41–50 of 200 posts
Man, the democrats are really trying to hand republicans every election for the next decade.
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The rioters came fairly close to getting to the senators. Suppose the mob found Nancy Pelosi? I think it is probable she would have been killed. That doesn’t mean they control the us government. But it’s non trivial.
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The rioters came fairly close to getting to the senators. Suppose the mob found Nancy Pelosi? I think it is probable she would have been killed. That doesn’t mean they control the us government. But it’s non trivial.
What leads you to call that probable?
I don't think it's impossible, after all it's only been a few years since that Bernie supporter shot at all those Republican congressmen, and Scalise almost did die. But that guy was actually armed and went with that purpose, these goofs appear to have been unarmed protesters who turned into a mob.
I know you don't need a gun to kill someone, I just find your assessment that it was probable she would be killed a stretch.
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"Nearly Died" yes, because the leadership guiding the riot wasn't particularly competent. If they had control of more institutions, it would likely have been more successful. When saying "any other show of power other than that they managed to break through a few weakly-secured doors" you downplay the fact they the rioters interrupted a session of Congress and succeeded in their purpose of delaying the certification…
Wow... so you're saying our democracy could be overthrown if you, A) disrupt Congress and B) cause a day's worth of delays. Amazing stability of our government that.
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Yes -- I almost stopped early in the article at "the deadly attack". It was a disgusting action taken by the mob, but the nation heals more if the press acts _honestly_. Media bias (especially on that story) only divides and embitters people.
Yes... some people died, but it wasn't what the media made it to be. Two protesters died of heart attacks, one died of an overdose, and one died of being shot by a cop. One died of a stroke and was widely misreported of being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher when that didn't actually happen, and four cops later committed suicide. This is all according to FactCheck.org. Was it great? Absolutely not - but it wa…
This kind of pressure on companies to censor seems like an end around on the first amendment. It technically is not the government censoring or mandating censorship, but it uses the threat of government power and the power to irritate and harass for companies that don't toe the line. Unfortunately, I can only see this getting worse. For example, if the Republicans come to power in 2022, I can see them having a commit…
Absolutely. These tech companies know they face the threat of regulation, whether on anti trust grounds or labor issues or whatever. When Twitter banned Trump, they wrote a blog post (https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...) that offered no good reason and pointed at things like his refusal to attend Biden’s inauguration. AOC also demanded that tech companies censor Parler (https://imgur.com/jJo0lEx), and Apple/Google/Amazon all complied. The timing of this sudden and willing compliance from all these companies who historically would resist, was not coincidental. It happened because there was a coming change of administrations, and this compliance bought them favor.
Glenn Greenwald has written many great articles on this topic, but here’s a particularly relevant one: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-sho...
Disclaimer: am googler, my opinions are my own. I have no non-public knowledge on this topic. It's not clear to me what the House committee is asking for. From what I read in their letters it's basically, "We think you have more than you've given us, so give it to us". That's not how this works. If you want to subpoena information, you need to be specific and targeted. If you don't get what you think you want, call p…
There is no way the full scope, procedures, code, algos, and more are public for all moderation methods and channels.
I suspect people are hoping trade secret law will protect, but I think the House wants to see regardless!
To be frank, no matter what side of the political spectrum, we're in very, very deep trouble here.
Our very democracies are at risk, and the manipulation by media, and enemies of our democracies will only get worse and worse.
Hell, even manipulation by members of our democracies, from special interest groups, political parties, to even just nutbars, what we've seen so far, has shown us that people will buy into anything, if it's all they hear.
Our civilization, our world, will live or die by how we all get a handle on misinformation.
And while I embrace democracy, and capitalism, I couldn't care one bit of the required fix tanks Google, Facebook, Twitter and more.
Quite literally, everything is at stake here.
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Sounds like you haven’t seen much evidence then. https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/13/politics/oath-keepers-seditio...
To me, from what I can tell, this means that there was a bunch of people protesting there, as was their legal right. A very small group had plans to break in, and unexpectedly succeeded in doing so. Everyone else then followed even though this hadn't been pre-planned.
So, from Facebook's perspective, you would have to censor at the level of squashing ants to have prevented this. Again, this is just from what I can see though and could be proven wrong.
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YouTube shows you more of what you look for. If it stops doing that, people will use a 3rd-party search tool that lawmakers will be unable to censor (e.g. Reddit, Digg, 9gag, 4chan). It's a scapegoat. If you want people to stop looking up content about distrusting the government, the solution is a more transparent government, not to stop them from watching the content.
It doesn't just do that, it pushes you more and more into specific niches. It doesn't have to do that either, but Youtube has designed it to do it, to put users into the famous Youtube Rabbit Hole. This rabbit hole encourages extremism in some people, and that can be harmful to society. Why the defeatist attitude, that huge companies have to encourage extremism or people will stop using their products? That's non-sen…
The other thing is that we really don't have shared definition or word-feel for "extremism". The people who are the most vocal about curbing extremist content also happen to be wildly partisan. I don't think that is a coincidence. I sense the false-positive rate is extremely high in this regard.