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I think being allowed to die on your own terms is a right that every human should have. And I think assisted suicide is a good thing. But I don’t understand why Twitter would block the Bishop for saying what he said. And the reason they gave, that it “promotes self harm”.. that’s straight up Kafkaesque.
I don't think this is "cancel culture" or being "woke" like the article implies. This is just an AI or inattentive human reviewer seeing the phrase "There is dignity in dying" in the same Tweet as the word "suicide" and misinterpreting it. This just seems like a non-story that will get resolved once the right person at Twitter sees it, that is being pushed by a biased website in their fight against what they perceive…
Yes and no, but likely mostly no. Keep in mind, the "intelligence" of those AI algorithms comes from datasets of previous behaviors. Given the popularity (?) of the cancel mindset on this particular platform it's reasonable to expect a bias in said data; and in turn the algorithm. Rinse and repeat.
Why does it matter if the flagging is automatic? Does that somehow make it more acceptable? The popularity of this view makes me wish more people read Kafka. A future tyranny might end up not being Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World, but a kafkesque nightmare where people are lost in a world of AI giving out absurd punishments. [1] Kafka's book The Castle [2] is essentially about this, although I think his aph…
I don't think this is "cancel culture" or being "woke" like the article implies. This is just an AI or inattentive human reviewer seeing the phrase "There is dignity in dying" in the same Tweet as the word "suicide" and misinterpreting it. This just seems like a non-story that will get resolved once the right person at Twitter sees it, that is being pushed by a biased website in their fight against what they perceive…
On the one hand you may be right, on the other hand you're giving Twitter so much deniability that you'd never get enough evidence to convince you that you're wrong.
If you can shown me one of those I might be convinced that there's something going. But a single anecdote like this that can easily be explained in a less conspiratorial way is not particularly strong evidence.
> And even if euthanasia is just that – and Twitter is very proud to toot its horn as the sensitive and sensible, woke platform that clamps down on promotion and encouragement of self-harm, including its ultimate form, suicide – the tweet, even though it opposed it, got banned. This is such an interesting topic, because while euthanasia can be considered a way of suicide, advocating against it can also be considered…
I think being allowed to die on your own terms is a right that every human should have. And I think assisted suicide is a good thing. But I don’t understand why Twitter would block the Bishop for saying what he said. And the reason they gave, that it “promotes self harm”.. that’s straight up Kafkaesque.
A friend of mine got a warning from Twitter for promoting self-harming last week after he gave someone a link to some documents and said "There you go. Knock yourself out."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the one hand you may be right, on the other hand you're giving Twitter so much deniability that you'd never get enough evidence to convince you that you're wrong.
If they deliberately made plans to block statements against issues like these then there would be proof. There would be documents. There would be people who could become whistleblowers. If you can shown me one of those I might be convinced that there's something going. But a single anecdote like this that can easily be explained in a less conspiratorial way is not particularly strong evidence.
Would there? Or would such blocks simply be the result of strong, shared political leanings at Twitter [1], without any need for central organization?
In age when so much is being attributed to unconscious bias and systemic effects, this seems like a strange spot to draw the line that now we need evidence of deliberate organization.
[1] Twitter is so liberal that its conservative employees ‘don’t feel safe to express their opinions,’ says CEO Jack Dorsey - https://www.vox.com/2018/9/14/17857622/twitter-liberal-emplo...
Why does it matter if the flagging is automatic? Does that somehow make it more acceptable? The popularity of this view makes me wish more people read Kafka. A future tyranny might end up not being Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World, but a kafkesque nightmare where people are lost in a world of AI giving out absurd punishments. [1] Kafka's book The Castle [2] is essentially about this, although I think his aph…
The founder(s) have a crazy, innovative, idea to improve the world, and while they're perceived as mad by the masses initially, it's the first followers who give credence and legitimacy to this idea. So the first employees, initial customers, initial investors, and even just random supporters who independently believe in the value what the originators are doing, and that helps propel acceptance within the larger community and eventually the masses.
This is the authoritarian opposite - really terrible decisions and mechanisms have been implemented and are being repeated on a daily basis by powerful companies or organisations, and while the masses find it worrying initially, there are apparently no shortage of apologists online and offline who are falling over themselves to helpfully explain to the rest of us why this crap is ok:
"It's an AI algorithm"
"They're a private company"
"You don't have to use them"
"Well, they're standing against bigotry"
etc
And then suddenly we find ourselves in an environment not unlike the Kafka-esque scenarios referenced. Be wary of "explainers" - often just they're consensus building, but it's not clear whether they're building in the right direction or the wrong one.
This is a non-story. Someone on twitter wrote: > There is dignity in dying. As a priest, I am privileged to witness it often. Assisted suicide, where it is practices, it not an expression of freedom or dignity, but of the failure of a society to accompany people on their "way of the cross" Twitter then flagged it for "promoting or encouraging suicide or self-harm". Obviously it is not, but this is a rather complicate…
This is actually a major problem with arguments that try to dismiss the need to have ideological diversity in these institutions - cancel culture can arise from genuine good faith moderation if those moderators also happen to just have extremely biased ideological priors, eg. "we need to fight back" is taken as a literal threat of violence when said by the outgroup but not by the ingroup.
In this case, I think we need to be vigilant against NLP models meant to flag content that may not explicitly build in ideological biases but incorporate feedback loops that will reinforce them - eg. they're meant to detect posts that will likely be flagged by users / human moderators, but the baseline flag rates are ideologically-biased.
Unsurprisingly, the woke are perfectly able to understand these concerns when it comes to concerns about say AI coming to exhibit latent racial biases. But when the same mechanisms may cause ideological biases there's a telling lack of concern.