It doesn't matter. This strawman is presented every time this topic comes up. It's not about the quality of the Post's journalism. It's about whether Twitter should restrict it.
I've been reading the Post off and on for the last 40 years, and you are correct that it is a rag. But it is a newspaper. A newspaper with a better reputation for reporting the news than Twitter.
Not every article is going to be to your taste, or ape your point of view. And as newspapers go, it is very sensational. This is not a secret. Everyone knows what to expect when they pick up a copy. And they read it with that filter in mind. This is literacy 101.
But people on HN try to falsely characterize it as the equivalent of the National Enquirer. It isn't. It's a legitimate newspaper, whether you like it or not.
99.9% of the Post criticism I see on HN is from people who have never lived in New York. Never actually read the Post, or any other newspaper. They just amplify and repeat the echo chamber hyperbole they see from other people who have never read the Post. Some of the most vocal have stated in other threads that they are Twitter employees.
If I have to choose between the Post being an information gatekeeper and Twitter, I'll go with the Post every time.
> It doesn't matter. This strawman is presented every time this topic comes up.
I can't ignore the irony here that you complain about straw-manning of the OP by cherry-picking the only negative comment in spite of the 99% of commentary in favor.
Edit: I also can't ignore that the plaint of pervasive "echo chamber hyperbole" is juxtaposed with statements like these:
> This strawman is presented every time this topic comes up.
> This is literacy 101.
> 99.9% of the Post criticism I see on HN is from people who have never lived in New York. Never actually read the Post, or any other newspaper.
That 'The New York Post has more merit than people afford it' might be worthy claim, but making a bunch of loud baseless claims isn't the way to convince people of it.
If it wasn't they would have critiqued my comment as you have. But instead it was a string of drive-by down-votes.
> it's that talking about irony and juxtaposition is not helpful
I think it is important to point out bad faith dialogue wherever it is seen. And that's what I did, by pointing out the contradictions in the moral stance made, and then the poster completely disregarding them in the same breath.
> vague comments on other people's cases.
They weren't vague at all, they were very specific. The poster was making a rhetorical play rather than furthering the discussion, and I pointed it out with direct quotes.
I agree with that.
> A newspaper with a better reputation for reporting the news than Twitter.
Twitter is a social media site that anyone can post on, it's not a news aggregation site and certainly isn't even a news generating company. Every news organization in the world could delete their Twitter account, and everyone could stop sharing links to news companies articles, and Twitter's purpose wouldn't change. Twitter doesn't hire journalists to research and write articles...
They are free to have their selective outrage, but they are a publisher, not a platform.
And therefore cannot claim protections under 47.230 This is like claiming tax exceptions of a non-profit charity, while being a for profit business
>" ... (c)Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material (1)Treatment of publisher or speaker No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
(2)Civil liability No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— (A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or (B)any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).[1]
..."
Anyone agreeing with Twitter's agenda, it appears.
What kind of orwellian shit is that?!? The twitter account itself was used very sparingly to upload content from my PS4, not controversial in the least.
There is very clearly an agenda being applied here. Which is fine with me because this kind of repression is indication of desperation.
You are either:
A platform. That allows all voices to be heard. 1st Amendment protections.
A publisher. That can edit or censor. And can be sued for slander and libel.
Whatever sophistry section 230 discussion is being fogged with, the above should be the way it is, period.
The NYPost is a platform with a (large) editorial slant.
Why should one be obligated to amplify the other? The NYPost gets to have an absolutely massive editorial slant (endorsing presidential candidates, etc) but Twitter can't? Should the NYPost be forced to amplify the NYTimes? What about other heavily user-driven platforms like HN and StackOverflow? Should HN be forbidden from curating its front page stories as well?
Keep in mind that HN itself is heavily curated. Should HN be allowed to do that?
(Browse HN with showdead on sometime to see what you're missing...)
I don't want Twitter to curate what ideas and speakers
I'm exposed to, in the same way that I don't want my
local library to ban certain books or Google to
delist websites that it decides are bad
I do want Twitter to curate things, by filtering out news from biased sources with questionable alliances and borderline journalistic practices. I want them to be transparent about it, and if I don't like the way they do it I'll go elsewhere. To me, that is the free market -- not forcing Twitter to amplify all voices indiscriminately. If Twitter was the only game in town I'd feel differently, but that is far from the case.
I think most really do want some level of curation. Do you want child porn on your feed? Endless ads for fake Viagra? Animal abuse?
I cannot imagine a platform like Twitter being useful without some kind of curation. I realize that blocking the NYPost is an opinionated move in some ways.
They were transparent about the reason, and I agreed with their move. That's all I ask. There are plenty of other places with more relaxed standards, and they're still available to me when I really want to drink from the firehose.
They can do it, but it's a silly, foolish way to run
a social network.
Illegal material aside, if someone posts something on Twitter that really disturbs me, I can block them. Twitter could create custom filters and let people opt in to them, too. But I want my technology to empower me, not infantalize me with paternalistic "protections."
I'm all for moderated communities. It's important for people to be able to create and define communities with their own rules and norms. But Twitter should be the value-neutral technology on which those communities are built. Empower us to create the world we want, don't force your vision on us.
Unfortunately, I think they feel responsible for the content now that they are actively picking what we see in our algorithmic feeds. The algorithmic feed was the first step in disempowering their users, and it logically leads to increasing censorship.
>I cannot imagine a platform like Twitter being useful without some kind of curation. I realize that blocking the NYPost is an opinionated move in some ways.
Blocking NYPost is not curating the extreme content you state. Your argument is an attempt to imply that wanting the NYPost is akin to wanting the other.
You should trust other people to have the same ability as yourself to evaluate information.
Wouldn´t it be better to have two options when
you log in to Twitter? Safe space Twitter and
wild west Twitter.
Then all sensitive people can log into a pink
bubble and the rest of us can enjoy uncensored
reality. Most people should realize that very
few would choose the pink bubble.
Except that Twitter claims to be a neutral platform in order to benefit from Section 230. I agree with you that it's just another media outlet with a slant, but the government needs to start treating them like it.
Edit: I'm not going to risk posting another comment in this thread because I'm getting negative votes. I keep seeing this more and more and I'm baffled. I haven't called names or even been combative. Is this place reddit now, where you just downvote anyone you disagree with?
Verge has a good article that discusses this in more detail: https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/22/20700099/section-230-comm...
But the other problem is defining neutral - many people seem to have decided that removing objectively false information is somehow not neutral. Which it isn’t.
What?
I personally find value in entities like Hacker News, Twitter, StackOverflow, etc that curate their content. I of course do want transparency there.
I also value utterly unfiltered sources. But, I do not need or want every source to be unfiltered. Then everything becomes a firehose of utter garbage.
I think there is room for both. But it just makes zero sense to me to essentially force primarily user-driven platforms like Twitter to amplify/aggregate content from literally everybody. If they don't want to amplify the NYPost's stories, that should be their choice. And then I can choose not to read Twitter if I don't like that. I completely fail to see the problem.
I agree with you that it's just another media outlet
with a slant, but the government needs to start
treating them like it.
Here's how I see it: if I wrote a letter to the editor to a popular US newspaper calling for an ethnic pogrom, they published it, and it incited riots or violence, that news paper would get tar sued out of it. They are responsible for the user-generated content that they chose to publish. If instead I used my phone to start a phone tree to rouse people to ethnic violence, only the phone call makers would be responsible. The phone company just lets me place calls to whoever will receive them and transmits my messages.
Where does Facebook fall? Currently, if they allow people to start groups and publish materials calling for ethnic genocide and it leads to violence, they bear no responsibility. Sure, there's a continuum between phone and newspaper, but currently they are having their cake and eating it too. What should the law look like?
Free speech doesn't mean you are not responsible for the things you say (or re-transmit). If they want to be a non-neutral media outlet, Facebook, Twitter, et al. should be liable for the damages caused when their platform is involved in incitement of violence. If you're attacked by White supremacist counter-protestors, and it turns out they organized or promoted their activities on the platform, it should be partially responsible and should be a co-defendant in court.
Personally, I would prefer them to remain neutral platforms and focus their efforts on providing stronger abuse prevention that makes it harder for extremists to "amplify" their message into the feeds of people that don't want it instead of trying to whack-a-mole offensive content. Tools that would allow users to filter and block more easily, or even better selectively subscribe to the content they do want. I guess that would probably mean reduced engagement, though.
This is simply not true.
However if the companies themselves behave as publishers, yet avoid that designation bybhiding behind a regulation intended to protect Non-Publishers...
Then clesrly they are going against the spirit of the law and the law should be updated so there are consequences, particularly if they enjoy network effect monopolies.
This is very simple to do. Any company using 230, that is publicly listed, has more than 1B in revenue or 100M of users should inmediately lose section 230 protection. Full stop.
Any infotech company of size becomes very attractive for political influence, and should be closely watched for potential violation of campaing finance laws among other things.
Twitter is a platform everyone gets to post stuff by default. You and many others make it sounds like Twitter has to deliberately to give permission to someone to make a post, so Twitter has no obligation to allow anyone to post. This is such a B.S. argument. Twitter doesn't deliberately allow someone to post. No. It deliberately bans someone from make a post. Banning is its action.
The question is why Twitter bans NY post and this action needs explanation.
The paper version pretty much is just that today. Online, it’s a different spin looking for a similar audience. Instead of cranky Jets fans, it’s targeting blue collar conservatives. The quality is much lower imo — they run native content that looks like Taboola.
Also nypost.com is a thing.
The reality is that plenty of sites use Twitter as an essentially free billboard ad. Then get upset when they’re told they can’t put whatever they want on a billboard on private property, especially one that they have no contract to use, nor pay rent for.
Size matters. A highway billboard and a world billboard are not the same. Thats why we have antitrust laws. Microsoft doesnt get to do whatever it wants just because its a sovereign company. Twitter Goog Fb should not leverage protections originally intented for sites like HN
Hard nope there.
Did Twitter or Facebook ever ask The Atlantic to "show them how they verified the information" about Trump calling war heroes "losers" and "suckers"?
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-a...
That story was based on 100% anonymous sourced. Unverified, unverifiable by definition. People who were on the scene went on record to deny it. Twitter and Facebook were happy to spread it. The Atlantic accounts were never blocked.
How about the NYT story about Trump's tax returns, also based on 100% anonymous, unauthorized, unverified document leak? Has the NYT account been blocked for that, too?
By contrast, the NYP actually did explain how they got the emails: from a laptop dropped off and signed for by Hunter Biden himself at a PC repair shop.
The double standard here is beyond obvious.
Yet Twitter did not block the NYT or its story. Instead, it blocked NYP, even though it had no evidence the NYP story was based on "stolen private documents", while the NYT story clearly and admittedly was.
Again, the double standard couldn't be more obvious.
The "double standard" idea makes my blood boil, because it casts basic facts in partisan terms. Twitter fact-checked Trump tweets, but not Biden tweets. But that's not a double standard; it's a single standard, and it just so happens that Biden does not tweet outright lies such as "California sends a ballot to anyone living in the state."
Twitter clearly does not want to be in this position and the right-wing misinformation machine is exploiting that aggressively. The NYPost story got a huge Streisand-effect boost. It's impossible to give Twitter good advice today.
Both stories had no external verification upon publication. One was blocked immediately. The other never was.
> The "losers and suckers" story was independently verified by NYT, WaPo, and AP.
One can't "independently" verify a story based purely on anonymous sources. Can you link these alleged verifications?
> But the NYPost has not been verified by anyone, nor they did seek verification, nor did they even ask Biden for comment, because they know the story is bullshit.
Not true. The NYP story cited sources, and these sources have seen been verified, for example by the NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/us/politics/hunter-biden-...
Your comment that they never asked Biden to comment is likewise untrue. This would be plainly ridiculous: all we'd need to know if a story is true is to see if they asked for a comment from the subject. In fact, plenty of untrue stories ask for these comments. Why wouldn't they? Do they want to make it obvious they are false?
A paper is not even required to ask for a comment from a subject of an expose. Thousands of stories are posted on Twitter every day by news outlets that did not request or include a response from their subject.
Now we have people claiming that not only does NYP have to request a response from its subject, it must also provide them the subject with source material for their article. Ridiculous.
Also, Joe Biden isn't even the subject of the NYP article - Hunter Biden is. Yet you are implying that Joe Biden must have been given the full source materials of the article and an opportunity to examine and respond to them, or else Twitter can block the story.
Was Trump afforded the same opportunity to examine the source material of the NYT story about his supposed tax returns?
The NYT still hasn't released that source material!
Yes, from a man who happens to be legally blind and can't verify who dropped it off. What are the priors on that? Turning up a week before the election?
The was supposed to be a professional servicing a machine, he violated his clients privacy for his own purposes, and now we're to trust him?
Still more verifiable sources than the Atlantic and NYT stories, which were based on zero verifiable sources.
> Turning up a week before the election?
The Atlantic and NYT stories were also published very recently, also a few weeks before the election.
> The was supposed to be a professional servicing a machine, he violated his clients privacy for his own purposes, and now we're to trust him?
The NYT story was based on illegally leaked tax returns. Whoever leaked these documents has not only breached their duty of confidentiality and privacy that they owe every taxpayer - they in fact committed a crime.
Why didn't Twitter and Facebook block a story that could only come from a source who breached their legal duties and committed a crime? And in your words, how can we trust such a source?
The Post refuses to take down the link to what they claim are private photos and documents.
It seems pretty clear that they prefer to keep the conversation focused on the censorship of private photos (which they can then conflate with censorship of their corruption allegations) instead of on the mix of nothingburger and likely faked evidence against Joe Biden.
That includes the Snowden leaks, Panama Papers, the Pentagon Papers, virtually all Wikileaks releases, and many of the most important news stories of the past several decades.
Twitter pretends to have standards by which any news story can be censored, then uses that standard to very selectively block specific stories as they choose.
Also, from a journalistic perspective, it is much better to publish the source documents, as NYP has done, rather than quote from them liberally without publishing the original, as the NYT has done.
There's a reason that sources remain anonymous, and I'm not sure I see an equivalency here. Look at what happened to Lt. Colonel Vindman. It seems like having a standard of "you must lose your livelihood to alert the world to something" might be a good way to keep all sorts of secrets bottled up, to everyone's detriment.
Twitter is a private company. They constantly, if unevenly, exercise their right to ban hate speech and what causes it.
> But it is a newspaper. A newspaper with a better reputation for reporting the news than Twitter.
Twitter is not a newspaper. Or a news organization. It's a social network.
> But people on HN try to falsely characterize it as the equivalent of the National Enquirer.
That's debatable. You admit it's a rag, that publishes some of the lowest quality journalism. It's also very politically biased, in a way that damages the very fabric of society. Restricting its reach is the responsible thing to do in their case.
As for the National Enquirer, nobody takes them seriously or call it a legitimate newspaper. That's why it's important to hold the NY Post to a higher standard.
Let's just let tech monopolies determine what information we can or cannot communicate. Definitely nothing wrong will come of it. In fact, it's "the responsible thing to do"!
Also, stating that NYP "publishes some of the lowest quality journalism" is an insane hyperbole with no basis in reality. It may not be a top newspaper, but it's also far from being the worst paper in the US.
This story, specifically, had more verifiable sources than plenty of recently published stories which cite only "anonymous" sources and are therefore completely unverifiable.
The NY Post can still publish their materials on Gab or Parler. Their intended audience is probably there already.
> It may not be a top newspaper, but it's also far from being the worst paper in the US.
It's a Murdoch rag, with the usual Murdoch standard for quality and ethics. Lower than that it shouldn't be called a news outlet.
The vast majority of people are on these monopolistic platforms. Yes, dissenters can still publish on some obscure platforms that nobody is consuming.
If you ban a story on Twitter and Facebook, you are effectively ensuring the vast majority of readers will never get a chance to see it.
> It's a Murdoch rag, with the usual Murdoch standard for quality and ethics.
So convenient that you can know everything about The Post without apparently reading it at all.
Also, seems we no longer need to bother looking at facts or evidence. If a news story is vaguely associated with someone we dislike, we can just declare it wrongthink and dismiss it completely without further discussion.
In fact, you strongly advocate that it should be blocked from being published at all. If a piece of information is associated with a group or person we dislike for any reason, we should consign it to the memory hole. We shouldn't let people make up their own mind, we should make it for them.
This is essentially the problem. FAANG are the gateways to the web and having your content removed from them makes it considerably harder to have a web presence.
I'm sure most sane people would not want tech companies to be the arbiters of truth, though the solution as to how people can consume information without the inherent bias of platforms/algorithms/company policy remains to be seen.
That's not true. NYP:s audience is much bigger than Gab or Parler.
What people on these threads never seen to think about is, how long until Chrome starts blocking "misinformation"? Would you be making the same arguments then because, someone could theoretically download a separate web browser that nobody has ever heard of?
The problem with these arguments is there's no obvious end to them. They are very much a slippery slope. It ends with people who want to criticise the Democrats having to build their own internet out of their own cables and radios, which would be a de-facto China-style totalitarian society.
The problem is the sort of people who now work for these tech firms are fundamentally untrustworthy, and appear to have kicked out or 'converted' the people who used to work there who were. We are now left with a big pile of infrastructures and institutions that are controlled by political extremists.
Unfortunately this means that if Biden does win his critics will claim his win wasn't legitimate/fair, just like Trump's critics claimed about Russia. Except "Trump won because of Russia" was investigated deeply and there was nothing there, whereas tech company censorship is plain as day and visible for all to see.
how is that worse than letting Rupert Murdoch control every newspaper, whose media conglomerate makes Twitter look tiny in comparison. As much as Dorsey an all the other techbros annoy me at least he's not an outright right-wing cartoon villain
So is Verizon. Do you want to live in a world where your phone gets turned off if they don't like the conversation?
If it made business sense for them to do this, they would.
Call in a few threats to local businesses or SWAT someone and see how long it takes for your phone to get disabled.
What we're dealing with here is not ordinary abuse control of the sort that isn't controversial, and it's a false equivalence to connect the two. It's outright suppression of doing anything that might harm the political left.
Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tiktok.
Collectively they form an extreme oligopoly position, something quite comparable to the telecom oligopoly. They should be held to a different standard accordingly, if they want to retain such power in our society. If only a few of them simultaneously collude to censor, it has what can only be considered something akin to direct government censorship in the impact it has: you are without voice while everyone else is holding a bullhorn.
In this day and age, being denied access to social media is probably even more socially & culturally punishing than having your phone number turned off. It's more akin to not allowing people to leave their homes and enter public spaces, not allowing them to ever protest, not allowing them to ever voice their opinions in a public square.
While I agree with you, something in your comment made me think. "What does not kill you makes you stronger". Maybe the test of our times is that we as a society learn how to ignore the trash ourselves, or if we do not learn the lesson, we perish. Do we want to learn to ignore, or learn to police?
Would you consider Twitter refusing to propagate this nonsense "learning a lesson"? I would.
And what causes it??
What if censorship itself causes hate speech?
What if windmills cause cancer? What if toenails cause climate change? Why do birds?
And the Streisand effect as stories like this get more press from the censorship news itself.
And the motivation I feel to beat this drum ever harder as people respond with downvotes and snark.
Hate speech existed before Twitter and will likely persist after it. Other social networks that allegedly do not practice content moderation also have identifiable hate speech content in them.
It's actually the uneven enforcement of their own terms of service that is primarily of issue and further whether their actions constitute an illegal campaign contribution to the Democrats by way of their intentionally tilted censorship.
If the DOJ were doing its job, they would be crushing Twitter right now with lawsuits over how Twitter selectively applies their terms of service to different groups when they feel like it. The Feds could make it extremely expensive to behave the way Twitter is. There are several other federal agencies that should be pursuing Twitter as well, that likely have legal ground to do so over these matters.
It's quite simple for Twitter: stop the intentionally selective application of your terms of service. Stop letting one side get away with constantly violating the terms of service with no consequences, while only aggressively punishing the political side you dislike.
The sheer volume of right wing propaganda that escapes their moderators would indicate the exact opposite. They suppressed this one so it wouldn't be glaringly obvious they ignore right wing abuses.
Interesting... after reading this, I immediately thought: same as Zero Hedge (also often criticised). But then again, that shouldn't be a surprise - basically a lower bar (on accuracy) should result both in lower reaction time, and in more false positives.
A comment to a sibling comment: I personally find lower time-to-publish immensely valuable - I prefer to assess the accuracy of news stories myself (usually considering the original source and how aligned their interests are with the published information), and I find almost no value in the supposedly "trustworthy" media because they're not actually trustworthy to me (besides the obvious political bias, there's also plenty of high-profile non-culture-wars fake news, e.g. Iraqi WMD, Bloomberg's China spying debacle, the current (non-)coverage of Assange, ...). If there's anything I've learned in the past 10 or so years, is that the "experts" are barely any better than myself at discerning what's true or not, and much less trustworthy.
A comment I saw once about them was “ZH has reported five of the last three catastrophes”.
I've seen that claim too and found it questionable. Almost every major news outlet that would cover international news I found had some story about coronavirus pretty dang early. It wasn't a breathless story predicting the impact, but they covered it.
I feel like most media "media does this" or "didn't do that" is mostly just what passed in front of someone's nose.
Purely anecdotal experience of mine was a reddit story ages ago that was "The Media is too busy covering X to cover this story Y."
Purely out of curiosity I turned around and flipped on the TV and checked the news channels. The first 3 news channels, 2 were covering Y... but the claims about nobody covering it were constant.
ZH is the canonical example of a correct-twice-daily broken clock.
The question is if we want to prevent all news sources from evolving into that.
If you think China was lying about it, you should see the public statements of checks notes every head of state in the West.
There was a whole lot that people didn't know, especially early. There were quite a few failures of communication and delays.
China was certainly communicating warnings about the virus by early January.
For the very simple reason that there weren't enough masks for the people that needed them ( medical personnel), and the last thing you wants in such a scenario is for the public to freak out and fight over the already non-existing stocks.
Plenty of governments were too slow to react ( with lockdowns/limitations, or planning), but to say all Western leaders failed is simply wrong.
They’re still poorly managing it because they lack decent information. I’d argue it’s the fault of the civil service that they’ve been crippling and obvious cronyism (e.g. Dido Harding) not equipped to provide decent information that they need for decision making.
Yes, and there is a period between where they realize they are wrong, where they reformulate their message and then communicate that publicly. What we're discussing here is a similar gap of 2-4 days between evidence of person-to-person spread and communication.
Meanwhile, we have no idea when the US president even first tested positive for covid.
I don't recall many news outlets putting out official positions...
People like to write off 4Chan for all the shit posting and racism, etc. But if you can ignore all that there are truly some amazing Gems to be found.
Pretty quick, I'll give them that, but not before coverage - this is only a week or so before I became aware of the virus. Granted, I was traveling in China at the time, but it was known.
In my analysis I find these are examples of fitting events to predictions after the fact; the huge number of 'larp' threads on conspiracy forums allows for cherry-picking examples where some content later rhymed with reality.
[0] https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/230585890/#q230593401
[1] https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/141096258/#141102703
[2] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/4chan-user-prediction-las-...
sponsored in part by the Gates Foundation and reported by the Washington Post and others, retweeted by Joe Biden.
This was not secret insider information.
[0] https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/237746333/#q237746818 (Warning, this link contains graphic hate speech like much of 4chan does and is not suitable for human consumption.)
https://www.wired.com/story/how-an-anonymous-4chan-post-help...
Separately I view Twitter as breaking section 230 free speech regulatory agreements in meddling with what they 'publish'
As the saying goes, Zerohedge has predicted 28 of the last 4 recessions. They have a consistently bearish bias (which rarely seems to play out), and ties to the Russian state, which brings into question the motivations behind their criticisms of the US (not that I'm the biggest fan myself).
All of that said, ZH introduced me to a lot of economic literature and concepts I likely wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise. They touch on niche subjects constantly, and I have to give them credit for broadening my understanding of economics in general.
Most of the corporate media are (sometimes ludicrously) optimistic, the other polarity. I read both.
Unfortunately being wrong on the internet is now becoming long-term grounds to be censored and excluded from mainstream society's systems.
Its quite sad really and I don't know what the solution is.
One thing that I DO know is that the solution isn't coming from the government. They are terrible at things. Their job should largely be relegated to protecting freedoms and security.
This 230 stuff is mostly probably going to backfire and create a less free internet. We don't need more lawyers and more government intervention to internet communication.
I do know we have many thousands of people working on solutions to things like Reddit (and Cloudflares) hyper-sensitive long-ago-crosed-the-line censorship, even if censorship is probably a poor world for it given the historical baggage.
Although this is the internet and even sights like T_D were almost entirely replaced on a site without Reddit's regulation and controls (a far worse situation in many's eyes) welll before it was banned on Reddit. It's thriving on a domain name I won't mention here.
Same with infowars and 8chan, they both quickly found new homes on new places.
But there censoring on any major platform and being related to fringe online communities being fringe DDOS protection services and aononimizers (who yes do still get heavily advertised and recruited on Reddit and redirected to these new unmoderated sites, so their censorship policies were always destined to fail).
I'm more concern about operating in the real world (VISA/Mastercard, Patreon, acess to advertising monopoly networks like adwords/adsense, etc), less so the online communities where discourse it happening. Reddit's censorship problem will eventually be solved on a wider/easier scale once the engineering work has been put into it.
It's probably one of the biggest problem of our current era for those of us who understand the importance of "outlaw thinking", free expression, and those who know the history of how these tools of control are almost always abused and riddled with false positives. The history of those who went against the grain (even if that grain is terribly wrong, wrong things have plenty of other ways to kill off than censorship).
I would be very surprised if a financial news outlet choosing the Fight Club quote did so at random and not specifically because of its predecessor.
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.
- Ecclesiastes, 300 B.C.E.
No question ZeroHedge is excessively pessimistic, but that saying is silly. The US has been having recessions almost like clockwork once every 10 years since 1950 [0].
Saying "a recession is incoming!" is pretty much trivially true. It is always very likely there will be a recession in the next 10 years.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...
Your standards for "clockwork" regularity seem to be quite low. Your own source offered to support that claim shows almost double that frequency from 1950-1990, and a maximum interval of 10 years, 8 months over the whole period. So it is neither "like clockwork" over that period (the frequency has on average dropped over the period, but the intervals are highly variable from one to the next), and not averaging anything like 10 years.
If you are planning your investments around not having a recession about once a decade, I'm unconvinced it will end well for you.
Anyway, the point stands - regularly predicting recessions is a sensible approach, and saying ZeroHedge overpredicts is wrong. The normal financial press are reckless in assuming that recessions are not imminent. Looking 5+ years into the future to assess the present state is prudent.
No, its not, because recessions do not occur on a regular pattern. And even if they did, its still possible to predict them much more frequently than they do occur.
> and saying ZeroHedge overpredicts is wrong.
Just doing a quick search, ZeroHedge seems to have predicted a recession, counting only predictions with a one year or shorter forward window, literally every year since the end of the of the Great Recession. In many of those years, they made at least one prediction where the window was effectively negative, as they claimed that the US was already in a recession that just wasn't yet recognized.
So, yes, ZeroHedge significantly overpredicts recessions, as they have predicted not less than 11 of the last 1 recessions.
> The normal financial press are reckless in assuming that recessions are not imminent.
That's a non-sequitur, in any case.
> Looking 5+ years into the future to assess the present state is prudent.
Sure, but if ZeroHedge was consistently predicting a recession within 5 years, they'd still be overpredicting by quite a lot (not if this was 1950-1990, but it isn't), but they are much, much worse than that.
I'm quite certain if someone simulated trading based on predicted recessions on ZH, you would end up well below market returns.
I wonder if that's actually true.
> I wonder if that's actually true.
Its not, as ZH was founded during the Great Recession, and there's only been one since.
That's at least 10 less than they've predicted, though, so the quote, while not literally true, understates the degree to which ZH overpredicts recessions.
But nothing. In short, the claim of 'scarily accurate' is not true. There may be underlying reasons that their accuracy has issues, but their track record up to this point has been highly inaccurate.
Section 230 isn't an agreement, it's a section of the Communication Decency Act.[1] There is no prohibition on the publisher "meddling", or moderating. Section 230 was specifically carved out to encourage voluntary content moderation on the nascent internet.
It states that hosting or republishing someone else's speech does not make you the speaker, even if you moderate. Which is to say that just because Twitter locks down accounts or stops a link from being shared, they still are not the Speaker (legally) of anything their users post. That's it, that basically the whole thing.
Section 230 was overtly adopted so that platforms would make efforts to censor content that they found to be objectionable; there are no "free speech regulatory agreements" associated with it.
It is the only surviving part of a law whose sole and entire purpose was internet censorship, the rest of which was struck down for violating Free Speech protections.
Usually it seems to be they're really saying "this shows section 230 is a bad idea."
If we could move past the reflexive "well actually" there's a real issue people feel needs to be addressed.
Without it, there is likely no Hacker News, nor any other social media.
My believe is that if this is forced into a take it or leave it scenario, we're not going to like the outcome.
Which, come to think of it, might be a net gain to society overall. Hard to say.
I think the first priority is to ensure that the poster's misinformation (i.e., telling people that 230 says/does something it is explicitly designed not to do) does not propagate through this medium. It's a public forum, not a conversation with just the poster.
Then, if possible, you can engage with their disfunction. But given the weaponized role of misinformation today that's the first item in the checklist to be addressed.
From my viewpoint, it's very likely Section 230 will be modified. Once that action is underway, you'll be well behind the curve if you're just starting to grasp what people want. Others will have taken that time and effort and figured out how to mold it to their own ends, and the momentum will be building.
Twitter (and FB) have crossed the rubicon in editorializing other people's posts with 'fact checks' (sic), shadow bans and public bans.
Practically the opposite of the free speech maxim 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it' and alarmingly close to totalitarian use of their publishing power.
>This legal protection can still hold even if a blogger is aware of the objectionable content or makes editorial judgments.
Caesar has crossed this Rubicon so many times there's a 4-lane highway with a Waffle House at the rest stop. Forum moderators have been exercising their right of free association for a long time.
Why would Twitter (and FB) agree to be regulated as common carrier, with limited ability to discriminate in its service to the general public? What should it/they get in exchange?
'Section 230 says that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (47 U.S.C. § 230). In other words, online intermediaries that host or republish speech are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do. The protected intermediaries include not only regular Internet Service Providers (ISPs), but also a range of "interactive computer service providers," including basically any online service that publishes third-party content. Though there are important exceptions for certain criminal and intellectual property-based claims, CDA 230 creates a broad protection that has allowed innovation and free speech online to flourish'.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— (A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected
With that it seems reasonable to read Section 230 as "you don't have to proactively moderate, and any good faith moderation you do doesn't break that protection".
Regardless of whether or not this is the right thing for society, it seems that Facebook and Twitter are well within the bounds of section 230 to do some moderation without losing the protection of section 230.
Example for Twitter editorializing and cancelling https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=1804a02d-a015...
Ammending S230 Bezos/WashPo
'...new legislation would target Section 230, a decades-old portion of law that spares social media sites from being held liable for the posts, photos and videos uploaded to their sites by their users. The proposal would pave the way for steep sanctions on major online platforms if they don’t act to remove a range of illicit content, from child exploitation to terrorism, according to Justice Department officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity Wednesday.
The agency also seeks to force tech giants to be more transparent about their content-moderation decisions and more consistent in their enforcement of them, according to a report the department released Wednesday. The move might offer the U.S. government a new avenue to probe and punish companies over allegations of political bias'.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/17/doj-bar...
The slightly less cynical way I think of this is that finance will directly be impacted vs non-finance so news targetted at them is more helpful, or at least not actively harming.
In the financial independence community most articles on mainstream sites are considered jokes or to have insufficient detail to actually improve your finances
A good non-money example: If you get a chronic disease, reading blogs and forums by people who have the disease is going to me more helpful than whatever a staff writer can do in 2 hours of research
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/youll-bury-everyone-invo...
It may be incorrect &/or partisan but you are likely to read these sort of revelations on ZH first for better or worse.
If the social platforms were just imposing costs on being wrong that would almost be a service, but I get the impression from all the ban stories that they're staffed mostly by people who aren't equipped to be that judicious. The platforms have thrown down their cards and are all in on this election cycle, and by showing what appears to be partisan recklessness, it's going to cost them moral high ground they might have had before all this.
The good news is the people reading this forum can build a platform killer in 6-8months, and there's going to be a bunch of balance sheet cash on the sidelines looking for startups to fund. These social platform companies are all just another Friendster waiting to happen.
The latter sounds like an "intent" argument, that imposing the costs has a quality factor that I'd say just doesn't (or doesn't have to) exist.
I am curious why this is so valuable to you. In my personal life a delay of hours in the news cycle would have no effect. How does it generate value for you?
Anyway I mention that because during that time I remember always leaning on weird ZeroHedge articles to prove things in dumb arguments. I don’t remember the specifics but it stuck with me enough to completely blacklist ZH when I realised how dumb I was being.
It sounds like I probably should take a look at it from a fresh perspective and without that baggage, because it’s obviously not what I remember based on these comments.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/jhksrq/do_not...
It seems to check out: https://old.reddit.com/domain/zerohedge.com/new/
Check the second link -- there hasn't been a submission from zerohedge on any subreddit in over 48 hours.
There's your problem.
It's one thing to want the raw data out there if you want it, and more importantly, for others who are smarter than you to analyze it. Same principle with publishing methods and analysis of a scientific paper, or publishing source code you'll never look at to github: The fact that others can see it is important in itself.
That said, your comment borders too close to the Trumpian "experts know nothing, we can't trust the fourth estate" mentality. Actually, Trumpians don't know the term 'fourth estate'. Anyway. There is value in having institutions of trust investigate events and curate the story.
It's definitely got some Russian backing, but there are occasionally some quite good finance-related articles on it too. Just avoid the comment section!
Mainstream US media are not trustworthy, period. Repeated cases of going beyond bias and into simply parroting government or political party claims with no evidentiary basis, merely for influencing public opinion one way or another. Often, one would guess, while fully knowing the claims are baseless. The omission of coverage of various issues also contributes to the 'trust-unworthiness'.
Basically the social media company argument is... we think people are too dumb to figure out what is "real" or not so we are going to censor. That to me is an extremely damning view of the common person.
But then, everywhere on the platform.. "make a plan to vote". So you trust people to vote but don't trust them with the unfiltered information so they can inform themselves without outside intervention?
Censorship is a hard question and I think we do need to have better laws promoting free access to material (even "libelous" material) but this is also an area where I think it's pretty clear the government has failed in a big way - twitter + FB shouldn't be news platforms, the dumb news aggregators (like google news) do a pretty good job of being dumb platforms, but those commentary platforms are being run by private entities that can "censor" speech as they like depending on how it benefits or harms their platform. America is in a bit of a crisis right now since the extreme partisan divide has driven the real media (print, TV) to actually split into mutually disproving and incompatible bubbles. On election night one half of the country is going to be absolutely astounded since everything they consumed said their candidate was going to win.
I'm not certain what the solution is but some moderation is required to prevent the apparent acceptance of some pretty hateful views along with conspiracy theories. The Internet introduced clickbait to the world in a manner it never previously conceived of - tabloids have been around for ever but never gotten serious consideration - suddenly major political figures are embracing and re-packaging tabloid headlines and it's a bit of a crisis of information for our society.
The "common person" is the one doing the moderating on the platforms. There is no pool of superintelligent, superwise, super-everything people doing the hard work of moderating on the platform. It's just common people.
It's not even a good sample of common people. It has a very particular slant to it; very American, for one thing.
I am cautiously optimistic that there are a lot, lot, lot of people (like myself) that are interested in trying to balance their views, and make a point of reading both sides - especially when a headline is sensational.
I don't think Google news is as balanced as RCP, but it sure beats just reading CNN or Fox!
The farthest left they go is in linking to Biden endorsements, but Biden is a centrist establish Democrat who has been endorsed by most of the pre-2016 Republican party.
It's obvious from the list of sources: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/
1. https://archive.org/details/TheCrisisOfDemocracy-TrilateralC...
You say "some moderation is required to prevent the apparent acceptance of some pretty hateful views along with conspiracy theories", but the entire point is that then you are giving over to some other person or entity the power and ability to decide what you get to read. I think this should be rejected as a slippery slope made of ky-jelly.
"Don't take security in the false refuge of consensus and the feeling that whatever you think you're bound to be okay because you're in the safely moral majority."
"It is not just the right of the person who speaks to be heard, it is the right of everyone in the audience to listen, and to hear, and every time you silence somebody, you make yourself a prisoner of your own action, because you deny yourself the right to hear something." - Christopher Hitchens [2]
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2uzEM0ugY
bonus (the whole speech is quotable): "Dr. Johnson was waited upon by various delegations of people, to congratulate him of the nobility of the quality; of the Commons; the Lords; and also by a delegation of respectable ladies of London, who tended on him in his Fleet Street lodgings and congratulated him: "Dr. Johnson," they said, "We are delighted to find that you have not included any indecent or obscene words in your dictionary." "Ladies," said Dr. Johnson, "I congratulate you on being able to look them up". Anyone who can understand that joke, and I'm pleased to see that 10% of you can, gets the point about censorship especially prior restraint as it's known in the United States where it's banned by the first amendment to the constitution. It may not be determined in advance what words are apt or inapt, no one has the knowledge that would be required to make that call and - more to the point - one has to suspect the motives of those who do so, in particular: the motives of those who are determined to be offended; of those who will go through a treasure house of English, like Dr. Johnson's first lexicon, in search of filthy words to satisfy themselves and some instinct about which I dare not speculate."
This is one of those statements that sounds bad on the surface but is actually totally reasonable and has nothing to do with some trope about the "uninformed masses" or whatever. Locally the individual matters a lot more but at the national level voting histories show that the party dominates.
People have "disqualifying issues." And this is totally rational. Being black and voting R is nuts -- same if you're gay. And if you're pro-life then voting D is unpalatable. These kinds of polarizing issues very nearly define the party line. So yeah, if you go the polls in Nov and don't know if you're voting D or R (nationally) then you're probably crazy uninformed.
The actual decision making happens during the primaries where people suddenly have an entire group of people who aren't immediately disqualified and the internal discussion gets a lot more nuanced.
I'm not sure if its objectively "nuts" but almost 25% of LGBT voters supported Romney over Obama. That's accounting for the fact that openly LGBT voters are much younger than other voters: twice as likely to be 18-34 and half as likely to be 55+. Median age is about 35, versus 50 for the overall population. Romney won 37% of folks 18-29 and 51% of folks 45-64. There are too many gay republicans to call them all "nuts."
But what I can't understand is how someone -- even if they agree with most of their chosen party's platform -- could vote for a party whose leadership largely wants to erase them. I just don't understand someone who is gay voting for people who believe that their sexual orientation is a "choice", many also believing that it's a "sin" that should be forcibly "re-educated" out.
Certainly calling them "nuts" is dismissive, disrespectful, and doesn't help us understand what's going on, but... really, I do not at all understand what's going on.
Similarly R-side folks might believe that all D-folks are Trotskyists while that's a rather rare stance to have - certainly the D-side is more towards interventionalism - but nobody with serious power on the D end of things (not even bernie) is advocating for a planned economy.
I feel very strongly about moving towards proportional representation for the house over FPTP slotting. I think the extremism in the current political climate is largely fueled by this us vs. them choice - get us better representation so we can all see that Trotskyists pull one or two house reps nation-wide and slice off of the Dems at large... And watch the white-supremists and westboro baptist church folks get kicked out of the GOP at large and end up with a seat or two themselves. These are fringe groups[1]...
Our current voting system allows negative campaign ads to be just as effective as positive ones - knocking your opponent down 3 pts is the same as raising yourself 3 pts... but it's far easier to craft negative campaign ads so the electorate is constantly submerged in hateful vitriol. We need election reform so we can stop viewing each other as the enemy.
1. Please note, the current administration has actually started embracing these groups more, but this is a new development and should be a clear signal that the country is in trouble.
Now, what do you mean by “erase?” Republicans don’t want to put gay people in concentration camps and forcibly re-educate them. But it has taken them longer to come around to accepting gay people than Democrats for predictable reasons that gay Republicans are presumably willing to put up with. Conservatism by its nature values the traditional family because they believe it is beneficial for society. The long-standing belief that being gay was a “lifestyle” along with 1970s rhetoric about disrupting the traditional family was predictably alarming. For liberals who had already abandoned the idea that society as a whole should pressure people to get married and have 2.1 kids, acceptance of same-sex relationships that wouldn’t necessarily follow the traditional path came much more easily. But attitudes towards same-sex relationships and marriage have evolved rapidly even among conservatives. In 1978, few people accepted that being gay was genetic. Today, 50% believe that. Acceptance of gay marriage very closely tracks rising understanding that being gay is innate. (Republicans aren’t as far along as Democrats in internalizing that. But even among Democrats only 61% believe that being gay is fully innate, so it’s not like gay Democrats can get totally away from such beliefs either: https://news.gallup.com/poll/234941/say-nature-nurture-expla....) Moreover, in this past decade studies have revealed that huge percentages of gay couples are already raising kids together. In the last decade, an image of gay people as being born that way, and being in committed relationships and raising kids no different than anyone else, has appeared. And it has enabled the reconciliation of conservatism and same-sex relationships to the point that half of Republicans already support same-sex marriage.
Gay Republicans presumably understand this thought process and are willing to work through it and let the process play out. Many, even agree with the general principle of social conservatism, even if they disagree about the specific case. It’s worth noting that gay conservatives played an important role in Obergefell. See: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/06/gay-marriage-vot...
> In 1989, most Americans had never even heard of gay marriage, and certainly couldn’t conceive that it would one day be legalized by popular vote. That year, Andrew Sullivan wrote a landmark essay for the New Republic, “Here Comes the Groom: A (Conservative) Case for Gay Marriage.” Sullivan’s essay is one of the most important magazine articles of recent decades. His argument, which he went on to elaborate in his books Virtually Normal and Same-Sex Marriage and in later essays, is that marriage for gays would “foster social cohesion, emotional security, and economic prudence.” Sullivan’s conservative case would eventually become the intellectual and moral foundation of the campaigns to legalize gay marriage. Sullivan gave Slate permission to reprint his New Republic essay in full.
> “The conservatism I grew up around” Sullivan writes on the second page of the book, “was a combination of lower taxes, less government spending, freer trade, freer markets, individual liberty, personal responsibility and a strong anti-Communist foreign policy.” His heroes were Thatcher, Reagan, Solzhenitsyn, Havel, Hayek and Orwell.
Sullivan is ideologically similar to, and a fan of, Anthony Kennedy, who was a life-long Republican: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/06/anthony-kennedy-and-... (noting Kennedy’s “pragmatic libertarianism — his belief in limited government, pluralism, moderation, and social cohesion”).
It’s not really as simple as “Republicans moved too far to the right and he’s a liberal now.” For example, Sullivan is a devout Catholic who thinks Roe was wrong to take the decision on how to regulate abortion out of the hands of voters: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/andrew-sullian-a-way.... (He thinks voters would converge on laws like in France or Germany, allowing abortion up to 12 weeks with limited exemptions after that.)
He supported Bush (and thought Gore tried to steal the 2000 election) and the Iraq war initially. He soured on it later and reeled at Bush’s deficits and fiscal excess, and Bush’s support for the federal marriage amendment. He supported Ron Paul for the Republican primary. He hates Hilary Clinton but begrudgingly supported her against Trump. He is very much against the rise of critical theory and wokeness: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-roots-of-wokeness. On LGBT issues, he thinks “the war has been won” after Gorsuch’s decision in Bostock: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/when-is-it-time-to-c.... In particular, he opposes the Equality Act’s attempts to eliminate religious freedom exemptions.
Circling back to the point: this is why a quarter of gay people identify as Republican (though Trump has been very unpopular). Most people have heterodox political views and don’t fit neatly into any particular camp. And the parties shift over time to capture different blocs so folks who aren’t strong partisans can find themselves shifting around. There’s plenty of people who would support the party of Biden over the party of Trump, but the party of Marco Rubio over the party of Bernie Sanders.
Those people have a right to be wrong. That's why your vote counts as much as theirs does. The space that that leaves is where leadership is supposed to come in, in order to tilt the balance one way or the other. If a good leader doesn't arise, that's probably the problem you should be trying to solve.
The elitism of "we know better than you" has been used to justify some pretty horrific chapters in human history. Whether you like it or not, it is a much better state of being for the uninformed to vote, than the alternative.
We're all complicated rainbows of opinions and when voting day comes around we're forced to either be red or blue and that's a problem.
1. Effectively, obviously you can vote third party by FPTP single slot elections make this incredibly ineffective - sorry... I really really wish this weren't the case.
The joke about minorities begrudgingly huddling around the Democratic Party exists for a reason.
To be fair that kind of rhetoric has existed since even the earliest days of the US, but I think on the whole voting has historically been seen as something you DO rather than something you use to fight against. The change in balance is... worrying.
Abortion will be banned, Bush will start a war, Obama will create the world's first Muslim Socialist state
It's one reason I've been quite happy to see the green new deal (or Biden's totally not the green new deal but most of it) talked about in debates - it's actually a policy position.
This is a vacuous statement. How smart is pretty smart?
The US's two-party entrenchment forces this false appearance of an us vs. them political battle. It's true that in the US you can only legitimately vote for either D or R in races and that this further entrenches the two parties - but issue voters should be flowing pretty freely between the two parties as their individual focuses shift.
Like the Southern Strategy, the Blue Dog Democrats, Tea Party, and Donald Trump (party-switcher).
Look at the radical positions calling themselves "conservative" today, getting more extreme since the 1980s when religous extremists stated taking over the Republican Party.
One-third of US voters are Independent not registered to a party.
The US electoral system forces to parties, but those parties change and are sometimes replaced.
What's wrong with conspiracy theories? They're as harmless as The X Files.
Conspiracy theories aren't harmless.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory
2. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/15/qanon-violen...
3. https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/anti-vaxxer-views-blamed-as-me...
4. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/23/health/covid-deaths.html
This only works if they remove themselves from choosing what to show who, what to promote, and what to demote.
As long as they are actively choosing who will see what, how often, what things will be promoted, etc. Then they are basically the judge and jury. This is their current dilemma. That's why they're starting to have stronger moderation. They'd want to actively promote things that make them money, and moderate away all things that puts them in hot water, without it affecting the money they make.
Why can't "we don't want this trash on our site" be the reason? It's "funny" how those who want to propagate banned material always cast themselves as some repressed group subject to the tyranny of government power.
It can still be posted on Gab or Parler, right?
That's a perfectly fine stance, and it has worked well for traditional publishers like the NY Times and Washington Post for decades. They control all their content, and publish exactly the narrative they want. OTOH, if NY Times publishes an OP Ed that slanders and doxes me, causes me to lose my job, etc. then I have the legal right to sue them. See for example the Covington Kid[1].
Facebook and Google want to have their cake and eat it too. They want free rein to pretend like they're just aggregating content, but this election shows that they are definitely using both AI and humans to control what's published. So why should they enjoy all the rights of both a "tech platform" and also a traditional publisher, with none of the responsibilities and liabilities?
Section 230 was crafted explicitly for tech. It can be modified or removed, too.
As I see it, there are three options:
1. "platforms" are not allowed to moderate content (pre-section 230) without getting liable.
2. What we have now (sites can moderate as they see fit)
3. Some external board adjudicates on what it is acceptable to moderate
Of these, 3 seems by far the worst, and 2 seems better than 1 on empirical grounds.
> OTOH, if NY Times publishes an OP Ed that slanders and doxes me, causes me to lose my job, etc. then I have the legal right to sue them.
You also have the legal right to sue Google if they publish content that slanders you. You can even sue them for doxxing you. You wouldn't win either one. Nor would you win if you sued the NYT for doxxing you, or if an NYT article caused you to lose your job. Keep in mind that "the covington kid" didn't actually win any lawsuits, he sued a bunch of people for ridiculous amounts and settled out of court for, likely, a relatively trivial sum. It might have paid for his college, and that was mostly "make it go away" money. He's the free speech equivalent of a patent troll.
Pre 230, platforms were liable regardless of whether they moderated.
I didn't like 230 at the time, and frankly we wouldn't be having so many (IF ANY) Facebook headaches over the past 10 years if it had never been born. FB et al didn't want to choose between editorial and common carrier status and the government acceeded to that whine. 230 is what we got, and now we find that 230-protected companies want to exercise editorial control. I don't know what the perfect solution is, but reversing to the common carrier distinction ain't gonna be it.
I understand that it's politically not helpful at this particular moment, and that the Trump kids are worse, but none of that makes it false, and it doesn't make me 'trash' for not liking it.
Yes, and it outs you as a blinkered rube. To be upset about Hunter Biden is 110% turnip truck.
It doesn't look super-crooked unless you take the word of certain interest-conflicted sources, because sinecures happen all the time, every day, for centuries, and $600K isn't that much for something like that in this day and age. It's simply not a big deal, and thus trash.
And yeah: now do Jared.
No, because that's clearly verifiable facts summarized by an opinion. Now ask "Is it trash to acknowledge that Hunter Biden had his dad use his influence to replace a straight-laced Ukrainian prosecutor with a corrupt stooge so Hunter could enrich himself?"
That's trash. Or:
"Is it trash to point out how Soros-funded Democrats are involved in a global pedophilia conspiracy that American conservatives are secretly working to take down?"
That's also trash.
You could cast doubt on Taibbi or an any narrative that fills in the blanks in some places, but compare to the fevered Russia-conspiracy talk that got mainstream credibility, Rachel Maddow features, WaPo editorial references, etc for years. Is one so much worse than the other? Or is it just a matter of which side it favors in the short-term?
But let me use Taibbi's own words here: “If something comes in and we don’t know the exact providence of it, that doesn’t mean we can’t publish it. All we have to do is establish that it’s true, and a lot of important stories have been broken that way.”
Ironically, Taibbi seems to say this as a criticism for Twitter reacting to the NYPost story. Except the NYPost did no work to establish it was true and even hired a Hannity employee to publish it since their own journalists wouldn't do it. That to me is the problem.
Twitter and Facebook, through action or inaction, now impact our democracy. Their action or inaction gives them responsibility whether asked for or not, conferred or not. I think this creates a need to act responsibly. I don't know how this should best be done, but I'm categorically against a complete "hands-off" given the expertise we've seen at creating and spreading manipulated content.
They streisand-effected the whole story, and made themselves look bad and unfair in the process -- how many unsourced claims about Russian interference have they let stand? This was a fiasco all around.
Cheers and solidarity.
If you don't do the work, there's no reason to believe that you can do as good a job judging plausibility of a story as a good journalist can do. It's not about who's smarter, it's about not having the evidence.
I don't make any phone calls either, but I try to crib from people who do their homework. I also appreciate basic filtering to keep the noise down. It's not that I couldn't do my own spam filtering, but rather I don't want to.
Most platforms, Twitter included, just wanted to be dumb service providers. They don't want to spend money and carry responsibility moderating content.
It was large media outlets and the public outrage they produced over "fake news" and "the far right" that pressured them into taking a more proactive stance.
People like me who were opposing it back then and saying "you don't know what you're asking for" got labeled far right, and essentially bunched with Trump, which was hilarious to me as a left leaning European.
Newspapers now becoming angry Twitter is evenly applying the new rules - the rules newspapers lobbied for - is even more hilarious to me.
And you have to understand that Twitter did not make a mistake in how they responded to this. The article objectively was against their rules.
Whether these rules are good rules is another matter, but clearly the whole thing was dumb from the start.
Not really. They already spend time and money figuring out what content to promote and demote in order to increase engagement and maximize their ad revenue. They're just finding that the some of the kinds of things that tend to surface because of that are the kinds of things that they need to moderate, otherwise people (both users and advertisers) will get fed up with the platform and leave.
But fake news has been spreading a lot, while maybe not in your circles it does still happen. And retraction or an apology article will not be spread as widely due to the fact that a lot of fake news is specifically inflammatory to be spread quickly and widely.
I'm still on the fence personally, this is a really hard problem.
Who's job should it be?
> we think people are too dumb to figure out what is "real" or not so we are going to censor. That to me is an extremely damning view of the common person.
Maybe dumb is the wrong word - but most people are not that bright. There's nothing wrong with saying that - it's why BS marketing is so effective.
You present this as an axiom, like it's some kind of foregone conclusion, but why? Why shouldn't they be allowed to curate what content makes on their platform? I'm not saying they should have a legal mandate to judge truth, but if they object to certain publications, articles, authors, posts, etc, that's up to them.
Regardless of the source, the information has already been filtered through whoever is presenting it.
(In this specific case I think the actions taken by Twitter were bone-headed/shortsighted but Twitter has no obligation to host any content or uphold your first amendment rights because they don't apply to Twitter.)
They can't. They simply aren't capable.
I don't even have to use a fallacy, this is literally happening:
The US has a growing population of people who sincerely believe devil-worshiping democrats are drinking the blood of stolen children. 15 are running for US congress.
We no longer need to even "slippery slope it", the worst-case scenario is happening: disinformation is usurping facts at an alarming rate with very real consequences.
What would be the difference in this argument between 'social media' and other media? For example, should the same be true of newspapers? What about scientific or government publications?
If people should be allowed to decide for themselves what is true, should private for-profit companies also be allowed to decide what is true for themselves?
Do you consider stories that are verifiably false to be "unfiltered information"? Why should it be considered "information" if it's not true? Does it matter if the information being presented was known to be false and is being published for subversive politically motivated reasons?
Is your framing that they're saying people are dumb really true if the "information" is difficult or impossible to verify? Does it matter if it's a breaking story and there's only one such source of information? Does it matter if, statistically, there's a sizeable portion of smart people that will accept published stories as true?
Isn't it self evident by now that most people lack critical thinking skills?
We've got a lot of historical evidence about what happens if you let only people of certain skin colors, gender or wealth vote and all of those approaches were eventually rejected in favor of a universal voting system[1]. Democracy seems like our best bet for a fair and just government and I'm strongly in favor of having better representation of the actual beliefs of the citizenry - even if they're folks I disagree with.
1. Assuming you ignore American oddities like the electoral college, ignore tacitly socially accepted voter suppression and accept that minimum voting ages should be a thing (which I'm still pretty "meh" on personally but whatever).
I really really want to dump FPTP voting since I think it inevitably leads to two party systems and that two-party partisan us vs. them politics is what lets authoritarianism grow.
I really appreciate parliamentary governments over the hot mess the US has - I think you get a lot better representation especially when no one party has a majority. If everyone is in a minority then you have consensus through coalitions of different fractions and it gets a lot closer to each skinny slice of the nation getting a legitimate say. The more slices you have the better your representation of the public will (up to, ultimately, true popular democracy) but as a society we probably want either majority or strong majority decisions to guide us and that's just conceptually incompatible with no one getting their free-will stomped on.
This hits a really deep point on the topic of freedom - I have the right to not be murdered, but that right comes at the cost of anyone who wants to murder me... restrictions of rights are necessary for greater general societal rights.
That ruleset does change with technology on a functional level (murder with a gun when guns don't exist is a non-issue) I don't think there is a particularly interesting relationship with technology though - it's more just an extension of existing rules to platforms.
One thing that might counter that is doxing though - this is a pretty new phenomena that was pretty inconceivable when the world moved slower and humans were more directly involved with communication handling. I think you have the right to not be doxed but I don't think that right clearly translates to any pre-internet rights - it might be an implied right (but unstated or considered due to the infeasibility) but it is a pretty good example of a more novel rule for a sustainable community... that said we're still societally new to the internet so maybe it eventually won't be a rule and we'll find that doxing was an unfortunate emergent behavior of some integrated systems that really shouldn't have been integrated.
Or the woman who won't vaccinate her children because she believes vaccines cause autism.
Or the person, communicating via the satellites that circle the Earth, who believes that the Earth is flat.
These people aren't rare - they're common. We live in an era of disinformation, and the very idea of truth has been eroded.
False stories spread over Twitter like wildfire, and to think that the majority of the thousands of readers who consume them are fact-checking them is perhaps a bit hopeful.
Covid-56 and flat earthers are some of the most outlandish examples, but the vast majority of misinformation is more subtle, and therefore more insidious. I'm not suggesting what the solution should be, but it's clear that complete un-regulation has lead to a completely broken information space.
Social Media companies are not equipped to make that distinction and should not do so.
It doesn't matter whether I trust them to vote because they have a right to vote no matter what I think. I definitely do not trust masses of people to identify real vs. manipulated content that is expertly designed to be misleading, and I think companies that directly facilitate the spread of information have some level of responsibility for the consequences of enabling manipulated media to infect their users. I don't know what the balance is, I'm not dogmatic, but I think everyone needs to be a little less dogmatic on this issue.
Let's find another way that does not limit free speech. It will be a harder solution to find sure, but the converse is too dangerous and nuanced to be implemented. It also gives social media companies undue influence over our democracy.
Social media companies already have undue influence over our democracy. I think we've already seen the damage they can do when they take a hands-off approach. There is no action they can take (or not take) that will not have major political implications. Do nothing and misinformation spreads like wildfire, likely first by bad-faith actors then by good and bad-faith actors. But doing something is fraught. Yet, I advocate for trying something over keeping one's hand off the till as we're talking about the real world here, and it is marginalized and under-served communities that ultimately pay the price.
The correct answer is to treat everyone as a worthy person, regardless of their intellectual prowess. The current left, with their self professed mission for the underdog, are the worst about this. The contempt a person must have for their fellow man in order to deem them as unworthy of free speech, is gut wrenching. Instead, we should be finding ways to make socially responsible ideas more accessible and inclusive for _everyone_.
You don't know me. That you feel I have so much contempt for my "fellow man" because of this disagreement of ours is wild. I may just as well bemoan - in equally bad faith - your contempt for honesty, transparency, or reality.
At no point have I argued that anyone should be prevented from free speech, yet there your accusation sits. My argument that purveyors of socially-distributed content have some level of responsibility for the real-world impacts this creates, particularly on marginalized communities that are often not sharing/consuming this information and only victimized by it. Did I say anyone should be prevented from expressing themselves? No. Neither do I offer solutions because I am not an expert. But I don't believe a completely "hands-free" approach is viable because of how easy it is to manipulate content, trick people, and use tricks to ensure your message is spread in non-natural ways (e.g., bot farms). That is not "contempt" for the intellectual prowess of others, it's a recognition of the reality we've already seen; I'm not immune to it and neither are you.
I find your seemingly dogmatic belief well-intentioned (a courtesy you certainly did not apply to me) yet naive, hopeful but damaging. I believe - wholeheartedly - that the position I take is much more respectful of people and communities than yours. Because I'm not taking an ivory tower principled stand as if there are no real world implications. There have been, there are, there will be.
Maybe I'm wrong. I'm willing to admit that. But this isn't merely an intellectual exercise for me as I feel it often is for so many.
And thus the right wing comes around to centralized government control of companies.
From the NY Times itself (https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th...)
"But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged -- or failed to emerge.
On Oct. 26 and Nov. 8, 2001, for example, Page 1 articles cited Iraqi defectors who described a secret Iraqi camp where Islamic terrorists were trained and biological weapons produced. These accounts have never been independently verified."
Was the Iraq war a one-off event where media held far too much trust and abused it? Is it just the continuation of a pattern of media being used as a tool of the state (either wittingly or unwittingly)? I'm leaning toward the second option but I still don't know if the inherent pro-establishment bias you get with large media conglomerates outweighs the benefits of vetted news.
The only thing I can say for sure is that public media funding (like PBS and the like) to subsidize the cost of media companies ends up having rather little effect on those outlets' biases, while forcing media to depend on corporate sponsorship absolutely does corrupt the messaging delivered to the populace at large. So I'm not certain what our media landscape should look like, but I'm definitely against people who decry any government sponsorship of news as being political mouthpieces - public radio and tv should form part of our news digest, their funding is diverse enough to allow them to freely criticize both national and local governments and while it probably won't yield the really valuable investigative journalism we need to fight corruption it's definitely part of the solution.
Implying that every other major MSM organization doesn't do the same exact garbage and aren't deserving of the same treatment.
Edit: the point is that rules should not favor one MSM corporation over the other. It should be neutral.
Now on the other day the NYPost has a narrative, with physical evidence, corrobrated by actual non-anonymous people alleging very bad things about a presidential candidate and what happens? Nothing. As usual 'the powers that be' have the media in the pocket.
how long till this comment gets disappeared? I hope I don't get fired!
Which is so obviously fake it isn't even funny. I'm getting very tired of the GOP's shameless tendency of creating controversies out of nothing. This is just another Benghazi or Hillary's Emails or Migrant Caravan.
It's possible for the mods to "shadow delete" your comments: it still appears to you when you're logged in, but no-one else can see it. (To see if any your comments have been shadow-deleted, check out the difference between news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=yourusername when you're logged in and logged out.)
Edit: for example, right now I have a delete button for this message
Proof?
I must assume you have personal possession of exculpatory physical evidence. Please share your physical evidence that discredits the physical evidence you don't like unearthed by the New York Post
Please downvote me if you have no evidence it was faked or know there's no evidence or want to see the NY Post story discredited because Trump should be replaced at any cost.
Also note: other news publications, like the Washington Post, claiming that the hard drive data is "not verified" without any evidence beyond their own reputation, which itself is long since forfeit, is not evidence.
In the impeachment case, that was not a case of the press digging up a document and making an accusation. It was the release of an accusation made to an inspector general. In and of itself, that is news. The fact that the white house was trying to prevent the release of the inspector general complaint to the Congress was also news. At that point, the veracity of the claim needs to be determined, and opinions clearly differed.
How is it “obviously” fake? Especially since most of the media refuses to investigate it — even if to establish that it isn’t fake? The media had no problem running with the very obviously fake Steele Dossier that claimed Trump got a golden shower on a hotel bed Obama once slept in. There was zero corroboration or legitimacy for that, but that dossier was used as a basis to obtain FISA warrant and ultimately led to an impeachment.
It’s “obviously fake,” because it’s politically uncomfortable, not because it’s actually “obviously fake.”
According to a Daily Beast interview, Isaac “switched back and forth” between saying that he contacted the FBI and saying the FBI contacted him. He also claimed that the FBI asked him for help in accessing the drive, though he didn’t indicate that the drive was encrypted or protected in any way.
There’s are several huge missing pieces in this story. For example, what did Isaac say to the FBI? “Hello, someone brought in a computer, and I think it belongs to Beau Biden.” If so, why would the FBI say anything other than, “Then give it back?” Why would Beau Biden dropping off a wet laptop cause the FBI to have any interest at all?
This, then, is the “official” story from the Post and Giuliani: A mysterious stranger drops off a laptop at a shop belonging to a legally blind Trump supporter who has said disparaging things about Biden. Nine months later, the FBI asks for that computer. Then 10 months after that, Giuliani hands over to the New York Post what he says is a copy of that computer’s hard drive. In between those dates, we have nothing. Well, nothing except for more Facebook statements from Isaac, who does devote some time to saying that Trump’s impeachment is a sham, but says nothing at all about Hunter Biden’s crack-smoking video that he found on a computer left at his store. And we have a lot of statements from Giuliani during this period, many of them essentially identical to what will eventually appear in the Post story.
What about the actual contents of the laptop? The emails, text messages, photos, and videos?
Nobody from the Biden camp has come out and denied the authenticity of the emails or the text messages that have been published. Why not?
In fact, you have one of Hunter Biden's former business associates who has come out and confirmed the authenticity of some of the materials.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-bid...
More recently, they allowed themselves to be used as the uncritical mouthpiece of the American federal government when they were starting an illegal war predicated on lies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller
If the NYTimes isn't pure, then surely none are. Genocide denial is particularly egregious, but at least they eventually came clean. I still read the NYTimes more than any other paper, but we must always remember to keep an open mind and to never be too trusting of what any newspaper says.
At the time it wasn't obvious. In those days information traveled much more slowly, with many more intermediaries than today and was, therefore, much less reliable.
I think that's the wrong framing, at least for an organization like the NY Times.
For one, there's a difference between "a lie" and "an inaccuracy" even though most of the time (but not always!) lies are a subtype of inaccuracy. If you make a similar conflation in software development, you'd say that a team member who pushes buggy code to your repo sabotaged your project instead of saying he made a mistake.
Also there's a difference between an organization and its members. Those individuals you mentioned may have lied, but that doesn't mean the organization lied. If a disgruntled member of your team does try to sabotage your project, that doesn't mean your team is sabotaging the project.
Duranty did his reporting literally 90 years ago, which is several generations in the past. That case is of limited use when reasoning about the organization today.
Miller was criticized by colleagues and was eventually forced out. She seems to me kind of like a software engineer who came up with some grand design that had fundamental problems, but couldn't let the design go. That's mistaken, arguably incompetent, but not sabotage.
News rooms are not trying to be Twitter. The goal is not to gather and disseminate information as fast as possible. They're more interested in telling a coherent story around a news event. So they might hold off while they verify or find supporting information. Who was the child? What was the outcome? Was anyone hurt?
There were multiple occasions when the organisation had information about a breaking news event but held off rushing to publish while, I assume, they verified information. One story that stuck in my mind was the murder of a woman and her children by her estranged husband. First reported as a car fire, and then later confirmed as a murder suicide. Ultimately no information was withheld, but care was taken to make sure the event was not turned into salacious clickbait by publishing rumours or rushing to be first.
This seemed counterintuitive to me, but at the same time, what do we gain by having that kind of news arrive more quickly? It's not actionable information.
Twitter can stop an account which causes harm without being immediately required to block all accounts which may cause harm.
I'm left leaning but honestly if we want to win the bias needs to be more subtle.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-bid...
But yeah I've seen the post basically copy and paste accusations as fact (without claiming they're facts, but not qualifying them in any way) about all sorts of things.
We need to reinstate the fairness doctrine to restore honesty in media. The "news" we have today used to be called "entertainment" and half the people on cable news are opinionated talk show hosts if you can even stand to watch any of it.
The laptop and its contents seem to have been obtained legally in this case, and even if the whole thing reeks of parallel construction, they are not even honestly enforcing their stated rule (which again, does not seem to apply when it benefits the other faction).
There's 0 chance that they block any negative controversial stories about the Trump campaign or it's related parties.
It's a foolish place to stand your ground, when the outcome is going to be far worse for all sides than if they'd just let it die off naturally. The controversy itself has now given some on the right another reason to double down on their positions. It's divisive by the nature of the action.
Given that Twitter has allowed people to publish anything and everything about Trump regardless of source (or lack thereof), this is a clear cut case of bias to push their preferred candidate.
A different take on the same idea, Google now adds "fact checks" when searching for videos of Biden, in his own words, describing his flip flopping position on fracking. Try it for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=biden+fracking
I'd love to know what other fact checks they've added. I can't find an explicit list. I submitted an Ask HN to see if anyone knew how to get that list. But that post was flagged as some people may feel that information is too dangerous to disclose.
Both actions are clearly driven by bias. Whether they're allowed to do it on a private platform is a separate topic. But you can't claim to be for free speech when the only speech you suppress or "clarify" is that which is negative to your candidate of choice.
Of course, but Twitter doesn't do that and never has. You are still very able to read what the New York Post writes by typing https://nypost.com/ into your browser, and Twitter's not going to stop you from doing that.
If the moderators of this site decide my comment is out of line with the standards this site tries to uphold, does this make me unable to communicate entirely? No, I'm still able to write whatever nonesense on plenty of other websites. Or I can host my own website where I can freely post whatever nonsense I choose to post. All the way up to the point where no ISP will offer me an internet connection or all the regional number organizations refuse to give me even a single IP address.
There have been multiple times when I've seen an insane video of something happening spreading around Twitter or WorldStar or some other "raw video" aggregation site, and then I'll see it on the NY Post, and that's it. The other major news sites will only show edited versions of the raw video with their own commentary playing over it, or they won't release it at all.
As a theoretical example-
Immediately after event:
Twitter: OH MY GOD look at this kid driving a schoolbus! <35 second video of a kid driving a schoolbus>
Two hours after event:
NY Post: Child seen driving school bus <35 second video of a kid driving a schoolbus>
Twelve hours after event:
NY Times: Child Arrested for School Bus Joyride <3 minute video, containing 18 seconds of footage from original video with expert analysis diagrammed on top>