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Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims

bbc.com

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Re: Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims

#371

Post by Robotbeat »

CivBase wrote: post #200
sangnoir wrote: post #185

Why is everyone ignoring @jack's official explanation for why Twitter blocked the specific link from being shared? This is the one falsifiable action Twitter clearly took. Twitters official policy is to not allow publication of hacked material or information with Personally Identifying Information - and this material was hacked and had unredacted personal email addresses. I haven't seen any reasonable arguments again…

How does this constitute hacking? The repair shop almost certainly retains ownership of unclaimed deviced after some period of time. The shop owns the laptop. The data is theirs to do with as they please and they chose to publish it (at least, that's the story). No hacking necessary.

That isn’t a credible argument. Why would Hunter Biden, whose dad is running for President, leave his laptop at a Trump-supporting discount computer repair shop without paying with (supposedly) incriminating emails on it? It’s so convoluted... it only makes sense if you wanted to fabricate cover for illegally hacking someone’s data (or more likely, modified and/or falsified data) and releasing it. As it is, the computer repair shop doesn’t own copyright of the PII and has no right to release it.

Re: Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims

#372

Post by donmcronald »

nemothekid wrote: post #262
prudhvis wrote: post #223

I have no idea what happened during the early 2010s. I grew up during the late 90s (born in late 80s) learning about the internet and its philosophies. Allowing Free speech still is the hill I'd like to die on. But the new generation of people, even here on HN and the internet hacker personalities I used to align with have turned so pro-censorship that I don't believe I'm in a proper reality/timeline anymore.

I was born in the early 90s, and likely grew up on the same internet you did in the late 90s/2000s. In that time, I remember fondly, of participating and even moderating many, many, phpBB, vBulletin and Invision forums, and this idea that, in the past, you could post anything you wanted and people would just "put up with it" has never been true to me at least. Even 4chan never had the "free from consequences" free sp…

Yeah. There was a significantly higher ratio of moderators to users back then and the way I remember it is that toxic people were banned and no one batted an eye.

Now it seems like half the internet is comprised of toxic people.

The “communities” are also huge and generic rather than smaller and topical. Back in the 90s/2000s moderators were usually enthusiasts with domain knowledge and insisting people stay on topic was a pretty solid moderation tool since the moderators’ on topic opinions usually had more value than some random troll.

Re: Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims

#373

Post by encom »

notadev wrote: post #339
snowwrestler wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 100% inline with free speech to let a given website decide what they want to publish. Even if it is a very popular website. If they make bad decisions, then people can go to competitors; it's as easy as typing in a different URL. That's how the Internet--and open societies in general--are supposed to work. What it looks like to me--someone who has been on the Internet since before the turn of the century--is tha…

Where does one go when Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube seem to take these steps in tandem? The joke of "go make your own social network" has been tried with places like Parler and Gab, but they get banned from app stores, ironically blocked from technically, but not ideologically, decentralized services like Mastodon, or even dropped from web hosts. The open Internet is dead.

CUT TO: Stallman standing on a rooftop, brooding. His hands at his hips. His cape flutters in the chilly evening wind.

"In your darkest hour, when the demons come, call on me brother, and we will fight them together!"

Re: Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims

#374

Post by tootie »

hintymad wrote: post #345
swalsh wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When guns were flint locks, the amount of damage one person could do was pretty limited. When machine guns became generally available (and i'm aware $200 is not "generally available" in 1920). That changed. These weapons were introduced to "force multiply" an individual. Before the internet, the amount of damange a single guy with free speech could do was pretty limited. But with the internet, we're all force-multipl…

Never owned gun, and never thought of owning one, until this year, precisely when politicians told us, on TV, that calling 911 is a privilege, and when politicians condoned publicly looting and robbery and violence and abolishing police. I never felt so much need to own many guns and train for tactical shooting to defend my family when needed.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm

Wear your mask, wear your seatbelt, get exercise and don't do drugs.

Re: Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims

#375

Post by tomp »

lanstin wrote: post #88
tomp wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haskell loses because it takes 2000 lines just to write a logging statement. Scala loses because you can’t even write a fast for loop. Lisp loses because it disrespects 100 years of math. I’m exaggerating a bit but not by much.

I don’t get the lisp thing? I thought lisp lost because of lisp weenies and worse (simple) is better as far as writing maintainable code bases?

Instead of writing 1 + 2 as in mathematics, in Lisp you write (+ 1 2). I'm not sure I get the second statement of yours, but personally I find Clojure in particular very inspiring and amazing, if only it had a better syntax...

Re: Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims

#376

Post by abootstrapper »

prudhvis wrote: post #223

I have no idea what happened during the early 2010s. I grew up during the late 90s (born in late 80s) learning about the internet and its philosophies. Allowing Free speech still is the hill I'd like to die on. But the new generation of people, even here on HN and the internet hacker personalities I used to align with have turned so pro-censorship that I don't believe I'm in a proper reality/timeline anymore.

Is it “free speech” to deliberately create a misleading story/propaganda for your advantage, then spend money on fake accounts to astroturf your propaganda and give it fake credibility on third party corporate services? — That sounds beyond the intent of “free speech” to me.

BTW, I use to run “blue ribbon campaign” banners on my 90s era webpages. So I understand where you’re coming from.

Re: Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims

#377

Post by tomjen3 »

Cookingboy wrote: post #254
prudhvis wrote: post #223

I have no idea what happened during the early 2010s. I grew up during the late 90s (born in late 80s) learning about the internet and its philosophies. Allowing Free speech still is the hill I'd like to die on. But the new generation of people, even here on HN and the internet hacker personalities I used to align with have turned so pro-censorship that I don't believe I'm in a proper reality/timeline anymore.

> Allowing Free speech still is the hill I'd like to die on At this rate it will be the hill that the civilization dies on. The whole "absolute free speech is a sacrosanct human rights for everyone" is an ideal that simply would not scale with the 21st century civilization. Most users around here grew up firmly believing that value, and it is further reinforced by American/Western exceptionalism, so I can see how thi…

It should be the hill that civilization dies on, because without free speech there is no civilization. Without free speech corruption will grow and societies will decay because there is nothing to stop the rot before it spreads.

Re: Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims

#378

Post by twirlock »

Gerardo1 wrote: post #227
centimeter wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter adopted this policy because they know that progressives are more likely to be compromised by leaked information

...are you suggesting that progressives have more "dirty laundry" than conservatives in general? Or that conservatives are more likely to dox people?

Leftists argue from a position of moral infallibility (and are typically completely blind to how this is their defining characteristic).

Re: Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims

#379

Post by crazygringo »

> However, it is highly unusual for an article published by one of the mainstream popular newspapers to be treated in this way.

That's a bit of a stretch. The NY Post is a tabloid [1]. Tabloids are technically newspapers, but they aim primarily to sensationalize [2].

Tabloids are nothing like the NY Times or Washington Post, which attempt to present objective, unbiased news. (Now you may argue that they fail at that -- but they do profess at least to aim for it, while tabloids don't even try in the first place.)

So seeing a tabloid article flagged doesn't seem all that different from a blog post being flagged. Seeing the NYT or WaPo flagged, on the other hand, would be highly unusual.

(I'm neither defending not criticizing FB/Twitter here, but just pointing out that the NY Post shouldn't be held up as even remotely a trustworthy source of reporting.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Post

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabloid_journalism

Re: Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims

#380

Post by beervirus »

wesleywt wrote: post #3
uncoder0 wrote: post #2

To add to this Trump's official campaign Twitter had it's account locked this morning and a video Trump uploaded was promptly deleted. This is new information from today. The thread yesterday was about the initial wave of censorship. I posted about the new actions this morning but it got flagged as a dupe of yesterday's discussion. It was not a duplicate, Twitter has taken new action and decided to go further this mo…

Do you think its correct to delibrately spread a false story about Hunter Biden? Is this type removing false information censorship?

>false

Citation very much needed.

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