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X Has Become a 'Global Sewer,' Mayor of Paris Says

nytimes.com

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Re: X Has Become a 'Global Sewer,' Mayor of Paris Says

#71

Post by Covzire »

davidw wrote: post #56
johnyzee wrote: post #51

The free speech thing is a red herring. Musk said 'freedom of speech' but not necessarily 'freedom of reach', which seems reasonable. This is not the problem. The problem is that the algorithms simply don't work. The sewer analogy is good - shit seems to float to the top, rather than the other way around. Places like HN and even reddit nailed this a long time ago, but any given X feed just looks like an append-only l…

HN is heavily moderated by very knowledgeable people and that's part of what makes it continue to work well. It's like if you go into a bar and there's a guy screaming a bunch of curse words and racist crap in the corner at everyone near him. Normal people are going to leave if no one kicks the guy out.

Anyone can unfollow those people. Nobody on my timeline is screaming curse words or racist crap.

The real reason X is being attacked is because the Following tab doesn't inject propaganda like every other social media / news website does, other than ads of course.

Re: X Has Become a 'Global Sewer,' Mayor of Paris Says

#72

Post by OrvalWintermute »

There is something I really like about X.

If you want to find coverage of the Palestinian position you can read it, and listen/participate in a space.

If you want to find coverage of the Israeli position you can read it, and listen/participate in a space.

To me it says that X is not practicing viewpoint discrimination for this issue which is actually heavily censored in much of legacy media.

Re: X Has Become a 'Global Sewer,' Mayor of Paris Says

#73

Post by numpad0 »

pityJuke wrote: post #19
porcoda wrote: post #8

To be honest, Twitter/X has been a sewer for a good decade or so. The only thing that has changed is the kind of sewage that is allowed or encouraged to flow through it.

And the fact that sewage is now the content that is prioritised. Blue checkmarks went from being a flawed, but useful signal of interest, to being a symbol for the most garbage content on the internet. And I have to wade through the filth if I want to make it to anything interesting. Elon's checkmark system is the equivalent to the hot weather that caused the Great Stink [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_…

Twitter of late is blue-checked bot replying to trending topic with copy-pasted text, to which bunch of another bots doing the same, creating fabricated and monetized reply trees. A lot has Arabic profile too. It's money laundering in the open, weird that no actions are being taken.

Re: X Has Become a 'Global Sewer,' Mayor of Paris Says

#74

Post by nomel »

emodendroket wrote: post #57
ThalesX wrote: post #12

X is the best social media platform out there at this point. What are the alternatives? Meta's Facebook, Instagram? TikTok? It's just bollocks. X is where a lot of interesting people post, and where freedom of speech is the most upheld. Community notes is also a super interesting aspect. It's not X's fault someone follows nazis or whatever and don't know where the mute / block buttons are.

I don't agree. It's really hard to tailor your feed to be stuff you want to read and not garbage you have no interest in.

I started using X just recently. My feed is entirely related to the people I follow and topics I'm interested in. I had a bit of garbage after I joined, but "show less like this" solved it very quickly. The only "garbage" is ads, but they're topical and annoyingly effective at catching my attention.

The people I follow have a very high signal to noise ratio, so maybe that helps.

What do you see?

Re: X Has Become a 'Global Sewer,' Mayor of Paris Says

#76

Post by ajross »

josteink wrote: post #32
rpmisms wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's compatible with freedom of speech. He's not censoring it, but he can show damages from misleading speech.

In this case it was specifically intentionally misleading (something they have logs to prove), and weaponized against the business of X itself. Clearly different from some random internet person saying something controversial or unpopular.

> In this case it was specifically intentionally misleading (something they have logs to prove)

No such logs have been produced, FWIW. They made some vague claims in the original suit, but haven't backed it up. Broadly the claim amounts to: Media Matters created burner accounts that follow a bunch of nazis, racists, and other hateful accounts, and did it so that they could embarrass X when it got served ads for Disney products or whatever.

And, maybe that's true. Media Matters is an in-the-trenches democratic political organ, and Musk has coded himself conservative in his current incarnation. He's an enemy, and they're going to go after him. That's just politics.

But I don't see how you get from there to damages. It's certainly not libel; Media Matters did, after all, tell the truth. Nor is it fraud. X really did serve the ads, and the content really was hateful. Anyone else following those hate accounts would get the same content, Media Matters didn't "hack the algorithm", they just followed a lot of evil nonsense.

Re: X Has Become a 'Global Sewer,' Mayor of Paris Says

#77

Post by theultdev »

davidw wrote: post #50
josteink wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case it was specifically intentionally misleading (something they have logs to prove), and weaponized against the business of X itself. Clearly different from some random internet person saying something controversial or unpopular.

People have replicated the results. Which isn't surprising, given how much trash content that place has these days. Also: does anyone think those big accounts just up and left after one shoestring organization published something? They most likely replicated the results themselves.

Yes you can replicate it by following very controversial accounts and business accounts and scrolling a lot until you find an ad and a controversial statement beside each other, as the logs show they did.

It doesn't represent an actual experience though, it's deliberate and misleading since that curation was left out of the report.

Re: X Has Become a 'Global Sewer,' Mayor of Paris Says

#78

Post by ecommerceguy »

davidw wrote: post #50
josteink wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case it was specifically intentionally misleading (something they have logs to prove), and weaponized against the business of X itself. Clearly different from some random internet person saying something controversial or unpopular.

People have replicated the results. Which isn't surprising, given how much trash content that place has these days. Also: does anyone think those big accounts just up and left after one shoestring organization published something? They most likely replicated the results themselves.

Is there a link or study for the replicated results? I'd like to see it.

Re: X Has Become a 'Global Sewer,' Mayor of Paris Says

#79

Post by valar_m »

josteink wrote: post #32
rpmisms wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's compatible with freedom of speech. He's not censoring it, but he can show damages from misleading speech.

In this case it was specifically intentionally misleading (something they have logs to prove), and weaponized against the business of X itself. Clearly different from some random internet person saying something controversial or unpopular.

You're making a lot of claims ITT about the Media Matters case. Do you have sources for those claims? I haven't noticed you posting any sources to back up any of your claims. If you're going to make a factual assertion, it helps to offer a source for others to verify that you aren't just making it up or parroting something that you didn't verify.

Re: X Has Become a 'Global Sewer,' Mayor of Paris Says

#80

Post by nomilk »

johnyzee wrote: post #51

The free speech thing is a red herring. Musk said 'freedom of speech' but not necessarily 'freedom of reach', which seems reasonable. This is not the problem. The problem is that the algorithms simply don't work. The sewer analogy is good - shit seems to float to the top, rather than the other way around. Places like HN and even reddit nailed this a long time ago, but any given X feed just looks like an append-only l…

> The sewer analogy is good - shit seems to float to the top, rather than the other way around

There are two distinct twitter feeds: 'for you' feed and 'following' feed. The former's like a sewer, but there's no excuse for the 'following' feed being anything but pristine (since it's curated by the user).

Something Musk discussed when he bought twitter was how users didn't always know the difference between the two feeds since the labelling was not clear - there was a 'stars' (?) icon to switch between the two.

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