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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

#571

Post by krapp »

zo1 wrote: post #497
krapp wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I can switch social media platforms a lot more easily than I can switch governments, and corporations don't have a monopoly on violence which would allow their tyranny to lead to torture, gulags and mass graves, but OK. I guess being banned from a forum is much much worse than being sent to the re-education camps.

The methods have changed, the motivation and net result is the same: opinion and thought control. Tech has made it impersonal, clinical, obfuscated, random and ubiquitous. There is no need to "send people to gulags" or torture them in order to suppress their ability to sow dissent amongst their peers. That is the sole purpose, even if it's algorithmic and emergent without a central "dictator" controlling what can or…

I don't see social media suppressing dissent at all. I see dissent everywhere - from anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, anti-maskers, BLM, Antifa, neo-nazis and militias. Ideologies and conspiracy theories once confined to AM talk radio and underground forums have become mainstream politics. Pedophiles have rebranded themselves "minor attracted persons" and are campaigning on social media for pedo rights as human rights. QAnon is mainstream enough to win elections. Even conservatives who are, we are told, terrified to speak openly in what they describe as an oppressive Orwellian atmosphere of left-wing censorship, somehow manage to flood social media with right-wing speech.

If the sole purpose of tech and social media is opinion and thought control and dissident suppression, it doesn't seem to be working outside of the obvious authoritarian places like China.

> I would urge you to consider what "network effects" are occurring due to mild and moderate censorship that is not absolute.

Subtle network effects and mild censorship exist everywhere - we typically refer to these networks as "society", "culture", "religion", "family,", "employer," etc. Certainly social networks can modify behavior, but typically it's easier to undermine that effect on social networks (through alternate accounts) than it is in real life, and typically the negative consequences for breaking norms on social media are less severe than in real life.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#572

Post by darkerside »

mshroyer wrote: post #352
darkerside wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the question is, what is the information? The story seems like spaghetti, thrown at the wall to convey a sense of corruption, with no disprovable claims being made.

I personally think the information is a big nothingburger. But that's quite a different thing from saying it's misinformation.

I think it's fair to characterize tone and intent as part of the message. And when the tone of the message is, BREAKING NEWS THERE HAS BEEN A CORRUPTION, having no evidence of it seems worthy of the phrase misinformation.

As has been said about Trump so many times this cycle, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Except nobody's saying that this time. Maybe because there is no actual claim being made? Just the appearance of one?

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#573

Post by beagle3 »

jjk166 wrote: post #530
beagle3 wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, if microsoft dislikes me for something I did, they can kick me out; Google has done so with respect to Android APK related stuff, for example. I'm sure courts can properly resolve this, after a few months, if it did happen .... It's the government coercing me to comply with Microsoft's TOS that's the problem. > They must bend over backwards to stay in the government's good graces, not the other way around. O…

If a restaurant owner doesn't like me taking my shoes off, they can kick me out. There is a clear business interest in maintaining an atmosphere where people want to eat, and my bare feet would make plenty of people lose their appetites. If the government points their guns at me and says eat at that restaurant or else, the restaurant owner has done nothing wrong. It is the government forcing me to wear shoes, not him…

Perfect analogy.

Unfortunately, said restaurant owner can (and has) kicked people of for sharing recipes that owner thinks it owns (but doesn’t have to prove)

The problem was never with the shoes off crowd.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#574

Post by unishark »

mschuster91 wrote: post #540
unishark wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No it's not. A HDD failing or getting lost? That can be guarded against with backups. Exactly. Back up your cloud data. > With getting banned by Google or Facebook? When all your accounts, your identity is tied to that address/account and you get banned, you cannot be reached anymore by people who don't know that you got screwed over. I thought the fact that I consider this perspective to be absurd was kind of obvi…

> I thought the fact that I consider this perspective to be absurd was kind of obviously built in to my statement. It is not absurd, it is reality. With emails you at least can manually walk through the hundreds of sites you have stored in your password manager, hope that the password still works and you did not encounter a site that got hacked and reset all the passwords, and change the email address... but with "si…

Ultimately this is just more information in the cloud which you failed to back up.

I end up having to reset forgotten passwords a lot (maybe dozens of times per year) and don't think I've ever encountered a reset situation like you describe. If it's important I can always call them to resolve an account problem. If it's unimportant I can make a new account.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#575

Post by beaner »

darkerside wrote: post #343
beaner wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a clever shift from discussing the respectability of the reporting at hand, to discussing the respectability of the reporting institution. Your claim that a failure to issue retractions is an admission of failure in accountability is true - when the reporting needs retractions. So far, there's no evidence that the reporting does.

> The NYPost has issued much fewer retractions than NYT and CNN, yet, Twitter does not attack those institutions. Yes, I claim the reason is a lack of accountability. You claim the reason is impeccability of reporting. I think the reputation and style of reporting is relevant to deciding which of those factors is more relevant. You're free to disagree with that. But please don't call it a clever shift. I'm having you…

You're really not.

How can you call the lack of a retraction a lack of accountability, when there is no evidence that a retraction is necessary?

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#576

Post by beaner »

dang wrote: post #487
lazugod wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or change the text itself to [flagged by users]?

That would indeed be unambiguous. But it would also be verbose and there's something about that which doesn't fit the HN spirit. I don't know that unambiguousness would even be all that helpful. I have a feeling that all the same complaints would continue, they'd just route around it, as the old internet adage goes.

How about [user flagged] and [mod flagged]?

Just throwing 'em out there.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#577

Post by beagle3 »

unishark wrote: post #574
mschuster91 wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I thought the fact that I consider this perspective to be absurd was kind of obviously built in to my statement. It is not absurd, it is reality. With emails you at least can manually walk through the hundreds of sites you have stored in your password manager, hope that the password still works and you did not encounter a site that got hacked and reset all the passwords, and change the email address... but with "si…

Ultimately this is just more information in the cloud which you failed to back up. I end up having to reset forgotten passwords a lot (maybe dozens of times per year) and don't think I've ever encountered a reset situation like you describe. If it's important I can always call them to resolve an account problem. If it's unimportant I can make a new account.

If it’s an account that’s not tied to anything important, sure; But if it’s tied to a bank account, credit card, utility bill etc, it’s often not as easy to “just make a new account”. You’ll likely need to fax a copy of your id to a fraud department who’ll take their time.

A friend of mine has been unable to convince a credit agency to reset their password as they are out of the country and cannot fulfill the requested authentication task. Wouldn’t be a problem in normal times, as they are back and forth every other month. Except it’s been 7 months since corona disrupted that. They can’t just “sign up for a new account” as it tied to their identity.

I’ve never had this problem myself either. But it’s a real problem.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#578

Post by unishark »

beagle3 wrote: post #577
unishark wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately this is just more information in the cloud which you failed to back up. I end up having to reset forgotten passwords a lot (maybe dozens of times per year) and don't think I've ever encountered a reset situation like you describe. If it's important I can always call them to resolve an account problem. If it's unimportant I can make a new account.

If it’s an account that’s not tied to anything important, sure; But if it’s tied to a bank account, credit card, utility bill etc, it’s often not as easy to “just make a new account”. You’ll likely need to fax a copy of your id to a fraud department who’ll take their time. A friend of mine has been unable to convince a credit agency to reset their password as they are out of the country and cannot fulfill the request…

Fair enough, extend the "call them" category to also mean signatures occasionally required by mail. I have had to do that, say with certain rarely-used financial situations. Though not banks, who are very accommodating in my experience (even the notoriously evil ones).

First class mail is working internationally, by the way, to almost every country. Unless they're in Yemen or something perhaps. Keep in mind we were comparing the dangers of corporations to governments. So being in a developing country during a pandemic when there's a communications breakdown with the US also presumably means you can't access a US consulate either. So you'd have the exact same difficulty if it was a govt agency you needed to deal with instead of Google/Facebook/Microsoft.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#579

Post by Kephael »

shlant wrote: post #488
Kephael wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not hyperbole, and we do live in authoritarian countries across most of the "Western" world. If you question the Leftist narrative in a public manner you will lose your professional job. If you tweet facts that the Left does not like, it will be deleted (and possibly result in the aforementioned termination of your employment). We don't presently have camps, but we absolutely have an undocumented social credit s…

you are clearly super biased and just painting the same old reactionary picture that doesn't actually exist. If you think a few examples of misdirected cancel culture and a couple private companies choosing some very specific sources/articles they don't want on their platform is akin to "authoritarianism" you either need to read up on the definition or you are being completely disingenuous to support your regurgitate…

I don't think my eyes and work email inbox are lying to me. Just because it's a softer form of control does not make it acceptable.

This is part of why institutional trust has collapsed in the US and this will all end violently.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#580

Post by galaxyLogic »

Mikhail_Edoshin wrote: post #464
drewrv wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compute…

Right so it would seem Twitter is a publisher. I'm fine with that. Who wouldn't be? But whether it is or not it has the right to take down content. And I think it should do so if it thinks such content is misleading the public.
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