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The way these companies openly engage in politically biased publishing and selective enforcement in the USA made this kind of thing inevitable. During this pas
by fareesh 5y ago
The way these companies openly engage in politically biased publishing and selective enforcement in the USA made this kind of thing inevitable.
During this past election the New York Post was banned because of a story that painted candidate Biden's son in a poor light, and nearly everyone who works in these companies wanted candidate Biden to win so they used their positions to protect his image, knowing that there would be no real consequences for them.
Now we have a crisis in my country and we are unable to criticize the government publicly because our posts can just be suppressed on a whim. We know all about the coveted "muh next billion users" meme that these companies obsess over - some of you probably hear about it at work all the time. They aren't going to have the cooperation of the government unless they do as they're told.
Just like with the NY Post incident, some song and dance excuse will be concocted about this and everyone will blindly accept it, and expect the rest of us to go along with it like fools, when it's pretty obvious what is happening here. This has even been published in the news a few months ago and the country's policy head got caught telling employees that they had to do their moderating duties in a partisan way so that it did not "damage the company's business prospects in the country", and had to resign (link below). Now we are supposed to believe that this was her personal position and literally zero people in company leadership had the same idea. (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-54715995 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-54715995)
Next year is a Midterm election in the USA, so I fully expect more coincidental and highly unusual yet conveniently partisan stories like this coming up where some scandal gets buried and some out of context quote gets amplified. We have seen whistleblowers from Facebook talking about features like "deboost" being employed in a partisan manner. By then everyone would have forgotten about this and I'll be seeing "boosted" clips from all the late night TV "comedy" propagandists talking about some obscure senate or house seat in which the fate of the world hangs in the balance lest the evil red party take control. Pathetic.
- dillondoyle 5y agoI don't think this take is totally fair, it doesn't include a lot of context. For sure it's a real discussion to have but I think only should be debated with the full context. First FB didn't totally block it was still shared over 600k times and they said they were not promoting in the feed until their fact check process proceeded. The specific reason Twitter cited for an actual block was their policy on hacked source material. Which in itself is kind of BS on its face I agree with you there, no one stoped Snowden. Compromising news is still news, even if the source material was stolen some of the best reporting ever is from 'stolen' source material. But the source material couldn't be independently verified and the Post seemed to treat it as direct source fact even though at best it's 2nd hand hearsay through Guiliani, at worst through some spy agency. Important context here is the impact of the Podesta emails originally reported to possibly have false or edited material, though in the future Senate report said unlikely. Being more careful is understandable and I think laudable. These are important nuances in reporting from more legit access to verifiable direct sources versus a more opinion style non-factual piece from the NyPost. There is also the political context of known and ongoing direct attacks on our Democracy and foreign nation state interference. The origin story of the laptop is suspect at a minimum and I can understand caution. again not verifiable. especially given all the attacks and degradation of Democratic norms and wanting to not repeat the same mistakes as Clinton which undeniably had very big important impacts long term, whether you think good or bad. Maybe they should have included that argument in their reasoning since it seems it probably had a big impact on their decision. Maybe they were given some tip offs from the FBI who knows. We might find out soon about Guilini's part in this, the actual 'russiagate' of direct cooperation with foreign government to undermine the election.
- fareesh 5y agoI don't accept the premise that the enforcement is done in good faith to begin with - there's no reason to. A bad faith actor can use a weak justification to selectively enforce the independently verifiable rule whenever they feel like it. The guy who made the decision, spent 10 years working for John Kerry, Barbara Boxer and the Democratic party prior to his role at Facebook. Why should the USA policy director be magically different from the India one? They both engaged in politically biased selective enforcement, yet you want me to give him the benefit of the doubt. I will not. There is no reason to. Why do these companies allow 10 year political veterans to take these positions?
- dillondoyle 5y agoI agree the twitter reason was weak. 'hacked source material' is a huge amount of journalism. But I stand by the rest.