Conservatives flock to Parler, claiming censorship on Facebook and Twitter
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Social media may have created an outrage economy -- a subset of the attention economy.
But like ebay, craigslist, etc, the social media platforms' broad focus means their product can't specialize when strong trends emerge. The outrage will be unbundled by niche companies.
I actually think this is a good thing. Seeing conspiracy theories on the same platform as your cousin's family photos, or nobel winners, has a legitimacy-building effect on the outrage content. Maybe on its own platform it will look more like what it actually is. Nobody mistakes the tabloids in the checkout aisle for a legitimate newspaper.
I'd love to see people go back to early 2000's PHPBB-similar specific topic/hobby/interest forums with tens to hundreds, maybe a couple thousand members. The good days.
and spam. relentless spam. in my view, spam and spammers are the worst thing that happened to forums. a constant arms race against spammers and then script kiddie types trying to break into forums, often so they could spam even more ads.
but I like the sentiment. there are still plenty of phpBB type forums out there, and I like them. It's much better than having everything hidden away behind the barbed wire wall of Facebook Groups.
On one hand, I agree there is a positive to isolating the worst of social media off on a separate site.
On the other hand, we're (maybe) just starting to see Facebook etc take some action on the worst elements of social media. This subverts that and makes it harder for Facebook to take further action in the future: shareholders will rightfully ask "what if you lose even more users by banning <socially negative thing>".
Also, the bad thing about fb etc is that they just want to sell you advertising. But that's also the good thing, Facebook don't care about your politics, they don't particularly want to influence you as a person, they just want you to click on ads for shit you don't need.
I wonder about other social networks, eventually someone will weaponise one, and sell votes rather than clicks. Is this the start of that? An expressly Conservative social network is much better placed to sell souls than clicks...
As long as the FBI are aware and can prevent these things, I suppose it's a nice honeypot, but if not then it's a literal weaponization of social media.
I'm just not quite sure the case has been convincingly made that internet cess pools generate crime that would't otherwise happen. I could probably be convinced otherwise, but I'm not sure.
Echochambers based on hatred (of Trump supporters, "SJW"s or black people) just leads to awfulness, what's needed is controlled exposure to average members of the hated group to cool them down.
In 2-4 years' time, we'll have an even bigger festering cesspool of self-reinforced beliefs than ever before, and an more difficult time having rational discourse among our society about how to run it.
And to nations that have connections to those key nations, right? Because encryption and steganography and VPNs all exist, and the amount of dangerous foreign propaganda in tweets is probably only being generated at a few bytes per minute.
Someone should write a techno-thriller set in your alternate universe where spies are investigating a WiFi connection between north and south Cyprus, with the endpoint in the north connecting via Turkey to Russia, and the endpoint in the south connecting via Ireland to the US. It could be a fun read if you can suspend disbelief.
It is a little bit less likely that you dislike heartland America when you spent a year working with Fred the Farmboy before you headed to Princeton. Fred could probably swap stories with a kid from the ghetto and may be they would come out with the understanding that they were not quite as different after all.
Of course, like any draft it would be a huge violation of the persons personal freedom.
I find it interesting you choose this as an example, and not rather say that "Fred the Farmboy" might actually see those "librul coastal elites" or "ivory tower intellectuals" as people like himself. The latter are terms I've actually seen used.
But on the topic of a Civilian Conservation Corp, yes, definitely bring that back!
I wonder, if he had instead chosen your example, would you no longer have found it interesting, but other people would then have found his new comment interesting (who did not find the one he made here interesting).
Abstractly, it is quite interesting what humans find to be interesting, and how that interest level can be so easily inverted by simply injecting of new values into various seemingly innocuous variables.
Well, I find it interesting anyways. But most other people I've encountered seem to kind of consider such topics to be....~"not appropriate for discussion in polite company", in that they often have strong negative reactions to the very idea, if not outright demanding that you cease engaging in discussion of such topics ("starting flame wars" is the formal terminology used during Overton Window enforcement) - and if you do not, they themselves will disengage from discussing the topic (while maintaining an air of extreme confidence and certainty in their alternative ideas). "Gaslighting", "whataboutism", "gish galloping", etc are some of the most common rhetorical accusations that I have experienced in my journeys (if any are given at all that is).
My point is that many on the right claim there is no attempt at empathy from the left, meanwhile there are many on the right (not always the same people, I acknowledge) who will say "fuck your feelings" and use (from their POV) epithets against leftists instead of addressing grievances or even ideologies.
I myself have what I consider enough perspective on the heartland; my parents grew up in Iowa, and both sets of my grandparents worked in the agricultural fields. This is not to claim I have first hand knowledge, but I am white and I recognize the many aspects of privilege I am afforded. I feel I have enough of that perspective.
Meanwhile, it seems glaringly obvious that many on the right are not even making attempts at understanding why BLM exists, and can't seem to comprehend systemic racism, because they've never been a victim of it. FFS, when Bloomberg admitted to stop and and frisk, that I felt should have been a turning point. For decades people of color have been telling us about this, but they were commonly dismissed by white americans as imagining it.
To elaborate on why I am not willing to empathize further than I have, I have no wish to empathize with bigotry. One set of my grandparents were also homophobes, which was laid bare in their will when their estate left out my homosexual brother completely. I hope I don't have to cite Popper's paradox of tolerance.
"Fred the farmboy" wants understanding and compassion? I'm all for that, I even want to put policy in place to help! But I have zero tolerance for intolerance, and will call it as I see it.
My point is that there is a widespread phenomenon whereby individuals notice logical or other shortcomings in members of their various outgroups, and then write comments on forums about this behavior in a manner that implies (if not outright asserts as fact) that this sort of behavior is overwhelmingly limited only to members of the outgroup, and does not exist within their ingroup.
And if one is in a community with a user base that is ideologically homogeneous, this one-sided, inaccurate description of reality often becomes kind of a constant theme that reappears in thread after thread, in turn (so they say) reinforcing these beliefs in the minds of those who regularly read such comments.
Regarding "found it interesting", it can also be observed within such communities how certain ideas catch the attention of people, but abstractly ~identical ideas (but differing at the object level due to different values of variables) go unnoticed.
If one observes these discussions carefully over a long period of time, patterns of behavior become extremely apparent: basically, textbook confirmation bias, information bubbles (and the flawed descriptions of and predictions about reality that inevitably result), and so forth and so on. Of course, this shouldn't be too surprising.
But the interesting part is if one happens to wade into such a conversation, drawing people's attention to the manifestation of these abstract behaviors within the current thread. At this point, one would logically expect a reaction something like surprise and then realization (due to HN being largely composed of highly logical people with above average levels of integrity and honesty). However, this is not what actually occurs, the majority of the time (in my experience as an ideological outlier). What actually occurs usually more so resembles what one would see on "less high quality forums" than here (rhetoric, "mental gymnastics", insults, logical fallacies, etc etc etc). Of course, this is just human nature in action, but still - it's weird, I don't see why we can't do better (than other communities), and I really can't wrap my head around why we wouldn't want to do better than other communities. And yet, here we are (not you...I am speaking in general).
> To elaborate on why I am not willing to empathize further than I have, I have no wish to empathize with bigotry.
> But I have zero tolerance for intolerance, and will call it as I see it.
I completely agree with the sentiments of what you've written here. However, I wonder if you are as good at exercising these beliefs as you perceive (I'm making no accusation, I am merely discussing the idea - I too deserve the very same cross examination, and encourage anyone to do so).
Let's start with defining some terms:
bigotry - stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one's own
truth - the true or actual state of a matter; conformity with fact or reality
epistemology - the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion
perception - the act or faculty of perceiving, or apprehending by means of the senses or of the mind; cognition; understanding.
prejudice - preconceived judgment or opinion; an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge
So, a non-controversial example of bigotry would be racism, which typically involves some variation of racist individuals forming negative conclusions of POC (individually, or as a group) based on preconceived ideas, without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge. Racism is a pretty easy one to spot, everyone here has consumed plentiful educational material, and most likely engaged in several conversations on the matter.
Now let's examine another group that is often subject to bigotry, even here on HN: conspiracy theorists.
1. Do you happen to have a personal opinion on conspiracy theorists?
2. Do you have an opinion on the nature of typical discussions here on HN related to conspiracy theorists?
And before you answer, please note:
a) I went to the trouble of stating definitions for several terms above, but really only made use of [prejudice] thus far.
b) It has been my experience that such questions are typically responded to with rhetoric, evasiveness, character attacks (insinuations of bad faith, gish-galloping, etc). I would prefer that this conversation does not fall victim to that pattern, but rather, follows a more honest, curious, and productive path (which I believe is one of the more important things that is missing in the world).
For example, someone wanting others to act according to their religion.
I spent decades with my parents, but there’s nothing to “understand”. They speak a different language (even though we have the ability to use the same words) and live in a different world than me.
If we can think about 5% of the population who simply have different life situations and backgrounds having a better appreciation for why they think what they do, and those 5% become less extreme and more understanding of compromising for the benefit of others, then you've just changed society completely.
In addition I think that if you are destined for the elites then it is more important that you understand (really understand) the life of the others, than if are apprenticing to be an electrician.
Two things here:
1. What exactly makes you think the college educated are exposed to fewer points of view than those from the "heartland"? Everything I've ever seen points to the opposite being true, where going to an institute of higher learning puts you in touch with a *vast* array of different people, and living in an urban center does the same. Which leads me to my second point:
2. Why exactly do you think it's not important for someone from the "heartland" to exercise empathy or be exposed to other viewpoints? It's pretty obvious that a large factor in the problems of today is tribalism and "othering", which gets pretty quickly destroyed by exposure to those same "others", something you don't often get in the "heartland."> It is a little bit less likely that you dislike heartland America
This is a strawman. Relatively few people "dislike" heartland America in and of itself. The objection has always been to people voting for bigotry, and on top of that, it's always to their own detriment, plus it is all too common that it is "heartland America" that are the ones who need to exercise more empathy and are the most likely to disparage "others" and outsiders because they are not exposed to them. There's a reason people become more liberal and in favor of progressivism as they move towards higher population centers and become more educated and exposed to the rest of the world.
And then, to ensure that all that hard work does not go to waste, modify the HN guidelines (or, introduce a brand new, experimental mode that includes these modified guidelines, to be used when discussing culture-war topics) such that ignoring this aspect of reality is explicitly forbidden.
There's no way of knowing whether this technique would fix the problem unless we actually try it. But as long as all social media platforms refuse to try this (or similar experimental ideas), choosing instead to only pay lip service to the idea of trying new ideas to improve the situation, I do not foresee humanity escaping this mud pit that we have built for ourselves.
[1] This is the fundamental root problem, but there are a few subordinate ideas that should be addressed simultaneously to maximize the chances of success.
Is there no possibility that you may be somewhat mistaken?
Note:
- your first statement references the entirety of HN; it is plausibly likely that you have not consumed (and comprehensively perceived with complete accuracy, and remembered) the entirety of forum discussions on HN
- your second statement involves events in the future - as far as I know, the ability to accurately predict the future in a multivariate scenario has never been proven
If I am incorrect on either of these two items, I would appreciate any corrections you may have.
Look up a Fermi problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem
That's a good place to start with these kinds of questions.
I figure this is true simply because of the remarkably low population of Hacker News compared to society at large; there's simply not enough people here for changes to this specific site to make an impact on the larger social media ecosystem.
To be more realistic, I'll estimate that getting the social media platform Hacker News exactly perfect from a systemic standpoint might have an impact on around 0.001% of the societal social media problem. We've then got 99.999% more to impact.
And if you believe that people reading Hacker News are somehow more influential to society than the average social media user or something... well, we would not then have that belief in common.
>>> How do we get back from where we are now? I have to admit, my social skills are lacking, my patience is low; and the problem just seems so vastly overwhelming that I can't imagine where to even begin.
I suggested a novel idea:
>> I suggest that we fully acknowledge in comprehensive, "dimensional & behavioural complexity", that which lies at the bottom of all of these problems: the human mind.
>> And then, to ensure that all that hard work does not go to waste, modify the HN guidelines (or, introduce a brand new, experimental mode that includes these modified guidelines, to be used when discussing culture-war topics) such that ignoring this aspect of reality is explicitly forbidden.
What I meant by the root problem being the human mind, is this commonly recurring issue where people make stuff up, and assert it as fact.
And lo and behold, observe the response.
> Look up a Fermi problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem
Ok...
> In [physics or engineering education], a Fermi problem, Fermi quiz, Fermi question, Fermi estimate, order-of-magnitude problem, order-of-magnitude estimate, or order estimation is an estimation problem designed to teach dimensional analysis or approximation of [extreme scientific calculations], and such a problem is usually a back-of-the-envelope calculation.
> Example questions given by the official Fermi Competition:
> "If the mass of one teaspoon of water could be converted entirely into energy in the form of heat, what volume of water, initially at room temperature, could it bring to a boil? (litres).", "How much does the Thames River heat up in going over the Fanshawe Dam? (Celsius degrees).", "What is the mass of all the automobiles scrapped in North America this month? (kilograms)" [2][3], Possibly the most famous Fermi Question is the Drake equation, which seeks to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. The basic question of why, if there were a significant number of such civilizations, ours has never encountered any others is called the Fermi paradox.[4]
These are pretty extreme, needle in a haystack class problems. Funny thing though: I seem to be able to find "needles in a haystack" on HN with about 75% of my comments. This is suggestive that perhaps these needles may not actually be as rare as you perceive, and claim (with evidence that consists of nothing but rhetoric).
> I figure this is true simply because of the remarkably low population of Hacker News compared to society at large; there's simply not enough people here for changes to this specific site to make an impact on the larger social media ecosystem.
My thinking is that if one group of people could learn how to have honest(!), non-imagination-presented-as-fact based discussions about the nature of reality (which includes massive amounts of unknown variables), something no other social media site (or perhaps even individual human being) that I know of seems to be able to accomplish in the year 2020, perhaps this knowledge could be shared to other subreddits, and we could get some sort of a grassroots anti-delusion movement underway. I know of several subreddits that have been trying different things to get people to stop fighting, I doubt they'd turn their nose up at a technique with a proven track record.
> To be more realistic, I'll estimate that getting the social media platform Hacker News exactly perfect from a systemic standpoint might have an impact on around 0.001% of the societal social media problem. We've then got 99.999% more to impact.
More imagination-based numbers, with no concern for the details of the underlying idea, or what might actually be possible. No concern or intent to improve the world. Must. Win. Argument. Must. Support. Tribe.
> And if you believe that people reading Hacker News are somehow more influential to society than the average social media user or something... well, we would not then have that belief in common.
Alternatively, you could consider the possibility that you are not omniscient, and that someone you disagree with may actually have a valid point.
More seriously, I think you would be surprised at the variety of human experience that’s not covered by your ideals here.
> More seriously, I think you would be surprised at the variety of human experience that’s not covered by your ideals here.
I'm not sure what you are getting at here. I am not talking about my "ideals", or at least that is not the primary focus of my comments. The primary focus of my comments is this phenomenon whereby people have an extremely strong aversion to discuss what is Actually True.
If you believe I am mistaken in this, I would be more than happy to discuss it at great length. Perhaps I have some imperfections in my analysis that I am unable to see, and you can point them out so I can then improve upon my model.
I welcome being proven wrong - I encourage people to do it.
This is the first good argument I've heard for the alt-right abandoning platforms with some standards of veracity, and it's an excellent idea. Sort of like how everyone knows what 4chan is about, and the moment you hear someone repeat some Qanon stuff you know you can stop listening.
(Please note, I'm not equating Conservatives with the Sith, here. I'm making the point that a story being censored can make it seem more interesting and more credible, even if it is heard from a source that is deemed disreputable by some).
I've seen this before with Usenet groups that got too bogged down with infighting and trolls, so splinter groups formed off on handmade vBulletin/phpbb sites or wherever.
They always imploded shortly afterward. A safe space eventually falls to the same splintering, just in more fractal detail.
Some of them survive the implosion and come out of the wreckage in okay condition, but a lot never come back.
Clay called it right, 17 years ago. https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisit...
"And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, because they were being overrun by these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn’t defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom. They had no way of saying, “No, that’s not the kind of free speech we meant.” But that was a requirement. In order to defend themselves against being overrun, that was something that they needed to have that they didn’t have, and in the end, they simply shut the site down."
1. Designing Social software is as different from UX design as UX is from bare functionality.
2. Tech groups are not immune from using “vilification of external enemies” to increase group cohesion, where enemies included Microsoft in the 90s, it’s probably surveillance capitalism today.
3. Unrestrained social software can lead to constitutional crisis: the tension between individuals and group, the rights and responsibilities of each, what’s the social contract for an online community? That’s more political science than computer science.
Was it "I disagree with Trump's approach to foreign policy..."
or was it thousands of spam messages?
https://www.cato.org/blog/twitter-alternative-they-can-keep-...
They also banned fake accounts pretending to be well known people and accounts engaged in illegal activity (death threats etc). I'm fine with that personally, I don't expect them to operate a totally "free" speech service and somehow weather all the lawsuits that brings.
I think this is a nice case study in how free speech inevitably conflicts with keeping majority opinions happy. The fact that they folded on freedom to get/keep people with such thin skin so sort of tells you what their business model really is imho.
Cest la vie.
But one could argue (and I'm not arguing that it's the case here), one could have different rules around what's allowed versus Twitter, and it could be a more open forum, but still censored (trolls, deaths threats, "fk you" posts).
I'd be content enough if they were upfront and said this is a place for "Conservative opinions only" rather than "free speech". I'd even agree that's their right and that they might get more open and productive discussion that way at least in some cases. But it's just not free speech.
I think that's what frustrates me about this: it's the hypocrisy.
I actually hold a few Conservative opinions myself. But i wouldn't ban people from disagreeing with me AND claim to support free speech...
Would you be in favour of banning people supporting ISIS, child molestors or the Nazis? Because from a conservative perspective, the rationales of one might apply to the other and so many nominally free speech environments ban support for those groups.
If someone is running a free speech platform, people should be able to advocate for all those things. Don't mistake me for a hypocrite who decrys censorship only of things I don't want censored. I'm not. People should actively discuss and advocate for positions they hold no matter the position. That's free speech. There are few limits (openly inciting violence, plotting crimes1, copyright etc)
If a platform or audience doesn't like that, they can drop free speech and become a safe space. That's their business. But they shouldn't censor speech and claim they are for free speech. That seems to be what is happening here.
Fyi, I haven't kept up on antifa or the events around them. But my position is that looting is wrong. At the same time, I'm sure they are right about at least something. That's a pretty safe, reasonable position right? Not on Parler. On Parlar that position is banned. And by banning my comment, you are banned from correcting me. How is that a positive for you or me or any other reasonable person? It only seems a positive for those who are too weak to bear hearing such simple positions. And even they are trading wisdom in the long term for comfort in the short...
Sorry. I feel quite strongly about censorship. It's a foolish idea we should have dropped back when we still had Kings and lived in mud huts.
Each social media site imposes its own filter bubble.
If you combine together a bunch of social media sites for consumption, you hit more different bubbles, and thus get more variety in the speach.
Adding new sites with different rulesets then makes freer speach on the whole, even though each platform is not very free on its own
Which is fine, I feel that people should be free to form any clubs/groups they want.
They can't do that AND profess to support free speech within their club.
I think people should be able to form their groups as they like. But that doesn't mean that that group is a healthy place or that it doesn't harm wider society.
I'm also not clear whether this is a group of people forming under their own initiative (as is their democratic right). Or if its actually some shady privately funded project by billionaires seeking to influence elections. That second option is much less democractic and would (imho at least) be open to investigation and regulation like any other campaign activity. Hopefully it's not that, it's just someone trying to launch twitter 2.0 and make some cash.
What a mess! :)
Sorry, but they can and do.
This is a group of people that will happily shut down your speech while proclaiming themselves to be the defenders of free speech and liberty.
They will happily insult you, but are quick to play victim and complain about being oppressed and harassed and insulted.
Let's not jump to conclusions, otherwise we are as guilty of the credulity we are casting on them (Soros bucks, anyone?). Until there is hard evidence of this, please don't bandy it about.
https://www.businessinsider.com/rebekah-mercer-funds-parler-...
"[Robert] Mercer played a key role in the campaign for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union by donating data analytics services to Nigel Farage. He is also a major funder of organizations supporting right-wing political causes in the United States, such as Breitbart News, and Donald Trump's 2016 campaign for president."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mercer
They're a husband and wife pair that fund hyper partisan causes, it's not exactly jumping to conclusions.
Well then, I am grateful you cited sources. GP proffered the claim with nothing to back it up. I'm definitely the kind to believe these claims, as I've seen them verified in other realms before (Murdoch, Ailes, Kochs, Sinclair, etc), but that's precisely why I have to question that instinct. I can't just go believing things without evidence.
They aren't remotely for free speech either, by the way. I started an account there, disagreed with someone (I guess one of the wrong people to counter), and was banned within 10 minutes for wrongthink.
It's also a free speech issue. The main purpose of free speech is the ability to criticize your government and social media have obviously a huge influence on elections. As we move towards more and more lockdowns, where you won't be even able to just go out and speak your mind to the public, the social media will become the only way of communication. If you are not allowed to speak freely on those platforms and be able to actually make a change, it will render the free speech laws completely useless and you might as well repeal them at this point. Free speech laws should apply to social media.
You might not agree with the ideas that are being censored right now, but sooner or later they will come after you too.
In the 1800s not everyone had a newspaper to spread their ideas. That is not a violation of freedom of speech for the ones who can't afford a newspaper. They aren't entitled to a platform - they're entitled to the government not restricting their platform.
What about a property on a busy road - a sign there has more impact than a sign at a house off the beaten path. You're essentially arguing that because that property has more visibility, it is unfair to the other who doesn't have that same location. This just isn't how the constitution works.
> What about a property on a busy road - a sign there has more impact than a sign at a house off the beaten path. You're essentially arguing that because that property has more visibility, it is unfair to the other who doesn't have that same location.
In US there were a couple of court cases that ruled that free speech applies to places that are technically private. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...
And if I'm not mistaken, you already have plenty of FCC regulations regarding means of communications like TV, radio and internet, that probably could be construed as violations of either freedom of speech or freedom of association.
We could spend all day arguing about legalities and whether it's constitutional or not. Under current laws it is in fact exactly as you say, but this is a huge problem. I live in one of post-soviet countries, so it shouldn't be a surprise that a lot of people here, including me, are against socialism. But I have to admit that the left has a point. Or at the very least had a point, since I sometimes encounter people who will say how capitalists are evil and then proceed to explain how social media are a private property and corporations are free to do whatever they want with them. If we don't do something about this, we might very soon find out how truly dystopian capitalism can be.
You're arguing for a fairness doctrine - e.g. Fox News should be forced to show the other side an equal amount of time.
I know there is no law preventing social media from censoring people. If there was, we wouldn't be arguing about this right now. What I'm saying is that free speech should be extended to social media.
Now regardless of 230, if the government says "twitter, you can not moderate." That is a violation of Twitter's freedom of speech. It can moderate content however it pleases as of now.
> I know there is no law preventing social media from censoring people. If there was, we wouldn't be arguing about this right now. What I'm saying is that free speech should be extended to social media.
The reason there is no law is because it's unconstitutional. The government can't force speech on platforms, even if said platforms are not responsible for its content.
Sure it doesn't, I brought 230 up because you've equated the ability to post content with endorsement of that content. And again, I'm not sure where do you got this "censoring you is actually my freedom of speech" thing from.
I already posted a wikipedia article proving that in fact yes, you can legally "force speech". I'm not a lawyer, I don't know the law, but it seems to me that we have all those politicians wasting time on nonsensical stuff like trying to ban E2E encryption, so why shouldn't they for once do something useful and ensure that corporations cannot abuse their powers?
I follow the topic carefully and I've never seen domains being taken down just because people were simply discussing conservative politics.
Hosting platforms love getting paid and tend to block extremist "clubs" like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormfront_(website)
I don't know much about Parler, but going just by what people are saying, it seems just like twitter but for conservatives, so it's no good either. Not sure what gab is now up to, but from what I remember, it was just a free speech site. They had some rules like no doxing, but other than that they never banned anyone for anything. You could say anything you want no matter what your politics are, as long as you didn't violate the law. So the issue for me is not really "conservative clubs", but that you will get targeted by the companies up the food chain, just by allowing free speech to be exercised.
Parler chooses not to maintain the same freedom. But then falsely claims it does...
This is, empirically, false.
Just as the right can chant “freedom of religion” and mean by that “freedom of my religion to impose it's views on others while others are suppressed”, they can also chant “freedom of speech” and mean the exact same thing with “speech” in place of “religion”.
At some point we'll need to have a psychological nuclear weapon disarmament... the question is when and how, not if.
This should be all anyone needs to know about how seriously these groups takes freeze peaches. Look at their actions, not their words.
Don't just take a claim like this as the whole story, they are generally in "tidied up" form.
You'd want the text of the post, the person's posting history on the forum in question, a list of warnings etc and a copy of the forum rules to even approach a reasonable judgement.
It's not about free speech and being oppressed, it's a literal safe space - which is fine, but selling themselves as the opposite of that just makes them look foolish.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/gumxuy/...
To be clear, it makes sense to ban fake accounts proporting to be well known people and people breaking the law.
Banning anyone with views you dislike and anyone paroding conservatives is where it gets censourous.
Thanks for the link but nothing in that article supports this comment. The only mention of content not allowed is:
1. Matze's post about spam, NSFW content, and death threats not being allowed (https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/styles/pubs/public...)
and
2. Matze's post about banning the accounts of a group of ANTIFA supporters (https://imgur.com/WaAMEyn). This image was linked without any context (perhaps because Matze posted this without any context) so we don't know why these accounts were banned.
> Trolls hoping to test the boundaries of Parler’s commitment to free speech and get a rise out of its users began, often vulgarly, impersonating prominent Trump supporters and conservative publications.
> Parler responded by banning the impersonating accounts, including some inoffensive parodies.
(The linked article seems to have some bias towards supporting Parler, so they may be giving Parler the benefit of doubt and framing it as a reasonable measure. BTW, kudos to parent comment for linking to a source like this - because of the article's bias towards Parler, there's no doubt to a random reader like me that these bans happened, as opposed to if it was reported by a politically opposed source. )
> A seeming[1] blanket ban of Antifa supporters from the platform, announced by founder John Matze, might be similarly understood as an antiharassment measure.
(Here the linked image seems to be implying that planned brigading was going on, to prompt the ban.)
I'm curious if Gab bans support of antifa. They couldn't claim it's about indirectly inciting violence, because they come close to the line when it comes to Nazi opinions. They do ban porn, which is fine with me. There's plenty of porn and it doesn't benefit from a network effect the same way. And I'm glad every place bans spam.
I doubt the first thing that Parler did was censor anyone, they probably first sent out advertisements to tell people of their existence.
I think free speech is important and I think that social media platforms can be a bit overzealous in their moderation of the content of its users. I just don't think you can sell a platform on it alone. It should be a feature of your platform, not the only thing going for it.
And it can’t be a coincidence that “Gaming” with a capital G is the only topic that I saw suggested for me to follow.
Netflix doesn't carry it in my country.
Star Trek Discovery is awful for many reasons.
How do they intersect?
So they could segregate every side into their own little recommendation bubble, if they have the content range for it. Seems to work for youtube.
Besides this, there's a clear feedback loop that happens regardless of the intent of the service's creators. The people most likely to get kicked off of social media platforms nowadays seem to be far-right kooks. So when they are looking for a new platform, they'll go somewhere that advertises for no moderation. What happens next is pretty obvious; the more those sort of people migrate to the service, the more visible their content will be to any visitor. And that content tends to be pretty effective at driving away non-kooky users, which leads to a reinforcing cycle that, over time, turns you into yet another take on Voat.
This greatly saddens me. Can't there be some way to build a platform that encourages intelligent, reasonable, polite debate? Discussions of ideas based on their merits instead of personal attacks and tribal allegiances? Some way to provide free speech without providing free amplification? Has society devolved to a point where this is no longer possible?
Start everyone off with a maximum influence credit of say 10 people, like in your local neighborhood.
As you contribute to thoughtful discussion, as determined by the diversity and ratio of up/down arrows, your maximum influence credit grows as a function of your geography.
What if there were separate dimensions for: Factually accurate, Morally agreeable, and Polite?
A machine learning algorithm could quickly work out which groups of users have different ideological positions, and which topics are likely to devolve into flame wars, so it could require that users have a minimum politeness score to be able to participate in a debate.
It could also, as you say, check for echo chambers forming and incentivise people with differing opinions to enter a discussion to balance it out.
The reason is you're inappropriately applying an technical solution to a social problem.
You also make at least one critical error:
> As you contribute to thoughtful discussion, as determined by the diversity and ratio of up/down arrows
Upvotes/downvotes pretty much never measure "thoughtfulness," because for them to do so would require a level of social cohesion that would probably make upvotes/downvote unnecessary.
Yes. They are called journals and academic conferences.
Most people aren't interested in these things and if you build forums for everybody, it definitely will not turn into scholarly debate.
Twitter allows (and promotes?) hate mobs while Parler supposedly doesn't.
There’s no hate in the KKK. They are all white. Why would they hate each other?
See the problem with this construction?
You are implying that hating people based on something they cannot control (e.g. ethnicity) is normal.
That said, since you bring it up, the history of humanity is largely the history of war between different ethnic groups. So yes, hating people based on ethnicity has been the norm for most of human history. It's still largely the case in varying degrees in different parts of the world.
Nice try.
> So yes, hating people based on ethnicity has been the norm for most of human history
There you go.
And yet history proves you wrong, starting with the roman empire and the middle ages.
You did. Right here: "e.g. ethnicity". That's a quote from you. I mentioned in-group, you added ethnicity.
> There you go. And yet history proves you wrong, starting with the roman empire and the middle ages.
At this point I wonder if you are trolling. The roman empire waged war on pretty much every single other ethnic group around them and enslaved them. Which the other ethnic groups around them were also trying to do at the time. Then we have the middle ages with the crusades and such... etc etc etc
Unless you provide proof, there is no reason to discuss this.
But on the internet, this is easy - it's a damn service you can buy and it scales on the orders of 1-to-1000 or (usually much more) voices.
CAPTCHA's don't solve it - because this is also a service - breaking CAPTCHA's by the hundred and supply account keys in bulk.
You simply cannot have a digital space which works like a physical one, and as such you cannot meaningfully not moderate it because human participants cannot out-pace bots and sockpuppet accounts. Facebook's entire, unearned initial trust was because notionally it solved this problem - people forget it was initially limited to student's with student email addresses at school's it knew. It was very much, initially, exclusive enough that it kept something of a lid on this problem.
The feeling about it has persisted far beyond the now non-existence of this mechanism.
edit: oops pasted wrong thing!
Totally agree with this. It should be baked in, not the defining feature.
The main problem with mastodon is that it's hard to discover a good instance to create your account on because you only get a good feel for the instances after you spend some time on there. This isnt all negative because the somewhat higher barrier of entry makes for a better userbase I think, because you need to do a bit of research.
I Honestly think that having a public square where people of all ideologies discuss everything is not that great. I don't want to discuss the US election with trump supporters, or read antisemetic garbage on my feed, I just want to shoot the shit with friendly likeminded people. I've been hanging around mastodon for 2 years now and I can count the times that it has made me mad or annoyed with another user on one hand. The ratio of positive experience to negative experience is way better than twitter.
For me mastodon is a place to talk about interesting tech, look at people's art, crafting obscure jokes that are only funny for an extremely online audience, and hanging out with a diverse group of techies, gamers, leftists, artists, philosophers, scientists, LGTB+ folks, solar punks.
When I follow people I mostly just check if they don't have any posts that are homophobic, transphobic or racist, because that is shit I do not want on my timeline. For the rest I don't really care, I just follow the people whose posts I enjoy reading.
The alternative for many might very well be attempting to hunt down and censor anything they find objectionable, so their feeds can be both representative, and clean.
A decade from now, I think we’ll view the 2020 election as the tipping point.
The parallels between the US at this moment and pre-war Europe or Rome at the time of the Catiline conspiracy are striking - the centre cannot hold, and the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
It is a democracy after all.
In its simplest form, the civil war wasn't fought because the north thought slavery was bad. It was fought because several states tried to leave the United States.
Hint: Most of the secession declarations include language like this:
> But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution.
Citation needed.
Individual self determination.
If a local majority secedes every time it wants to trample on a minority, or in the case of the civil war, an oppressed majority, two things happen: one, politics devolve into fractured feudalism. Local elites have a mechanism for wresting absolute control. That, not the Constitution or a Bill of Rights or elections, becomes the basic unit of power.
Two, our two-plus century record of peace on the homeland shatters. Every election or court case found unseemly by a contiguous local majority prompts a Twitter and existential crisis. Foreign adversaries hammer the wedge and split the nation into warring vassal states and too-small-to-matter opposing countries.
If such a thing were to happen, the states that ended up on each side would probably end up doubling down on the oppression of those in the other tribe who are still in their state, to encourage them to move to a state that's on their side.
I have a dreadful feeling that the turning point for all of this societal dysfunction will be following the aftermath of a world war.
We're in lockdown so that elite privileges ("Grand Tour", etc.) can be restored, while the "common man" is put in his or her place, with strict regiments governing thought, speech, action, and movement. It is wise to ignore the cultural and political stun and smoke grenades, and pay attention to what is actually happening in real world. As usual, follow the money.
I don't think our elites particularly want a world war either. I think they're perfectly prepared to push us in that direction in an attempt to cling on to their wealth and power though. They will prefer liberalism but they'll support far right populist who protects their property if that fails to garner popular support.
Another part of the complication (fortunately) is that there is also no "real life" external markers that separate us on these issues. You may know where people stand on the Internet about issues, but step outside and it's a sea of ambiguity with every individual you meet. And at that point, people just go about their day treating everyone with respect. (At least in the same amount they have been the last 60 years, which in some cases is not much respect)
I think a lot of those are good things and things we’ve been taught to over-value, without regard for their dangers and without an appreciation for the attendant responsibilities. The country was founded with a HEAVY skepticism of democracy. It allowed for some democratic influence, but the constitution goes to great lengths to restrain, channel, and temper the will of the people. It was adopted at a time when voting was highly regulated and limited to people who were considered best qualified to handle the responsibility. Even today the Constitution contemplates that presidents should be elected, not by the people directly, but by their state legislators. The whole idea of allowing direct democracy in presidential elections is a cop-out by legislators who’ve found a way to avoid that responsibility.
Same with using the law as a sword... that’s largely how it’s supposed to work. This idea that the FBI should be independent flies in the face of having 3 branches. It’s impractical. They’re humans, they also have axes to grind. The difference is that they’re appointed and not easily removed. Leadership is human and will therefore always enforce the law according to whatever axe they have to grind. The goal of a successful republic should be to accept, channel, and utilize that human nature.
However, I agree that there is an overarching crisis in the form of the internet which is destabilizing entrenched powers the same way the printing press did (leading to the renaissance).
A lot of it also comes from the renaissance itself and traditional media. It remains true that there are people who are responsible and learned enough in maters of government to be able to vote, and others who aren’t. However the old rules of racism and sexism have - for all their terrible faults - also lost their utility in this respect. You government can’t count on “white landowning men of good character” to be a ‘superior’ pool to draw insight from. Since our economy is no longer 99.9% agricultural, being “a landowner” is no longer a guarantee that landowners are among the most prosperous and responsible individuals. Now many of our most informed and influential people own little to no land, and those that own modest acreage may be far less knowledgeable.
Women and non-whites are (rightfully) now allowed to be and actually are very well educated and experienced in having serious responsibilities, etc.
So it’s very hard to effectively discriminate between high-quality and low-quality voters...
Meanwhile everyone is almost socially required to care about politics, to be informed, hold opinions, vote, speak out, etc. when there are frankly a lot of people in the world who have other shit going on in their lives and who don’t have the time and resources to waste worrying about politics. Simply not knowing and not caring is viewed as some sort of sin, by both sides, because they view these people a potential votes they could win. I think this is where a lot of the pandering and vitriol is created, because things have to seem super clear to get people - who don’t want to care - to care. Even if you don’t know the first thing about politics, you know the nazis are the bad guys and the communists are the bad guys... Soo, yes, that’s who the other side is!
Once that happened, the government gave up on the average American, allowed middle class jobs to disappear, and spent more time joining global virtue signaling parties and subsidizing bombs in Yemen than fixing lead pipes in cities.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-g... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/... https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/how-ame... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/opinion/sunday/vietnam-th...
Government and citizens are not even two super distinct entities, government are citizens and is put in place by citizens.
Once people with that world view actually enter government, they don’t have a lot of desire to use government for what it could be used for in terms of helping citizens instead of consolidating powers as a function of lobbying dollars.
See, the things we buy wouldn’t be so cheap if we didn’t let some companies in china dump toxic waste for free.
E.g. cheap rare earth minerals from China are only cheap because we are borrowing from the future people who will pay to clean up the mess.
When we more accurately price the real cost of goods by quantifying damage to the worker’s health, global environment, etc. then outsourcing would not look nearly as attractive.
Could you give some examples of these parties and an estimate of how much time was spent on them? I could try to guess what you're referring to, but I don't want to put words into your mouth.
(An uncharitable interpretation of what you said would lead me to believe that you're objecting not to "virtue signaling" but to virtue itself, which is not a helpful assumption for me to make).
This could have easily been written about the late 1960s / early 1970s, though - the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Hoover's FBI and COINTELPRO, the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and Watergate.
The top wobbled but righted itself; perhaps it will do so again.
Every generation thinks they have it the worst.
And even before all that crap below up, they had the gov't taking a long and hard look at the anti-trust problem. The platform censorship just threw gasoline on that smoldering fire.
The smartest move now is to fire all their public relations and government affairs folks. They handled this about as poorly as they could.
How did we, as a species, drop so low that to say that the thing a person says is disputed gets blown up into a huge issue.
I have no problem with people of ANY political persuasion being fact checked - is it perfect? No. But is it better than nothing? On balance, it appears so.
Especially when one side, from the top down, considers everything other than sycophantic praise for its leader to be 'fake news', and the other side has some people opining that even reporting things the other side says without qualification is irresponsible journalism.
If anything, I'd say hindsight makes some of their more dubious decisions (slapping content warnings on stuff deemed to be aimed at undermining the democratic process) look better.
Our society is fractured. There is so much hate and whining online. So much righteousness and loathing. And big tech has only amplified the problem. At times they even fan the flames, what with dubious fact checkers and their “hate speech” bans.
I can’t even go on Reddit anymore. I find myself disagreeing with absolutely everyone now that the dissenting opinions have been pushed out and banned.
And it’s only getting worse.
But I have absolutely no doubt that whatever you consider to be 'fair and unbiased' others will regard as unfair, unbalanced and unpleasant.
I don't get 'banned' but I get downvoted - as I did on this thread with no real explanation.
I have absolutely no problem with "Fact checking" because at least it shows the original thing. I have a big problem with shadow banning, deleting and outright banning. The latter is censorship.
Then if you go the way of Reddit you will please one side and make the other even more angry.
I think the problem is that we see what is happening in the US with poverty and the middle class, but instead we focus on tribalism.
Not sure what the solution is here.
There was this ideal of the internet with information being freely distributed and available, that people would seek out truth. What we have seen though is that large groups of people just believe whoever has the bigger microphone.
Yes they did. In fact, in Twitter's case, they explictly altered their policies so that the failure to take action against this very same POTUS would no longer be a blatant failure to enforce it's generally-applicable policies.
Twitter has apparently had something of a change of heart about that blatant favoritism, and adopted completely new rules to reign in the monster their own rule change created on their platform, but it is not at all the case that the rules that were in place until recently were not crafted with this kind of Presidential action in mind; not only was it generally in minf, the rules were, in fact, created to license this kind of action for the benefit of this specific President, without allowing a level playing field for his opponents.
That's why the fact they even tried, at least in my mind, guaranteed they would fail.
The other side has outright banned questioning important tribal narratives. (That I happen to agree with those tribal narratives is besides the point)
Facebook had a news team that hand-curated top stories (to stop obvious lies going viral). As was the nature of these young news teams, they were more liberal than the average viewer of Fox News. Prominent media personalities on Fox News, as well as US senators agitated that this was biased against conservatives.
Facebook then fired all the editors, and obvious fake news took over the site, with predictable results (who would have thought that the Pope would endorse Trump?).
This incident is important context. Also note that the most engaging content on FB is right-wing conservative content, not left-wing content.
Like, FB tried desperately hard to avoid regulating speech on their platform, but both sides demanded it, leaving them in a position where both groups of partisans think they are biased towards the other side.
> And even before all that crap below up, they had the gov't taking a long and hard look at the anti-trust problem. The platform censorship just threw gasoline on that smoldering fire.
The conflation of these two things makes me very said. There are 100% huge anti-trust concerns around Big Tech, but the censorship crap is a sideshow that will end up preventing any bi-partisan action on this (if I was a super-cynical policy exec at these companies I might even say, just as planned....).
Then the goat was chosen to moderate the cabbage and here we are. If the predictions hold, the ironic end will be, some CEOs blown up by a terrorism wave they helped to create. Thus ended the lesson and the revolution can now eat its kids
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/is-meaningful-section-230...
It's possible that there is some emergent behaviour in markets with large companies and it might even seem like it's a single 'person', but it's not and it makes discussing specifics really hard. Perhaps it's an american thing, but it seems really odd looking from the outside in.
If we're going to be that far removed from reality you might as well live in the woods and fling poo at each other.
The thing is computers do not do any implicit censoring - and so we are expecting FAANG to step up. But we need firstly a set of agreed rules, then the ability to automatically understand the rules before we even get to due process.
The issue is firstly one of scale - HN kinda sorta works because it had clear rules from the start, abs had a lot of moderation, from early users and mods.
Multiply by 1000x the volume and suddenly dang's keyboard explodes.
Facebook is trying to produce moderation at scale with thousands of human moderators, but they probably will never "succeed" - because success is not defined well enough.
Let me restate that. There are thousands of groups on FAANG - each one has its own evolving rules on what is and is not acceptable. But facebook can only really deal with one set of rules. It will try and manage the lowest common denominator - no child porn, no murder, but it slowly heads towards "define free speech"
The main indicator here is that both sides of every political debate think FAANG is censoring them.
- If you are the moderator and both sides think you are biased, you are probably in the right zone.
The problem is do we as society, really want a handful of private companies deciding what the rules are - deciding for example if a Philipino politician can use FAANG to talk to his electorate (because the electorate is all on facebook, say de facto facebook are garejeeping this)
Society does not particularly want this, Zuckerberg definitely does not want this.
So we need to find a way to have regulations that deal with a set of poorly defined globally circumstances (Philipino election law as well as German hate speech laws), some areas of which are the companies problem, some are individual, some are societal and some a mixture. And we want those solutions to be technically achievable, auditable and not constrain us in the future.
That's quite a lot for a few thousand human moderators in poorly air conditioned offices to deal with.
The problem is not the obvious cases. Child porn is a crime in every country, it can be hunted down online. Society generally agrees on that. Similarly for flat earthers. 99% of people in a pub or street will roll their eyes at this shit. It's only because it's all over youtube and so are we that we think it's big. Problems where most societies mostly agree are not the issue.
We could build some kind of rebuttal system - a distributed URL based downvoting system. This would help with the labelling / tagging of dubious posts - at the prominence level of the original post. (ie some W3C tagging for fact checking)
But this is also not about agreeing the same set of facts - people rarely disagree over facts unless facts lead to different political positions. And that's the real issue.
Climate change is probably too huge to cover but let me try - Climate change does not have a solution - the bomb has dropped we are just waiting for the shockwave to hit. Now we can stop pouring fuel on the fire (metaphor breaking sound) by moving off fossil fuel, but also we need to handle the massive changes involving water rights (hello India China) immigration as people get displaced by flooding (hello everywhere).
Denial of this is a human response - because otherwise you have to welcome massive change and people who are not confident their needs will be looked after by the establishment.
This is the real reason for the disparity in numbers of deniers in US and canada / europe - if US built a welfare state tomorrow it would see a massive drop off in climate change denial.
So I think I lost my thread - but fact checking is only part of the politics problem - rapid rebuttal for every stupid online statement is a fine thing to aim for - something good recommendation algorithms could really help with !
But it stops there. Yes it is fine to mandate Ford and GM build cars with airbags and seatbelts - but it is crazy to ask them to build more parking spaces or solve rush hour.
Same goes for online political discussions - YouTube must "fix" (god knows what how) recommendations and facebook must fix the newsfeed and twitter must something. But it has to stop somewhere around the point that someone reading a post is informed - that it is clear and obvious there is debate around what is being said.
After that it is about human biases and cognitive failures - ie politics.
We should work to ensure everyone has the same set of facts. Yes.
But the same set of facts when run through different mental models come up with different actions.
And I don't think it is right to have FAANG ensure everyone has the same mental model. That's what politics is about - and the fact that two people can have the same facts but use different mental models is basically the difference between every political party ever - and is why everyone thinks they are being censored - because if they weren't censored then obviously everyone would vote their way.
On a side note this is something software gives us hope for - I can conceive of building a politics observatory - a sort of version of that UK economy coloured water experiment - where you can view the economy globally - the shows made in China shipped to Fermany and sold - and see how immigration or welfare changes the model.
I think it's possible to have people build up a real software model - to try and reflect in software what their own biases are. I think if this was an app everyone had it would have interesting repercussions- would everyone tend towards a common model? Could you ask for explanations why your model on (prejudice dunjoir) was wrong?
Hang on - I just described a university education.
But these are the easy edge cases. It should be trivial (it was trivial) to rebut.
The problem is not that there was no evidence Obama was Kenyan, it's that there were plenty of people who wanted to believe it. Because they did not want a Black president, or because their mental model is so far away from reality that they think it's possible for someone to cheat that huge.
Then the issue is not everyone having same facts in front of them - it's everyone being willing to accept facts, and so change their own mental models. And then we are back to politics.
Look, I fully support some system of global rebuttal. It will mean no politician can open their mouths without opposition rebuttal - but that's pretty much where we are now in mainstream media. (it's an argument that this is an attraction of online social media - there was no rebuttal (at least no rebuttal that appeared in the same timeline)
I am less happy about the idea of FAANG deleting posts - deleting criminal posts is a tough call (which crinalmlaw to use etc), deleting minsinformation - that's a huge open wound
But the issue is not misinformation - the issue is fertile ground these posts find. And that is about mental models and that is about changing peoples internal mental models of the world - that is getting others to agree with you and that is human politics - and there is no tech fix for that. That is schools and education and society and diversity and a feeling of belonging and investment in society and shared protection.
Surprised the countries with the poor welfare systems have this problem worst? Don't be.
Worried about politicians who are always facing rebuttal - just imagine a world where politicians have to treat their statements like scientific publications - we might start getting somewhere !
Countries with poor welfare systems are that way in large part because there is propaganda against them. Welfare in the US is painted as communist. Same thing with education.
[x] In fact I think this is too important to leave to tech companies. I would like to see some W3C standard for tagging a URI - that is a distributed comments system where the browser / client SHOULD / MUST show that "in the cloud" there are rebuttals to this statement / position. So the rebuttal is seen where the rebutted is shown. The more views a rebuttal gets the more prominent it is in the list of rebuttals.
Yes it will mean everything everywhere has rebuttal but ... that's kind of true anyway. And I like the upthread approach of a common (W3C) distributed moderation (ie a jury of ones randomly selected peers). I think the idea seems workable - but more study is needed :-)
Call it the Other Side Protocol.
I personally prefer smaller communities like forums such as this one, slack groups, or other forums, compared to Facebook or twitter.
I am not sure how a W3C standard for tagging a URI comment would work. Aren't a lot of URIs not even opinion/fact based things? Like if my uri is a product on Amazon or a piece of sheet music there wouldn't be any rebuttals right? But idk seems interesting, would like to see if it worked.
It would change the nature of HN slightly yes, but it could be done with little impact - I think. But having some floor level of debate seems like a social necessity.
PS The Indian issue with WhatsApp a couple of years back makes defining "publish" quite difficult if you can manage to create murderous mobs with opt in messaging systems....
The problem is with determining the standard by which people are censored. Currently, like most large social media companies, Facebook's standard is largely arbitrary, opaque and unequally enforced. Posting audio of Melania Trump's personal phone calls is fine, even though it violates Facebook's policy on posting someone else's personal data without their permission, but posting the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop receives an instant ban. Posting info about the Steele Dossier was fine, even though none of it was verified, but posting any articles about the Biden Ukraine scandal received bans...because none of it was verified.
I'm less concerned with censorship and more concerned with the censorship standard being uniformly applied, and right now, on most sites, it's not.
Most of the staff they use to censor people are young people with left-leaning politics, so even well meaning censors will inadvertently censor conservatives far more often and without explanation.
I think minds.com probably does censorship the best. There's a public log of what gets removed, and it can be appealed to a public group of randomly selected users to judge whether or not the removal was warranted. That's both scalable (since they don't have to hire thousands of moderators) and is responsive and accountable to the community it's trying to foster.
As someone who never engaged with FB/Twitter from the beginning because I thought they were terrible ideas (all the rules, risks, and challenges of elite-level competition with none of the benefits), I was very glad to read this because this kind of divergence is precisely what creates growth. The platforms were becoming a ceiling on growth, and their policies have created the critical mass to start new ones. This will be a great time to be in tech.
Personally, I like Parler's interface, and don't mind that it's kind of a conservative bent, but I've heard from other conservatives that the interface isn't as good as Twitters. And it's smaller audience is already keeping some big-names away from it, even people who would theoretically really like the platform, like Ben Shapiro or Scott Adams. They've both created accounts there, but have both signaled that it's just too small of a platform and is a waste of their time to post there, so they stick with Twitter.
Former British PM Tony Blair once related an anecdote about why he decided to run for the leadership, when Labour had just lost hard in an election and he heard their campaign lead rant, "I can't believe it, the people voted against us...what's wrong with them?" And that is how he saw his opportunity.
Between this cultural shift, tons of idle cash sitting on balance sheet sidelines looking for productive assets and growth, and a winter of semi-lockdowns ahead of us with nothing to do but code, next summer is going to be the most epic year for startups since '96-97. That is, assuming civilization isn't wiped out, but I'm pretty well hedged.
The internet has created the ability for any given subculture to discover instant validation and reinforce their beliefs into a tribe, which further solidifies and extremifies those beliefs.
It's a psychological power almost equivalent to a nuclear reaction: beliefs and ideas that might have naturally died out pre-internet are instead amplified and spread, and dug deeper into peoples' minds.
This is a critical time to be in tech, but not for the growth: for the need to design solutions to that problem. Censorship is a primitive attempt at stopping this psychological nuclear reaction; people are finding ways around it. We need a bigger, better solution to the reaction, lest society destroy itself through unfettered tribalism.
I think that it's possible to minimize tribalism by enabling civil discussion that shares many perspectives, with all hostility removed (and perhaps minimal emotions), and most importantly, let the audience form their own opinions. I really think that technology can solve this. Like all ideas, success is entirely dependent on implementation.
One of the reasons I strongly believe that design—not engineering technology—will be the limiting factor and defining practice for the 2020's.
It is unsurprising that HN commentators think that the best discussion forum would be one without any emotion or hostility.
I think it is important, however, to guard against the hubris of porting your own model (whether it is American-style democracy or HN-style discussion forums) to every corner of the globe.
It might be apparent to us why this model is better, but it might be equally apparent to other, more combative internet commentators, why their model is better. When very smart people on both sides think that a different approach is best, it might be worth treading carefully.
I’m not the person you responded to, of course, but I don’t see how you could’ve read their post and thought they were advocating for inescapable censorship.
Censorship (or official annotation, let's call it) was an attempt to curb the tribalism or put some controls on the spread of it; I'm certainly saying that it will not work.
I can't imagine alternative solutions at this time, but we need to. It will likely be some sort of system we can't yet imagine, and it will likely need to be at the societal level of mutual agreement. Think less of controlling speech, more "wow cars can kill people, we should probably agree to some rules around driving them around."
I expect things will get much worse before those types of systems are put in place.
It's as if the centrists have thrown away liberalism, which makes no sense to me given that liberal values are immensely popular among the public.
Keep in mind also that censorship is a government matter: the government should not censor people; that's enshrined in the 1st amendment. But private platforms and companies have every right to design their communications systems the way they see fit, and I expect them to do so ethically with societal impact in mind.
I expect soon the government will need to enter into this race and take some wider action, but I don't know what that will be, nor how it will play with our constitution. It's going to be a wild ride as the psychological nuclear weapons we've created duke it out with the individual rights principles we've laid in stone hundreds of years ago. I can only hope we design some systemic solution that does not require that fight to take place.
And just to give an idea of the solution type I have in mind: right now the social network systems we have are optimized for addiction and engagement of content, and quick viral spread of content with minimal thought. Could we instead design systems that are more about human communication and understanding? Could we alter our existing platforms to tune down the addictive tribal dopamine hit in their nature? I bet that would have a large impact.
In other words, simply censoring speech without considering the design of the technology would be foolish. The platforms, not the speech, are the problem.
We'll need to find something better, but it's difficult to imagine what shape that'll take at this point.
Take, for instance, limits on total expenditures on political speech over $1,000,000.
Could we conceive of a way not to control speech, but to inform or educate or provide information in context--or do something, anything so that it doesn't have the power to self-reinforce and create psychological weapons of mass destruction? What if it's the design of our current social networks around instant engagement and addictive content that's the root of the problem? Could we change the nature and design of that platform without restricting the speech on it whatsoever?
I have to believe it's possible. I'm under no illusion that I know the answer, or that the answer is even something that we have a name for yet. This is not contradictory or incoherent, it's just yet unknown.
The problem is the asymmetry between bad-faith and good-faith action. In tightly-connected local societies that asymmetry is generally countered by reputation effects and limited scope of bad-faith action. In the worst cases, it's countered by societies being small enough that even when bad-faith ideas take over their spread is limited.
Technology has broken down the limitations. Information is spread by entities with no history or reputation at all (Twitter bots, for instance). The spread of bad-faith ideas is no longer limited spatially. The result of this is that obvious scams like QAnon (created to sell merchandise) thriving because there are now mechanisms to bypass all the natural limitations that used to constrain them throughout centuries of history.
Censorship is kind of like slapping a tourniquet on it. It may stop some of the worst symptoms, but it has a lot of terrible side effects and doesn't work that well anyway.
The biggest advances that need to be made are in recognizing that there is a problem in the first place, and that a "marketplace of ideas" is not equipped to deal with asymmetric bad actors. I don't know what the solution is, but "marketplace of ideas" has proven insufficient to deal with the real world. We need people to be looking for something better instead of claiming there is no problem.
E.g where it was once totally normal to light up a cigarette in the elevator, the subway, the theater, etc, it is now acceptable to spend every moment of down time staring at your phone, scrolling.
If there is wider recognition of the negative (mental) health effects of that it will be less acceptable to do it in public, and less acceptable to espouse views or information learned from such a source.
It's a real shame, because it seems we had reached a peak with the advent of mandatory state school and television. Now things are going downhill with more and more diverse subcultures allowed to build upon themselves and explore the limits and avenues for improvement in their ideas.
There has to be a way to keep people in line with our society's values while still giving them an impression of freedom.
Is this satire?
If you're okay with putting society to the whims of its current incentives and the corporations' addictive advertising-optimized technology, you're free to your opinion, but that seems even more dystopian to me than attempting to do better.
At the very least I think arguing for sustaining the current complex designed incentivized structured state of society is morally equal to arguing for some different state.
That said, I think we also have to recognize that there is no true vacuum of discourse - ie.
> There has to be a way to keep people in line with our society's values while still giving them an impression of freedom.
Even if this is not what we're moving to with public schooling, it is essentially what we're moving to in the private sphere post-Citizen's United, etc. only the values are dictated by those with wealth, rather than procedural, governmental power.
We need to start understanding that there is no such thing as a natural state of freedom; there is only freedom from and freedom to, within specific environmental constraints and power structures. We are always influenced--the question is just what influences we want to prevent, design, or control and which we want to leave undesigned or "free."
Anyway, we are already in a balanced system that keeps people in line with society's values while still giving them an impression of freedom. The question is just which direction you go from there.
Second, your argument devolves to everyone should be able to decide what to do for themselves or their company without discussion about what is good or bad for society or the environment at large.
So no, I can’t agree with that.
At some point we need to be able to discuss how to make society better. If that’s not allowed, then that’s not a society I want to live in.
For example, how much of this reaction is caused by the earlier amplification of other ideas that would have just as easily died out?
I’ve been watching the political machine for a long time and one thing I can say for conservatives is that they are consistent in what they “say” they believe. It hasn’t changed much in years and I can at least respect that.
On the other side, there seems to be a new cause every week. Maybe it’s simply better use of technology, but most of what I see on Twitter seems to be messages designed to benefit the left. Whether it’s drawing attention to a subculture that feels marginalized or convincing that same group that everybody on the right hates them, it’s a pattern that’s really hard to deny. IMO Reddit is far worse that Twitter or FB in this respect too.
Nobody has the energy, time or capacity for the amount of things the right is supposed to hate.
I don’t think a different platform is going to change any of that. I think it’s just going to create a new channel.
I don't believe this is true. I remember "Ye Olde Days" (TM) of the Internet. You went to an independent forum or mailing list that supported your interest (video games, music, politics) and then you argued with everyone in your "tribe" about video games and music and politics regardless of the purpose of the forum (which is hilarious and endearing to me). You had friends and you had frenemies but you didn't have strangers. It was nice. It was a community. Some interest brought you all together but you didn't stay there solely for that interest. You stayed for the people.
Now what do we have? Complete corporate domination and centralization. All interests are segmented into hashtags and subreddits but exist in the same super-massive platform. And there conversation is moderated by two entities. Moderators and the mob. There is no community anymore because the community is too fluid and too large (sometimes its everyone on the internet). You don't know the people you argue with. And so argument can never be taken on good faith.
You know, I had more stuff written but can't quite complete the thought in words. I think I'll just make an alternative.
So if you set up a forum for fans of the Atari, you get all kinds. They get to know each other. And then they talk about whatever.
But several things have smashed that all to pieces.
The first and main problem is that everything is a single site with millions of people now. You can go over to /r/atari and talk about Atari, but if you try to talk to any of those people about climate change they'll direct you to a different sub, which is full of entirely different people who you don't know or trust.
Then the sites that are independent are often operated by the company that makes the product. Sony might host a PlayStation forum, but they're going to boot you out for talking about politics or religion.
And then there's the fact that everything has become disposable. What do you do with your broken out of warranty Atari? Get a soldering iron. What do you do with a broken out of warranty iMac? Get a rubbish bin. But then there's nothing to build a community around, because everything is an appliance that you can't improve or repair.
Perhaps the problem isn't the self-reinforcement, but rather the platforms being designed more on instantaneous engagement and addiction rather than talking and human-level discussion.
We've devolved internet discourse into very simplistic, unintelligent, instant gratification that's friendly to advertising and monetization.
That makes a lot more sense, and why I think it's so important to think of this problem as a much bigger systemic ecosystem. The design of a platform or a system impacts how people behave; the ones we have now have just the right mix of characteristics to cause this sort of insular tribalism.
We can choose to design different ones.
We can do far better.
But I get your point. Realistically this has to be a societal change that demands better social media platforms, not something just thrown into the market with no demand.
This statement may be the crux of disagreement in the culture wars as well. To me this is an alien and hostile idea against all that can be good. I'm sure you have some reasoning based on an experience behind it, but it's very likely one of those irreconcilable differences of interests that we have conventions and civilization to navigate and negotiate around. I don't think we persuade each other, but rather, negotiate boundaries. Those boundaries are what we understand as tolerance.
I am just a user experience designer. There is a wide, wide rift between what users desire and what will actually solve their problems. I'm paid to reconcile that difference.
I do not intend to design society. But then, people are, as we speak. I don't know what's better--letting them design for what people want regardless of what it does to society, or designing for a society that's better regardless of what individuals desire.
We're primitive creatures. All of us, myself included. We're mostly run by our lizard brains, going after what spurts the happy chemicals into our brains.
I don't think society should be shaped to battle against human nature; but I certainly don't think uncontrolled human nature should shape society. As in all things, a balance.
That is what design is, always.
Screamy and thirsty seem to be innate to most (important) human discussions. So we can throw those out. They're irrelevant to the platform problem if the platform didn't create them (amplification is not relevant either in my mind).
So then, did users "choose" censored, algorithmic ones. Technically... but I think the nature of the censoring and the algorithms changed. It went from pulling spam and porn to pulling "harmful" content. The algorithm went from "WHERE user_id IN ..." to "curation".
I don't think those things are necessarily bad or evil. But these things started as open platforms to connect everyone. Now they're reverting to "communities" and people are adapting. People are forming "communities" on different "platforms".
The whole social media marketplace is so muddled and ripe for disruption. Network effects are bogus. Its just an excuse incumbents and academics use to rationalize their dominance post hoc. Twitter, Facebook, Parler, the rest will fail and fail fast with the right alternative.
There is no diversity in 140 characters of closely monitored claptrap, and there is no risk and opportunity in trust and safety. There is no culture in a homogenized overton window, and there is no innovation in walled gardens.
The very idea that we need to suppress ideas for fear that the ignorant masses may be exposed to them is a fatuous, aspirational elitism that is the very reason the platforms have become stagnant.
I can't see how people fail to notice the snobbish elitism underlying "we need to manage the discourse so that people's behavior is under control."
It's amazing how cyclical this sort of stuff is. Plato's Republic was enmeshed with a similar logic: that there is a natural way for society to progress, that human society is interfering with this natural way and that is a problem, and that we ought to have philosopher-kings (read: techies & politicians) to shape beliefs and discourse into a more natural (and thus "good") direction.
G.A. Cohen's writings on the history of philosophy have a scathing critique of this sort of thinking that I recommend.
We've designed communication systems that are optimized for instant gratification, engagement, getting the dopamine hit of seeing things you agree with or angry at, and rapidly moving to the next. That's not speech, that's a designed system of attention seeking, all with the primary objective of getting eyeballs on advertisements and content primarily.
We've designed communication platforms that cause us to cease seeing each other as human beings, and instead condensed thoughts and memes that are simply repeated to conform and get reinforced for a quick natural drug.
I do not think we should control the discourse or have structural control over what's right or wrong to say or think; that would be absurdly dystopian.
I do think we need to change our systems to incentivize human context around that speech, and reinforce our own humanity in how we read and respond to it.
I think it's possible to design better platforms that don't bring out the worst in society, and that we should do so.
Indeed much of JS Mill's On Liberty (1859) was dedicated to responding to these and others.
> we need to change our systems to incentivize human context around that speech
Who is the "we" who "should" do so? How does that "we" coordinate so that everyone building these systems builds them in the same way?
And why should these systems be optimized for whatever extrinsic goal you like better than "attention seeking"? That is managing speech.
Twitter isn't some natural state of the world that is pristine and unassailable; Facebook isn't the square in the park where people can speak their voice, and other choose to listen, participate, or walk along. Neither are anything like a book or newspaper.
If you're saying we shouldn't optimize or manage or turn the dials of these systems, then that's accepting that the current management and optimization and dials are somehow, inexplicably, acceptable or natural.
Someone has designed these systems and is influencing speech with their decisions. I don't have any power over them, but someone does, and the dials and designs of the system and the type of speech and communication they reinforce or encourage will change over time.
What gives them, the designers of the systems, any more right to manage their own system and the speech on it by their design choices? Are we to simply accept the corporations' design of their systems without critique or argument?
Not taking any action is to accept the current action, which still influences society. Not managing systems is to accept the current state of those systems, which still manages speech.
I do not see any difference whatsoever in those paths, so I will argue for trying to improve the systems.
There are ideas and then there are lies. I think the problem is the lies, not the ideas. If an idea, like that the Earth is flat, can only find support in lies, the idea will go away if people aren't free to lie.
To be clear, a lie is a proposition insincerely asserted with the intention of causing others to sincerely believe it.
I, for instance, watched in astonishment as a relatively straightforward story about Hunter Biden's emails somehow became a Russian disinformation campaign.
It’s hard stuff, on the one hand, if 1999 era tech was all we had, I’d likely be sick or dead as remote work wouldn’t have been possible for me. On the other, with 1999 era tech, we wouldn’t have a reality show host president fueling a pandemic to get more attention in media.
Right wing lunatics (and other fringe types) weren’t powerful in 1990 because they couldn’t broadcast their filth. They got traction because the rules were loosened for radio and angry white man radio became a thing.
You have the state of shitshow today because any lunatic can broadcast anything and gather a following.
It’s also very possible that Parler will only go uncensored for so long. At some point, if they get big enough, it could easily become apparent that they’re losing ad revenue by hosting certain opinions, resulting in similar changes to those of Twitter and Facebook
The same is true for the left, isn't it? this will just increase the social bubbles we live in. Now instead of different recommendations and content shown in an app, you've got a different app.
"The left eating itself" is a trope that goes back a number of years to JRE and others.
What a platform like Parler does is that it gives a voice to "the right" and unites it, regardless of whether they are stoking the flames of conspiracy, or are simply "conservative" in whichever way. Having your own turf is a powerful thing. After all, see Twitter and the blue checkmarks. I'm sure more of this is to come in various forms. There is also the reddit alternative Voat but I'm not sure if it took off properly at all.
I don't have a dog in this race but it's fascinating to watch it all the same.
Edit: Thanks to perardi for corrections.
I agree, but there is a difference between an opinion and disinformation. FFS, masks have been made political, and only one group is doing that. Before that it was AGW, before that it was evolution. I don't know about you, but I've recognized a pattern and quite frankly have zero interest in "respecting" it.
And to be clear, Parler isn't uncensored. They still censor things. They're a business trying to attract an audience to make money, so they have to censor something just to protect the brand. Like posting a photo of literal shit. (I'm not kidding, the CEO explicitly said they'd ban posts like that) They're just a lot lighter on political censorship, since the big market demand created by Twitter has been for a platform that allows more political expression.
The thing is, to expect attacks on freedom by exploiting fear of chaos and anarchy.
A few weeks ago I tried to create a throwaway on Reddit to create a new post but the post was immediately removed due to lack of karma.
Twitter now requires I provide a cell phone number to create an account. It throws up on me by suspending my account if a new account is unused for a few days. Requires I prove I’m not a bot to unsuspend it.
Facebook basically requires that I provide a birth certificate to sign up.
If you want to spread misinformation you basically need to be on an alternative platform but it’s also helpful for people like me who don’t want to give up my privacy to a social media company.
Facebook is creepy as fuck though. Recently I was logging on from a new location, and haven’t given them my phone number for 2FA. The only option they provided was for me to send in photos of my DRIVER’S LICENSE - are you kidding me?
2. Instead of changing people’s minds (isn’t the evidence overwhelmingly conclusive that people rarely change political viewpoints?), people flock to “community bubbles” like Parler, TheDonald, etc where they feel welcome.
3. This marginalisation leads to increasing extremism; going from the likes of “immigrants bad” we saw in 2016 to disputing and attempting to overturn democracy.
If you’ve ever participated in one of the banned subreddits; you’ll know “hate speech” or “doxxing” are a big fat lie. WE are the ones getting doxxed and brigaded!
It’s not too different to police using marijuana laws to target Black communities. In a free-to-join community of thousands to millions of people, you will get people breaking the rules. Moderators clean them up. The only difference is unwelcome viewpoints get their subreddit banned with this as the pretext.
Source: moderator of 3 banned subreddits; from political to sexual kinks like consensual rape fetishes (which 31% of women say they have fantasises; just FYI).
Admins have never; ever, ever engaged with us during my tenures.
Also, he attacked accepting refugees from certain high-risk countries (which had been designated as such by the Obama administration).
He didn’t say “immigrants bad.”
> Kaine has embellished the controversy by saying Trump has said "all Mexicans are rapists." The Democrat doesn’t come close to proving his claim; all of the Trump quotes Kaine’s campaign sent us pertain to unauthorized immigrants crossing the Mexican border into the U.S.
Also, it’s not like Clinton didn’t spend four years “disputing ... democracy.” See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum...
> Hillary Clinton dismissed President Trump as an “illegitimate president” and suggested that “he knows” that he stole the 2016 presidential election in a CBS News interview to be aired Sunday.
Journalists can’t help allowing their point of view to influence their reporting. But when someone can just pull up as transcript and say “well he didn’t really say that” that damages the credibility of the media. Even if what he actually said was wrong or bad on its own merits. This is what drives people to alternative media silos, and that’s bad because people are no longer operating from the same facts.
I don't believe Clinton ever attacked the integrity of the election process itself. She did claim (and as far as I'm aware the investigations more or less supported the claims) that the Trump campaign colluded with foreign governments to influence the election.
Seems like Trump has taken her advice.
At this point she really should just retire from politics and spend her hundreds of millions of dollars living the good life. She doesn’t do Democrats any favors.
Hillary said this might drag out for a while... and she was right, it is. That’s fine. We have a process for this; no need to be melodramatic.
Biden has almost assuredly won, but first there will be some court cases and recounts simply because it was extremely close. That’s a good thing for Democracy.
The trump campaign is literally putting forth the unfounded conspiracy theory that Democratic-party-affiliated groups some how placed fraudulent ballots, and that this is the only reason Trump lost.
> Biden has very likely won, but first there will be some court cases and recounts simply because it was extremely close.
There aren't actually. Biden doesn't need to carry any states with recounts to win. Pennsylvania isn't going to a recount, nor is Arizona. Even if GA and Wisconsin flip on a recount, Biden has carried the electoral college. All of the court cases so far have have been thrown out or withdrawn.
Despite this, Trump continues to claim that there was election fraud (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13277501276798894...), even after his own lawyers have dropped suits in Arizona and Pennsylvania, and have yet to, in any suit in any state, provide an example of fraud. There's no substance to his claims, and when in front of a judge, the lawyers admit that. And yet.
There've been 6 elections over the last ~20 years.
Popular vote count
1. Obama-08 7.27%
2. Obama-12 3.86%
3. Biden-20 3.4%
4. Bush-04 2.46%
5. Bush-00 −0.51%
6. Trump-16 −2.09%
By Elector College
1. Obama-12 365
2. Obama-16 332
3. Biden-20 306
4. Trump-16 302
5. Bush-04 286
6. Bush-00 271
That was a difference of around 500 votes out of nearly 6 million, which was around 0.009%. That's well within the range you can get with just the ordinary counting error. It is not at all uncommon for a recount to reverse a lead that small.
In addition, Florida at the time was using a lousy ballot marking system that caused many ballots to fail to register that the voter had tried to vote in the Presidential race. Neither side disputed this. The dispute was over how to address it.
Are you really comparing that to trying to challenge in several states where the difference is well outside ordinary counting error and there is no evidence of sufficient voting irregularities to come anywhere near changing the winner in those states?
> But there's a danger to Mr. Gore's eventual legitimacy too, if this extraordinary story eventually results in his election. The recounts will now go forward in three counties--Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade. That at least was the situation as of last night. All three of those jurisdictions are heavily Democratic and voted heavily for Mr. Gore; the recount is thus tilted in his favor.
Gore’s tactics got very ugly including objecting to counting military ballots: https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/documents...
> The Gore campaign, however, viewed the absentee mili- tary ballots received between Election Day and November 17 as a lethal threat. Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican candi- date, who had lost Florida, nonetheless had received a hefty majority of the military absentee vote. Bush would likely top 60 percent at a time when he already enjoyed a 300-vote margin, which Gore was seeking to erase with selective recounts.
So recount all the counties.
But that's beside the point, which was that we know there were severe problems with the 2000 Florida vote due to a large number of dimpled or hanging chads, meaning that votes were being counted by the machines as being omitted where the voter intended to and thought they had voted, and poorly designed butterfly ballots that appear to have led to many people to mix up the Gore hole and Buchanan hole (and led about 19k people to punch both holes, since both were next to Gore).
There's nothing like that for 2020, where Trump is claiming the vote was fraudulent but keeps failing to actually bring up any evidence in court.
There was a statewide machine recount, and Bush won that too. Gore never asked for a statewide recount. He pursued a selective recount strategy, and in the process burned half the time available to certify the results. https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/05/bush-v-gore-fake-news...
> But that's beside the point, which was that we know there were severe problems with the 2000 Florida vote due to a large number of dimpled or hanging chads, meaning that votes were being counted by the machines as being omitted where the voter intended to and thought they had voted
That sort of thing happens in every election. An MIT analysis found that about 2% of ballots in a large sample set from 1988-2000 showed no vote for President: https://news.mit.edu/2001/voting1
Normally that doesn’t matter. As long as you apply a uniform standard, like the machine count, the error affects all parties equally.
What Gore did was turn that fact of vote counting into an election strategy. He realized that by demanding hand recounts under subjective standards, he could gin up more votes from that pool of 2%. And by demanding hand recounts only in Democratic counties, he could ensure that these new votes would disproportionately go to him. And even when the Florida Supreme Court smacked him down and ordered a statewide recount, he vigorously pursued a strategy of convincing Democratic counties to adopt looser counting standards, and indeed standards that shifted mid-count: http://electoralcollegehistory.com/electoral/florida/00837-2...
See also: https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/partisanship-my...
> In Palm Beach, if the hand counters saw a card with several punches on it, and a dimple near Al Gore’s name, the election officials did not count it because that voter knew how to punch a card and did not punch a hole next to Mr. Gore. The machine worked correctly when it did not read it.
> Not so in Broward County. If some of the vote counters saw several clean punches for Democrats and no punch for Gore, not even an indentation, but they saw a “scratch” near his name, they called it for Gore
> The state attorney general, a Gore elector, argued that “never before the present election had a manual recount been conducted on the basis of the contention that ‘undervotes’ [ballots with no punches on them] should have been examined to determine voter intent.”
That’s why all this stuff about hanging chads and pregnant chads and whatnot mattered at all. Ordinarily, those errors should cancel out. It’s only when you try to get a selective recount, or pursue different counting standards in different counties, that this matters.
Ultimately, Gore handed the Supreme Court a giant mess. The Justices agreed 7-2 that the recount that was ongoing at Gore’s request was unconstitutional.
> and poorly designed butterfly ballots that appear to have led to many people to mix up the Gore hole and Buchanan hole (and led about 19k people to punch both holes, since both were next to Gore).
The butterfly ballot could have been better designed, but there was an arrow clearly pointing to what hole voters were supposed to punch: https://static-propublica-org.cdn.ampproject.org/ii/w820/s/s...
Also worth mentioning that, while I can't find the full clip of the quote anywhere, some of the reporting on it seems to imply that the question she was responding to was if Biden should concede on election night, and the answer was under no circumstances. That really strains the whole "disputing democracy" thing.
Russia Collusion itself is an attack on the legitimacy of Trumps presidency - just like election fraud is an attack on the legitimacy of a Biden presidency.
Collusion was not proven, and the left-wing media went completely overboard on this.
Did Russia want Hillary Clinton to lose? Yes.
Did the Trump campaign meet with Russian operatives? Yes.
Did they collude with Russians? No, not in a legal sense.
Was the determining factor in the election Russian interference? No, it was almost certainly the NYT covering the James Comey investigation into Hillary's emails in the last week.
Mind you, if I were a Russian disinformation specialist, I would be very proud of how the American people took up my insanities (on both sides) and ran with them.
Keep in mind the entire Hillary's emails thing may have stemmed from Russian foreign intelligence work.
Like, I'm not American (and I would have voted for Sanders twice if I was), but the core issue here is that people are focusing on conspiracy-like theories to explain their loss in elections, rather than trying to understand where the other side is coming from.
Yeah liberals did with Russiagate in 2016, then Trump supporters will probably run with something into 2020. It's a convenient distraction from material policies.
How else is one to take this? He said some are good people implying the majority are not despite evidence to the contrary.
You brought up a non-sequitor, re Judge Curiel. He has provided legal representation for a hispanic-supremacist organization named La Raza (meaning "the race" in Spanish), which has a public political opinion on matters such as the wall on the southern border. Perhaps Trump should have mentioned the group "La Raza", however the point stands that Judge Curiel has racial-supremacist political affiliations, was in-explicitly hostile in the lawsuit, & Trump called it out as a theory.
https://thenewamerican.com/judge-in-trump-university-case-ti...
For many, the "Orange Man Bad" & "all white people are racist" narrative will probably kick in & they will reject what I'm saying outright because it does not fit their narrative; however this interpretation better fits Occam's razor, considering that Trump has also worked with certain people of all ethnicities in a harmonious fashion, while having rocky relationships with certain people from all ethnicities. The differences have to do with political worldview rather than ethnicity. Unfortunately, the political left has a habit of editorializing worldviews according to race, so other explanations are rendered moot according to the worldview of the political left, which views the world according to race.
Most "good people" don't have to cross the border illegally. They can get a U.S. visa and never leave. The people who will definitely not get a U.S. visa to do that is those have a criminal record in their own country, so their only option is to cross the border illegally.
Similarly, there is little proof that a significant fraction of the people crossing the border have criminal records for things other than immigration law.
Now, let's get back to what Trump said. Right after he said what you quoted in that speech, he said: "I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They're sending us not the right people."
He's constantly repeating how good the Mexicans and Japanese and everyone else is... (as opposed to the American leaders back then)... but the best ones among the Mexicans are not the ones coming in to the U.S. by crossing the border illegally. If you look at the context, he is clearly saying that Mexico has great people in general, the leaders are smarter and they have some terrible people who they're sending across the border illegally.
His opponents, which were all of the media back then, because he was neither liked by either party, attacked him for it. It was even a part of the attack strategy by Jeb Bush's campaign because he has a Mexican wife. They did it by taking the quote out of context, as anybody would do. If I was a political strategist, I would happily do the same. It was a easy hand to play and would potentially sway voters away from him.
Since the election is over, I'm assuming you're not one of Media Matters bots and I think, like a lot of people, you genuinely believe that those remarks were what the media told you they were... which is why I'm having this conversation.
Have a nice day!
The part you quoted is sandwiched between two statements that make that clear. Right before, he says:
> When do we beat Mexico at the border?
Right after the part you quoted, he says:
> But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They're sending us not the right people.
The reference to what “border guards” are “telling him” makes quite clear he’s characterizing their descriptions of illegal border crossers. That is how Factcheck.org interpreted the statement (see above) as well.
There is a fair criticism of Trump here—most people who immigrate illegally are “good people” (other than the fact they broke the law in crossing the border). On the other side, there is a truth to his point. We have MS-13 operating in Northern Virginia now where I grew up. They don’t arise there organically.
1. Tech platforms were too slow with limiting extremist viewpoints
2. Instead of keeping extremist views isolated, this allowed them to pick up more support. These groups continue to move more and more extreme, and more popular.
3. Delays in taking action to prevent the spread of these views allowed the combination of extremism and popular support that empowered people to make outrageous claims.
Of course, the presidential bully pulpit being used to stoke these ideas didn't help. We could argue about which of these mis more likely all day.
I certainly do take issue with extreme views on the other side, but those views are usually things like crystal healing, not Coups.
I think many on the right under estimate how much slack the right really do get from Twitter and YouTube. Refusing to ban bannon after he called for the execution of the FBI director (does that count as anti police?)
To play devil's advocate a little: BLM's ideology (the core activists, not the average supporter) is based on a specific view of anti-racism — critical race theory. CRT is not the only way to think about race, and many would argue it's a bad way to think about it: it's illiberal, divisive, wedded to ideologically left-wing ideas about power and social relations, and not particularly amenable to evidence-based thinking. In fact, it could be argued that the CRT is a huge misrepresentation.
Furthermore, while each of the "inciting incidents" did happen, so did hundreds more involving every racial combination of police and victim you can think of. It is a misrepresentation to focus on a subset of incidents because it moves focus from the actual cause of the problem. It is not racist police. It is poorly trained, unaccountable, and psychologically unsuited police officers. You could drum every racist police officer out, make every one of them take the knee and attend endless mandatory bias classes until only dyed-in-the-wool CRT advocates are left, and these incidents would keep happening until training and recruitment undergo a radical change.
Moderate right-wing people don't oppose or fear "anti-racism" or the support it receives in the corporate world because they are racist, but because they think i) It doesn't work and can't work, ii) it's a bad diagnosis, iii) it leads to socially damaging second order effects.
All I've heard of CRT has been misrepresentation by its opponents. I'm not sure what actual proponents say about it.
The problem goes further than the police into the prosecutors, too. Hence the refusal to prosecute in cases of murder by police of black people.
> make every one of them take the knee
This is not what is being asked for and itself is a common misrepresentation.
Yes.
> Hence the refusal to prosecute in cases of murder by police of black people.
No. They refuse to prosecute cases of murder by police regardless of race. The race of the person killed is largely irrelevant, which is the point I was making in the previous comment. Black officers aren't prosecuted, white officers aren't prosecuted. They aren't prosecuted when they kill white people or people of color. The problem is that police (and the prosecutors) aren't accountable, and they know it.
You make it about race rather than accountability and the problem will not be fixed.
I mean they're anti-union.
I'm also not clear about the equivocation you're making. Being anti-capitalist or "anti-American-police", even if we take those at face value, while certainly extreme in the modern American political sphere, aren't on a global scale, nor is it advocating for political violence (which we've seen not only advocation for, by both the Trump and his supporters), but actual real-world attempts at smaller-scale violent coups[0].
This runs into the philosophical questions of what "extremism" is, and whether or not it's socially constructed, and I think an important takeaway is that there are tons of reasonable, "objective" measures, by which abstract anti-capitalist sentiment is fine, and calls for defunding the police are fine, while false claims of election fraud are not. A platform choosing an independent, objective measure by which to judge extremism and then having one group go off the deep end doesn't make the platform biased against that group, it makes that group more extreme by the objective measures.
Even if a person doesn't understand Critical Race Theory, or is afraid of the "socialism" boogeyman or whatever, people advocating for socialism, modern anarchism, or critical approaches in politics[1] aren't usually doing so violently, and those that do are usually deplatformed as well.
Like in your followup to another user you get into the weeds on CRT, and your conclusion was "You make it about race rather than accountability and the problem will not be fixed." Which okay, that's a fair view. Ultimately I disagree. I think a rising tide lifts all boats, and among white-middle class people police apologia is so strong that you're never going to get popular support. So gathering support among minorities is the best you can do (and I'll add, reasonable levels of support amongst Republicans and white people as well, Black Lives Matter is, if I'm reading the polling correctly, more popular than Joe Biden). But even ignoring all of that, so what? Does that mean that a site should remove that content? Does it at all compare to right wing content that is removed?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_pl...
[1]: which are really just a lighter version of the modern anarchism take and, I should add, should be super popular on HN because they resemble libertarianism a surprising amount
Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s many of these large companies billed themselves as open platforms where you can express yourself. Twitter's Jack Dorsey said in 2012 that "We are the free speech wing of the free speech part". Now he says it was joke.
The terms of service on these platforms appears to be enforced selectively, information appears to be selectively censored and a lot of the time it appears to be based on their politics. Also a lot of internet jokes that have been around for years are being censored because the people doing the moderation don't understand the odder internet subcultures.
So It isn't just tech platforms being uncomfortable with certain viewpoints. It a combination of things that make it seem that these companies are censoring viewpoints (some not even that extreme) on one side of the political spectrum. That is what people are complaining about.
> people flock to “community bubbles” like Parler, TheDonald, etc where they feel welcome.
This isn't true. People are removed from platforms and go to another service where they won't be censored or banned and then a bubble forms.
> 3. This marginalisation leads to increasing extremism; going from the likes of “immigrants bad” we saw in 2016 to disputing and attempting to overturn democracy.
This is a strawman of what these people believe. The vast majority of American conservatives and Trump supporters I know don't say "immigrants are bad". They said "Illegal Immigrants are bad". There is a very important difference. The former is clearly xenophobia, the latter is not.
As for "over turning democracy". They see that there was a lot of odd things that seemed to happening upto and including election night. They feel that there has been voter fraud. Whether that is true or not I have no idea and it looks like it will be settled in court. But they believe they are preserving democracy not overturning it.
I’m not sure the bulk of the people currently flocking to Parler were ones who were removed from Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit. Especially when they use those sites to announce their move.
So I am quite sure that there is a good bulk of people that are going there for those reasons. In anyevent it feels that a line has been crossed.
Wow, seems like the people who voted for a candidate who said that mail-in voting was a hive of fraud for six months before an election were less likely to vote by mail, leading to a huge number of mail-in ballots being cast for the opposing candidate. Odd.
Like I'm not sure where these people were getting their news, but literally every news paper pointed out that this would happen, and it did.
That isn't what they are complaining about though e.g There are saying that some areas have very high turnout (over 95%) in specific counties. Even in countries with mandatory voting you don't get past 95% of the population voting. I haven't looked into these claims myself. So I have no idea if they are true.
They don't say illegal immigrant is bad as a legal status (so that merely changing the law to make everyone legal would make it ok).
They say that illegal immigrants are bad for the same reason that the lawmakers made a distinction between legal and illegal immigrants: to place quota, immigration criteria, and so on.
For the most part, those "viewpoints" are verifiable falsehoods, conspiracy theories, and other types of disinformation and misinformation. For instance, the recent migrations to Parler are chiefly people who want to deny the legitimate US presidential election result and spread false claims of widespread vote fraud.
Using the term "viewpoint" like you did is misleading, since it has the effect of making literal lies sound like legitimate differences of opinion.
> 3. This marginalisation leads to increasing extremism; going from the likes of “immigrants bad” we saw in 2016 to disputing and attempting to overturn democracy.
Eh, not so much. A lot of the recent "increasing extremism" (for instance QAnon and Boogaloo Bois), occurred on mainstream social networks like Facebook and Twitter. While pushing crazies and extremists to places like Gab and Parler probably radicalizes many of them further, it also isolates them from the wider community, which helps reduce their ability to recruit new people into their lunacy.
Btw: I think conspiracy theories are good indicators for what certain people want to believe. I personally don't want to be disconnected from these indicators.
And they are, but if they want to do it on Twitter, Twitter gets to have its say as well. However, the conspiracy theorists don't seem to like it when Twitter exercises its rights by labeling their tweets, like in this case.
As for why this matters, people who want to live in functioning democracies have a strong interest in making sure the truth prevails in public discourse, and that lies find the habitat difficult.
Part of making sure "truth prevails" is having open discourse about topics. That involves people with "Wrong" ideas the ability to talk.
When platforms like Facebook and Twitter become the arbiter of what's "right"? Then people will leave those platforms because lawfully they have the "right" to censor their platform... but people WILL talk about it elsewhere.
Facebook/Twitter may win this "battle" by purposefully influencing an election by hiding disinformation they disagree with (while allowing disinformation they are okay with)... but they'll lose the war as other platforms gain momentum and legitimacy.
The internet will route itself around the censorship.
Because life isn't as simple as "2+2=7"... it's opinions and people saying "my opinion is valid and yours is banned from open discussion".
Because I can find plenty of examples of stuff that isn't as clear as flat-earthers or pizzagate that's being blocked from public discorse.
For example: There is a climate crisis. This is a scientifically proven fact, not an opinion. Yet people deny it, often with the argument "I'm entitled to this opinion." No. You are not, because it is not an opinion; at most it is a delusion, at worst it is a lie (that you might honestly believe in). This is a 2+2=4 situation, or as near as one can get; yet one that even heads of "modern" states keep saying that is anything but 4.
Once we start from the basis that "there is a climate crisis", we can move forward, make choices and so on. A choice might be "it's there, but we're not going to do anything against it, because our economy". That is effective. (albeit something I would have a strong opninion about). At least others can still move forward.
But stating it does not exist (which is provably untrue) really harms effectiveness a lot.
But I am assuming that doesn't count in your utopia.
Legally, maybe the distinction doesn't need to be made, but I think users of social media deserve to know up front what they're in for.
Yes, but for that to work, the discourse has to between people who are actually seeking out the truth and who have the ability to recognize it. Dead-enders and nutjobs fighting to spread (often obvious) lies do not qualify.
And that's why they are exercising their right to move away from Twitter.
ask jim watkins or weev or dick masterson about that. alternative platforms get to exist on a small scale as long as they maintain obscurity, but as soon as old media releases a black pr scarepiece, they get Esther Aronowitz'ed pretty quickly.
>people who want to live in functioning democracies have a strong interest in making sure the truth prevails in public discourse, and that lies find the habitat difficult.
i think you will find that every conspiratorial thinker completely agrees with that sentiment.
Twitter is a publisher and should be responsible for all that it publishes including calls for violence which it regularly features.
That would have easily been labeled misinformation and disinformation 10 years ago.
But it's like people saying "MS is selling all your behaviour data" today, which is likely partially true, but not quite in that way. And when they take that extreme position without having something to back it up, it's hard to / not worth discussing.
If someone said "that's a lie", it would likely have been viewed as disinformation, but it would have been the truth.
I already know I sinned by trying to have a productive conversation of twitter, however when "talking" with a few self proclaimed communists (no, I don't think they were joking) they basically implied the "rich" deserve to die, they were morally allowed to kill them, etc. IIRC, this was on a post about a teachers union displaying a guillotine and I pretty much said "yea, lets not be like this." There was also some racism thrown in there, I guess for good measure. They seem to have even developed their own "secret language", calling white people 'mayos' and 'yts' - maybe to get around filters? Or just to be extra edgy.
I would argue that pushing some justification of murdering fellow citizens because of their net worth is just as dangerous as the insane conspiracies about lizard people... if not more. Yet, I don't think these things are shut down or given the same standards as what you're thinking of.
I wish for twitter (and everyone else's sake) they equally applied their "TOS". I have no need to go to those sites you mentioned... in fact I can't think of anything less productive but on the flip side of the coin, I've pretty much deleted twitter for the same reason.
We know which side is crazy though.
However, if we want to go deeper into the rabbit hole, if there was a coup to steal the election I'd expect there to be ample fake claims of election stealing that would be easy to debunk.
This is 100% gaslighting by mainstream media. Immigration _per se_ isn't bad. I say so as an immigrant myself. Trump is married to an immigrant. But unrestricted low-skill illegal migration in tens of millions is most definitely bad, and it leads to modern day slavery, while at the same time depressing the wages of the working poor and making them dependent on welfare. That's why Kochs want it so much. So bad, in fact, that Barack Obama deported a lot more illegal migrants than Trump ever did. So long standing that Bill Clinton highlighted the issue in his 1995 State of the Union: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IrDrBs13oA. So severe that Hillary Clinton voted for a border wall: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/jun/27/cal-thomas.... Immigration from countries where one can't even meaningfully do a background check is also bad. Skilled immigration program abused to get H1B wage slaves to the detriment of US grads who are drowning in debt is very bad indeed.
> disputing and attempting to overturn democracy
Nobody is "attempting to overturn democracy". There are hundreds of sworn affidavits and abundant video evidence of election irregularities. This needs to be followed up on, for the same reason why Nancy Pelosi was calling for the same in 2017: https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/864522009048494080. She spent _4 years_ undermining the choice of the American people, and by extension "democracy". Presenting evidence in the court of law is democracy. If evidence is shit (as it was in Pelosi's case), the court will throw it out. If it's not you should be just as interested in hearing about it, because such things tend to backfire, just like Harry Reid's filibuster fiasco did.
Here's an explanation of what happened to you that will alleviate your cognitive dissonance somewhat: https://twitter.com/astateofEmily/status/1327079491760361472
This has happened in all the lawsuits so far, I believe?
You're being gaslit about that too, although yes, some motions were denied and some lawsuits were rejected outright. Watch the last link in my original post. It explains the propaganda barrage perfectly.
There are a bunch of deadlines and appellate levels baked into this process for a reason. If Al Gore could hold things up for over a month over a few hundred votes, all the concerns about following lawful process are null and void. Same with histrionics about "overturning democracy".
The choice is pretty simple even to Trump voters: either Trump finds the smoking gun and deservedly gets a second term, or he's full of shit and he doesn't deserve a second term. Nobody on the right will set cities on fire either way.
Literally 10 seconds in DuckDuckGo. Notice that where lawsuits are rejected they are mostly rejected over lack of standing, and will be re-filed elsewhere with stronger evidence, or dropped outright due to insufficient evidence. This is what the legal system is for - to establish the veracity of claims, and obtain relief when due. Still more lawsuits will be filed next week. The current crop are just the small fry ones that could be filed quickly.
None of this constitutes "overturning democracy" in any shape or form.
I do recommend that you watch the video though.
>"Coming for Blacks and Indians first welcome to the New World Order."
at their rallies.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-anchor-pauses-mid-segment-...
Don't make the mistake of assuming these decisions are informed by anything except estimates of what will make them the most money.
Maybe I don't want big tech incumbents solving that problem for me. The dilemma as posed makes a lot of assumptions that I don't agree with.
Maybe I would be OK with some curation or annotation service. If I had some say in hiring, firing, and replacing that service separate from my choice of social media platform.
I think it’s great that you’ve tailored your content so well. But you’re the exception rather than the rule.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-merc...
Is it? I could not find a proper reference documenting both the average and median wealth of voters of both parties.
What's more, I've also read the Wall Street Journal article on the subject which made it even clearer.
"Ms. Mercer, in a post on Parler after a version of this article was published, said that her father had no involvement or ownership of the company."
Not sure how "Parler" is going to be better than twitter with a central point of failure. More political fodder I guess.
The only real solution to censorship will be a completely distributed system, where users control their own data and associations, and all communication is peer-to-peer, end-to-end encrypted, with zero middle-men.
Who is 'they' ? The most used servers ?
I use Mastodon and am definitely a fan, but the rudimentary stats we have (https://the-federation.info/) don't show the growth.
The number of monthly active users fluctuates between 400k-500k this entire year.
One reason of censorship becomes so prevailing is because of advertising. The advertisers ultimately defines what is 'toxic' and what not.
If Parler can stick to its current path and manage to survive, it would pretty significant to the internet ecosystem.
Nike shoes is an interesting recent example. They embraced the controversial NFL player Colin Kaepernick in various advertising campaigns, playing in his bravery for kneeling during the National Anthem of the United States. However this was not some sort of altruistic, egalitarian business campaign. It was a cold calculation from their data which said young people buy their products and young people are sympathetic to his cause and therefore we will sell more shoes going with this endorsement. It helped make Nike, a company with a very spotty humanitarian history and questions of exploitive labor practices, a corporation their audience of largely young progressive people felt identified with them.
Advertising is about as cynical as it gets. For some companies it will make sense to “choose a side” which when thinking about it is as absurd and ridiculous as something could be. What would Adam Smith make of this?
"The context of social networks serving as amplifiers for idiots and crazy people is not what we intended".
Do you think its possible for you to understand?
Would you want to understand and learn new things?
If you knew that honestly understanding would lead to mental pain and anguish as you literally would have to admit you were wrong in your past judgements and admit your view of the world was wrong, would you still want to understand? Because it will cause you pain. It even might lose you friends. Changing your mind is hard. Learning new things about the way the world works means you have to remove whatever was in that place before and you do that by admitting you were wrong. If you've been on HN for a while you will agree with me that having people admit they were wrong is extremely rare! It hurts.
Most people don't want to understand. It's much easier not to.
I applaud a sincere expression of not understanding, so congratulations! It means that somehow you know that your view of the world is not complete. I would suggest that instead of asking for answers from others which you can disagree with, true understanding requires a fundamental and painful change in your own brain.
Empathy is just one tool to help understand and work out how you were wrong, there are others. It won't mean you start to believe the ideas just that for the first time you will start to see that there are other ideas.
There is potential danger, however, that what caused your initial attachment to a particular view of the world might switch to these other newer ones. Like how an ex-cult member is always the most vocal anti cult activist, or how a recent Vegan is always the most evangelistic about their new way of life. Empathy alone doesn't cause that, but maybe a kind of stockholm syndrome, so take it slow and try not to be overwhelmed.
Even if you feel like you could start to understand, there is also the fear and disgust of the other which you would need to overcome to begin. For many this fear and disgust is so strong it's enough to stop any thoughts of change. (it's why fear and disgust is so often used as a political tool)
I'm not asking you to change and I don't expect you to change. Change hurts. I'm warning you about the dangers of understanding others if you really wanted to understand what's going on which I hope you might.
Don't destroy the world over a failed ideology.
To understand the other is to win against bigotry.
Don't destroy the world with bigotry disguised as righteousness. Most peace processes start with the humanising of the other and the identification of shared commonalities. Bigotry is against peace and coexistence.
To advocate for not understanding people is to destroy the world. I get why people don't want to understand others (see above comment) but I would not encourage it.
In my opinion, bigotry in mainstream public discourse is never going to happen. It's a feature of capitalism and why you won't see gas vans as long as we remain a capitalist society.
But don't let me dissuade you from advocating for your beliefs.
Is wanting less polarisation and more understanding wanting the world one way? Seems like it might be the opposite. Seems also that those who are polarised want the world one way in opposition to the other group who wants the world the other. Is there a way to undo that? Would that way be painful? I think most people don't like to change their minds. It's painful. But just because it's painful, doesn't mean it's not possible or that it might be positive.
How do we achieve polarization?
How is actual peace is the real world achieved?
Wanting things to be one way is bigotry. I wish things to be understood more and less bigotry!
What are my beliefs? How have I advocated for them? I see only an appeal for common ground, understanding and therefore less bigotry overall.
Any bad actor like this can have their manipulative manifestos seen by thousands of people every day.
Whether or not it’s actually persuasive - it shouldn’t be, they’re pretty much rephrasing the sentiment “don’t be afraid of this”, “be open-minded”, “take the red pill” over and over - it’s at the very least attempting to be
Does empathy and understanding other people lead to Nazism etc or away from extremism? Does encouraging less thought and consideration about your neighbour make the world better? I don't think so.
Explicitly how do we change a person's mind away from extremism? Is it possible? Will they want to? See my above comment in that light. Understanding others is hard but it's possible.
Is it possible for humans to be less polarised? If so, perhaps understanding and empathy is one way.
I try to allow people to change their minds and allow peace and more empathy. Real change comes from inside. I cannot change another's mind for them. Some see this change as painful and some others are fearful of people changing their minds as it means less in group cohesion. If opposite groups are less coherent is that better than advocating for more polarisation?
Back to the original question: If you do not understand what is going on, do you think it's possible to understand? If yes, do you want to understand? if yes, how does one understand something? If no, how does not wanting to understand something affect the world? Does less or more understanding help or hinder lives?
As a European, I just stopped and wonder in what world America lives.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119237/
(Please note: I am not recommending watching Gummo. Once you've seen it you can't un-see it. I'm just saying that you're picture of America is incomplete if you haven't encountered that side of the nation.)
My theory is that while I'm interested in the personal lives of the people I follow, for the most part I couldn't care less about things they post with the direct intent of emotionally-manipulating me. So much of those kinds of posts are driven by loneliness, boredom, existential angst, and the comfort that public clanning brings people. While I'm completely committed to supporting and caring for my friends, these posts never bring them the relief they seek. Instead, it always ends up in a more-and more frenetic argument. I am almost beginning to think that for many of them, if they can't find that comfort online, they'll settle for a good fight. And after more than two decades online, I have never seen that comfort successfully delivered, aside from in a performative way.
So every time one of my friends re-posts or shares something I find emotionally manipulative, whether I agree or disagree with the sentiments, I take a look at the original source. Is this a source with, say, more than 10K followers? If so, my friend's participation in this communication stream is much more like a little propagandist than somebody who is either seeking or offering comfort. So I block the original source; after all, it'll just keep appearing again and again in my freed until one day it causes an argument.
This, for the most part, leaves honest-to-goodness things my friends are actually experiencing in person, instead of vicariously. As long as that's the case, I try to allow wide latitude, after all, I want to learn and share from as many people as possible with differing views. If, however, I notice a pattern of pain, either pain they're experiencing that I can't help with or pain they're seeking to inflict in others in order to fight with them, I start the snoozing and nofollowing.
I wish I could say that this strategy has been highly successful. It has certainly made social media much less painful, but over time I'm finding that I'm pretty much zapping everybody. Very few people have the editorial discipline to actually be responsible worldwide publishers. Most of us will far too easily choose attention over quality conversations. Social media isn't helping us; it's hacking us.
I wish my friends on the right the best of luck. I think it's a good move. Anything to advance the destruction of this cognitive and epistemology monopoly is a win in my book. I look forward to seeing how it goes for them.
https://mobile.twitter.com/davetroy/status/13272539919364546...
A public platform is the only solution that fixes our free speech problem.
This isn't a quality control problem. People, and sadly specifically those with advanced education, tend to be easily triggered by random things. They say, often, terrible things. They bully. They argue over minutiae. They blast those with ever so slightly differing opinions.
Imagine what they do to people with significantly different opinions. They must be destroyed.
So those folks leave. And go somewhere more friendly to the free exchange of views, without the automatic pile on shutdowns, and cancellations we see with FB/Twit.
Its tiring to me as an infrequent twit-er. Its tiring on FB as I use it for family communications and dad jokes.
Apparently, it is in vogue to call these companies out for their complicity ... their participation in the actual undermining of democracy (should be read in a tone dripping in sarcasm). It is considered bad form to say you use them. It goes against goodthink.
I'm really tired of this. Social media has very low value to begin with. This toxic behavior, this is what should be canceled. This is what should be deplatformed.
Not the viewpoints that have people with different ones running to the exits.
I think actual US conservatives should draw a border at some point. Because there is nothing conservative about dreaming of returning to a past that never existed (it is usually a ethnic clean past, where everybody was happy and agreed what the good values were, nobody had to pay taxes, etc)
Simply limit how far something can go viral. Let any family photos take precedence. Let at most 1000 people view any news article, and shadow ban the rest.
That dynamic will help platforms like Parler. Whether or not the ideas are good ones, the people there going to be people who were pushed off Twitter because they had compelling or persuasive ideas.
Can't meet bad ideas by silencing people. It doesn't work, people just get the impression that the ideas have power.
First I’d say that if you’re running a 24 hour news channel, you need to fill the time with something, and people would complain equally if you just rephrased and repeated the facts over and over. Second, perhaps you don’t, and perhaps I don’t either, but a lot of people want to hear opinions on the news. They want context, and how certain groups view the news, and I suspect, more than anything, they also just enjoy hearing opinions. So the news companies are meeting a demand.
Now I’m quite a left-leaning, pro-govt-intervention person, so I would support government regulation of the news to prevent them playing too heavily to this demand.
However I know that a lot of HN users are not like this, and I’m curious to see where they think the solution could lie
The big social media platforms should be treated as common carriers, and as such only be responsible for preventing malware and flat-out illegal content.
Expecting Big Tech to moderate content (for what?) while allowing them to force feed unwanted/unrequested content to users is the perfect shit-storm we have today.
Why don't people switch to Mastodon or something similar?
But there are almost 500 comments and thus far no one has mentioned Dave Troy's unbelievable thread res arching how Parler got started. He very much points out that coverage like NPR gives here, reviewing it as it wants to be seen, carries water for the team, fails a necessary obligation to report on just how shady & murky the founding & running of Parler is.
Until someone gathers better research, this is, by far, the most important write up on Parler. A company with strong ties to russia, trying loudly to undermine the safe harbor & free speech protections we enjoy, & as a company a gathering place for political swindlers & ultrapartisans. This kind of intel on who Parler is is extremely important, at least as much so as who joins & goes there.
The amazing Dave Troy: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1327259427481800704.html
Fact-checking is biased?
TIL that the Scientific Method, critical thinking and bullshit detection is “biased”.
Wow. The depths of conservative delusions know no bounds.
Half-truths can and slightly inaccurate statements can be construed as either hard-TRUE or hard-FALSE.
On the opposite side of the political spectrum, "nuance" in political discussion is an accepted reality.
Gatekeeping is acknowledged as a problem - we know those who position themselves as arbiters of truth are not beyond scrutiny.
It would be contradictory to know these are true but also believe conservatives are deluded in believing that fact-checking is fraught with bias.
>Indeed, conservatives have long claimed that fact-checking was riddled with anti-conservative bias and even conflicts of interest (as when PolitiFact, one of Facebook’s six United States-based fact-checkers, shot down a critique of a Clinton Foundation initiative without disclosing that one of that program’s principal funders was a major donor to PolitiFact’s parent organization, the Poynter Institute).
https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/media/310849-who-will...
> 14. You agree to defend and indemnify Parler, as well as any of its officers, directors, employees, and agents, from and against any and all claims, actions, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses (including but not limited to all attorneys fees)
TL;DR: if Parler gets sued over a post of yours, you get to foot all their legal bills. Not an ideal setup for a “free speech” platform.
The thing I saw even then was selective enforcement, I'd get death threats all the time from various tough guys over posts where I'd mocked them for being socialists or whatever, which I'd report, they'd never get banned. I didn't care that much because it's the internet and I wasn't posting under my real name, what were they going to do. But then I'd see people getting banned for telling others threatening them that they were strapped and it wasn't a good idea to make those threats. There's a hierarchy on Twitter when it comes to following the rules, and if you draw the ire of the people in the protected upper echelons you'll be threatened and bullied without any recourse.
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
I do wonder what the mainstream's response will be when this website inevitably actualises its witch-coven destiny (though it may already have according to some). Based on the apparent billionaire backing, it may not depend on payment processors (which otherwise seem to be among the most willing pieces of infrastructure to summarily cut off "extremist" customers), but it will probably still require Cloudflare to weather DoS attacks, a DNS record and carriers willing to provide it connectivity.
It would probably be a terrible place to live physically, but not necessarily a terrible place to visit online. Places such as the ones SSC refers to are terrible places to visit for people who get deeply emotionally hurt when they see hateful discourse and for people who lack the skill of filtering low-value content in search of high-value content. However, both the skill of being unaffected by hateful discourse and the skill of rapidly finding high-value content in an ocean of low-value content can be learned. I think that learning those skills is worthwhile because in strongly free speech areas, one can often find high-value content that is difficult or impossible to find in thought-policed places.
>I think that learning those skills is worthwhile because in strongly free speech areas, one can often find high-value content that is difficult or impossible to find in thought-policed places.
i have had far more positive experiences & formed some of the most valuable connections in my life on 'toxic' freespeech sites than i ever have on twitter. it's actually shocking sometimes how much more caustic and genuinely awful twitterposters are than anons. you see the same thing in online games. free for alls tend to breed a certain amount of community enforced values while games with heavy oversight & no shit talk end up being much more miserable experiences.
doesn't matter because the msm will tell you it did either way and you'll believe them without a second thought and then post midwit pisstakes when yet another independent community inevitably gets deplatformed by chokepoint monopolies. because we still totally have free speech right? just don't say the wrong things 4head!
If I was going to make a social media platform (I know, this is YC... it's not my sphere of interest but maybe it should be), I'd rate limit everyone to one post per day. I'd also ban short (<500 words) posts. Lincoln needed 250 words, MLK 400, you're not as good an orator as either of them and you can, and therefore should, provide citations in written media. Readers can freely highlight unsupported claims, and annotate - annotations need to be accepted by the author to be visible, but highlights do not.
Let's encourage thought, research and yes, silence. Listen first, then only say things if they are worth taking a long time to say.
Making money off this is left as exercise to the reader.
I remember it as a haven for gasbags who were overly fond of their own verbiage; essentially a write-only medium.
My vision isn’t the best but I can usually manage.
Will they allow a post claiming that the Mercer family also funds a major child theft and transport ring? In other words, will they allow blatant lies or slander to stand?
"Free speech for me, but not for thee"
Parler already has some big names on its platform and I think the big fish, mr. Donald Trump, will leave Twitter shortly for this platform and bring with him millions of new users.
Big monopoly social media have succesfully prevented being split up by capturing regulators, ironic if this is how the monopolies finally are broken.
Far more interesting questions:
Why are Facebook and Twitter more durable than the historical average?
Where are they in their lifecycle? How much time do they have left?
What are the lessons learned by their outsized success?
My personal hot take (prediction market bets):
Facebook (et al) has plateaued.
Twitter will tank when Trump leaves and takes his following with him.
1. Parler is actively recruiting liberals and moderates, to build a "big tent" of diverse opinions and perspectives.
2. The moderation guidelines are quite explicit: don't censor anyone for expressing a political opinion of any sort. Don't censor people you disagree with. Do moderate extremely toxic content -- but it has to be pretty clear, like "I'm going to kill you" or a stream of expletives with zero redeeming content. Or spam, or nonsensical posts.
3. The parleys (their version of tweets) are largely sociopolitical commentary of the type that's being downvoted or censored on the major platforms like Twitter and Facebook. For example, you can post freely about hydroxychloroquine as an effective treatment for covid19. You can say "The 2020 Election was stoken". Pretty much all of the "3rd rail" topics that have been restricted elsewhere. You can link to an article by Alex Jones or Q. Their attitude seems to be, read and decide for yourself.
4. Competition is a good thing. A lot of people here have a reflexive notion that "fringe" sites like Parler and Gab will just create more echo chambers to keep "those people" ignorant. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Giving people a free speech platform is a breath of fresh air, a return to a broader and more civil discourse. Censorship does not encourage civility; it does not foster broadminded attitudes. On the contrary, it causes more extremism.
https://mobile.twitter.com/mmasnick/status/12777231528946810...
I have a confession... my boss, @devinnunes is a closet computer geek. He just bought his first domain!
www.loser.com
> actively recruiting liberals and moderates, to build a "big tent" of diverse opinions and perspectives
I wonder what the selling point is?
On the Parler "Values" page I see this:
"Regardless of race, sex, age, sexual preference, religion, politics, or dietary choices —- well , except pineapple pizza -- every user is treated equally under Parler’s Community Guidelines."
Using the phrase "sexual preference" speaks volumes. Not in a good way.
While I can see the attempt at humor ("dietary choices"), adding it to this list has at least two problems from my perspective:
- undermines the seriousness of the other categories
- makes fun of what for many is a consequence of their religious beliefs (which appears earlier in the list)
> "Do moderate.... nonsensical posts".
I don't know whether this is the Parler position, or yours, but this is going to upset a lot of people.
* I'm not a liberal but..
* I'm not a conservative but..
* Twitter may be a private company, but..
* Freedom of speech but...
If there is a new view point on how to analytically break such news down that would be great to hear indeed!
The black box is always going to optimize for the worst aspects of humanity. The best aspects simply aren’t worth enough money.
Trump told what are generally considered incorrect opinions on corona virus prevention. Eg: Hydroxy Chloroquine works, masks don't and so on...
His followers then parroted and posted these comments on social media and were promptly defunded, suspended and even banned for breaking Eula terms. Because Covid is serious and far too important to risk endangering others lives with misinformation like that...fair enough.
The campaign rolls on only now a significant portion of Trump's most vocal supporters are no longer able to voice their support and encourage people to vote for him due to being punished for spreading false info that Trump told them regarding Covid, or is that the real reason? Maybe the plan was to silence the right's voice all along but Covid presented itself at an oppertune time, the left leaning social media companies took full advantage and Trump and his followers walked right into the trap!
Could that be why right wing supporters might want to find a new forum to express themselves? Somewhere that they wont have their voices taken away right before an election that they feel passionate about?
Just a different thought from an outside observer with no skin in the game.
I'm sure they do want a forum to express their views and claim they're silenced. But they need to stop and think about why everyone else has deemed them so toxic.
You're right about hitting a subject they cared about..that's right now I remember it was HB's laptop story that brought about the bannings.
Check and Mate I guess. Good luck sorting that mess out, hopefully You get a few weeks rest after the Georgia runnoffs before the campaigns start up again but I fear the media has found a cash cow in political outrage and will be milking it for every drop from now until the endof time(or twitter).
Most of the vocal support for political candidates comes from the minority of voters, on both sides. That doesn't change the situation.
The point is wether real or not there is a perception that powers that control social media are activist, woke or whatever other lable You want to give them.
These are private companies, right wing supporters do not believe in heavy handed government, so what else are they to do but find new venues to expresd their views? Do You realky expect them to just shut up and take it? That will never happen.
Social media is neither Left nor Right leaning, nor are the rules. But if the people enforcing said rules have bias, then problems arise, isn't that the point BLM was making about the Police?
US voters want to express themselves but they lack information and critical thinking;
Not all information is good; Journalism is dying and the advertising business distorts people's perceptions for profit;
Taxes are needed but the lucid, rational discourse needed to make good public policy is absent;
It is hard to cultivate the citizenry in the above conditions; the political system is starved of courageous and intelligent politicians; panderers have a significant demographic to exploit.
tldr: US public discourse has attained a toxic equilibrium. But it is profitable for some.
Biden's staff will now just tweet the odd photo of his rescue dogs in the White House.
This is simply not true. Twitter blackballed the Hunter Biden laptop story and locked you out of your account if you DARED to tweet a link to it, saying that it violated their code of not publishing hacked material. It was not hacked. But they happily allowed news outlets to publish Donald Trump's hacked alleged tax returns (we never received a source, so quite dubious).
I found Twitter too toxic, it made me angry with people for no reason, so I deleted all my tweets and the app. No more notifications, no more “just checking Twitter quickly”.
I now go to Twitter like once a day just to have a look what is going and and oh my god, the more I am absent the more I see how rotten Twitter is and all of its users. Everyone is so negative, pessimistic, judgemental, sarcastic in tone, confrontational, and self righteous. People are posting so much shit it’s unbelievable how much time they waste of their lives there. One huge thread after another, people crying for attention.
Everyone just posting negative stuff to make other people feel bad, down or guilty about something. I was part of the problem too.
Lots of this:
> “When I was a kid, I once had to work at my uncle’s shop. Let me tell you about <insert bullshit here>. A thread...”
I don’t know what Parler is, but Twitter is THE WORST of social media and if Parler is an alternative then it’s going to be equally bad!
Second and most importantly, follow a set of users that are interesting, friendly, and who don’t engage publicly with trolls. It’s a magnificent tool for staying up to date with a narrow topic like a niche technology.
Just unfollow or block the negative people and trolls.
Because your peers will only get their side of the story while they're criticising you.
> This isn’t high school.
Sorry not sure what you mean here. What does school have to do with it?
1. Only enable notifications and DMs from mutual follows. People who get into pile ons don't tend to follow their "arch enemies" to do so (because their followers would not like them to follow "the wrong people"). You have full control over who can pester you.
2. Walk away from conversations if your get harrassed, bored or annoyed, but be clear that you are doing it. "This is going nowhere and it's getting late. I'm muting this thread". Again, you have control. If you imagine getting into a heated debate in the pub, this is the equivalent of leaving the table to talk to another group. It gives you the ability to peacefully walk away, and deny someone the opportunity to keep arguing with you against your will.
3. Realise that people don't change their minds during an argument. Always give them room to back down. A cornered animal will always lash out, and we are just animals.
4. Always be clear and civil. Be generous. Don't assume that people are acting out of malice.
5. In sometime is a toxic person who causes pile ons, quote tweets you, intentionally misrepresents you by cherry picking your comments out of context, doxes etc, block the fuck out of them.
Yes. Twitter is fantastic only if you accept that you can’t have arguments on it. It’s just not a good idea. But not all conversation requires disagreement.
Also: I use Twitter as a news feed. I don’t tweet, just read. For me it’s the successor of rss.
I'm not sure where John Cleese would be, but I don't think it would help
No, I think there's a big difference between an echo chamber constructed by algorithms that push content upon you without your consent or knowledge, and an "echo chamber" constructed by yourself when you actively curate and trim the media you consume.
You and your wife's suggestions are really good ideas, but for them to be effective, it's essential that you exercise control over what hits your eyeballs. Twitter, in particular, is a hot mess. I use the "muted words" feature to filter out tweets that contain words that raise my blood pressure, it's now well over 200 words since late 2016. Is that a making a bubble? Perhaps, but I've found it's better to engage with that subject matter in a time and context of my own choosing rather than having it dropped into "my feed".
What is the difference?
The problem is that people have become hyper-partisan en masse and whether they arrived there because of "the algorithm" or because they intentionally filter out sources they disagree with ... it doesn't really matter.
https://www.allsides.com/filter-bubbles
The real problem (in my humble opinion) is that there is too much news and it's almost all intentionally biased to some extent. It's therefore not practical for people to keep up with the news without entering an echo chamber. You would have to, for each instance of "news", read at least 3 versions of it to ensure you are considering all perspectives. No one is going to do that.
Do people want to consume net unbiased news? Everyone says they do but consumption patterns says otherwise. Is it commercially viable to produce unbiased news? It used to be favorable but now distribution is cheap and there is more competition so the incentives are to be more biased and find a niche.
I don't think this is a solvable problem, the genie is out of the bottle. This is just a price we pay societally for having the Internet.
At the end of the day, we're each responsible for making sense of the world from news sources. People get too hung up on the concept of "unbiased". I think that's an unrealistic ideal when it comes to politics. It's like wanting to eat fruit but always expecting it to be peeled for you, meticulously, and placed on your plate without blemishes or bruises.
While it's certainly possible to responsibly and critically "consume a feed" that has been algorithmically generated for you based on your history of media consumption behavior and your social network attributes-- it's much more efficient to seek out high quality sources of information.
That doesn't mean block out everything you disagree with, but it does mean block out noise and consider what you give your attention to. You can't do that easily when a third party is dumping garbage onto the page for the sake of motivations that have little to do with informing you.
I have a simple rule: I won't block or defollow based on your ideas, but I will do it very quickly if you are obnoxious, boring, trying to build an audience on twitter to sell products or build a brand or otherwise act stupid.
It is easier to follow my "don't say stupid things" if we already agree on most things, so I relax it a bit for those whom I disagree with to only include not denying reality and being non-stupid within their world view (e.g I am not going to follow someone who posts about 5G covid, but I have followed people who are against abortions.
Isn't there the problem where your favorite "celebrity" you follow posts nice stuff but when election or some other event is happening they start posting a ton of "off-topic" stuff ?
Them posting that stuff isn't a "problem" just because you do not appreciate some of the content.
I just see tweets from those I follow, in chronological order, with no ads.
If I saw ads, “recommended” or “trending” etc., I’d get off that client in a hurry.
That’s my point: Twitter isn’t half as good if using the official clients.
I don’t think it’s possible to create a safe space from opinions you disagree with. What happens on twitter could happen with your friend or uncle. On Twitter it’s at least easy to unfollow someone and it’s not a personal tragedy like it is if you need to break from a relative because they turn out to believe in conspiracy theories.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
Except it isn't actually anonymity (or pseudonymity) per-se, as the phenomenon has long existed in many other contexts as well:
You can probably generalize to something like "technologically mediated assholism", but there is more than one thing happening here, such as:
+ Filter bubbles/homogeneous in-group opinions lead people to becoming more extreme in their views.
+ Observing some rando (it doesn't have to be an authority figure, although that helps) "say the quiet part out loud" is validating, to say the least.
+ Lack of f2f contact leads to thinking of individuals as impersonal abstractions, and in particular, as the "other".
+ The pathetic fallacy applies to groups just as it does to inanimate objects.
+ Text communication often causes people to misread tone.
+ The affective fallacy (the assumption that the effect of an action was the intent behind it) becomes particularly powerful because of the former two points.
+ The affective fallacy seems to operate in reverse too: Someone informing you of an outcome seems like they are making a claim about your intent.
+ No-one is a villain in their own story. On the internet, everything is a story, and if the story is about someone like you, obviously they can't be a villain either.
+ Exposure to information that conflicts with (even weakly held) beliefs tied to a person's identity often triggers defensive rejection of the new information and strengthens those beliefs.
+ Group dynamics are in play for public interactions, so there is always a performative aspect even for ostensibly 1-to-1 communications. This often doesn't get turned off for private electronic channels such as email.
And so on. A lot of these mental quirks are like ratchets that only ever tighten. Although each in isolation is often self limiting, the limiter can be bypassed by some other quirk, after which the ratchet can tighten some more.
The above poster is right on. That your favorite poet or whoever can fly off the handle with their toxic political faction-war delusions or whatever is a direct contradiction to the common idea where Twitter is useful for following your favorite X.
It often sucks the fun out of things you like and it’s a good reason to not use it at all. Nobody is pitching “safe spaces” here. But it’s a good time to ask yourself how much a toxic one is going to enrich your life.
Getting off Twitter and Reddit are two great life upgrade tips.
You follow Twitter accounts. Those can be thematic slices of humans, whole humans, aggregates of humans, or lots of different things.
I was thinking you could have say a way to tag your posts or shares so your professional posts and personal posts could be separated but the "activist" would ignore the tags so they push their message to everyone. So as other suggested you would need a filter on client side to get around people that attempt to push some to everyone.
A blog/website with an RSS feed is even better, IMO. And for in-depth discussions traditional forums (or even subreddits) beat Twitter easily. Twitter is the king of low-effort posting.
I prefer twitter's method to RSS feeds. I need curation with the amount of content that my list publishes.
If you do want to continue in Twitter, change your location. I used to follow key topics (like Go and Flutter) on Twitter, but couldn't avoid the nasty "trends" Twitter throws at you that (IMO) are very biased. So, I set my location as Iceland (I live in the US), and after that life has been good. :)
> "Wonder if shaping discourse via a site where performativity is rewarded, single lines can be taken out of context from qualifying threads and piled on, pithy takes are amplified over nuance, and everyone is either Good or Bad, was overall a positive or negative development"
For example you can't subscribe to grugq for political-infosec content without some IRA memes. And I don't mean that other people shouldn't post stuff they want, just that I'd like to see a filtered view of their posts most of the time. After a few iterations I gave up Twitter almost completely.
I wish Twitter allowed people to tweet into different personal channels, and I could only subscribe to the personal channels I'm interested in.
Social networks badly need to evolve. What they are currently is quickly eroding the social fabrics.
But, I have all Twitter alerts turned off, and only check every few days. I rarely look at my own Twitter timeline and instead go directly to people's timeline who I have found will have the news I'm interested in.
It's a blazing fast way of accessing Twitter content.
Did you read what I said? I have stopped using Twitter. I don't tweet, I don't have the app, I don't engage in anything what happens there now.
I just occasionally peek in to see if I'm missing out on anything and surprisingly I don't. As a result I see myself (unconsciously) check Twitter less and less.
> I just occasionally [use Twitter] to see if . . .
Hm.
My current Twitter “usage” is the same concept. You decide if you call this a Twitter user or not.
That's the thing: it's become extremely deeply embedded in our society, since it's damn catnip to 24-hour news (which, IMO, was the originator of this problem - they need content, now, and anything which provides is thrown up there).
Switching to chronological mode, aggressively unfollowing the rude people who think that their technical knowledge allows them to plaster their opinions on your face, and changing my location to burundi did it for me.
This is where the major problem lies and you don't even realize you're complicit in it. The "current events" blasted out on Twitter are curated by Twitter admins to only show what they want to show. They place heavy over-weighting on events and discussion that they want everyone to see. They hide hashtags they don't want trending. They don't show a pure list of what's actually trending. They shadow-ban users that talk about topics they don't want talked about. They give priority to media outlets that are also involved in heavy censorship, therefore adding extra fake credibility to false narratives. And the latest is the whole "Fact check" thing, where they only fact check the discussion that they want discredited (even if it's 100% true).
You are an example how censorship is so powerful. When people believe they've found a "good way to follow current events", and refuse to question the accuracy of the medium, they quickly become prone to believing false narratives. Currently, the elites who own the media are doing everything in their power to further the left's agenda. (The active campaign is their attempt to cover up and discredit any discussion of election fraud. Also, you probably didn't hear that Zuckerberg donated half a billion dollars towards democrat vote-counting strategies) Many people want to bury their head in the sand because it aligns with their political beliefs. Hopefully this is a wake up call to some.
I didnt even know that it exists. I meant twitter users that cover current events (like wars), that you can find by searching or through other social media. It works like a telegraph office. I agree that algorithms range from plain bad and lazy to dangerous. If one thinks that what's trending on twitter is reality, they are delusional
God forbid people be able to exercise the right to vote.
“A conservative legal group, Thomas More Society, has filed lawsuits in eight states, including the presidential battlegrounds of Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Iowa, seeking to block the grants from going through”
Also, donations towards partisan strategies meant to directly impact election results aren't allowed.
"Mr. Landry said one way the grant money could be used would be to send out prepaid return ballots in heavily Democratic districts around New Orleans, “while some guy in a rural parish [a conservative area] still has to buy his 50-cent stamp.”"
"Though the CTCL maintains it is a non-partisan organization that offers “free and low-cost resources for local election administrators” with no regard to political leaning, the group’s founders each boast records in progressive and pro-Democratic circles. Prior to creating the CTCL, all three founding members – Tiana Epps-Johnson, Donny Bridges and Whitney May – held top positions with the New Organizing Institute, described by the Washington Post in 2014 as “the left's think tank for campaign know-how.” Epps-Johnson also remains a fellow at the Obama Foundation, her LinkedIn page shows."
"In Philadelphia, long a Democratic stronghold, money provided by the center is to be used to establish 800 polling places, an increase of 76% the number of polling places"
Reference: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/oct/29/zuckerberg-...
Curiously, the right (and you) have no problem with 42 other states having access to those grants, but god forbid any purple states get that money. The fact that Joe Bob lives in a rural parish that wont apply for grants is on your team, not those sneaky lefties.
“800 polling places”
Why do people loathe making voting accessible? What does it matter how many there are? That’s the best you can do on a site that loathes Zuck?
Has the Moonie Times found Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate yet? See, I do read it, and I have a very long memory. Thx for playing.
I'm sorry for triggering you with non thought-police compliant dialogue. You may re-enter your safe echo chamber now where your participation awards are waiting.
I especially despise the “trends” sections. It ignores any keywords and sites that you’ve blocked and seems designed to inflame. Dorsey at one point made a big statement about trying to change the tone but I’ve seen little evidence of it.
I have a small list of people that I actually follow who tend to keep things civil
Now I haven't used Facebook for six weeks (I still use Instagram and Messenger). I don't miss it at all. If I'm bored or tired, every once in a while I'll reflexively start to open it in a browser tab but so far I have always caught myself and not gone into the Zuckerworld.
I'm not active on Twitter but I imagine it's more of the same.
I doubt if some Alternabook that lets conspiracy theorists go nuts in their own little bubble will make the world a better place, but I'm not convinced it'll be any worse than what Facebook and Twitter have been doing.
I do wonder if this might make them less useful for advertisers.
The internet has brought communication to everyone that travels at incredible speed. This has the effect of causing emotive responses, rather than reasoned. Requires no effort at all to respond, and encourages the toxicity you describe. What gains most traction are those posts that are the most emotive. It used to be "if it bleeds, it leads", but I suspect these days it's more akin to "emotion deserves promotion".
Speed carries a number of other implications. For example, it allows a cheap, steady stream of constant information that can be completely irrelevant at best to you, plus it's information about which you often can do nothing about, except hit the reply button. This can only make things worse, because people feel powerless except in this superficial way.
The other effect is the quantity of information, and it's impossible now for a user of the internet to wade through it, or even validate it without incredible effort. Our current techniques for filtering that information is essentially populist individualism: we rely on what other people have liked, linked to, or shared, but at the same time, read what is presented to us based on our previous interactions.
I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that I perhaps pessimistically feel that these things are fundamentally baked into the medium, in much the same way that Neil Postman felt entertainment was intrinsically baked into television. Hopefully I'm wrong, and there are solutions to these things. Not sure what they are myself.
I agree there may not be a solution, given the technology we now have and the minds we'll never improve upon in our lifetimes.
But I think we have to try...
Twitter isn't making good decisions. The killed Vine and gave Musicaly and then TikTok oxygen. Their censorship is giving rise to competitors.
There is no way around it because humans are deeply emotionally flawed, and these flaws are amplified by our technology. No amount of technology will fix it, as it will just be another catalyst.
Looking elsewhere in the branches of life for intelligence, such as octopuses, whales, in particular orcas, and elephants, we see different types. Are they more or less emotional? The communal spirit of elephants and that of orcas, the latter of which showcase particularly striking examples of cooperation, does make you wonder. But then it again, it makes you wonder if all higher forms of intelligence lead you to take advantage of a greater amount of situations and why we even bother trying to establish ourselves out there for other intelligent lifeforms to find.
Since then, my favorite instance was killed by a bunch of irony-poisoned instances ganging up on it to convince others it was a toxic hell (projection!) and defederate from it. The instance was basically dead within a week as people migrated off to avoid losing contact with friends on the fediverse.
https://twitter.com/DamienGranz/status/1314710715635204103
It's not much different from people ganging up on someone on Twitter to report them into an automated suspension.
[1] Instances choose how to render things delivered over ActivityPub. So (for example) Mastodon would render a write.as post as a toot, while write.as might render replies to that toot as comments on a blog post.
I also entirely stopped using Reddit for the same reason. IMHO it's even more toxic than Twitter.
And don't get me started about Facebook. What is it about politics that takes relatively sane friendly people who you've known for years and transforms them into raging psychopaths? When my own sister found out I didn't think Trump was a literal Nazi, she then proceeded to call me a racist, with all her douchebag "online friends" cheering her on. And before Facebook, we used to get along really well. But now it's like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.
I've ditched the lot, deleted my reddit and twitter accounts, configured my pihole to block the domains for the occasions that my willpower fails me and my life has improved dramatically.
But yes, I’ve found that without careful curation, it quickly turns into a depressing cesspit. Then again, that’s not unique to Twitter. I culled my contacts in the real world when in high-school and college for the same reasons and to the same effect.
Done the same on Facebook, which I use mostly for family communication and posting dad jokes. But again, as hard as I try to separate work / family life, colleagues want to connect and they spew the same tired BS I see elsewhere.
So, on FB, I can permanently mute them. Which, I do.
If twitter's business model was to be a toxic stew of partisan talk and censorship of "incorrect views", yeah, they nailed it.
Facebook I stopped using a while back. It gives me the feeling of universal garbage bag where everyone in a race to impress others. On twitter I follow top people from my domain and ignore everything. No political BS. In LinkedIn, I literally removed all HR connections and started to follow people whom I really adore and take direction from their career path.
You have to see it for what it is: An online digital slot machine. The stakes are, well your time and your life. And just like in real life, the house always wins.
The thing about Twitter is that it is entirely about who you follow, and what those people talk about and retweet. So if somebody is a source of toxicity, unfollow them. I have a very low threshold for both following and unfollowing.
This part, curating your feed, is not trivial, but it is what determines 100% of your experience. I don't blame you at all for having a bad experience and not wanting to use Twitter again! But also realize that it's not the only experience to be had there, and I think that for many, and hopefully most people, it's a positive experience.
Thus, Twitter is horrible, no matter the fake emotional output of a single user's anecdotal experience.
If this default is "horrible" can you say more about that?
> fake emotional output of a single user's anecdotal experience
What do you mean by this? What is the emotional output and what is fake? Are you talking about my single user's experience, or that of the person I replied to?
> I was part of the problem too.
Not to be overly personal here, but doesn't this post veer close to describing itself?
Look at how many negative words are in this post of yours and hopefully see the irony of what you’re saying. Twitter isn’t magic, it can only give you what it thinks you want from what you give it!
If you’re seeing Tweets that make you angry, unfollow that person. It’s really as simple as that.
If someone doesn’t have the willpower to avoid anger-inducing follows and tweets, deleting Twitter entirely is a good option. For everyone else, it’s really not difficult to curate your feed to be more reasonable.
Use the unfollow button liberally.
But I eventually realized what it really is: a gossip site. With all the mean gossip anyone could ever want.
I pretty much just ignore it now.
What gets thrown out by that filter is all the inconsequential news, and gossip, and speculation, and learning people's knee-jerk reactions before you've had a chance to make up your own mind. You can still seek out all that stuff if you have the impulse, but you aren't being fed it intravenously all the time.
This is all by way of saying that the cost of just cutting these platforms out of your life altogether is pretty low, and there are some benefits.
I still read the news every day (Feedly) and know what's going on, but it's compartmentalized.
Most of the BBS and IRC rooms I frequented had little to no moderation. Flamewars occurred, but everyone eventually calmed the fuck down..you just have to let it burn out almost like how you’d allow a child to have his tantrum and then it’s back to life as usual.
I think moderation and rules are making communication worse. Anyone who has been in a marriage or a relationship can maybe attest to the fact that in the fiery instances where we don’t sit down and ‘figure out rules of engagement’ burn out fast. When there are rules for the emotional pressure valves to be released, arguments and disagreements become nested and multi layered.
In today’s world..we are all toddlers and/or married to each other on social media and Twitter, FB et al have become our nannies creating and putting out meltdowns and tantrums at the same time.
Having said that, IG is still my favourite. Except that they are allergic to images of certain parts of the human anatomy and sometimes even onions can be too sexy for their nipple detection algorithms..but otherwise it’s brimming with joy and positivity.
I'm working on a new open chat site, https://sqwok.im, and hoping to recapture some of that essence. Particularly the simplicity, and lack of overly strict moderation like you describe. Irc never hit mainstream because the majority of users would never download and install a client, but it's neat that with modern web technology we can finally build these experiences in a way that general users can enjoy.
I am unsure tho how to navigate to get to the chat rooms.
ETA: ahhh! I got it! Will there be some form of indexing?
Eta2: can I describe it this way: the author of a topic of discussion is the moderator of the topic?
So the key thing is on Sqwok each post has a built-in chat room instead of comments, meaning that creating your own chat and sharing it with anyone else is as easy as sharing the url for your post. It currently works on mobile and desktop web.
> can I describe it this way: the author of a topic of discussion is the moderator of the topic?
yes this is accurate! I'm still actively building out some key features including ability to do some basic moderation, but that's the plan!
Do you intend to keep it this way? (Please say yes)
will post the link since I'm going to be hanging out there watching the SpaceX Crew 1 launch :D
hmm, that seems like a bug! the username limit is set at 20 but maybe I accidentally copied that validation onto the password field, I'll remove it, thanks for reporting!
edit: forgot there was #undernet too.. dang, what a fun time. I remember there were a bunch of other servers on top of those but I can't remember them
For starters, here's a good maintained list: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/...
I'm sure I miss a few from time to time, but you get the point.
I've unfollowed lots of tech luminaries I admire, lots of musicians whose music I love, lots of brands that make good products. And I still buy some of the books and albums and products they produce. I might even miss the occasional awesome announcement from one of those outlets. But the resulting sanity and focus of my social media feeds is worth it.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/10/reading-t...
Welcome to planet earth. We hope you enjoy your stay.
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing 'Hallelujah.'
It also kinda helps that Parler has a central authority that's able to verify certain accounts. Mastodon's designed not to support that "feature".
My Facebook feed was full of pins, shirts, mugs, and posters of Ruth Bader Ginsberg with a tacky Notorious B.I.G. crown on her head for weeks after her death. Sometimes they’d even say “Rest In Power” whatever that means.
They must have been selling like hot cakes.
I expect they made lots of money there if they outsourced to print on demand.
During the Ron Paul craze I had some Gold adverts printing money.
And that was in a kinder, gentler age, when more of the arguments were about tax policy and the political management of South and Central America. In today's considerably more polarized era...
In an amazing coincidence, people who believe that masks have 5G chips in them to allow Soros/Gates to perform mind control (or is it via the chemtrails?) and that climate change scientists are being manipulated by Big Solar turn out to be easy to sell things to. Who would have thunk it?
But more likely it’s a scheme to create a platform to deliver ideas to a specific target group. Or a way of attacking the established actors and regulation in the space. Or a way of simply creating division. Or (my guess) all of the above.
>even though there is no evidence for these allegations of systemic anti-conservative bias.
All there is evidence of is them removing misinformation. Like banning the NYPost after they fabricated a ridiculous story how Hunter Biden flew across the country to give his laptop to a computer repair guy who 'found' all this data. As MSNBC says, NYPost is a conspiracy theory peddling tabloid.
Though I do agree Twitter hasn't done enough to remove the hate and misinformation.
Sure, Twitter did ban lots of people who were defending that racist maga hat kid. The Native American man he was taunting explained what happened very well. His explanation that the boys surrounded him and threatened him is so typical of MAGA people. I also agree that anyone who threatened to kill the maga hit kid shouldn't be punished.
Banning the people who called Jussie Smollet a hoax, after he was attacked by Trump voters. That was justice.
I also agree with all the transphobes who have been banned. They should never be allowed to use the wrong pronoun, or use a deadname, or for that matter just say things like women have 2 X chromesomes. All these abusive people have no place on Twitter.
Left-wing, (not neo-liberal mind you), outlets are getting censored too, just ask The Grayzozone, Jacobin etc.
As for your average Twitter consensus, if you say i.e. Biden, even Sanders is a radical socialist then you're going to get laughed at, because it's far from true.
But as far as the reach of conservatives, #ProudBoys is trending on Twitter right now and am getting conservative YouTube recommendations about the 'culture war' on a regular basis, that's despite me not being logged in, not watching conservative channels and having history/personal recommendations etc. turned off. It just seems to be popular content right now.
We've seen this movie before. Minds, Gab, Patreon alternatives, Voat, all of this has been done with no success.
Whatever you open to the public will be infiltrated by the enemy. I think the new model is to do it secretly in closed groups away from the public, preferably local groups where you meet with people in person, have strict rules and only sign up new users via strong referrals: family members, close friends etc. Once some of them work well, they can be franchised. A very good example of this is Freemasonry.
Yes, such social networks will be much slower and decentralized but they will be much more effective and better for the members long-term.
Can you explain what you mean by this? I wouldn't have thought that the average user of social media had that many enemies, but i could be wrong.
In fact, one can do much more damage to an online community, specially if it can have anonymous users.
The people who run the platforms directly or those who help them operate via partnerships, investments, can be threatened, bought or invited to the current equivalent of the Epstein's island... and they'll eventually have to get in line.
The current assumption that these tech companies work the way they do because of the ideology of people who own them or work for them is either very incomplete or completely flawed.
https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/contenu/menu/droit-national-e...
Another responded “Yeah it’s a new app for right wing circle jerk”
That alone is the reason Parler exist. Anything that goes against the views of the liberal left is automatically deemed trash/conspiracy.
This is more then a handful of disaffected basement keyboard Nazis. It's millions of people. Many of them reasonably upset at censorship and ultimate determination of truth by a group of 20-30 something high-top sneaker wearing San Francisco people.
A free speech obsessed person myself, I've been keeping a close watch. In the old days, hate speech to block meant, imminent harm. Today, someone saying I don't feel Safe has become an acceptable argument. The argument was made against a liberal signatory of the Harper letter, the argument was made against the editor of the NYT who published the Cotton piece. We've rapidly descended to calling disagreement Hate Speech. And we have double standards like the NY Post Biden debacle, where it was clear that Silicon Valley can rationalize away the most basic values of journalistic freedom. Hypocrisy does down the memory hole, it's tossed into that chute like in 1984's Ministry of Truth.
It didn't have to come to this. For those who think squashing dangerous right-wing views is good and just: what do you think will happen on Parler? Moderation? Lessons learned?
What is the end goal here, Facebook and Twitter? How do you see online discourse in ten years time?
Because there's a (probably incorrect) assumption about my political views?
Because I'm suggesting that maybe the line "censorship will lead to more problems, not less" is to be "voted against" a if it were a design choice in reality itself?
Let's put it this way. Going back to Twitter. How would you feel if your views were suppressed. And if we can suppress views now that you don't like, what happens one day when the views you LIKE are suppressed?
It cuts both ways. Your eagerness to shut something down today can come down to bite you and you'll have no argument to stand on. That's why we defend those we disagree with, on principle.
I don't buy the argument that Parler needs celebrities and mainstream journalists to survive. Do Discord or Reddit have any? Yet they are doing fine. It will probably stay an echo-chamber and with fewer right-wingers, Twitter will become more of an echo-chamber. 8 days on the top of both app stores is a real momentum for Parler, let's see what they do with it.
When I saw Twitter's head of site integrity post this: "a phenomenally documented (and illustrated) study from @3r1nG about the ways that inauthentic social media accounts can be deployed to attempt to discredit an activist movement" and actually followed the link and saw that it was just a blog post about very obvious Antifa parody accounts and journalists falling for 4chan-like trolling, it became clear how bad is Twitter's company culture. They've been drifting around, not innovating, and their underperforming stock price reflects it well.
Dick Costolo, the former CEO of Twitter, made a post about "lining up and shooting" people. AOC recently tweeted about "making lists" of opposition supporters, which was amplified by many others. There were 3 years of unfounded accusations of foreign involvement in the 2016 election, amongst many other titillating rumours, gossip, and slander against an elected official and his family and cabinet members.
None of those were flagged by social media companies the way Trump and others are being flagged now. Whatever pretzel-like justifications one may come up with for the obvious double-standard, the average person no longer believes in neutrality of media or of any of the major tech platforms.
[0]https://twitter.com/tysmith12206/status/1326669493817516034
[1]https://img.ifunny.co/images/f9cf7b18c206377f293432986acf677...
> Dick Costolo, the former CEO of Twitter, made a post about "lining up and shooting" people. AOC recently tweeted about "making lists" of opposition supporters, which was amplified by many others.
> Whatever pretzel-like justifications one may come up with for the obvious double-standard, the average person no longer believes in neutrality of media or of any of the major tech platforms.
I hope your last sentence is made in jest, because that is not a good basis in which to engage with the world.
we don't need a conservative npr (there are alternatives for that), we need an independent and diverse npr, which is something we're truly lacking in the media landscape.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...
>All of the mechanical “glitches” that took place on Election Night were really THEM getting caught trying to steal votes. They succeeded plenty, however, without getting caught. Mail-in elections are a sick joke!
is true. (recent presidential tweet). Not quite sure what the endgame is.
There are now two realities as a result.
I mean Apple will demand that content violating their policies in apps are removed. I'm sure Parler is full of exactly the kinds of things Apple wont tolerate.
IANAL, but we already have laws against libel, slander, and defamation.
Section 230 / communications decency could be modified. New laws could be created to prevent amplified spread of factually incorrect information. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom to broadcast that speech.
I'm not advocating for this, but I see it as a possibility.
A handful of exceptions do exist to the First Amendment, but free speech absolutists tend to be skeptical of the comparison you make in your post, because historically there have been some serious legal wrongs performed in the name of said crowded theater.
A) Government. Some years liberals will supress conservatives, when the power is switch conservatives will supress back. The whole concept of free speech was specifically designed to not have the government dictate what you can say or not say.
B) The press. Which one, CNN or Fox News? The trust on the media is an all-time low and they clearly have earned that reputation.
C) The judicial system? Again, most of them are appointed by the government.
D) Tech lords. I really hope no one is advocating for this.
I am not American, I wish to live in a country where I can criticize anyone, even the President, without fear of getting arrested for a bogus claim of defimation. Is sad to see that most Americans don't value their own freedoms.
It's not free speech. It's one-sided.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/parler-ted-cruz-approved-free-speec...
Edit: this post is getting downvoted like crazy. People have strong opinions about this.
I've said it about twitter and I'll say it about parler. Freedom of association is also a first amendment right. Speech is being exercised by the owners of a platform when they edit/curate/annotate posts, and association is being exercised when they ban/shadowban users.
It sounds like they were banned for being antagonistic assholes, not for being liberals.
It obvious that "we want to allow someone to say anything they could say on twitter+(spout conspiracy theories and implicit/explicit racist shit)" is both freer than twitter, and not as free as previous+harass people.
I really don't think allowing right wing nuts to voice their opinion but not letting users harass each other makes a hypocrite?
As it should. It's one thing to claim space lizards are controlling Facebook, it's another to start saying you want to shoot up busses full of Facebook workers.
Unconvincing? Replace "Facebook" with "Democrats" and you get worryingly close to Parler.
But there is another problem. These sites don't just happen. If they were bottom-up spontaneous forums - someone starting with phpBB and taking it from there - they'd be tolerable. (And likely less extreme.)
They aren't. These are deliberate attempts to farm and concentrate certain kinds of people with certain kinds of sentiments so they can be used as political leverage for certain interests.
They're not free speech at all - they're farmed speech.
That is the problem. The people who farm them are knowingly and maliciously using them to spread lies and enflame violent sentiment so they can profit from both, financially and politically.
>dog whistle
to be reductive, yes far right and even fascist ideas would fall under the umbrella of free speech as would... literally everything else.
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/11/02/huckster-hack-uk-govt-rep...
/r/TheDonald was notorious for brigading other subreddits, manipulating votes and other TOS violations then crying censorship when they got banned.