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Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

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Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#301

Post by nearbuy »

jsu32 wrote: post #273
linuxhansl wrote: post #267

Meh... Call me unimpressed. Twitter refrained from forwarding a story to which there is no factual basis. You can of course still read it with the New York Post if you so desire. That's all there is to it.

Was the story that the NY Post article was the result of Russian 'disinformation' based on facts? Because Twitter did nothing to stop that, not a fact check, not a block, nothing. Twitter was certain that 'story' was true, but the FBI (who said they have no evidence the Russians did it) was clueless? If I may, the reason you are unimpressed is that you are on the political side that benefited from Twitter's selective…

Twitter's objection was that the New York Post article contained hacked or illegally obtained material (personal intimate photos, etc.). Publishing those materials is a legal grey area.

I don't think Twitter ever said that article was Russian disinformation.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#302

Post by stonogo »

onecommentman wrote: post #269
stonogo wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get back to me when Twitter has the power to round up everyone who read a given story and have them executed in the street, because that's what government censorship can look like. It's not limited to some partisan nerd toggling a flag in a database somewhere. I think you should probably take this opportunity to re-evaluate the relative powers of these entities.

I think the discussion is focusing on levels of the US government and what has been experienced by the public under that government since its founding. Actual exercised power by US governmental entities. The discussion of other governments will probably lead this thread into a swampy delta and it will lose its motive force.

I'm not sure why the artificial limitations on comparison; Twitter and Facebook are wholly active and engaged in markets with governments with such histories. Anyway, if you want such examples, look to the Mexican Dirty War for many, as well as the Banana Massacre. The latter of course was merely a threat to deploy the Marines, but the reasoning announced was not strikebreaking but because the strikers were "subversives"; that is, the US claimed to want them silenced not for what they were doing but for what they were saying.

In the past, I would have said that Posse Comitatus would have prevented such behavior from being directed toward American citizens, but after seeing the mutual-law-skirting nature of the Five Eyes approach, as well as the presence of Federal troops in law enforcement roles in US cities over the past year, I'm no longer confident.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#303

Post by cortesoft »

salawat wrote: post #184
cortesoft wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My money is on content moderation being censorship. If content moderation is censorship, then you are arguing that if I ask you to say something out loud and you don't say it, you are censoring me.

No. You are censoring the other by attempting to compel their speech. Their speech is no longer free.

Isn't requiring twitter to publish a tweet also compelling speech?

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#304

Post by tracer4201 »

commandlinefan wrote: post #142
missedthecue wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should T Mobile or Verizon be able to censor your phone calls and text messages if they don't like the content? After all, they're private companies as well.

ISPs are private companies, too. Should they be suppressing political information as well?

For one, ISPs aren’t social media companies. If my ISP censors information, then effectively I have no way to access that information, particularly in cases when there’s no other ISP in my area.

A social media platform banning certain content is different. Just as we have alt right media sources such as Breitbart, nothing is preventing you from starting your own social media platform, with whatever content you want or don’t want.

At the end of the day, you still have a variety of content sources on the internet to consume that same content. Twitter is not the only source of information, and if you believe it is, then we have more serious problems.

I was literally banned from r/conservative for posting a question that folks found very inconvenient. Should they be forced to reverse the ban? How far do you believe is too far?

In my opinion, this is pretty clear cut. If you don’t like Twitter’s policies, don’t use their website.

I’m surprised the free enterprise conservatives are actually the ones so against this. “We want government to get out of the way... unless it furthers our agenda and helps us stay in power, in which case, let’s threaten to regulate or break up private companies.”

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#305

Post by timmytokyo »

csours wrote: post #275

> "The Republican version of Burisma story – essentially, that former General Prosecutor Viktor Shokin was Elliott Ness, and Joe Biden intervened to fire him specifically to aid his son’s company – is also not supported by evidence. What Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his cohorts have done to date is take a few unreported or under-reported facts and leap straight to a maximalist interpretation of corruption on Joe Bi…

The NYT's media columnist had some behind-the-scenes reporting on the Trump campaign's attempt to get the Hunter Biden emails into the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ reported out the story and provided the necessary context. The story ultimately concluded there was no evidence of malfeasance on Joe Biden's part.

The kind of reporting the WSJ did here is worlds apart from just leaking a bunch of documents without any context, and I'm glad we have real journalists doing it this time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-bid...

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#306

Post by acituan »

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…

> But let's not pretend that Twitter and Facebook hold information monopolies with equivalent power to the government's ability to censor

Agreed, their narrative shaping capabilities far exceed governments'.

> As proof, consider that we are having this conversation right now,

That is a very poor way of judging it for several reasons; a) we are not currently on Twitter or Facebook, we don't have the same reach nor subject to same corporate normativities b) past performance is not always indicative of things to come.

> You can disagree with Twitter's editorial choices,

Except they claim they are not making editorial choices, and can't be held up to that standard, which a great chunk of the problem.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#308

Post by TravHatesMe »

reificator wrote: post #154
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> will now normalize all kinds of behavior by platforms of all kinds big and small Slippery slope is a falacy , just like "correlation proves causation", to pick one HN somehow likes. Was there any doubt of their technical ability to delete and otherwise change content on their network in every which way? No, of course not. Was there any doubt that it would be legal? None whatsoever... Nothing has changed, except one…

> Slippery slope is a falacy, just like "correlation proves causation", to pick one HN somehow likes. I've seen too many "if this happens then that will be next" come true to write every use off just because your 9th grade teacher said it was fallacious. For instance the U.S. legal system leans very heavily on the concept of "precedent". Slippery slopes are baked into the system. I don't think you can just pull out t…

I get tired of seeing these comments too. In the last few years it has become commonspeak to throw around these terms with no nuance. Strawmanning is a new favorite word for many. I sometimes shudder at the pretentiousness of it all (for some reason "false dichotomy" gets on my nerves, I feel like there are easier ways of saying that there are other possibilities).

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#309

Post by jounker »

googthrowaway42 wrote: post #187
hackyhacky wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My apologies: one laptop, three hard drives. My point stands. He had been a senator in Delaware, but no longer lived there at the time. Why would he travel across the country to visit a repair shop in the middle of nowhere with a conveniently blind owner and conveniently erased camera footage. There is no universe in which this story is plausible. Before accusing me of not understanding the story, please take a momen…

They made copies of the hard drive in the laptop? As a software engineer I can assure you that that it is very easy to make copies of a hard drive and I expect that a computer repair guy would know how. > He had been a senator in Delaware, but no longer lived there at the time. The Bidens have multiple houses in Delaware. There are many pictures leaked from Hunter's laptop that have Delaware in the geocode. If you wa…

The reporters at the New York Post thought the story was so dubious that they refused to be named in the byline, and the basic premise directly contradicts the historical (and easily verifiable) facts surrounding the Shokin’s removal.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#310

Post by jsu32 »

nearbuy wrote: post #301
jsu32 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was the story that the NY Post article was the result of Russian 'disinformation' based on facts? Because Twitter did nothing to stop that, not a fact check, not a block, nothing. Twitter was certain that 'story' was true, but the FBI (who said they have no evidence the Russians did it) was clueless? If I may, the reason you are unimpressed is that you are on the political side that benefited from Twitter's selective…

Twitter's objection was that the New York Post article contained hacked or illegally obtained material (personal intimate photos, etc.). Publishing those materials is a legal grey area. I don't think Twitter ever said that article was Russian disinformation.

Trump's taxes were illegally obtained (hacked or leaked.) For all we know, the Chinese may have given it to the NYT, as the NYT never bothered to tell us how they got their hands onto them. But Twitter did nothing about them.

If Twitter was honest, every time the figure $750 appeared in a Tweet it should be blocked.

If you feel my statement above is absurd, that just shows how normalized the double standard has become.

ps I think there should be a law that all Presidents disclose tax returns and financial information. If you run for President you deserve a lesser right for privacy. It's not about that though. Twitter shouldn't censor based on its opinions.

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