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I don't follow or give attention to American politics, I don't live in America, and probably never will. But the Left bias in Social media is extremely concern

I don't follow or give attention to American politics, I don't live in America, and probably never will. But the Left bias in Social media is extremely concerning, its so apparent from the type of people who work in tech, especially in Silicon valley, that they have a Leftist bias, whether the Left or the Right are correct doesn’t matter. The issue is Social media in our time is it’s where a lot of people form opinions, follow news coverage, and basically inform themselves about the world. Instead of it just being a impartial medium, it actively controls and narrates the conversation. before Social media (IMO) no conversational medium strived to control and influence the conversation itself. the coffee shop didn’t really pay attention to what you said(with exceptions of course) they just cared that you ordered something. In a family gathering the medium itself doesn’t influence the conversation, your family members do. And when People go to complain about this, Left-leaning tech workers will just say “don’t be mean”, or don’t break the rules, I doubt their reaction would be the same if Social media was more right leaning, heck Left-leaning journalists are already trying to dismiss the story as nothing important, while it’s the first known proof of political leaning affecting moderation by going beyond the rules. the Hunter Biden laptop story should’ve been much bigger, and downplaying the affect social media censorship had on it, is just lying. Its a problem and I don’t know the solution either, is it creating a new type of classification that forces Social networks to act as an impartial communication medium? Is it creating a public social media for each country?, almost nobody knows, but acknowledging the problem is a first step. (Please don’t go into a flame war about American politics, this is a conversations about Social media political leanings, not American politics)

whateveracct 4y ago
Why should it have been a bigger story exactly? My understanding is there wasn't any wrongdoing found (not to mention the chain of custody was a mess).
- jacooper 4y ago
  I didn't read the whole thing, but from the reactions of politicians in the Twitter files and some news writers, it looks like it was something worth paying attention to, surely more than the every day doom and gloom headlines. (As I said I am not an avid american politics follower, I would remove the "should've been a bigger story" line if that's an issue)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
mikkergp 4y ago
Here’s the thing thought. So far the emails show a team making a mistake, and being thoughtful about it. Trying to look to their moderation principals and disagreeing about the path forward. Then, later we know Jack and Yoel and most of the team apologized and admitted it was a mistake. If these people were all conservatives and I saw this interaction I would say the same thing. So tell me a story about principals that apply universally that should make me more concerned. > the hunter biden laptop story should have been a much bigger story. Should it? This is the most Barbara Streisanded news story in history; There have been two years of investigations and nothing has come of it. Maybe it was just a nothingburger that also happened to have been handled by Twitter badly. Even Matt taibbi said that the suspression was a bigger story than the original article.
- jacooper 4y ago
  I edited the bigger story line
- ilyt 4y ago
  > Then, later we know Jack and Yoel and most of the team apologized and admitted it was a mistake. Sound more like "we're sorry we got caught"
  - mikkergp 4y ago
    I didn’t read details about their apology, what makes you say that?
    - ilyt 4y ago
      I just don't believe there is anyone that would look at what they are doing and go "yes, that's the right course" only to figure out that maybe manipulating politics using your power in social media company is not a good thing to do.
  - etchalon 4y ago
    They got caught doing something that it was public knowledge they were doing and the whole point of them doing it was immediately acknowledged in public?
andsoitis 4y ago
> In a family gathering the medium itself doesn’t influence the conversation, your family members do. One perspective is that the medium IS the message.
nikitaga 4y ago
If you think it's the Twitter's moderation team who's responsible for "to control and influence the conversation itself" on Twitter, I got bad news for you. Political conversation on twitter is driven by: 1) loud extremists on all sides of the political spectrum 2) domestic and foreign agents working to destabilize society for their gain 3) bots amplifying all of the above Regular people, the majority of them with bland moderate opinions, are largely absent from all of that, yet somehow we all pretend that Twitter and other such platforms are representative of the population. I mean, if we weren't pretending, there would be very little reason to pay attention to it, yet here we are. There are two types of platforms that (somewhat!) managed to escape the trap of extremism: 1) Those owned and controlled by billionaires for their own gain (state funded channels, major private news channels, local news stations, etc.) 2) Platforms that are too small / too niche / not used by people for sharing political opinions (niche forums, most people's email, etc.) I am yet to see any solutions for this. Everyone's pumping Mastodon as if it can solve extremism / spam / bots. It can't, the extremists, special interests, and their bots will just follow you there... if Mastodon ever becomes big enough to drive political discourse that is. And if it won't, then it's no different from the myriad of niche forums we already have – those are great, but utterly irrelevant to the problems we face with platforms like Twitter. Neither will government-enforced censorship improve the situation. If you disagree, let's wait until <party-you-hate> is in power, then implement this change. <excuses follow>. Yeah, that's what I thought.
- jacooper 4y ago
  > 1) loud extremists on all sides of the political spectrum One side controls and puts rules for the entire conversation, that's the issue. > Regular people, the majority of them with bland moderate opinions, are largely absent from all of that Yet they consume that content, that's why it shouldn't be controlled by a biased party.
  - nikitaga 4y ago
    > One side controls and puts rules for the entire conversation, that's the issue. Moderation bias is only a minor issue in practice, compared to the real issues that I mentioned. Twitter is still a cesspool of both left wing and right wing propaganda despite your claim that one side "controls the entire conversation". > why it shouldn't be controlled by a biased party So... 1) You have an unbiased party in mind, and this party is unbiased because it's magically incorruptible in principle, not because it currently holds no power worth corrupting. or 2) You claim that no party should control twitter at all (aka free speech absolutism), and have a magical solution to ward off extremism and deliberate attacks and bots. Either way, it's irresponsible to keep such groundbreaking discoveries from the world, please do share.
objectivetruth 4y ago

whateveracct 4y ago

Why should it have been a bigger story exactly? My understanding is there wasn't any wrongdoing found (not to mention the chain of custody was a mess).

jacooper 4y ago
I didn't read the whole thing, but from the reactions of politicians in the Twitter files and some news writers, it looks like it was something worth paying attention to, surely more than the every day doom and gloom headlines. (As I said I am not an avid american politics follower, I would remove the "should've been a bigger story" line if that's an issue)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

mikkergp 4y ago

Here’s the thing thought. So far the emails show a team making a mistake, and being thoughtful about it. Trying to look to their moderation principals and disagreeing about the path forward. Then, later we know Jack and Yoel and most of the team apologized and admitted it was a mistake. If these people were all conservatives and I saw this interaction I would say the same thing. So tell me a story about principals that apply universally that should make me more concerned. > the hunter biden laptop story should have been a much bigger story. Should it? This is the most Barbara Streisanded news story in history; There have been two years of investigations and nothing has come of it. Maybe it was just a nothingburger that also happened to have been handled by Twitter badly. Even Matt taibbi said that the suspression was a bigger story than the original article.

jacooper 4y ago
I edited the bigger story line
ilyt 4y ago
> Then, later we know Jack and Yoel and most of the team apologized and admitted it was a mistake. Sound more like "we're sorry we got caught"
- mikkergp 4y ago
  I didn’t read details about their apology, what makes you say that?
  - ilyt 4y ago
    I just don't believe there is anyone that would look at what they are doing and go "yes, that's the right course" only to figure out that maybe manipulating politics using your power in social media company is not a good thing to do.
- etchalon 4y ago
  They got caught doing something that it was public knowledge they were doing and the whole point of them doing it was immediately acknowledged in public?

andsoitis 4y ago

> In a family gathering the medium itself doesn’t influence the conversation, your family members do. One perspective is that the medium IS the message.

nikitaga 4y ago

If you think it's the Twitter's moderation team who's responsible for "to control and influence the conversation itself" on Twitter, I got bad news for you. Political conversation on twitter is driven by: 1) loud extremists on all sides of the political spectrum 2) domestic and foreign agents working to destabilize society for their gain 3) bots amplifying all of the above Regular people, the majority of them with bland moderate opinions, are largely absent from all of that, yet somehow we all pretend that Twitter and other such platforms are representative of the population. I mean, if we weren't pretending, there would be very little reason to pay attention to it, yet here we are. There are two types of platforms that (somewhat!) managed to escape the trap of extremism: 1) Those owned and controlled by billionaires for their own gain (state funded channels, major private news channels, local news stations, etc.) 2) Platforms that are too small / too niche / not used by people for sharing political opinions (niche forums, most people's email, etc.) I am yet to see any solutions for this. Everyone's pumping Mastodon as if it can solve extremism / spam / bots. It can't, the extremists, special interests, and their bots will just follow you there... if Mastodon ever becomes big enough to drive political discourse that is. And if it won't, then it's no different from the myriad of niche forums we already have – those are great, but utterly irrelevant to the problems we face with platforms like Twitter. Neither will government-enforced censorship improve the situation. If you disagree, let's wait until <party-you-hate> is in power, then implement this change. <excuses follow>. Yeah, that's what I thought.

jacooper 4y ago
> 1) loud extremists on all sides of the political spectrum One side controls and puts rules for the entire conversation, that's the issue. > Regular people, the majority of them with bland moderate opinions, are largely absent from all of that Yet they consume that content, that's why it shouldn't be controlled by a biased party.
- nikitaga 4y ago
  > One side controls and puts rules for the entire conversation, that's the issue. Moderation bias is only a minor issue in practice, compared to the real issues that I mentioned. Twitter is still a cesspool of both left wing and right wing propaganda despite your claim that one side "controls the entire conversation". > why it shouldn't be controlled by a biased party So... 1) You have an unbiased party in mind, and this party is unbiased because it's magically incorruptible in principle, not because it currently holds no power worth corrupting. or 2) You claim that no party should control twitter at all (aka free speech absolutism), and have a magical solution to ward off extremism and deliberate attacks and bots. Either way, it's irresponsible to keep such groundbreaking discoveries from the world, please do share.

objectivetruth 4y ago