6 ms·

OK, so EU is allowed to manipulate social media under various threats, and now when some social media says enough of this, they are criminalized? And people are

by storus 1y ago

OK, so EU is allowed to manipulate social media under various threats, and now when some social media says enough of this, they are criminalized? And people are applauding it?

xyzal 1y ago
Those threats are called "laws". We strive to the ideal of living in a society that respects laws. Twitter/X is free to leave if they don't like it, of course.
- bluecalm 1y ago
  Yeah but then laws need to be clear, understandable and possible to enforce fairly. What is X accused of specifically? "Algorithm manipulation" doesn't sound like a crime to me.
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    > What is X accused of specifically? Nothing. There is an investigation (there are named offenses that are the main, but not stated as exclusive, focus), not an accusation against X and various individuals. The investigation may, depending on what it finds, result in accusations against some or all of the people on whom the investigation is focused, but whether it will and what the accusations will be is not known until the investigation has occurred.
  - xyzal 1y ago
    I bet on 'foreign interference'
    - storus 1y ago
      That's becoming the new "think of the children".
  - orwin 1y ago
    It is if you find criminal intent. They probably won't find any, so the probe won't end up in a lawsuit. Basically it's a discovery process before a litigation. I'm 99.99% sure it won't end up in a lawsuit. My bet is that the probe will end up saying: 'criminal intent can't be proven'. Then either the parquet (basically DOJ but less political) or customer protection will say "this probe showed that your algorithm wasn't neutral, you choose which content to show and which not show, you're a publisher now" and Twitter will have to prove it's not, or be treated as a publisher.
fzeroracer 1y ago
Maybe we can ask Mecha Hitler what his opinions are on social media manipulation.
libertine 1y ago
TV, Radio, Press, Outdoors, and every other media have laws and regulations - laws and regulations set by elected officials, that go through a transparent process, and for which people might disagree and vote out those elected officials. This ranges from the amount of advertising space, content, and political propaganda; everything has a set of rules and regulations. Why is it ok for you to have a billionaire do whatever he wants, including spreading disinformation and propaganda, and allow for bot networks to spread propaganda from foreign agents, without any accountability? Why should we have no rules for social media, while all the remaining media have to abide by laws and are held accountable for it? Why should a billionaire have more power than the people who voted?
- retinaros 1y ago
  he complies with those law and even proved it thousands of times. he even said it himself that he had to comply to country law and blocked/banned accounts french gov asked him to Do you believe that your political opponents investigating an "algorithm" to prove it is "manipulated" would not already have written the output of this investigation? Every freaking machine learning model has a bias. ask GPT or anthropic about palestine or even Trump, ask Deepseek about tiananmen. If you search for something you will find it. I could take GPT and prove its "manipulated" toward any race I want. Ill just start from this affirmation and then find things good enough to prove it to random people that will read the billionaire backed press that you praise
  - libertine 1y ago
    I'm not sure what you're trying to imply. Didn't the Twitter algorithm change in July 2024 after Elon endorsed Trump, to increase his reach and the reach of other individuals?[0] > Every freaking machine learning model has a bias. You're saying this like there's no human decision behind it. As if it's an act of nature and "oh well that's how it turned out to be!", without any concern for legality, revenue, growth, user engagement, nothing matters, it's just "the algorithm doing its thing". Every social media algorithm is tailored, and people continually modify them. Heck, Google even named their algorithm updates for search! But let's entertain that idea of lack of agency - just because they don't have agency over the algorithm (which they do), they can still shut it down. If they can't control whether an algorithm promotes illegal stuff, or if it's being massively used by foreign agents' bot networks, then should they be running their own business? But hey, somehow they have it figured out for advertisers! lmao [0]https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/17/24298669/musk-trump-endorsement-x-boosting-republican-posts-july-algorithm-change https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/17/24298669/musk-trump-endo...
retinaros 1y ago
look at what europe and its media did to romanian elections. we are in Huxley brave new world
- drcongo 1y ago
  You've not read Brave New World have you.
- tzs 1y ago
  Romania really needs to fix their election system. They are using a system where the winner is whoever gets more than 50%, but if nobody gets more than 50% they hold a run-off vote between the top two from the first vote. The problem is that Romania has several viable political parties, which would be great if they used an election system designed to handle that like ranked choice, but in a top two run-off system has a high chance of electing someone that a large majority of the voters rank near the bottom of the candidates. In the election you are referring to there were candidates from 10 different parties plus 4 independents running. I believe 6 of the parties were right-wing and 4 left-wing. The right-wing parties got 47% of the votes, with the top 3 of them getting 19.18%, 13.86%, and 8.79%. The left-wing parties got 20% with the highest part getting 19.15%. Independents got 33% with the highest individual getting 22.94%.
  - retinaros 1y ago
    france actually has the same. this is how they decided the president of france for 2 decades. forcing french people to choose the lesser evil. but somehow romania doesnt have this freedom because they chose wrong apparently.

by storus 1y ago

OK, so EU is allowed to manipulate social media under various threats, and now when some social media says enough of this, they are criminalized? And people are applauding it?

xyzal 1y ago

Those threats are called "laws". We strive to the ideal of living in a society that respects laws. Twitter/X is free to leave if they don't like it, of course.

bluecalm 1y ago
Yeah but then laws need to be clear, understandable and possible to enforce fairly. What is X accused of specifically? "Algorithm manipulation" doesn't sound like a crime to me.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > What is X accused of specifically? Nothing. There is an investigation (there are named offenses that are the main, but not stated as exclusive, focus), not an accusation against X and various individuals. The investigation may, depending on what it finds, result in accusations against some or all of the people on whom the investigation is focused, but whether it will and what the accusations will be is not known until the investigation has occurred.
- xyzal 1y ago
  I bet on 'foreign interference'
  - storus 1y ago
    That's becoming the new "think of the children".
- orwin 1y ago
  It is if you find criminal intent. They probably won't find any, so the probe won't end up in a lawsuit. Basically it's a discovery process before a litigation. I'm 99.99% sure it won't end up in a lawsuit. My bet is that the probe will end up saying: 'criminal intent can't be proven'. Then either the parquet (basically DOJ but less political) or customer protection will say "this probe showed that your algorithm wasn't neutral, you choose which content to show and which not show, you're a publisher now" and Twitter will have to prove it's not, or be treated as a publisher.

fzeroracer 1y ago

Maybe we can ask Mecha Hitler what his opinions are on social media manipulation.

libertine 1y ago

TV, Radio, Press, Outdoors, and every other media have laws and regulations - laws and regulations set by elected officials, that go through a transparent process, and for which people might disagree and vote out those elected officials. This ranges from the amount of advertising space, content, and political propaganda; everything has a set of rules and regulations. Why is it ok for you to have a billionaire do whatever he wants, including spreading disinformation and propaganda, and allow for bot networks to spread propaganda from foreign agents, without any accountability? Why should we have no rules for social media, while all the remaining media have to abide by laws and are held accountable for it? Why should a billionaire have more power than the people who voted?

retinaros 1y ago
he complies with those law and even proved it thousands of times. he even said it himself that he had to comply to country law and blocked/banned accounts french gov asked him to Do you believe that your political opponents investigating an "algorithm" to prove it is "manipulated" would not already have written the output of this investigation? Every freaking machine learning model has a bias. ask GPT or anthropic about palestine or even Trump, ask Deepseek about tiananmen. If you search for something you will find it. I could take GPT and prove its "manipulated" toward any race I want. Ill just start from this affirmation and then find things good enough to prove it to random people that will read the billionaire backed press that you praise
- libertine 1y ago
  I'm not sure what you're trying to imply. Didn't the Twitter algorithm change in July 2024 after Elon endorsed Trump, to increase his reach and the reach of other individuals?[0] > Every freaking machine learning model has a bias. You're saying this like there's no human decision behind it. As if it's an act of nature and "oh well that's how it turned out to be!", without any concern for legality, revenue, growth, user engagement, nothing matters, it's just "the algorithm doing its thing". Every social media algorithm is tailored, and people continually modify them. Heck, Google even named their algorithm updates for search! But let's entertain that idea of lack of agency - just because they don't have agency over the algorithm (which they do), they can still shut it down. If they can't control whether an algorithm promotes illegal stuff, or if it's being massively used by foreign agents' bot networks, then should they be running their own business? But hey, somehow they have it figured out for advertisers! lmao [0]https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/17/24298669/musk-trump-endorsement-x-boosting-republican-posts-july-algorithm-change https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/17/24298669/musk-trump-endo...

retinaros 1y ago

look at what europe and its media did to romanian elections. we are in Huxley brave new world

drcongo 1y ago
You've not read Brave New World have you.
tzs 1y ago
Romania really needs to fix their election system. They are using a system where the winner is whoever gets more than 50%, but if nobody gets more than 50% they hold a run-off vote between the top two from the first vote. The problem is that Romania has several viable political parties, which would be great if they used an election system designed to handle that like ranked choice, but in a top two run-off system has a high chance of electing someone that a large majority of the voters rank near the bottom of the candidates. In the election you are referring to there were candidates from 10 different parties plus 4 independents running. I believe 6 of the parties were right-wing and 4 left-wing. The right-wing parties got 47% of the votes, with the top 3 of them getting 19.18%, 13.86%, and 8.79%. The left-wing parties got 20% with the highest part getting 19.15%. Independents got 33% with the highest individual getting 22.94%.
- retinaros 1y ago
  france actually has the same. this is how they decided the president of france for 2 decades. forcing french people to choose the lesser evil. but somehow romania doesnt have this freedom because they chose wrong apparently.