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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

#461

Post by dang »

nkurz wrote: post #139
dang wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason people seem to be assuming that more lately (i.e. that "flagged" means mods did it). I'm not quite sure how to correct that notion. I suppose we could hyperlink "[flagged]" to an explanation...but would people click? It's not as if this isn't in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html . Explanations don't seem to help much.

It wouldn't explain a recent change, but the label "flag" does imply calling something to someone's attention, and that someone would presumably be a moderator. Whether or not not stories are killed immediately by flagging (and it makes sense to me that they are), would it be reasonable for a moderator to eventually review everything that is flagged, or at least everything flagged by more than one person? I don't hav…

We do review all of them. But there are so many that I can't say we review them all equally closely. A lot of the time we're tired and just skimming. Vigilant users' contributions are extremely helpful.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#462

Post by thu2111 »

stonogo wrote: post #260
RhysU wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But let's not pretend that Twitter and Facebook hold information monopolies with equivalent power to the government's ability to censor. Those private entities can censor in excess of the government. They are scarier.

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.

People are alarmed by these moves because they represent a wider trend in which the left increasingly does not recognise the right as politically legitimate, i.e. they do not believe non-leftists should be allowed to exist. Tech firm activist censorship is merely one visible (or not so visible) aspect of this. But it's not the only aspect.

The very same sorts of people with the very same views are also in government institutions in abundance, as we've seen in recent years with the descent of the various left-wing elites into conspiracy theories about Russia - theories that were then used to try and effectively block implementations of public votes, on the belief that surely the public could not possibly reject their enlightened governance unless they were being manipulated.

This isn't purely a US thing. The UK has the same problems. Recently one of the government's advisors on COVID was complaining (on Twitter!) that the BBC had agreed to unfairly rig a debate she was involved with, but hadn't properly enforced that rigging:

https://twitter.com/SusanMichie/status/1311234012283899904

A lot of the British political class lost their minds over Brexit. You saw incredible things, like politicians running as candidates of the party saying they'd implement the decision, and then switching post-election to the party with saying they'd void the vote and never leave. They had flat out lied to voters about their intentions. That happened quite a few times. There were many other tricks deployed too. They fundamentally didn't believe in the legitimacy of their political opposition and were willing to manipulate the electoral processes to try and "win" despite having lost at the ballot box.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#463

Post by dang »

nwienert wrote: post #180
nkurz wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Probably in this case it's because metadrama threads like that are a dime-a-dozen and never lead anywhere new I think that's unlikely. While it would be great to know why users flag the stories that they flag (feature request?) in this case I'd wager heavily that it was flagged by people who feel the underlying story is false and unworthy of public discussion, and not out of concern that the discussion would be bor…

Thanks for vouching, that was the thread I linked in the GP post dang was replying to. Constructive ideation on fixing a community problem of censorship is now "metadrama", Orwellian. I'm open to it not being a problem, but we can't even have that discussion. Taibbi frequently gets flagged, he's not liberal enough for the site. I don't have the motivation to now but if someone wrote a "HN has a flagging problem" and…

You're talking as if there's some new development here but HN has operated this way for many years. People are prone to interpret normal fluctuation as catastrophic decline. They were saying similar things about HN over a decade ago. It reminds me of what Voltaire said when told that he drank too much coffee and that it was a slow poison: "It must be very slow". [1]

Taibbi pieces have had more significant threads here than most political commentators. If HN did as you seem to be suggesting and disallowed flags on any articles like this—the ones that you like, plus the ones that everyone else likes, since why should one user be privileged over another?—then the site would consist of nothing but articles like this. That's obviously not its mandate. I don't see how this is "Orwellian", but it's not always easy to know WWOD (what would Orwell do).

[1] Actually it was Fontenelle but Voltaire makes for a better story. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/11/22/coffee/

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#464

Post by Mikhail_Edoshin »

drewrv wrote: post #389
jsu32 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter has been claiming it's not a newspaper or editorial organization. They are legal benefits for Twitter to NOT be a newspaper. That's why they need to claim an objective reason for censoring/fact checking a specific story. So, I understand what you say but Twitter would beg to differ with you. Also network effects are harder to come by in newspapers. Imagine if there was one newspaper that had 100x the readersh…

They don't need to claim any reason, they can take down any content they want for any reason. The only legal protection they have is not being held liable for the speech of their users. Newspapers don't have that because the writers are on their payroll.

The payroll is not the reason. Libraries and newsstands and post service are free from that liability either, but they don't have writers on their payroll. Newspapers that publish readers' letters normally don't pay for that. What makes them publishers is that newspapers choose what to publish. According to the court decision of 1995 [1]:

"By actively utilizing technology and manpower to delete notes from its computer bulletin boards on the basis of offensiveness and "bad taste", for example, PRODIGY is clearly making decisions as to content, and such decisions constitute editorial control. (Id.) That such control is not complete and is enforced both as early as the notes arrive and as late as a complaint is made, does not minimize or eviscerate the simple fact that PRODIGY has uniquely arrogated to itself the role of determining what is proper for its members to post and read on its bulletin boards. Based on the foregoing, this Court is compelled to conclude that for the purposes of Plaintiffs' claims in the action, PRODIGY is a publisher rather than a distributor."

[1] http://www.tomwbell.com/NetLaw/Ch04/Stratton.html

Section 230 was written after that court decision. Yet for the law to be consistent its provisions must agree with this reasoning.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#466

Post by raxxorrax »

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…

I think the perspective of Schwartz is much better developed instead of just ignoring the negative effects of well visited social media sites removing content on political grounds.

Yes, technically the info is still available.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#467

Post by dang »

nwienert wrote: post #174
dang wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users flagged it. That's usually what happened. Probably in this case it's because metadrama threads like that are a dime-a-dozen and never lead anywhere new - they just become generic hodgepodges.

Of course they flagged it. Even more ironic is you missed the point of the post anyway, and your core reply here off: it wasn't meta-discussion, it was an entirely different discussion on the overuse of flagging on this site with examples of how it's happening + call for comments specifically on how to change flagging. In fact it was constructive, and the tone tempered. Not being able to discuss changes to the flag s…

By meta I mean Hacker News threads about Hacker News. Meta is the crack of internet forums. Users tend to flag such threads and moderators tend to moderate them because they're mostly all the same, they breed like rabbits if allowed to, and they're not actually interesting—they're internet drama, which feels interesting but isn't. Such pseudo-content pleases/riles the self-obsessed minority (I mean the minority of HN users who are fascinated with HN, which certainly includes me) but leaves the majority of the audience cold. Self-referentiality is one way for a forum to lose its audience, and our #1 job is to prevent that happening to HN.

This is bog standard HN moderation, btw, and has been the same for many years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Even my analogies have been the same for years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Everyone who rushes to post such a thread feels like this is the one that changes everything, but that's the crack talking.

I realize that your intention was good and that what I'm saying here must sound cynical and heavyhanded, but you have to understand what it's like to see these things a hundred times and realize that they're never different and never lead anywhere. If they don't make you feel weary and slightly nauseated, that's because you haven't seen too many of them yet.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#470

Post by thu2111 »

pavlov wrote: post #325
jsu32 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was really fun to watch half (liberal) Twitter claiming this was disinformation (i.e. false information) and the other half - including Twitter itself - claiming it was hacking (i.e. absolutely true information, albeit one they shouldn't have their hands on). I feel most people don't care about the facts, they care about their opinions which is now part of their identity. This is not good at all.

You've got this wrong. The ban on publishing personal information from hacks doesn't apply only when it's "absolutely true". It's about the claimed provenance, not the veracity. If I made a tweet that reads: "Here's some juicy extracts from jsu32's personal diary, I stole it from their hard drive" — it would fall under Twitter's policy, regardless of whether I ever stole your hard drive or not.

Almost by definition information that was stolen via hacking is true, unless for some bizarre reason the victim was privately forging documents about themselves, which nobody has ever alleged.

At any rate, the OP merely observed that people supporting Twitter can't get their story straight: half are claiming it's Russian disinformation (again) and others that it's hacking (but supposedly it's not), and those two narratives aren't compatible.

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