Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#171

Post by dkarl » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 3:01 PM UTC

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #91

keiferski wrote: post #12

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…

> Why does it matter if the flagging is automatic? Does that somehow make it more acceptable? Neil Postman discusses this at length in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992) : > Naturally, bureaucrats can be expected to embrace a technology that helps to create the illusion that decisions are not under their control. Because of its seeming intelligence and impartiality, a computer has an almost mag…

AI is a new wrinkle in an old trick to distance elected officials from accountability. After the electrical blackouts last week in Texas, the weather-worthiness of power generation facilities was framed as a technical decision that engineers made, instead of a political decision to weigh costs and benefits of regulation. When the decision is framed this way, the public's attention is directed away from the elected officials who are supposed to be accountable, and for which we have created straightforward mechanisms of accountability. Public anger dissipates in a fog of uncertainty of how these unknown, anonymous engineers could be held accountable and what kind of accountability they should actually have. AI plays exactly the same role.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#172

Post by rzzzt » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 3:02 PM UTC

thedanbob wrote: post #23

keiferski wrote: post #12

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…

Or Gordon Dickson: https://www.atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=133

"Do not fold, spindle or mutilate" was written on IBM punch cards.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#173

Post by lotsofpulp » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 3:03 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #105

sjwalter wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not left/right any more, it's "people who want to control others" vs. "people who want to be left the fuck alone".

So, abortions for anyone who wants one, right? Birth control for anyone who needs it? Trans people allowed to participate in sports? Stop pretending the right has no interest in controlling people's lives.

I can’t imagine the reasoning one must go through to want another person to suffer as much as possible at the end of their life.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#174

Post by hntrader » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 3:07 PM UTC

4ggr0 wrote: post #86

ceejayoz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why would anyone get banned for being pro euthanasia? Because it's explicitly against the rules. "You may not promote or encourage suicide or self-harm." https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/glorifying-se...

Euthanasia is an official, assisted(!) suicide. We could technically label it as a plain suicide, but that's not what it is. It's an official procedure, assisted by doctors, and not allowed spontaneously for everyone. That would be like saying a limb amputation is illegal to talk about on Twitter, because amputating a limb equals to self-harm.

I agree with everything you've said, but the policy for this needs to be thought out very carefully.

Because of suicide contagion, it's not exactly analogous to discussion of limb amputations. Even though discussion of assisted dying/euthanasia isn't the same thing as discussion of specific suicides (as per suicide contagion), the policy still needs to be well considered.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#175

Post by f154hfds » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 3:10 PM UTC

franciscop wrote: post #120

jkingsbery wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The offending tweet was arguing against all forms of suicide, assisted or otherwise. I'm trying to understand your point charitably, but it escapes me how arguing against suicide could be interpreted as arguing for suicide. I understand that there's a consequentialist argument ("it is going to happen anyway"), but that seems to accept something as inevitable which is not.

Going against legal abortion yields more illegal abortions. Going against legal alcohol yields more illegal alcohol. Going against legal X yields more illegal X. Same concept, going against legal suicide (euthanasia) yields more suicides. Sure overall the number of suicides might go down , maybe even very noticeable, but the quality of care would suffer tremendously. I'm not arguing on suicide vs suicide, but on the…

There are so many things wrong with this reasoning, it's kind of hard to know where to start:

1. Take 'Going against legal X yields more illegal X': This is a meaningless statement. For example, going against legal murder yields more illegal murder. It is a non-statement, tautological.

2. Take a revised and more debatable statement: 'Going against legal X yields more X' (much rarer, but possible, for example cocaine proliferation brought about by prohibiting less damaging drugs). This deserves careful consideration. Do our laws assume from the outset the required enforcement to enable their utility? In some ways yes, in other ways no (for example, our laws shouldn't need to take into account politically motivated lack of enforcement).

3. Even if we say that a particular law leads to _more_ of the exact averse outcome and the legislature should have known the challenges of enforcement - illegal drugs being a good example of this, or illegal immigration, it _still_ doesn't follow in all cases that the answer is to decriminalize. A debate must be had, for sure - and some change is required, but that change may be subtle, enabling better enforcement for example.

However, your above logic as it stands is essentially an argument for anarchism, though I'm not sure you intended it that way.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#176

Post by CivBase » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 3:11 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #95

keiferski wrote: post #12

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…

Why does it matter if the flagging is automatic? Does that somehow make it more acceptable? The problem is very simple. Unless social media companies either stop moderating content, which will kill their profits because advertisers will run away, or pay people to moderate everything, which will kill their profit because it'd be wildly expensive, they'll continue to do the half-assed version of moderating they do now…

> or pay people to moderate everything, which will kill their profit because it'd be wildly expensive

This gets repeated ad nauseam whenever excessive automated moderation is questioned on big platforms, but I have yet to see any actual evidence of it. I don't believe for a second that the likes of Google, Facebook, or Twitter can't afford to turn down their algorithms and significantly increase their manual moderation efforts.

Platforms like Reddit and Discord get along alright with limited automated moderation combined with a federated mod structure where most community-specific moderation is handled by unpaid volunteers. Those platforms are gigantic, but they don't make the front page of HN daily for illogical, heavy-handed moderation practices.

Besides, nobody expects all moderation to be 100% manual. A lot of content can be reliably identified and moderated by an automated system. Automated systems can even still help with things which they cannot be certain about. Instead of removing the content and taking punitive action against the user, an automated system can just bring the questionable content to the immediate attention of an organization of humans.

Not to mention we're talking about some of the wealthiest companies in the world here. Do we have any idea how much they currently spend on manual moderation? Professional content moderation isn't exactly a highly compensated position. I suspect they could increase their moderation workforce by a couple orders of magnitude without the slightest concern about breaking the bank.

The big social media platforms complain that significant manual moderation impossibly expensive, but they'll say just about anything to save a dime. That's the real reason they rely so heavily on automated systems - to save as much money as possible. As long as it doesn't cut into their revenue, they'll keep doing it. And if people buy their crap about it being impossible, that suits them just fine.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#177

Post by lvass » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 3:11 PM UTC

koonsolo wrote: post #123

keiferski wrote: post #12

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…

Alright, let's say you get appointed at Twitter to clean up this mess. You get full authority to do whatever needs to be done. How would you solve this? Your solution will be criticized by the other HN-ers here :D.

Migrate to a federated network, put up a large barrier for the ability to post and have employees moderate it. Facilitate administrators creating their own user moderated nodes and force users to opt into someone else's node if they want to read or post in them.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#178

Post by onion2k » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 3:11 PM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #142

onion2k wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it matter if the flagging is automatic? Does that somehow make it more acceptable? The problem is very simple. Unless social media companies either stop moderating content, which will kill their profits because advertisers will run away, or pay people to moderate everything, which will kill their profit because it'd be wildly expensive, they'll continue to do the half-assed version of moderating they do now…

>> stop moderating content, which will kill their profits because advertisers will run away, One common trend for decades has been that "conservative" advertisers quickly acquiesce once they see that their customers do not share such values. Once upon a time major brands wouldn't go anywhere near sexualized content. Now coke/pepsi/ford will pay millions to get their into a Miley Cyrus video. Once upon a time major br…

* Advertisers today don't want to be associated with unmoderated websites. That too will change as such websites become a norm.*

Or, to put that another way, stopping moderation would lead to a few quarters of negative growth, which would cause shareholders to riot, try to sack the board, etc, and that is exactly why it'll never happen.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#179

Post by _qulr » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 3:17 PM UTC

koonsolo wrote: post #170

_qulr wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, break up all the tech giants, and prevent monopolistic platforms from ever arising. A platform so gigantic that it's impossible for humans to intelligently manage it should simply not exist.

You do realize the network effect right? You mean that a bunch of your friends is on one platform, and a bunch of others on another platform, and your family on still another one. But then you have to be on all platforms, so this means everyone else also needs to be on all platforms. So how exactly do you see this working when reality pushes everyone to use a single platform? because you know, it's a social network.

1) My family is on Facebook. I am not. ;-) It's already the case that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for example have different "crowds", though there's some overlap.

2) Somehow humanity survived without these networks pre-2007ish.

3) I have no problem with the existence of many smaller special-interest social networks. Those are manageable, and we had them before the rise of the BigCos. The problem is with the existence of a few all-encompassing, world-consuming, general-purpose social networks. They have proven to be completely unmanageable and toxic.

"Abolish Gmail", for instance, doesn't mean abolish email providers. Not at all. And it doesn't mean that "the next gmail" will replace it. Healthy competition is good, unhealthy monopolies are bad.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#180

Post by 4ggr0 » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 3:24 PM UTC

jtbayly wrote: post #149

4ggr0 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Euthanasia is an official, assisted(!) suicide. We could technically label it as a plain suicide, but that's not what it is. It's an official procedure, assisted by doctors, and not allowed spontaneously for everyone. That would be like saying a limb amputation is illegal to talk about on Twitter, because amputating a limb equals to self-harm.

Euthanasia is killing somebody out of "mercy." It does not require the agreement or desire of the person being killed. It is definitely a step beyond physician-assisted suicide, and the two should not be confused or used interchangeably, though both are morally repugnant.

Either your country is handling assisted suicides in a terrible way, or you don't really know what you're talking about, as rude as that makes me sound.

Especially "It does not require the agreement or desire of the person being killed" is absolutely, 100% false.