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Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

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Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#261

Post by Domenic_S »

function_seven wrote: post #31
blhack wrote: post #19

To the people constantly saying that twitter is a private company and should be allowed to do whatever they want: Would you support the same idea around electrical power? If the power company providing the power to the office at the NyPost decided that they had a political disagreement with them, would it be okay to just cut off their power? NyPost could just make their own power, of course, by purchasing a generator…

Twitter is not a utility. It is not common infrastructure. The Internet is, and I would not be okay with Internet access being terminated over political disagreements. But individual services? Sure, why not? For those who argue that Twitter is a de facto common platform, well these decisions are moving them away from that role. The more they exercise their own prerogatives in removing content, the more they're no lon…

Ok, what if the only grocery store in your town did it? Or the only gas station or the only doctor's office?

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#262

Post by free_rms »

javagram wrote: post #241
free_rms wrote: post #18

So what happens when Biden probably wins? Will any criticism of our sitting President be punishable by banning from social media?

Unlikely. Remember, there were 10 separate investigations into Benghazi, for instance, and Twitter didn’t block any of them from being posted. No reason to suppose they will act differently for Biden. Their action here seems to be more out of fear of a pre-election bombshell similar to the 2016 “emails” that turned out to a nothingburger.

That was then, this is now. They are acting differently for Biden.

Twitter's setting themselves up as the arbiter of what constitutes "properly sourced" information. What happens if there's another Snowden-type leak under Biden? Hacked materials, gathered without consent, potentially slanderous, definitely hurting the 'good guys' in this news cycle...

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#263

Post by DanielBMarkham »

LegitShady wrote: post #161
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good point, and often overlooked. A helluva lot of people joined these networks and got captured by the network effect because we were told or believed that they were open sites, just like the rest of the net. If content (or types of content) came along that folks didn't want? Nerds like us would make and give away (or sell) tools for getting rid of that garbage. In a big way, what we're going through right…

You didn't make the legal claim, but Clarence thomas has started going down that path in the recent Malwarebytes judgement https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/101320zor_8m...

The more you think about this the more ticked off you can get.

Voters, and their representatives, made a deliberate effort to be as hands-off as possible to the early internet. It remained tax free. Public facilities were used. Section 230 was passed to remove the specter of liability and so on. We all did the most we could to stay away and let the net develop, knowing that if we came in too heavy-handed, not only would we destroy this new creation, we'd forever taint it in the world's eyes as just being some kind of US thing.

We had high hopes. We were open-minded and experimental. And here's where we freaking ended up: just another Standard Oil or United States Steel Corporation, only this time there wasn't any kind of behind-the-scenes mucking around in politics. It's directly in our face. (And when you point that out, the monopolies themselves will beg for regulation, knowing full well that by the time their money finishes paying off the legislators, the fix will be in. They'll set the wall so high they'll never have true competitors)

Not a happy political place to be, no matter what your particular political views.

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#264

Post by Spivak »

munk-a wrote: post #170
cjjuice wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should not be the job of the social media companies to be judge and jury for truth. Let the people decide for themselves what is true and false. Basically the social media company argument is... we think people are too dumb to figure out what is "real" or not so we are going to censor. That to me is an extremely damning view of the common person. But then, everywhere on the platform.. "make a plan to vote". So you…

The "common person" is honestly pretty depressing. The common person primarily votes based solely on a historical allegiance to a political party (be it individually formed or inherited) with about 75% of America essentially being unmovable D or R safe votes. Censorship is a hard question and I think we do need to have better laws promoting free access to material (even "libelous" material) but this is also an area w…

> The common person primarily votes based solely on a historical allegiance to a political party (be it individually formed or inherited) with about 75% of America essentially being unmovable D or R safe votes.

This is one of those statements that sounds bad on the surface but is actually totally reasonable and has nothing to do with some trope about the "uninformed masses" or whatever. Locally the individual matters a lot more but at the national level voting histories show that the party dominates.

People have "disqualifying issues." And this is totally rational. Being black and voting R is nuts -- same if you're gay. And if you're pro-life then voting D is unpalatable. These kinds of polarizing issues very nearly define the party line. So yeah, if you go the polls in Nov and don't know if you're voting D or R (nationally) then you're probably crazy uninformed.

The actual decision making happens during the primaries where people suddenly have an entire group of people who aren't immediately disqualified and the internal discussion gets a lot more nuanced.

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#265

Post by munk-a »

dasudasu wrote: post #240
munk-a wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "common person" is honestly pretty depressing. The common person primarily votes based solely on a historical allegiance to a political party (be it individually formed or inherited) with about 75% of America essentially being unmovable D or R safe votes. Censorship is a hard question and I think we do need to have better laws promoting free access to material (even "libelous" material) but this is also an area w…

With two parties divided along ideological left-right lines, it’s expected that a majority won’t be switching side too often in their lifetime. The opposite would be ideologically weak parties doing a form of clientelism that would change according to the trends of the day.

Comparing the US system with parliamentary governments - I reject the assumption that the two parties are clearly divided along left-right lines. People all have a pretty wide diversity of opinions there are plenty of people I know that are both pro-life and pro-medicare for all - they don't have a home in the US political system and thus have to settle for one party of the other.

The US's two-party entrenchment forces this false appearance of an us vs. them political battle. It's true that in the US you can only legitimately vote for either D or R in races and that this further entrenches the two parties - but issue voters should be flowing pretty freely between the two parties as their individual focuses shift.

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#266

Post by lucaspm98 »

La1n wrote: post #213
lucaspm98 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This site tends to have fairly reliable analysis of media biases, and AP falls questionably between center and leaning left. https://www.allsides.com/news-source/associated-press-media-...

>Because AP’s displays of Lean Left bias are quite infrequent, AP still warrants a Center rating. They just rate it center. There is no single media source that will never have any bias at all. So that would mean there would never be an center.

I completely agree with your conclusion, but you're cherry picking a quote.

>AP is a source that AllSides has struggled to rate, due to its content seeming to toe the line between Center and Lean Left. People on the right may be more likely to see AP’s content as clearly Lean Left. While AP's news and world reporting is largely Center, AllSides has found AP often includes subjective, leftward analysis in hard news reports and omits sources in its political writing; in addition, its fact checks are biased to the left

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#267

Post by newcomputer »

xadhominemx wrote: post #98
numpad0 wrote: post #75

That’s their normal courses of action for account freezes. They programmatically freeze your account with the message “Twitter freezes accounts that violate Twitter Rules.” which criteria is just a /dev/urandom that apparently any average script kiddies can trigger at will. They don’t bother dealing with your complaints, but don’t bother with ban evasions either, so people either keep sending complaints until it reac…

The NYPost’s account was not frozen programmatically. And if they want to unfreeze their account they can do so by deleting the tweet that was manually flagged. They have not done so because they want to draw attention to themselves as an alleged victim of bias against conservative media outlets. Edit: is there a reason my factually sound comment is being downvoted?

There's no alleged about it. When far-left publisher, the Guardian, published a completely unverified Trump Russia dossier, they received no condemnation from Twitter. Yet, when the NY Post publishes proof of a Democrat illegally using his political office to enrich his family, all of sudden publishers need to start proving every last detail of their story before they can post to Twitter?

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#268

Post by SirensOfTitan »

Large tech companies like Twitter and Facebook and media alike have suddenly come up with all sorts of new standards to justify blocking or not reporting the Hunter Biden documents. I find it grotesque and completely inappropriate. Democracy is not a bunch of educated elites (and most of the "respected" media is white and ivy-league educated) telling the unwashed masses what to think and how to feel.

From Mikhail Bakunin:

> Liberty can and must defend itself only through liberty; to try to restrict it on the specious pretext of defending it is a dangerous contradiction.

Despite the intentions of these companies, I find it fairly evident that censorship usually just reinforces the status quo. It's a terrible tactic for forward progress.

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#269

Post by mcintyre1994 »

tomp wrote: post #64
quacked wrote: post #6

The Post publishes a lot of disreputable trash that's outright false or unproven, but more and more often, it seems that they release primary sources of information (especially videos) much earlier than other news outlets will, if the other news outlets do so at all. There have been multiple times when I've seen an insane video of something happening spreading around Twitter or WorldStar or some other "raw video" agg…

> The Post publishes a lot of disreputable trash that's outright false or unproven, but more and more often, it seems that they release primary sources of information (especially videos) much earlier than other news outlets will, if the other news outlets do so at all. Interesting... after reading this, I immediately thought: same as Zero Hedge (also often criticised). But then again, that shouldn't be a surprise - b…

This is a really interesting thread to read for me. I remember when I was in school as a dumb teenager watching the Zeitgeist video that was going around then, it’s a bunch of dumb conspiracy theories which if I watched now I’d probably peg as blatantly antisemitic as those things tend to be.

Anyway I mention that because during that time I remember always leaning on weird ZeroHedge articles to prove things in dumb arguments. I don’t remember the specifics but it stuck with me enough to completely blacklist ZH when I realised how dumb I was being.

It sounds like I probably should take a look at it from a fresh perspective and without that baggage, because it’s obviously not what I remember based on these comments.

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#270

Post by cortesoft »

gedy wrote: post #247
khawkins wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting to see how quickly Silicon Valley culture has changed over the past 10 years from one of free speech absolutism to "benevolent censorship". The people so vociferously clamoring about the nightmare-hellscape of a world without Net-Neutrality are now telling us that a handful of major corporations actively and blatantly censoring speech is no cause for concern.

I think people show their true colors when emotional, and many blame social media, misinformation, etc as why Trump won in 2016; whereas before they were praising how savvy Obama was to use social media, etc.

So if you think politicians utilizing social media to reach the people is ok, you also have to think it is ok for a foreign nation to use fake social media accounts to influence an election?

Social media is the tool, and some uses are ok and some aren't. I am not 'showing my true color' when I condemn someone who uses a knife to murder someone, even though I praised a master chef's use of a knife to cut food just the day before.

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