It's also true that these lists are only a small part of what affects your fringe website or twitter accounts.
I say this as someone whose political views, if you force them onto the left-right spectrum, probably end up about 80% toward the left. E.g. I've spent millions over the past several elections supporting the Democrats.
It used to be that censorship was something the right did, and free speech was something the left were in favor of. But over the last few decades, banning "problematic" ideas has become a huge component of left culture (http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html).
Plus tech companies in general, and especially Twitter, lean to the left. Imagine walking around Twitter pre-Covid. You'd find plenty of openly far-left employees. How many openly far-right employees would you find? I don't think you'd find any.
The combination of (a) the left's recent focus on banning heretical ideas, (b) the leftward lean of tech companies generally, and (c) the leftward lean of Twitter even among tech companies, means that right-wing speech is much more likely to get banned on Twitter than left.
That's why people on the far right keep starting lame Twitter alternatives. You don't see people on the far left doing that. They don't need to. They have Twitter."
The left and right are not equal. The left does not rely as much on lies to advocate its positions, and the left is not as oriented around destruction and regression as the right.
We need a more robust understanding of speech than “allowed or not”. Emphasis & volume matters.
If you listen to the intolerant wing of the right, the parts that would legitimately support overturning elections and arresting political opponents, they sound eerily similar to your sentiment.
It’s a thought stopping theory that allows you to remain smug and correct despite being deeply ignorant.
Something needs to be done. Free speech maximalism is a threat.
To be honest, that's hilariously false. The left suppressed Hunter Biden's laptop story for two years, saying it was misinformation, before admitting it was true. The IRS targeted right-wing and Christian non-profit organizations deliberately for auditing. Obama claimed that forcing nuns to buy health insurance covering birth control was necessary, and claimed you could keep your doctor under Obamacare, which even PolitiFact called a Pants-on-Fire Lie. The left claimed that a baker needed to make a personalized cake supporting gay rights, or it would open the waves to discrimination, even though the baker was willing to sell any other cake to them that wasn't customized with that particular label.
I can go on and on.
Edit: are our neoliberal overlords a bunch of cold hearted shit heads? Yes. Should we elect and promote barely disguised fascists in response? No.
Who the fuck cares about Maxine waters?
> it’s not the one you think
Yes it is.
They don't need to because they have cool Twitter alternatives. Like Mastodon.
It existed before.
Open source, such that anyone can use it
"On the right, banning books means trying to prevent their kids from reading them. But on the left it often means trying to prevent anyone from reading them." https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1515563419386191880
> We, the members of the OUP USA Guild, are calling upon our colleagues and authors to take a stand against the upcoming publication of “Gender-Critical Feminism”. Sign the petition below (OUP employees and authors only).
Yeah, that's not a "ban", and "gender critical feminism" = TERFs. Ie, "people who think trans women are faking it so they can rape women and children in bathrooms or 'cheat' 'the system'"
Remind me which side thinks businesses have a constitutional right to refuse to serve people if it violates their "beliefs"...yet finds it unacceptable that unionized workers are objecting to publishing of research on a subject?
Also, remind me which side is boycotting a major entertainment company...because said company's CEO voiced displeasure...at a bill that bans any language referencing non-straight gender orientations?
Even if that's precisely true, is it not good to be creating a more trusted space for everyone? The grievances, regardless of merit, are mostly coming from the right. If you want to create a service that caters to all you're going to have to address their concerns. If he can do that in a way that is fair to all, it sounds like a win to me.
But couldn't it at least be better?
https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/1248099002
https://www.vox.com/2017/6/27/15878980/europe-fine-google-an...
https://i.imgur.com/MVlshAT.png
You don't have to be conservative to see there's a pretty significant bias, just in the headlines. I'm a Pacific Green and I can still see it.
Like, say I drum up a conspiracy about how the government is putting Glupkleins in the water. Since it's not a real word, the only results that'll show up will be the conspiracy nonsense that I myself am peddling. People who "do their own research" on Glupkleins by punching it into a search engine will come away with the impression that the entire community is unified on whatever stance I want purely because nobody else knows or cares enough about it enough to write their own articles debunking it.
This is the same thing here, just at a murkier scale. Nobody uses the term big tech except in this context, and so using that term to find something which disproves the context around the term is a losing battle
If it were objective, you'd think it would try and suggest something for all queries just to be maximally useful. But it doesn't. I mean surely people have asked questions that start with "are white people" why not show the most common one, or the most controversial, or the "highest quality" whatever that is. But no, absolutely nothing.
Someone clearly has their thumb on the scale.
>religion
Nah, this one is super obvious in the lack of an Easter doodle, but every other religion gets a shoutout on their important days. Just like the lack of one for International Men's day. Google's bias is as predictable as every other (D-CA).
Now if you truly want to address this concern of the people, the question obviously would be if it was the algorithm that blocked the article or was it "a guy in a room"? I don't see what is the difficulty in admitting that it was "a guy in a room" because our values/ideology does not align with ideology of New York Post.
When you start to say that it was the algorithm that did it, and that there was zero human interference, without any proof to back up those assertions, then it is much the same as saying that it was a "popup" that triggered when one is caught watching porn. "I did not do it, it was the machine."
Then it becomes even more important to open source the algorithm so everyone can see what is happening internally. It at least puts some doubts to rest. It is better than saying "believe me it was the algorithm not me".
Those who investigated thoroughly found that the chain of custody of the hard drive was incredibly sloppy and the content of the hard drive was changed multiple times, making it impossible to confirm where the hard drive came from or who put which content onto it.
The speculation is that someone obtained Hunter Biden’s emails in some unrelated way (e.g. from other hacks) and then placed them onto the hard drive in question as a way to obscure the source/method.
Here’s the clearest story explaining the details: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/hunter-...
Their skepticism turned out to be well founded. There’s really no story there. (This was similar to the non-story of Hillary Clinton’s email server, Russian-hacked DNC emails, etc. of 2016 which turned out to be completely anodyne and routine, but became the intense focus of months of news coverage and whipped partisans into a frothy frenzy based on wild lies/speculation.)
That's your opinion and you are entitled to it. But it doesn't turn away from the fact that the story was suppressed. Real or not.
> This was similar to the non-story of Hillary Clinton’s email server, Russian-hacked DNC emails, etc. of 2016 which turned out to be completely anodyne and routine
At least it got proper coverage. There was no suppression of either the email gate or the Russia gate. Whether it was fake, true, hoax doesn't matter. It got the coverage it was due.
> were rightly skeptical of a tabloid fluff story with no details, corroboration, or expert analysis about a mysterious harddrive
Joe Biden said it was based on a "bunch of garbage". That it was "Russian disinformation". All news media outlets, including Washington Post, carried that forward in all their news headlines and editorial posts (except right wing news media outlets of course). What were the details, corroboration or expert analysis that they went through before labelling the Laptop as "Russian disinformation"?
> Their skepticism turned out to be well founded
I missed the part of their skepticism where they called it "Russian disinformation" and it turned out to be true. Can you highlight to me where it was proved that the Laptop was part of a smear campaign against Joe Biden initiated through "Russian disinformation"?
What Washington Post has finally done is admitted that the Laptop and its contents are real. Now when it comes to the meat of the matter, the actual contents of the Laptop, it hasn't gone through sufficient scrutiny yet. It also hasn't taken into account the whistleblower's account of what dealings the Biden family had with the Chinese and Ukrainians. On who the "Big Guy" was who received the payments; which is mentioned in a March 2017 email conversation between James Gilliar (Hunter's associate) and a Chinese energy firm where he says: "10 held by H for the big guy?". Who is the "Big Guy" here? Who is "H" here? I am assuming H is Hunter and "Big Guy" is Joe Biden. It is still an assumption and can only be proved in some Court of law in USA. But if you aren't even going to give this evidence a chance to see the light of the day you'll never be able to get to the bottom of the Truth.
Now I am not saying any of it is 100% true as it is still under scrutiny by a Grand Jury (though a lot of it is coming out to be true now). I am just saying that the media actively suppressed this information from the general public out of "fears" of it being "Russian disinformation" which still hasn't been proved. Or maybe, just maybe, they did not want their favorite candidate to lose.
There is unfortunately not enough verifiable information about the sources and chain of custody of the hard drive to distinguish between these two alternatives.
Various media sources (and the American public in general) were burned multiple times by credulously repeating Bannon- and Giuliani-pitched (completely made up) bullshit, some of which actually was later demonstrated to be Russian government produced disinformation. Even if the hard drive turned out to be what they said (again, this is still dubious), it would be a good example of a “boy who cried wolf” situation.
Even the laptop has been proven to belong to him.
The onus is on you to prove it isn't Hunters laptop.
Excellent. So when is Twitter going to ban Taylor Lorenz for doxxing an anonymous Twitter user LibsofTikTok? This is her tweet right here: https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1516399663305297920
It has been up since April 19th, 2022. Twitter immediately blocked New York Post's tweet.
I wonder why the algorithm is so slow when it comes to Taylor Lorenz? Maybe we'll find out when the code is open sourced. Then we can all legitimately blame "the algorithm" for causing all this divide between the left and right wing in a neutral, faultless, perfect digital town square called Twitter.
The racist algorithms critique isn't that their is a shadowy conspiracy of people pushing buttons behind the curtain, getting the results they want with conscious decisions, it is a concern about datasets mainly, as well as sociological questions about unconscious bias in testing and verifying the correctness of programs, which can cascade into social effects.
It is a completely different thing, and one grounded in actual research.
“The Epoch Times is a far-right[16] international multi-language newspaper and media company affiliated with the Falun Gong new religious movement”
A link to his own website and his bibliography is not a peer review.
You said his work has been peer-reviewed, but when asked to provide such peer-reviews, you only cited a news article about him, and his self-published bibliography. Interestingly enough, his own bibliography doesn't even link to peer reviews of the Google/election-focused research.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=robe...
In his bibliography you can see many follow up papers. So you are just wrong saying his methodology and approach is the work of a lone warrior.
If you are asking me to summarize his research body that’s unreasonable to show my claim that it’s peer reviewed, which it as shown above demonstrably is.
Also, The EpochTimes is not a good source, it's a far-right site run by IMHO a religious movement that borders on a cult. It publishes Q-Anon theories on its front page uncritically.
And "peer-reviewed" by whom?
https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/robert-epstein-google-b...
"Epstein is a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research, but other than a technologist who doesn’t appear to help with the studies, Epstein is the organization’s only staff member, according to the AIBR website. Epstein is the co-author of a study published by his employer, only the summary of which is available, that claims that biases in Google’s search results may have tilted millions of undecided voters to vote for Clinton in the 2016 election. That was the study Epstein described in his Senate committee testimony, where he didn’t mention that his huge claim is based on monitoring the search results of just 21 undecided voters out of 95 voters for a 2017 white paper. In his submitted testimony, Epstein did provide seven pages of citations—but all of them are papers or op-eds he wrote or co-wrote himself. Only one of them—a 2015 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, about how biased results produced by search engines could have the ability to sway undecided voters—was peer-reviewed. Even that study didn’t demonstrate that this has actually happened."
There you go, n=21. This guy fails high school stats. Fails 30% large counts condition, fails 10% sample condition, probably isn't a random sample either.
With regards to this specific paper, you say yourself the methods paper is peer reviewed. It’s also been cited 470 times according to Google scholar, which is an academic home run.
Will a methods paper apply the methodology at scale? Look at his follow up papers for that.
The point on scale is fair if true, but the paper Slate criticize is a methodology paper which is not where you would expect a large scale study. I haven’t read his body of work to get a full picture of that question, and it’s not clear to me that Slate did so either. No matter what Slate is an activist publication that at times misrepresent to support a predetermined conclusion.
Slate's criticisms were factual, they are of course biased, but so what?
This study's statistical parameters are really shoddy, and just straight up bad data. Garbage in, garbage out. His PNAS original study had a larger sample, but again, the conclusions don't really follow, and there are many more explanatory effects for how search behaves (including his own point about how searches can create band-wagoning and reinforcing behavior), and the claims that it shift votes are not established.
One only has to imagine that if more voters are searching for Clinton and clicking Ads or the first few SERP results, then the search engine might take that as a signal to return MORE of those results, which causes more people to do follow up searches for Clinton info, establishing a positive-feedback loop without any BS about tech companies putting their foot on the balance. We've in fact seen this behavior before, famously when Microsoft's Bing started returning search results for documents it couldn't possibly have crawled, simply due to click-tracking.
Plus, the sheer fact that a majority of world wide media were against Trump, Google's crawler is going to end up with a lot of pro-Clinton content. I'm not just talking about US mainstream media and newspapers, but UK, French, German, Canadian, Australian, you name it, a majority of the media did not like Trump. The search engines can only deal with the data they're crawling and the user behavior they're receiving.
I know it comes as a shock, but a majority of not just Americans, but the Western world did not have a high opinion of Trump in 2016. You don't need to invent elaborate tech conspiracies to end up with pro-Clinton or Trump-critical articles getting surfaced since that was the actual Zeitgeist.
It's amazing to me that even after winning in 2016, Trump and his cadre were still sore that Clinton won the popular vote. Well, newsflash, but the Democrats have been winning the popular vote pretty much every election. Add up all of the votes House & Senate members got, and you'll see far more Democratic votes, because the GOP generally represents lower population density districts. Again, not surprising.
The GOP could use that information to decide they need to change policies to attract different demographics, and widen their audience, but it seems like in the post-Trump era, it's down to claiming vote fraud, media bias, and doubling down on populism and weird stuff about their opponents being Groomers or CRT theorists. It's honesty sad, because the GOP used to run some campaigns on issues that had cross cultural appeal, like crime reduction, but now it's all weird culture war stuff.
I agree the GOP fails at providing a policy alternative. That is undoubtedly true, but it’s not clear it will remain so.
That said look at how Hispanics in polls are moving heavily towards GOP. But gaining votes by just not being democrat and putting on a pretense of not supporting the woke policies is not a stable way to shift coalitions.
> weird stuff about their opponents being Groomers or CRT theorists.
More than 50% of the second biggest teacher union voted to teach CRT even in states where it’s illegal. I’ll summarize why a few popular activist teaching tools accurately fit the term grooming.
Queer theory as praxised in schools seek to teach the student to deconstruct their sexual identity and interpret it in an oppressor/oppresssed dynamic. Goal isn’t to acknowledge and stabilize a sexual identity, but to destabilize the kid sexually into constantly engaging in a critical introspection of their sexuality as a Marxist activist. Queer theory seek to destabilize in the vulnerable stage when the kid is learning that they are a sexual being. This was piloted by Lukacs in the Hungarian communist revolution.
CRT does the same as queer theory, but for race.
Critical pedagogy (SEL, the other CRT etc) that is applied across almost all schools instead of teaching skill, teach the student to interpret the words and math through their personal emotion applying the Marxist process to find the oppressor/oppressed dynamic instead of skill.
Paulo Freire that invented critical pedagogy, like all Marxists, view skills teaching as evil because it at best train people to take on roles in the meritocratic system they deem evil. In Marxist theology skilled people manifest the status quo reality through false consciousness. They believe a skilled person act like a robot based upon instructions of dead people.
Critical pedagogy results in a huge expected drop in functional literacy in high school graduates, that means they can not read words on a page and understand what the sentences mean, and the math skills are dropping in the same way. That’s not surprising when you spend school talking about how you feel about a subject instead of how to establish a shared interpretation and practicing skill.
SEL is a super evil corruption of group psychology techniques by teachers unlicensed in psychology to break kids resistance to the teachers activism.
Why should we allow Marxist teachers to indoctrinate in Marxist process instead of teaching skill?
What's really happening is the "CRT" in high schools being taught was already being taught before it got labeled CRT. Here's examples of what it boils down to: 3/5ths clause, red lining, crack vs cocaine sentencing, etc. What's controversial about this? Even conservatives admit for example, that the criminal justice system is inherently racist due to sentencing differentials.
>"Queer"..."Marxist"..."Communist"...
Do you realize how crazy this sounds? Maybe in college if you take a course in Queer Theory, you might get this, but K-12 are not teaching kids to "deconstruct sexual identity and interpret it in an oppressor/oppresssed dynamic". Do you even have kids in school? My kids are in hyper-liberal California school system and they teach ZERO of anything you're said. It's nonsense.
> teach the student to interpret the words and math through their personal emotion applying the Marxist process to find the oppressor/oppressed dynamic instead of skill.
Reality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikehX9o1JbI Actual SEL in classroom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaCVfeWKTp0
Here is the most famous teacher on TikTok that uses SEL techniques, are you really going to claim this woman is teaching a super evil marixst corruption of psych? Good lord: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc_RnQvaqoY
Where dafuq is the Marxism? They're teaching the kids self control, to regulate their emotions. I have a daughter, whenever she gets something wrong, or doesn't understand something, she gets frustrating and emotionally upset, and while she is upset, nothing else the teacher says is heard. At home I have to reassure her that failure is the process of learning, that its ok to get something wrong, or not understand it, that's a step along the way to understanding. Only after I manage to calm her, can she return to doing her work. She's too much of a self-critic/perfectionist.
What I see is a bunch of stodgy conservatives who often have no clue about what is actually going on in their schools, because they don't really spend hours a day with their kids (I spend 2hrs a day helping my kids with school every night), and freaking out because things aren't done the way they learned them, and therefore, since it is different, it is bad. I know exactly what is being taught in my kid's middle school and high school history class. No marxism, no "CRT", but yes, guess what, they do teach the factual horrors of colonialism, of slavery, Jim Crow, and the REAL causes of the civil war, not the "Lost Cause" BS.
Our high school has on campus counselors, psychologists (you can get therapy), and they specifically teach conflict resolution and empathy. So unlike my high school experience which was full of bullies and fights and cliques, the kids are remarkably decent towards one another.
And ironically, none of this is really any different than what my Catholic middle school taught me growing up. the "SEL" techniques were all over my Catholic middle school. If two people were in conflict, the nuns would talk to you about empathy for the other person and how you made them feel. They literally preached recognition of other kids feelings, with a religious overtone (because that's how Jesus would act towards others), and this was 40 years ago. They just didn't call it "SEL".
What I see is the conservative movement demonizing pretty milquetoast things, and most people just mindlessly repeating CRT CRT CRT or SEL SEL, and never having actually visited a classroom or read their kid's textbooks.
Prove me wrong: Cite a K-12 textbook that "deconstructs sexual identity", or teaches "Marxism"
Let me give you an example of NOT CRT. One of the Math textbooks banned in Florida had a statistics question about racism in a Implicit Association Test (https://www.fldoe.org/academics/standards/instructional-mate...). Are you telling me that using an actual test questionnaire as a data to construct a model on is CRT just because it's subject matter is race? it's not even a systems view (which is what CRT is), but an individual bias dataset. Explicitly NOT CRT, but LABELED CRT and banned.
What we're seeing is CRT being used as a swearword to ban any discussion of America's racist history in Southern/Conservative school districts because they don't like it. Just as "Voter ID" under the guide of securing elections (which have statistically insignificant fraudulent votes) is being used to roll back decades of progress in civil rights after the Voting Rights Act provisions expired and failed to get renewed.
It's fooling no one.
Your mileage may vary.
Also, The Epoch Times is a far right source -- not trustworthy generally.
Humans write and train algorithms, and the quality of a search engine stems from biasing the result. Human moderation is also done by people with bias.
So tech workers that tilt heavily woke, not even just democrat, are likely to both intentionally and unintentionally bias results.
Tech oligarchs of cause will pursue their own politics, but their use of repressive tolerance to censor true unfavorable stories to their politics (eg Hunter Biden laptop showing curruption) and pushing dubious stories favorable to their politics (eg russia collusion) should give them editorial liability as a publication not a section 230 company.
[1] Russia interfered with the 2016 election (though "collusion" seems a few steps too far into "they changed people's votes", which to my understanding did not happen with any high frequency, they just advertised and propagandized illegally) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
People at tech companies have political persuasions across the board. It's naive to think the companies are any sort of concerted bloc of voting power, or that the company leadership is the new room of smoking men around a conference table deciding elections.
Political party leadership, on the otherhand....
The laptop is real as verified by the FBI that has opened a grand jury on Hunter Biden due to this and other evidence.
Likewise, FBI verified that the Hailey Biden diary was real in its illegal raid of Project Veritas.
Despite the hoax Mueller found nothing despite spending immense resources. With regards to the Russia collusion hoax, follow the Durham indictments around it that show it was a Hillary political ploy all along. Example indictments is Fusion GPS fabricating the Steele report for Hillary, a tech executive thar tried to plant evidence on Trump computers, a Hillary lawyer that lied to the FBI about not acting on behalf of Hillary etc
Wokism, like all forms of Marxism, demand praxis (“do the work”) from its adherents which is why it’s so visible and progressively take over organizations until all they do is praxis.
Side note: Activism through praxis is not optional, because Marxist theology has this idea that their adherents have a special gnostic knowledge where they like a God create reality. The idea is that once all alive are Marxist utopia will be spontaneously created by the collective.
It may not have been algorithmic, but it definitely happened.
https://www.mediaite.com/news/ex-google-engineer-says-glitch...
I'm not making any comment on the theory in the article, but it has certainly happened.
Edit: more context in thread here:
IMO they just stopped caring about accuracy along time ago and have shifted into "engagement" and recommendation based results instead of accurate ones. Now when you search for something and very few results come back or they think your search terms should be something else, your given a shitty recommendation instead of what you actually searched for.