish figures in the past century, anti-semitism had kind of a special status where it’s taboo even when it’s very nuanced, on both the left and right sides of the aisle.
It’s drowning in the cultural discourse now. When 70 million voters are labeled “racist” - or at least supporting “racist policies” - the word loses its deterrence altogether.
the aclu was pretty much built out of support from the jewish community and jewish lawyers who understood that free expression is the strongest protection any minority has against the state and will of the of the majority. the rights i enjoy today exist in a large part because of their tireless work and they have my eternal gratitude.
bad ideas never go away, though the words and the arguments for them may change. we cannot censor away the problem, the only defense is a vigorous and open forum of debate where everything can be challenged.
America used to be an explicitly racist county where the majority of voters supported bans on interracial marriage and segregation in schools as recently as the 1960s. There's nothing absurd or unlikely about racist voters being a large fraction of the country.
How about doing a thought experiment for a minute?
Trump told what are generally considered incorrect opinions on corona virus prevention. Eg: Hydroxy Chloroquine works, masks don't and so on...
His followers then parroted and posted these comments on social media and were promptly defunded, suspended and even banned for breaking Eula terms. Because Covid is serious and far too important to risk endangering others lives with misinformation like that...fair enough.
The campaign rolls on only now a significant portion of Trump's most vocal supporters are no longer able to voice their support and encourage people to vote for him due to being punished for spreading false info that Trump told them regarding Covid, or is that the real reason? Maybe the plan was to silence the right's voice all along but Covid presented itself at an oppertune time, the left leaning social media companies took full advantage and Trump and his followers walked right into the trap!
Could that be why right wing supporters might want to find a new forum to express themselves? Somewhere that they wont have their voices taken away right before an election that they feel passionate about?
Just a different thought from an outside observer with no skin in the game.
Look for actual polls, the belief that HCQ works and masks don't are in minority among Republicans, same with most of them having never heard of Qanon, the proud Boys or the boogaloo (which is more a meme than what was depicted in msm) These positions are inflated by the MSM to make right wingers look like crazy lunatics.
Look at the polls huh? You must think I'm dumber than a sac of hammers if You think I'm gona believe another one of them.(tounge in cheek)
Most of the vocal support for political candidates comes from the minority of voters, on both sides. That doesn't change the situation.
The point is wether real or not there is a perception that powers that control social media are activist, woke or whatever other lable You want to give them.
These are private companies, right wing supporters do not believe in heavy handed government, so what else are they to do but find new venues to expresd their views? Do You realky expect them to just shut up and take it? That will never happen.
Social media is neither Left nor Right leaning, nor are the rules. But if the people enforcing said rules have bias, then problems arise, isn't that the point BLM was making about the Police?
There's plenty of opinion out there that the leadership of these companies themselves are right leaning, even if the average silicon valley employee isn't. I don't know.
But maybe they are also just hoping to be neutral. Maybe it's good business to not alienate half of your marketplace. Maybe there's some aspect of genuine principle there. If you believe that can't exist, how is it possible that right leaning state governments ever can verify the election in favor of a left leaning candidate? I'm naive in so many ways, but I need some hope to stay alive.
That very much depends on the issue in question. Most of them are pro-gay rights, for example, because that is either a win or neutral for people they care about but if you’re talking about issues which have a direct financial impact (tax rates, corporate liability, privacy or workers rights, etc.) you’ll unsurprisingly find big differences. When you look at the money that the big tech company PACs spend it tends to skew towards whoever is in power or promises the least regulation, like most other industries.
Truth is I can still see both sides of the political argument, possibly even more so the libratarian point of view, which is a fairly safe place to be ATM.
I believe for bad or worse though that many people have gotten caught up in the frenzy a bit too much during this election cycle and have made morality comprimising decisions on both sides. Maybe it's the Rona driving it, after all so many people have died from it, and the US went to war over 911. Rona is literally exponentially worse as far as the death toll goes, so IDK what is to come but emotions are raw for sure.
I have tried to stay out of the discussions, (taken Dang's advice and waited for things to cool down) then a hit job story about another platform comes out like this one and tries to politicize Parler. So unfortunately I got sucked into the politics too and foolishly weighed in.
Twitter spent a long time trying not to take action against posters, for all kinds of abuse and libel. What happened is that finally the endless lying hit a subject which personally mattered to those running the companies.
I'm sure they do want a forum to express their views and claim they're silenced. But they need to stop and think about why everyone else has deemed them so toxic.
Oh but wait!! I was wrong it wasn't the HCL and masks after all.
You're right about hitting a subject they cared about..that's right now I remember it was HB's laptop story that brought about the bannings.
Check and Mate I guess. Good luck sorting that mess out, hopefully You get a few weeks rest after the Georgia runnoffs before the campaigns start up again but I fear the media has found a cash cow in political outrage and will be milking it for every drop from now until the endof time(or twitter).
I suspect that twitter's growth and becoming profitable is directly correlated with the election of Donald Trump and the outrage culture that followed.
Biden's staff will now just tweet the odd photo of his rescue dogs in the White House.
I can only imagine what kind of sub-culture that platform will create. Since it is now considered the "right-wing" platform, will it also breed a sub-culture that is considered too extreme for the "far right"?
> "even though there is no evidence for these allegations of systemic anti-conservative bias"
This is simply not true. Twitter blackballed the Hunter Biden laptop story and locked you out of your account if you DARED to tweet a link to it, saying that it violated their code of not publishing hacked material. It was not hacked. But they happily allowed news outlets to publish Donald Trump's hacked alleged tax returns (we never received a source, so quite dubious).
In mid October I deleted almost all my tweets and likes (but Twitter being so shit they are still showing my likes except it’s not liked anymore lol) and have not been tweeting anything anymore.
I found Twitter too toxic, it made me angry with people for no reason, so I deleted all my tweets and the app. No more notifications, no more “just checking Twitter quickly”.
I now go to Twitter like once a day just to have a look what is going and and oh my god, the more I am absent the more I see how rotten Twitter is and all of its users. Everyone is so negative, pessimistic, judgemental, sarcastic in tone, confrontational, and self righteous. People are posting so much shit it’s unbelievable how much time they waste of their lives there. One huge thread after another, people crying for attention.
Everyone just posting negative stuff to make other people feel bad, down or guilty about something. I was part of the problem too.
Lots of this:
> “When I was a kid, I once had to work at my uncle’s shop. Let me tell you about <insert bullshit here>. A thread...”
I don’t know what Parler is, but Twitter is THE WORST of social media and if Parler is an alternative then it’s going to be equally bad!
I've long held the opinion that Twitter and Facebook are just content in the medium, a bit like complaining about Sky, CNN or Fox on TV without looking at television itself and the impact it had on communication.
The internet has brought communication to everyone that travels at incredible speed. This has the effect of causing emotive responses, rather than reasoned. Requires no effort at all to respond, and encourages the toxicity you describe. What gains most traction are those posts that are the most emotive. It used to be "if it bleeds, it leads", but I suspect these days it's more akin to "emotion deserves promotion".
Speed carries a number of other implications. For example, it allows a cheap, steady stream of constant information that can be completely irrelevant at best to you, plus it's information about which you often can do nothing about, except hit the reply button. This can only make things worse, because people feel powerless except in this superficial way.
The other effect is the quantity of information, and it's impossible now for a user of the internet to wade through it, or even validate it without incredible effort. Our current techniques for filtering that information is essentially populist individualism: we rely on what other people have liked, linked to, or shared, but at the same time, read what is presented to us based on our previous interactions.
I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that I perhaps pessimistically feel that these things are fundamentally baked into the medium, in much the same way that Neil Postman felt entertainment was intrinsically baked into television. Hopefully I'm wrong, and there are solutions to these things. Not sure what they are myself.
That and you can instantly find a huge tribe. In the past you had to deal with others around you as well, which challenged ideas. Now you plug in to this huge tribe of anonymous people around the world and assume you’ve found the truth.
I think this is a misunderstanding. Social platform users have little reason to leave one platform for another. Censorship is one of those few reasons. Censorship 8s at a very simple level telling those with different thoughts to go start a tribe somewhere else.
Twitter isn't making good decisions. The killed Vine and gave Musicaly and then TikTok oxygen. Their censorship is giving rise to competitors.
Parler censors energetically also, it's just that it's owned by Breitbart rather than amoral profit-seeking VCs. The VCs censor whatever gets anyone upset, especially powerful people who can cause them legislative, legal, or tax trouble. Parler's owners censor sex and other things that don't agree with their ideological line, probably anti-racism, anti-military/police and positive depictions of the socialized functions of government (which can probably all be neatly grouped under "terrorism.")
The Internet just taps into the primal (that is, of primate) instincts of humans. We're just a bunch of apes with technology, and the Internet is just a conduit for our lackluster emotional brains to connect to each other.
There is no way around it because humans are deeply emotionally flawed, and these flaws are amplified by our technology. No amount of technology will fix it, as it will just be another catalyst.
Looking elsewhere in the branches of life for intelligence, such as octopuses, whales, in particular orcas, and elephants, we see different types. Are they more or less emotional? The communal spirit of elephants and that of orcas, the latter of which showcase particularly striking examples of cooperation, does make you wonder. But then it again, it makes you wonder if all higher forms of intelligence lead you to take advantage of a greater amount of situations and why we even bother trying to establish ourselves out there for other intelligent lifeforms to find.
The popular candidate that the Electoral College prevented from becoming President was Clinton, it just turns out it's easier for an unfit candidate to win via the Electoral College than it is for an unfit candidate to win via the poplar vote.
The system was designed by Hamilton alone (or nearly so).
The system was designed to prevent a popular but unfit candidate.
You seem to be arguing that because one of those three is inarguably correct that Twitter shouldn’t be giving a “this tweet may not be correct” warning. That’s not how it should work, IMO.
...but Parler launched over 2 years ago? I guess you could argue that it wouldn't receive an influx of new users recently, but it'd still be very much here, even without Twitter's fact-check.
I think it’s down to who you follow. First, never ever read “trends” or random tweets. Never trust Twitters official app to show you anything useful. Using third party apps also saves you from ads.
Second and most importantly, follow a set of users that are interesting, friendly, and who don’t engage publicly with trolls. It’s a magnificent tool for staying up to date with a narrow topic like a niche technology.
Just unfollow or block the negative people and trolls.
>It’s a magnificent tool for staying up to date with a narrow topic like a niche technology.
A blog/website with an RSS feed is even better, IMO. And for in-depth discussions traditional forums (or even subreddits) beat Twitter easily.
Twitter is the king of low-effort posting.
Twitter does a good job of highlighting the important posts someone makes rather than requiring I curate for myself. It also has brought to my attention the important people in the network of those I follow introducing me to insightful people I might not have otherwise known.
I prefer twitter's method to RSS feeds. I need curation with the amount of content that my list publishes.
Actually, if your goal is to stay up-to-date on specific topics, tools like Discord and Slack are much better IMO because of the way they work to allow two-way communication. Even Reddit is offering a similar setup now.
If you do want to continue in Twitter, change your location. I used to follow key topics (like Go and Flutter) on Twitter, but couldn't avoid the nasty "trends" Twitter throws at you that (IMO) are very biased. So, I set my location as Iceland (I live in the US), and after that life has been good. :)
Isn't there the problem where your favorite "celebrity"
you follow posts nice stuff but when election or some other event is happening they start posting a ton of "off-topic" stuff ?
Absolutely. You follow humans. Whole humans. They have every right to attract followers with technical tweets and then suddenly anger half their followers by being political come election year.
I don’t think it’s possible to create a safe space from opinions you disagree with. What happens on twitter could happen with your friend or uncle. On Twitter it’s at least easy to unfollow someone and it’s not a personal tragedy like it is if you need to break from a relative because they turn out to believe in conspiracy theories.
The above poster is right on. That your favorite poet or whoever can fly off the handle with their toxic political faction-war delusions or whatever is a direct contradiction to the common idea where Twitter is useful for following your favorite X.
It often sucks the fun out of things you like and it’s a good reason to not use it at all. Nobody is pitching “safe spaces” here. But it’s a good time to ask yourself how much a toxic one is going to enrich your life.
Getting off Twitter and Reddit are two great life upgrade tips.
It could happen, but it doesn’t happen nearly so often. I’ve had to mute one of my best friends on Twitter, because his posts are just filled with toxic bile that I’ve never seen reflected when I talk to him in person.
You can probably generalize to something like "technologically mediated assholism", but there is more than one thing happening here, such as:
+ Filter bubbles/homogeneous in-group opinions lead people to becoming more extreme in their views.
+ Observing some rando (it doesn't have to be an authority figure, although that helps) "say the quiet part out loud" is validating, to say the least.
+ Lack of f2f contact leads to thinking of individuals as impersonal abstractions, and in particular, as the "other".
+ The pathetic fallacy applies to groups just as it does to inanimate objects.
+ Text communication often causes people to misread tone.
+ The affective fallacy (the assumption that the effect of an action was the intent behind it) becomes particularly powerful because of the former two points.
+ The affective fallacy seems to operate in reverse too: Someone informing you of an outcome seems like they are making a claim about your intent.
+ No-one is a villain in their own story. On the internet, everything is a story, and if the story is about someone like you, obviously they can't be a villain either.
+ Exposure to information that conflicts with (even weakly held) beliefs tied to a person's identity often triggers defensive rejection of the new information and strengthens those beliefs.
+ Group dynamics are in play for public interactions, so there is always a performative aspect even for ostensibly 1-to-1 communications. This often doesn't get turned off for private electronic channels such as email.
And so on. A lot of these mental quirks are like ratchets that only ever tighten. Although each in isolation is often self limiting, the limiter can be bypassed by some other quirk, after which the ratchet can tighten some more.
If you don't like the stuff they post, don't follow them. This includes things that you don't think they should post - you know, the "off-topic" stuff.
Them posting that stuff isn't a "problem" just because you do not appreciate some of the content.
Not only is it not the default, it switches back after an arbitrary amount of time (they do say they'll do that when you switch, but they aren't specific on how long and don't alert you when it's gone back)
I don’t use any client from Twitter (such as the official Twitter app or the Twitter dot com website) and I’d probably rather stop using Twitter than use one of them.
That’s my point: Twitter isn’t half as good if using the official clients.
I don't think that could help, because you have a person with many followers and in their mind they think they are doing a good thing to spread "the message" so they would push their message to as many people as possible.
I was thinking you could have say a way to tag your posts or shares so your professional posts and personal posts could be separated but the "activist" would ignore the tags so they push their message to everyone. So as other suggested you would need a filter on client side to get around people that attempt to push some to everyone.
Doesn't that just reinforce the echo chamber? I don't actually use Twitter or Facebook, and I deleted my Reddit, so I'm not the one to talk. But my wife uses Twitter a lot and has managed to get into conversations that are very hard to keep civil. She has found several approaches that work without blocking.
1. Only enable notifications and DMs from mutual follows. People who get into pile ons don't tend to follow their "arch enemies" to do so (because their followers would not like them to follow "the wrong people"). You have full control over who can pester you.
2. Walk away from conversations if your get harrassed, bored or annoyed, but be clear that you are doing it. "This is going nowhere and it's getting late. I'm muting this thread". Again, you have control. If you imagine getting into a heated debate in the pub, this is the equivalent of leaving the table to talk to another group. It gives you the ability to peacefully walk away, and deny someone the opportunity to keep arguing with you against your will.
3. Realise that people don't change their minds during an argument. Always give them room to back down. A cornered animal will always lash out, and we are just animals.
4. Always be clear and civil. Be generous. Don't assume that people are acting out of malice.
5. In sometime is a toxic person who causes pile ons, quote tweets you, intentionally misrepresents you by cherry picking your comments out of context, doxes etc, block the fuck out of them.
Yes. Twitter is fantastic only if you accept that you can’t have arguments on it. It’s just not a good idea. But not all conversation requires disagreement.
Also: I use Twitter as a news feed. I don’t tweet, just read. For me it’s the successor of rss.
>> [block early, block often]
> Doesn't that just reinforce the echo chamber?
No, I think there's a big difference between an echo chamber constructed by algorithms that push content upon you without your consent or knowledge, and an "echo chamber" constructed by yourself when you actively curate and trim the media you consume.
You and your wife's suggestions are really good ideas, but for them to be effective, it's essential that you exercise control over what hits your eyeballs. Twitter, in particular, is a hot mess. I use the "muted words" feature to filter out tweets that contain words that raise my blood pressure, it's now well over 200 words since late 2016. Is that a making a bubble? Perhaps, but I've found it's better to engage with that subject matter in a time and context of my own choosing rather than having it dropped into "my feed".
"No, I think there's a big difference between an echo chamber constructed by algorithms that push content upon you without your consent or knowledge, and an "echo chamber" constructed by yourself when you actively curate and trim the media you consume."
Well presumably the parent to my comment is implying that echo chambers are only problematic if they are "imposed" upon you by "the algorithm", which I would disagree with.
The problem is that people have become hyper-partisan en masse and whether they arrived there because of "the algorithm" or because they intentionally filter out sources they disagree with ... it doesn't really matter.
The real problem (in my humble opinion) is that there is too much news and it's almost all intentionally biased to some extent. It's therefore not practical for people to keep up with the news without entering an echo chamber. You would have to, for each instance of "news", read at least 3 versions of it to ensure you are considering all perspectives. No one is going to do that.
Do people want to consume net unbiased news? Everyone says they do but consumption patterns says otherwise. Is it commercially viable to produce unbiased news? It used to be favorable but now distribution is cheap and there is more competition so the incentives are to be more biased and find a niche.
I don't think this is a solvable problem, the genie is out of the bottle. This is just a price we pay societally for having the Internet.
Absolutely. Apparently CSPAN's coverage of the US election was far more even-handed, but people want to watch Fox or CNN because they're drawn to the smell of blood from the tribal war. People love to band together with their tribe to hate other tribes. It's sad because when you look at the basic needs of all people, they're the same. And when you put a reasonable Democrat into a room with a reasonable Republican, ban any talk of party affiliations and just discuss those basic needs they'll agree more than they disagree. The internet is a marvel, but humans didn't evolve the ability to stay rational in large numbers, so ultimately I think we're better off without it.
> whether they arrived there because of "the algorithm" or because they intentionally filter out sources they disagree with ... it doesn't really matter.
At the end of the day, we're each responsible for making sense of the world from news sources. People get too hung up on the concept of "unbiased". I think that's an unrealistic ideal when it comes to politics. It's like wanting to eat fruit but always expecting it to be peeled for you, meticulously, and placed on your plate without blemishes or bruises.
While it's certainly possible to responsibly and critically "consume a feed" that has been algorithmically generated for you based on your history of media consumption behavior and your social network attributes-- it's much more efficient to seek out high quality sources of information.
That doesn't mean block out everything you disagree with, but it does mean block out noise and consider what you give your attention to. You can't do that easily when a third party is dumping garbage onto the page for the sake of motivations that have little to do with informing you.
I don't think there is anything wrong with a limited viewpoint or an echo chamber but I haven't actually seen one operate (plenty of clutched pearls though).
I have a simple rule: I won't block or defollow based on your ideas, but I will do it very quickly if you are obnoxious, boring, trying to build an audience on twitter to sell products or build a brand or otherwise act stupid.
It is easier to follow my "don't say stupid things" if we already agree on most things, so I relax it a bit for those whom I disagree with to only include not denying reality and being non-stupid within their world view (e.g I am not going to follow someone who posts about 5G covid, but I have followed people who are against abortions.
People seem to get furious about being blocked. I’ve seen people post publicly the name of the person who blocked them demanding an explanation. It seems to escalate things rather than calm them down.
I published all my blocks with rationales to whyiblockedyou.com for a while. Then I decided to get serious about just banning networks of white nationalists en masse instead of blocking one user at a time.
I long for the old IRC days...when you can open a room on DalNet and talk to a small group of like minded people about what you are interested in and curious about..invite/kick those who get obnoxious. It was cozy and I’d give anything to get an online community where we all get along and where it’s ok to be open to new ideas.
Most of the BBS and IRC rooms I frequented had little to no moderation. Flamewars occurred, but everyone eventually calmed the fuck down..you just have to let it burn out almost like how you’d allow a child to have his tantrum and then it’s back to life as usual.
I think moderation and rules are making communication worse. Anyone who has been in a marriage or a relationship can maybe attest to the fact that in the fiery instances where we don’t sit down and ‘figure out rules of engagement’ burn out fast. When there are rules for the emotional pressure valves to be released, arguments and disagreements become nested and multi layered.
In today’s world..we are all toddlers and/or married to each other on social media and Twitter, FB et al have become our nannies creating and putting out meltdowns and tantrums at the same time.
Having said that, IG is still my favourite. Except that they are allergic to images of certain parts of the human anatomy and sometimes even onions can be too sexy for their nipple detection algorithms..but otherwise it’s brimming with joy and positivity.
I miss those days too! I used to spend a lot of time in #efnet and #dalnet, speaking to strangers about things like #skateboarding and other random topics. It was kind of cool because back then most people didn't know what irc was, nor did they have the prowess to download, install, and configure a client. Mirc was the jam.
I'm working on a new open chat site, https://sqwok.im, and hoping to recapture some of that essence. Particularly the simplicity, and lack of overly strict moderation like you describe. Irc never hit mainstream because the majority of users would never download and install a client, but it's neat that with modern web technology we can finally build these experiences in a way that general users can enjoy.
Checked it out. I like the simplicity of the design. The font/size is a little odd for my eyes but I can get used to it.(maybe because I am seeing it on my phone)
I am unsure tho how to navigate to get to the chat rooms.
ETA: ahhh! I got it! Will there be some form of indexing?
Eta2: can I describe it this way: the author of a topic of discussion is the moderator of the topic?
So the key thing is on Sqwok each post has a built-in chat room instead of comments, meaning that creating your own chat and sharing it with anyone else is as easy as sharing the url for your post. It currently works on mobile and desktop web.
> can I describe it this way: the author of a topic of discussion is the moderator of the topic?
yes this is accurate! I'm still actively building out some key features including ability to do some basic moderation, but that's the plan!
I like that there are no "engagement" or "proofing" indicators like likes and hearts, or other mechanisms signaling approval and consent-of-the-crowd(like votes/points/karma).
Do you intend to keep it this way? (Please say yes)
Yes! I wanted to build a place that's mission focused on conversation, and tries to mimic the real world as much as possible. There are no plans to add likes, voting, or public "karma", and I'm split on whether or not to show follower count. In real life people "vote" by either walking away from a conversation, or chiming in with an alternate viewpoint. The relevance algorithm is based on conversation metrics such as activity and publish date, and I'd like to explore further ideas around that.
Outstanding! I've signed up and am already having a few interesting chats about space launches :) Really interesting experiment you've made here, I hope it succeeds
hey, thank you & thanks for checking it out, appreciate it!
hmm, that seems like a bug! the username limit is set at 20 but maybe I accidentally copied that validation onto the password field, I'll remove it, thanks for reporting!
it was #atheism for me on dalnet. quarter century since, i still am friends with my chat buddies there. what does that tell you? "social media' as a platform these days, is laughable. i will laugh my arse off one of these days.
haha yep, that's about the time I was hanging out on there, although I mostly remember hanging out in quake gaming channels, #skaters on efnet, maybe a few others. It was a fun time because due to the slight obstacle of figuring out how to get online, there was a certain exclusiveness to it. Plus it was the first time I had ever used something like that other than AOL chatrooms (which I think were around at the time of the aol cdrom you would install)
edit: forgot there was #undernet too.. dang, what a fun time. I remember there were a bunch of other servers on top of those but I can't remember them
I’m only a very light Twitter user, but I cull and curate my feed. It’s mostly funny, positive people in fintwit now, and it’s a good experience. I almost always learn something while flicking through.
But yes, I’ve found that without careful curation, it quickly turns into a depressing cesspit. Then again, that’s not unique to Twitter. I culled my contacts in the real world when in high-school and college for the same reasons and to the same effect.
I find that some of my professional colleagues are some of the most toxic posters. I've got many active filters in place, but in some cases, I've simply muted/blocked some of them.
Done the same on Facebook, which I use mostly for family communication and posting dad jokes. But again, as hard as I try to separate work / family life, colleagues want to connect and they spew the same tired BS I see elsewhere.
So, on FB, I can permanently mute them. Which, I do.
If twitter's business model was to be a toxic stew of partisan talk and censorship of "incorrect views", yeah, they nailed it.
I noticed same thing some years back. Don't let the social medias work ON you, push trends on you. Ignore all suggestions. Keep it minimal and use only for your personal goals. Importantly stop notifications on cell phone.
Facebook I stopped using a while back. It gives me the feeling of universal garbage bag where everyone in a race to impress others. On twitter I follow top people from my domain and ignore everything. No political BS. In LinkedIn, I literally removed all HR connections and started to follow people whom I really adore and take direction from their career path.
I'm a longtime lurker on Twitter, the list of people I follow is well-curated. If someone looks like they cause me more trouble than insights, I unfollow or even block them with little hesitation. In this form, Twitter is working great for me. Needless to say that I stay away from politics (and related topics) as much as possible.
I tried that hard for quite some time but never managed to get a purely on-topic timeline. Follow 10 experts who post mostly about topic X and you'll constantly find at least one of them posting something different at any point.
For example you can't subscribe to grugq for political-infosec content without some IRA memes. And I don't mean that other people shouldn't post stuff they want, just that I'd like to see a filtered view of their posts most of the time. After a few iterations I gave up Twitter almost completely.
That's the problem with Twitter, you can't follow only a subset of tweets of a person that is related to a particular interest of that person. You only can follow everything the person tweets, likes, and retweets (albeit randomly filtered by Twitter's AI logic). Which makes it hard to exclude various nonsense from the feed.
I wish Twitter allowed people to tweet into different personal channels, and I could only subscribe to the personal channels I'm interested in.
Social networks badly need to evolve. What they are currently is quickly eroding the social fabrics.
On Twitter I also mainly lurk. I've found it to be the best place to get the detailed news I want (for example, Wasserman or Cohn for election result), but know to avoid comments unless I'm looking for pure entertainment.
But, I have all Twitter alerts turned off, and only check every few days. I rarely look at my own Twitter timeline and instead go directly to people's timeline who I have found will have the news I'm interested in.
Yeah, I agree. I still occassionaly read some people I follow on Twitter, but I rarely comment and never read notifications.
I also entirely stopped using Reddit for the same reason. IMHO it's even more toxic than Twitter.
And don't get me started about Facebook. What is it about politics that takes relatively sane friendly people who you've known for years and transforms them into raging psychopaths? When my own sister found out I didn't think Trump was a literal Nazi, she then proceeded to call me a racist, with all her douchebag "online friends" cheering her on. And before Facebook, we used to get along really well. But now it's like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.
Every occurrence of "twitter" in the top level comment could have any other social media site substituted and it would read the same and still be entirely accurate (HN is one of the rare exceptions obv.)
I've ditched the lot, deleted my reddit and twitter accounts, configured my pihole to block the domains for the occasions that my willpower fails me and my life has improved dramatically.
I haven't used Twitter or Facebook since about 2007. People say they need to use these platforms to stay on top of what's happening in the world, but I have not found that to be true at all. If something is important, I hear about it about an hour after everyone else, and then read up on it if I want to.
What gets thrown out by that filter is all the inconsequential news, and gossip, and speculation, and learning people's knee-jerk reactions before you've had a chance to make up your own mind. You can still seek out all that stuff if you have the impulse, but you aren't being fed it intravenously all the time.
This is all by way of saying that the cost of just cutting these platforms out of your life altogether is pretty low, and there are some benefits.
Wow, that's rather shocking to me. I find Twitter to be a fantastic news source, with higher concentration of good links than HN, and often see stuff there far before it shows up ok HN.
The thing about Twitter is that it is entirely about who you follow, and what those people talk about and retweet. So if somebody is a source of toxicity, unfollow them. I have a very low threshold for both following and unfollowing.
This part, curating your feed, is not trivial, but it is what determines 100% of your experience. I don't blame you at all for having a bad experience and not wanting to use Twitter again! But also realize that it's not the only experience to be had there, and I think that for many, and hopefully most people, it's a positive experience.
The default Twitter lets you select from lists of topics, none of which are very toxic unless you ease into confrontational politics.
If this default is "horrible" can you say more about that?
> fake emotional output of a single user's anecdotal experience
What do you mean by this? What is the emotional output and what is fake? Are you talking about my single user's experience, or that of the person I replied to?
I am not a twitter user really. I check it maybe once every 2-3 weeks at most. But,.... It really depends on who you follow. I follow a few indie game dev friends and unfollow if one of them starts posting political stuff. My feed is mostly cool info about indie games in unity, unreal, pico-8, some graphics info. Very little bad stuff except for twitter itself with it inserting ads and trying to get me to follow "popular" people I have zero interest in or posting "trending" crap. Some of that I've managed to ublock origin away though of course it's extremely frustrating that both twitter and facebook obfuscate their css
If you’re seeing Tweets that make you angry, unfollow that person. It’s really as simple as that.
If someone doesn’t have the willpower to avoid anger-inducing follows and tweets, deleting Twitter entirely is a good option. For everyone else, it’s really not difficult to curate your feed to be more reasonable.
Twitter can feel like YouTube without the videos, just the comments.
I especially despise the “trends” sections. It ignores any keywords and sites that you’ve blocked and seems designed to inflame. Dorsey at one point made a big statement about trying to change the tone but I’ve seen little evidence of it.
I have a small list of people that I actually follow who tend to keep things civil
> Everyone is so negative, pessimistic, judgemental, sarcastic in tone, confrontational, and self righteous. People are posting so much shit it’s unbelievable how much time they waste of their lives there. One huge thread after another, people crying for attention.
> I was part of the problem too.
Not to be overly personal here, but doesn't this post veer close to describing itself?
Twitter is a hellfire, but it still has value if well controlled. I use a third-party client and added dozens of muted word (eg anything political or covid related) and it's amazing; it's a bit of a escape even. Once I realized I don't have any obligation to mind the Latest Piece of Shitty News 24/7, I'm a much better online social media user.
I still read the news every day (Feedly) and know what's going on, but it's compartmentalized.
> "Wonder if shaping discourse via a site where performativity is rewarded, single lines can be taken out of context from qualifying threads and piled on, pithy takes are amplified over nuance, and everyone is either Good or Bad, was overall a positive or negative development"
It took me a while to realize what Twitter was. At first, it was described as "micro blogging" and it sorta looked like people just text messaging to the world with shades of IRC.
But I eventually realized what it really is: a gossip site. With all the mean gossip anyone could ever want.
You can unfollow people you know. I make it a point to unfollow or mute anyone who's too negative. There's some value in Twitter, but it requires curation.
The way I see it, the problem with social media is that you surround yourself with like-minded people, which diminishes your tolerance to different views. People become self righteous and can't take criticism lightly. Compare this to how things were 15 years ago, or how they are in here, where everyone and their dog can challenge your opinion. You become more open minded long term, and can handle criticism in a more mature way.
I take the contrarian viewpoint here. I think the division is good. There's no reason people in the valley should have to live by the cultural rules of the people in Jackson Mississippi or vice versa. That's exactly what happens right now under our political system. The US has at least two distinct cultures and the more they grow to despise one another the sooner we can have an amicable divorce and allow each group to live freely. There can never be mutual respect when we toggle back and forth between who is forcing their will on the other.
If we're not striving for some modicum of cultural unity, then yes, we need to get over our insistence that every solution be implemented at the federal level.
I agree with your statement, but took a long time to decide whether the best way to endorse it was to upvote or downvote your comment. (For what it's worth, I went with upvote).
"I'd say that has more to do with the HN platform and its rules"
Isn't that what we are discussing - platforms, their rules, and how that influences discussions? I'm just saying that there are plenty of people, in my experience on here, that would rather downvote an opposing opinion rather than start a discussion about it or answer a question about their own position.
I routinely even get downvoted when asking why the previous comment was downvoted. To me, these behaviors are akin to mob-driven censorship of minority opinions - downvote it so it moves down and greys out.
It's so interesting...there is this well known phenomenon where ~everyone has at least some bias the vast majority of the time, and in a forum thread where this phenomenon is the specific topic of discussion (say, a psychology paper discussing subconscious bias, and the associated psychological/neurological phenomena that enable it), any significant disagreement (including whether each one of us suffers from it) with this general notion is typically very rare.
But then switch over to a different thread where the topic of discussion is not some abstract idea like this, but rather an object level idea, say just for example a news story about conservative leaning people switching to a new social media platform to escape what they consider to be censorship, and something very curious occurs. In such threads, it is rare to encounter much talk about this phenomenon of psychological bias, and if it does come up, it is ~always only about the obvious bias suffered by those who are in the ~"general outgroup" of the forum community. In those cases, it is common to read numerous anecdotal observations of how people in the outgroup(s) are cognitively flawed in that they exhibit signs of "living in a bubble", and "just(!) won't listen to reason or consider ideas that are contrary to their worldview".
But then if one is to initiate a conversation with a person in one of these threads, and make a reference to the formerly non-controversial abstract idea (from the psychology thread) that ~all people suffer from some bias, at ~all times, it seems as if all knowledge of that phenomenon has somehow become cognitively inaccessible, that the individual has no knowledge whatsoever of the phenomenon.
Conversely, if one is to mention (say, in a different subthread in the same overall thread) this exact same phenomenon, except switching the object of reference away from the person (who was making a biased comment about their outgroup), over to members of the outgroup, this formerly inaccessible knowledge then becomes accessible once again.
Just for the sake of discussion (a mental experiment of sorts), let us imagine that there is some significant truth to this theory - let's (temporarily) assume(!) it to be True, at least to a significant degree. In this purely hypothetical scenario, might this phenomenon offer some logical explanation for the amount of extreme polarization of opinion that can be witnessed in the world, this "crisis of epistemology" we talk about where different tribes seem to live in completely different realities from each other, with each reality having significantly different sets of facts? To me, this seems not only reasonable, but quite consistent with objectively observable reality.
Consider the theory that aliens intent on causing strife are using mind control rays to affect people’s political opinions en masse.
Just for the sake of discussion (a mental experiment of sorts), let us imagine that there is some significant truth to this theory - let's (temporarily) assume(!) it to be True, at least to a significant degree. In this purely hypothetical scenario, might this phenomenon offer some logical explanation for the amount of extreme polarization of opinion that can be witnessed in the world etc.?
The answer is yes. If people’s political opinions were being manipulated by aliens en masse (assumed as a premise), then it would be very likely that the amount of polarization in the world would have some connection to that.
But assuming arbitrary premises like this this doesn’t seem like a very useful way to learn about the real world.
> But assuming arbitrary premises like this this doesn’t seem like a very useful way to learn about the real world.
See this comment is interesting, here are two ways (there may be more):
1. You have made a rather significant change in the topic.
I was talking about: "It's so interesting...there is this well known phenomenon where ~everyone has at least some bias the vast majority of the time, and in a forum thread...."
But you switched the topic, to the examination an attribute: arbitrariness
2. You have described a hypothetical scenario, focused attention one one single attribute, and then suggested/implied that the two scenarios are ~"the same". Also, in doing so, you are treating "arbitrary" as a boolean, which might cause a reader to not realize that the degree of arbitrariness is not even close to the same. This technique would generally fall under the Strawman Argument category.
These are really enjoyable conversations, let me know if you have more ideas.
There's actually a handbook (can't remember the name at the moment) of some sort floating around the internet that goes through lots of these techniques, in case you're interested in this sort of thing.
I am not talking about marketing. I am talking about a very specific neurological/psychological phenomenon, that is highly suggestive that memory access is dynamic, that it varies on the topic, that it varies based on perspective (abstract vs real-time object level), and that it occurs here on HN.
My claim is also contrary to a claim higher in the thread:
>>> Compare this to how things were 15 years ago, [or how they are in here, where everyone and their dog can challenge your opinion]. [You become more open minded long term, and can handle criticism in a more mature way].
Now it's true that on a relative basis, HN is superior to many other forums, and also that it is true to some degree that certain opinions can be challenged, and subsequent discussions will be handled in a mature way.
This is far from comprehensively true though. And also, it can be observed that people seem to not like to discuss this idea (that certain topics cannot be maturely discussed on HN, including the the abstract idea that certain topics cannot be maturely discussed on HN).
Since then, my favorite instance was killed by a bunch of irony-poisoned instances ganging up on it to convince others it was a toxic hell (projection!) and defederate from it. The instance was basically dead within a week as people migrated off to avoid losing contact with friends on the fediverse.
The default is 500 characters. Some compatible implementations of ActivityPub have longer limits. Mastodon hides longer posts from those instances behind a link to open the toot[1] and show the whole thing.
[1] Instances choose how to render things delivered over ActivityPub. So (for example) Mastodon would render a write.as post as a toot, while write.as might render replies to that toot as comments on a blog post.
I've aggressively sanitized my Twitter and Instagram to make sure it's little more than an easy way to see posts about computing, video games, vinyl records, or whatever nerdity I'm into at the moment. The moment one of those accounts posts something related to the outrage du jour, it's an almost immediate unfollow. It doesn't matter whether I agree with the content of the post or not.
I'm sure I miss a few from time to time, but you get the point.
I've unfollowed lots of tech luminaries I admire, lots of musicians whose music I love, lots of brands that make good products. And I still buy some of the books and albums and products they produce. I might even miss the occasional awesome announcement from one of those outlets. But the resulting sanity and focus of my social media feeds is worth it.
That's the frustrating thing. I was convinced to try using a twitter account by a friend who talked about how great it is to follow interesting tech people. For some cases, I guess it could be. But the problem is, everyone seems to also tweet about current political stuff, and I have no interest in seeing that at every turn. I know "stop talking about politics everywhere" is trite, but stop talking about politics everywhere.
It shouldn’t be seen as trite to want rest and reprieve from the psychologically exhaustive nature of “always on” political engagement[1]-especially in times such as these, but I completely understand what you’re getting at, and to my own individual extents: I agree with you.
To some extent the top voted post at the moment displays an inherent issue with a lot of people of these platforms. If the message is not pleasant to the reader, either they will engage with it in a reactionary way, or seek to further isolate themselves in information bubbles. (Notwithstanding abusive behaviour, which should not be tolerated)
Look at how many negative words are in this post of yours and hopefully see the irony of what you’re saying. Twitter isn’t magic, it can only give you what it thinks you want from what you give it!
Just to bring to levity to this discussion, your quote very much brings to mind the hilarious and ever-relevant Four Yorkshiremen[0] sketch from Monty Python.
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing 'Hallelujah.'
And people get addicted to that thing. I remember when Twitter used to have a tweet counter on people's profiles, and for some people it was running into the tens of thousands.
I look at twitter discussions and it honestly like like a lot of people are just shouting past each other. I don't think anyone is out to win hearts and minds out there...
It s still a good way to follow current events by following specific people or journalists.
Switching to chronological mode, aggressively unfollowing the rude people who think that their technical knowledge allows them to plaster their opinions on your face, and changing my location to burundi did it for me.
This is where the major problem lies and you don't even realize you're complicit in it. The "current events" blasted out on Twitter are curated by Twitter admins to only show what they want to show. They place heavy over-weighting on events and discussion that they want everyone to see. They hide hashtags they don't want trending. They don't show a pure list of what's actually trending. They shadow-ban users that talk about topics they don't want talked about. They give priority to media outlets that are also involved in heavy censorship, therefore adding extra fake credibility to false narratives. And the latest is the whole "Fact check" thing, where they only fact check the discussion that they want discredited (even if it's 100% true).
You are an example how censorship is so powerful. When people believe they've found a "good way to follow current events", and refuse to question the accuracy of the medium, they quickly become prone to believing false narratives. Currently, the elites who own the media are doing everything in their power to further the left's agenda. (The active campaign is their attempt to cover up and discredit any discussion of election fraud. Also, you probably didn't hear that Zuckerberg donated half a billion dollars towards democrat vote-counting strategies) Many people want to bury their head in the sand because it aligns with their political beliefs. Hopefully this is a wake up call to some.
“The couple initially gave $250 million to the nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which has set up a grant program that funds local government efforts to expand voter access, including drive-through voting, temporary staffing support, equipment to process ballots and applications and nonpartisan voter educations”
God forbid people be able to exercise the right to vote.
“A conservative legal group, Thomas More Society, has filed lawsuits in eight states, including the presidential battlegrounds of Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Iowa, seeking to block the grants from going through”
So let me get this straight, your response to my criticism of left-wing censorship is to quote an article from a major left-wing media outlet who actively participates in censorship & altered-framing of news topics? And on top of that, you provide a smug response that misses the underlying point? This thought-cycle is common, and is deepening the divide in America. I urge you to diversify your news sources, and think critically about issues rather than believing everything you read.
Also, donations towards partisan strategies meant to directly impact election results aren't allowed.
"Mr. Landry said one way the grant money could be used would be to send out prepaid return ballots in heavily Democratic districts around New Orleans, “while some guy in a rural parish [a conservative area] still has to buy his 50-cent stamp.”"
"Though the CTCL maintains it is a non-partisan organization that offers “free and low-cost resources for local election administrators” with no regard to political leaning, the group’s founders each boast records in progressive and pro-Democratic circles. Prior to creating the CTCL, all three founding members – Tiana Epps-Johnson, Donny Bridges and Whitney May – held top positions with the New Organizing Institute, described by the Washington Post in 2014 as “the left's think tank for campaign know-how.” Epps-Johnson also remains a fellow at the Obama Foundation, her LinkedIn page shows."
"In Philadelphia, long a Democratic stronghold, money provided by the center is to be used to establish 800 polling places, an increase of 76% the number of polling places"
Since you provided no citation about Zuckerberg’s grants to 50 states but chose to frame it as a “democrat” conspiracy, I thought other readers could use some context.
Curiously, the right (and you) have no problem with 42 other states having access to those grants, but god forbid any purple states get that money. The fact that Joe Bob lives in a rural parish that wont apply for grants is on your team, not those sneaky lefties.
“800 polling places”
Why do people loathe making voting accessible? What does it matter how many there are? That’s the best you can do on a site that loathes Zuck?
Has the Moonie Times found Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate yet? See, I do read it, and I have a very long memory. Thx for playing.
You clearly don't understand my primary point. You don't even understand why I provided those specific examples. (e.g. 800 polling places is completely fucking unnecessary and is setting the stage for fraud in a historically fraudulent city). Not worth my time explaining to someone not interested in understanding.
I'm sorry for triggering you with non thought-police compliant dialogue. You may re-enter your safe echo chamber now where your participation awards are waiting.
> current events" blasted out on Twitter are curated by Twitter admins
I didnt even know that it exists. I meant twitter users that cover current events (like wars), that you can find by searching or through other social media. It works like a telegraph office. I agree that algorithms range from plain bad and lazy to dangerous. If one thinks that what's trending on twitter is reality, they are delusional
No more trending topic suggestions. Apparently nothing happens in burundi which is great. It also stopped suggesting me local politicians but i m not sure it's related
You seem to have engaged with this content and followed networks of people who also engage. My twitter is a very engineering-forward happy place. Sorry you got the you know what end of the algorithm stick. I feel in some way this was self-fulfilling?
I had a similar experience with Facebook: I was pretty good at not feeding trolls, but I'd get involved in these long discussions on political topics with apparently well-meaning people and inevitably, someone in the thread would start arguing from either bad faith or an "alternative facts" perspective -- and I'd end up angry and exhausted and having convinced nobody.
Now I haven't used Facebook for six weeks (I still use Instagram and Messenger). I don't miss it at all. If I'm bored or tired, every once in a while I'll reflexively start to open it in a browser tab but so far I have always caught myself and not gone into the Zuckerworld.
I'm not active on Twitter but I imagine it's more of the same.
I doubt if some Alternabook that lets conspiracy theorists go nuts in their own little bubble will make the world a better place, but I'm not convinced it'll be any worse than what Facebook and Twitter have been doing.
I am beginning to wonder if social media may have had its heyday. Specifically I’m curious as to whether Facebook and Twitter will start to be used less and less by people, but who won’t abandon it completely.
I do wonder if this might make them less useful for advertisers.
I had the same experience that leads me to delete my account entirely.
You have to see it for what it is: An online digital slot machine. The stakes are, well your time and your life. And just like in real life, the house always wins.
The only thing you've actually told us with this comment is you follow people who post a lot of drama. Presumably because you like reading it. I have no sympathy.
To be fair, we're all "using" Twitter somehow now. It became impossible to ignore when mainstream news would now lead based on what people have tweeted.
That's the thing: it's become extremely deeply embedded in our society, since it's damn catnip to 24-hour news (which, IMO, was the originator of this problem - they need content, now, and anything which provides is thrown up there).
Did you read what I said? I have stopped using Twitter. I don't tweet, I don't have the app, I don't engage in anything what happens there now.
I just occasionally peek in to see if I'm missing out on anything and surprisingly I don't. As a result I see myself (unconsciously) check Twitter less and less.
When I switch TV programs I might view a program for 1 minute before I decide that I don’t like the content. The next day when I look for something to watch I might tune into the same TV station again for a minute before moving on. I am not a “user” (viewer) of that TV station despite checking it out for approximately a minute each.
My current Twitter “usage” is the same concept. You decide if you call this a Twitter user or not.
With mainstream news being so propagandist, only way to keep up with actual news is Twitter: people bypassing curators and directly & efficiently stating what happens.
I mean, Mastodon's founder and most of its userbase are definitely left-leaning, but I think the sole reason that it's Parler seeing the surge is because that's where a lot of right-wing pundits decided to go to. Dinesh D'Souza, Ted Cruz, Devin Nunes, Sean Hannity, etc.
It also kinda helps that Parler has a central authority that's able to verify certain accounts. Mastodon's designed not to support that "feature".
It will go the same way as its direct predecessor Gab.ai, Voat and other "alternatives for conservatives" - it ends up as a self radicalizing Nazi hole, as no one except right-wingers wants to be on a network dominated by right-wingers.
I signed up out of morbid curiousity. The thing seemed mainly full of porn accounts hijacking right-wing hashtags. There seemed to be much more spam than there was on Twitter - at least from my brief look around.
Are there any good information how advertising works in this network?
From my experience its easy to convince "free-speechers" to buy things - think gold investment, self defense equipment, prepping, everything with the US flag colours on it.
If you want to make a quick, but cynical buck, start on Facebook.
My Facebook feed was full of pins, shirts, mugs, and posters of Ruth Bader Ginsberg with a tacky Notorious B.I.G. crown on her head for weeks after her death. Sometimes they’d even say “Rest In Power” whatever that means.
Same was happening on Twitter for quite a while with 2 bots chatting to each other on every popular thread about Trump: "just drinking from this <mug with "leftist tears">", "OMG, where did you get that", "<link to shop>".
I expect they made lots of money there if they outsourced to print on demand.
Yeah, cheap things with huge value. But if you want to sell very expensive but completely worthless, if not downright harmful things, you need to go to the other side.
Parler isn’t a tech startup like any other. It’s unlikely to ever be profitable. Why Mercer and others think it’s a good idea to plow money into it is the question.
Twitter is ridiculously overstaffed for what they are and it resulted in very few improvements over the years. I really wonder what most people there do. And yes, I’ve run popular apps so I’m not underestimating anything. If Parler can grab a percentage of this market and not unnecessarily overextend themselves, they’ll be just fine.
You’ve run popular apps on the scale of Twitter? It’s left ambiguous, but personally or with a team that’s much smaller than Twitter? That sounds very impressive. Can you share more details?
Significantly smaller than Twitter of course but big enough to have a pretty good direct idea of sizes of various teams that are needed and also indirectly when working with larger apps of others. And for completeness I’ll admit that it was 3+ years ago. Twitter is not exactly going through explosive growth either.
If it was crowdfunded somehow I’d think that. This is someone with plenty of room for their ideas (Mercers are pretty extreme in this sense!) so it’s someone making a space for others’ ideas in that case.
But more likely it’s a scheme to create a platform to deliver ideas to a specific target group. Or a way of attacking the established actors and regulation in the space. Or a way of simply creating division. Or (my guess) all of the above.
A quick leaf through the ads in the National Review (back when I would occasionally happen across a paper copy) yielded a pretty good indication that right-wing stuff usually comes with a fairly good serving of grift.
And that was in a kinder, gentler age, when more of the arguments were about tax policy and the political management of South and Central America. In today's considerably more polarized era...
In an amazing coincidence, people who believe that masks have 5G chips in them to allow Soros/Gates to perform mind control (or is it via the chemtrails?) and that climate change scientists are being manipulated by Big Solar turn out to be easy to sell things to. Who would have thunk it?
I think the idea here is more into logically thinking in a critical manner, and in the last few years especially due to wikileaks, some of your worst nightmares are real AF, and then Epstein happened.
>even though there is no evidence for these allegations of systemic anti-conservative bias.
All there is evidence of is them removing misinformation. Like banning the NYPost after they fabricated a ridiculous story how Hunter Biden flew across the country to give his laptop to a computer repair guy who 'found' all this data. As MSNBC says, NYPost is a conspiracy theory peddling tabloid.
Though I do agree Twitter hasn't done enough to remove the hate and misinformation.
Sure, Twitter did ban lots of people who were defending that racist maga hat kid. The Native American man he was taunting explained what happened very well. His explanation that the boys surrounded him and threatened him is so typical of MAGA people. I also agree that anyone who threatened to kill the maga hit kid shouldn't be punished.
Banning the people who called Jussie Smollet a hoax, after he was attacked by Trump voters. That was justice.
I also agree with all the transphobes who have been banned. They should never be allowed to use the wrong pronoun, or use a deadname, or for that matter just say things like women have 2 X chromesomes. All these abusive people have no place on Twitter.
I have no doubt there's censorship going on, but to paint this as uniquely an issue for conservatives is what gets me about this. It's an anti-mainstream censorship if anything.
Left-wing, (not neo-liberal mind you), outlets are getting censored too, just ask The Grayzozone, Jacobin etc.
As for your average Twitter consensus, if you say i.e. Biden, even Sanders is a radical socialist then you're going to get laughed at, because it's far from true.
But as far as the reach of conservatives, #ProudBoys is trending on Twitter right now and am getting conservative YouTube recommendations about the 'culture war' on a regular basis, that's despite me not being logged in, not watching conservative channels and having history/personal recommendations etc. turned off. It just seems to be popular content right now.
As much as I would like to see this happen, I don't think it is going to happen this time around either... or ever.
We've seen this movie before. Minds, Gab, Patreon alternatives, Voat, all of this has been done with no success.
Whatever you open to the public will be infiltrated by the enemy. I think the new model is to do it secretly in closed groups away from the public, preferably local groups where you meet with people in person, have strict rules and only sign up new users via strong referrals: family members, close friends etc. Once some of them work well, they can be franchised. A very good example of this is Freemasonry.
Yes, such social networks will be much slower and decentralized but they will be much more effective and better for the members long-term.
The problem is that all the alternatives are open to the same line of attacks that the current platforms are.
The people who run the platforms directly or those who help them operate via partnerships, investments, can be threatened, bought or invited to the current equivalent of the Epstein's island... and they'll eventually have to get in line.
The current assumption that these tech companies work the way they do because of the ideology of people who own them or work for them is either very incomplete or completely flawed.
Well its not as if Twitter or any sort of social media platform out there represents reality these days, for me anyway. Which is why I deleted my accounts once I had a look at both platforms to see if I'm missing anything.
Unsurprisingly, It turns out that both of them still have their extreme crack-pots and Parler is no exception; which is just another one of them, so nothing new here on the subject of 'randos' and 'crackpots'.
> No one wants to spend time on the Internet listening to a bunch of randos talking about how the Jews are secretly lizard people manipulating the elections except other such crackpots.
I don't think that is representative of users of Parler. I would agree with you if you said Gab.
This may surprise you but the vast vast majority people are joking about the likes of the lizard people. It is a bit of fun because of how ridiculous the idea is.
> Let these people go there and convince each other of their fringe conspiracy theories. Freedom of association and all that. If they will stop polluting normal places with their crackpottery we're all better off.
From "Anatomy of the State" by Murray Rothbard pages 27 and 28:
> It is also important for the State to inculcate in its subjects an aversion to any “conspiracy theory of history;” for a search for “conspiracies” means a search for motives and an attribution of responsibility for historical misdeeds. If, however, any tyranny imposed by the State, or venality, or aggressive war, was caused not by the State rulers but by mysterious and arcane “social forces,” or by the imperfect state of the world or, if in some way, everyone was responsible (“We Are All Murderers,” proclaims one slogan), then there is no point to the people becoming indignant or rising up against such misdeeds. Furthermore, an attack on “conspiracy theories” means that the subjects will become more gullible in believing the “general welfare” reasons that are always put forth by the State for engaging in any of its des-potic actions. A “conspiracy theory” can unsettle the system by causing the public to doubt the State’s ideological propaganda.
When large news organisations that are owned by the rich or the state are telling you that they need to "stop mis-information and conspiracy theories" on platforms where anyone can post anything that means some of those theories might not be as soo fringe as you like to make out.
Nah, I don't need large news organizations to do anything. If you walked up to me today and gave me the latest spiel about how Kamala Harris was born in Kenya to a two-headed alligator man, I'm going to walk away.
Online it's not so easy to walk away, so I prefer that you have alligator man conversations with other alligator man enthusiasts.
> If you walked up to me today and gave me the latest spiel about how Kamala Harris was born in Kenya to a two-headed alligator man, I'm going to walk away.
Except most of the so called "conspiracy theorists" don't talk about that stuff at all. They normally talk about how "this information Y is being supressed from the public because this will undermind the governments policy on X".
People always bring up the crazy the stuff to discredit the other things that could be legitiment. It must be some form of strawmanning.
> Online it's not so easy to walk away, so I prefer that you have alligator man conversations with other alligator man enthusiasts.
I don't have alligator man conversations at all. I just don't strawman the other side position to feel morally superior like you appear to be doing.
I'm sure this is how they perceive themselves and I'm sure they spend at least a few hours to talk about this stuff. But in my experience, the SNR is low. It's hard to find the new MKULTRA hidden in the pizzagate, qanon, and birtherism.
And ultimately, that's it. But be my guest: go be informed about subtle government interference by the guys who are convinced that Democrats are injecting old people with SARS-CoV-2 so they can steal their identities to vote.
And obviously the 'you' is a "generic you"¹. It doesn't mean you specifically, dude. Substitute with "one" m.m. if you find it confusing. It's not an insult targeted at you. It is an insult targeted at the loons that seem to populate every one of these "free speech" sites: voat, gab, whatever.
I didn't know that strawmanning is the way to the truth /sarcasm.
I put conspircy theorists in quotes because the news organisations label people as such when they look away from an official narrative. This is known as dissent. If you are an American your country is founded on dissent.
That why I gave you the the Rothbard quote (not a conspiracy theorist btw but an Anarcho Capitalist) because it specifically talks about how dissenters are dismissed. You are doing exactly that. You should be very worried when large media organisations and news are talking about "fact checking" and "stopping mis-information". What they are really saying is that they wish to silence dissenters.
I'm not interested in who large media say are dissenters or conspiracy theorists because I can make that judgment myself: it being trivial on first listen.
Like I don't actually need someone to tell me Qanon dudes are crazy. I just have to listen to the Qanon dudes themselves. Of course they are convinced they are dissenters exposing the corruption in Big Pizza. Heroes, I'm sure.
That's the funny part. You keep bringing up this Big Media Telling You Who Is Real thing like Big Brother is in charge when I kinda don't really need Big Brother. When this guy comes walking up to me saying that Joe Biden has a secret sex dungeon where he keeps children he abuses that he farms using mutant tadpoles, I kinda really don't need CNN to tell me anything about this guy.
> I'm not interested in who large media say are dissenters or conspiracy theorists because I can make that judgment myself: it being trivial on first listen.
Yet you are repeating exactly the same things as they do in the same manner by focusing on the crazy people.
I have said many times in this thread that are always those that are on the fridge and they do not represent the whole.
Dismissing all dissent (which is what you are doing) as crazy people is wholly disingenous.
> Like I don't actually need someone to tell me Qanon dudes are crazy. I just have to listen to the Qanon dudes themselves. Of course they are convinced they are dissenters exposing the corruption in Big Pizza. Heroes, I'm sure.
Again you keep on strawmanning by saying that everyone is a crazy and ignoring the very prescient point about dissent. It is very tiresome when people engage like you do.
> That's the funny part. You keep bringing up this Big Media Telling You Who Is Real thing like Big Brother is in charge when I kinda don't really need Big Brother.
Then why are you repeating what they say point for point? Odd that.
> When this guy comes walking up to me saying that Joe Biden has a secret sex dungeon where he keeps children he abuses that he farms using mutant tadpoles
I am 100% certain this event didn't happen. So you are basing your stance on a falsehood. That must be fallacious.
> Then why are you repeating what they say point for point?
For the obvious reason that if you go read voat and gab that's, um, literally what those dudes are saying. Like, I didn't make up the shit about pizzas, man. Sometimes some things are just fact.
I'm sure it must be very convincing that I am in cahoots with CNN weather because we both think it's a sunny day in San Francisco today. Or maybe Big Calendar and I are conspiring to decide that today is Nov 15, a Saturday. After all, we're saying the same thing. Coincidence? I THINK NOT!
And who cares if you don't believe any of this. It doesn't really matter. The SNR is everything. One guy here or there is a speck of dust on the vinyl.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go attend to my master. His nictitating membrane is giving him some trouble this morning. And I've got to learn from him what day we're going to decide tomorrow is.
Lots more Strawmen you have built. You must like building them.
> For the obvious reason that if you go read voat and gab that's, um, literally what those dudes are saying. Like, I didn't make up the shit about pizzas, man. Sometimes some things are just fact.
I've been on Gab in the past and while there were some that said that stuff like that, most weren't.
> Like, I didn't make up the shit about pizzas, man.
Again keep on bringing up the crazy stuff while ignoring the stuff that is plausible. That is very disingenous.
> I'm sure it must be very convincing that I am in cahoots with CNN weather because we both think it's a sunny day in San Francisco today. Or maybe Big Calendar and I are conspiring to decide that today is Nov 15, a Saturday. After all, we're saying the same thing. Coincidence? I THINK NOT!
I never that you were in cahoots with a news media. I said that you were repeating the same lines in the same manner. It is obvious that you are just repeating what they've said and then pretending on here that you are not.
> Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go attend to my master. His nictitating membrane is giving him some trouble this morning. And I've got to learn from him what day we're going to decide tomorrow is.
Can't engage in an honest manner at all can you. It is all very tiresome.
To be fair, I've largely stopped using twitter due to the incessant politics, pretty much what you described above but just in a different flavor. Ironically manipulating elections was one of those "incessant" topics, however it was all coming from a completely different crowd then (around when I left).
I also remember seeing a ton of racism against whites and (ironically) anti-semitic comments and conspiracies that would be alarmingly praised (likes and retweets) which I assume weren't really taken down if they were able to get thousands of impressions.
I like places like stack and HN because you're able to usually escape it... but its hard to find any social network that pretty much doesn't turn into an echo chamber of one side or the other.
> pretty much what you described above but just in a different flavor
I'd love to see what part of twitter would be merely a different flavor to "Jews are secretly lizard people manipulating the elections". There's an important difference between the mere existence of an echo chamber and the contents of the chamber. Let's not "both sides" this when comparing to anti-semitism.
The part of twitter that believes the real Jews are of African descent would be a good example no? Antisemitism seems one of the few conspiracy theory topics that is prevalent on both sides of the political spectrum, though on the left it seems to mostly come from NOI types or Muslims who take antizionism a little too far.
BLM UK got in a lot of trouble for saying that discussion of antisemitism was being stifled in British politics, and it looks like they still have their twitter account. Nick Cannon looks like he still has his twitter account as well, though his comments were made on air iirc.
> I've largely stopped using twitter due to the incessant politics, pretty much what you described above but just in a different flavor
I'm not saying there aren't crazy takes in many corners of Twitter, but OP made a very far reaching claim here that I can't imagine holding water from my experience. The examples you bring up seem pretty fringe at best and not representative of common activity on Twitter.
>a different flavor to "Jews are secretly lizard people manipulating the elections".
ahah, just a little funny because it literally is ironically "Jewish people keep us down because reasons" - admittedly, I don't know too much because I didn't get into it but its still just as absurd.
If you want just a taste, look at how much "support" Nick Cannon has on twitter.
Thinks nick cannon got fired for "telling the truth" -- and what is that truth? Apparently it is "Jewish people, white people, Europeans" — “are a little less" and have a “deficiency” that historically caused them to act out of fear and commit acts of violence to survive."
It gets worse the more you go down the rabbit hole but I'd argue this is just as bad as the lizard people stuff because it is less outlandish, perhaps making it more "believable" for some.
If you really want, I can go through and find the tweets that had thousands of upvotes, defending the antisemitism and "discussing" how Jews control everything (especially sports and music).
>There's an important difference between the mere existence of an echo chamber and the contents of the chamber. Let's not "both sides" this when comparing to anti-semitism.
I can agree on this. The problem is the contents of the twitter echo chamber are pretty bad too and its only seems to have gotten worse.
I use Twitter quite a bit and there's no politics on it. Mostly AI stuff and the musings of my friends. Twitter only gives you stuff from people you follow and one level past.
Of course not using it is a good option but ultimately what you get from Twitter is what you put in.
>I use Twitter quite a bit and there's no politics on it.
Sure. It does depend on who you follow and if you choose to click on things so again it is my original sin to try to have productive conversations... so yes, if I choose to put myself in a bubble on twitter, I probably wouldn't see that stuff... but I tend to click on articles or discussions on any social media. I "try" to use it as intended.
Just look up "mayos" or "yts" or "white people" in the search bar and you'll instantly see racism.
Click any articles about start ups or business or billionaires that make their way to the "general population" of twitter and you'll see tons of hatred.
Sure, I don't want to convince you to use a tool or not use a tool because we each must make that decision for ourselves. If you would find yourself searching Twitter for "mayos", "yts", or "white people", then I can see why you don't enjoy it and I can see why you don't want to use Twitter. That's a very reasonable decision.
I just wanted you to have the information that there are certain ways to use the tool to get good SNR. If you decide that using the tool in those ways is not worth it to you, that would be reasonable as well and I won't try to convince you otherwise. If you already had that information, then it was just wasted effort on my part, which I'm willing to accept.
Nah I know I could get away with "unfollowing" certain people. I mean, eventually people will post new articles and I would click on them and be met with that vitriol. Mostly because I followed a lot of business related accounts and it seems like if any of those get picked up by the "general population" of twitter its open season on anyone that feels business/capitalism/startups aren't pure evil.
I do get your point though, it wasn't lost on me. I might give it another shot eventually.
Nah, you stay on the main sites and get mainstream videos of a dude skating on a street lipsyncing to Fleetwood Mac. Which is like 3x better than the latest theory about the alien overlords and their pyramid eyes that have hacked our voting machines.
thrasher and big brother in their heyday wouldn't even be allowed on mainstream social media, nor would nearly anything steve rocco ever touched. skateboarding has always been by and for 16 year old shitposters
Haha, this kind of sarcasm is what everyone used when I said this about Voat.co. Went there to check if perhaps my prediction was wrong but no, it's full of crackpottery of all kind by disaffected losers.
So yeah, everyone is welcome to their parler too. I'm not signing up to find out.
I'm mostly a classic liberal person, think founding fathers, enlightenment era.
And to be honest, I'm curious about what your definition of conservative is?
To me, there's only two way to define it. Either the old way, where conservative means you are a feudalist, monarchist, theocrat, oligarch, autocrat, statist, fascist, etc. Basically you want to go back to a pre-liberal establishment style of society, and are opposed to a liberal democracy.
In this definition, as you see, all these today are generally known as morally bad. Jew hating tin foil crackpot would fall under here, or any other form of A hates on B, since all prior forms of government are about having a ruling individual or class over others, thus a way for A to rule over B.
So in that definition, being conservative means being against liberal democracy, thus against democracy, reason, liberty and equality.
Or the new way, where conservative means liberal but not progressive. In this sense, you believe and value liberal democracy, thus democracy, reason, liberty and equality, but you are content with the implementation of government that we currently have to drive and uphold those liberal values. Therefore you oppose yourself to progressives who think that we're not doing a good enough job at implementing liberal values, in that you believe it is either too risky to change the current implementation or that the proposed changes would result in a worst realization of liberalism.
As you see, in the second categorization, you're still a liberal, so it doesn't make sense to speak about conservative vs liberal in that second one. And because in the US I see people put liberal and conservative at opposite ends, I tend to assume the first categorization. Which would imply that conservatives, to me, are a huge treat to democracy, reason, liberty and equality.
So I'm genuinely looking for clarity. Is there some miscommunication here? How do you categorize "conservative".
I ask because it is very confusing to me. You speak of nuance, and I want to understand that nuance, so would love an explanation.
I think your dichotomy of either you’re a liberal conservative or you’re a fascist illustrates my point pretty well. You simply cannot imagine that someone could be a non-liberal without being evil.
By conservative here i meant really anyone who is not 100% onboard with democratic party doctrine, which is enough to be ostracized in SV today.
It seem you're trying to avoid telling me what you value. If you don't value democracy, reason, liberty and equality, then what do you value?
I listed a lot of known alternatives, you could value ultranationalism with strict traditional societal and economic rule like fascists do, or you could value white supremacy and rule over other races like nazis, or you could value biblical rule of Christian interpretation like theocrats, etc.
Now you seem to say, no it's none of the many alternatives I listed, okay, but what is it?
And yes, I actually can't imagine what else you could be than one of the many non-liberal alternative I listed.
> You simply cannot imagine that someone could be a non-liberal without being evil
That's because it is hard for me to think that someone who doesn't value democracy, doesn't value reason, doesn't value liberty, doesn't value equality, will be willing to accept that I live my life as I please, with a fair chance at opportunity, riches, power, and happyness. So it seems anyone without those value will be trying to have authority and rule over me one way or another, and not with my best interest at heart. It seems natural to consider evil someone whose likely to do you wrong.
> By conservative here i meant really anyone who is not 100% onboard with democratic party doctrine, which is enough to be ostracized in SV today
So by conservative, you mean a republican voter? Why not say republican party voter or something super clear and unambiguous then? Why does the article say "conservative" ? Is it not because republican are conservative? And now I'm back at my original confusion, what kind of conservative is the republican party? Liberal conservative? Or anti-liberal?
I find the narrative against liberalism dangerous. Liberalism is what the western democracies, including the US are based on, and it's what made them prosper and a great place to live. So am I suppose to believe there is a strong anti-liberal movement in the US? Pushing for a return to nazism, facism, monarchies, theocracies, oligarchies, feudalism, etc. ? If not, it only takes people to say, hey woa, hold on, you got.it all wrong, we're full on liberal, just conservative as in my second definition above. But the fact that even when I ask people don't say that, but seem to circle around and evade the question, makes me feel it might be the former.
I'm trying to have a discourse right here in the open, but you keep evading the topic and burrying your head in the sand.
I've been very transparent and upfront. I value democracy, reason, liberty and equality above all else. I have good reasons to do so, one of which is that its proved itself historically to create some of the most peaceful and prosperous societies. But I also have phylosophical reasons for it, such as believing that individually we're better off working collaboratively on equal footing with others, than in a constant battle of the fittest for supremacy. And as I brought up the individual, I believe that individual rights are very important to stability, and should be respected even against a majority, for the betterment of each individual and society as a whole.
I don't believe anyone is of lesser worth and value than me, that would go against liberal values to do so. It's quite the contrary in fact, I'm strongly against anyone who'd try to suggest A is lesser than B narratives, or A is more deserving than B narratives.
Now being against someone doesn't mean I believe they are lesser, but simply that they are a liability to what I value, thus a risk towards democracy, reason, liberty and equality. And I am prepared to hope to change their minds, or go to war for it, if it came to that. It would be quite unamerican not too:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" - United States Declaration of Independence
Edit: And just so there's no misunderstanding, I'm not talking about democrats or republicans. I'm talking about liberalism and democracy. I don't have any issue with any political party who'd simply disagree on how best to uphold liberalism and democracy in practice. But I will have issue with one who tries to destroy democracy, take away my liberty, increase inequality, and employ illogical and irrational justifications and strategies. And I'm not saying the republican party is trying to do so, but it's never been less clear to me if they are or not then now.
Sure, but you can't stop people from creating spaces where they want to talk to people they agree with. And besides, I'm certainly not going to spend my time explaining to other people why lizard people are not controlling SecDef through mind probes.
I've got better things to do with my time, like telling you how I don't have time to do that other thing.
Nah, I know a few Republican voters and none of them have decided to dedicate their life to explaining how Obama's secret police are waiting in the wings to take over America and the only tool that can stop them is a dollar store katana.
This is more then a handful of disaffected basement keyboard Nazis. It's millions of people. Many of them reasonably upset at censorship and ultimate determination of truth by a group of 20-30 something high-top sneaker wearing San Francisco people.
This can only lead to a further bifurcating of the electorate, and exacerbates the echo chamber phenomenon. I'm not conservative, not even close, but I do blame Facebook and Twitter for picking winners and losers and alienating conservatives.
A free speech obsessed person myself, I've been keeping a close watch. In the old days, hate speech to block meant, imminent harm. Today, someone saying I don't feel Safe has become an acceptable argument. The argument was made against a liberal signatory of the Harper letter, the argument was made against the editor of the NYT who published the Cotton piece. We've rapidly descended to calling disagreement Hate Speech. And we have double standards like the NY Post Biden debacle, where it was clear that Silicon Valley can rationalize away the most basic values of journalistic freedom. Hypocrisy does down the memory hole, it's tossed into that chute like in 1984's Ministry of Truth.
It didn't have to come to this. For those who think squashing dangerous right-wing views is good and just: what do you think will happen on Parler? Moderation? Lessons learned?
What is the end goal here, Facebook and Twitter? How do you see online discourse in ten years time?
I'm actually curious what's downvotable here. Is it because we are not to criticize Facebook and Twitter, here?
Because there's a (probably incorrect) assumption about my political views?
Because I'm suggesting that maybe the line "censorship will lead to more problems, not less" is to be "voted against" a if it were a design choice in reality itself?
Let's put it this way. Going back to Twitter. How would you feel if your views were suppressed. And if we can suppress views now that you don't like, what happens one day when the views you LIKE are suppressed?
It cuts both ways. Your eagerness to shut something down today can come down to bite you and you'll have no argument to stand on. That's why we defend those we disagree with, on principle.
When Twitter blocked the NY Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop for "hacked content" (and it wasn't factually disproven) and then was very petty and wouldn't unblock their account unless they deleted it, they lost whatever remaining trust they had left among right-wingers. Twitter has been slowly becoming more and more restrictive with many users cheering every ban of voices they disagreed with based on their ideology. Trump will probably be banned soon after he becomes a former president due to pressure from these same users and that could give Parler another influx of people.
I don't buy the argument that Parler needs celebrities and mainstream journalists to survive. Do Discord or Reddit have any? Yet they are doing fine. It will probably stay an echo-chamber and with fewer right-wingers, Twitter will become more of an echo-chamber. 8 days on the top of both app stores is a real momentum for Parler, let's see what they do with it.
When I saw Twitter's head of site integrity post this:
"a phenomenally documented (and illustrated) study from
@3r1nG about the ways that inauthentic social media accounts can be deployed to attempt to discredit an activist movement" and actually followed the link and saw that it was just a blog post about very obvious Antifa parody accounts and journalists falling for 4chan-like trolling, it became clear how bad is Twitter's company culture. They've been drifting around, not innovating, and their underperforming stock price reflects it well.
If you look at Donald Trump's Facebook account, every post of his (including one about getting a new COVID relief bill to him to sign and one wishing people Happy Diwali) is "flagged" by Facebook with their "helpful notice". Twitter has plenty of their own notices as well, spawning several memes already[0][1].
Dick Costolo, the former CEO of Twitter, made a post about "lining up and shooting" people. AOC recently tweeted about "making lists" of opposition supporters, which was amplified by many others. There were 3 years of unfounded accusations of foreign involvement in the 2016 election, amongst many other titillating rumours, gossip, and slander against an elected official and his family and cabinet members.
None of those were flagged by social media companies the way Trump and others are being flagged now. Whatever pretzel-like justifications one may come up with for the obvious double-standard, the average person no longer believes in neutrality of media or of any of the major tech platforms.
> Dick Costolo, the former CEO of Twitter, made a post about "lining up and shooting" people. AOC recently tweeted about "making lists" of opposition supporters, which was amplified by many others.
The former Twitter CEO is not the POTUS, and while the tweet is distasteful, is it really surprising that Twitter doesn't have the resources to flag tweets by every user on the platform? Auto-flagging works for links, not for inciteful remarks. AOC, on the other hand, wasn't talking about death lists, like you imply in your comment, she was talking about people taking responsibility for their actions under the Trump regime.
> Whatever pretzel-like justifications one may come up with for the obvious double-standard, the average person no longer believes in neutrality of media or of any of the major tech platforms.
Yes, because the average American is a fascist at this point. This says more about average people than it says about tech platforms, though.
Thanks for proving my point about "pretzel-like justifications"! The downvotes are also helpful since they clearly demonstrate the refusal of one group to engage and simply censor differing viewpoints by greying them out.
I hope your last sentence is made in jest, because that is not a good basis in which to engage with the world.
AOC suggested making record of sycophants in Trump's wake so they can't distance themselves from him[0]. These aren't opposition supporters. They are the senators, representatives, and other politicians who refuse to be the check on Trump because his (distr)actions benefited them, and still do.
Anyone think this is an operation to gather info on voters of a certain category? Seeing the investors and the fact that you need a real telephone number to register seems like a big red flag.
npr has never been unbiased, but it's fallen heavily into partisanship in recent years. that's problematic even for folks who agree on a lot of their positions, as unsavory methods overwhelm credibility.
we don't need a conservative npr (there are alternatives for that), we need an independent and diverse npr, which is something we're truly lacking in the media landscape.
agreed. it’s a non-profit with some gov’t funding, but major donors and sponsors (advertisers), along with competitive pressures from other national media, hold significant sway over their (im-)partiality. it’s concentrated capital again using our heads and hearts to hoard more money and power for themselves.
It's a bit like they're making a fantasy second reality where stuff like
>All of the mechanical “glitches” that took place on Election Night were really THEM getting caught trying to steal votes. They succeeded plenty, however, without getting caught. Mail-in elections are a sick joke!
is true. (recent presidential tweet). Not quite sure what the endgame is.
How come Parler wasn't removed from iOS app store months ago?
I mean Apple will demand that content violating their policies in apps are removed. I'm sure Parler is full of exactly the kinds of things Apple wont tolerate.
How long until America starts putting limits on free speech?
IANAL, but we already have laws against libel, slander, and defamation.
Section 230 / communications decency could be modified. New laws could be created to prevent amplified spread of factually incorrect information. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom to broadcast that speech.
I'm not advocating for this, but I see it as a possibility.
There are limits to free speech which have been long established. The clear and present danger doctrine describes limits to free speech, in that you can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater. When/if the amplification possible with social media is connected with mob violence, there could be prosecution. I don't think court systems and law enforcement are sophisticated enough yet, though.
The most famous use of the ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater analogy was 1919’s Schenck v. United States, where the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that protesting the draft by passing out pamphlets exemplified a clear and present danger worthy of regulation.
A handful of exceptions do exist to the First Amendment, but free speech absolutists tend to be skeptical of the comparison you make in your post, because historically there have been some serious legal wrongs performed in the name of said crowded theater.
You may find the "Make No Law" first amendment podcast interesting. It's created by Popehat (Ken White), a well known first amendment lawyer. In his podcast he talks about the history of "fire in a crowded theatre", along with many other first amendment topics. It provides a really interesting view into how the courts have applied the first amendment over the years.
Just a note: "Shouting Fire in a crowded theater" is protected, since Brandenberg in 1969. The standard is that you can't incite imminent lawless action, and people trying to escape from a fire isn't "lawless".
You mean falsely yell 'fire' in a crowded theatre - an exceedingly important distinction which is core to much discussion about free speech (should offensive speech be allowed if it is stating facts etc.)
You mean falsely, otherwise your 'clear and present danger' part doesn't make sense - the entire point historically with your example is that it is perfectly acceptable to yell in the theatre if there is clear and present danger. Reducing it to simply 'yelling in a theatre' means you're evaluating it just on.. yelling alone? What? Are you saying all 'social media amplification' is the same?
The danger in 'clear and present danger' of yelling in the crowded theater is specifically and intentionally causing panic where people are likely to get hurt. As others have mentioned, though, it's complicated. The original poster was suggesting we need new laws targeting the amplification of social media, which could limit false and damaging speech. My suggestion is that existing speech, slander, and libel laws apply. The 'amplification' of social media gives individual voices more reach and clout, similar to yelling. Social etiquette, law enforcement, and the judicial system have yet to adapt.
Then who will have the power to decide what free speech needs to be suppressed? Let's give it a thought at the options available:
A) Government. Some years liberals will supress conservatives, when the power is switch conservatives will supress back. The whole concept of free speech was specifically designed to not have the government dictate what you can say or not say.
B) The press. Which one, CNN or Fox News? The trust on the media is an all-time low and they clearly have earned that reputation.
C) The judicial system? Again, most of them are appointed by the government.
D) Tech lords. I really hope no one is advocating for this.
I am not American, I wish to live in a country where I can criticize anyone, even the President, without fear of getting arrested for a bogus claim of defimation. Is sad to see that most Americans don't value their own freedoms.
I’m not a conservative but I support free speech. I installed it but the recommended people were Fox News pundits and politicians I didn’t care about. I like the idea of enabling users to hide speech they don’t like rather than a Speech Czar that determines what we are allowed to hear. But it will take some time for something like this to get a critical mass of users to make it work.
This is what I was curious about, though I'd like to see what they actually posted and whether they got banned for the speech or for harassing people or other behavior like that.
/r/TheDonald was notorious for brigading other subreddits, manipulating votes and other TOS violations then crying censorship when they got banned.
The fact that it's funded by the Mercers should give everyone pause for concern. They're rolling their own platform to do what Cambridge Analytica did without having to answer to anyone.
C/A as sinister manipulators has to be the most preposterous conspiracy theory to come out of the last 4 years -and that includes Qanon. They were a marketing company also known for the scoundrely manipulations of the.... LL Bean catalog. Maybe they sold some people flannel shirts. Terrible.
"free speech" is just being used as a dog whistle for far right ideas in this case. These people are not behaving in good faith, don't bother engaging with them as if they were.
parler is neither a free speech platform by design or a far right one, it's purely an attempt to create the fox version of twitter. their tos are highly dubious.
>dog whistle
to be reductive, yes far right and even fascist ideas would fall under the umbrella of free speech as would... literally everything else.
That's the point of "free speech" - I don't care how far right / left / in outer space your ideas are. You can say them, and I won't absorb the message if I don't care. It's the old saying about TV - if you don't like what's on, just change the channel.
That ends when you start inciting violence and promoting actions that can end other people's lives.
As it should. It's one thing to claim space lizards are controlling Facebook, it's another to start saying you want to shoot up busses full of Facebook workers.
Unconvincing? Replace "Facebook" with "Democrats" and you get worryingly close to Parler.
But there is another problem. These sites don't just happen. If they were bottom-up spontaneous forums - someone starting with phpBB and taking it from there - they'd be tolerable. (And likely less extreme.)
They aren't. These are deliberate attempts to farm and concentrate certain kinds of people with certain kinds of sentiments so they can be used as political leverage for certain interests.
They're not free speech at all - they're farmed speech.
That is the problem. The people who farm them are knowingly and maliciously using them to spread lies and enflame violent sentiment so they can profit from both, financially and politically.
> "Pretty much all of my leftist friends joined Parler to screw with MAGA folks, and every last one of them was banned in less than 24 hours because conservatives truly love free speech," one user recently wrote on Twitter.
It sounds like they were banned for being antagonistic assholes, not for being liberals.
I mean...that's kind of the reason a lot of these people got banned from Twitter/etc, too, being antagonistic assholes, not for being conservative. So kind of ironic if they and the platform are saying Parler is better because "free speech".
It doesn't matter what they were banned for, it's still hypocritical for a platform apparently based around "free speech" to ban people for speech they don't agree with.
I don't think it's hypocritical at all. The U.S. is based around free speech and we ban all of types speech for good reasons.
It obvious that "we want to allow someone to say anything they could say on twitter+(spout conspiracy theories and implicit/explicit racist shit)" is both freer than twitter, and not as free as previous+harass people.
I really don't think allowing right wing nuts to voice their opinion but not letting users harass each other makes a hypocrite?
Every forum needs human moderation, but that doesn't imply that this moderation cannot be done in good or bad faith. Just like a good judge is not congruent to a big, deterministic computer.
So you're saying you believe Parler to be moderating in better faith than Twitter/Facebook/etc? 'cause I think for your statement to be relevant that would have to be the assertion...
Upthread everyone is arguing that everything except imminent incitement to violence is free speech. Aren't mere insults free speech? Do you not like it when it's aimed at you?
Indeed, indeed. If it's not about the principled and unflinching protection of free speech, then what is it about?
I've said it about twitter and I'll say it about parler. Freedom of association is also a first amendment right. Speech is being exercised by the owners of a platform when they edit/curate/annotate posts, and association is being exercised when they ban/shadowban users.
It's all about justifications for being egotistical assholes and believing feelings are enough justification for policy. You can't reason with people who dismiss facts, empathy and consequences. You can reach the middle ground on issues that affect livelihoods of people and try to map where this may be improved.
