10 ms·
Wonderful, so Twitter is now a tool for corporate propaganda, Google is providing Censorship-as-a-Service API, Facebook is removing links classified as "Fake Ne
by bitL 10y ago
Wonderful, so Twitter is now a tool for corporate propaganda, Google is providing Censorship-as-a-Service API, Facebook is removing links classified as "Fake News(tm)", Reddit is deleting whatever mods don't agree with etc. Seems like we are going full steam into a dystopian society. I think I should start reading Solzhenitsyn to prepare for what is coming...
- rublev 10y agoCan you recommend something by Solzhenitsyn?
- rangibaby 10y agoGulag Archipelago
- kemoly 10y agoOne Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
- oskarth 10y agoOne Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a slightly lighter (fiction, but reality-based) version of Gulag Archipelago, also by Solzhenitsyn. Might be a good entry if the length of Gulag Archipelago scares you away.
- heliumcraft 10y agoIn the long term we can at least attempt to counteract this by contributing to decentralized platforms such as Ethereum & Maidsafe, which create transparent decentralized systems in which this sort of censorship is not possible.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- c4n4rd 10y agoTweeter and all others you mentioned are private corporations. Their goal is to turn profit to their shareholders - NOTHING MORE. He who believes these companies exist as a way for the mass population to voice their opinion and as a way to exercise democracy should rethink what these companies are all about. Note: I do not necessarily agree with that they do, just pointing out what they are all about.
- 1337biz 10y agoThat's why they need to feel the pain from consumer backslashs. Just look how ridiculous the Pepsi outrage did become.
- fullshark 10y agoAnd look at how quickly everyone forgot about it
- TeMPOraL 10y agoWhat outrage? Serious question, I wasn't even aware there was one recently.
- Nadya 10y agoLook up "Pepsi Riot Commercial". There was a brief and short-lived outrage against Pepsi for a distasteful commercial where a (generic, but people attribute it to BLM) riot was ended by giving a police officer a can of Pepsi. Or at least, that's what I gathered from reading about it on random comments from unrelated threads on Reddit because I'm out of the loop myself. E: Twitter? Meant Reddit. Unimportant change.
- fullshark 10y agoA good run down, with a live link to the commercial: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/business/kendall-jenner-pepsi-ad.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/business/kendall-jenner-p...
- sillyquiet 10y agoThe scary thing is when you realize the so-called news organizations, for the most part, have exactly the same motivations. NYT, WSJ, et al are, after all, corporations too.
- 10y ago
- Mao_Zedang 10y agoCustomers will only tolerate it for so long, think of it as an opportunity.
- ihsw2 10y agoCustomers have been clamoring for more control over Twitter's moderation functionality since the 2016 US Presidential elections and they got it. To be more clear, Twitter's customers are corporations and special interest's groups, not regular non-paying end-users.
- exelius 10y agoTwitter has always been a marketing platform for large brands. The number of meaningful tweets I see these days is just drowned out by people discussing global brands or whatever manufactured controversy is running around this week (that stupid Pepsi commercial for example). Also, the news media is lazy and doesn't research stories anymore; they just look at trending topics on Twitter (which is honestly a really, really bad barometer for any sort of public sentiment given how much of Twitter is controlled by bots). But yeah, I agree with you. Unless you're paying to get tweets removed, you're the product.
- Mao_Zedang 10y agoCant sell ads for a non existent audience, see twitters stock price for proof.
- akst 10y agoI'm skeptical, as I feel it's too normalised and the of majority people/customers are willing to live with this. On top of that "Customers" who are paying nothing to use these services (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.), are the products
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- zeteo 10y agoImagine if the local water or electric monopoly could vary your service by how much they liked your views. It's time for some antitrust regulation of the big tech companies. If you control a platform then you have an obligation to be fair to the general public.
- nommm-nommm 10y agoThe web would degrade into unusable garbage if every single platform was required to display every single person's mouth diarrhea. Do you believe every website should be shut down if they don't have a comments section on every page? Should Google be forced to abandon PageRank because it censors shitty content?
- zeteo 10y agoHow about some form of transparency at least when deleting undesirable statements? It's not like you can go and tweet to your followers somewhere else.
- meddlepal 10y agoWhy do you believe Twitter us obligated to help you reach your followers?
- nommm-nommm 10y agoSo? You also can't get your indie movie on prime time TV.
- jerf 10y agoWhen weblogs first started around 2000, one of the things I really liked about the community that briefly formed was that you had to reach out to make connections to people. I actually favored weblogs that didn't have comment sections at all for this. If some jerk decided to copy & paste your every post and troll as hard as possible in their own space, you could in fact go months without being aware of it, and even once you found out, all you had to do was... not visit it. No active action was required to avoid it. Perhaps the core problem is that the "comment box" is a fundamentally unscalable tool. Instead of putting up a piece of content and letting everybody slap whatever they want on the end of it, maybe everybody needs to be given their own space, with no comment box. Maybe people should have to active seek out "comments" without having it pushed into their face. If "someone" built a system around that idea instead, perhaps we'd get a more stable structure. (This, incidentally, harmonizes nicely with my other post that if you want to make money on this, you need to fundamentally rethink the whole situation and the entire incentive structure, not just create "X, but without ads!")
- spectistcles 10y agoCapitalism at its latest
- oska 10y agoCorporatism, not capitalism.
- spectistcles 10y agoCorporatism in this sense is really just monopolization of capitalism, which in itself is a symptom of unchecked capitalism.
- beaconstudios 10y agocorporatism is a specific legal implementation of capitalism. Capitalism is really just private property plus trade. Capitalism can exist outside of a government framework (like many black-grey markets do), but corporatism cannot.
- sctb 10y agoPlease comment civilly and substantively on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- yohanesMarganda 10y agoLet's not forget content creators getting demonetized on youtube. Although it's hardly youtube's fault.
- root_axis 10y ago> Seems like we are going full steam into a dystopian society Gonna have to roll my eyes pretty hard at this. These are privately owned servers, they can delete whatever content they want off of them, if you don't like it, you're totally free to host your own server and content.
- williamle8300 10y agoSure... It's like a restaurant spitting in your food.
- root_axis 10y agoThat's an absurd comparison. Besides being illegal, spitting in someone's food creates a health risk for the victim, in addition to being a violation of a customer agreement (wherein you pay money to have food prepared for you with reasonable expectations of cleanliness). Having your posts deleted from a private forum is about as benign as it gets.
- Nutomic 10y agoSo what alternative do you propose? 99% of users are on those platforms. Moving everyone to a different platform is almost impossible.
- root_axis 10y agoThe alternatives are the hundreds of other discussion sites on the web that you're free to use at your own discretion. Twitter isn't so important that it "needs an alternative", if you don't like it, don't use it. In the same vein, if all my comments get downvoted on HN, it doesn't mean HN "needs an alternative" anymore than I am inclined to create one and the masses are inclined to use it. If they're not, that means it isn't needed. None of that changes the fact that twitter is still free to do whatever they want with their own code and servers, and you're free to do the same with yours.
- chrononaut 10y agoIt's worth pointing out that some of the aforementioned platforms are specifically popular because of the curated content that they allow. You're on a platform now that effectively limits and controls the material. For example, it's a particular reason why some people like 4chan, while others dislike it.
- upofadown 10y agoYeah, you don't just pay for free services with your privacy, you also pay with your free expression. That is why things like privately run blogs, forums and email lists are ultimately very important...
- alphonsegaston 10y agoThis is why it's now, more than ever, necessary to build a social media platform owned and democratically controlled by its users. The reality of our contemporary social fabric is that meaningful discourse is occurring in privately controlled, authoritarian systems, where individual rights have little protection. This will not change outside creating a new network that guarantees these rights. I know Mastadon is trying to do something like this, but IMO I think it has be premised on a centralized platform with direct democratic control if it's ever to gain steam.
- AlexandrB 10y ago> Wonderful, so Twitter is now a tool for corporate propaganda, Google is providing Censorship-as-a-Service API, Facebook is removing links classified as "Fake News(tm)", Reddit is deleting whatever mods don't agree with etc. This was inevitable. All the above-mentioned services are funded - in large part - by ads. When it came to choosing between serving the users vs. the advertisers the latter would always win in the long run because they were the paying customers. What's needed is some sort of "public" space on the internet that's not controlled by corporate (and increasingly advertising) interests. Non-profits like Wikipedia and archive.org come close, but aren't meant for real time communication. Ironically, technologies like SMS are also somewhat neutral because they were conceived before advertising became the dominant business model on mobile and have no hooks for "curation" and "engagement".
- arca_vorago 10y agoIt makes me wonder if perhaps the internet is ready for an ad-free, paid news and communication as a service site? I mean, I personally already do (in the form of various services, such as usenet), but I'm talking about larger portions of the internet. I think maybe the exclusivity via paywall of the right service might actually draw users in.
- reaperducer 10y agoBeen there. Done that. Compuserve, GEnie, Delphi, etc...
- jerf 10y ago"This was inevitable. All the above-mentioned services are funded - in large part - by ads." Unsustainable situations always seem to go on for longer than you expect, but I wonder if we're finally getting to be just a year or three out from Adpocalypse, when the ad-supported internet companies finally end up having to face head on that you can not serve two masters. I wonder if there's going to be a market developing for services that look like current services, but actually cost money somehow. Probably a billion-dollar-level opportunity for figuring out how to charge for a Facebook or Google or Twitter a couple of bucks a month. (If you are seriously inclined to take this on, which I would support, bear in mind that the answer to these questions, for all sorts of reasons, is never "It's just Facebook, with a subscription." Facebook, to take one example, has been deeply structured around advertising for years now. You can't take the end result and just remove advertising from it. You need to start back at the beginning and rethink the whole thing, figuring out how to get people to spend some money on it. And I can all but promise "It's Facebook, but cares about your privacy" is a dead letter too, as that has been tried. I don't know what the answers are, just some of the problems. It'll take some serious thought to solve this.)
- pg_is_a_butt 10y agoso start your own website. you're all idiots.
- sametmax 10y agoIt's almost like if turning our free decentralized internet into a bunch of centralized privately financed information silos have been a bad idea. Who saw that coming hu ?
- metaphorm 10y agoTwitter has always been a tool for corporate propaganda. It was almost literally created to be that.