They have extremely rigid standards for conservatives and very loose standards for everybody else. That's a real thing and it's something you don't see until you are one of those whose views are being targeted.
Ultimately, I predict that conservative discourse will take a similar path to MP3s: first, it will be targeted by the big powers-that-be. Next, technologies will appear that make it impossible to police or shut down. Finally, corporate America will realize that it's better to work with people than fight them and the discourse will be brought back into the fold and corporations will once again make money off of it.
It only seems that way to you because you’re seeing only one side getting arbitrarily suspended.
My left-leaning Twitter feed has for years been regularly full of people complaining about how Twitter censors black women, activists, feminists and sex workers, while not doing enough against white supremacists, etc.
Probably the truth is that the standards are just unevenly rigid one day, loose the other, depending on who catches their attention. Policing hundreds of millions of active users is nearly impossible, and adding automated systems increases the risk of false positives.
Here is a more complete discussion of Prager's charges of censorship, and in my opinion they are laughable: https://reason.com/2019/07/18/dennis-prager-who-boasts-1-bil...
Who would have thought that another conservative story about censorship would turn out to be bullshit.
It’s not like the people parroting them have the impetuous to check though, it’s much easier and more comfortable to drone on about “YouTube blocking a video about the 10 commandments” over and over until it becomes your reality, where you’re persecuted.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/10/two-new-studies-show-again...
> What we see for prominent conservatives, however, feels very unfair to me
I find this extremely ironic given that the slogan "facts don't care about your feelings" is attributed to conservatives in particular
I don't follow anyone on facebook or twitter I can't vouch for those, maybe it's just youtube who does all the censoring.
Joe Rogan, Sargon of Akkad, Viva Frey, Academic Agent, Thunderf00t, 1791
Are you talking about the two in this article, or alluding to more?
The studies:
1) https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/26/censorship-conserva...
"The findings demonstrate how a small number of conservative users routinely outpace their liberal rivals and traditional news outlets in driving the online conversation — amplifying their impact a little more than a week before Election Day. They contradict the prevailing political rhetoric from some Republican lawmakers that conservative voices are censored online — indicating that instead, right-leaning talking points continue to shape the worldviews of millions of U.S. voters."
2) https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/new-study-finds-facebo...
"right-leaning pages consistently earned more average weekly interactions than either left-leaning or ideologically nonaligned pages"
This doesn't seem to me to support that "Facebook and twitter do not censor conservatives";
The assumption seems to be that if conservatives are ultimately more influential, they mustn't have been censored. I'm also not sure how fine-grained the distinction of right/left leaning is.
If all conservatives voices are censored except for a few far-right/extremist voices that are amplified, does this balance out? Add a few more dimensions and you might come up with a different conclusion.
In any case, I'll need to see more before I agree it's "well established".
The tweets that they quote are simply innocuous. The ban isn't justified based on the tweets, and was either a panicked response to the news with no investigation or a very thinly veiled political move. I think the right wing has reason to claim bias from that one. What is the closest parallel with that involving a left wing figure?
[0] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
I've posted this before, and while I agree that those are far from his most egregious tweets, given the fact of the insurrection at the Capitol, the ban doesn't seem unjustified at all. Especially since there are now many videos coming out from the insurrection of the rioters believing they are acting in accordance with Trump's wishes.
But why then did Twitter quote two tweets? The tweets do not support the decision. They could just have said "based on context off Twitter, we are banning Trump".
The fact that they didn't makes me think they were scrambling and not thinking clearly. Their reading of the tweets is bizarre. Or maybe they being dishonest about their reasoning.
What made those tweets untenable was the changed circumstances of the attack on the Capitol and the knowledge that those engaged in it were relying on Trump's support and encouragement.
If you were going to put % chances that he was speaking literally, what would you put them at? Surely you'd agree there is at least a chance he was just stream-of-conciousness tweeting what he was thinking?
https://youtu.be/270F8s5TEKY?t=151
I don’t think you can wave away the impact of Trumps words, even if he didn’t intend violence. His audience interpreted approval. That’s what matters. To disagree is to be deliberately ignorant or to argue in bad faith.
That is a totally unreasonable standard that would speak very clearly of a bias (if that is what Twitter thought, which I doubt). It isn't being applied to politicians at all evenly, it is only being applied to Trump. If the speakers intentions and literal words don't matter, and they are to be judged by the most extreme fringes of their supporters then no politician is going to be allowed to speak.
But their word means absolutely nothing because they have zero credibility since they would be saying these exact same things no matter what.
If you always cry fire, you end up in a situation where people don't care if you are lying or that your house is on fire.
>. Finally, corporate America will realize that it's better to work with people than fight them
Conservative media isn't 'the people' and these tech companies aren't the corporates. The tech companies follow this policy because otherwise their employees walk out.
And the so called conservative media is a very tiny super elite spending a ton of money trying to pervert traditional values into a death cult for personal gain.
To them, it seems, not getting everything they want qualifies as persecution.
The problem for <i>feminist</i> outlets is that we have to believe their word that they are being prosecuted.
>tech companies aren't the corporates. The tech companies follow this policy because otherwise their employees walk out.
We at $bigname law firm aren't corporate, it's just if we hire poc our employees will walk out. -someone before the civil rights era.
I have the argument that the policy implemented are inherently biased against conservative groups. For example, a policy about misgendering would disproportionately affect conservatives because they feel that sex is an immutable characteristic.
You are right. The tech firms could be more transparent about the rules they apply and which ones are violated. The ambiguity is indeed solvable, but considering the state of the world, it seems like a low moral priority to me.
>We at $bigname law firm aren't corporate, it's just if we hire poc our employees will walk out. -someone before the civil rights era.
That's disingenuous. Your comparsions fails in five ways:
1. Its not about who gets hired, its about who is served as a customer
2. The violated rules of these firms are also defined as criminal behavior by law in all of the western world, so to 'serve the customer' you are talking about being an accessory in a crime. Even if public prosecutors don't make a habit of prosecuting companies when they are simply the platform, companies have an obligation to their shareholders to not take unnecessary risks.
3. None of this has anything to do with traditional or conservative values. Both the far-left and far-right have been creating a lot of propaganda suggesting that traditional values include racism, sexism, sedation, anti-semitism, etc.
4. The employees walking out is a realistic problem, because there is barely any supply of death cult members with the intellectual and educational background required to perform the job. I'm sure lots of people work at these tech companies that have traditional values, like a small government and low taxes, or a more family centric focus on life. But at this point those people are referred to as 'traitors' by the same so called conservative media
5. People's skin color isn't a choice. They are born with it. Your views on the other hand are a choice. There is accountability and liability. You can be an anti-semitic person and post a video about how to cook an egg without it being removed from youtube. You just can't express anti-semitic views on somebody else's platform. Not complicated nor an issue.
That's unlikely due to a anti-conservative bias though. YouTube is notorious for their aggressive demonetisation of content.
In any event, there is a definite difference between demonetisation and censorship. Nobody is obligated to pay you for telling them what you think .
> That's unlikely due to a anti-conservative bias though.
Can you point me out to left leaning content that gets demonetized constantly so I could compare with the right leaning one. I've not seen this happen in people I've subscribed and would like to see if this claim has any merit.
I understand these to be separate issues that get lumped together because Google changed the way their recommendation engine worked to de-emphasise the importance of subscriptions around the same time as advertisers started to care about where their ads played. Happy to be proved wrong, but I had a quick look around on the internet and couldn't find a reasonable source to contradict me.
> Youtube is also able to monetize your video, but since people have reported seeing adds on demonetized videos, you just don't get the money.
This might be right, it might be wrong, but it isn't censorship.
> Can you point me out to left leaning content that gets demonetized constantly so I could compare with the right leaning one. I've not seen this happen in people I've subscribed and would like to see if this claim has any merit.
I don't watch much 'left leaning' content, so I can't readily provide an example, but a lot of true crime and history channels are constantly having videos demonetised for touching on non-advertiser friendly themes. I know this because they constantly complain about it!
Thanks this was what I was looking for.
> This might be right, it might be wrong, but it isn't censorship.
This is to respond that youtube can monetize or demonetize as it pleases. Since it contradicts itself by demonetize for you and not for them.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/nasim-ag...
Is there a public notification of what videos are monetized? I'm unaware of one, and my quick check shows the poster gets one and some proprietary services that can supposedly check.
Without a public way to check, you would he unable to distinguish actual bias from which side complains more.
It's complains sometimes side vs never complained side, in my pool of channels.
This is a false equivalence. For all the flaws of Antifa and woke culture, they aren't the ones advocating violent insurrection against democratic government in the United States and the murder of Republican law makers for being traitors to the cause. Not as satire or comment, but literally.
I would contend that it is not surprising that one of these sides is encountering more problems with posting guidelines than the other.
Is right leaning content for insurrection? Sorry I've missed that train. The "right/libertarian" I see censored is much tamer than that, Joe Rogan, Sargon of Akkad, Viva Frey, Academic Agent, Thunderf00t, 1791.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/another-bernie-staffer-allege...
Shit talking like that in private, in a bar in a heavily editorialised recording is one thing. I've been a student and Ive heard people brag about all kinds of stuff. Actually following through in the capitol with a violent, literally murderous insurrection is on a completely different level and it's frankly exasperating to me that you can't or won't see that.
Sure, demonetization makes YouTube political commentary an unprofitable business model which is unfortunate for people who would like to earn a living from it, but free speech isn't about Google's advertisers owing anybody a living, and if people are only willing to express a particular view for click revenue then that political position has much bigger problems than Google,...
Videos are demonetized because advertisers don't want to be associated with them. You can't just force companies to compensate what they view as an unprofitable position.
>If they are financially incentivizing one side and not the other, it leads to a dramatic imbalance in the amount and quality of content on either side.
We've currently had well over a century of the far left, socialism, receiving almost no corporate or government financial support. Both groups have been openly hostile towards the position, yet it has somehow managed.
That is absolutely not how demonetization works. Google doesn't take a poll of advertisers and ask if they think they should demonetize them. YouTube reviewers unevenly apply intentionally vague policies to demonetize videos, seemingly at random.
We've currently had well over a century of the far left, socialism, receiving almost no corporate or government financial support. Both groups have been openly hostile towards the position, yet it has somehow managed.
I'd argue that the current incarnation of the Democratic Party is incredibly far left, and it has plenty of financial support. By today's standards, Bill Clinton during his Presidential years would be considered a conservative. Even Barack Obama has been criticized by the woke left for saying that cancel culture is toxic [1]. You have to be pretty far left for Obama to say you're too far left.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/obama-woke-meaning-mich...
Advertisers don't have time to check every video, neither do YouTube reviewers. Advertisers set the guidelines, and they include many things common to the right wing narrative.
>I'd argue that the current incarnation of the Democratic Party is incredibly far left, and it has plenty of financial support.
Note that I called the far left "socialism," and that neither Biden nor the Democratic party strongly support socialized healthcare, something common worldwide. The Democratic party isn't remotely far left, it's center left at best.
This simply isn't true. Google sets the guidelines, and they are intentionally vague so that they can get away with anything they want.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278
The page is titled "Advertiser-friendly content guidelines," and they aren't overly vague. There's some uncertainty, and I'm sure the bots in charge make many mistakes that YouTube is terrible at correcting. It's still not some arbitrary attack on one side.
And we're talking about an ecosystem for political opinion on a platform with low payouts here: the incentives are supposed to be convincing people of something you believe to be important, and thousands of politically active people are already prepared to donate time communicating with much smaller audiences than can be reached on YouTube. The health of political debate really doesn't depend on the representation of the sorts of opinions people are only willing to voice in return for a $5 CPM.
But I would suspect that the same (but opposite) goes for you, since I constantly hear about non-conservatives getting demonetized.
They didn't ban Kathy Griffith for holding up Trump's decapitated head either. You wouldn't get away with doing that to Biden's head.
Voat was probably my "favorite" of all. Literally the only reason it got any traffic were people were mad they could no longer post to r/fatpeoplehate.
You just don't see it, because it's outside of your bubble of interest.
Associating people with the worst of whatever group you can lump them in, then following up with "they're that guy"
BUT, there are literal groups of swastika-flashing Nazis that do support Trump. Targeting these people with harassment should be encouraged, NOT because they support Trump, but because they are Nazis.
Trump and non-nazi Trump supporters MUST NOT be harassed by simple association, EXCEPT to the extent that they are themselves protecting the nazis, or trying to muddy the waters.
Because a lot of people ARE muddying the waters from the "Trump" side as well: instead of recognizing that many attacks are against literal nazis who happen to support Trump, they act as if the attacks are against Trump supporters in general, or that people are calling a crowd nazis because they support Trump, not because they were chanting "jews will not replace us". Or claiming that Trump, who said about the crowd chanting "jews will not replace us" and the antifa counter-protest "there are fine people on both sides", was not literally defending nazis in this case.
He pulled exactly the same 'stop the steal' crap in 2016, claiming massive voter fraud then as well, as a pre-emptive strike in case he lost. But hang on, if he actually believed there was massive voter fraud, how come he did nothing about it for four years eve when he controlled both houses? Where were his reforms of the voting system, increased supervision of voting and vote counting? why no improvements to ballot security and statistical analysis to identify the fraud (the current analyses show it's negligible). If he actually believed what he is saying about vote fraud, why didn't he act on it?
He did nothing about this for two reasons. First he knows there isn't any significant vote fraud, this is well established and was not a partisan issue before he started talking about it. Second, if he reformed voting security, he would become responsible for preventing any potential fraud and would be unable to blame failings in the system on anyone else, taking away his excuse.
That's the thin end of the wedge though.
- Muslims must not be harassed by simple association, except where they muddy the waters to protect Islamists.
- Feminists must not be harassed by simple association, except where they muddy the waters to protect transphobes.
- Conservatives must not be harassed by simple association, except where they muddy the waters to protect an anti-gay rights agenda.
"Muddying the water" is dangerously vague. Who adjudicates between good-faith arguments and those intended to give cover for extremists?
like BLM protesters providing cover to violent antifa & rioters, you mean?
If you're part of a protest and it begins to turns bad, either repel the rioters, or leave - it's not impossible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzZ_VJXWtNs
Otherwise, how are you not complicit?
Ron Paul's page was never banned, blocked or censored in any way for people viewing his content. Admin rights on his page were mistakenly blocked, and reopened a few hours later. I in know way see that targeting the right, especially since I hear plenty of bitching from people on the left who also think it's some sort of conspiracy whenever they get blocked (e.g. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/04/24/facebook-whil... )
"It only seems that way to you because you’re seeing only one side getting arbitrarily suspended."
There is one point that Tim Pool made that I think still stands. you have to moderate such that all content is within the Overton window. Only the left and right have different views on what does and does not fit inside this window. For example right wingers want to argue about the role of trans rights in womens sports. Much of the left and Twitter consider this to be outside of the Overton window.
But even the conspiratorial mindset that "Oh look, this accident must be deliberate!!" is really annoying because it completely ignores the consequences of the mistake. Ron Paul (or anyone) not being able to post for a few hours is some big abuse of power, when none of his existing posts were unreadable? I've had power outages in urban settings that lasted longer.
https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/348388-kat...
https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/524681-kat...
It's not quite true though.
It's what happens when you're the new kid on the block and the incumbents are appointing Witchfinders General to burn the heretics, because then rather than languishing in obscurity as you would otherwise, you get a huge influx of refugees and thousands of them are witches. Then if you let the witches chase off all the other refugees, you reach the undesired end state.
The way around this is to get big enough that most of your users are not witches. So the incumbents can do it already. Just stop having witch hunts. The witches can't take over when all the witches in the whole world are 0.5% of your user base, and other people only leave once the witches take over. It's a stable equilibrium.
But you can also get there another way, which is when the incumbents are hunting witches so hard that 95% of their refugees are innocent people. Then you just sit there and let everybody in, and your percentage of actual witches isn't so high that you're in trouble.
Unless anybody who tries to do that gets canceled before they can get a large enough user base to outnumber the witches.
Presumably this would be reflected in Gab, Voat and Parler being entirely normal discussion forums where people talking about storming capitols or Jewish problems would soon be shouted down by the majority userbase of perfectly normal people. Has this been the case?
The only one of the three that reached the point of having enough users to plausibly get there was Parler, and they were forced offline almost immediately after that happened. On the basis of a list of misbehavior which was unlikely to have been representative.
They had 10 million users. I have a hard time believing that there are 10 million "insurrectionists" in the country and if there were we have bigger problems. Meanwhile the cherry picked examples weren't anything you couldn't also find on Twitter or Facebook.
The network effect is strong. That's the problem to begin with. If people would quit so easily then there would be a lot more platforms and competition and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
And Slashdot has a moderation system that hides that stuff.
Who exactly is the fringe here?
I assumed OP meant that Twitter is "over-sensitive" and bans you for just misgendering nowadays. I clarified that it doesn't action your account for that specifically but the underlying context, if it's part of harassing someone.
None of this is meant to excuse or justify the excesses of McCarthyism, but rather to explain exactly what McCarthyism was. The Hollywood blacklist were, by and large, a group of people who were “deplatformed” for being enthusiastic supporters of Joseph Stalin. That’s not inherently far off from what a lot of people would favor today.
I think it’s more accurate to say that there were people enthusiastic about communism, rather than Stalin. Your statement is akin to stating that all republicans are enthusiastic about Trump. The Lincoln Project would suggest otherwise.
I would further state that I’m, in general, opposed to political repression, even if the intent is to repress totalitarian ideologies that entail violence and mass murder such as communism.
10 years ago I would've agreed with you. The problem is Trump called investigations "witch hunts" despite them proving the existence of dozens of witches.
The term in OP is used in this recent context, where witches do exist, despite the witches' protests.
Doesn't Twitter ban people who define "man" and "women" in a way other than self identity and use the pronouns appropriate to that identification?
Doesn't it ban people who go on about how insert-minority is intellectually and morally inferior and should be removed from the country?
The rules are not hard to stay within. The disturbing part is that many conservatives self-identify with these extremes.