> 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.
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.