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Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

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Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#361

Post by NE2z2T9qi »

nobody9999 wrote: post #308
NE2z2T9qi wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you not get that this is the exact point? “Experts” in the US government and the “intelligence agencies” declared forcefully that it was true. You—-not an “expert” and not a member of “authoritative” US intelligence agency—-claiming that it was just “propagandistic patriotic fervor” would be “misinformation” stated “without evidence”. Stopping people from questioning the narrative is fundamentally against free…

>Stopping people from questioning the narrative is fundamentally against free speech and having a small group of people presume to be the final arbiters of truth with the power to suppress contrary speech is dystopian to the max. I am so sick to death of hearing this "argument." Because it's irrelevant to the situation. And I'll tell you why: In the United States, 1. Private entities are not bound by the First Amendm…

I agree that private entities can largely can do whatever they feel like. But there is something deeply obnoxious and unprincipled when these entities piss on your leg and tell you it’s raining. They’re actively suppressing non-establishment viewpoints while pretending to be a non-editorial, neutral platform. And, perhaps most insidiously, because of their secret suppression of ideas and voices, they make it seem as if certain mainstream viewpoints are actually unacceptable fringe ideas. Suppose I ran a forum used to discuss crimes in my city, but secretly hid anyone’s post unless the crime they were discussing had an Asian or Arab person as a suspect? And then, suppose I also secretly deleted any comments from people complaining about the secret editing. That’s not the style of forum people should be defending. It’s legally permissible but all types of dystopian.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#362

Post by nobody9999 »

NE2z2T9qi wrote: post #361
nobody9999 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Stopping people from questioning the narrative is fundamentally against free speech and having a small group of people presume to be the final arbiters of truth with the power to suppress contrary speech is dystopian to the max. I am so sick to death of hearing this "argument." Because it's irrelevant to the situation. And I'll tell you why: In the United States, 1. Private entities are not bound by the First Amendm…

I agree that private entities can largely can do whatever they feel like. But there is something deeply obnoxious and unprincipled when these entities piss on your leg and tell you it’s raining. They’re actively suppressing non-establishment viewpoints while pretending to be a non-editorial, neutral platform. And, perhaps most insidiously, because of their secret suppression of ideas and voices, they make it seem as…

>I agree that private entities can largely can do whatever they feel like. But there is something deeply obnoxious and unprincipled when these entities piss on your leg and tell you it’s raining.

You won't get any argument about that from me.

>That’s not the style of forum people should be defending. It’s legally permissible but all types of dystopian.

I'm not defending any such forums. In fact, I avoid them like the plague.

But I do support freedom of expression.

And whether you (or I, for that matter) dislike Twitter or Facebook, or even Stormfront or the ACLU, while we are perfectly free to express our dislike, expose dishonesty or bias, recommend/create other forums and encourage others to do the same, we aren't allowed to block the speech of others.

What would you suggest as a viable alternative to the status quo?

I think Justice Brandeis[0] said it much more succinctly than I did: "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitney_v._California#Quotes

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#363

Post by russellbeattie »

shadowgovt wrote: post #359
mynameishere wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rural people are happy to have iPhones, as long as they don't need to understand the science behind the technology, Said the guy who probably doesn't even know how to thresh his own soybeans.

I, for one, wouldn't mind knowing that. Agriculture is an absolutely fascinating topic.

Well. If you have a handbook and an afternoon free, I'm sure you could figure it out.

Just like designing an algorithm for efficient mobile phone battery utilization while handing off wireless connections in a moving car.

They're totally equivalent. Really!

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#364

Post by grishka »

crazygringo wrote: post #357
grishka wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's worked at a big social media company — no, that's not at all what consumers want. They want chronological feeds with zero garbage mixed in. It's okay to have a separate recommendations feed, some (not all!) people want to discover new things, but it's totally not okay to meddle with the main one, and it's nothing but mockery to give users no control over it. People also want their preferences respect…

Well I guess it depends on making a distinction between what consumers think they want, versus what they actually do. Yes, people say they don't want recommendations, because 95% of them are irrelevant. But then the 5% (or 2% or 0.5%) turn out to be super -relevant, and they find new people to follow that they love, and learn about things they love, and the experience in the end turns out to be a net positive. Their…

I'm not denying the undeniable fact that some people sometimes want to discover new things. I'm just saying that it's absolutely possible to have it done in a respectful manner. No one, ever, under any circumstances, likes or wants to be manipulated, be it overtly or by having their subconscious played with — period. Adding non-configurable extra anything into people's newsfeeds, be it recommended posts, ads, or "people you may know" blocks, is a crime against user-frendliness. Those who do want to discover new things, will simply open the "discover"/"explore" tab that contains a dedicated recommended content feed on their own. There is no need to nudge anyone to anything.

People aren't stupid if you don't build your UI/UX around the assumption that they are. They also like transparent, understandable algorithms. Chronological feed of (only) the people one follows is as transparent as it gets. A chronological feed with some recommendations mixed in is more opaque and confusing. An algorithmic feed is an epitome of opaqueness. Opaqueness naturally drives users away because it doesn't exactly instill confidence that their posts will reach their followers.

Another example: do you understand what the "see less often" button in Twitter does? No one does. No one likes cryptic algorithmic bullshit forced on them with no way to disable it.

Choice is very important.

> versus what they actually do.

Do manipulations work? Of course they do. Are people happy when they are manipulated? Of course they are not.

> Recommendations aren't advertisements, sites don't make money off them

They absolutely do. Recommendations aren't there because Twitter wants to be helpful — they'd be more user-respecting as I said above if that was the case. They're there because they drive engagement metrics up, and those in turn translate into someone's KPI.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#365

Post by core-questions »

nobody9999 wrote: post #319
core-questions wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good take. Skepticism is one of the most important aspects of thinking critically, and building a library of skeptical techniques so as to be able to sniff out things that aren't true is crucial to being able to navigate through a sea of information. It's sort of like the Godel incompleteness theorem of social networking: you can either be incomplete or inconsistent; any system which tries to be perfectly c…

>This in turn will result in a user exodus. You say that like it's a bad thing.

Sorry, let me be clear, it's absolutely a good thing, and I exodized (if that's a word) quite some time ago. It doesn't seem to be happening fast enough, which I will attribute to a lack of a clear, decentralized but dead simple alternative.

Look at how quickly something like BitTorrent was adopted back in the day.... it's an esoteric and difficult to understand thing under the surface, until clients and sites came along that made it super simple.

Maybe Urbit will evolve into this, maybe Mastodon, we'll see.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#366

Post by cutemonster »

shadowgovt wrote: post #210
RIMR wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers also want cocaine, but that doesn't mean you get to sell it to them with impunity.

We cross a threshold if we treat information like cocaine. A threshold that calls the First Amendment in the US into question.

Is lying and deceiving people fine, according to the 1st amendment?

For example foreign states that pays armies of internet trolls to in effect choose president in the US -- is that what the 1st amendment wants to happen

I think "information" can kill more people than cocaine, is more dangerous

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#367

Post by colejohnson66 »

danudey wrote: post #194
ValentineC wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> >Second, we will prevent “liked by” and “followed by” recommendations from people you don’t follow from showing up in your timeline and won’t send notifications for these Tweets. I don't know if a Twitter PM will read this, but showing Likes in my feed — and not having an option to turn it off in the official mobile app client — is one big reason I stopped consuming tweets. It's a shame that the only way to opt out…

This, and other timeline muddling they've done, are the reasons I use third-party clients like Tweetbot almost exclusively (other than when clicking a link opens the official app). The thing that irritates me the most is that they also seem to track the last time you logged in via the Twitter website or official client, and show me "while you were gone" tweets that it thinks I might be interested in. Typically, they'…

I don’t understand why social media companies don’t offer a paid tier. They don’t have to charge everyone as they’d lose the vast majority of users, but for those who want to pay, why prevent them? They’d be making more money than they do from ads.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#368

Post by shadowgovt »

cutemonster wrote: post #366
shadowgovt wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We cross a threshold if we treat information like cocaine. A threshold that calls the First Amendment in the US into question.

Is lying and deceiving people fine, according to the 1st amendment? For example foreign states that pays armies of internet trolls to in effect choose president in the US -- is that what the 1st amendment wants to happen I think "information" can kill more people than cocaine, is more dangerous

Don't misunderstand that I'm a First Amendment absolutist.

Indeed, I mean exactly what I said: the questions you raise call the First Amendment into question.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#369

Post by blocked_again »

majewsky wrote: post #138
blocked_again wrote: post #73

Twitter should add an option to hide tweets from users that are not verified and make it the default. And charge $5 for verification every year and verify everyone who wants to get verified.

No serious actor would blink an eye at having to pay a few bucks to get 10,000 blue-checkmarked bot accounts. After a short adjustment period, there would just be no non-verified accounts anymore and 5$/year would just be the regular price to use Twitter.

I don't know. You can ask to submit some kind of identification and ask the user to submit a video. It will massively reduce the fake accounts.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#370

Post by cutemonster »

shadowgovt wrote: post #368
cutemonster wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is lying and deceiving people fine, according to the 1st amendment? For example foreign states that pays armies of internet trolls to in effect choose president in the US -- is that what the 1st amendment wants to happen I think "information" can kill more people than cocaine, is more dangerous

Don't misunderstand that I'm a First Amendment absolutist. Indeed, I mean exactly what I said: the questions you raise call the First Amendment into question.

Hmm not sure I understand.

You're saying that maybe the 1st amendment could be edited a bit so that it was more clear that such things aren't okay?

I'm thinking people interpret "free speech" in sometimes quite different ways

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