4 ms·

What the Twitter Files Reveal About Free Speech and Social Media

10 points by cocacola1 4y ago

ETH_start 4y ago
What Wells is leaving out, when writing the following, is the testimony of the journalists who reviewed the Twitter files: >>When the authors characterize internal company communications as reflecting a progressive point of view and provide a couple of screenshots as examples, the reader has no way to check that the characterization is fair. The authors claim that the content removal requests came primarily from people who leaned left and supported the Democratic party: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598829996264390656?s=20&t=Grn8NkbuOsZOOtrHw1MQuQ https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598829996264390656?s=20&... Regarding Wells' characterization of facts surrounding the moderations actions taken against Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya, there are a few problems: >>Now, Bhattacharya is not the guy who got the pandemic right. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed in March, 2020, he claimed that covid was only one-tenth as deadly as the flu; He did not claim this. He said that one very preliminary finding could suggest that, but by no means staked his position on that: https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as-they-say-11585088464 https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as... He also got the damage that the lockdown would do, and their minimal effectiveness in reducing the spread of COVID, right: "lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, while they have imposed enormous economic and social costs." Report: https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature... https://tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.1976051 https://tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.197605... So Wells' claim that: "We should be glad that most governments did not take this advice." Is misinformation. He tries to downplay the signficance of the trends blacklist here: "You could also make a case that declining to include a tweet in the “trending” section is a pretty mild course of action, amounting to a decision not to promote: if the Times opinion editors had passed on Bhattacharya’s op-ed before the Journal accepted it, no one would accuse them of suppressing free speech." The trends curation is typically done via algorithms, base on user behavior data, unlike the Op-Ed section of a newspaper. This was meddling with the organic functioning of the trends algorithm to suppress an entire viewpoint.

10 points by cocacola1 4y ago

What Wells is leaving out, when writing the following, is the testimony of the journalists who reviewed the Twitter files: >>When the authors characterize internal company communications as reflecting a progressive point of view and provide a couple of screenshots as examples, the reader has no way to check that the characterization is fair. The authors claim that the content removal requests came primarily from people who leaned left and supported the Democratic party: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598829996264390656?s=20&t=Grn8NkbuOsZOOtrHw1MQuQ https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598829996264390656?s=20&... Regarding Wells' characterization of facts surrounding the moderations actions taken against Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya, there are a few problems: >>Now, Bhattacharya is not the guy who got the pandemic right. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed in March, 2020, he claimed that covid was only one-tenth as deadly as the flu; He did not claim this. He said that one very preliminary finding could suggest that, but by no means staked his position on that: https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as-they-say-11585088464 https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as... He also got the damage that the lockdown would do, and their minimal effectiveness in reducing the spread of COVID, right: "lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, while they have imposed enormous economic and social costs." Report: https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature... https://tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.1976051 https://tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.197605... So Wells' claim that: "We should be glad that most governments did not take this advice." Is misinformation. He tries to downplay the signficance of the trends blacklist here: "You could also make a case that declining to include a tweet in the “trending” section is a pretty mild course of action, amounting to a decision not to promote: if the Times opinion editors had passed on Bhattacharya’s op-ed before the Journal accepted it, no one would accuse them of suppressing free speech." The trends curation is typically done via algorithms, base on user behavior data, unlike the Op-Ed section of a newspaper. This was meddling with the organic functioning of the trends algorithm to suppress an entire viewpoint.