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Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views

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Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Twitter is censoring based on the CEO's views. That's exactly my point.

You're saying that, because Twitter is not allowing a custom emoji who's entire reason for existing is to be a negative attack on someone, it's censorship?

Yes. "Negative attacks", as defined by you, are still free speech. Twitter is free to censor it, but we should point it out as censorship.

Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views

#193
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can be super emphatic an right wing, how do you think someone becomes a populist nationalist. At the bottom? Fear of the other; in the United States, fear of the other rooted particularly in racism. Because it's not "nationalism" here--a disease by itself, but a controllable one. It's white supremacism , given nicer clothes by calling it "white nationalism" for some godforsaken reason, peddled by leaders who wa…

Nationalism and white supremacism are not the same thing at all. Equating them and needlessly injecting race into it is bog standard Russian divisive propaganda.

In America, they are. Both are historical and current disasters; the icing on the cake of American white supremacism fueling American nationalism is extra gross, though.

I do want to compliment you for the rhetorical twirl of trying to co-opt reality with the Russian specter, though. It's bold. Projecting...but very bold.

Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views

#194
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By the way, it's stupid that we still can't have user-defined [emojis]. Emojis should have only been embedded user-defined pngs. I know I'm being cranky and old, but I feel our character sets shouldn't have been used to encode novel cute pictures.

Yes. The problem is that it assumes that language is fixed. However, the correct way is to make emojis freely definable, so that the emoji language will continue to develop; of course, the unfortunate side-effect for character set maintainers would be that they have to expand the set in order to incorporate the new parts of the language. But that is their problem; you can't force a population to use a limited set of…

> you can't force a population to use a limited set of symbols.

It's called an "alphabet".

Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but there is evidence that Twitter is censoring certain icons based on their CEO's political leanings.

There's zero evidence of that here. "No attack ads" isn't the same thing as "no anti-Hillary attack ads". If you can cite the Hillary campaign getting a custom emoji for an anti-Trump hashtag, do so.

> "No attack ads" isn't the same thing as "no anti-Hillary attack ads".

Irrelevant. Twitter denied them a custom icon whereas allowed their opposition to have one. The content of the icon has no bearing on the matter. It's censorship. That is twitter's choice but it is still censorship, based on the CEO's politics.

Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but there is evidence that Twitter is censoring certain icons based on their CEO's political leanings.

Why is that the case instead of, say, Twitter not wanting to turn custom emoji into attack ads?

> Twitter not wanting to turn custom emoji into attack ads?

Maybe it is. It is still censorship. And it is based on the political opinion of the CEO.

Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views

#197
post #4

A bit of both-sides-ism here. The poll shows that Republicans almost universally believe that these companies censor their viewpoint, despite the fact that these companies have bent over backwards to accommodate those views and to give them platforms. Meanwhile only a small fraction of Democrats believe this is very likely, and they aren’t strongly sure about which side is benefiting from the supposed bias.

> The poll shows that Republicans almost universally believe that these companies censor their viewpoint

To me it looks like the polls say that they believe these companies censor content, and that these companies also lean left. Nothing about their viewpoints.

Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views

#198
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Twitter is censoring based on the CEO's views. That's exactly my point.

No, your point was, "It is if you allow the other side to do exactly the same, as noted in the linked article." The other side is not doing exactly the same. The other side never intended to do exactly the same, and for good measure, the CEO promised that if they did, they would be prevented from doing so, too. You are now making the claim that, if side X exhibits behavior A, and opposing side Y exhibits behavior B,…

> The other side is not doing exactly the same.

The other side wanted a custom icon. They got it. The content of the icon is irrelevant to the question "did twitter censor political views not shared by the CEO?" The answer is "yes", regardless of the content of the icon granted to the other side.

Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views

#199

I lean conservative, but to be honest, I assign only a small portion of the blame to social media giants. Their office areas and leadership certainly lean left-wing, but I don't think that's the main issue. I think the biggest contributor is just that left-leaning people are more likely to be offended by right-leaning views. As a result, even an entirely neutral algorithm focused on retention / user satisfaction will…

Conservatives do seem to see themselves as people who don’t get offended. I wonder what causes that. There seems to be an idea that the things that offend them are, like, “naturally” abhorrent, so it’s not offense so much as, like... digust in satanic things, virtue in “common sense”, etc. There’s a whole language to talk about things that carefully avoids the concept of “being offended”.

Most parsimonious explanation; conservative adherence to old fashioned liberalism (aka "I disagree with what you say, but fight for your right to say it" kinds of sentiments), which is no longer really a part of the left.

Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're saying that, because Twitter is not allowing a custom emoji who's entire reason for existing is to be a negative attack on someone, it's censorship?

Yes. "Negative attacks", as defined by you, are still free speech. Twitter is free to censor it, but we should point it out as censorship.

Sure, but it isn't biased censorship. It is censoring attacks against individuals regardless of their origin.

If the Clinton campaign ran an ad that was targeting Trump in a similarly negative way and Twitter allowed that, then it would be bias.

But so far I haven't seen that counterexample.

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