951–960 of 1001 posts
Leaving Facebook, Instagram and Twitter a few years ago (and never joining TikTok) has been the number one top decision for my mental health. I wish everyone and society as a whole to make the same decision.
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As the root comment noted, one of the great things about community notes on X are that the algorithm and the data it's operating on are public. If Musk were removing notes that would be trivial to prove. The fact that such claims of tampering are never accompanied by said proof should tell you all you need to know.
How would it be trivial? Can you describe in a more specific way? The data I can find says it was last updated 9:02 PM Jan. 5, 2025 (presumably America/Chicago from my browser). That’s a >2 day window as of writing this comment. Not throwing any accusation, just trying to understand the technicals. If there was any manipulation of community notes in the last 2 days, how would we know? If there’s manipulation of this…
You can't know until the data is published. 2 days isn't that long though. Just wait a couple more days for the next data dump, then run the algorithm and compare the results to what the X UI was showing at that time.
> If there’s manipulation of this data before it is published, such as ratings or notes never hitting these data files, how would we know?
That would be a bit more sneaky than just outright removing notes. As you noted, you'd need a user whose ratings or notes were omitted from the dump to notice and come forward. Or perhaps with careful analysis you could prove that the manipulated data could not have resulted in the allegedly removed note being shown and then later not shown, indicating something fishy happened.
Theoretically if X wanted to improve on this system, they could go even further and implement something like certificate transparency (append-only log verified by a publicly distributed merkle tree), or create an independent third party organization that users interact with to submit and rate notes, rather than that happening through X's UI. Given the threat model though, I feel like the UX and complexity trade-offs of that wouldn't be worth it. Open sourcing the data and algorithm as X has is already far more transparency than we get from any competing social media company.
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The ideological bits are: * Dana White added to the board. * "Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content." - like people being in Texas makes them more objective?! The actual mechanisms of running a social media network at scale are tricky and I think most of us would…
I can’t help but roll my eyes at mindless euphemisms like “attacking trans people.” There are very serious issues involving trans people with no easy answers. Like allowing minors access to irreversible treatments. Like women’s sports. Like the safety of women only spaces. I bring this up because on so many questions like these, the progressive reaction is to shut down any discussion and isolate themselves from expos…
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Community notes launched at the start of 2021. It predates the buyout by almost two years. If what they said about their design is to be believed, political downvoting shouldn't heavily impact them. I wish it was easier to see pending notes on a post though.
I agree, you should be able to see pending notes even if you're not a CN moderator.
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The ideological bits are: * Dana White added to the board. * "Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content." - like people being in Texas makes them more objective?! The actual mechanisms of running a social media network at scale are tricky and I think most of us would…
Blue Sky is what mastodon was when musk bought Twitter now X. Also currently in the App Store (iPhone) bluesky sits at 167 .. Musk's X at 46 and Facebook at 19.
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The twitter files that showed that accounts of conservatives got special treatment that explicitly prevented them from facing consequences of breaking site rules?
I have no idea how you cane to the conclusion that they showed any such thing. Even Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files ) takes the stance that the points raised were generally showing bias against conservatives, and tries to downplay them.
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I tend to blame the people actually doing the genocide for genocide, rather than a social media network. Ultimately I think one can clearly draw the line for personal responsibility well before literal murder. Tens of thousands of have been raped, entire towns have been destroyed, around 50k killed and 700k forced to flee. If Western countries actually cared about the human cost of this genocide, it would be almost a…
Eh, I don't think that lens is useful. It appears to me that the genocide very likely may not have occurred -- and certainly would have harmed fewer people -- if Facebook didn't exist. It is not simply a matter of it happening elsewhere on the internet -- Myanmar is one of the countries that Facebook provided its Free Basics package to. Of course, I think the bulk of the blame lays on those actively perpetrating the…
I think blaming the medium for communication is a bit silly. That is just the substrate. The responsibility solely lies with the murderers.
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The ideological bits are: * Dana White added to the board. * "Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content." - like people being in Texas makes them more objective?! The actual mechanisms of running a social media network at scale are tricky and I think most of us would…
I get how the partisan story is easy to tell here, but I'm saying something pretty specific: I think it would have been product development malpractice for this decision not to have been in the works for many, many months, long before the GOP takeover of the federal government was a safe bet. Community Notes has been that successful, and Facebook's fact-checkers have been that much of a product disaster. I've never s…
Probably because fact checkers are able to make content become unshareable so you not seeing them is the point? But "fact checking" NGOs have a long history of embarrassingly stupid, biased and self-serving decisions.
To pick just one example, in 2020 an op-ed in the New York Post arguing that COVID might have come from the coronavirus research lab in Wuhan was banned from Facebook and Twitter because of being labelled by an anonymous fact checker. Who was this fact checker? Turns out one of them was Danielle E. Anderson, an assistant professor at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, who had literally conducted experiments at the Wuhan lab and collaborated with its scientists.
You can't possibly get more biased than that, but because she was an academic the sort of people who chose the fact checkers assumed she would be automatically correct. And worse, that anyone who disagreed with her - even mildly - should therefore be banned from the internet.
That is the common pattern in every incident that make people mad at "fact checkers" and the reason they have no credibility is that these events happen all the time, are always in favour of left wing beliefs, and they never attempt to learn from these events strongly implying they're deliberate. Indeed the assumption that government funded people are always correct is basically hard-wired into the fact checker ecosystem. They don't attempt to actually work out what's true themselves, so they can't be fixed.
This is the kind of thing that Zuck is referring to when he says they're discredited. Wrong fact checks are commonplace, you just won't notice them if you rely on news feeds they control.
Leaving Facebook, Instagram and Twitter a few years ago (and never joining TikTok) has been the number one top decision for my mental health. I wish everyone and society as a whole to make the same decision.
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I really like Community Notes, and hate the rest of what Twitter has become. But... Community Notes is subject to "tampering." Elon's either removes the CNs himself from his posts, or his brigade downvote them to infinity so they don't appear on all the misinfo he posts.
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