6 ms·

Yann Lecun is also telling everyone on Twitter very loudly that he won't be posting on Twitter. The Guardian in another article explains that they are annoyed

• adastra22 2y ago
  > The Guardian itself used their own platform to publicly endorse Harris. Isn’t The Guardian a UK publication?
  • ThomPete 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • seydor 2y ago
    Yes https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2024/oct/23/the-guardian-view-on-the-us-presidential-election-2024-a-democratic-government-is-the-one-we-need https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/202...
  • skissane 2y ago
    > Isn’t The Guardian a UK publication? Yes and no. For many decades they only operated in the UK. More recently they have launched digital-only US and Australia editions, whose editors are based in the US and Australia respectively, creating content aimed at each country’s audience using local journalists, but the three editions share content for stories of global significance. But still their HQ is in the UK, and I believe their UK staff and readerships are significantly larger than their US or Australia operations
  • jfengel 2y ago
    Yes, they are a UK publication. But they cover a lot of US news and have a significant American readership. So, like American newspapers, they have an informed opinion and an audience that wishes to hear that opinion. That's how newspaper endorsements work. In this case the writer of the endorsement cannot themselves vote, but their opinion can still have weight. The Economist, another UK-based periodical with a more right-wing stance, explains why it endorses candidates: https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2024/10/31/why-the-economist-endorses-political-candidates https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2024/10/31/...
    • adastra22 2y ago
      At least here in America, endorsement of foreign politicians is seen as election interference, and generally not done.
      • jfengel 2y ago
        Newspapers don't generally do it, but I've never seen it as a matter of avoiding interference. Rather, it's just that we simply don't have much interest one way or the other in most elections. The newspapers don't spend a lot of time covering them and would not consider themselves sufficiently knowledgeable to make an endorsement. The American election is special, in that it's the "leader of the free world". What we do here affects everybody, in a way that even the leadership of Germany, France, and England doesn't. Perhaps we'd have an opinion about the leadership in Russia or China, but they don't have free elections. The government should probably refrain from making an endorsement, but if people can't figure out the distinction between a government and a newspaper, that's their own lookout.
  • gerdesj 2y ago
    It's the Grauniad.
  • rsynnott 2y ago
    It has a US version, with its own editor and some of its own reporting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_US This is somewhat common for British media groups; the Guardian also has Australian and New Zealand versions, and the BBC has _loads_ of regional versions.
• grahamj 2y ago
  I think it's much more reasonable for a news outlet to have a political opinion than a social platform.
  • gjsman-1000 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • boogaboo 2y ago
      [dead]
    • pm90 2y ago
      Endorsements for political candidates are done via the editorial boards which are different from the newsrooms. The editorial boards of news organizations have always had opinions and publish them as such. There is nothing problematic with this approach.
      • gjsman-1000 2y ago
        > There is nothing problematic with this approach. A. You assume the editorial board does not have a significant influence over the newsrooms. By endorsing a candidate, they demonstrate which direction the pressure on the newsroom is coming from. B. This was not why freedom of the press was granted. I was not arguing whether it is a good or bad thing now; merely that this was directly opposed to the role envisioned for them.
        • ywvcbk 2y ago
          > This was not why freedom of the press was granted Not about this specific point but people making these decisions back in the 1700s and 1800s were at least as flawed as us (arguably much more) and made some extremely horrible/stupid choices in hindsight. Treating them as effectively infallible religious figures is well.. just that. Especially if we consider that the interpretation of what freedom of speech (and press) meant was extremely narrow by modern standards well into the late 1800s and beyond.
• boogaboo 2y ago
  [dead]
• jmull 2y ago
  Is it "childish antics" for the Guardian to have their own political viewpoint? Musk can have a preferred candidate and political stance. And he can run Twitter accordingly. The Guardian can have a preferred candidate and political stance. And they can choose the platforms they use accordingly. It all seems perfectly reasonable to me.
  • hulitu 2y ago
    > Is it "childish antics" for the Guardian to have their own political viewpoint? When a journal is biased... it is biased. Objectivism is one thing. Bias is another. Bias at the US elections shit is just another level.
    • the_mitsuhiko 2y ago
      > When a journal is biased... it is biased. I would like to know which newspaper or journal is not biased.
      • secstate 2y ago
        This. Goddamn am I sick of people claiming bias on a news organization with tacit expectation that somewhere the platonic form of news information exists which is objectively true and unbiased. It does not exist, it never will exist, and if Serenity has taught us anything, it's that you can't stop the signal, Mal.
        • oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
          I remembering learning at school, at about the age of 12, that all sources are biased.
        • jay_kyburz 2y ago
          Yes but, a new organization should at least _strive_ to be objective, even if the journalists have subconscious bias. If you lean in to your biases you stop being news and start being entertainment.
• oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  The Guardian is a newspaper with a long-proclaimed left-wing bias. Musk has claimed that X is politically neutral.
  • whamlastxmas 2y ago
    X is hundreds of millions of people so it’s hard to claim it’s anything
    • crabmusket 2y ago
      X refers to the company itself, not every user. And by extension naturally it should refer to the algorithms developed by the company.
      • whamlastxmas 2y ago
        The algos are public information so if there was bias it seems like it’d be fairly straightforward to show it
  • rurp 2y ago
    Musk claims a lot of things. Amplifying right wing propaganda and conspiracy theories, often from his own twitter account, is not politically neutral.
    • jslaby 2y ago
      It's not even amplified just from his account but the site itself. Create a new account and follow something like sports or entertainment.. then see what floods your feed. I logged in first time today, and it's quite shocking actually. Not a single left leaning account, just all maga that outnumbers the sports or whatever you clicked as interests.
      • wruza 2y ago
        Is it even strange, considering that elections just happened and who’s gonna be the new president?
• dools 2y ago
  Musk claims he is trying to be an open and free speech town square. I don’t have an opinion on whether he did this or not but it is certainly the case that if he put his finger on the scales that goes against his claims.
  • briandear 2y ago
    Did X suppress support of the other side? The Hunter Biden laptop story is a prime example of the difference between X and Twitter. The suppression of Covid debate is another example. On old Twitter you could call someone a Nazi and accuse them (falsely) of genocide. But if you “dead name” a celebrity, you’d get banned.
    • 1986 2y ago
      Yes, a user was banned for sharing the Vance dossier https://www.fastcompany.com/91198871/why-x-suspended-journalist-ken-klippenstein-for-sharing-a-hacked-document-on-jd-vance https://www.fastcompany.com/91198871/why-x-suspended-journal...
    • dools 2y ago
      I'm not sure about the veracity of your claims of bias pre-Musk (I have heard of the NY Post story issue, as far as I'm aware they suppressed it on advice from law enforcement that it was foreign propaganda, which was later withdrawn and the block removed). However in answer to this question: > Did X suppress support of the other side? If you have 2 options and you promote one artificially then that is the same as suppressing the other option, in either case you're making sure more people see one option than the other.
    • rsynnott 2y ago
      I mean, new!Twitter went through a phase of banning people for merely uttering the dread word 'mastodon'. They also, briefly, hilariously, memory-holed the word 'Twitter' (any occurrence of the string 'twitter' on the mobile app would be replaced with 'X', leading to a rare 2020s outbreak the Medireview Problem: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/medireview https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/medireview). And various other deranged petty nonsense.
• montagg 2y ago
  Maybe this isn't something you believe, but actual adults can have different opinions and then choose not to associate with one another. There's nothing childish about that. Help me understand, though: what are you actually proposing? That The Guardian, while feeling they can't get their own message out given how Musk runs Twitter, should stay on Twitter? Should anyone disadvantaged by how Twitter is run stay there?
  • maxilevi 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • valval 2y ago
    I’m more interested in what it is you’re proposing with your questions. It seems like you’re implying that the way “Musk runs” X would disadvantage media sites like The Guardian operating on their platform.
  • ranyume 2y ago
    You're right. I think hypocrisy is an adult thing. Parent's post gives unjust bad reputation for children.
  • wruza 2y ago
    There’s no proposition in the root comment, and the opinion and judgment is valuable by itself, imo. Let them do what they do and let us say what we think. It all does something, right?
• JSDevOps 2y ago
  [flagged]
• alsetmusic 2y ago
  X doesn't control algorithms that promote content and suppress dissenting views on a major social network.
  • stonogo 2y ago
    No, its owner does that.
• EGreg 2y ago
  Looking past the childish antics, don’t you think it’s kind of rich that; 1) The party which has been kvetching the most about being deplatformed and canceled by mainstream media and colleges etc. is now in power and in the name of promoting free speech promises to go after institutions in academia etc. that are full of their political opponents (who lean left) for “claming down on free speech and calling it disinformation” 2) One man bought Twitter and controls everything about the platform, some things definitely increase freedom of speech (eg proliferation of neo nazi and openly antisemitic viewpoints) and some of his own decisions clamp down on it (eg overnight declaring that “cis”, the opposite if “trans”, is a slur and cannot be said on Twitter anymore) 3) The same man will now be heading up D.O.G.E., the bureau of government efficiency, together with another private sectir billionaire (who got public sector money) to defund many public sector things, or at least make them more efficient To sum up, we’ll be in the strange situation where the party in power is concerned about increasing freedom of speech (usually the counterculture wants this freedom while the ones in power want to repress dissent). We will have the world’s “most free social network” actually OWNED AND CONTROLLED by one guy, who happens to also work for the government, in fact head up a new government agency tasked with defunding others, and is a super-Fed. People on the left will start to question the optics and unusualness of all this. Will the MAGA party (the acronym GOP seems very outdated) in good faith encourage speech against themselves, and will the owner of X, while heading up a major new agency in the federal government, also encourage loud criticism of their own activities? Or will their algorithms — which one man will continue to ultimately control — silently (and maybe only as an emergent behavior) prioritize what they want and suppress what they don’t? As long as Zuck controls Facebook (sorry, “Meta”), Elon controls Twitter (sorry, “X”), and a few on the top control Google, YouTube, TikTok etc. I do not see true power for the people. “Freedom of speech” is just another expression the owners and corporations co-opted and hijacked to mean “controlling a platform” and “owning an audience”. Why do we simply donate our audience and content to these platforms? Because they have the backend software infrastructure and we don’t. I believe that we need open source alternatives that anyone can host, that no one can own the entire network. Not even Durov. Mastodon and Matric and Bluesky are a good start. I’m working on my own too: https://community.qbix.com/t/growing-your-community/305 https://community.qbix.com/t/growing-your-community/305 And yes, it is possible for the entire ecosystem to make money serving the people with open source infrastructure, just like Wordpress, Drupal etc. Here is how it could work: https://qbix.com/ecosystem https://qbix.com/ecosystem
• pupppet 2y ago
  Not quite the same. There’s a bit of difference between encouraging votes for the good of the people and encouraging votes to help you personally. But if I’m mistaken and Harris promised the Guardian a govt position they could use to pass laws to help them personally, do tell.
• NewJazz 2y ago
  The Guardian is not a platform, it is editorialized content.
• jmyeet 2y ago
  That's a very silly conflation. The Guardian is a newspaper. They broadly have two sections: reporting and editorial. Reporting is basically that. Now you can (correctly) argue that there is bias on the reporting side in how they choose to cover certain stories, how they choose what stories to cover, etc but there are still minimum standards they adhere to, like they won't knowingly print anything objectively false. They'll issue corrections and retractions if necessary. The editorial side is quite literally opinion. The Guardian, like any publication, can issue their opinion on a given political race. But you know that's opinion. They'll argue why for their position. You can agree or disagree with their reasoning or conclusions. But it's intellectually honest. Now compare that to Elon and Twitter. It's not even remotely the same. Twitter has an algorithm to decide what to show people. He's used it to push his own posts [1]. His own posts have openly pushed conspiracy theories [2], things that are provably false. This can go as far as pushing literal Nazi conspiracy theories (aka the Great Replacement [3]) and make sure as many people as possible see it. It is utterly disingenuous to conflate the two. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets-algorithm-changes-twitter https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets... [2]: https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/5/20/23730607/elon-musk-conspiracy-twitter-texas-shooting-bellingcat-taylor-lorenz-psyops https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/5/20/23730607/elon-musk-... [3]: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-great-replacement-conspiracy-theory-1234941337/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-...
• UltraSane 2y ago
  The richest man in the world using his own social media company to get someone elected President so he can benefit personally from writing his own regulations is something EVERYONE should be very VERY concerned about. The US is on the path to Russian style oligarchic kleptocracy.
• tzs 2y ago
  Generally, when newspapers endorse a candidate that runs on the editorial page. How did Musk use Twitter to promote his candidate? Was it on whatever the Twitter equivalent of editorial pages are? Was it promoting posts favorable to that candidate in people's feed and/or demoting posts favorable to other candidates? Details matter in these things.
  • netsharc 2y ago
    The discussion in here is infuriatingly childish. Saying a news site is just the same as a site that's ended up as Elon's (and numerous rightwing trolls') soapbox...
    • wruza 2y ago
      As an external observer, it’s all sites working as -ist soapboxes to me. The fact that you call a politically superaffined site “a news site” alone, man. A news site doesn’t promote specific candidates by definition. Seems like some people forget what “news” means. Saying a leftwing site is just the same as a site that's ended up as Elon's (and numerous rightwing users) soapbox... Ftfy
      • NewJazz 2y ago
        Op eds have always been a component of news.
      • stvltvs 2y ago
        It sounds like you're unfamiliar with the split between the news desk and the editorial desk, two separate functions in the same org. Last I checked the Fox News news desk was a pretty reliable source of info. All the editorial programming on the other hand, wackadoodle partisan hackery.
• croes 2y ago
  Did the Guardian also use lies and fear mongering like Trump and Musk did?
• blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  Very disappointing to see that overt bias from Yann LeCun. Makes me wonder how much Meta and Llama can be trusted on AI.
  • lofaszvanitt 2y ago
    Corporatism is en route to USA. Cyberpunk, big time. Watch it unfold.
  • tim333 2y ago
    Dunno - X/Twitter, at least at the leadership level, has switched from neutral to MAGA. I find it quite reasonable for him to want to move somewhere more neutral.
• rsynnott 2y ago
  The Guardian, note, isn't a social network, it's a newspaper. The idea that social networks and newspapers should be held to different standards is reasonable, because they are different things. It is _legal_ for Carface to use Twitter to promote ol' minihands, but, yeah, I mean, not everyone's going to like it and some people are going to leave due to that (or due to many other problems with Twitter over the last two years).