5 ms·

I actually went into a deep dive of any statistical efforts that showed bans on twitter based on American political leanings. Apparently in both studies I foun

I actually went into a deep dive of any statistical efforts that showed bans on twitter based on American political leanings. Apparently in both studies I found the most statistically significant user behavior for bans was if the user had a tendency to post articles from low quality online ”news” sites. So essentially even the political controversy around moderation boils down to the fact that one side, the right, is happily posting low quality news/fake news that they either get banned for disinformation or other rule-breaking behavior. https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5 https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5

leereeves 4y ago
The first concern is identifying "fake news". One of the biggest political news stories of 2020, Hunter Biden's laptop, was falsely declared misinformation, and the NY Post was accused of being a low quality site. Now we know it's true. On the other hand, the Steele Dossier was considered legitimate news at the time and "many of the dossier’s most explosive claims...have never materialized or have been proved false."[1]. So I'd like to know exactly what the study's authors considered low-quality news, but unfortunately I couldn't find a list in the paper you linked. In my experience, most people tend to declare sources "high-quality" or "low-quality" based on whether they share the same worldview. 1: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/business/media/spooked-private-spies-news-media.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/business/media/spooked-pr...
- haberman 4y ago
  I had the same skepticism as you, but the study authors did attempt to be fair by letting a set of politically balanced laypeople (equal number Democrat and Republican) adjudicate the trustworthiness of sites. They also had journalists rate the sites, but they present the results of both results (layperson-rated and journalist-rated). I wish they had included the list so we could see for ourselves. It's still possible that there are flaws in the study. But the it appears to take the concern of fairness more seriously than most.
  - leereeves 4y ago
    Of course, that also raises the question of who they asked to rate the sites, and they don't provide that information either.
- oezi 4y ago
  As a European I don't know much about the Hunter Biden story, but it wasn't a political news story because it doesn't even cover a politically relevant person. It is a celebrity story and even two years later no allegation of substance seems to have come from it (skimming wikipedia). From a European perspective it was just outlandish hearsay and speculation. Hard to understand why Americans get so invested when no criminal case materializes.
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    The news was that you couldn’t even talk about the truth of the situation in DMs on Twitter.
  - didericis 4y ago
    This is a political minefield/one of the most polarized topics of conversation in a minefield of extremely polarized topics, and I greatly value this forum as a place for intelligent conversation. Please don't jump to any assumptions about my presentation of this perspective, or endorsement of crazy people who say similar sounding things, this is simply a summary of why this story is important to the right. The Hunter Biden story is significant because there are emails which suggest Hunter Biden had ties to foreign companies that wanted access to his father. This could be grounds for a criminal case implicating his father. Now, in a sane society during a less polarized election, this would have been discussed in the open, and people would make cases as to the relevance or irrelevance of the evidence, relevance to Joe Biden specifically, and whether the evidence merits investigation through proper channels in an open and transparent way. Since Trump was viewed as even more corrupt and more of a threat by enough people capable of suppressing the story, the story was suppressed, and this conversation didn't happen until after the election. That does not mean the entire FBI and judicial process is broken like some people on the right claim, which is an extremely dangerous accusation, and the lack of a proper case means we do not know the extent or non extent of corruption, but the suppression of the story was a violation of public trust by those who suppressed it and poured a lot of fuel on an already raging fire.
    - notafraudster 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pstuart 4y ago
  Hunter Biden's "laptop" is a misdirection campaign. The contents appear to be from Biden but whether or not it was actually sourced as claimed will likely never be verified (the recipient is conveniently effectively blind). But those that care about this story only seem to care about the story about the story, i.e., that there was effort to prevent propagating it. I find it fascinating that every person who is hung up on this story doesn't care about the substance or relevance of it. In regards to substance, it's a story about corruption. The corruption on its face is irrefutable (i.e., Hunter Biden was paid money in an attempt to purchase the influence of his father). That's genteel, old school corruption. But the relevance of it is that Hunter himself is a private citizen and his (mis)conduct is not really newsworthy. But the implication of it is that his father is equally corrupt (which has not been shown), and that is the entire point of the story. That charge of corruption is important to deflect any reports of corruption by the political rival of Hunter's father (of which there's significant reporting of such). My commenting here is pointless yet necessary: pointless because I've yet to see a cogent rebuttal, and necessary because this topic is toxic and should be countered as best possible. edit: 4th paragraph substance to relevance
  - leereeves 4y ago
    It wasn't my intention to litigate this story here. I was simply citing it as an example of the difficulty of identifying misinformation. Also, I think a fair discussion of Twitter moderation should include a post-mortem of one of their most famous mistakes, discussing what Twitter did and what should they have done differently, and not so much the story itself. (Of course, the substance is also important, but this isn't the right place for that discussion.)
    - pstuart 4y ago
      That's just it: I don't think it was a mistake (if we're talking "censorship" about the laptop story). The story is radioactive. The veracity of it means nothing -- just the phrase is now a talking point, a campaign slogan. If my points are correct per the prior comment, what good does it serve the people to be amplified in a short attention span economy? Why shine light on dialog that sucks oxygen out of the room? HN is not the place to come to blows over tribal politics, but I think that discussing policies, strategies, and other political hacking is worthy of being explored if there's willingness to examine the impacts that these actions have.
- originalvichy 4y ago
  This is a tangent. Twitter declared this story a story about hacked material which they treated as rule-breaking at the time. They changed their rule afterwards, but it is a legitimate rule to have. The quality was measured by a group that was selected due to their broad range of leanings. It should be in the final paper.
- rallison 4y ago
  As mentioned elsewhere, the laptop story was not restricted for being misinformation, it was restricted due to Twitter's policy (at the time) on hacked materials. Some background: https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/16/twitter-fixes-bad-policy-blocking-hacked-documents/ https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/16/twitter-fixes-bad-policy... It was a policy that had previously received criticism, and had already come into play in a significant story: https://www.techdirt.com/2020/09/16/content-moderation-case-study-twitter-removes-account-pointing-users-to-leaked-documents-obtained-hacking-collective-june-2020/ https://www.techdirt.com/2020/09/16/content-moderation-case-... And, following the laptop story, Twitter changed their policy on hacked materials. And that's the thing with content moderation - specific examples of content moderation often themselves go viral, but often also shed the actual context of said moderation (as was the case in your example), and thus feed into existing narratives around bias in content moderation. With full context, one might still disagree with the policy, but the narrative falls away.
nfgivivu 4y ago
sdafdasfds 4y ago
"This working paper has not yet undergone peer-review."

leereeves 4y ago

The first concern is identifying "fake news". One of the biggest political news stories of 2020, Hunter Biden's laptop, was falsely declared misinformation, and the NY Post was accused of being a low quality site. Now we know it's true. On the other hand, the Steele Dossier was considered legitimate news at the time and "many of the dossier’s most explosive claims...have never materialized or have been proved false."[1]. So I'd like to know exactly what the study's authors considered low-quality news, but unfortunately I couldn't find a list in the paper you linked. In my experience, most people tend to declare sources "high-quality" or "low-quality" based on whether they share the same worldview. 1: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/business/media/spooked-private-spies-news-media.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/business/media/spooked-pr...

haberman 4y ago
I had the same skepticism as you, but the study authors did attempt to be fair by letting a set of politically balanced laypeople (equal number Democrat and Republican) adjudicate the trustworthiness of sites. They also had journalists rate the sites, but they present the results of both results (layperson-rated and journalist-rated). I wish they had included the list so we could see for ourselves. It's still possible that there are flaws in the study. But the it appears to take the concern of fairness more seriously than most.
- leereeves 4y ago
  Of course, that also raises the question of who they asked to rate the sites, and they don't provide that information either.
oezi 4y ago
As a European I don't know much about the Hunter Biden story, but it wasn't a political news story because it doesn't even cover a politically relevant person. It is a celebrity story and even two years later no allegation of substance seems to have come from it (skimming wikipedia). From a European perspective it was just outlandish hearsay and speculation. Hard to understand why Americans get so invested when no criminal case materializes.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  The news was that you couldn’t even talk about the truth of the situation in DMs on Twitter.
- didericis 4y ago
  This is a political minefield/one of the most polarized topics of conversation in a minefield of extremely polarized topics, and I greatly value this forum as a place for intelligent conversation. Please don't jump to any assumptions about my presentation of this perspective, or endorsement of crazy people who say similar sounding things, this is simply a summary of why this story is important to the right. The Hunter Biden story is significant because there are emails which suggest Hunter Biden had ties to foreign companies that wanted access to his father. This could be grounds for a criminal case implicating his father. Now, in a sane society during a less polarized election, this would have been discussed in the open, and people would make cases as to the relevance or irrelevance of the evidence, relevance to Joe Biden specifically, and whether the evidence merits investigation through proper channels in an open and transparent way. Since Trump was viewed as even more corrupt and more of a threat by enough people capable of suppressing the story, the story was suppressed, and this conversation didn't happen until after the election. That does not mean the entire FBI and judicial process is broken like some people on the right claim, which is an extremely dangerous accusation, and the lack of a proper case means we do not know the extent or non extent of corruption, but the suppression of the story was a violation of public trust by those who suppressed it and poured a lot of fuel on an already raging fire.
  - notafraudster 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pstuart 4y ago
Hunter Biden's "laptop" is a misdirection campaign. The contents appear to be from Biden but whether or not it was actually sourced as claimed will likely never be verified (the recipient is conveniently effectively blind). But those that care about this story only seem to care about the story about the story, i.e., that there was effort to prevent propagating it. I find it fascinating that every person who is hung up on this story doesn't care about the substance or relevance of it. In regards to substance, it's a story about corruption. The corruption on its face is irrefutable (i.e., Hunter Biden was paid money in an attempt to purchase the influence of his father). That's genteel, old school corruption. But the relevance of it is that Hunter himself is a private citizen and his (mis)conduct is not really newsworthy. But the implication of it is that his father is equally corrupt (which has not been shown), and that is the entire point of the story. That charge of corruption is important to deflect any reports of corruption by the political rival of Hunter's father (of which there's significant reporting of such). My commenting here is pointless yet necessary: pointless because I've yet to see a cogent rebuttal, and necessary because this topic is toxic and should be countered as best possible. edit: 4th paragraph substance to relevance
- leereeves 4y ago
  It wasn't my intention to litigate this story here. I was simply citing it as an example of the difficulty of identifying misinformation. Also, I think a fair discussion of Twitter moderation should include a post-mortem of one of their most famous mistakes, discussing what Twitter did and what should they have done differently, and not so much the story itself. (Of course, the substance is also important, but this isn't the right place for that discussion.)
  - pstuart 4y ago
    That's just it: I don't think it was a mistake (if we're talking "censorship" about the laptop story). The story is radioactive. The veracity of it means nothing -- just the phrase is now a talking point, a campaign slogan. If my points are correct per the prior comment, what good does it serve the people to be amplified in a short attention span economy? Why shine light on dialog that sucks oxygen out of the room? HN is not the place to come to blows over tribal politics, but I think that discussing policies, strategies, and other political hacking is worthy of being explored if there's willingness to examine the impacts that these actions have.
originalvichy 4y ago
This is a tangent. Twitter declared this story a story about hacked material which they treated as rule-breaking at the time. They changed their rule afterwards, but it is a legitimate rule to have. The quality was measured by a group that was selected due to their broad range of leanings. It should be in the final paper.
rallison 4y ago
As mentioned elsewhere, the laptop story was not restricted for being misinformation, it was restricted due to Twitter's policy (at the time) on hacked materials. Some background: https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/16/twitter-fixes-bad-policy-blocking-hacked-documents/ https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/16/twitter-fixes-bad-policy... It was a policy that had previously received criticism, and had already come into play in a significant story: https://www.techdirt.com/2020/09/16/content-moderation-case-study-twitter-removes-account-pointing-users-to-leaked-documents-obtained-hacking-collective-june-2020/ https://www.techdirt.com/2020/09/16/content-moderation-case-... And, following the laptop story, Twitter changed their policy on hacked materials. And that's the thing with content moderation - specific examples of content moderation often themselves go viral, but often also shed the actual context of said moderation (as was the case in your example), and thus feed into existing narratives around bias in content moderation. With full context, one might still disagree with the policy, but the narrative falls away.

nfgivivu 4y ago

sdafdasfds 4y ago

"This working paper has not yet undergone peer-review."