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Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims

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Re: Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims

#81

Post by orangecat »

taxicab wrote: post #23

The story reeks from top to bottom. The owner of the repair shop that allegedly received the laptop from Biden is a super far right conspiracy theorist. To the point where he literally believes that the Clintons are out to kill him for the information he has [1]. The whole story is that this is Hunter Biden's laptop, but in reality some random dude dropped it off and the owner said that "he had a medical condition th…

Yes, it's sketchy. I'd rate it as slightly more plausible than the gang rape allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, which Twitter had no problem with.

Re: Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims

#82

Post by svrb »

wesleywt wrote: post #3
uncoder0 wrote: post #2

To add to this Trump's official campaign Twitter had it's account locked this morning and a video Trump uploaded was promptly deleted. This is new information from today. The thread yesterday was about the initial wave of censorship. I posted about the new actions this morning but it got flagged as a dupe of yesterday's discussion. It was not a duplicate, Twitter has taken new action and decided to go further this mo…

Do you think its correct to delibrately spread a false story about Hunter Biden? Is this type removing false information censorship?

The Biden campaign explicitly did not dispute that the emails are real when asked (only that the meeting mentioned in the emails took place, which is... an odd distinction). Twitter does not claim that the emails aren't real. In short, the emails are real and everyone admits this... except the people who have fallen for social media giants' propaganda in this case.

Twitter claims that the justification is that the emails are "hacked" and/or "leaked" (they're inconsistent), even though (1) this is patently false since they were found on a hard drive which became property of the repair shop; and (2) Twitter has no problem with, say, Trump's tax returns and other "hacked"/"leaked" materials.

Re: Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims

#83

Post by hackinthebochs »

holler wrote: post #73
hackinthebochs wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been pretty vocal about being against censorship from social media companies. But with the stakes being as high as they are this close to an election (not just this particular election, but any election in general), I see no problem with social media companies deciding they will not be a party to the spread of misinformation intended to sway the election. These companies are not neutral communication platforms…

With the stakes being as high as they are, wouldn’t we want to know if there’s a crumb of truth to the allegations? A President beholden to shady foreign actors doesn’t sound like a good idea. Likewise if it’s false then let that come out. The bigger problem is that journalists/newspapers are no longer the arbiters of truth, and instead the distributors are.

>With the stakes being as high as they are, wouldn’t we want to know if there’s a crumb of truth to the allegations?

Sure, but this will not be adjudicated on twitter. Letting the unverified and extremely suspicious story spread on twitter does nothing to bring us closer to the truth. On the contrary, the truth is harmed by the unchecked spread of misinformation because the truth doesn't have the same viral quality as lies.

Re: Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims

#84

Post by lanstin »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #27
vinhboy wrote: post #13

In the first post about this, people were like, how come they didn't do this to the Democrats in 2016.. Uhhh because they were not taking ANY aggressive actions in 2016 against anyone, that's why we are here. They are trying to correct a wrong. I applaud them for trying. Also it's unfair to say they are doing this for political favoritism. Democratic politicians are the loudest ones calling for their breakup, ie. Ber…

> Democratic politicians are the loudest ones calling for their breakup, ie. Bernie, AOC, Warren. Incidents like this may make Republicans a lot more interested in breaking up Facebook and Twitter...

If the populace as a whole thinks large corporations have too much power and want to spread the power out more, that’s certainly a coherent position. Run your email servers and lobby for anti-trust suits. The internet can certainly support a distributed model.

Re: Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims

#85

Post by cirgue »

Hot take: they should do more of this, not less. As a medium it’s fundamentally distortionary, what is popular on Twitter is as much a function of the peculiarities of its ranking algorithm as it is of the material significance of the information. The less people trust twitter popularity as an indication of importance, the better off society is, and the more diverse the online media ecosystem can be.

Re: Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims

#86

Post by throwawaysea »

Here's a list of various hoaxes/leaks/etc. that the big tech social media companies allowed and did not censor, even though they took action in this instance: https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/15/11-hacks-leaks-and-hoax...

This list seems like strong proof that the we cannot trust these social media companies to be neutral actors. They shouldn't be given controlling power to the digital public square.

Re: Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims

#87

Post by naiveprogrammer »

vinhboy wrote: post #13

In the first post about this, people were like, how come they didn't do this to the Democrats in 2016.. Uhhh because they were not taking ANY aggressive actions in 2016 against anyone, that's why we are here. They are trying to correct a wrong. I applaud them for trying. Also it's unfair to say they are doing this for political favoritism. Democratic politicians are the loudest ones calling for their breakup, ie. Ber…

Instead of blaming fake news and misinformation for the 2016 elections outcome, maybe the Democrats should look themselves in the mirror.

I have yet to see a clear decisive causation link between the Russian interference (e.g. bot farms) and the outcome of the election. Of course there was interference, nobody denies it. But show me that these trolls swayed the election. There is none.

Re: Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims

#88

Post by lanstin »

tomp wrote: post #62
martythemaniak wrote: post #19

Most people are pragmatic. Simple, axiomatic principles can be very intellectually appealing (probably more so amongst the STEM-crowd than the general population), if they don't produce good outcomes, they will and should be discarded. In our field we constantly see languages with stronger intellectual foundations (Haskell, Lisp, Scala, Perl6) constantly lose out market share to pragmatic, practical, messy and oftent…

Haskell loses because it takes 2000 lines just to write a logging statement. Scala loses because you can’t even write a fast for loop. Lisp loses because it disrespects 100 years of math. I’m exaggerating a bit but not by much.

I don’t get the lisp thing? I thought lisp lost because of lisp weenies and worse (simple) is better as far as writing maintainable code bases?

Re: Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims

#89

Post by rayiner »

dkackman11 wrote: post #48

Maybe getting rid of professional journalism, and crowd sourcing the news via secret algorithms, isn't such a great idea after all...

The “professional journalists” aren’t that great either. The field has been overtaken by 20 year olds. Even Matt Yglesias, who has spent most of his career to the left of Democrats as a whole, has been grumbling on his podcast about journalists these days failing to respect the difference between journalism and advocacy. Matt Taibbi (who I don’t like as a person but who is at least a real journalist) has written an entire book about it: https://intpolicydigest.org/2020/02/19/review-matt-taibbi-s-...

Re: Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims

#90

Post by jungletime »

wesleywt wrote: post #3
uncoder0 wrote: post #2

To add to this Trump's official campaign Twitter had it's account locked this morning and a video Trump uploaded was promptly deleted. This is new information from today. The thread yesterday was about the initial wave of censorship. I posted about the new actions this morning but it got flagged as a dupe of yesterday's discussion. It was not a duplicate, Twitter has taken new action and decided to go further this mo…

Do you think its correct to delibrately spread a false story about Hunter Biden? Is this type removing false information censorship?

Just curious, what do you make of the Biden photos with a crack pipe found on the laptop too. Are those fake?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8842709/Joe-Bidens-...

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