231–240 of 510 posts
> President Trump saying "when the shooting starts, the looting starts”
They have the quote backwards. I may be crazy, but it seems strange to not notice the error. What Trump actually wrote is far more insidious than how he is being quoted.
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I think you might want to brush up on more recent news, because by now Cambridge Analytica’s data has been shown to have been mostly useless at meaningful targeting. Even the New York Times reported that Cambridge Analytica’s impact on the election of Donald Trump as president was overrated. https://stratechery.com/2018/the-facebook-brand/ From the article: “But a dozen Republican consultants and former Trump campaig…
I'm not contesting the conclusion. But traditional media is incentivized to be biased against social media. So "even the NY Times" isn't particularly compelling. (Not to mention NYT is squarely center right, politically. "Left" of the GOP but not left in any meaningful sense.)
1. That the traditional media is incentivized to be biased against social media, and "even the NYTimes" came to a conclusion that advances a social media friendly narrative is exactly the point. If we are talking about the historical biases of the NYTimes, their reporting has consistently had a bent critical of the Citizens United decision (pertaining to paid political speech) and in this particular case, overstating the impact of Cambridge Analytica. That the NYTimes would then go on to conclude that CA's impact on the 2016 election was overrated is absolutely worthy of special remark.
2. Calling NYT "squarely center right and not left in any meaningful sense" is pretty odd. The left-right spectrum is created within the polity in question. It's of no use to an American to classify the American political spectrum from the locus of European politics, because Europeans have no say in American politics. It literally doesn't matter that Joe Biden is "to the right of" Corbyn, because the two will never run against each other in a political election, and British voters have no say in American elections. So while you're technically correct that, on a global scale, the NYT is "center right", that fact is not meaningful at all to their readers, the vast majority of whom are American voters participating in the American political spectrum.
3. Even if one were to concede your premise that it's somehow valuable to classify American politics through another political entity's spectrum of discourse, the left-right spectrum is an extremely lossy way of encoding both social and economic views. On social issues, I think you'd have a pretty difficult time arguing that the NYT is "squarely center right". The issues of election integrity, paid speech, and campaign finance are decidedly social in nature.
Facebook has a really interesting feature that I haven’t seen in Twitter, Google, or others. I can block all ads from a page. Whenever I see a political ad, I can choose “don’t show me any more ads from XXX” and it actually works. This was a godsend during the primary and I wish was available in other platforms. I’m surprised they have this feature and have expected it to go away for years.
Wouldn't it be simpler to just use ublock origin?
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You could say the same of most of the web, from Github to HN...
You can say that about life It is an exceptionally privileged situation to be in when you believe you can simply opt out of politics.
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>Sounds an awful lot like giving up to me No! The opposite in fact! When Democracy is messy it means there's a lot of 'bumping' and 'turn' (to use some metaphors), unlike the sterile utopia that some push for, where everything is clean and specified and everyone follows a neat pattern (to use more metaphors). For example, I love how messy caucuses are, people are yelling and clamouring, convincing each other to join…
Chaos is way easier to game if your goal is to accentuate chaos to an extreme. It's a mistake to think all competitors want a competitor they can trick into helping them. What if they just want to see their competition crumble?
> What if they just want to see their competition crumble?
Who cares! Every person will have different motives for doing what they are doing. That's expected. Welcome to Democracy.
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Indeed -- quite the timely response: Allow people to turn off ads advocating racial justice and equity.
This is a great point. Will a person who turns these ads off even UNDERSTAND that they're not allowing a Black Lives Matter organization to let them know about upcoming events? How will that be explained to the user? The advertiser might only even be sharing the ads with people set up on a recurring contribution to inform them how to stay involved.
But I imagine that wouldn't sit very well at caring-and-considerate Facebook HQ as it would dent the bottom line
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NYT v Sullivan renders it impossible to legislate this (short of a Constitutional amendment)
This case is about public officials suing the press. In my humble opinion, it should be perfectly possible for citizens to sue their politicians for being lied to. Eventually they are supposed to act in our interest and without real information, the democratic process is undermined. Civilians should be able to trust the elected leaders' words.
In this case, Facebook is "the press". Keep in mind that there is no legal definition of what it means to be "the press" — rightfully so. NYT v Sullivan is particularly relevant because, in the case, NYT carried out a full page ad by supporters of MLK Jr containing several factual inaccuracies, such as the number of times King had been arrested during the protests, what song the protesters had sung, and whether or not students had been expelled for participating. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that, unless you can prove "actual malice", the free dissemination of information is protected by the Constitution.
Those that post on FB are already held liable. The whole point is that Facebook Inc isn't liable. If you were to post the text of the first chapter of Harry Potter in a FB post, Facebook Inc would not be liable for copyright violation, it would be the individual (or association) that posted it.
> In my humble opinion, it should be perfectly possible for citizens to sue their politicians for being lied to.
It already is possible to do this, it's just practically infeasible. If you are able to prove "actual malice" — I.e. if you can prove that a politician knowingly lied to their constituents, they can already be held liable for damages. The burden to prove this is high enough that you would need to find documented evidence that the individual in question knew the truth and specifically lied. Remember, it is not illegal to make political promises that you can't keep, and it is not illegal to be publicly wrong about the facts.
> Civilians should be able to trust the elected leaders' words.
No disagreements there. The only issue is that the First Amendment makes it essentially impossible regulate how those words are disseminated.
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> But they are going away to just regular, boring voting because this chaos makes many people uncomfortable and it FEELS better to have a top-down, clean, organized, designed approach. I am strongly opposed to caucuses, but not for the reasons mentioned. I'm actually fine with the disorder, the chaos, the shouting. What I'm not okay with is the time commitment required. It seriously disenfranchises those who cannot a…
>What I'm not okay with is the time commitment required. I understand your position but this is way overstated. Anything worth doing is going to cost you time and effort and streamlining it will make it lose some important intrinsic property of it. Approximately 50% of American households carry credit card debt. Do you know why? Because if you truly want something, you'll find a way to get it even if it means financi…
There exist people for whom this is a real barrier.
Do you have a job that allows you to take a day off work if you need to? Probably.
There exist people for whom this is a real barrier.
Do you have a job that doesn't require you to work on weekends? Probably.
There exist people for whom this is a real barrier.
It's hard to ask someone to just CARE more, if caring more means they might be fired from the job that puts food on their table.
I'm sorry I used your trigger-word "privilege". I do want this to be a safe space for everyone to participate, so next time I'll avoid that word. For my previous post, you can substitute the word "economically able" instead of the word "privileged", and the meaning should remain mostly the same.
I actually don't mind the additional barrier that caucuses create that deter the people that don't care that much. If two people are equally able to attend a caucus, and the activation energy of the caucus filters out the one that doesn't care that much, that seems good to me.
But I really very much do mind the additional barrier that caucuses create for the people that are not able to attend them due to their circumstances. If two people care equally, but one doesn't attend because they would lose their job or need to earn enough money for dinner—then I have a massive problem.