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Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

taibbi.substack.com

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Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not suppressing the article because it's wrong, but because it's pretty obviously intentionally planted misinformation disguised as news. Twitter has a choice: either they can suppress it; or they can be pawns of whatever bad actors are creating this disinformation. It's a hard choice, and clearly it's a struggle that as a society we have to deal with. Right now, creating and distributing disinformation is ea…

“pretty obviously intentionally planted misinformation disguised as news” I am astonished at your blinding confidence in your ability to distinguish misinformation from news. You must be a Facebook content moderator ::snicker::

I can't tell you for sure if this story is misinformation or not. That's part of the problem with misinformation. Well constructed misinformation is not easily proven false.

What I can tell you is that it is absurd to believe it is true given what we know about the details surrounding the "discovery" of the information.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#312
It seems that suppression is the only choice in this prisoner’s dilemma of right vs left media right now.

Now I don’t like censorship.

Chinese media censored the COVID-19 outbreak in the beginning, which cost lives.

Right wing media in the west censored ‘liberal bias’ which cost lives.

The left’s censorship here is a recognition that the other side doesn’t play “fair” and they’ll take their chances on this morally grey choice because lives are immediately at stake.

It’s hard to even consider this a scandal. It’s hard to defend censorship here knowing that one might have a better chance of survival in a draconian Orwellian state that is modern China over the bastion of freedoms that is supposedly the United States.

It’s disappointing.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#313

> 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 have a lot of respect for Aaron swartz, but:

> They have no constitution to answer to.

Do we seriously believe any government follows it's constitution? What is the mechanism for redress should it fail to do so?

> They’re not elected.

Neither are most operators in the government. And even for those operators that are elected, the role of government has expanded to the point where any given elected official has authority over so many concerns that the one you care about is going to be diluted to the point where you may not even want to vote for the thing you care about the most.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#314
post #215
post #122

I think Twitter was well within their rights to refuse to allow their website to be a vector for what they considered to be foreign meddling in an American election -- something that they've been criticized for in the very recent past.

If it wasn't a foreign meddling attempt then it was a domestic one. To me this is less a question about Twitter's right to block stories (which it absolutely has) but rather a question of whether election meddling attempts should be recognized on their own as blockable or censorable content.

The most recent OTM had a segment about the way conservative groups have been following the Russian playbook, creating fake local news sites, taking advantage of underemployed journalists to seed real content as cover for disinformation articles etc.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#315

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 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

Get back to me when twitter can order an airstrike against an minor and enjoy qualified immunity.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#316
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does removing “Viagra bot spam” adhere to the moral principle of free speech? Why does the New York Post get special moral privileges that Bob’s Viagra Store does not? This is the frustrating thing about this debate: one side tries to position itself as “anti-censorship”, when really that position only extends to cover speech they care about.

Because the one is an obvious expression of carnal desires and greed while the other is at least ostensibly about ideology and truth.

The whole point of “freedom of speech” is that there should be no value judgment that determines whether or not something is acceptable to say.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#317
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If something is going to be suppressed as Russian propaganda, there better be evidence that it is Russian propaganda. Otherwise the suppression itself is propaganda in the other direction.

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.

No, if if the content is true and in the public interest, there is really no question about the legality of publishing it in the US: it is 100% constitutionally protected.

Twitter’s initial justification for removing the “hacked” material is completely at odds with their past decisions to leave up hacked/illegally obtained materials like the Snowden docs, Trump tax returns, Panama papers, etc. Of course they have since changed their stance.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And at the same time, private companies cannot force you to use their services, or threaten you with violence or imprisonment if you refuse to follow their rules.

This is getting blurry as well, and though you are technically correct, one might have to sue or suffer damages for not following their rules: My children’s schools requires the use of Microsoft Teams From home (and associated TOS) for them to attend class. There is also a parent WhatsApp group for urgent messages to parents. And as of the pandemic, there is also mandatory Zoom classes. This is a public school. If I…

It's still fundamentally government that made that choice to force you into one service.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#319
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am always impressed when people make these kinds of absolute statements about the primacy of private property rights. Now, let's consider: * Alice should be able to choose without restriction to whom she is going to rent * Bob should be able to choose without restriction who's allowed to play golf at his club * Carlos should be able to choose without restriction to whom his bank is going to lend money etc. I am not…

Your analogy is broken. Clever to try to compare Twitter to discrimination though. In all of the situations, the principals have broad discretion to make choices about their property. Alice can turn away people with credit problems. Bob can require a specific handicap to play. Carlos can choose to not loan money to high risk professions. They cannot say “no black people at my apartment complex”, “no golf if you are J…

One person’s chaos is another’s vitality. Every human on earth, by living the natural world, has chosen chaos/vitality at some level. We also “moderate” that entropy in lots of convenient and comforting ways.

Cybernature is a new experience. As a species, we are working out what level of moderation we would like.

Explorers tends to be rough-and-ready sorts, and so veer towards the vitality side of things. They know how to make the chaos work for them. For good and/or evil. Since there isn’t the downside of “instadeath” of the physical world, more risk-taking, and thus more chaos, may be justified.

Settlers tend to like fences, highways, channel markings, flight corridors...structure. There are usually eventually more settlers in any area, so their view prevails in the long run.

(You can be an explorer in one area and a settler in another...it’s not some permanent psychological feature. You can demand political content freedom from de facto pseudocarrier monopolies while being happy with a locked-down OS for self-driving cars.)

In computing, the barrier to entry for exploration is so low and it is so new (in the long view) that the percentage of settlers is pretty low, hence the cultural bias toward freedom (including content) rather than control in these forums.

[Personally, I trust the American people to curate their own content. I expect the educational system to educate the citizenry to be skilled enough in critical thinking to be able to curate the content presented.

But I expect the marketplace of ideas to police itself against systematic biases and inaccuracies, either with effective editing of its own content and/or in actively and effectively supporting a “loyal opposition” to its views.

Twitter seems to be doing neither, because it’s much closer to being a de facto common carrier monopoly than a media channel. Common carrier monopolies had been accepted and successful for a hundred years in the US, but only with heavy Federal regulation. The hip, cool alternative: break them up.

Great truths from Gen X, the generation to which you can’t easily mass-market.]

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#320

I fear Taibbi is right, the suppression by Twitter, irrespective of the merits and veracity of NY Post's report, will now normalize all kinds of behavior by platforms of all kinds big and small. Which will then incentivize governments to take on the platforms. This also raises issues of unequal treatment - say the NY Post report was factually wrong - why pick on the NY Post only? Why not the hundreds of other "news o…

They're not suppressing the article because it's wrong, but because it's pretty obviously intentionally planted misinformation disguised as news. Twitter has a choice: either they can suppress it; or they can be pawns of whatever bad actors are creating this disinformation. It's a hard choice, and clearly it's a struggle that as a society we have to deal with. Right now, creating and distributing disinformation is ea…

> They're not suppressing the article because it's wrong, but because it's pretty obviously intentionally planted misinformation disguised as news.

This would be a more credible assertion if the media hasn’t spent 3 years reporting totally random shit as “bombshells.”

Taibbi, himself a left-leaning journalist (formerly at Rolling Stone) has catalogued these at length on his substack. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombshell-memory-hole-d20

In the cold light of the morning after, even WaPo has criticized the coverage over stories sources from the Steele Dossier: https://www.mercurynews.com/hanson-the-dangers-of-elite-grou...

> The Washington Post recently published a surprising indictment of MSNBC host, Stanford graduate and Rhodes scholar Rachel Maddow.

> Post media critic Erik Wemple wrote that Maddow deliberately misled her audience by claiming the now-discredited Steele dossier was largely verifiable — even at a time when there was plenty of evidence that it was mostly bogus.

> At the very time Maddow was reassuring viewers that Christopher Steele was believable, populist talk radio and the much-criticized Fox News Channel were insisting that most of Steele’s allegations simply could not be true. Maddow was wrong. Her less degreed critics proved to be right.

People should be a lot madder about how they were lied to and manipulated about Russiagate. If the media takes this sort of “ends justify the means” approach to Trump, they will eventually do it with something you care about.

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