321–330 of 412 posts
I talked to an ex-twitter employee I met in Ireland at bar. He told me very candidly that twitter employees loathed Milo Yiannopolous and were actively trying to figure out any way to ban him. Not a fan of Milo, but there are clearly agendas which can't be extricated from politics.
When he isn't playing his troll persona he is actually a very intelligent and reasonable person.
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I imagine a good part of that is because he led a brigade of followers that would go out and harass other users.
Can you clarify how he "led a brigade." Point me to an example where he encouraged his followers to say derogatory things?
When a friend posts on Facebook and it doesn't show up in my feed that's FB making a call as to what to show me. Why? Because algorithms. Maybe "censorship" is a strong word in this instance — do we prefer "selective disclosure"? Regardless, not what I signed up for. Deleted FB.
Once in awhile Facebook decides I shouldn't be friends with someone anymore and suppresses all of their posts from my feed. I start to wonder what's happened to them, so I make a point of searching for their page and find that they've been posting daily. Things I would have been interested to see and would have commented on.
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I think there's a pretty clear distinction between advertising and organic speech, and also a pretty clear distinction between wanting to restrict how other people use your platform and simply having views of your own.
Somewhat unrelated. Advertisers dont want their to be a clear distinction anymore. Hell pretty soon the most effective marketing strategy wont be shameless plugs but offhanded ones. Ones that sneak in like oh hey yeah I was using x the other day and it helped me with y. Once gun manufactuers catch up it might look something like: popular social media user offhandedly mentions purchase of lgun, posts some pictures fir…
I talked to an ex-twitter employee I met in Ireland at bar. He told me very candidly that twitter employees loathed Milo Yiannopolous and were actively trying to figure out any way to ban him. Not a fan of Milo, but there are clearly agendas which can't be extricated from politics.
Twitter could have easily banned him, and others like him, if they had the will to. It’s their platform and they’re free to exclude anyone they like. The fact that they don’t is, in my view, rooted simply in a desire to remain neutral in an attempt to prevent their MAU growth from declining and resulting in lower advertising income and less attractiveness to investors. In other words, it’s a business decision. Twitte…
"In July 2016 he was permanently banned from Twitter for what the company cited as "inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others", referring to a harassment campaign against actor Leslie Jones and others."
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There's also lots of evidence to the contrary: Twitter refuses to ban self-identified Nazis who incite violence but there are dozens of instances of people getting banned for saying mean insults to those same Nazis.
Making Nazis out to be just a more extreme form of the Republican viewpoint is hardly a good way to engage in discussion about a politically sensitive topic.
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By the way, it's stupid that we still can't have user-defined emoticons. We could have enriched our online culture with a flourishing set of shared emoticons by now!
My discord feed is infinitely better as a result of custom emotes. Reactions to memes are much more often on point with what I wanted to communicate.
Case in point is that consumers are more than happy to be given custom-tailored feeds that filter content they agree with (or that the provider's algorithm THINKS they agree with). If this was not true, Vero would have taken off instead of falling flat. Social media is pretty much broken at this point. The idea was to increase reach and communication. Instead we've got people grouped into thought bubbles and echo cha…
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I don't believe that it is hacker news admins that are doing the censorship. There is a flag feature and any post that is flagged is automatically hidden. There is a dedicated contingent of users that will flag anything that goes against their narrative. This happens for articles that discuss China, diversity, etc.
It would be prudent to let "controversial" subjects stand before the court of public opinion rather than be automatically censored, regardless of how riled up the comments section can get.
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By some measures, Clinton campaigned (slightly) to the right of Trump in the run-up to the general election: https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2016 For the primaries, using similar measures at least, the Republicans all more or less clumped together to the right of Clinton.
That article makes claims that are just not true. "Trump supported a decent minimum wage from the start, wants free education in state universities, has supported universal health care, consistently opposed the Transpacific Partnership Agreement and wants more bank regulation." He very clearly is not in favor of free education, he is very clearly not in favor of raising the minimum wage, he very clearly is not in fav…