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Manufactured consensus on x.com

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Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#21

Post by selectodude »

trollied wrote: post #18
arrowsmith wrote: post #11

Not to defend Musk but it's not like "X" was a bastion of neutrality and even-handedness before he took over (the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story being one prominent example.) Nor are the platforms Musk doesn't own yet. Does the author of this piece take a principled stand against censorship and bias? Or is he just upset that the censorship and bias isn't going in his preferred direction?

HN certainly leans one way. X has gone more central. BUT remember that what you see is driven by the people you follow, mostly. Don’t like what they say or their political persuasion? Unfollow.

If twitter is “central”, what on gods earth do you consider “right of center”?

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#22

Post by timewizard »

Genuine social interaction is not profitable.

Trying to achieve this on a for profit platform is pure folly.

These are time wasting machines and were never truly capable of being more than that particularly once their use base reached a size where monthly churn no longer impacts the bottom line of advertising revenue.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#23

Post by miltonlost »

arrowsmith wrote: post #11

Not to defend Musk but it's not like "X" was a bastion of neutrality and even-handedness before he took over (the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story being one prominent example.) Nor are the platforms Musk doesn't own yet. Does the author of this piece take a principled stand against censorship and bias? Or is he just upset that the censorship and bias isn't going in his preferred direction?

If your complaint is that the right-wing lies of the laptop story weren’t amplified, then you desire propaganda to be spread. We should, as a society, want to stop liars from lying.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#24

Post by ty6853 »

mrdoops wrote: post #20

Manufactured consensus is everywhere there is enough attention to incentivize such an effort. The worst by far is Reddit.

The most glaring example of this was how reddit did a total 180 before/after the election. Before the election questioning putting a candidate in without a primary was sacrilege. Afterwards it was a popularly supported reason for the loss. It was like watching an inflated balloon of propaganda deflate.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#25

Post by joseda-hg »

fouc wrote: post #5

Reading that I couldn't help but think there's parallels to HN. At least HN tries to be transparent about "the algorithm", and it's essentially a dumb algorithm compared to what X/FB/etc use.

I think it's fundamentally different in HN, everyone sees the same posts/comments (Barring settings / mod privileges), but in X everyone can get a slightly tailored feed

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#26

Post by MOARDONGZPLZ »

trollied wrote: post #18
arrowsmith wrote: post #11

Not to defend Musk but it's not like "X" was a bastion of neutrality and even-handedness before he took over (the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story being one prominent example.) Nor are the platforms Musk doesn't own yet. Does the author of this piece take a principled stand against censorship and bias? Or is he just upset that the censorship and bias isn't going in his preferred direction?

HN certainly leans one way. X has gone more central. BUT remember that what you see is driven by the people you follow, mostly. Don’t like what they say or their political persuasion? Unfollow.

> BUT remember that what you see is driven by the people you follow, mostly. Don’t like what they say or their political persuasion? Unfollow.

It would be nice if this were true, but I did an experiment where I created a new account on a VM with a new IP not previously connected to me and it almost immediately started serving me right wing slop regardless of who I followed. It seems obvious to me from this anecdote that it’s not as simple as following or unfollowing.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#27

Post by sorcerer-mar »

riffic wrote: post #17
sorcerer-mar wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure people calling it a public utility was always an aspirational claim and not an earnest belief that it had a governance structure that made it immune to such an attack…

poorly thought out aspirations then. Many of the communication outlets through this utility have as well their own web infrastructure, hopefully serving as a single source of truth, whether that looks like wsj.com or whitehouse.gov. Interestingly enough the W3C has a recommendation to publish activities through an interoperable manner. There's even talk of putting the Bluesky protocol through whatever process the IET…

It’s “poorly thought out” to want there to exist truly public infrastructure that’s of the rough shape of Twitter?

I personally would love not having every viable tool of propaganda owned by private interests totally free of any Constitutional obligations.

A public utility Twitter would surely be inferior in many ways, but IMO would be a useful counterbalance to have in the mix of platform options.

Your comment makes sense if the social value of Twitter was exclusively posting links from other actual sources of truth, but it’s not. That’s not even the primary source of social value in a free society (it’s the dialogue).

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#28

Post by dec0dedab0de »

arrowsmith wrote: post #11

Not to defend Musk but it's not like "X" was a bastion of neutrality and even-handedness before he took over (the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story being one prominent example.) Nor are the platforms Musk doesn't own yet. Does the author of this piece take a principled stand against censorship and bias? Or is he just upset that the censorship and bias isn't going in his preferred direction?

People don't want neutrality and even-handedness. They used to think that they did, but at some point in my lifetime they stopped lying to themselves.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#29

Post by jjeaff »

arrowsmith wrote: post #12
MaxPock wrote: post #3

X is once again full of bots selling crypto and financial services .

Hey, that's not fair! It's also full of porn bots and Holocaust denial.

Don't forget the graphic fight videos with comments full of racial undertones. I have literally never engaged with nor watched more than a few seconds of those types of videos yet my feed is full of them.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#30

Post by woooooo »

sorcerer-mar wrote: post #14
riffic wrote: post #10

It’s hilarious to look back at old threads on the orange site where people made wild claims, like calling Twitter a “public utility” without much thought. But honestly, I always saw the company as vulnerable to these issues. That’s why Masnick’s article “Protocols not Platforms” is still so spot-on. https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...

Pretty sure people calling it a public utility was always an aspirational claim and not an earnest belief that it had a governance structure that made it immune to such an attack…

Also, have the key "public utility" factors changed? Do politicians and journalists still get their news/engagement there?

Honestly asking. For me, a former "public utility" poster, it seemed like the public square for elite opinion and that was what made it a utility. I don't think anyone was saying we need public utility microblogging in general.

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