Relevant context - this was written by a member of the team who released the Twitter files, alongside Matt Tabibi.
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How Twitter moderated the Covid debate
161–170 of 986 posts
Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate
#162A tangent: this domain seems to have an abnormal number of flagged articles. It made me wonder if there's something like shadowbans for domains here and if so, what are the criteria?
Some domains are banned. Others are downweighted- that includes most media sites, including this one.
Thank you for answering my question
Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate
#163A tangent: this domain seems to have an abnormal number of flagged articles. It made me wonder if there's something like shadowbans for domains here and if so, what are the criteria?
HN readers lean toward the establishment narratives.
Meh, HN seems very reasonable, but it seems there is small and very active group that flags posts like this. An organized group of 10-50 accounts can quickly censor anything, unless the mods intervene. Imo, flagging a post must be accompanied by an explanation, and the mods should review these explanations from time to time to catch such censorship teams.
Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's a hard tradeoff between false positives and false negatives. it's like being a soccer referee or a judge, you can be almost perfect but the screwups are all anyone remembers. short of putting everyone away for life, some convict is going to get out and do something, and some tabloid is going to question why this person was on the street. You do the best you can subject to the Constitution, the laws, and common s…
If it's such a hard tradeoff then maybe don't make the trade in the first place. Just don't censor speech. Problem solved. Insisting on censoring speech in this case is what's known as a Hegelian dialectic: there is a problem, we need to solve the problem, here's how we solve the problem.
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Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate
#165Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate
#166Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate
#167Imagine if this was Trump. That for me puts the reaction in tech circles in perspective. We would see two impeachments, wall to wall news coverage, protests by employees at Facebook, Apple and Google, all asking for deplatforming everyone associated and so much more. Its ridiculous that we're unable as a society to separate actions from political affiliation.
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Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am fairly certain this is an American thing The exact same thing happened here in the Netherlands.
Perhaps Denmark is the exception then?
Maybe, it would be worth investigating what made that difference. For sure NL was in chaos and, drivers were a relatively small number of individuals with a disproportionate influence on the outcome.
Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weird take imo, if anything I think trust in big pharmacy among the mainstream has increased, although maybe the fringe moved a bit more, most people still got vaccinated etc., Republicans were already anti everything before the pandemic.
People (on HN) are acting like the misinformation being targeted was innocent stuff on 51:49 judgement calls — complete retconning of the abject lunacy profiteers were out there saying. Talk to anyone in health care, people were nebulizing bleach and hydrogen peroxide, convincing their vets to give them literal animal medicine when the supplies of human ivermectin were cut off, taking fish antiparasite drugs, and on…
People were censored early in the pandemic for saying that wearing masks was a good idea, and a number of other things that are now widely accepted as true.
Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's such a hard tradeoff then maybe don't make the trade in the first place. Just don't censor speech. Problem solved. Insisting on censoring speech in this case is what's known as a Hegelian dialectic: there is a problem, we need to solve the problem, here's how we solve the problem.
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> If you are running a social media platform for the masses, you have to censor certain things, and you have to abide by all regulations. You can’t just X.
Legally speaking yes. You absolutely have to censor a decent amount of content. Outside of what is legally required (at least in the US), I’d be in favor of allowing the community to block and mute to curate their own experience. It seems a losing battle to rely on the whims of the people that run the business of Twitter/Facebook/etc. to be the deciders of what should and should not be allowed.
> We have already seen that musk’s pathetic approach via free speech absolutism does not work.
Is this tongue and cheek? Musk’s policies are the antithesis of free speech.