8 ms·
Erm, what? This is just not true, and is a false dichotomy. Moderation is hard. Always has been. Stuff will slip through the cracks. POTUS has the most popular
by Jestar342 6y ago
Erm, what? This is just not true, and is a false dichotomy. Moderation is hard. Always has been. Stuff will slip through the cracks.
POTUS has the most popular (and currently most controversial - note, that's _controversial_ not _extreme_ or some other morph) so it's easy to see why Twitter are on top of it. Other blue-checked accounts, whilst more "important" than unverified, just simply don't compare to the importance and prevalance of POTUS' account.
- efitz 6y agoIf most of the mistakes happen in one direction, then I would argue that there's some other mechanism at work than just "mistakes". Update: data https://quillette.com/2019/02/12/it-isnt-your-imagination-twitter-treats-conservatives-more-harshly-than-liberals/ https://quillette.com/2019/02/12/it-isnt-your-imagination-tw... Update: admission https://www.vox.com/2018/9/14/17857622/twitter-liberal-employees-conservative-trump-politics https://www.vox.com/2018/9/14/17857622/twitter-liberal-emplo...
- gameswithgo 6y agoMaybe conservative america needs to appeal to people smart enough to start their own tech companies, so they can compete in the free market to do things the way they like.
- zarkov99 6y agoMaybe companies should be idelogical neutral instead? Or do you also think liberal America should start to appeal to conscientious and patriotical people so they can have their own armed forces and police?
- techntoke 6y agoIdeological neutral by whose standards? If conservatives tend to violate TOS more frequently and get blocked/banned, then that is neutral. They are simply enforcing their TOS based on the content.
- zarkov99 6y agoDo you really think that the 50% of the population that is conservative is really much more prone to asshole behavior? Does that really make sense to you?
- techntoke 6y agoWhen the 50% you're talking about was notorious for calling people snowflakes and betas, yes I do believe they are more prone to advocate for violence, racism, and hate speech.
- zarkov99 6y agoAs opposed to notorious for calling people violent, racist and hateful, since those are just accurate assessments, right?
- techntoke 6y agoAre you disagreeing here that Republican voters are not more prone to those behaviors than Democrats?
- zarkov99 6y agoYes, I am. Both parties have assholes and both parties have great people in roughly equal proportions. The exact shape of the insults the shitty people throw at each other does not matter .
- perl4ever 6y agoMy kneejerk reaction would be that the worst of both sides are equally bad, but the proportions are wildly different.
- Simulacra 6y agoCompanies cannot be neutral. They have a base just like any politician. Twitter has acutely recognized - I believe - that their base is libera, and it's important to go along with that base. Would Twitter be as popular if a conservative was running it?
- zarkov99 6y agoWhat difference would it make if Twitter was run by a conservative or a democrat as long as they were not meddling with the content? And if they are meddling the content, do you not think that this very dangerous given their dominance as a medium of speech? Just run the thought experiment, imagine that Twitter's leadership held political positions you abhorred and was free to boost or suppress speech, what Dorsey calls the "global conversation", in order to advance those politics. Does that sound OK to you?
- Simulacra 6y agoI think we are in agreement. I don't want Twitter meddling with content, regardless of who runs it. My opinion is that the outrage would be different if it were run by a conservative. The American two-party system seems to require us versus them, even in how twitter is run.
- Jtsummers 6y agoWhy should they be neutral and how would you enforce that? What does "ideological neutral" even mean?
- zarkov99 6y agoBecause corporations have disproportionate effect on the public and their mandate is to make money not proseletize whatever brand of BS the CEO happens to believe in.
- Jtsummers 6y agoOk, then define "neutral" and how it would be enforced.
- zarkov99 6y agoIt is a tough problem. I think social media companies should treated more like utilities than publishers and should not be held responsible for their content beyond removing illegal materials. I think they should provide their users with the tools they need to moderate their feeds themselves, with an emphasis on transparency and user control. We do not need Twitter and Facebook to protect us from each other.
- riffic 6y ago> I think social media companies should treated more like utilities I don't think that's a good, or even workable solution. Social media companies are not public utilities.
- zarkov99 6y agoI may have used the wrong term. I do not mean utilities in that sense, I mean they should act as carriers rather than publishers of information. That is more like the phone company and less like the NY Times.
- 6y ago
- woah 6y agoMaybe companies should be allowed to do whatever they want on their own websites
- bjustin 6y agoCompanies have some of the same rights as people. Why should we expect companies to be neutral when we don't expect people to be neutral? Governments must be neutral, including armed forces and police, but even then neutrality doesn't mean letting one group break rules (laws in the case of government) with impunity just because they're the ones who most frequently break those rules.
- zarkov99 6y agoLiberals have a stranglehold in Tech. This will probably never change, its not the result of a conspiracy its simply an emerging phenomenon that arises from the over representation of traits like openness and curiosity in left leaning people. However, this is not fair nor good for the nation and it floors me that this is not obvious to any fair minded person. There are other sectors of society that have symmetrical proportions of conservatives. Farming, for example. Should farmers choose to feed only conservatives? Of course not. This isn't about left and right, its about a modicum of empathy, of fairness to all, including people who think differently.
- perl4ever 6y agoMy grandparents were farmers; my parents programmers. Remember nearly everyone used to farm, including the ancestors of liberals. Today's right wing "family farmers" are the people who were most stubborn or least able to learn new things as their way of life shrank and not the representatives of farming in general.
- zarkov99 6y agoI am not sure I get what you are trying t say here. Whatever way we came to the demographics the fact remains that different occupations have very different proportions of liberals and conservatives so we best able to treat each other fairly because we need each other to function as a society.
- FireBeyond 6y agoYou can't rule that 'corporations are people' when it suits you, and can donate to political campaigns... ... and then say "no, they need to be ideologically neutral" when they act in ways you dislike.
- zarkov99 6y agoWho is "you" here? Why do you assume I subscribe to corporation are people? Maybe stick to the actual point being made?
- dlp211 6y agoAnytime that someone says 'you' on the internet, the actual you should assume that they aren't speaking about the actual you specifically, but to the collective you that makes the argument that corporations are people.
- ThomPete 6y agoThat's not really the point. Regardless of your political view the issue is the same. If you want to be editorializing people's content then you are a publisher and then you are responsible for the content they write. The point of social media is that each person is their own publisher and own their own words. Oterwhise lets just regulate Twitter and FB and Youtube like a publisher and lets see them handle the lawsuits.
- thejynxed 6y agoYou mean people like Ellison and Thiel?
- mschuster91 6y agoThey actually do, there is alt-right Twitter aka gab.ai, alt-right Youtube aka Bitchute, alt-right Facebook aka Vkontakte, a boatload of "bulletproof" hosters and domain registrars. They even have their own TV stations (OAN, parts of Fox News), radios and podcasts. For just about anything you want the alt-right has their "free speech" alternatives. The thing they are whining about is that the reach of these alternatives is way, WAY lower than the reach of the companies/projects of the alt-right. Almost as if the free market actually works and people deliberately choose to not engage in platforms dominated by alt-right hate mongers...
- Thinkx220 6y agoOr the other more logical reason being that free speech platforms are typically only clones of more poput platforms which don't offer any more features or increase ease of use. I think it's completely possible for a popular pro free speech platform to exist provided it is able to be more user friendly or have some other killer feature.
- buzzerbetrayed 6y agoConservative is not the same as alt-right. Most conservatives wouldn't go anywhere near Gab.
- virmundi 6y agoThat’s already happened. Conservatives don’t do social media as much as the left. Voat and gab haven’t taken off.
- meheleventyone 6y agoThe problem with the offshoots is that they instantly turn into cesspools. I don't think it's that conservatives do social media less it's that associating themselves with values they disagree with isn't popular. Even the conservatives that agree with the people "saying the quiet bits out loud" know that it's tactically dumb to align yourself with them.
- BryantD 6y agoThe link you've characterized as an admission discusses internal bias, and doesn't say anything about bias in moderating.
- d0100 6y agoWould you not doubt an "internally racist" person to moderate a black community?
- enumjorge 6y agoI’m not convinced by the arguments from your first link. As stated by the article itself, a difference in the number of left-leaning vs right-leaning bans does not prove the standards for censorship are different depending on what side of the political spectrum you fall on. It could be that conservative content violates rules more frequently than liberal or centrist content. It goes on to say this can’t be possible because it would mean that conservative content would have to violate rules at 4x the rate of others, and that statistically its highly improbable. Why? It’s a known problem that Twitter has a lot of accounts that are fake accounts from bad actors trying to sow discord in the US political system, and those tend to be right leaning. Didn’t Twitter relatively recently do a purge of a large number of accounts that were deemed fake? That could easily skew the numbers, especially because those accounts tend to engage in the kind of rhetoric that gets you banned. And then the article points to cases where liberal leaning content doesn’t get banned even though it should. I can also find cases where conservative content violates the rules yet it didn’t face consequences, most prominently the president’s account. It’s not just liberals who get a free pass, so I’m not sure what that proves. Is it possible there is a bias in how Twitter sensors content? Sure. But that article makes it sound like they have a data driven, mathematically rigorous proof that it’s true, and I don’t think they meet that mark.
- mthoms 6y agoMaybe right leaning users have a higher propensity to say offensive/harmful things? I'm not being facetious. Isn't this something the right is actually proud of? I mean, they actually boast about not being "politically correct" (something the rest of the western world calls "common decency").
- ThomPete 6y agoYou base that on what exactly?
- xrd 6y agoThe Quillette article posted as evidence above says exactly that: "Perhaps conservatives are simply more likely to violate neutral rules regarding harassment and hate speech. In such case, the observed data would not serve to impugn Twitter, but rather conservatives themselves."
- mthoms 6y ago>You base that on what exactly? Just about every other editorial on right leaning outlets that complain and moan about political correctness? Oh, and actual self-identified right leaning HN/Redit users. Just ask, many of them will be quick to tell you (some version of) "political correctness is BS". (To be clear, I know not all right-leaning people think this way, but a very large proportion do). Just so I'm clear, are you arguing that avoiding political correctness is not a core tenet of a large part of the conservative base? I thought it was a badge of honor for many?
- meheleventyone 6y agoAlso going around calling everyone snowflakes for being offended by whatever heinous thing they come out with that day.
- ThomPete 6y agoi am arguing that who is politically correct depends on time and context. There was a time when the left was politically incorrect conpared to the mainstream. It has nothing to do with political observation.
- rovolo 6y agoI think the Quillette piece is overstating its evidence to make a rhetorical point. 1) They're only measuring the last enforcement step. 2) n=22 is really small. 3) They're measuring (suspended|trump) and are asserting the relationship is causal. If you download their dataset, you find these 4 people listed under the "supports trump" column: Alex Jones, American Nazi Party, David Duke, Richard Spencer. I think most everyone can agree these 4 weren't suspended because they are conservative or voted for Trump. (The other instances probably aren't partisan either, but not everyone will know about those people) > database of prominent, politically active users who are known to have been temporarily or permanently suspended from the platform. … Of 22 prominent, politically active individuals who are known to have been suspended since 2005 and who expressed a preference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, 21 supported Donald Trump. The Vox piece isn't an "admission" that their moderation is biased. Twitter's CEO is "admitting" that the politics of the developers is heavily liberal: > “We have a lot of conservative-leaning folks in the company as well, and to be honest, they don’t feel safe to express their opinions at the company,” Dorsey said. “They do feel silenced by just the general swirl of what they perceive to be the broader percentage of leanings within the company, and I don’t think that’s fair or right.”
- scythe 6y ago>Update: admission This link doesn't say what you claim. It's Dorsey talking about the internal social environment at Twitter's offices, not Twitter's moderation policies.
- StanislavPetrov 6y ago>This is just not true, and is a false dichotomy. Moderation is hard. It's absolutely true, and has absolutely nothing to do with moderation "being hard". As someone who absolutely opposes Trump, but also absolutely opposes our many wars and global bombings, I'm horrified on a daily basis (and have been since 2009 when I joined Twitter) by open calls for violence against a wide variety of countries from Syria to Venezuela to Iran. When has Twitter ever suspended anyone (let alone a public figure, or even Trump himself, who has called for violence against other countries many times) a single time for openly calling for violence against the people of any of the countries? The answer is never. Its beyond absurd, bordering on delusional, to pretend that Twitter's actions here weren't nakedly political and have absolutely nothing to do with a standard against, "fomenting violence".