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I think there's a fundamental difference of opinion about the notion of fairness. Some people think that fairness is defined as something that affects everyone
by pron 6y ago
I think there's a fundamental difference of opinion about the notion of fairness. Some people think that fairness is defined as something that affects everyone equally in some clean-slate world, while others think of fairness as equalizing the effect of something in an already unfair situation in the world as it is. To the first camp it seems that "suppressing" a particular story on a particular platform is unfair regardless of circumstances because it is not done to other stories; others think that if that particular story has a de facto unfair advantage of being amplified by an army of bots on that particular platform, then "suppressing" it is the fair thing to do. The question is, is it always unfair to tip the scales or does fairness depend on whether or not the scales are already tipped? Should the fairness of laws, rules and regulation be judged with or without consideration to existing circumstances?
- bassman9000 6y agoThat's a really long way of trying to justify unfairness under some arbitrary criteria. If Twitter's policy is to surpress under some criteria (e.g. data illegally obtained), and they're not doing so every single time (they don't), then they're unfair on the arbitrary application of that criteria.
- pron 6y agoThe criterion can be that stories that are unfairly promoted are penalised. HN does something similar.
- bassman9000 6y agoThus paving the way for being arbitrary. Because the decision of what's fair is hidden. That's not criteria: is lack of. I understand you can't 100% define what's fair. That's why judges interpret. But if Jack has to come out to state they screwed up, something's not right. And they're not fixing it, by design: decisions will still be made by highly biased Twitter personnel.