Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by rhizome » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 7:53 PM UTC

varispeed wrote: post #285

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…

Exactly this. Medium that uses censorship for any reason, they think you are too stupid to understand the content in front of you so they take that decision from you to delete something. That should be illegal with few exceptions.

>That should be illegal with few exceptions.

And thus the right wing comes around to centralized government control of companies.

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

#332

Post by ummonk » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 7:53 PM UTC

SpaceRaccoon wrote: post #57

ummonk wrote: post #11

I mean, isn't it good when they uniformly apply policies against sharing illicitly obtained private content?

Should Twitter have blocked all the accounts sharing the Panama Papers?

In a hypothetical alternate world in which individuals / organizations were publishing the raw Panama Papers? Yes, I would think their accounts should get banned.

Fortunately, as with the Trump tax returns, the journalists handling the Panama Papers did not engage in such unscrupulous behavior.

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

#333

Post by gamblor956 » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 7:53 PM UTC

weareallcowards wrote: post #304

gamblor956 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's not how power companies are other utilities work and that's not what a natural monopoly is. A natural monopoly is one that arises due to the high costs of entering the market and other barriers to entry that make it difficult for competitors to establish a footing. Utilities are natural monopolies because it is very expensive to place pipes, transmission lines, etc., over large geographic areas. Consequent…

Isn't that what I said? That the cost of entering the market of mass-scale social media companies is extremely high? I wholeheartedly disagree that the cost is "nothing, nada, zilch". The network effects of having everybody using a couple of sites is what makes the cost of switching high, not the technical triviality of creating a new website.

No, that's not at all what you said.

The cost of entering the mass-scale social media market is basically zero, since you can do that in a day with minimal cost other than a domain name and a server (or VPS or AWS/Azure account or similar), and you can scale your costs as you grow, but your costs don't grow as fast as your customer base.

A natural monopoly's costs start high, and just scales from there. It costs tens of millions for a utility just to enter a small market, and with utilities, growing may actually increase their costs (see, for example, power and water utilities).

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

#334

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 7:54 PM UTC

wow_yes wrote: post #225

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or on the side that Twitter thinks is the good side.

We are on the right side of history - progress always is. People like me are much more trustworthy because we're not motivated by greed, but for the desire for a better world.

[deleted]

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

#335

Post by jimbokun » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 7:54 PM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #279

jaywalk wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Net Neutrality is not really that different. These corporations just want to be the ones doing the blocking instead of allowing ISPs to do it.

You honestly don't see a difference between net neutrality and platform content moderation? This is like not seeing the difference between allowing anyone to drive on a public road verse forcing everyone to pick up all hitchhikers.

If a very small number of platforms control essentially all of the content people are exposed to, the distinction starts to blur.

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

#336

Post by manquer » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 7:54 PM UTC

throwawaygh wrote: post #315

keiferski wrote: post #118

Honestly, I see this kind of action as good. The sooner the population at large realizes that Big Social aren't neutral players in the marketplace of ideas, the better. We need decentralized solutions, ASAP, and the only way that's going to happen is when normal people start caring.

> We need decentralized solutions TBH maybe we just need to move on from social media instead.

It like the printing press, more wide spread availablity of content distribution is not going to go away.

For all its flaws abilty produce content cheaply has created value too.

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

#337

Post by eesmith » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 7:54 PM UTC

smnrchrds wrote: post #255

function_seven wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We live in a world where Twitter is the place to get information about official government policy (US) or emergency alerts regarding life-or-death situations (NS). If Twitter were not a common infrastructure, it should have been downright illegal to use it like one, at least for government agencies and officials. That ship has sailed long ago. We might as well try to make sure everyone has unfettered access to Twitte…

Your NS example shows why Twitter isn't common infrastructure and wasn't an effective method for getting information out in life-or-death situations:

> .. many questions were raised about why Nova Scotia failed to use Alert Ready, Canada's mandatory emergency population warning system, to warn the public about the attacks but instead chose to use social media platforms Twitter and Facebook to provide updates, RCMP officials said they had been dealing with an unfolding situation and details were being updated frequently. However, the areas affected had poor cellular Internet service and were mostly populated by seniors who might not have used social media. Relatives of the victims pointed out that the use of Alert Ready could have saved lives.

I stopped using FB 8 years ago because the attention-seeking design was making me depressed, always wanting to check was was going on.

If we say that Twitter and FB are the places to get information about official government policy then 1) we need to let minors under the age of 13 have Twitter account (not allowed under the current ToS), 2) we need to have some way to ensure that personal information is not sent outside the country (currently allowed in the current ToS) or sold in any form - basically, the same protections as if you were to go to a government-hosted site - and 3) we need some way so people can see only essential government information, without advertising or viewing other sources designed around "engagement".

I don't think Twitter wants to take on this role.

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

#338

Post by duxup » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 7:55 PM UTC

koenigdavidmj wrote: post #102

tomp wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

ZH was talking about coronavirus way earlier than anyone else, which is bound to happen if you don’t validate as well—sometimes you do strike gold. A comment I saw once about them was “ZH has reported five of the last three catastrophes”.

"ZH was talking about coronavirus way earlier than anyone else"

I've seen that claim too and found it questionable. Almost every major news outlet that would cover international news I found had some story about coronavirus pretty dang early. It wasn't a breathless story predicting the impact, but they covered it.

I feel like most media "media does this" or "didn't do that" is mostly just what passed in front of someone's nose.

Purely anecdotal experience of mine was a reddit story ages ago that was "The Media is too busy covering X to cover this story Y."

Purely out of curiosity I turned around and flipped on the TV and checked the news channels. The first 3 news channels, 2 were covering Y... but the claims about nobody covering it were constant.

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

#339

Post by caseysoftware » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 7:56 PM UTC

Personally, if [company] wants to filter or censor, go for it if and only if a) they disclose it and b) I can turn it off.

We have a model for this already, it's called "safe search"

When you filter without disclosing, you're stealing my agency and creating a situation for near-undetectable abuse.

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

#340

Post by rhizome » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 7:56 PM UTC

free_rms wrote: post #262

javagram wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

>They are acting differently for Biden.

The difference is that right-wing trash usually comes directly from Trump, then republished in the tabloids. We've seen that get reined in a little in annotating his worst tweets and FB posts, but don't pretend there's an equivalence between their public communications.