pannSun

> the company will work toward “pinpointing many types of online harmful content, including toxicity and misinformation.”

If your goal is not to identify misinformation (or political misinformation, or medical misinformation) but only harmful misinformation, then you are not a fact-checker but a self-professed propagandist.

This is similar to how journalists will write, depending on how hostile they are to a statement/person, "X said Y", "X claimed Y", and finally, "without providing evidence, X claimed Y" - sometimes even when X is speaking directly about their own experience.

> Because being kicked off Twitter is hardly the same as not being able to dial 911

The Civil Rights Act also prevents Twitter (or any company) from banning users based on protected characteristics (e.g. race and sex). It is not remotely limited to critical services or common carriers.

You can't have what both ways, specifically? User-facing spending and capacity limits that are hard to accidentally set too high, without also unilaterally and without warning terminating compute nodes for opaque, alleged ToS violations when their compute actually gets used?

You are being deliberately obtuse. No matter how one answers your question, most internet users still have unaccountable 3rd parties opaquely choosing who they communicate with [1].

Do you admit this is a problem, but you just don't see a solution compatible with the 1st amendment's freedom of association? Do you support the Civil Rights Act's restriction of freedom based on race and/or think it is constitutionally valid? Why would the same logic not hold for restricting companies such as Twitter then?

[1] Spare me rebuttals of "if they really wanted to communicate, they could do so by carrier pigeon!" - 99% of users won't go through with such effort, or even know who they are being herded away from. The remaining motivated 1% is too small to have any political power, and so the censor wins.

Keep in mind that "gun deaths" include suicides. I'm not sure what kind of policy choice is informed by counting suicide and homicide under the same category. But it does make the gun problem seem more severe to the inattentive reader.

Let's ignore for the moment that their CEO is paid over $3 million/year [1], and focus on the $200K for the junior software engineer.

If that's what it takes to hire a programmer in CA, then maybe Mozilla should headquarter somewhere else.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30665913

> That will also help the company prepare for an "extensive independent audit" — as required by the new law — which is aimed at protecting internet users from illegal content and reducing the spread of harmful but legal material.

(Emphasis mine. It's hard to imagine a more Orwellian move than using the phrase "harmful but legal" in laws.)

I hope Twitter will do so transparently. When a tweet's spread is reduced, it should be clearly marked on the tweet itself, visible to its poster and any readers, that "This tweet has been identified as harmful but legal, and, in accordance with EU regulation X, its visibility has been reduced".

Illegal tweets should similarly show up as black boxes, without content, but listing the specific rationale for their removal. And just like court documents are public, a list of all illegal tweets, including content, should be available to at least journalists and researchers, so that citizens can know how these censorship powers are being (ab)used.

But I have a feeling they won't do that. I have a feeling the EU wants to hide the very fact that censorship is even taking place.

This would not be any less wrong if there was a law mandating it, instead of informal pressure.

Yes, until every spark of freedom has been irreversibly extinguished, we are blameless for helping in that process.

Here are a few examples of non-extreme/factual positions resulting in backlash: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33800802

If you take the most uncharitable interpretation of the most extreme position, then of course the backlash looks justified. But have you tried actually understanding the "other side"?

That distinction is irrelevant to the morality of Apple's actions in this case.

Law of the land, government pressure, it's ultimately all the same.

I wonder if Apple's repeated cooperation with the Chinese police state [1] will result in the same kind of advertiser exodus as Musk's loosening of censorship on Twitter.

[1] One may claim they're just complying with the law of the land, it was Apple's choice to take away their users control over their phones, and place themselves in the position of arbiter on what they can install and run. They knew (from experience!) how an authoritarian government will force them to abuse that power.

> All four accounts had been singled out for criticism by Andy Ngo, a far-right writer whose conspiratorial, error-riddled reporting [1] on left-wing protests and social movements fuels the mass delusion that a handful of small antifascist groups are part of an imaginary shadow army called “antifa.”

Let's see these errors then. [1] is a twitter thread about Ngo's reporting on the Dayton gunman Connor Betts' presence at an anti-KKK protest 2 months before his killing spree. Ngo claims Betts came to an antifa rally and wore black-block style clothing to mask his identity.

But this is entirely false - it was not an antifa rally, but a "diverse array of anti-racist groups and individuals". He did wear sunglasses and a bandana to mask his identity, but did not wear "all black". And while he was "in the crowd", the journalist claims he was "not part of any group".

I am certain that when links to the right are found with a mass shooter, this same journalist will remain consistent, and claim there is no such thing as the alt-right, merely a "diverse array of anti-globalist groups and individuals", and that while the shooter may have attended their protests, he was "not part of any group".

Later in that thread: Ngo showed his fans an image of the small black bloc contingent at the anti-KKK protest. His fans won't hear me say they were about a dozen in a crowd of 500-600 and Betts was not with them.

Reminds me of the saying "If there's a Nazi at the table and 10 other people are sitting there talking to him, you have a table with 11 Nazis." Apply this rule only to your enemies - the Good Guys can associate with whoever they want, and come out clean.

[1] https://twitter.com/RobertMackey/status/1466292569843793921

> To be very naive, as long as the set of voters includes me, my wishes will be at least proportionally represented, right?

How this fails is difficult to arrive at through theory. "Fortunately" we have examples from practice: Tibetan, Uyghur, and Hong Kong voters in China, Kurdish voters in Turkey, Kashmir voters in India [1], or Ukrainian voters under the Soviet union, to name a few.

People don't behave as atomic individuals, but as members of groups.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/08/08/kashmirs-new...

This article makes out China's social credit system to be much nicer than how Wikipedia portrays it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System#For_indiv...

> behavior listed as positive factors of credit ratings includes donating blood, donating to charity, volunteering for community services, praising government efforts on social media, and so on [..] 26.82 million air tickets as well as 5.96 million high-speed rail tickets had been denied to people who were deemed "untrustworthy" [..] According to Sarah Cook of Freedom House, city-level pilot projects for the social credit system have included rewarding individuals for aiding authorities in enforcing restrictions of religious practices, including coercing practitioners of Falun Gong to renounce their beliefs and reporting on Uighurs who publicly pray, fast during Ramadan, or perform other Islamic practices.

It's a puff piece, trying to convince us that because it's not yet as terrible as the worst we've seen on Black Mirror, it's nothing to worry about, despite every indication that's the direction it's headed.

> So if you were from Belgium and it grew to 500M, you'd have to support a move to partition Belgium into 50 separate nations, for the same reason you're against the EU [1]. Right?

Such as how the British empire partitioned into the US, Canada, Australia.., or how China and Japan became distinct countries despite a common origin? Yes. A shared identity can support a larger country (the inverse can be seen in the breakup of Yugoslavia), but not without limit.

> I buy that smaller democracies could work better in many ways

It's not just about size. It's about the simple and intuitively obvious idea that it matters who chooses your rulers. I find it both fascinating and frightening that people have been so trained into ignoring their instincts (evolved through millions of years of inter-group competition, but now casually dismissed as "irrational"), that this basic notion now needs arguing.

[1] A small correction: I am not against the EU - the opposite, I am strongly in favor of it, for the simple pragmatic reasons that it safeguards peace among the member states, and because the relatively small European countries would otherwise be picked off individually by larger geopolitical rivals. What I am against is the expansion of EU law into areas of law and life that can be perfectly adequately addressed by individual states themselves.

Yes, I believe a government that is more local, and representing a community that has more in common, will be more reflective of the wishes of that community, and more responsive (and vulnerable!) to its criticism.

I find it somewhat insulting I even have to argue for this - this move of power further away is a change. It should be justified, instead of happening by default, while the former status quo of sovereign nations has to argue for its continued existence.

Should we even worry? If it were only remote communities using fossil fuels, the climate would barely be affected. It's only a problem because everyone is using them.

This is the highest fruit - once we've picked all the rest, we can easily afford to leave this one hanging.

It's mere chance they all agree on this issue, and certainly not a reason to look critically at these ad agencies that decide which businesses live or die.

I.e. put themselves in massive legal peril.

Of course, if we pretend nations don't exist and their people have no common interest, it doesn't matter if laws come from your national government, from Brussels, or from a distant capital like Washington or Beijing. So long as you get a vote, even if diluted by millions or billions of new fellow citizens, it's all the same.

It is not the amount of regulation I take issue with[1], but the scope. While I am strongly pro-EU, I am also strongly in favor of it being made up of countries that are more than just nominally sovereign and independent. Power is slowly being moved from national governments and to the EU, and I don't like this slow subversion of nations one bit.

[1] Not saying over-regulation isn't a problem, merely not my main concern.

The scope of EU laws is growing. Do member countries enjoy having social-economical policies dictated from above? This is meddling in what should be internal matters of sovereign states. Then they are surprised anti-EU sentiment is growing.

I look forward to when industry takes this logic further, and requires an additional "business" license if their analytics detect your vehicle use exceeds allowed "personal/family" parameters.

You should organize politically to compel businesses to behave ethically. They understand the power of political organization - they've built the whole lobbying industry for it.

If we reduce ourselves to consumers, we have already lost.

B2B: You think more granular control of how their goods are used will benefit Intel's business consumers? That Intel won't carefully adjust every parameter to extract the maximum value from each business?

Another small erosion of ownership.