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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

#391

Post by pengaru »

swalsh wrote: post #334
meroes wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So HN can't remove posts either because that violates free speech? I grew up on the internet too and forum bans were always a thing. You haven't convinced me this is different.

The president doesn't make major annoucements using HN. The fact is, Twitter has taken on a different role.

Give me a break, the president should have his twitter account permabanned for all his ToS violations, and he should use official channels like a .gov web site to address the nation, where he can be held more accountable when spreading blatant falsehoods and certainly won't be censored.

This whole sham of using Twitter is a freedom of private speech trick he uses to facilitate ambiguously mixing occasionally factual official statements with trash "protected" speech.

If anyone holds his feet to the fire for tweets, he can simply claim he was acting as a private citizen stating an opinion - obviously the president of the united states wouldn't use twitter for official business!

I look forward to seeing how history treats this embarrassingly incompetent era of american politics.

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

#392

Post by rapind »

sailingparrot wrote: post #264
prudhvis wrote: post #223

I have no idea what happened during the early 2010s. I grew up during the late 90s (born in late 80s) learning about the internet and its philosophies. Allowing Free speech still is the hill I'd like to die on. But the new generation of people, even here on HN and the internet hacker personalities I used to align with have turned so pro-censorship that I don't believe I'm in a proper reality/timeline anymore.

New technologies brought new challenges. There was no social network in the 2000s and before. No retweet button, no "curated" timeline that showed you what you "like". YouTube did not try to push more videos like the ones you watched previously until the mid 2010s. Free speech does not have the same meaning as before. Before it just meant that you could say whatever you wanted. Now people use it implicitly to mean th…

Our problems are simply symptoms of a business model that’s out of control.

If I had to choose between advertising and free speech, I’d be happy to utterly abolish advertising. Even though that means completely tearing down the current media industry.

Obviously there’s middle ground to be found, but censorship is just treating the symptoms and in the dumbest possible way.

We’re just digging the hole deeper and deeper.

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

#393

Post by partiallypro »

tomjen3 wrote: post #377
Cookingboy wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Allowing Free speech still is the hill I'd like to die on At this rate it will be the hill that the civilization dies on. The whole "absolute free speech is a sacrosanct human rights for everyone" is an ideal that simply would not scale with the 21st century civilization. Most users around here grew up firmly believing that value, and it is further reinforced by American/Western exceptionalism, so I can see how thi…

It should be the hill that civilization dies on, because without free speech there is no civilization. Without free speech corruption will grow and societies will decay because there is nothing to stop the rot before it spreads.

You could even make the argument that China and Russia are actively feeding into things like this in order to make people anti-free speech/thought and cause internal strife/erosion because our eroding institutions (including free speech) gives them a leg up globally to set their own agendas in motion.

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

#394

Post by rbetts »

prudhvis wrote: post #223

I have no idea what happened during the early 2010s. I grew up during the late 90s (born in late 80s) learning about the internet and its philosophies. Allowing Free speech still is the hill I'd like to die on. But the new generation of people, even here on HN and the internet hacker personalities I used to align with have turned so pro-censorship that I don't believe I'm in a proper reality/timeline anymore.

I was born in 1974. Netscape's browser (what became Mozilla) was released my junior year of college. It was a cute alternative to gopher and ftp.

Then, newspapers were published once or twice a day. Magazines weekly or monthly. Publishers worked as editors, fact-checkers, and curators (with their various agendas, of course).

The original miracle of internet free speech was the promise that anyone could become a publisher - no more gate keeping by major media companies - no more financial barrier to entry to buy presses, paper, delivery trucks.

Then various platforms emerged to centralize online publishing -- Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LiveJournal, Yelp, ... and thousands more. They took the profit model of traditional publishers (paid advertising), exploited the structural advantages of digital publishing, and gave up the overhead and responsibility of curating and creating content.

Now we are trying to figure out how to manage real time publishing platforms that can't (or won't?) validate identity, won't take responsibility for fact-checking, are open to targeted manipulation by adversaries, and are capable of distributing damaging lies and propaganda with little oversight or financial consequences.

Speech is still "freer" now than when I was a teenager. The reach of an individual voice is massive in today's world compared to the 1980's. When I was young, my community was the people who lived within biking distance. Now it includes all of reddit, twitch, hackernews...

Can we sustain these advances while managing the mob-mentality inherent in human nature? Can we protect our forums from adversarial misuse? Are open platforms that shrug off responsibility for content while collecting advertising profits compatible with democracy?

Looks like we'll find out in the next few years.

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

#395

Post by crazygringo »

hartator wrote: post #326
sailingparrot wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New technologies brought new challenges. There was no social network in the 2000s and before. No retweet button, no "curated" timeline that showed you what you "like". YouTube did not try to push more videos like the ones you watched previously until the mid 2010s. Free speech does not have the same meaning as before. Before it just meant that you could say whatever you wanted. Now people use it implicitly to mean th…

> I believe free amplification is terrible It's exactly what they were saying at the invention of the printing press. Amplification becoming too cheap. Maybe being on the side of censorship is always being on the wrong side of history no matter the issue. Can you remember one time in history where we now like "thanks god they censor these thoughts!"?

> Can you remember one time in history where we now like "thanks god they censor these thoughts!"?

Absolutely, of course. Hate speech and Holocaust denial are censored in Europe generally, and a majority of people in those countries today do say support these bans (i.e. they say "thank god"). Because they saw the kind of hateful thinking that led to WWII, and how shockingly easy it is for people to be convinced of revisionist history, and don't want that to be repeated.

Similarly, libel laws function effectively as censorship, but are widely supported. I think most of us are happy that newspapers can't maliciously print lies about common citizens.

(Edit: love that I'm being downvoted for this -- apparently people don't like these objective facts?)

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

#396

Post by mogrifier »

lanstin wrote: post #67
high_derivative wrote: post #58

Ahhh: 1. We must censor terror propaganda and child abuse to avoid harm & because it's the law 2. We must censor stormfront and the far right because it's the right thing to do 3. We must censor covid misinformation because it could kill people 4. We must selectively censor news reporting for political candidates we are aligned with because it's probably false. ---- we are here now 5. We must remove all news critical…

Twitter is not the government. Support decentralized messaging and publication platforms if you don’t like big winners having too much power.

Distinction without difference. Twitter has the capability to whip up a sizable mob and inflict violence anywhere in the world, on a spectrum from cancel culture to corporate cowering to violent riots to color revolutions.

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

#397

Post by mfer »

sailingparrot wrote: post #264
prudhvis wrote: post #223

I have no idea what happened during the early 2010s. I grew up during the late 90s (born in late 80s) learning about the internet and its philosophies. Allowing Free speech still is the hill I'd like to die on. But the new generation of people, even here on HN and the internet hacker personalities I used to align with have turned so pro-censorship that I don't believe I'm in a proper reality/timeline anymore.

New technologies brought new challenges. There was no social network in the 2000s and before. No retweet button, no "curated" timeline that showed you what you "like". YouTube did not try to push more videos like the ones you watched previously until the mid 2010s. Free speech does not have the same meaning as before. Before it just meant that you could say whatever you wanted. Now people use it implicitly to mean th…

Who gets to choose who gets pick the things amplified or not?

In today's world these folks get to have a strong influence over how people are influenced.

Handling this well is very important. If people misuse that position than they can and will cause people to be influenced certain ways because of it.

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

#398

Post by tootie »

intrasight wrote: post #342
inglor_cz wrote: post #172

This is the Streisand effect in practice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect Here in Czechia we mostly concentrate on our outrageous Covid numbers of late, but this story about Twitter pulling down a NY Post article made it through into our local news. If it stayed up, no one would have cared enough to write about it.

Exactly - blocking it just brought it to the front page.

You're assuming Twitter's intent is to bury the story. Their intent is to not be involved or liable.

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

#399

Post by DeonPenny »

sangnoir wrote: post #185

Why is everyone ignoring @jack's official explanation for why Twitter blocked the specific link from being shared? This is the one falsifiable action Twitter clearly took. Twitters official policy is to not allow publication of hacked material or information with Personally Identifying Information - and this material was hacked and had unredacted personal email addresses. I haven't seen any reasonable arguments again…

Yeh but what about wikileaks, trumps taxes, and so many other story. But even if it was policy the fact they banned the press secretary of the united states should give everyone pause.

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

#400

Post by ProcNetDev »

notadev wrote: post #339
snowwrestler wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 100% inline with free speech to let a given website decide what they want to publish. Even if it is a very popular website. If they make bad decisions, then people can go to competitors; it's as easy as typing in a different URL. That's how the Internet--and open societies in general--are supposed to work. What it looks like to me--someone who has been on the Internet since before the turn of the century--is tha…

Where does one go when Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube seem to take these steps in tandem? The joke of "go make your own social network" has been tried with places like Parler and Gab, but they get banned from app stores, ironically blocked from technically, but not ideologically, decentralized services like Mastodon, or even dropped from web hosts. The open Internet is dead.

You can still publish! AWS and cloudflare will happily take your money if you're not a neonazi. If you are a neonazi, A) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTs_Q4hEqmA B) you can find some mom-and-pop co-lo that will take your money. AFAIK, 8chan is still serving page views.
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