Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

951–960 of 1001 posts

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

#951

Post by anoraca »

75dvtwin wrote: post #841
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.

Well, I think you underestimate the gravity of this. A thoroughly corrupt money laundering Biden family machine (which also involves children of other previously high profile politicians) -- may become the presidential family of US. And the social networks in the country, have chosen to do what they have always done with anti-left news -- they censored them. My view, make the execs accountable now. They have to be on…

Are you basing those positions on an article by a tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch that was released 3 weeks before an election?

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

#952

Post by biffstallion »

Shocking...NOT... that the social media platforms are all pro liberal.

Then they pretend to be socially conscious and pro environment yet most of these companies have YET to commit to permanent work-from-home to stave off "carbon climb". Just another exposure of liberal hypocricy.

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

#953

Post by jayko »

TwoBit wrote: post #859
dude3 wrote: post #838

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Can you point me to a link of how this was hacked? My understanding is that the laptop was given to a mac repair place and then they didn't pay for it. I have no idea why someone would do not pay for their repair though. - A lot of people are focusing on the Donald Trump tax returns which were hacked in a way but accepted on Twitter. They have personally identifiable information too as in when you go to the IRS web…

Somebody dropped off a laptop and never identified themselves nor was there any paperwork, and the owner happens to be unable to see anybody well enough to recognize them, and this laptop has highly personal and sensitive information, and nobody ever returns for it or inquires about it? How is anybody taking this story seriously?

> How is anybody taking this story seriously?

By the fact that Hunter Biden is a crackhead an he probably didn't even remember that. The guy went high to test into the army, the incredulity barrier is lower than you think.

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

#954

Post by chrshawkes »

ffggvv wrote: post #124

i remember during the BLM Riots, we had stories going around that jacob blake was just "breaking up a fight" between two women. when it turns out he had just finished robbing someone he'd previously sexually assaulted with her kids in the house. and twitter let it trend i remember they had a video of gunshot sounds trending with a description saying that an innocent 16 year old girl was shot by police when in reality…

I agree. We have no reason to give our data and power of speech to these shit companies. We need a decentralized authority in charge of social networks. Nothing these companies provide is of any substantial value that cannot be open sourced and decentralized.

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

#955

Post by Adutude »

Oh noes, my beloved hacker news has sunk down into the political morass.

I think the bigger picture, and meta topic here is that private companies have become the arbiters of what is and what is not appropriate social discourse.

We as a society have chosen to let the Marks and Jacks of the world decide what is appropriate to publish.

I think the bigger part of the problem is that while we sit and argue about whether the policy was fair or not or was biased or not, we are not asking the question of are the right people setting those policies?

Should private companies with no accountability to the public they serve/sell to the highest bidder, be the ones to decide what constitutes valid social discourse?

We all thought social media was a good idea, when we were young up and coming geeks. We thought it would be a force for good and allow people to connect and talk.

What we as geeks actually invented were a bunch of brain washing machines that profit by selling the minds of their "users".

I have an opinion about whether or not there was bias, but I don't think it's as important as the bigger question this story brings up.

We now, in this thread are fighting about how the brain washing machines are being used, instead of the IMHO, the more important topic of, how can we turn off the brain washing machines and put the genie back in the bottle?

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

#956

Post by chrshawkes »

ibejoeb wrote: post #915
drew-y wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> BLM Riots This is a harmful characterization of an important movement. No protests on that scale are going to go without a hitch. That shouldn't minimize their importance. > Researchers at the US Crisis Monitor analyzed over 10,600 nationwide protests between May 24 (the day before George Floyd was killed by police) and Aug. 22, and found that nearly 95 percent were peaceful [1] Jacob Blake was shot seven times in…

>He was unarmed He was armed, and he admitted to it, and it is documented in the DOJ statement.

Please don't speak facts.

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

#958

Post by Adutude »

donmcronald wrote: post #906
remarkEon wrote: post #887

In case anyone doesn't want to read through all the pages, here are the prevailing themes of this discussion as I see them. - the facts of the case are irrelevant, what's important now is how the tech companies reacted - the facts of the case are extremely relevant, because that would obviously inform how Twitter/Facebook deal with the content on their website - Twitter's response was severely mismanaged (or not, som…

> "How did we get here? When I was young, the internet was a free for all and it was cool. Can we go back to that?" The biggest difference IMO is that trolls were simply trolls, not paid adversaries or guerilla marketers or influence peddlers, so ignoring the trolls was an effective response. The bots nowadays also makes the volume of everything so much greater and harder to deal with. The good old days aren't coming…

I was just talking w/ someone about the good old days (and farting some dust) and back in the day, if someone was trolling hard, or spamming or running bots that should not be run, they got hacked, and hard. Your servers would be a smoldering ruins.

Then there was that case of the spammer who got hacked for being an ahat and he sued and got the hackers sent to big boy prison. That was back in the mid to late 80's (I think... it was so long ago.

Back then we were setting up uucp, and uudecoding alt and we were all alt.binaries.gifs.sex.freaky.youdontwanttoknow

Aol wasn't even a thing yet, but after Gen Pop got let in to the Intenet and that spam guy got someone put in jail, it was all downhill IMHO..

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

#959

Post by born_a_skeptic »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #144
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…

1. That the FBI subpoenaed the laptop is sort of interesting. That usually requires a grand jury, doesn't it? But this is really weird: >During the subsequent summer and fall, Mac Isaac said he became alarmed after browsing through the computer's files. He claims he then spoke with an associate more versed than him in the law and in current events. >That unnamed person then contacted the FBI, Mac Isaac said. >Federal…

Giuliani said the computer shop guy was a fan of his and given he saw the Biden sticker on the laptop, probably led him to be interested in what was stored on the computer.

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

#960

Post by jancsika »

heartbeats wrote: post #701
jancsika wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I grew up during the late 90s (born in late 80s) learning about the internet and its philosophies. And with this specific case, I'm with you on your hill. But more broadly we're usually not talking about the web from the late 90s. We're talking about a handful of modern social networks most of which use of anti-democratic dark patterns. And algorithms that are known to push a given percentage of users down a rabbit…

>But that is a much bigger problem IMO and the answer of "more speech" is at most helplessly incomplete wrt it. Why? Why can't the leftists push people down rabbit holes and make them rabid communists? Serious question.

Two answers.

One utilitarian-- it's a smaller market.

E.g., there was story on the intercept sourcing leaked FBI documents that showed the FBI's awareness and concerns about white supremacist infiltration of local law enforcement[1]. This was to the point that the FBI was cautious about sharing access to its surveillance tools for fear that they could be used by some local LE to target and harass minorities. (Not sure if that's in the same article or a different Intercept article.)

Racist rabbitholes can draw on a pre-existing audience of racists, which make them more widespread and effective, and that attracts more ad dollars.

Two-- emphasis on "rabid." There are racist groups where the membership is people from various ethnic backgrounds spouting the stereotypical white-supremacist rhetoric. The draw is apparently aggression and violence.

If someone on the left wants to "counter" that, the video content is going to need to be equally irrational and aggressive to sufficiently capture the audience's attention. Again, you've got a smaller audience here. But the smaller audience you gain is going to be equally irrational to the far right group.

So you've got a system that optimizes for irrational, rabbit-hole ideologies (hell, it could be bigfoot or flat earth for all they care), that tends to filter out more reasoned, thoughtful content. Hell, I can't even listen to a movement of a Brahms symphony without commercials interrupting a section. Even television isn't that fucking allergic to reasoned reflection.

Talking about free speech inside such an unhealthy, anti-democratic system is about as coherent as adopting one of that system's rabid, rabbit-hole ideologies.

1: https://theintercept.com/2020/09/29/police-white-supremacist...

Post reply on HN