7 ms·

Twitter is put on par with newspapers, because they do gatekeeping and have accepted bias. Twitter can not have the cake and eat it too. There is nothing sini

Twitter is put on par with newspapers, because they do gatekeeping and have accepted bias. Twitter can not have the cake and eat it too. There is nothing sinister just the laws kicking in. You wouldn't want google manipulating search results and then claim to be neutral.

danso 5y ago
> You wouldn't want google manipulating search results and then claim to be neutral. But Google does manipulate search results, so ostensibly they should also be put on par with newspapers? examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27477797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27477797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13274753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13274753 edit: Also your comment misleads on what the article reports. Twitter has not lost safe harbor because "they do gatekeeping and have accepted bias", but because they haven't met the staffing requirements imposed by India on large social media companies: > The move comes as tension escalates between the Indian government and Twitter. Google, Facebook, and several other firms have partially or fully complied with the IT rules, which among other things, requires any significant social media firm (any firm with over 5 million users in India) to appoint a chief compliant officer, a resident grievance officer, and a so-called nodal contact person to address on-ground concerns. > Twitter has not complied with any of these requirements, the court filing said. Twitter had no comment on Monday’s filing, but has said in the past that it intends to comply with the IT rules.
- 6510 5y ago
  how would one even sort search results without bias?
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    I think most would call the original pagerank algorithm unbiased. Sure, any algorithm will have a bias towards a certain content length, or towards pages that contain the search terms at a particular density. But by doing that you don't arrive at algorithms that have an opinion on the holocaust or Tiananmen Square [1]. Of course Twitter somehow managed to implement the worst of both worlds, with a sorting algorithm that promotes controversial content (without bias regarding the actual content), but then does biased moderation on that content. 1: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-57367100 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-57367100
    - Majromax 5y ago
      > I think most would call the original pagerank algorithm unbiased. I disagree: the point of the original Pagerank algorithm was its bias. In particular, its use of link weights gave the algorithm a strong bias for (a proxy for) relevance. An "unbiased" search algorithm would need to return results based on simple criteria, readily explained and presented to the searcher, such as "date first crawled" or "number of keyword appearances."
      - mlnj 5y ago
        You are trivializing every bit of research and advancement gone into improving search engines in the last 20 years. Please attempt a simple implementation with the methods you describe and see how it performs over even a non trivial amount of data and you will see the difference in results. And I'm not even considering malicious results gaming the whole system.
        Majromax 5y ago
        > You are trivializing every bit of research and advancement gone into improving search engines in the last 20 years. I disagree. If anything, I think I give this research more credit, because I appreciate it as imposing a normative view on what makes search results "good." This is more than just "how do we sort a list containing billions of keys" or "how do we grab data from a distributed database;" it's also "how do we understand relevance or quality based on machine-interpretable signals?" The latter is a judgment call.
      - AbrahamParangi 5y ago
        This is a conflation between the meanings of the word bias as “a weight” and “an ideological stance”. The thing that people take issue with is generally the latter, rather than the former.
        Majromax 5y ago
        It is a conflation, but I argue that there's no bright line between the two. The ideology behind pagerank is that relevant results are better and that backlink popularity measures relevance. Another sorting objective is that "more engaging results" are better. Each is ultimately an expression of will, since there is no objective ranking of what makes something relevant or engaging. Everyone will agree on the order of names in a phone book, but nobody will agree on the "relevance" order of search results. You see this every day in news-adjacent search topics, where popularity, relevance, and factual correctness can all give different "proper" orderings. Ultimately, people dislike stances that give disagreeable results, but they think benign stances to be invisible. I don't believe a coherent, legal argument can work this way.
  - Google234 5y ago
    By returning the best match to a search first… second one second…
    - Retric 5y ago
      Defining best is a biased process. Is cost or quality more important? There is no objective criteria for such judgments it’s all based on personal bias. So Google favoring low latency responses is saying latency (cost) matters when people browsing may not care.
    - danso 5y ago
      What makes the best match? Highest number of back links?
      - 6510 5y ago
        Ideally you rate the person by his work. (Magnus is a great chess player because we wins games) If we cant rate someones work we can use opinions from those note worthy in their field. But when those people got their respectable reputation by the same means you could have an entirely circular self-praising reputation machine that seems to work wonderfully but operates without reviewing any work. At some stage of google the Nr 1 result for both "France" and "Paris" belonged to a blogger from NYC who had a single highly optimized page about France and one about Paris. Similarly a high page rank page about cars shouldn't be an authority on anything else but if they link to your article about flowers it gains a lot of points. So much it would be attractive to pay them for it. Back links were fabulous when the internet started then increasingly became a self serving loop.
  - kumarvvr 5y ago
    By removing user profile data as an input to the search query processing and result ranking.
    - gruez 5y ago
      So censoring a specific topic or viewpoint is fine as long as it's applied to everyone?
      - kumarvvr 5y ago
        Did you even read what I said? If you remove user related data as an input to the search query, the results will be purely based on algorithm efficiency, rather than feeding on the biases of the users. Such feedback loops, of showing content that is suitable to the user, will lead to information silos and gradual radicalization of the user.
        6510 5y ago
        > the results will be purely based on algorithm efficiency With much respect for those who have to hammer them out: The algorithms are full of bias, they have to be. They are essentially just a pile of hacks. Machines cant understand articles. Even if they could they would have the same problem a human reviewer would have when asked if article A is better than B. You cant switch off your own bias. Even if we could do all that you may end up with a category dominated by the writings of [say] 50-51 year old Caucasian males which forces you to ponder corrections that may or may not be terrible ideas if or if not applied. And then you have to chose which bias to apply and we are back to biased search results. People are the sum of their experiences, if you remove that nothing is left.
    - mlnj 5y ago
      That is not the topic being talked about. Is Google allowed to filter results on any internal criteria they can come up with? It includes all avenues like political, censorship, fake news, low quality, competitor results etc.
  - argvargc 5y ago
    Allow user choice. We all define "bias" differently.
- factorialboy 5y ago
  Google's time will come
- kumarvvr 5y ago
  To characterize appointment of a legal compliance officer as "staffing requirements" is wrong. It makes it seem like India is forcing Twitter to hire local people. If you are a global MNC with multi billion dollar valuation, and want to operate in a market that has a billion potential users, it is only fair that the company has a local presence.
  - web007 5y ago
    > If you are a global MNC with multi billion dollar valuation, What if you're none of those? Is it still fair to require a local presence for every single site / app / network to have access to a population?
    - ridiculous_lol 5y ago
      The regulations only apply to platforms with at least 5 million registered users.
      - sangnoir 5y ago
        Fastmail, Disqus and a good chunk of subreddits could easily have 5 million registered users in India, and they are not billion-dollar MNCs (not sure about the valuation of the first 2)
- specialist 5y ago
  > ...they should also be put on par with newspapers? Correct.
IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago
Does google claim to be neutral? Does twitter? Why should the attempt to remove some harmful content from their platform create a requirement to be absolutely perfect at doing so? Was there any doubt that twitter had the technical capabilities to remove some tweets? If you ever help a person, are you then required to help any other person in the same situation? What's the outcome you want? Do you believe it's possible to moderate billions of tweets without a mistake? If not, what's so great about social media that is overrun with swastikas and porn after the toxicity scared away all normal people? How does that help? Do twitter employees maybe have the free speech right of not being involved in the distribution of stuff they find horrible? What's worse, your tweets being deleted by twitter or being forced to make statements you know to be wrong and harmful (i. e. coerced speech)? Do you realise the standard for newspapers in the US is "actual malice", meaning the editors must know something they are publishing is false and harmful, and they must act with the intent to cause some harm. Is that how you'd describe "lost liability protection"?
- kumarvvr 5y ago
  They do. In testimony afyer testimony, they swear they are neutral and only censor illegal materials like trafficking or porn.
  - zackees 5y ago
    This. Same thing in the United States. They swore they were neutral and the media mocked everyone who claimed bias. Then when the tech giants went full propaganda for the left the media just switched narratives that this was their right all along.
carschno 5y ago
As mentioned by others, Google does "manipulate" search results too, but it is a slightly less sensitive/emotionalized topic because Google's content (web pages) is very different from Twitter's (personal utterances). The question is: what does "neutral" even mean in this context? The dichotomy between neutrality and manipulation is artificial, although I do see the underlying assumption that the output of any algorithm would be "neutral" whereas manual interference with its results would be "manipulation". In reality, however, the boundary is fluid. Would an algorithm that automatically excludes certain sites be neutral, while excluding the same sites manually is considered manipulation? Is "apply keyword search, then apply blacklist" an algorithm or manual manipulation? On the other side, is an algorithm that automatically penalizes SEO-optimized (spam) sites neutral, even though a search term occurs much more frequently on that given site?
alisonkisk 5y ago
Nothing sinister when demagogues want to shut down the free press to cement their own power?
- Valmar 5y ago
  Twitter is the complete opposite of "the free press". Twitter's admins arbitrarily remove content that they disagree with, while allowing content they do agree with, regardless of whether said content is illegal or not.
  - mlnj 5y ago
    And the whole objection is that Twitter is not bowing down to the requests of the government to censor what the government feels should be censored. So the crux of the whole thing is not the censorship but the entity censoring the content. And obviously the government wants to wield this power.
  - rishav_sharan 5y ago
    Twitter provides a platform for people who would otherwise have no media representation. A lot of news regularly breaks there and a lot of discourse that the regime is unable to control, also happens there. It is as critical as any "free press" in a country like India where the regular press kow tows to the regime and the country is ranked at 142 for press freedom. https://rsf.org/en/india https://rsf.org/en/india You take it away and you take away more "free press" from the citizens of India.
chupchap 5y ago
> You wouldn't want google manipulating search results and then claim to be neutral. Isn't ranking a manipulation? Not sure what you mean by this.
- msravi 5y ago
  I think it's clear from the context that OP was referring to manipulation based on ideological biases tainting search results, versus, mnipulation (ranking) based on relavence of search.
  - chupchap 5y ago
    Ah okay, but what makes Google great for me is the fact that it contextualises and uses details about me to provide more accurate details.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kranner 5y ago
Twitter is neither a news website nor a search engine. The only sinister thing here is that, as the article mentions, the Government wants Twitter to reveal the IP addresses of specific users and Twitter is refusing to do so. Also Twitter is marking fake news spread by Government ministers and functionaries as manipulated media. Another issue that the article doesn't mention is that the Government is pushing users towards Koo, a private alternative to Twitter that is by all accounts extremely aligned with the Government's political and religious views. It's another step towards replicating the Great Firewall. Edit: corrected "fake users" to "fake news"
- kumarvvr 5y ago
  Unfortunately, it acts as both in many instances. User profiling and data mining, coupled with corporate interest to keep users on the site as long as possible, leads to slow but firm biasing. Search results are not objective, but subjective based on the user history and profile. On the flip end, it is not a news site, but a massive distributor of news items. So it does act as a newspaper, because people consume large amounts of news from it. Is it a news site, yes. Does it have mechanisms of editorial policy or checks and balances? Not that I can see. Is it a search engine. Yes. Is it unbiased as a search engine, no.
  - kranner 5y ago
    All your points apply to YouTube as well, and YouTube has more than 10x the users it has in India than Twitter does. But then why is YouTube not being targeted by the Government? One salient difference I see is that Twitter is protecting its users by being identified and punished by the Government for being anti-Government.
    - kumarvvr 5y ago
      Because youtube has no mechanism to label content one way or other. It is not a massive distribution network. It is a content heavy site used for sharing videos. The actual sharing happens on other platforms.
villgax 5y ago
Yo Mouli you have zero understanding of how google works dude. You do not sign T&C with your newspapers do you? It is extremely sinister that you think a govt has any business curating & culling criticism of its policies or fallacies. That's literally a civil liberty which most politicians in India are rarely aware of unless taught a lesson by the courts.
addicted 5y ago
> There is nothing sinister just the laws kicking in. I’m not sure I understand how the fact that something is enshrined in law means it’s not sinister. In fact, the fact that anti democratic or government strengthening actions are enshrined in law makes it more worrisome rather than less.
- addicted 5y ago
  > In a court filing on Monday, New Delhi said Twitter has lost its immunity in India after the American social network failed to comply with the new local IT rules, which were unveiled in February and went into effect in late May. This is even more worrying when the “laws kicking in” are laws the government passed unilaterally without discussion a couple of months ago precisely to prevent dissent on social media. Further, let’s not ignore the elephant in the room. This is a government that has been absolutely pathetic when it comes to competent law making, whether you’re talking about demonetization, GST, or article 370 (which even if you may agree with the action on principle, the execution of which is an absolute sad joke, where the government has unnecessarily imprisoned the people of a state in their own homes for almost 2 years because they had absolutely no plan, and are now looking for a face saving way of backtracking from their actions).
  - leereeves 5y ago
    Liability for published content isn't unusual or unprecedented. Twitter et al enjoyed unprecedented liability protection for a little while; I don't see how holding them to the same standard other companies are held is worrying.
  - kumarvvr 5y ago
    Why is GST imllementation "pathetic"? Could you elaborate?
    - srean 5y ago
      For one thing payment to state governments not ruled by the BJP the party at the center) have been indefinitely delayed. States have been complaining about this, they have lost significant revenue, and are practically held under ransom.
rektide 5y ago
unlike newspapers Twitter is a crucial tool for everday citizens to share themselves with the world. unlike newspapers > Twitter is put on par with newspapers, because they do gatekeeping and have accepted bias. Twitter does some minimal moderation, and everything& everyone has bias. calling them a newspaper though? no. that's absurd. there's no pretense here that this is truth, that people are reporting. one's entering a bazaar of voices. I don't get the impulse to be cruel & constraining & mean to these democratic emerging mediums. demanding that they fulfill certain roles we want them to have is unjust, a horrible constraint against creativity & liberty.
LatteLazy 5y ago
Twitter don't do any of the things you're claiming. I don't know why you think they do.
rsj_hn 5y ago
I think you are going to see at least the large nations throw up firewalls and crack down on the international social media companies because they have an awful lot of power to shape perceptions by silencing some voices or labelling their views as "misinformation" while promoting other voices. That's enormous power. It is absolutely naive to think that companies like twitter don't use that power to advance the political/social agendas their most powerful employees care about and it's even more naive to think that governments will see this power and not want to control it for themselves, but instead let it operate unchecked in their own borders, influencing their own elections. They will either block these companies from operating via firewalls or demand that they use their power to share the political and cultural values they want to push, systematically deplatforming any company that they view as a threat to their agenda. China was ahead of the curve.

danso 5y ago

> You wouldn't want google manipulating search results and then claim to be neutral. But Google does manipulate search results, so ostensibly they should also be put on par with newspapers? examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27477797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27477797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13274753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13274753 edit: Also your comment misleads on what the article reports. Twitter has not lost safe harbor because "they do gatekeeping and have accepted bias", but because they haven't met the staffing requirements imposed by India on large social media companies: > The move comes as tension escalates between the Indian government and Twitter. Google, Facebook, and several other firms have partially or fully complied with the IT rules, which among other things, requires any significant social media firm (any firm with over 5 million users in India) to appoint a chief compliant officer, a resident grievance officer, and a so-called nodal contact person to address on-ground concerns. > Twitter has not complied with any of these requirements, the court filing said. Twitter had no comment on Monday’s filing, but has said in the past that it intends to comply with the IT rules.

6510 5y ago
how would one even sort search results without bias?
- wongarsu 5y ago
  I think most would call the original pagerank algorithm unbiased. Sure, any algorithm will have a bias towards a certain content length, or towards pages that contain the search terms at a particular density. But by doing that you don't arrive at algorithms that have an opinion on the holocaust or Tiananmen Square [1]. Of course Twitter somehow managed to implement the worst of both worlds, with a sorting algorithm that promotes controversial content (without bias regarding the actual content), but then does biased moderation on that content. 1: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-57367100 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-57367100
  - Majromax 5y ago
    > I think most would call the original pagerank algorithm unbiased. I disagree: the point of the original Pagerank algorithm was its bias. In particular, its use of link weights gave the algorithm a strong bias for (a proxy for) relevance. An "unbiased" search algorithm would need to return results based on simple criteria, readily explained and presented to the searcher, such as "date first crawled" or "number of keyword appearances."
    - mlnj 5y ago
      You are trivializing every bit of research and advancement gone into improving search engines in the last 20 years. Please attempt a simple implementation with the methods you describe and see how it performs over even a non trivial amount of data and you will see the difference in results. And I'm not even considering malicious results gaming the whole system.
      - Majromax 5y ago
        > You are trivializing every bit of research and advancement gone into improving search engines in the last 20 years. I disagree. If anything, I think I give this research more credit, because I appreciate it as imposing a normative view on what makes search results "good." This is more than just "how do we sort a list containing billions of keys" or "how do we grab data from a distributed database;" it's also "how do we understand relevance or quality based on machine-interpretable signals?" The latter is a judgment call.
    - AbrahamParangi 5y ago
      This is a conflation between the meanings of the word bias as “a weight” and “an ideological stance”. The thing that people take issue with is generally the latter, rather than the former.
      - Majromax 5y ago
        It is a conflation, but I argue that there's no bright line between the two. The ideology behind pagerank is that relevant results are better and that backlink popularity measures relevance. Another sorting objective is that "more engaging results" are better. Each is ultimately an expression of will, since there is no objective ranking of what makes something relevant or engaging. Everyone will agree on the order of names in a phone book, but nobody will agree on the "relevance" order of search results. You see this every day in news-adjacent search topics, where popularity, relevance, and factual correctness can all give different "proper" orderings. Ultimately, people dislike stances that give disagreeable results, but they think benign stances to be invisible. I don't believe a coherent, legal argument can work this way.
- Google234 5y ago
  By returning the best match to a search first… second one second…
  - Retric 5y ago
    Defining best is a biased process. Is cost or quality more important? There is no objective criteria for such judgments it’s all based on personal bias. So Google favoring low latency responses is saying latency (cost) matters when people browsing may not care.
  - danso 5y ago
    What makes the best match? Highest number of back links?
    - 6510 5y ago
      Ideally you rate the person by his work. (Magnus is a great chess player because we wins games) If we cant rate someones work we can use opinions from those note worthy in their field. But when those people got their respectable reputation by the same means you could have an entirely circular self-praising reputation machine that seems to work wonderfully but operates without reviewing any work. At some stage of google the Nr 1 result for both "France" and "Paris" belonged to a blogger from NYC who had a single highly optimized page about France and one about Paris. Similarly a high page rank page about cars shouldn't be an authority on anything else but if they link to your article about flowers it gains a lot of points. So much it would be attractive to pay them for it. Back links were fabulous when the internet started then increasingly became a self serving loop.
- kumarvvr 5y ago
  By removing user profile data as an input to the search query processing and result ranking.
  - gruez 5y ago
    So censoring a specific topic or viewpoint is fine as long as it's applied to everyone?
    - kumarvvr 5y ago
      Did you even read what I said? If you remove user related data as an input to the search query, the results will be purely based on algorithm efficiency, rather than feeding on the biases of the users. Such feedback loops, of showing content that is suitable to the user, will lead to information silos and gradual radicalization of the user.
      - 6510 5y ago
        > the results will be purely based on algorithm efficiency With much respect for those who have to hammer them out: The algorithms are full of bias, they have to be. They are essentially just a pile of hacks. Machines cant understand articles. Even if they could they would have the same problem a human reviewer would have when asked if article A is better than B. You cant switch off your own bias. Even if we could do all that you may end up with a category dominated by the writings of [say] 50-51 year old Caucasian males which forces you to ponder corrections that may or may not be terrible ideas if or if not applied. And then you have to chose which bias to apply and we are back to biased search results. People are the sum of their experiences, if you remove that nothing is left.
  - mlnj 5y ago
    That is not the topic being talked about. Is Google allowed to filter results on any internal criteria they can come up with? It includes all avenues like political, censorship, fake news, low quality, competitor results etc.
- argvargc 5y ago
  Allow user choice. We all define "bias" differently.
factorialboy 5y ago
Google's time will come
kumarvvr 5y ago
To characterize appointment of a legal compliance officer as "staffing requirements" is wrong. It makes it seem like India is forcing Twitter to hire local people. If you are a global MNC with multi billion dollar valuation, and want to operate in a market that has a billion potential users, it is only fair that the company has a local presence.
- web007 5y ago
  > If you are a global MNC with multi billion dollar valuation, What if you're none of those? Is it still fair to require a local presence for every single site / app / network to have access to a population?
  - ridiculous_lol 5y ago
    The regulations only apply to platforms with at least 5 million registered users.
    - sangnoir 5y ago
      Fastmail, Disqus and a good chunk of subreddits could easily have 5 million registered users in India, and they are not billion-dollar MNCs (not sure about the valuation of the first 2)
specialist 5y ago
> ...they should also be put on par with newspapers? Correct.

IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago

Does google claim to be neutral? Does twitter? Why should the attempt to remove some harmful content from their platform create a requirement to be absolutely perfect at doing so? Was there any doubt that twitter had the technical capabilities to remove some tweets? If you ever help a person, are you then required to help any other person in the same situation? What's the outcome you want? Do you believe it's possible to moderate billions of tweets without a mistake? If not, what's so great about social media that is overrun with swastikas and porn after the toxicity scared away all normal people? How does that help? Do twitter employees maybe have the free speech right of not being involved in the distribution of stuff they find horrible? What's worse, your tweets being deleted by twitter or being forced to make statements you know to be wrong and harmful (i. e. coerced speech)? Do you realise the standard for newspapers in the US is "actual malice", meaning the editors must know something they are publishing is false and harmful, and they must act with the intent to cause some harm. Is that how you'd describe "lost liability protection"?

kumarvvr 5y ago
They do. In testimony afyer testimony, they swear they are neutral and only censor illegal materials like trafficking or porn.
- zackees 5y ago
  This. Same thing in the United States. They swore they were neutral and the media mocked everyone who claimed bias. Then when the tech giants went full propaganda for the left the media just switched narratives that this was their right all along.

carschno 5y ago

As mentioned by others, Google does "manipulate" search results too, but it is a slightly less sensitive/emotionalized topic because Google's content (web pages) is very different from Twitter's (personal utterances). The question is: what does "neutral" even mean in this context? The dichotomy between neutrality and manipulation is artificial, although I do see the underlying assumption that the output of any algorithm would be "neutral" whereas manual interference with its results would be "manipulation". In reality, however, the boundary is fluid. Would an algorithm that automatically excludes certain sites be neutral, while excluding the same sites manually is considered manipulation? Is "apply keyword search, then apply blacklist" an algorithm or manual manipulation? On the other side, is an algorithm that automatically penalizes SEO-optimized (spam) sites neutral, even though a search term occurs much more frequently on that given site?

alisonkisk 5y ago

Nothing sinister when demagogues want to shut down the free press to cement their own power?

Valmar 5y ago
Twitter is the complete opposite of "the free press". Twitter's admins arbitrarily remove content that they disagree with, while allowing content they do agree with, regardless of whether said content is illegal or not.
- mlnj 5y ago
  And the whole objection is that Twitter is not bowing down to the requests of the government to censor what the government feels should be censored. So the crux of the whole thing is not the censorship but the entity censoring the content. And obviously the government wants to wield this power.
- rishav_sharan 5y ago
  Twitter provides a platform for people who would otherwise have no media representation. A lot of news regularly breaks there and a lot of discourse that the regime is unable to control, also happens there. It is as critical as any "free press" in a country like India where the regular press kow tows to the regime and the country is ranked at 142 for press freedom. https://rsf.org/en/india https://rsf.org/en/india You take it away and you take away more "free press" from the citizens of India.

chupchap 5y ago

> You wouldn't want google manipulating search results and then claim to be neutral. Isn't ranking a manipulation? Not sure what you mean by this.

msravi 5y ago
I think it's clear from the context that OP was referring to manipulation based on ideological biases tainting search results, versus, mnipulation (ranking) based on relavence of search.
- chupchap 5y ago
  Ah okay, but what makes Google great for me is the fact that it contextualises and uses details about me to provide more accurate details.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

kranner 5y ago

Twitter is neither a news website nor a search engine. The only sinister thing here is that, as the article mentions, the Government wants Twitter to reveal the IP addresses of specific users and Twitter is refusing to do so. Also Twitter is marking fake news spread by Government ministers and functionaries as manipulated media. Another issue that the article doesn't mention is that the Government is pushing users towards Koo, a private alternative to Twitter that is by all accounts extremely aligned with the Government's political and religious views. It's another step towards replicating the Great Firewall. Edit: corrected "fake users" to "fake news"

kumarvvr 5y ago
Unfortunately, it acts as both in many instances. User profiling and data mining, coupled with corporate interest to keep users on the site as long as possible, leads to slow but firm biasing. Search results are not objective, but subjective based on the user history and profile. On the flip end, it is not a news site, but a massive distributor of news items. So it does act as a newspaper, because people consume large amounts of news from it. Is it a news site, yes. Does it have mechanisms of editorial policy or checks and balances? Not that I can see. Is it a search engine. Yes. Is it unbiased as a search engine, no.
- kranner 5y ago
  All your points apply to YouTube as well, and YouTube has more than 10x the users it has in India than Twitter does. But then why is YouTube not being targeted by the Government? One salient difference I see is that Twitter is protecting its users by being identified and punished by the Government for being anti-Government.
  - kumarvvr 5y ago
    Because youtube has no mechanism to label content one way or other. It is not a massive distribution network. It is a content heavy site used for sharing videos. The actual sharing happens on other platforms.

villgax 5y ago

Yo Mouli you have zero understanding of how google works dude. You do not sign T&C with your newspapers do you? It is extremely sinister that you think a govt has any business curating & culling criticism of its policies or fallacies. That's literally a civil liberty which most politicians in India are rarely aware of unless taught a lesson by the courts.

addicted 5y ago

> There is nothing sinister just the laws kicking in. I’m not sure I understand how the fact that something is enshrined in law means it’s not sinister. In fact, the fact that anti democratic or government strengthening actions are enshrined in law makes it more worrisome rather than less.

addicted 5y ago
> In a court filing on Monday, New Delhi said Twitter has lost its immunity in India after the American social network failed to comply with the new local IT rules, which were unveiled in February and went into effect in late May. This is even more worrying when the “laws kicking in” are laws the government passed unilaterally without discussion a couple of months ago precisely to prevent dissent on social media. Further, let’s not ignore the elephant in the room. This is a government that has been absolutely pathetic when it comes to competent law making, whether you’re talking about demonetization, GST, or article 370 (which even if you may agree with the action on principle, the execution of which is an absolute sad joke, where the government has unnecessarily imprisoned the people of a state in their own homes for almost 2 years because they had absolutely no plan, and are now looking for a face saving way of backtracking from their actions).
- leereeves 5y ago
  Liability for published content isn't unusual or unprecedented. Twitter et al enjoyed unprecedented liability protection for a little while; I don't see how holding them to the same standard other companies are held is worrying.
- kumarvvr 5y ago
  Why is GST imllementation "pathetic"? Could you elaborate?
  - srean 5y ago
    For one thing payment to state governments not ruled by the BJP the party at the center) have been indefinitely delayed. States have been complaining about this, they have lost significant revenue, and are practically held under ransom.

rektide 5y ago

unlike newspapers Twitter is a crucial tool for everday citizens to share themselves with the world. unlike newspapers > Twitter is put on par with newspapers, because they do gatekeeping and have accepted bias. Twitter does some minimal moderation, and everything& everyone has bias. calling them a newspaper though? no. that's absurd. there's no pretense here that this is truth, that people are reporting. one's entering a bazaar of voices. I don't get the impulse to be cruel & constraining & mean to these democratic emerging mediums. demanding that they fulfill certain roles we want them to have is unjust, a horrible constraint against creativity & liberty.

LatteLazy 5y ago

Twitter don't do any of the things you're claiming. I don't know why you think they do.

rsj_hn 5y ago

I think you are going to see at least the large nations throw up firewalls and crack down on the international social media companies because they have an awful lot of power to shape perceptions by silencing some voices or labelling their views as "misinformation" while promoting other voices. That's enormous power. It is absolutely naive to think that companies like twitter don't use that power to advance the political/social agendas their most powerful employees care about and it's even more naive to think that governments will see this power and not want to control it for themselves, but instead let it operate unchecked in their own borders, influencing their own elections. They will either block these companies from operating via firewalls or demand that they use their power to share the political and cultural values they want to push, systematically deplatforming any company that they view as a threat to their agenda. China was ahead of the curve.