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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

#811

Post by dragonwriter »

refurb wrote: post #762
rayiner wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is hacked emails, doesn’t that prove the article is credible?

This is the key point. Twitter blocked the NYPost article before doing any sort of investigation. Jack is just trying to justify it after the fact.

Just like the policy change he made to privilege government-connected after an extended period of letting Trump get away with violating Twitter’s supposed rules. For some reason, the Trumpeters never combined about that retrospective justification.

The Jack giveth, the Jack taketh away...

That's what happens with a free press when you are at first see as a benefit and later a liability to the person who owns a press...

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

#812

Post by djsumdog »

doktrin wrote: post #329
DevKoala wrote: post #290

Incredibly disappointed. I had never seen such a concerted effort to hide information in the USA. Is this how it feels to live under the CCP’s control?

> Is this how it feels to live under the CCP’s control? This is an overly dramatic comparison that trivializes the Chinese surveillance state.

Agreed. The CCP is fucking terrible. We wouldn't be having this conversation in China. Well we might; tech people with VPNs and encrypted comms. But most normal people would no be able to see it.

But I do fear the US is headed that direction. When you seen BLM protestors telling people to raise their fists and kiss their feat and people saying you must denounce racism over and over and over again no matter how many times you may have before. Make to mistake: These are American Struggle Sessions.

We have people in major outlets, publications, tech .. all saying Trump people are universally racist and evil. 60+ million people voted for him. That's the most insane thing I've ever heard.

I knew we were headed this way years ago. I wrote about it:

https://battlepenguin.com/politics/the-fallout-of-american-a...

I never thought it would get this bad. I don't think we'll turn into the CCP, but we are in danger of having dramatic shifts in what Americans consider morally right.

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

#813

Post by RonanTheGrey »

andrewprock wrote: post #595
ManBlanket wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What could go wrong from empowering biased corporations with the ability to control a national narrative of what constitutes misinformation and hyperbole? I'm noticing a wide spread lack of the ability to weigh the pros and cons of policy in order to arrive at a rational decision based on due consideration of legitimate data analysis. I guess we should've been concerned when today's young adults couldn't discern real…

The most interesting thing about this comment is that this is precisely how things have been for a very very long time. If you would like to know "what could go wrong" you need simply take a look and see what is going wrong now.

Yeah, I think the "what could go wrong" line was more hyperbolic than anything else. It's been happening for a long time now.

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

#814

Post by magnusmagnusson »

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…

It is always hilarious when people pretend there is symmetric application of retroactive rules.

"We've always been at war with Eastasia" tier gaslighting.

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

#815

Post by RonanTheGrey »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #504
blhack wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just want to tell you that you're not alone in this. It's seriously unsettling to me to see the way in which this culture has changed.

Most of the tech companies have decided that China will soon dominate the world. They appear to be getting ready for China's attitude towards free speech to be imposed on the rest of the world. I hope I'm wrong.

You know that's not the first time that idea has occurred to me either and I have this worrying nagging in the back of my head that that is literally exactly the long game they're playing.

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

#816

Post by opo »

joe_the_user wrote: post #505
nemo44x wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Speech is considered violence by some people. Some people consider a lot of speech violence but nearly everyone considers a small amount of speech violence or some equivalent. Telling someone to grab a electrified wire is violence by nearly everyone's standard. A mafioso directing a hit man to kill is nearly everyone's standard. The famous "shouting fire in a crowded theater" is mostly violence etc. So you can't say…

The infamous "shouting fire in a crowded theater" was mentioned by Holmes in U.S. v. Schenck which had nothing to do with fires or theaters. The case involved whether Schenck could be convicted under the Espionage Act for the crime of writing and distributing a pamphlet that expressed his opposition to the draft. That is the dangerous idea that sent a person to prison.

>...In 1969, the Supreme Court's decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio effectively overturned Schenck and any authority the case still carried. There, the Court held that inflammatory speech--and even speech advocating violence by members of the Ku Klux Klan--is protected under the First Amendment, unless the speech "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action"

Even Holmes seemed to quickly realize that the Schenck decision was odious since in the same term, he also wrote:

>...In what would become his second most famous phrase, Holmes wrote in Abrams that the marketplace of ideas offered the best solution for tamping down offensive speech: "The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out."

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

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

#817

Post by djsumdog »

wwright wrote: post #91
naiveprogrammer wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The media has been pedaling the Russian collusion story for 4 years and you don't seem to care because it fits your priors and political agenda. The bigger lesson here is that everybody is ready to accept censorship as long as they are not bearing the (immediate) costs of it.

Well, multiple members of the Trump campaign have literally pleaded guilty to lying about involvement with Russia; that story does have that going for it :)

If you're talking about Flynn, he was entrapped by the FBI, his lies weren't material, his lawyer had a conflict of interest, when his new lawyer uncovered all of that in discovery, the prosecutor moved to dismiss (because they had committed misconduct), Sullivan, in AN UNPRECEDENTED MOVE, appointed his own Amicus to say they couldn't dismiss the case.

Flynn was then charged for lying when he plead guilty, because ht wasn't actually guilty. Seriously. This is a Kafka trap.

On top of that, it's now clear Sullivan was getting e-mail, exparte, and ENTERING THEM into evidence!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFMk48KA608

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

#818

Post by officehero »

crazygringo wrote: post #379

> However, it is highly unusual for an article published by one of the mainstream popular newspapers to be treated in this way. That's a bit of a stretch. The NY Post is a tabloid [1]. Tabloids are technically newspapers, but they aim primarily to sensationalize [2]. Tabloids are nothing like the NY Times or Washington Post, which attempt to present objective, unbiased news. (Now you may argue that they fail at that…

Interesting point of view. So as long as a paper is "non-tabloid" it should be more trusted. A Chinese or Russian state owned non-tabloid is then more trustworthy than NYP? Propaganda is everywhere and the definition of what and when something is sensationalist is fuzzy.

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

#819

Post by JohnBooty »

Karunamon wrote: post #592
JohnBooty wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 I was born in the 1970s and I can tell you why I flipped. The (hopelessly naive) ideal many of us had was that, by breaking down communication barriers, we'd create an egalitarian "marketplace of ideas" and the best ideas would win. And by "best" ideas we generally meant principle…

There is no solution to this problem that doesn't involve unaccountable third parties setting the ground rules for what is okay to say. I'd take a thousand racist uncles writing about chemtrails before taking a single official censor. The abuse factor for the latter is simply too high to ever permit. Freedom of speech, as a concept, includes by extension the freedom to be wrong.

    There is no solution to this problem that doesn't 
    involve unaccountable third parties setting the 
    ground rules for what is okay to say
Literally nobody is talking about taking away anybody's right to say, write, or think things.

You're confusing this right with Twitter's utterly nonexistent obligation to transmit and amplify your thoughts to others.

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

#820

Post by dlivingston »

CivBase wrote: post #189
gok wrote: post #146

It's frustrating Twitter and Facebook won't just say the truth: "This is a blatant attempt at disinformation by politicians who have repeatedly attacked our employees, and we don't want it. It's our web site, stop trying to tell us what our own rules are. Go spread your nonsense somewhere else. If you think this is a 230 violation sue us."

Reading through these HN comments, it is amazing to me how many people have already concluded the NY Post story is either obviously true or false. But I agree with the gist of your point. Social media platforms should stop pretending to be unbiased disinformation watchmen. It's their platform and they don't have to justify squat. If people want free speech, they can go somewhere else. On that note, I really do think…

> On that note, I really do think distributed social media networks are the future.

I think they could be the future, but any social media platform is only as strong as its underlying social graph. A flawless platform which checks every box will still fail unless you can convince a significant amount of users to join. Or, more to the point, a certain amount of graph edges need to be formed.

How do you do that? That’s the question floating over the graves of dozens of Facebook clones.

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