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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

#561

Post by LocalPCGuy »

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 fully agree with you regarding free speech. Where we probably differ is that I also uphold the rights of private companies, however large, to set their own standards of what can be posted to their platform. Now, if we want to have the debate about whether the platforms are too large, have too much power to shape the conversations we have, etc, we can have that debate. But it isn't censorship for a private company to remove information it believes violates it's standards (whether because it's false, misleading, or for other reasons).

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

#562

Post by bgilroy26 »

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…

I read all of the replies to you looking for a positive one to vote up and couldn't find one

I think your phrasing of this new problem for our society is very clear and objective.

By the power invested in me as a computer possessor with an internet connection, I declare this to be a good idea, worthy of amplification!

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

#563

Post by 8note »

rayiner wrote: post #161
mellosouls wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that the liberal-run tech firms are biased against conservative news sources, I think it is only fair to point out that the list you link is compiled and presented by a conservative organisation that has apparently been under criticism for its own approach to covid reporting (see the wiki page; and yes, I think wikipedia seems often liberal-biased), and can not be considered a neutral voice in this part…

I would encourage folks to resist the urge to put up blinders based on the URL. Particularly where, as here, the source is just collecting publicly-available documents and links. You’re not being asked to trust the author’s synthesis of a bunch of facts. You can check the underlying links yourself. Obviously conservative organizations have more of an incentive to compile this sort of thing. That doesn’t make it in an…

You can look at the source for each link included in the list sure, but how to I find the content they haven't included in the list? The unreliable part is verifying whether the sample provided is an accurate representation of the population

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

#564

Post by zaroth »

zucked wrote: post #355
adventured wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not good intentions. The tech giants are attempting to throw an election and they don't care who knows at this point. For the 2012 election Facebook execs bragged about illegally assisting the Obama campaign by giving them practically the entire FB social graph, for free. That violates federal campaign finance laws. Nothing was done about it and you'll never get anyone on HN to go near talking about that fraud,…

You gonna cite some of these outlandish claims? Particularly interested in: > The media ran every possible baseless story they could about Trump the past four years, often with zero supporting evidence to the story in question. Every time they turned out to be fake stories, the media conveniently ignored it, refused to run retractions and moved on to the next fraudulent story. >You've got people inside of these compa…

I mean the first one is well established fact. No one could argue in good faith that the quality of report first, fact check later stories on Trump is like nothing we’ve ever seen before. But it’s all just flame-bait I guess.

As for the second point, the people making these decisions at Facebook and Twitter factually did or do currently work for the DNC; for the DNC, on the Biden transition team, or worked for Harris.

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

#565

Post by some_account99 »

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.

Same and i miss our people.

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

#567

Post by esoterica »

christoph wrote: post #365
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.

I've been here over 10 years and I don't really recall seeing anything other than blatant spam or crap removed in that time. Maybe I've just not seen it happen. But, the way things seem to have worked here (very well I might add) is that when enough of the community disagrees, things get downvoted to death and if you don't have "Show dead" enabled, you don't see them. Your choice. I've had show dead enabled as long a…

HN is a LOT more heavily moderated than Facebook, Twitter, and most subreddits. You must really not have been paying attention if you haven't noticed after 10 years.

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

#568

Post by eli_gottlieb »

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'm with you. Rather than censor "disinfo", I'd really prefer to just break up the damn networks so it can't spread so easily.

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

#569

Post by thaumasiotes »

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…

> While I believe free speech is a good thing, I believe free amplification is terrible.

This thought is the exact reason the first amendment separately mentions freedom of "speech" (hard to accomplish much with it) and "the press" (much more effective).

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

#570

Post by nkurz »

cs702 wrote: post #285

The Washington Post tried to verify the authenticity of the claims made by the blocked article... and so far they have found ZERO evidence supporting the story: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/14/hunter-bi... This bit, in particular, suggests that the blocked article actually deserves to be blocked: > The New York Post published PDF printouts of several emails allegedly taken from the laptop, but for…

Thanks for the explanation. I can half-agree, but think the meta-discussion about the role of Twitter and Facebook in shaping the US politics is worthy of discussion even if the NY Post article turns out to be a wholesale fabrication.

You might be interested that I also posted this article [https://blog.erratasec.com/2020/10/yes-we-can-validate-leake...] which talks about the relative ease of validating the emails using GMail's DKIM header. Unlike this one (where I think the first two pages of comments are actually pretty good), that one got very few votes and no discussion.

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