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

bbc.com

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

#421

Post by mopsi »

mfer wrote: post #397
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…

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.

The dirty secret is that no-one picks that. There's no-one turning the knobs to adjust your news feeds, just like there's no-one managing your Gmail inbox who you can turn to for help. It's all machines. Algorithms automatically amplify what's most engaging, and flame wars are more engaging than calm discussions.

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

#422

Post by trident1000 »

mfer wrote: post #397
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…

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.

People dont really understand how dangerous of a situation were in right now. When big tech platforms can amplify or decrease thoughts, sources, and even political candidates voices, they literally decide politics. Democracy is being challenged. We need to decide if we want kings or democratically elected representatives to be in charge of the country.

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

#423

Post by UncleMeat »

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!"?

Is it the wrong side of history? Early printing is unambiguously connected with violence just as much as it is connected with intellectual freedom. Blood Libel and the associated murders of innocent jews could not have spread in the same manner without broadsheets.

"It is really complicated" is the conclusion that early modern historians of information come to.

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

#424

Post by krapp »

partiallypro wrote: post #406
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…

Twitter's "rules" would have stopped huge stories like The Pentagon Papers, Panama Papers, Watergate, etc from being posted on their platform. The statement read like it was typed up by an intern that didn't communicate with the legal team or any logical person. (edited for clarification)

>Twitter's "rules" would have stopped huge stories like The Pentagon Papers, Panama Papers, Watergate, etc.

Only in a universe in which Twitter is the sole means of broadcasting, publishing and communication - but we don't live in that universe, so no, they really wouldn't have.

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

#425

Post by tootie »

theklub wrote: post #336
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.

"Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me" Was the phrase I grew up on. Seems like the opposite today where we allow looting and riots but saying the wrong thing gets you in trouble.

Looters and rioters were arrested by the scores. Meanwhile our sitting president insults, lies, spreads disinformation and incitement to violence and we made him president.

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

#426

Post by nostromo »

nemo44x wrote: post #362
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.

Speech is considered violence by some people. It has been this way since the late 80's but it was confined to certain subcultures that weren't taken too seriously. But they have taken over certain institutions, like the university (and increasingly big-tech), and own that platform and teach this as esteemed fact rather than an opinion. And it's dangerous because when you equate speech with violence then how far are w…

> But they have taken over certain institutions, like the university (and increasingly big-tech)

And the media, which is increasingly opposed to free speech.

Today we're seeing journalists talk about how other journalists should be banned from the public square by powerful corporations. They seemingly aren't bright enough to pause and wonder if this will ever be used against them. And this is being done under the banner of progressivism.

There are so many layers of irony here.

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

#427

Post by partiallypro »

krapp wrote: post #424
partiallypro wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter's "rules" would have stopped huge stories like The Pentagon Papers, Panama Papers, Watergate, etc from being posted on their platform. The statement read like it was typed up by an intern that didn't communicate with the legal team or any logical person. (edited for clarification)

>Twitter's "rules" would have stopped huge stories like The Pentagon Papers, Panama Papers, Watergate, etc. Only in a universe in which Twitter is the sole means of broadcasting, publishing and communication - but we don't live in that universe, so no, they really wouldn't have.

I don't mean they would have literally stopped the entire story from being a story, but that their own rules would have banned the posting of that news on their own platform, even from viable sources.

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

#428

Post by dkackman11 »

zpeti wrote: post #71
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...

We as consumers should be valuing real journalism and actually paying money for it. Otherwise this carries on going downhill. Journalism, at least some of it, should not be about clicks and sound bites.

We need to consider that some things are a public good that must be paid for as such, not as merely a commodity. Public broadcasting is the model that works best and achieves the correct balance between public good and market forces.It can be neither entirely one (state controlled media) nor the other (click bait drivel).

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

#429

Post by rayiner »

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…

You’re mischaracterizing how free speech was viewed in the recent past. “Free speech” (as a cultural value, I’m not talking about the first amendment) was about the marketplace of ideas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketplace_of_ideas. It meant a free market in ideas, where the dominant ideas arise from competition. What you call “amplification” is just something that makes the marketplace more efficient—it allows ideas to disseminate faster so people can decide which are the good ones and the bad ones. The curation you mention is the antithesis of a free market of ideas.

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

#430

Post by wutbrodo »

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 think this is just an extension of the Eternal September. The population of the Internet is wildly different from those that you're thinking of: not only is a majority of the world now online, a vanishing minority of the countries many of us are primarily exposed to are not.

There are plenty of reasons that this new population may establish different norms than the old one: Some say it's because they're privileged, and don't understand the harm that Enlightenment liberalism does to the marginalized. Some say it's because they were free-thinkers and iconoclasts, and indeed, you'd expect any heavily-selected subpopulation to be less conformist than "all people". Others have claimed it's simply intelligence: back when the Internet was all educated nerds, support for free speech was higher because of the well-known correlation between intelligence and free speech absolutism[1].

In addition to the Eternal September effect, I think the broader retrenchment of liberalism we see across the world is very relevant. The cause/effect relationship between the Internet and this cultural retrenchment is unclear but IMO, almost certainly bidirectional. My model of liberalism has always been that its support in large populations is a fragile state, and that it's only supported by the masses when they've cargo-culted it from their civic religion. The minute this effect fades, most people don't have the moral reasoning ability to actually hold a principle, and can't be convinced that protection of an enemy under a principle is a protection of that principle, not of the enemy. They also don't appear to have the capacity to understand that the world turns, and the person on top is guaranteed to be someone they dislike, at one point or another. The only skew that rolling back Enlightenment protections is likely to have over time is against the _marginalized_.

[1] Note that this isn't a stand-in for "free speech is good", since the proponents of the privilege argument would claim that measures of intelligence are themselves just measuring privilege.

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