Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

Post by Covzire » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 1:01 AM UTC

centimeter wrote: post #111

__float wrote: post #7

At what point do we look to capitalism as a driving factor for misinformation spreading? Media outlets are incentivized to bring in clicks/shares/likes. They're not incentivized to research stories sufficiently, so...a shaky lead from a sketchy source but a super compelling headline? Of course that gets published. Taking this as some anti-conservative war from the tech industry is super misleading.

The abundance of low-quality news today can be understood as a consequence of the cantillon effect in an inflationary environment. American-style crony capitalism might incentivize low-quality media, but without the presence of massive subsidies propping up News Corp, AT&T, and the other few firms owning the vast majority of American media, I would expect more legitimate and reputable news firms like Bloomberg or Reu…

Post by pron » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 1:02 AM UTC

bassman9000 wrote: post #197

pron wrote: post #43

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…

That's a really long way of trying to justify unfairness under some arbitrary criteria. 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.

Post by pessimizer » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 1:03 AM UTC

hackyhacky wrote: post #211

mrfusion wrote: post #191

> 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 respect Swartz a lot, and he makes many good points. But let's not pretend that Twitter and Facebook hold information monopolies with equivalent power to the government's ability to censor. As proof, consider that we are having this conversation right now, about an article that was published and is freely, legally available online to anyone with a web browser. You can disagree with Twitter's editorial choices, but…

Post by amanaplanacanal » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 1:06 AM UTC

Negitivefrags wrote: post #81

tracer4201 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say yes. If they censor my calls, I would switch providers. But more importantly, if we as a country believe that’s wrong, we should pass legislation

There is legislation. It’s called common carrier. The argument is this existing legislation should be extended to social media as well.

Post by Sophistifunk » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 1:07 AM UTC

r00tanon wrote: post #200

Drivel. No sensible person believes blocking QAnon nonsense is a "scandal." For many reasons, not the least being that it is also the very definition of "unsubstantiated" as is this Hunter Biden story. 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…