191–200 of 596 posts
- Aaron Swartz
Many are confusing "censorship" with "content moderation". The difference is very important. Censorship is when you are prevented from publishing on your own platform. Content moderation is when a platform owner choses what can be published on theirs. Twitter decided they did not want their platform used to spread what they considered to be Russian disinformation and propaganda, but they in no way prevented the NY Po…
You can call it "censorship" or "content moderation." I don't care, the distinction is meaningless for this conversation. The only meaningful argument is what Twitter (for example) CAN do (legally), and what they SHOULD do (morally). Clearly, Twitter is legally in the right to suppress this information, because it's their platform. They can set the content rules as they like, as arbitrarily and capriciously as they l…
This has got to be Taibbi click-baiting pro-Trump subscribers. He buries his admission that Trump's Biden/Burisma narrative is a lie so deep in the piece, you really have to trudge through a lot of hand-wringing drivel to find it. You can read 90% of this piece thinking that Taibbi is clearly sympathetic to the Republican narrative, and he gives no indication otherwise!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem here is something new, as Matt points out. Law enforcement, tech companies, and the news media are operating under on some type of cooperating agreement which is not transparent to users or the creators of content. In normal human society you know the binds that bond, this is a reasonable expectation, and an expectation that even been challenged in the law. As the law infinitely expands, who am I (as a co…
If your point is that the originators of the Biden story are shocked and confused that it's being suppressed in an opaque tech cooperating agreement, they shouldn't be: the story is being suppressed because it's at best illegally obtained data, and at worst deliberately falsified; and in either case, it's now being used by bad actors in an attempt to manipulate the results of the election. There's no mystery here: Tw…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can call it "censorship" or "content moderation." I don't care, the distinction is meaningless for this conversation. The only meaningful argument is what Twitter (for example) CAN do (legally), and what they SHOULD do (morally). Clearly, Twitter is legally in the right to suppress this information, because it's their platform. They can set the content rules as they like, as arbitrarily and capriciously as they l…
Would you say the same if, next year, the official investigation founds that he is guilty?
I support a total blackout of political stories in the run-up to an election.
[Edit: rephrase to clarify that my position would not change.]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's just some users though, and I'm 99% sure they don't want others to see it, because they believe knowing about it might damage their political side. I'm sure they have good intentions and believe that the end justifies the means and if suppression of truth is required to let the good guys win, then so be it. Of course, everybody generally thinks they are the good guys, and once you're going down the road of "ev…
It’s not the truth though as far as we can tell.
Facebook and Twitter are effectively acting as editors for select news organizations.
I think there's a fundamental difference of opinion about the notion of fairness. Some people think that fairness is defined as something that affects everyone equally in some clean-slate world, while others think of fairness as equalizing the effect of something in an already unfair situation in the world as it is. To the first camp it seems that "suppressing" a particular story on a particular platform is unfair re…
If Twitter's policy is to surpress under some criteria (e.g. data illegally obtained), and they're not doing so every single time (they don't), then they're unfair on the arbitrary application of that criteria.
This has got to be Taibbi click-baiting pro-Trump subscribers. He buries his admission that Trump's Biden/Burisma narrative is a lie so deep in the piece, you really have to trudge through a lot of hand-wringing drivel to find it. You can read 90% of this piece thinking that Taibbi is clearly sympathetic to the Republican narrative, and he gives no indication otherwise!
> Both the government and private companies can censor stuff. But private companies are a little bit scarier. They have no constitution to answer to. They’re not elected. They have no constituents or voters. All of the protections we’ve built up to protect against government tyranny don’t exist for corporate tyranny. - Aaron Swartz
I guess being banned from a forum is much much worse than being sent to the re-education camps.
Applying editorial standards (finally) to some of the more outrageous content posted on social media platforms is no more controversial than that of print media's choice to do so.
The term "social media" is a complete misnomer to begin with. It started socially, but the sheer number of posts from advertisers and other organizations compared to the number of friend and family posts just goes to show how far from "social" these platforms have become. But that's another can of worms.
EOD private companies can do whatever they want to do with their products. Everyone has a choice of the products they use. Not controversial.