301–310 of 391 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, its not like the Taliban ever supported an insurrection.
It's ridiculous that this utterly obvious joke is being downvoted. I'm amazed -- and I say this kindly, as someone with Asperger's -- at the aggregate autism level on this site.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_ ...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29485514.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_ ...
[flagged]
"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."
a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls
Earlier quoted context omitted.
very convenient that a lot of bot accounts suddenly follows an account for people trying to amplify the accessibility of information of a trial that is suspiciously low profile considering the people involved.
Time to bust out the cork board and string boys!!! Hacker news is definitely gonna crack this case
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> newspeak You guys keep using that word, but I don't think you know what it means. Twitter is a private company. Newspeak was a language developed by the government in Orwell's 1984. VERY different contexts here. For the record - what Twitter communicated is not clear and potentially deceptive, but this response wasn't written by some Twitter PR person. Some support person pressed a button and a canned twitter respo…
Everyone knows Twitter is a private company, that is besides the point. Consider this: Whoever governs society is the government. Reality does not have clear lines like a textbook about economics and politics might have. When does a company begin to govern society? In my opinion, companies like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Amazon, etc. are large enough to govern society. And as such they can be considered in a differe…
EDIT: According to Wikipedia[1], "The company eventually came to rule large areas of India, exercising military power and assuming administrative functions." This sounds like a government power to me, one that Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Amazon don't have. I don't see examples of companies today that have these powers over people in my country, but am willing to be proven wrong.
There is a Substack associated with the suspended twitter account [0]. They have made a recent post about the suspension of said account and all of the users other twitter accounts [1]. It states that twitter told the user "the account was “artificially” amplifying information". [0] https://patriotone.substack.com [1] https://patriotone.substack.com/p/twitter-suspension
It's ironic that they're using Substack when they say: > Big tech has gotten too powerful, and they can silence us anytime they want. Substack is well on its way to becoming part of "big tech" and is yet another platform you don't control. Setting up your own blog will not protect you from any and all threats but it makes arbitrary "suspensions" very difficult.
While it's certainly a possible concern, not all platforms descend in to censorship. I think it's reasonable to wait until there's at least warning signs before criticizing a specific site.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I grant you she’s doing a good job, but that does not grant her a monopoly on fact. If only accredited journalists are allowed to report then we have no Wikileaks, no citizen journalism etc. Twitter is in the wrong to suppress an account on account of “artificially” inflating engagement. First, they don’t have to present evidence and second What news organ doesn’t create artificial engagement? It’s a preposterous exc…
> If only accredited journalists are allowed to report You are not replying to anyone who has suggested this. Anyway, the government licensing of journalists is at least 5 years off.
As a society we need to redefine what a public space is.
Let's consider that the question can be altered slightly to "how much private space can one single entity acquire?" Perhaps the current understanding of public/private is sufficient, e.g. "a private company can bar who it chooses, given that they do not violate some paradigm of protected classes, etc." The problem is that ONE entity owns a majority of a certain type of "space." The redefinition would be to say, "once…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the point of your home to allow me to live there?
It’s building a community center but not letting the fat kids come play.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would like to know too. But if you look at that profile, he says he works at Google. Think about that for a second. He claims this is an easy problem. But consider Google's approach to spam detection algorithms and see how there are so many false positives and innocent people getting screwed out of their ad accounts and livelihood. If this kind of stuff was easy, why hasn't anybody informed Google about it? I'm not…
I very specifically said that there were hard problems, just that this wasn't one ;) In this case, a fairly straightforward account age rule would get you like 95% of the way there. My twitter account, which is 7 years old and has a few hundred followers and tweets once a week isn't going to benefit from this. You don't ban it. Similarly, you don't ban a 7 year old account with 10s of thousands of followers that's be…
b) For your page rank analysis, how do you a priori decide who is a bot or not? Oh I know, you can look at a bunch of data like posting frequency, location, keywords, links posted, and other things, and try and create some clever formula to decide the likelihood that some account is a bot. But at the end of the day, even the best possible approach is going to miss bots created by even half-way clever people, and wrongly screw some innocent people over.
c) What about transparency? How can the public trust any of Twitter's claims that bots did X, therefore we had to ban account Y? Where's the proof? Given that bots on Twitter are endemic, this accusation would always be technically true, to some extent.
d) The amount of money and effort thrown around to influence social media is staggering. Even if you can't program, even an average person can buy tens of thousands of followers for what amounts to pocket change. The crazy Twitter activists who spend 18 hours a day on Twitter wouldn't be willing to spend what amounts to a few days worth of minimum wage work to try and take out some arch-nemesis? A shady political activist who wants to influence politics or hide some damaging info and has access to millions of funding isn't able to arrange this? A nation state who wants to put their thumb on the scale of American public opinion can't spend the tiniest bit of pocket change for a concerted effort to move the scale of public opinion?
e) I don't want to be insulting, but your stated approach and mentality here is exactly why Big Tech algorithms screw over so many innocent people.