481–490 of 580 posts
Twitter lied about their activities, and they targeted conservatives and the political right. Those are facts. Inexcusable.
Elon is pro-regulation in a non-deceitful manner. He's solving the problem.
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The mediums which have the most reach have the most reach explicitly because they have less spam porn hate and crazy. If twitter gets more "democratic" more crazy, more hateful, less desirable and less popular shall we suggest the next big platform welcome an equal number of undesirables?
The problem is that for a lot of people “hate and crazy” is a euphemism for “political ideas I disagree with”. This isn’t new or original. Anyone can classify their political opponents as crazy, dumb, misguided, “hateful” is the new one, ignorant, *ist. I think a healthier framing is, people who disagree with me politically have their reasons for doing so and the best for everyone is if we have a dialog.
In the early 00s forums dealt with “trolls” as we labeled them. Moderation was used to keep things on topic and deal with people who did not add to the community, made threats and really made being a moderator annoying. Total free speech gives you 4chan or kiwi farms. There needs to be a balance of content moderation to keep off literal hate speech and threats to prevent that. Twitter would not be a billion+ dollar c…
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It is there in the thread > 3. Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending.
> who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Using science or using propaganda? The issue, as I'm trying to make as abundantly clear as possible, is that we still don't know what the offending tweet says. Therefore we cannot actually conclude if the down weighting was appropriate or not. If he said "I have a paper which shows that under lockdown children are performing worse on tests" then I'd be upset. But…
I just checked the Twitter Rules [1], they don't forbid "propaganda".
And I just checked the definition of "propaganda" [2], seems like it includes many things that nobody alleges is against the Rules (for example, any political ad is "propaganda").
[1] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules
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This outrage is hilarious coz HN shadowbans people too. Which increases site quality which is why all the complainers are on here.
Transparently removing content is the normal way to moderate a forum. This research [1] suggests it reduces mod workload because users learn the rules. Discourse doesn't secretly remove content and is popular. It isn't accurate to say secrecy increases site quality. No such qualitative study has been done. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/duwdco/should_mode...
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IRC generally has no barriers to account registration while Twitter generally requires a phone number. In the former bans are meaningless, in the latter they pose in an insurmountable hurdle to all but organized and funded campaigns. The real problem with shadowbans is "us" - humans. Shadowbans are a great tool for helping to minimize the impact of things like literal spammers and scammers, but it's also a tool that'…
> IRC generally has no barriers to account registration while Twitter generally requires a phone number. in the latter they pose in an insurmountable hurdle to all but organized and funded campaigns. Since when is getting a new phone number that receive SMS an insurmountable expensive? There are literally dozens, perhaps hundreds of services selling this. Example [1] https://www.textmagic.com/sms-pricing/ seems to co…
You are correct that burning a SIM card is not that expensive.
However, your example of a text capable VOIP number is not a good one. FAANGs require a real mobile number and these texting services (twilio, for instance) will not work.
All of this to say:
It’s a bit more expensive than you think. If you really care about succeeding, you’re going to need to burn a SIM card.
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I don't like the term misinformation. I don't think Twitter should have restricted his tweets. However, it's important to remember Bhattacharya was wrong. In the op-ed posted above he guessed that the predicted death toll of 2-4 million people was off by multiple orders of magnitude. He said that dramatic interventions like lockdowns would be justified to prevent that kind of death toll, but that COVID was nowhere ne…
He was responding to an estimate that placed the death toll at 3.4%. The highest estimates now seem to be at around .28%. That's more than an order of magnitude. He wasn't all that wrong. Also, he advised focusing efforts on the most vulnerable; the elderly and people with comorbidities. He was very right there too. All those vaccines into kids and lockdowns of schools after the elderly were triple-vaccinated was a s…
But the reality is that the medical establishment has an immune system honed by decades of vaccine denialism (remember "vaccines cause autism because mercury") and tends to overreact when people- acting in good faith- question its findings publicly.
Incredible, how openly twitter gas-lights users when it comes to policy enforcement.
Not to mention the commenters here as well: "There's no evidence people and tweets are being suppressed" "This is old news, nothing new here." Is there a mailing list where these things are coordinated? I remember there was JournoList in the late 2000s, so is there a new one for internet commenters of a certain political persuasion? How do they get the talking points memo?