I’m not a conservative but I support free speech. I installed it but the recommended people were Fox News pundits and politicians I didn’t care about. I like the idea of enabling users to hide speech they don’t like rather than a Speech Czar that determines what we are allowed to hear. But it will take some time for something like this to get a critical mass of users to make it work.
Indeed, indeed. If it's not about the principled and unflinching protection of free speech, then what is it about?
I've said it about twitter and I'll say it about parler. Freedom of association is also a first amendment right. Speech is being exercised by the owners of a platform when they edit/curate/annotate posts, and association is being exercised when they ban/shadowban users.
It's all about justifications for being egotistical assholes and believing feelings are enough justification for policy. You can't reason with people who dismiss facts, empathy and consequences. You can reach the middle ground on issues that affect livelihoods of people and try to map where this may be improved.
> "Pretty much all of my leftist friends joined Parler to screw with MAGA folks, and every last one of them was banned in less than 24 hours because conservatives truly love free speech," one user recently wrote on Twitter.
It sounds like they were banned for being antagonistic assholes, not for being liberals.
It doesn't matter what they were banned for, it's still hypocritical for a platform apparently based around "free speech" to ban people for speech they don't agree with.
Who's to decide what is spam and flood and what's not?
The circle never ends.
Call Parler what it is - a right-wing circle jerk, for aggrieved snowflakes who think that "free speech" means that you can say whatever and whenever, as long as it's sufficiently conservative, and not only can the government not punish you, but those big meanie private companies can't either.
Every forum needs human moderation, but that doesn't imply that this moderation cannot be done in good or bad faith. Just like a good judge is not congruent to a big, deterministic computer.
So you're saying you believe Parler to be moderating in better faith than Twitter/Facebook/etc? 'cause I think for your statement to be relevant that would have to be the assertion...
I don't think it's hypocritical at all. The U.S. is based around free speech and we ban all of types speech for good reasons.
It obvious that "we want to allow someone to say anything they could say on twitter+(spout conspiracy theories and implicit/explicit racist shit)" is both freer than twitter, and not as free as previous+harass people.
I really don't think allowing right wing nuts to voice their opinion but not letting users harass each other makes a hypocrite?
I mean...that's kind of the reason a lot of these people got banned from Twitter/etc, too, being antagonistic assholes, not for being conservative. So kind of ironic if they and the platform are saying Parler is better because "free speech".
Upthread everyone is arguing that everything except imminent incitement to violence is free speech. Aren't mere insults free speech? Do you not like it when it's aimed at you?
"free speech" is just being used as a dog whistle for far right ideas in this case. These people are not behaving in good faith, don't bother engaging with them as if they were.
That's the point of "free speech" - I don't care how far right / left / in outer space your ideas are. You can say them, and I won't absorb the message if I don't care. It's the old saying about TV - if you don't like what's on, just change the channel.
That ends when you start inciting violence and promoting actions that can end other people's lives.
As it should. It's one thing to claim space lizards are controlling Facebook, it's another to start saying you want to shoot up busses full of Facebook workers.
Unconvincing? Replace "Facebook" with "Democrats" and you get worryingly close to Parler.
But there is another problem. These sites don't just happen. If they were bottom-up spontaneous forums - someone starting with phpBB and taking it from there - they'd be tolerable. (And likely less extreme.)
They aren't. These are deliberate attempts to farm and concentrate certain kinds of people with certain kinds of sentiments so they can be used as political leverage for certain interests.
They're not free speech at all - they're farmed speech.
That is the problem. The people who farm them are knowingly and maliciously using them to spread lies and enflame violent sentiment so they can profit from both, financially and politically.
parler is neither a free speech platform by design or a far right one, it's purely an attempt to create the fox version of twitter. their tos are highly dubious.
>dog whistle
to be reductive, yes far right and even fascist ideas would fall under the umbrella of free speech as would... literally everything else.
The fact that it's funded by the Mercers should give everyone pause for concern. They're rolling their own platform to do what Cambridge Analytica did without having to answer to anyone.
C/A as sinister manipulators has to be the most preposterous conspiracy theory to come out of the last 4 years -and that includes Qanon. They were a marketing company also known for the scoundrely manipulations of the.... LL Bean catalog. Maybe they sold some people flannel shirts. Terrible.
This is what I was curious about, though I'd like to see what they actually posted and whether they got banned for the speech or for harassing people or other behavior like that.
/r/TheDonald was notorious for brigading other subreddits, manipulating votes and other TOS violations then crying censorship when they got banned.
How long until America starts putting limits on free speech?
IANAL, but we already have laws against libel, slander, and defamation.
Section 230 / communications decency could be modified. New laws could be created to prevent amplified spread of factually incorrect information. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom to broadcast that speech.
I'm not advocating for this, but I see it as a possibility.
There are limits to free speech which have been long established. The clear and present danger doctrine describes limits to free speech, in that you can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater. When/if the amplification possible with social media is connected with mob violence, there could be prosecution. I don't think court systems and law enforcement are sophisticated enough yet, though.
You mean falsely yell 'fire' in a crowded theatre - an exceedingly important distinction which is core to much discussion about free speech (should offensive speech be allowed if it is stating facts etc.)
You mean falsely, otherwise your 'clear and present danger' part doesn't make sense - the entire point historically with your example is that it is perfectly acceptable to yell in the theatre if there is clear and present danger. Reducing it to simply 'yelling in a theatre' means you're evaluating it just on.. yelling alone? What? Are you saying all 'social media amplification' is the same?
The danger in 'clear and present danger' of yelling in the crowded theater is specifically and intentionally causing panic where people are likely to get hurt. As others have mentioned, though, it's complicated. The original poster was suggesting we need new laws targeting the amplification of social media, which could limit false and damaging speech. My suggestion is that existing speech, slander, and libel laws apply. The 'amplification' of social media gives individual voices more reach and clout, similar to yelling. Social etiquette, law enforcement, and the judicial system have yet to adapt.
Just a note: "Shouting Fire in a crowded theater" is protected, since Brandenberg in 1969. The standard is that you can't incite imminent lawless action, and people trying to escape from a fire isn't "lawless".
You may find the "Make No Law" first amendment podcast interesting. It's created by Popehat (Ken White), a well known first amendment lawyer. In his podcast he talks about the history of "fire in a crowded theatre", along with many other first amendment topics. It provides a really interesting view into how the courts have applied the first amendment over the years.
The most famous use of the ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater analogy was 1919’s Schenck v. United States, where the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that protesting the draft by passing out pamphlets exemplified a clear and present danger worthy of regulation.
A handful of exceptions do exist to the First Amendment, but free speech absolutists tend to be skeptical of the comparison you make in your post, because historically there have been some serious legal wrongs performed in the name of said crowded theater.
Then who will have the power to decide what free speech needs to be suppressed? Let's give it a thought at the options available:
A) Government. Some years liberals will supress conservatives, when the power is switch conservatives will supress back. The whole concept of free speech was specifically designed to not have the government dictate what you can say or not say.
B) The press. Which one, CNN or Fox News? The trust on the media is an all-time low and they clearly have earned that reputation.
C) The judicial system? Again, most of them are appointed by the government.
D) Tech lords. I really hope no one is advocating for this.
I am not American, I wish to live in a country where I can criticize anyone, even the President, without fear of getting arrested for a bogus claim of defimation. Is sad to see that most Americans don't value their own freedoms.
For those unaware of the connection, Robert Mercer was also a key investor behind Cambridge Analytica, the data firm which played a large role in the hyper targeted Facebook ads during the 2016 election.
If I recall correctly, he was also one of the very few rich people to back Trump in 2016, when everyone had written Trump off. Which also caused some drama at Rentech.
No he didn't. This is what the article says, "On Saturday, CEO and co-founder John Matze said one of the privately-owned company's early investors is Rebekah Mercer"
What's more, I've also read the Wall Street Journal article on the subject which made it even clearer.
"Ms. Mercer, in a post on Parler after a version of this article was published, said that her father had no involvement or ownership of the company."
She runs the Mercer Family Foundation through which her father donated over $100million to rightwing propaganda causes. Point being that they work closely together and have shared ideologies.
This is more then a handful of disaffected basement keyboard Nazis. It's millions of people. Many of them reasonably upset at censorship and ultimate determination of truth by a group of 20-30 something high-top sneaker wearing San Francisco people.
Money and power has found a way to hack the first amendment. Algorithms are amplifying the most inflammatory messages on both sides to increase engagement.
Is this the endgame of the attention economy? If I show you a picture of a cat and evidence of an existential threat, which are you most likely to pay real attention to?
The black box is always going to optimize for the worst aspects of humanity. The best aspects simply aren’t worth enough money.
How about doing a thought experiment for a minute?
Trump told what are generally considered incorrect opinions on corona virus prevention. Eg: Hydroxy Chloroquine works, masks don't and so on...
His followers then parroted and posted these comments on social media and were promptly defunded, suspended and even banned for breaking Eula terms. Because Covid is serious and far too important to risk endangering others lives with misinformation like that...fair enough.
The campaign rolls on only now a significant portion of Trump's most vocal supporters are no longer able to voice their support and encourage people to vote for him due to being punished for spreading false info that Trump told them regarding Covid, or is that the real reason? Maybe the plan was to silence the right's voice all along but Covid presented itself at an oppertune time, the left leaning social media companies took full advantage and Trump and his followers walked right into the trap!
Could that be why right wing supporters might want to find a new forum to express themselves? Somewhere that they wont have their voices taken away right before an election that they feel passionate about?
Just a different thought from an outside observer with no skin in the game.
There's plenty of opinion out there that the leadership of these companies themselves are right leaning, even if the average silicon valley employee isn't. I don't know.
But maybe they are also just hoping to be neutral. Maybe it's good business to not alienate half of your marketplace. Maybe there's some aspect of genuine principle there. If you believe that can't exist, how is it possible that right leaning state governments ever can verify the election in favor of a left leaning candidate? I'm naive in so many ways, but I need some hope to stay alive.
That very much depends on the issue in question. Most of them are pro-gay rights, for example, because that is either a win or neutral for people they care about but if you’re talking about issues which have a direct financial impact (tax rates, corporate liability, privacy or workers rights, etc.) you’ll unsurprisingly find big differences. When you look at the money that the big tech company PACs spend it tends to skew towards whoever is in power or promises the least regulation, like most other industries.
Truth is I can still see both sides of the political argument, possibly even more so the libratarian point of view, which is a fairly safe place to be ATM.
I believe for bad or worse though that many people have gotten caught up in the frenzy a bit too much during this election cycle and have made morality comprimising decisions on both sides. Maybe it's the Rona driving it, after all so many people have died from it, and the US went to war over 911. Rona is literally exponentially worse as far as the death toll goes, so IDK what is to come but emotions are raw for sure.
I have tried to stay out of the discussions, (taken Dang's advice and waited for things to cool down) then a hit job story about another platform comes out like this one and tries to politicize Parler. So unfortunately I got sucked into the politics too and foolishly weighed in.
Twitter spent a long time trying not to take action against posters, for all kinds of abuse and libel. What happened is that finally the endless lying hit a subject which personally mattered to those running the companies.
I'm sure they do want a forum to express their views and claim they're silenced. But they need to stop and think about why everyone else has deemed them so toxic.
Oh but wait!! I was wrong it wasn't the HCL and masks after all.
You're right about hitting a subject they cared about..that's right now I remember it was HB's laptop story that brought about the bannings.
Check and Mate I guess. Good luck sorting that mess out, hopefully You get a few weeks rest after the Georgia runnoffs before the campaigns start up again but I fear the media has found a cash cow in political outrage and will be milking it for every drop from now until the endof time(or twitter).
Look for actual polls, the belief that HCQ works and masks don't are in minority among Republicans, same with most of them having never heard of Qanon, the proud Boys or the boogaloo (which is more a meme than what was depicted in msm) These positions are inflated by the MSM to make right wingers look like crazy lunatics.
Look at the polls huh? You must think I'm dumber than a sac of hammers if You think I'm gona believe another one of them.(tounge in cheek)
Most of the vocal support for political candidates comes from the minority of voters, on both sides. That doesn't change the situation.
The point is wether real or not there is a perception that powers that control social media are activist, woke or whatever other lable You want to give them.
These are private companies, right wing supporters do not believe in heavy handed government, so what else are they to do but find new venues to expresd their views? Do You realky expect them to just shut up and take it? That will never happen.
Social media is neither Left nor Right leaning, nor are the rules. But if the people enforcing said rules have bias, then problems arise, isn't that the point BLM was making about the Police?
As a Jewish person I’d say that none of this political polarization is beneficial for us. It’s not that one side has intrinsically safer qualities for Jews.
With the work of ADL and many prominent Jewish figures in the past century, anti-semitism had kind of a special status where it’s taboo even when it’s very nuanced, on both the left and right sides of the aisle.
It’s drowning in the cultural discourse now. When 70 million voters are labeled “racist” - or at least supporting “racist policies” - the word loses its deterrence altogether.
America used to be an explicitly racist county where the majority of voters supported bans on interracial marriage and segregation in schools as recently as the 1960s. There's nothing absurd or unlikely about racist voters being a large fraction of the country.
the aclu was pretty much built out of support from the jewish community and jewish lawyers who understood that free expression is the strongest protection any minority has against the state and will of the of the majority. the rights i enjoy today exist in a large part because of their tireless work and they have my eternal gratitude.
bad ideas never go away, though the words and the arguments for them may change. we cannot censor away the problem, the only defense is a vigorous and open forum of debate where everything can be challenged.
The Electoral College and First-Past-The-Post distort the voters' interest in favour of a two-party system that encourages dogmatic thinking;
US voters want to express themselves but they lack information and critical thinking;
Not all information is good; Journalism is dying and the advertising business distorts people's perceptions for profit;
Taxes are needed but the lucid, rational discourse needed to make good public policy is absent;
It is hard to cultivate the citizenry in the above conditions; the political system is starved of courageous and intelligent politicians; panderers have a significant demographic to exploit.
tldr: US public discourse has attained a toxic equilibrium. But it is profitable for some.
One of the advantages Free Speech has is censorship is only worthwhile if deployed against ideas that have potential to attract people. One of my pet hobbies is arguing against socialism. I don't bother arguing against flat-earthism because nobody sane believes it. But socialism has some compelling points and people keep trying it.
That dynamic will help platforms like Parler. Whether or not the ideas are good ones, the people there going to be people who were pushed off Twitter because they had compelling or persuasive ideas.
Can't meet bad ideas by silencing people. It doesn't work, people just get the impression that the ideas have power.
1. Tech platforms are uncomfortable with certain viewpoints expressed on their platforms and seek to limit these viewpoints.
2. Instead of changing people’s minds (isn’t the evidence overwhelmingly conclusive that people rarely change political viewpoints?), people flock to “community bubbles” like Parler, TheDonald, etc where they feel welcome.
3. This marginalisation leads to increasing extremism; going from the likes of “immigrants bad” we saw in 2016 to disputing and attempting to overturn democracy.
On reddit, these reasons you mention are selectively enforced and often actually made by people trying to get the subreddits banned. Bans are also familial: reddit tends to do “ban waves” where they also ban similar subreddits, irrespective of whether they have rule violations or not. There’s no communication; no appeals; no “you got this wrong”.
If you’ve ever participated in one of the banned subreddits; you’ll know “hate speech” or “doxxing” are a big fat lie. WE are the ones getting doxxed and brigaded!
It’s not too different to police using marijuana laws to target Black communities. In a free-to-join community of thousands to millions of people, you will get people breaking the rules. Moderators clean them up. The only difference is unwelcome viewpoints get their subreddit banned with this as the pretext.
Source: moderator of 3 banned subreddits; from political to sexual kinks like consensual rape fetishes (which 31% of women say they have fantasises; just FYI).
Admins have never; ever, ever engaged with us during my tenures.
Also, he attacked accepting refugees from certain high-risk countries (which had been designated as such by the Obama administration).
He didn’t say “immigrants bad.”
> Kaine has embellished the controversy by saying Trump has said "all Mexicans are rapists." The Democrat doesn’t come close to proving his claim; all of the Trump quotes Kaine’s campaign sent us pertain to unauthorized immigrants crossing the Mexican border into the U.S.
> Hillary Clinton dismissed President Trump as an “illegitimate president” and suggested that “he knows” that he stole the 2016 presidential election in a CBS News interview to be aired Sunday.
Journalists can’t help allowing their point of view to influence their reporting. But when someone can just pull up as transcript and say “well he didn’t really say that” that damages the credibility of the media. Even if what he actually said was wrong or bad on its own merits. This is what drives people to alternative media silos, and that’s bad because people are no longer operating from the same facts.
I don't believe Clinton ever attacked the integrity of the election process itself. She did claim (and as far as I'm aware the investigations more or less supported the claims) that the Trump campaign colluded with foreign governments to influence the election.
“Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances, because I think this is going to drag out” - Hillary Clinton
Seems like Trump has taken her advice.
At this point she really should just retire from politics and spend her hundreds of millions of dollars living the good life. She doesn’t do Democrats any favors.
So are you claiming that Clinton's suggestion that we wait until absentee ballots are included before letting someone claim victory is "disputing ... democracy", or are you trying to change the subject to something else?
Nobody is “disputing democracy” at this point. Bush vs Gore took an entire month to sort out.
Hillary said this might drag out for a while... and she was right, it is. That’s fine. We have a process for this; no need to be melodramatic.
Biden has almost assuredly won, but first there will be some court cases and recounts simply because it was extremely close. That’s a good thing for Democracy.
> Nobody is “disputing democracy” at this point. Bush vs Gore took an entire month to sort out.
The trump campaign is literally putting forth the unfounded conspiracy theory that Democratic-party-affiliated groups some how placed fraudulent ballots, and that this is the only reason Trump lost.
> Biden has very likely won, but first there will be some court cases and recounts simply because it was extremely close.
There aren't actually. Biden doesn't need to carry any states with recounts to win. Pennsylvania isn't going to a recount, nor is Arizona. Even if GA and Wisconsin flip on a recount, Biden has carried the electoral college. All of the court cases so far have have been thrown out or withdrawn.
Despite this, Trump continues to claim that there was election fraud (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13277501276798894...), even after his own lawyers have dropped suits in Arizona and Pennsylvania, and have yet to, in any suit in any state, provide an example of fraud. There's no substance to his claims, and when in front of a judge, the lawyers admit that. And yet.
comparing margins for EC and popular vote does not really capture how close a US presidential election was. you can easily have a blowout in the EC that was determined by a <1% lead in a few key states. popular vote is an interesting stat, but not very meaningful under the current rules.
That was a difference of around 500 votes out of nearly 6 million, which was around 0.009%. That's well within the range you can get with just the ordinary counting error. It is not at all uncommon for a recount to reverse a lead that small.
In addition, Florida at the time was using a lousy ballot marking system that caused many ballots to fail to register that the voter had tried to vote in the Presidential race. Neither side disputed this. The dispute was over how to address it.
Are you really comparing that to trying to challenge in several states where the difference is well outside ordinary counting error and there is no evidence of sufficient voting irregularities to come anywhere near changing the winner in those states?
There is a lot more to it than that. There had already been a machine recount in Florida, and Bush won that one as well. What Gore did was use a loophole in Florida law to pursue a dubious recount strategy. He demanded hand recounts only in four counties he had won by large margins. That tilted the recount in his favor: hand recounts will find more discernible votes than machine counting, and by only requesting recounts in counties that where the base rate of Gore votes was very high, most of those newly-counted votes would be for Gore. Even WaPo called out this strategy as obviously unfair: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2000/11/18/o...
> But there's a danger to Mr. Gore's eventual legitimacy too, if this extraordinary story eventually results in his election. The recounts will now go forward in three counties--Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade. That at least was the situation as of last night. All three of those jurisdictions are heavily Democratic and voted heavily for Mr. Gore; the recount is thus tilted in his favor.
> The Gore campaign, however, viewed the absentee mili- tary ballots received between Election Day and November 17 as a lethal threat. Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican candi- date, who had lost Florida, nonetheless had received a hefty majority of the military absentee vote. Bush would likely top 60 percent at a time when he already enjoyed a 300-vote margin, which Gore was seeking to erase with selective recounts.
> He demanded hand recounts only in four counties he had won by large margins. That tilted the recount in his favor: hand recounts will find more discernible votes than machine counting, and by only requesting recounts in counties that where the base rate of Gore votes was very high, most of those newly-counted votes would be for Gore
So recount all the counties.
But that's beside the point, which was that we know there were severe problems with the 2000 Florida vote due to a large number of dimpled or hanging chads, meaning that votes were being counted by the machines as being omitted where the voter intended to and thought they had voted, and poorly designed butterfly ballots that appear to have led to many people to mix up the Gore hole and Buchanan hole (and led about 19k people to punch both holes, since both were next to Gore).
There's nothing like that for 2020, where Trump is claiming the vote was fraudulent but keeps failing to actually bring up any evidence in court.
There was a statewide machine recount, and Bush won that too. Gore never asked for a statewide recount. He pursued a selective recount strategy, and in the process burned half the time available to certify the results. https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/05/bush-v-gore-fake-news...
> But that's beside the point, which was that we know there were severe problems with the 2000 Florida vote due to a large number of dimpled or hanging chads, meaning that votes were being counted by the machines as being omitted where the voter intended to and thought they had voted
That sort of thing happens in every election. An MIT analysis found that about 2% of ballots in a large sample set from 1988-2000 showed no vote for President: https://news.mit.edu/2001/voting1
Normally that doesn’t matter. As long as you apply a uniform standard, like the machine count, the error affects all parties equally.
What Gore did was turn that fact of vote counting into an election strategy. He realized that by demanding hand recounts under subjective standards, he could gin up more votes from that pool of 2%. And by demanding hand recounts only in Democratic counties, he could ensure that these new votes would disproportionately go to him. And even when the Florida Supreme Court smacked him down and ordered a statewide recount, he vigorously pursued a strategy of convincing Democratic counties to adopt looser counting standards, and indeed standards that shifted mid-count: http://electoralcollegehistory.com/electoral/florida/00837-2...
> In Palm Beach, if the hand counters saw a card with several punches on it, and a dimple near Al Gore’s name, the election officials did not count it because that voter knew how to punch a card and did not punch a hole next to Mr. Gore. The machine worked correctly when it did not read it.
> Not so in Broward County. If some of the vote counters saw several clean punches for Democrats and no punch for Gore, not even an indentation, but they saw a “scratch” near his name, they called it for Gore
> The state attorney general, a Gore elector, argued that “never before the present election had a manual recount been conducted on the basis of the contention that ‘undervotes’ [ballots with no punches on them] should have been examined to determine voter intent.”
That’s why all this stuff about hanging chads and pregnant chads and whatnot mattered at all. Ordinarily, those errors should cancel out. It’s only when you try to get a selective recount, or pursue different counting standards in different counties, that this matters.
Ultimately, Gore handed the Supreme Court a giant mess. The Justices agreed 7-2 that the recount that was ongoing at Gore’s request was unconstitutional.
> and poorly designed butterfly ballots that appear to have led to many people to mix up the Gore hole and Buchanan hole (and led about 19k people to punch both holes, since both were next to Gore).
Oh c’mon. “Don’t concede under any circumstances” is a lot stronger of a statement than “wait for absentee ballots to be counted.” She was reinforcing accusations that she and folks like Jerry Nadler made that Trump would try to “rig” the election.
In context it really isn't. I think it was misguided, but her entire concern was that trump would attempt to mess with absentee ballots and get the race called before they were counted. By any account, he's done both. He hasn't really succeeded, in the "popular" sphere (although he's still delaying the Biden transition from starting, which is bad for the entire country), but if the race had been a bit closer his claims of "well overturn the results on a recount" might ring truer, especially if news organizations weren't able to call the races.
Also worth mentioning that, while I can't find the full clip of the quote anywhere, some of the reporting on it seems to imply that the question she was responding to was if Biden should concede on election night, and the answer was under no circumstances. That really strains the whole "disputing democracy" thing.
Russia Collusion itself is an attack on the legitimacy of Trumps presidency - just like election fraud is an attack on the legitimacy of a Biden presidency.
This is actually true (god I hate agreeing with Trump/the GOP).
Collusion was not proven, and the left-wing media went completely overboard on this.
Did Russia want Hillary Clinton to lose? Yes.
Did the Trump campaign meet with Russian operatives? Yes.
Did they collude with Russians? No, not in a legal sense.
Was the determining factor in the election Russian interference? No, it was almost certainly the NYT covering the James Comey investigation into Hillary's emails in the last week.
Mind you, if I were a Russian disinformation specialist, I would be very proud of how the American people took up my insanities (on both sides) and ran with them.
> Was the determining factor in the election Russian interference? No, it was almost certainly the NYT covering the James Comey investigation into Hillary's emails in the last week.
Keep in mind the entire Hillary's emails thing may have stemmed from Russian foreign intelligence work.
Again, lots of speculation around this, no reasonable evidence in favour.
Like, I'm not American (and I would have voted for Sanders twice if I was), but the core issue here is that people are focusing on conspiracy-like theories to explain their loss in elections, rather than trying to understand where the other side is coming from.
>but the core issue here is that people are focusing on conspiracy-like theories to explain their loss in elections
Yeah liberals did with Russiagate in 2016, then Trump supporters will probably run with something into 2020. It's a convenient distraction from material policies.
The muller report found collusion between the trump campaign and the Russian government. It also found obstruction of justice by both the Trump campaign and Trump Whitehouse. What is up for discussion is if it found criminal collusion on the part of Trump, which it might have but stopped short of explicitly stating for political, not criminal, reasons (Muller did not feel he was able to indict a sitting president).
When Donald Trump launched his campaign he said; “ When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
How else is one to take this? He said some are good people implying the majority are not despite evidence to the contrary.
Trump was referring to the Drug, Weapons, & Human trafficking that was occurring due to the border policy at the time. This illicit trafficking and violence against civilians & journalists is well documented in many sources.
That doesn't accurately describe Trump's comments. This wasn't some onetime only type of comment. Remember when he said a US judge couldn't rule on a case where Trump was losing, because the judge was of hispanic origin. That's another racist comment. Trump has continually made these types of comments, made references to shithole countries. You can't just dismiss that with a claim that he was saying something else, because his comments were part of a long standing sequence.
Exactly. Trump apologists like to pretend like there isn’t a pattern of these statements and treat each of them as a one off and they often add context that doesn’t quite fit.
It does accurately describe Trump's comment. The DEA, ICE, & FBI have documented cases of criminal activity across the border. The left often editorializes his comments however his supporters understand what was meant, and no, it's not a racist dog whistle.
You brought up a non-sequitor, re Judge Curiel. He has provided legal representation for a hispanic-supremacist organization named La Raza (meaning "the race" in Spanish), which has a public political opinion on matters such as the wall on the southern border. Perhaps Trump should have mentioned the group "La Raza", however the point stands that Judge Curiel has racial-supremacist political affiliations, was in-explicitly hostile in the lawsuit, & Trump called it out as a theory.
For many, the "Orange Man Bad" & "all white people are racist" narrative will probably kick in & they will reject what I'm saying outright because it does not fit their narrative; however this interpretation better fits Occam's razor, considering that Trump has also worked with certain people of all ethnicities in a harmonious fashion, while having rocky relationships with certain people from all ethnicities. The differences have to do with political worldview rather than ethnicity. Unfortunately, the political left has a habit of editorializing worldviews according to race, so other explanations are rendered moot according to the worldview of the political left, which views the world according to race.
He was specifically talking about Mexicans crossing the border illegally. Are you saying majority of people who cross the border illegally are good people?
Most "good people" don't have to cross the border illegally. They can get a U.S. visa and never leave. The people who will definitely not get a U.S. visa to do that is those have a criminal record in their own country, so their only option is to cross the border illegally.
Very few people can get US visas without work sponsorship. The green cards are rationed, aren't they?
Similarly, there is little proof that a significant fraction of the people crossing the border have criminal records for things other than immigration law.
Now, let's get back to what Trump said. Right after he said what you quoted in that speech, he said: "I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They're sending us not the right people."
He's constantly repeating how good the Mexicans and Japanese and everyone else is... (as opposed to the American leaders back then)... but the best ones among the Mexicans are not the ones coming in to the U.S. by crossing the border illegally. If you look at the context, he is clearly saying that Mexico has great people in general, the leaders are smarter and they have some terrible people who they're sending across the border illegally.
His opponents, which were all of the media back then, because he was neither liked by either party, attacked him for it. It was even a part of the attack strategy by Jeb Bush's campaign because he has a Mexican wife. They did it by taking the quote out of context, as anybody would do. If I was a political strategist, I would happily do the same. It was a easy hand to play and would potentially sway voters away from him.
Since the election is over, I'm assuming you're not one of Media Matters bots and I think, like a lot of people, you genuinely believe that those remarks were what the media told you they were... which is why I'm having this conversation.
I'm not from the US so may interpret differently, but when Trump says "Mexico sends" it has a strong implication that the government and/or the general collective people of Mexico are deliberately transporting criminals to the US.
Yes, I’m saying the vast majority are good people and regardless of how they cross the border demonizing people with lies or exaggerations is unacceptable.
The part you quoted is sandwiched between two statements that make that clear. Right before, he says:
> When do we beat Mexico at the border?
Right after the part you quoted, he says:
> But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They're sending us not the right people.
The reference to what “border guards” are “telling him” makes quite clear he’s characterizing their descriptions of illegal border crossers. That is how Factcheck.org interpreted the statement (see above) as well.
There is a fair criticism of Trump here—most people who immigrate illegally are “good people” (other than the fact they broke the law in crossing the border). On the other side, there is a truth to his point. We have MS-13 operating in Northern Virginia now where I grew up. They don’t arise there organically.
This is certainly a line of thinking. Of course the alternative is:
1. Tech platforms were too slow with limiting extremist viewpoints
2. Instead of keeping extremist views isolated, this allowed them to pick up more support. These groups continue to move more and more extreme, and more popular.
3. Delays in taking action to prevent the spread of these views allowed the combination of extremism and popular support that empowered people to make outrageous claims.
Of course, the presidential bully pulpit being used to stoke these ideas didn't help. We could argue about which of these mis more likely all day.
I agreed with you until the last paragraph, where it became clear that your problem isn’t with extreme views in general, just the sort of extreme views Trump is likely to endorse. That’s exactly the bias that people behind Parler aim to exploit (or provide an escape from, depending on your view)
I was discussing the exact same set of views as the parent: those espoused on "Parler, TheDonald, etc" (and also subtly objecting to the parent's proposed timeline. The_donald started self-radicalizing long before it was quarantined. In fact, it was the radicalization that took place in the Donald that led to its subsequent quarantine and removal).
I certainly do take issue with extreme views on the other side, but those views are usually things like crystal healing, not Coups.
I imagine this view will not be looked on with approval, but the ethos espoused by the BLM cadre is explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-police. To many who are right of center, that looks like an extreme left-wing view that is not only tolerated by tech and social media companies, but actively promoted. It’s not all crystals and homeopathy.
Well, it is those things, but it's not explicitly pro violence, it's anti racist, and it's not based on lies or misrepresentation. In each case the inciting incidents actually happened and in many we have footage.
I think many on the right under estimate how much slack the right really do get from Twitter and YouTube. Refusing to ban bannon after he called for the execution of the FBI director (does that count as anti police?)
> it's not based on lies or misrepresentation. In each case the inciting incidents actually happened and in many we have footage.
To play devil's advocate a little: BLM's ideology (the core activists, not the average supporter) is based on a specific view of anti-racism — critical race theory. CRT is not the only way to think about race, and many would argue it's a bad way to think about it: it's illiberal, divisive, wedded to ideologically left-wing ideas about power and social relations, and not particularly amenable to evidence-based thinking. In fact, it could be argued that the CRT is a huge misrepresentation.
Furthermore, while each of the "inciting incidents" did happen, so did hundreds more involving every racial combination of police and victim you can think of. It is a misrepresentation to focus on a subset of incidents because it moves focus from the actual cause of the problem. It is not racist police. It is poorly trained, unaccountable, and psychologically unsuited police officers. You could drum every racist police officer out, make every one of them take the knee and attend endless mandatory bias classes until only dyed-in-the-wool CRT advocates are left, and these incidents would keep happening until training and recruitment undergo a radical change.
Moderate right-wing people don't oppose or fear "anti-racism" or the support it receives in the corporate world because they are racist, but because they think i) It doesn't work and can't work, ii) it's a bad diagnosis, iii) it leads to socially damaging second order effects.
> The problem goes further than the police into the prosecutors
Yes.
> Hence the refusal to prosecute in cases of murder by police of black people.
No. They refuse to prosecute cases of murder by police regardless of race. The race of the person killed is largely irrelevant, which is the point I was making in the previous comment. Black officers aren't prosecuted, white officers aren't prosecuted. They aren't prosecuted when they kill white people or people of color. The problem is that police (and the prosecutors) aren't accountable, and they know it.
You make it about race rather than accountability and the problem will not be fixed.
Certainly one can imagine that. But do you really think, upon more than a cursory examination, that you'll see Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg actively arguing for an end to capitalism as we know it?
I mean they're anti-union.
I'm also not clear about the equivocation you're making. Being anti-capitalist or "anti-American-police", even if we take those at face value, while certainly extreme in the modern American political sphere, aren't on a global scale, nor is it advocating for political violence (which we've seen not only advocation for, by both the Trump and his supporters), but actual real-world attempts at smaller-scale violent coups[0].
This runs into the philosophical questions of what "extremism" is, and whether or not it's socially constructed, and I think an important takeaway is that there are tons of reasonable, "objective" measures, by which abstract anti-capitalist sentiment is fine, and calls for defunding the police are fine, while false claims of election fraud are not. A platform choosing an independent, objective measure by which to judge extremism and then having one group go off the deep end doesn't make the platform biased against that group, it makes that group more extreme by the objective measures.
Even if a person doesn't understand Critical Race Theory, or is afraid of the "socialism" boogeyman or whatever, people advocating for socialism, modern anarchism, or critical approaches in politics[1] aren't usually doing so violently, and those that do are usually deplatformed as well.
Like in your followup to another user you get into the weeds on CRT, and your conclusion was "You make it about race rather than accountability and the problem will not be fixed." Which okay, that's a fair view. Ultimately I disagree. I think a rising tide lifts all boats, and among white-middle class people police apologia is so strong that you're never going to get popular support. So gathering support among minorities is the best you can do (and I'll add, reasonable levels of support amongst Republicans and white people as well, Black Lives Matter is, if I'm reading the polling correctly, more popular than Joe Biden). But even ignoring all of that, so what? Does that mean that a site should remove that content? Does it at all compare to right wing content that is removed?
[1]: which are really just a lighter version of the modern anarchism take and, I should add, should be super popular on HN because they resemble libertarianism a surprising amount
Common, plenty of extreme left content and people were suppressed. It is just that each group complains primary about own suppression and never able suppression of other groups. And extreme left groups are also smaller.
> 1. Tech platforms are uncomfortable with certain viewpoints expressed on their platforms and seek to limit these viewpoints.
Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s many of these large companies billed themselves as open platforms where you can express yourself. Twitter's Jack Dorsey said in 2012 that "We are the free speech wing of the free speech part". Now he says it was joke.
The terms of service on these platforms appears to be enforced selectively, information appears to be selectively censored and a lot of the time it appears to be based on their politics. Also a lot of internet jokes that have been around for years are being censored because the people doing the moderation don't understand the odder internet subcultures.
So It isn't just tech platforms being uncomfortable with certain viewpoints. It a combination of things that make it seem that these companies are censoring viewpoints (some not even that extreme) on one side of the political spectrum. That is what people are complaining about.
> people flock to “community bubbles” like Parler, TheDonald, etc where they feel welcome.
This isn't true. People are removed from platforms and go to another service where they won't be censored or banned and then a bubble forms.
> 3. This marginalisation leads to increasing extremism; going from the likes of “immigrants bad” we saw in 2016 to disputing and attempting to overturn democracy.
This is a strawman of what these people believe. The vast majority of American conservatives and Trump supporters I know don't say "immigrants are bad". They said "Illegal Immigrants are bad". There is a very important difference. The former is clearly xenophobia, the latter is not.
As for "over turning democracy". They see that there was a lot of odd things that seemed to happening upto and including election night. They feel that there has been voter fraud. Whether that is true or not I have no idea and it looks like it will be settled in court. But they believe they are preserving democracy not overturning it.
> This isn't true. People are removed from platforms and go to another service where they won't be censored or banned and then a bubble forms.
I’m not sure the bulk of the people currently flocking to Parler were ones who were removed from Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit. Especially when they use those sites to announce their move.
I said "censored or banned". Enough people are getting censored and they are moving. A lot of people that were conservative talking heads that were banned went on parler as that really is the only alternative that is getting traction at the moment.
So I am quite sure that there is a good bulk of people that are going there for those reasons. In anyevent it feels that a line has been crossed.
> As for "over turning democracy". They see that there was a lot of odd things that seemed to happening upto and including election night.
Wow, seems like the people who voted for a candidate who said that mail-in voting was a hive of fraud for six months before an election were less likely to vote by mail, leading to a huge number of mail-in ballots being cast for the opposing candidate. Odd.
Like I'm not sure where these people were getting their news, but literally every news paper pointed out that this would happen, and it did.
> Wow, seems like the people who voted for a candidate who said that mail-in voting was a hive of fraud for six months before an election were less likely to vote by mail, leading to a huge number of mail-in ballots being cast for the opposing candidate. Odd.
That isn't what they are complaining about though e.g There are saying that some areas have very high turnout (over 95%) in specific counties. Even in countries with mandatory voting you don't get past 95% of the population voting. I haven't looked into these claims myself. So I have no idea if they are true.
Same day registration appears to account for most of this. Normally the registered voters count is from the start of a month, so same day registration can make the numbers look really weird.
I don’t think you have captured their take on immigration correctly. If it is only illegal immigration that is bad, that would mean that changing the law to make them legal would solve the problem. But that’s not what they want.
They don't say illegal immigrant is bad as a legal status (so that merely changing the law to make everyone legal would make it ok).
They say that illegal immigrants are bad for the same reason that the lawmakers made a distinction between legal and illegal immigrants: to place quota, immigration criteria, and so on.
> 1. Tech platforms are uncomfortable with certain viewpoints expressed on their platforms and seek to limit these viewpoints.
For the most part, those "viewpoints" are verifiable falsehoods, conspiracy theories, and other types of disinformation and misinformation. For instance, the recent migrations to Parler are chiefly people who want to deny the legitimate US presidential election result and spread false claims of widespread vote fraud.
Using the term "viewpoint" like you did is misleading, since it has the effect of making literal lies sound like legitimate differences of opinion.
> 3. This marginalisation leads to increasing extremism; going from the likes of “immigrants bad” we saw in 2016 to disputing and attempting to overturn democracy.
Eh, not so much. A lot of the recent "increasing extremism" (for instance QAnon and Boogaloo Bois), occurred on mainstream social networks like Facebook and Twitter. While pushing crazies and extremists to places like Gab and Parler probably radicalizes many of them further, it also isolates them from the wider community, which helps reduce their ability to recruit new people into their lunacy.
So what? People should be free to discuss stupid and wrong ideas.
Btw: I think conspiracy theories are good indicators for what certain people want to believe. I personally don't want to be disconnected from these indicators.
> So what? People should be free to discuss stupid and wrong ideas.
And they are, but if they want to do it on Twitter, Twitter gets to have its say as well. However, the conspiracy theorists don't seem to like it when Twitter exercises its rights by labeling their tweets, like in this case.
As for why this matters, people who want to live in functioning democracies have a strong interest in making sure the truth prevails in public discourse, and that lies find the habitat difficult.
"Twitter gets to have it's say" Free speech is more than just a law... it's an idea and a philosophy.
Part of making sure "truth prevails" is having open discourse about topics. That involves people with "Wrong" ideas the ability to talk.
When platforms like Facebook and Twitter become the arbiter of what's "right"? Then people will leave those platforms because lawfully they have the "right" to censor their platform... but people WILL talk about it elsewhere.
Facebook/Twitter may win this "battle" by purposefully influencing an election by hiding disinformation they disagree with (while allowing disinformation they are okay with)... but they'll lose the war as other platforms gain momentum and legitimacy.
The internet will route itself around the censorship.
What place does someone with the delusion that '2+2=7' have in 'prevailing the Truth'. Such a person only frustrates that search for truth. They don't make the outcome faster, easier or more true, do they?
What place does "russian collusion" have? because "2+2=7" is provably true/false... but Russian collusion? not so much... meanwhile, it's "truth" that's allowed to be spoken of without repercussion...
Because life isn't as simple as "2+2=7"... it's opinions and people saying "my opinion is valid and yours is banned from open discussion".
Because I can find plenty of examples of stuff that isn't as clear as flat-earthers or pizzagate that's being blocked from public discorse.
Ok, but let's start with stuff that is provably false, yet is debated all along.
For example: There is a climate crisis. This is a scientifically proven fact, not an opinion. Yet people deny it, often with the argument "I'm entitled to this opinion." No. You are not, because it is not an opinion; at most it is a delusion, at worst it is a lie (that you might honestly believe in). This is a 2+2=4 situation, or as near as one can get; yet one that even heads of "modern" states keep saying that is anything but 4.
Once we start from the basis that "there is a climate crisis", we can move forward, make choices and so on. A choice might be "it's there, but we're not going to do anything against it, because our economy". That is effective. (albeit something I would have a strong opninion about). At least others can still move forward.
But stating it does not exist (which is provably untrue) really harms effectiveness a lot.
Is their competition a medium like mobile calls and text messages? Or is their competition curated content streams like newspapers or cable news networks?
Legally, maybe the distinction doesn't need to be made, but I think users of social media deserve to know up front what they're in for.
> Part of making sure "truth prevails" is having open discourse about topics. That involves people with "Wrong" ideas the ability to talk.
Yes, but for that to work, the discourse has to between people who are actually seeking out the truth and who have the ability to recognize it. Dead-enders and nutjobs fighting to spread (often obvious) lies do not qualify.
ask jim watkins or weev or dick masterson about that.
alternative platforms get to exist on a small scale as long as they maintain obscurity, but as soon as old media releases a black pr scarepiece, they get Esther Aronowitz'ed pretty quickly.
>people who want to live in functioning democracies have a strong interest in making sure the truth prevails in public discourse, and that lies find the habitat difficult.
i think you will find that every conspiratorial thinker completely agrees with that sentiment.
Once Twitter has a say it becomes a publisher not a platform. There is no practical difference between writing a piece yourself and choosing which piece to publish out of thousands other people write. After all you can always claim something you write was submitted by an anonymous donor.
Twitter is a publisher and should be responsible for all that it publishes including calls for violence which it regularly features.
Recall that for at least 3 years, Reddit, here, and many other places were pushing the Russia collusion conspiracy theory.
Nobody can fact check for you. You need to make your own opinions based on the knowledge you have, and suppressing information does not make you more informed.
> many other places were pushing the Russia collusion conspiracy theory.
I might be out of touch but isn't it fairly established at this point that - for certain definitions of "collusion" - it was factually true?
i.e. not "Trump got together with Putin and hatched a plan" true but "both sides obliquely acknowledged the interests of the other with a nod and a wink" true?
I'm not one for comprehension, but are you stating that if China prefers to have Biden at the helm, and if he wins that they colluded to get him there? Quite the gymnastics friend.
No - I'm saying in addition to "Russia prefers Trump at the helm", there was some (direct or indirect) contact between the two parties and some awareness and (implicit or explicit) encouragement from the Trump camp for Russian actions.
Surely there is a meaningful distance between that and your formulation?
Literally the only reason "oh it was just not true" is a prevailing bit of logic is because no one in power has cared to do a single thing about it, or even so much as announce that it's in no way acceptable.
How are they “verifiable” falsehoods? E.g., conspiracy theories are famous for being almost always unfalsifiable. These views usually are a mix of low prior hypotheses, politically incorrect semi-truths, marketing propaganda (with few empirical assertions), and lies.
And... That's fine I think. Nobody actually knew that, even though many suspected it. Less strict versions of that sentence would be completely fine. Discussing the details of things like their secret rooms at internet exchanges and countermeasures in case it was true would be great too.
But it's like people saying "MS is selling all your behaviour data" today, which is likely partially true, but not quite in that way. And when they take that extreme position without having something to back it up, it's hard to / not worth discussing.
Not sure why you're down voted. It's a good example. The whole "Saddam was buying yellowcake" was completely false, yet the only evidence was a gov't statement saying it was true.
If someone said "that's a lie", it would likely have been viewed as disinformation, but it would have been the truth.
Not sure why you're being downvoted either. This scenario is completely true and it absolutely would've been marked as disinformation by Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc. It's being marked as disinformation now by Hacker News members without any actual discussion as to why. It's a very valid scenario and a great topic of discussion.
Like the knowledge that the Mueller investigation got criminal convictions on a number of Trump associates including Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Rick Gates and a couple dozen Russians?
I could agree with a lot of this... the problem for me though is it always comes back to actually enforcing this stuff.
I already know I sinned by trying to have a productive conversation of twitter, however when "talking" with a few self proclaimed communists (no, I don't think they were joking) they basically implied the "rich" deserve to die, they were morally allowed to kill them, etc. IIRC, this was on a post about a teachers union displaying a guillotine and I pretty much said "yea, lets not be like this." There was also some racism thrown in there, I guess for good measure. They seem to have even developed their own "secret language", calling white people 'mayos' and 'yts' - maybe to get around filters? Or just to be extra edgy.
I would argue that pushing some justification of murdering fellow citizens because of their net worth is just as dangerous as the insane conspiracies about lizard people... if not more. Yet, I don't think these things are shut down or given the same standards as what you're thinking of.
I wish for twitter (and everyone else's sake) they equally applied their "TOS". I have no need to go to those sites you mentioned... in fact I can't think of anything less productive but on the flip side of the coin, I've pretty much deleted twitter for the same reason.
I'm sure it must have been terrifying but overall I'd rather have the real war, Poor v Rich , than the deluded Poor v Poor. It would be over quickly and we won't even lose anything of value.
I agree, but the situation is symmetrical. Parler is removing liberal memes (unsure if it’s automatic moderation after flagging - but that doesn’t really matter as the outcome is the same).
For the most part, those "viewpoints" are verifiable falsehoods, conspiracy theories, and other types of disinformation and misinformation.
"For the most part"
But incredibly, disinformation and misinformation like "the Hunter Biden story is a Russian plot" doesn't get censored, despite absolutely no proof and in fact, evidence to the contrary.
No, there really isn’t. Election fraud happens all the time, but there is zero evidence of it happening in any quantities here that would change anything about the results.
I've dug a fair bit into the statistic based claims and most of them just don't hold much water. The benfords law one that picked up steam being the main one I dug into, I even made a nice repo with fancy graphs but the meme had died out by the time I finished so I never shared it. However the main summary was "Benfords law just doesn't work for proportions of a precinct"
However, if we want to go deeper into the rabbit hole, if there was a coup to steal the election I'd expect there to be ample fake claims of election stealing that would be easy to debunk.
No, there's not. This is the point. The people driving these conspiracies are applying statistical techniques poorly and then parroting their claims on social media.
This is 100% gaslighting by mainstream media. Immigration _per se_ isn't bad. I say so as an immigrant myself. Trump is married to an immigrant. But unrestricted low-skill illegal migration in tens of millions is most definitely bad, and it leads to modern day slavery, while at the same time depressing the wages of the working poor and making them dependent on welfare. That's why Kochs want it so much. So bad, in fact, that Barack Obama deported a lot more illegal migrants than Trump ever did. So long standing that Bill Clinton highlighted the issue in his 1995 State of the Union: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IrDrBs13oA. So severe that Hillary Clinton voted for a border wall: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/jun/27/cal-thomas.... Immigration from countries where one can't even meaningfully do a background check is also bad. Skilled immigration program abused to get H1B wage slaves to the detriment of US grads who are drowning in debt is very bad indeed.
> disputing and attempting to overturn democracy
Nobody is "attempting to overturn democracy". There are hundreds of sworn affidavits and abundant video evidence of election irregularities. This needs to be followed up on, for the same reason why Nancy Pelosi was calling for the same in 2017: https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/864522009048494080. She spent _4 years_ undermining the choice of the American people, and by extension "democracy". Presenting evidence in the court of law is democracy. If evidence is shit (as it was in Pelosi's case), the court will throw it out. If it's not you should be just as interested in hearing about it, because such things tend to backfire, just like Harry Reid's filibuster fiasco did.
> This has happened in all the lawsuits so far, I believe?
You're being gaslit about that too, although yes, some motions were denied and some lawsuits were rejected outright. Watch the last link in my original post. It explains the propaganda barrage perfectly.
There are a bunch of deadlines and appellate levels baked into this process for a reason. If Al Gore could hold things up for over a month over a few hundred votes, all the concerns about following lawful process are null and void. Same with histrionics about "overturning democracy".
The choice is pretty simple even to Trump voters: either Trump finds the smoking gun and deservedly gets a second term, or he's full of shit and he doesn't deserve a second term. Nobody on the right will set cities on fire either way.
Literally 10 seconds in DuckDuckGo. Notice that where lawsuits are rejected they are mostly rejected over lack of standing, and will be re-filed elsewhere with stronger evidence, or dropped outright due to insufficient evidence. This is what the legal system is for - to establish the veracity of claims, and obtain relief when due. Still more lawsuits will be filed next week. The current crop are just the small fry ones that could be filed quickly.
None of this constitutes "overturning democracy" in any shape or form.
At the rate law firms are dropping Trump, those cases next week will have to be argued by Rudy himself. And god willing, he'll give us some more press conferences as a bonus.
If your idea of a solution includes people arguing with other folks about whether or not their humanity should be recognized, then you will be surprised when no one meets you halfway. It's a horribly simple bad faith argument that anyone should try to "convince" or coddle folks who hold signs such as
>"Coming for Blacks and Indians first welcome to the New World Order."
I wouldn't downplay where they were in 2016. TD was crawling with things like Pinochet helicopter kill all leftists, celebrating punching protestors. Their "community bubbles" were never a place to respectfully disagree about immigration policy which you can and always have been able to do on whatever platform you like.
When "free speech" is the primary selling point of a social media website, it tends to only attract people who feel slighted by the platform they're migrating from. Unfortunately this has the opposite effect of Parler's stated goal of being "the world's town square" since it simply isn't attractive to people with opposing views of those who did move.
I think free speech is important and I think that social media platforms can be a bit overzealous in their moderation of the content of its users. I just don't think you can sell a platform on it alone. It should be a feature of your platform, not the only thing going for it.
They can claim that all they want but a quick glance at their sign up flow shows you that they’re really only interested in peddling extreme right wing personalities and associated accounts.
And it can’t be a coincidence that “Gaming” with a capital G is the only topic that I saw suggested for me to follow.
> Unfortunately this has the opposite effect of Parler's stated goal of being "the world's town square" since it simply isn't attractive to people with opposing views of those who did move.
What you're saying is irrelevant at this point. That ship sailed in late 2019.
Leftists/Marxists will remain on Twitter and Youtube, and the right must move to alternate platforms like Parler.
For example, MRAs mostly use YT to announce their alternative platform links now, since they can be yanked at any time by the SJW moderators working at YT.
Agree, we will likely end up with right leaning town square and left leaning town square. And because every company seems to think they need to pick a side on political topics, it may extend beyond speech platforms. For instance I wouldn't be surprised if at one point conservative leaning viewers would migrate away from the likes of netflix for been fed up of being preached woke catechism in every TV show. And perhaps calling your customers sexists and bigots isn't the best advertising strategy for shaving products. Etc.
As a Star Trek fan and appreciator of well-written TV, I can't agree with this at all. The first season was hot garbage with maybe 3 watchable episodes, S2 was a little better but most of that was Pike. S3, despite finally being free of continuity baggage, is so far about as poorly written as S2.
It's a shame, but it really does feel like "free speech" has become a near dog-whistle. Almost any time I hear of a service billing itself with free speech as a primary selling point, a quick visit is more than enough to turn me off of ever returning.
Besides this, there's a clear feedback loop that happens regardless of the intent of the service's creators. The people most likely to get kicked off of social media platforms nowadays seem to be far-right kooks. So when they are looking for a new platform, they'll go somewhere that advertises for no moderation. What happens next is pretty obvious; the more those sort of people migrate to the service, the more visible their content will be to any visitor. And that content tends to be pretty effective at driving away non-kooky users, which leads to a reinforcing cycle that, over time, turns you into yet another take on Voat.
>It's a shame, but it really does feel like "free speech" has become a near dog-whistle. Almost any time I hear of a service billing itself with free speech as a primary selling point, a quick visit is more than enough to turn me off of ever returning.
That's because you're on the side of those doing the censoring. If it was the 80s and it was the conservatives doing the censoring, you'd say the opposite...
You can be against censorship and also be against the type of racist, xenophobic, sexist etc content you find unchecked on places like Parler, Gab, 4chan.
It's not that simple. Xenophobic content, for example, is "unchecked" on any U.S. owned platform, so is some racism, but not racism against black people specifically. At the same time in most other countries in the world racism, and especially racism against black people, isn't even a thing, but xenophobia is. So it's very unlikely for someone to truly sincerely be both against racist content and xenophobic content at the same time and even more unlikely to also sincerely be against censorship, then it's getting into very dystopian views territory, you can't hold such views without being exposed to massive amounts of propaganda.
Can we agree that there is a difference between an on screen nipple or saying fuck on TV and the POTUS actively undermining democracy?
The general talk of free speech and censoring is not really useful here without specifics. Just like someone can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater, there are other things we are finding that may be similar in nature. I think a more useful discussion could be around the specifics. Should the POTUS be able to communicate anything they want? Should platforms be forced to carry it?
First? No. Most prolific? I think so. He's also one of the first to make heavy use of direct social media, which is different than mass media of old.
Notice also I didn't say Trump, but POTUS in general. What do we want to do here going forward? Should the POTUS be treated differently than a private citizen?
What this current period reminds me of historically is McCarthyism, except we have the POTUS lobbing baseless claims instead of a senator. I don't think McCarthyism impacted the general public as much as claims undermining the election does though.
I think the "POTUS actively undermining democracy" is a gaslighting / pearl clutching for what is a crass person but otherwise business as usual in the White House...
Apparently Patriot Act, mass surveillance, Guantanamo, the "WMD", Echelon, trillion dollar bailouts, false congress testimonies, etc weren't "undermining democracy", but an old guy tweeting some braggadocio/BS is.
And those that designed, established, and voted those things (e.g. Clinton, Bush, and Obama) are all love for each other, and all stand "united" against the "big threat" that is this guy...
We're downvoting you, but there is a valid point: many of those things are also bad. The false narrative that started the Iraq war had bi-partisan support and was popular with the public.
Treating everything as if there were only two sides is part of the problem. But I see dissent within the democrat party over these issues - and not within the republican party, who have supported everything that Trump has said and done.
I tend to straddle the line between Republican and libertarian, so I consider myself more conservative than liberal. But I have to agree with you. I recently tried out Voat. Holy hell, what a dumpster fire.
I'm about as close to a free-speech absolutist as there is, and it's very frustrating that the market for these platforms seems to be settling into ruts where we have to choose between the hyper-conformity of highly managed platforms and the dumpster fires of the unmanaged platforms. I think the feedback loop you describe is a big part of it. I also wonder if we're experiencing a decline in education and critical thinking skills that could be fueling these ruts.
This greatly saddens me. Can't there be some way to build a platform that encourages intelligent, reasonable, polite debate? Discussions of ideas based on their merits instead of personal attacks and tribal allegiances? Some way to provide free speech without providing free amplification? Has society devolved to a point where this is no longer possible?
There can, I’m surprised no one has implemented this:
Start everyone off with a maximum influence credit of say 10 people, like in your local neighborhood.
As you contribute to thoughtful discussion, as determined by the diversity and ratio of up/down arrows, your maximum influence credit grows as a function of your geography.
Taking this idea further, maybe part of the problem is that platforms reduce the quality metric for posts down to effectively a single dimension: upvotes / likes / thumbs up.
What if there were separate dimensions for: Factually accurate, Morally agreeable, and Polite?
A machine learning algorithm could quickly work out which groups of users have different ideological positions, and which topics are likely to devolve into flame wars, so it could require that users have a minimum politeness score to be able to participate in a debate.
It could also, as you say, check for echo chambers forming and incentivise people with differing opinions to enter a discussion to balance it out.
> There can, I’m surprised no one has implemented this:
The reason is you're inappropriately applying an technical solution to a social problem.
You also make at least one critical error:
> As you contribute to thoughtful discussion, as determined by the diversity and ratio of up/down arrows
Upvotes/downvotes pretty much never measure "thoughtfulness," because for them to do so would require a level of social cohesion that would probably make upvotes/downvote unnecessary.
Yes, I believe HN does a pretty good job with this. The only way to provide what you are asking is active moderation, or the opposite of absolute free speech. There will always be people for whom the only solution is to ban them off your platform to create a good environment.
Because at this point, there is a sharp divide between conservatives who care about fiscal responsibility and family values, and "conservatives" who care about unmasking (((conspirators))) in pizza restaurants. Although to be fair, the platform will likely attract nothing but the latter.
Actually that's not what I said it all. The concept on in/out-group can be completely arbitrary, e.g. assigned by flipping a coin. The principle still holds.
That said, since you bring it up, the history of humanity is largely the history of war between different ethnic groups. So yes, hating people based on ethnicity has been the norm for most of human history. It's still largely the case in varying degrees in different parts of the world.
You did. Right here: "e.g. ethnicity". That's a quote from you. I mentioned in-group, you added ethnicity.
> There you go. And yet history proves you wrong, starting with the roman empire and the middle ages.
At this point I wonder if you are trolling. The roman empire waged war on pretty much every single other ethnic group around them and enslaved them. Which the other ethnic groups around them were also trying to do at the time. Then we have the middle ages with the crusades and such... etc etc etc
"free speech" of this type also doesn't really exist on the internet - because bots are a thing. You can't have a digital equivalent of a town square because whatever else you do, it's simply not possible to create in-person pseudo-anonymous supporters.
But on the internet, this is easy - it's a damn service you can buy and it scales on the orders of 1-to-1000 or (usually much more) voices.
CAPTCHA's don't solve it - because this is also a service - breaking CAPTCHA's by the hundred and supply account keys in bulk.
You simply cannot have a digital space which works like a physical one, and as such you cannot meaningfully not moderate it because human participants cannot out-pace bots and sockpuppet accounts. Facebook's entire, unearned initial trust was because notionally it solved this problem - people forget it was initially limited to student's with student email addresses at school's it knew. It was very much, initially, exclusive enough that it kept something of a lid on this problem.
The feeling about it has persisted far beyond the now non-existence of this mechanism.
This is exactly why I believe a dutiful representation of the 1st amendment in the Internet includes anti-botting measures, since bots flood the town-hall with un-measured broadcasting, shuttering out any and all active speech. But beyond anti-botting and one or two other very minor holds, a public forum should have no other restrictions of moderation. There is an exact restriction needed for the moderation to itself not be speech-impacting either by too much or too little of it.
Well all the major internet firms are based in the United States, if they want to hold to foreign markets they would need to hold separate divisions in separate countries, or in coalition dealings. There is a reason USA law Section 203 debates (which doesn't address the core problem) are so contentious regarding Social Media.
>since it simply isn't attractive to people with opposing views of those who did move.
I haven't seen a lot of evidence of this. If anything, it's the opposite. For example, David Pakman, Youtube political pundit and liberal grifter, joined Parler (I think just because Parler's CEO offered $20k to the first progressive with >50k twitter followers to signup) and he received very kind comments from people who largely dislike his politics.
Naturally, despite the warm welcome, Pakman never used the site. Because like most leftists, he's not interested in freedom of speech or reaching out to new audiences. He knows who his audience is, which are fringe leftists who hate anything like Parler, so he knows he has nothing to gain by using it.
Are there any good information how advertising works in this network?
From my experience its easy to convince "free-speechers" to buy things - think gold investment, self defense equipment, prepping, everything with the US flag colours on it.
If you want to make a quick, but cynical buck, start on Facebook.
My Facebook feed was full of pins, shirts, mugs, and posters of Ruth Bader Ginsberg with a tacky Notorious B.I.G. crown on her head for weeks after her death. Sometimes they’d even say “Rest In Power” whatever that means.
Same was happening on Twitter for quite a while with 2 bots chatting to each other on every popular thread about Trump: "just drinking from this <mug with "leftist tears">", "OMG, where did you get that", "<link to shop>".
I expect they made lots of money there if they outsourced to print on demand.
A quick leaf through the ads in the National Review (back when I would occasionally happen across a paper copy) yielded a pretty good indication that right-wing stuff usually comes with a fairly good serving of grift.
And that was in a kinder, gentler age, when more of the arguments were about tax policy and the political management of South and Central America. In today's considerably more polarized era...
In an amazing coincidence, people who believe that masks have 5G chips in them to allow Soros/Gates to perform mind control (or is it via the chemtrails?) and that climate change scientists are being manipulated by Big Solar turn out to be easy to sell things to. Who would have thunk it?
I think the idea here is more into logically thinking in a critical manner, and in the last few years especially due to wikileaks, some of your worst nightmares are real AF, and then Epstein happened.
Yeah, cheap things with huge value. But if you want to sell very expensive but completely worthless, if not downright harmful things, you need to go to the other side.
Parler isn’t a tech startup like any other. It’s unlikely to ever be profitable. Why Mercer and others think it’s a good idea to plow money into it is the question.
Twitter is ridiculously overstaffed for what they are and it resulted in very few improvements over the years. I really wonder what most people there do. And yes, I’ve run popular apps so I’m not underestimating anything. If Parler can grab a percentage of this market and not unnecessarily overextend themselves, they’ll be just fine.
You’ve run popular apps on the scale of Twitter? It’s left ambiguous, but personally or with a team that’s much smaller than Twitter? That sounds very impressive. Can you share more details?
Significantly smaller than Twitter of course but big enough to have a pretty good direct idea of sizes of various teams that are needed and also indirectly when working with larger apps of others. And for completeness I’ll admit that it was 3+ years ago. Twitter is not exactly going through explosive growth either.
If it was crowdfunded somehow I’d think that. This is someone with plenty of room for their ideas (Mercers are pretty extreme in this sense!) so it’s someone making a space for others’ ideas in that case.
But more likely it’s a scheme to create a platform to deliver ideas to a specific target group. Or a way of attacking the established actors and regulation in the space. Or a way of simply creating division. Or (my guess) all of the above.
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
I do wonder what the mainstream's response will be when this website inevitably actualises its witch-coven destiny (though it may already have according to some). Based on the apparent billionaire backing, it may not depend on payment processors (which otherwise seem to be among the most willing pieces of infrastructure to summarily cut off "extremist" customers), but it will probably still require Cloudflare to weather DoS attacks, a DNS record and carriers willing to provide it connectivity.
>It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
It would probably be a terrible place to live physically, but not necessarily a terrible place to visit online. Places such as the ones SSC refers to are terrible places to visit for people who get deeply emotionally hurt when they see hateful discourse and for people who lack the skill of filtering low-value content in search of high-value content. However, both the skill of being unaffected by hateful discourse and the skill of rapidly finding high-value content in an ocean of low-value content can be learned. I think that learning those skills is worthwhile because in strongly free speech areas, one can often find high-value content that is difficult or impossible to find in thought-policed places.
didn't scott erase his entire community and body of work out of fear of being subjected to a witch hunt?
the witch doth protest too much.
>I think that learning those skills is worthwhile because in strongly free speech areas, one can often find high-value content that is difficult or impossible to find in thought-policed places.
i have had far more positive experiences & formed some of the most valuable connections in my life on 'toxic' freespeech sites than i ever have on twitter. it's actually shocking sometimes how much more caustic and genuinely awful twitterposters are than anons.
you see the same thing in online games. free for alls tend to breed a certain amount of community enforced values while games with heavy oversight & no shit talk end up being much more miserable experiences.
America was created by people who fled persecution, and turned out pretty well. It is the most attractive country on earth. What are you talking about?
I mean, the implications of having "seven zillion witches" clearly depend on what the witches being hunted in question are. Over the duration of America's existence, waves of immigrants arrived from Europe for reasons ranging from belonging to an extreme and/or politically undesirable religious movement, plain poverty, or finding themselves on the wrong side of a war or ethnic cleansing. When Europe decided that it would persecute Jews, the place that did not perform Jew-hunts did probably in fact attract innumerably many more Jews than people who opposed persecution of Jews on principle; it's just that the hyperbolic "seven zillion Jews" did not turn out to be detrimental to a locale's flourishing in a way that the witches of legend are assumed to be in the metaphor.
(On the other hand, one could argue that the seven zillion persecuted religious fanatics that formed many of the earlier strata of immigrants did in fact have an adverse effect on the country where they got concentrated. Is the provenance of midwestern millenarians, https://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/19/open_the_gates_that_t..., Scientology and other UFO cults entirely coincidental?)
If you mean the Pilgrims, that's not quite true. They fled from persecution in Britain, sure enough... to the Netherlands, which was very liberal by the standards of its time. And then they fled the Netherlands, because they found the place to be too liberal, and thus "morally corrupting" their community - they wanted a society where sin would be actively persecuted.
Taking HN threads into nationalistic flamewar and adding personal swipes will get you banned here. If you keep posting like this we are going to have to ban you again, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules going forward.
Getting into which is "the most attractive country on earth" is nationalistically baity, and "what are you talking about" is an internet swipe.
More precisely, if you say that in an internet comment, the default is that it comes across as a personal swipe, for example as a judgment of incoherence. If you actually mean that you would like to understand the other person better, that needs to be expressed more explicitly, in a way that disambiguates from the internet default.
Hopefully, with a new administration, those carriers will be declared “common carriers” and won’t be able to disconnect them. Don’t know if this is ironic or not.
doesn't matter because the msm will tell you it did either way and you'll believe them without a second thought and then post midwit pisstakes when yet another independent community inevitably gets deplatformed by chokepoint monopolies. because we still totally have free speech right?
just don't say the wrong things 4head!
No one wants to spend time on the Internet listening to a bunch of randos talking about how the Jews are secretly lizard people manipulating the elections except other such crackpots. These platforms are lightning rods.
Let these people go there and convince each other of their fringe conspiracy theories. Freedom of association and all that. If they will stop polluting normal places with their crackpottery we're all better off.
Haha, this kind of sarcasm is what everyone used when I said this about Voat.co. Went there to check if perhaps my prediction was wrong but no, it's full of crackpottery of all kind by disaffected losers.
So yeah, everyone is welcome to their parler too. I'm not signing up to find out.
I'm mostly a classic liberal person, think founding fathers, enlightenment era.
And to be honest, I'm curious about what your definition of conservative is?
To me, there's only two way to define it. Either the old way, where conservative means you are a feudalist, monarchist, theocrat, oligarch, autocrat, statist, fascist, etc. Basically you want to go back to a pre-liberal establishment style of society, and are opposed to a liberal democracy.
In this definition, as you see, all these today are generally known as morally bad. Jew hating tin foil crackpot would fall under here, or any other form of A hates on B, since all prior forms of government are about having a ruling individual or class over others, thus a way for A to rule over B.
So in that definition, being conservative means being against liberal democracy, thus against democracy, reason, liberty and equality.
Or the new way, where conservative means liberal but not progressive. In this sense, you believe and value liberal democracy, thus democracy, reason, liberty and equality, but you are content with the implementation of government that we currently have to drive and uphold those liberal values. Therefore you oppose yourself to progressives who think that we're not doing a good enough job at implementing liberal values, in that you believe it is either too risky to change the current implementation or that the proposed changes would result in a worst realization of liberalism.
As you see, in the second categorization, you're still a liberal, so it doesn't make sense to speak about conservative vs liberal in that second one. And because in the US I see people put liberal and conservative at opposite ends, I tend to assume the first categorization. Which would imply that conservatives, to me, are a huge treat to democracy, reason, liberty and equality.
So I'm genuinely looking for clarity. Is there some miscommunication here? How do you categorize "conservative".
I ask because it is very confusing to me. You speak of nuance, and I want to understand that nuance, so would love an explanation.
I think your dichotomy of either you’re a liberal conservative or you’re a fascist illustrates my point pretty well. You simply cannot imagine that someone could be a non-liberal without being evil.
By conservative here i meant really anyone who is not 100% onboard with democratic party doctrine, which is enough to be ostracized in SV today.
It seem you're trying to avoid telling me what you value. If you don't value democracy, reason, liberty and equality, then what do you value?
I listed a lot of known alternatives, you could value ultranationalism with strict traditional societal and economic rule like fascists do, or you could value white supremacy and rule over other races like nazis, or you could value biblical rule of Christian interpretation like theocrats, etc.
Now you seem to say, no it's none of the many alternatives I listed, okay, but what is it?
And yes, I actually can't imagine what else you could be than one of the many non-liberal alternative I listed.
> You simply cannot imagine that someone could be a non-liberal without being evil
That's because it is hard for me to think that someone who doesn't value democracy, doesn't value reason, doesn't value liberty, doesn't value equality, will be willing to accept that I live my life as I please, with a fair chance at opportunity, riches, power, and happyness. So it seems anyone without those value will be trying to have authority and rule over me one way or another, and not with my best interest at heart. It seems natural to consider evil someone whose likely to do you wrong.
> By conservative here i meant really anyone who is not 100% onboard with democratic party doctrine, which is enough to be ostracized in SV today
So by conservative, you mean a republican voter? Why not say republican party voter or something super clear and unambiguous then? Why does the article say "conservative" ? Is it not because republican are conservative? And now I'm back at my original confusion, what kind of conservative is the republican party? Liberal conservative? Or anti-liberal?
I find the narrative against liberalism dangerous. Liberalism is what the western democracies, including the US are based on, and it's what made them prosper and a great place to live. So am I suppose to believe there is a strong anti-liberal movement in the US? Pushing for a return to nazism, facism, monarchies, theocracies, oligarchies, feudalism, etc. ? If not, it only takes people to say, hey woa, hold on, you got.it all wrong, we're full on liberal, just conservative as in my second definition above. But the fact that even when I ask people don't say that, but seem to circle around and evade the question, makes me feel it might be the former.
What I personally am is not really relevant. The point is that liberals like you are like a religious cult. People who don’t agree with you are not just of a different opinion, they are lesser people. Wrong and evil. You illustrate this again and again.
It makes sense that you want to exclude them from social media and public discourse in general, since they don’t have the one true faith.
I'm trying to have a discourse right here in the open, but you keep evading the topic and burrying your head in the sand.
I've been very transparent and upfront. I value democracy, reason, liberty and equality above all else. I have good reasons to do so, one of which is that its proved itself historically to create some of the most peaceful and prosperous societies. But I also have phylosophical reasons for it, such as believing that individually we're better off working collaboratively on equal footing with others, than in a constant battle of the fittest for supremacy. And as I brought up the individual, I believe that individual rights are very important to stability, and should be respected even against a majority, for the betterment of each individual and society as a whole.
I don't believe anyone is of lesser worth and value than me, that would go against liberal values to do so. It's quite the contrary in fact, I'm strongly against anyone who'd try to suggest A is lesser than B narratives, or A is more deserving than B narratives.
Now being against someone doesn't mean I believe they are lesser, but simply that they are a liability to what I value, thus a risk towards democracy, reason, liberty and equality. And I am prepared to hope to change their minds, or go to war for it, if it came to that. It would be quite unamerican not too:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" - United States Declaration of Independence
Edit: And just so there's no misunderstanding, I'm not talking about democrats or republicans. I'm talking about liberalism and democracy. I don't have any issue with any political party who'd simply disagree on how best to uphold liberalism and democracy in practice. But I will have issue with one who tries to destroy democracy, take away my liberty, increase inequality, and employ illogical and irrational justifications and strategies. And I'm not saying the republican party is trying to do so, but it's never been less clear to me if they are or not then now.
Sure, but you can't stop people from creating spaces where they want to talk to people they agree with. And besides, I'm certainly not going to spend my time explaining to other people why lizard people are not controlling SecDef through mind probes.
I've got better things to do with my time, like telling you how I don't have time to do that other thing.
Well its not as if Twitter or any sort of social media platform out there represents reality these days, for me anyway. Which is why I deleted my accounts once I had a look at both platforms to see if I'm missing anything.
Unsurprisingly, It turns out that both of them still have their extreme crack-pots and Parler is no exception; which is just another one of them, so nothing new here on the subject of 'randos' and 'crackpots'.
To be fair, I've largely stopped using twitter due to the incessant politics, pretty much what you described above but just in a different flavor. Ironically manipulating elections was one of those "incessant" topics, however it was all coming from a completely different crowd then (around when I left).
I also remember seeing a ton of racism against whites and (ironically) anti-semitic comments and conspiracies that would be alarmingly praised (likes and retweets) which I assume weren't really taken down if they were able to get thousands of impressions.
I like places like stack and HN because you're able to usually escape it... but its hard to find any social network that pretty much doesn't turn into an echo chamber of one side or the other.
> pretty much what you described above but just in a different flavor
I'd love to see what part of twitter would be merely a different flavor to "Jews are secretly lizard people manipulating the elections". There's an important difference between the mere existence of an echo chamber and the contents of the chamber. Let's not "both sides" this when comparing to anti-semitism.
The part of twitter that believes the real Jews are of African descent would be a good example no? Antisemitism seems one of the few conspiracy theory topics that is prevalent on both sides of the political spectrum, though on the left it seems to mostly come from NOI types or Muslims who take antizionism a little too far.
BLM UK got in a lot of trouble for saying that discussion of antisemitism was being stifled in British politics, and it looks like they still have their twitter account. Nick Cannon looks like he still has his twitter account as well, though his comments were made on air iirc.
> I've largely stopped using twitter due to the incessant politics, pretty much what you described above but just in a different flavor
I'm not saying there aren't crazy takes in many corners of Twitter, but OP made a very far reaching claim here that I can't imagine holding water from my experience. The examples you bring up seem pretty fringe at best and not representative of common activity on Twitter.
>a different flavor to "Jews are secretly lizard people manipulating the elections".
ahah, just a little funny because it literally is ironically "Jewish people keep us down because reasons" - admittedly, I don't know too much because I didn't get into it but its still just as absurd.
If you want just a taste, look at how much "support" Nick Cannon has on twitter.
Thinks nick cannon got fired for "telling the truth" -- and what is that truth? Apparently it is "Jewish people, white people, Europeans" — “are a little less" and have a “deficiency” that historically caused them to act out of fear and commit acts of violence to survive."
It gets worse the more you go down the rabbit hole but I'd argue this is just as bad as the lizard people stuff because it is less outlandish, perhaps making it more "believable" for some.
If you really want, I can go through and find the tweets that had thousands of upvotes, defending the antisemitism and "discussing" how Jews control everything (especially sports and music).
>There's an important difference between the mere existence of an echo chamber and the contents of the chamber. Let's not "both sides" this when comparing to anti-semitism.
I can agree on this. The problem is the contents of the twitter echo chamber are pretty bad too and its only seems to have gotten worse.
I use Twitter quite a bit and there's no politics on it. Mostly AI stuff and the musings of my friends. Twitter only gives you stuff from people you follow and one level past.
Of course not using it is a good option but ultimately what you get from Twitter is what you put in.
>I use Twitter quite a bit and there's no politics on it.
Sure. It does depend on who you follow and if you choose to click on things so again it is my original sin to try to have productive conversations... so yes, if I choose to put myself in a bubble on twitter, I probably wouldn't see that stuff... but I tend to click on articles or discussions on any social media. I "try" to use it as intended.
Just look up "mayos" or "yts" or "white people" in the search bar and you'll instantly see racism.
Click any articles about start ups or business or billionaires that make their way to the "general population" of twitter and you'll see tons of hatred.
Sure, I don't want to convince you to use a tool or not use a tool because we each must make that decision for ourselves. If you would find yourself searching Twitter for "mayos", "yts", or "white people", then I can see why you don't enjoy it and I can see why you don't want to use Twitter. That's a very reasonable decision.
I just wanted you to have the information that there are certain ways to use the tool to get good SNR. If you decide that using the tool in those ways is not worth it to you, that would be reasonable as well and I won't try to convince you otherwise. If you already had that information, then it was just wasted effort on my part, which I'm willing to accept.
Nah I know I could get away with "unfollowing" certain people. I mean, eventually people will post new articles and I would click on them and be met with that vitriol. Mostly because I followed a lot of business related accounts and it seems like if any of those get picked up by the "general population" of twitter its open season on anyone that feels business/capitalism/startups aren't pure evil.
I do get your point though, it wasn't lost on me. I might give it another shot eventually.
Nah, you stay on the main sites and get mainstream videos of a dude skating on a street lipsyncing to Fleetwood Mac. Which is like 3x better than the latest theory about the alien overlords and their pyramid eyes that have hacked our voting machines.
thrasher and big brother in their heyday wouldn't even be allowed on mainstream social media, nor would nearly anything steve rocco ever touched. skateboarding has always been by and for 16 year old shitposters
Nah, I know a few Republican voters and none of them have decided to dedicate their life to explaining how Obama's secret police are waiting in the wings to take over America and the only tool that can stop them is a dollar store katana.
> No one wants to spend time on the Internet listening to a bunch of randos talking about how the Jews are secretly lizard people manipulating the elections except other such crackpots.
I don't think that is representative of users of Parler. I would agree with you if you said Gab.
This may surprise you but the vast vast majority people are joking about the likes of the lizard people. It is a bit of fun because of how ridiculous the idea is.
> Let these people go there and convince each other of their fringe conspiracy theories. Freedom of association and all that. If they will stop polluting normal places with their crackpottery we're all better off.
From "Anatomy of the State" by Murray Rothbard pages 27 and 28:
> It is also important for the State to inculcate in its subjects an aversion to any “conspiracy theory of history;” for a search for “conspiracies” means a search for motives and an attribution of responsibility for historical misdeeds. If, however, any tyranny imposed by the State, or venality, or aggressive war, was caused not by the State rulers but by mysterious and arcane “social forces,” or by the imperfect state of the world or, if in some way, everyone was responsible (“We Are All Murderers,” proclaims one slogan), then there is no point to the people becoming indignant or rising up against such misdeeds. Furthermore, an attack on “conspiracy theories” means that the subjects will become more gullible in believing the “general welfare” reasons that are always put forth by the State for engaging in any of its des-potic actions. A “conspiracy theory” can unsettle the system by causing the public to doubt the State’s ideological propaganda.
When large news organisations that are owned by the rich or the state are telling you that they need to "stop mis-information and conspiracy theories" on platforms where anyone can post anything that means some of those theories might not be as soo fringe as you like to make out.
Nah, I don't need large news organizations to do anything. If you walked up to me today and gave me the latest spiel about how Kamala Harris was born in Kenya to a two-headed alligator man, I'm going to walk away.
Online it's not so easy to walk away, so I prefer that you have alligator man conversations with other alligator man enthusiasts.
> If you walked up to me today and gave me the latest spiel about how Kamala Harris was born in Kenya to a two-headed alligator man, I'm going to walk away.
Except most of the so called "conspiracy theorists" don't talk about that stuff at all. They normally talk about how "this information Y is being supressed from the public because this will undermind the governments policy on X".
People always bring up the crazy the stuff to discredit the other things that could be legitiment. It must be some form of strawmanning.
> Online it's not so easy to walk away, so I prefer that you have alligator man conversations with other alligator man enthusiasts.
I don't have alligator man conversations at all. I just don't strawman the other side position to feel morally superior like you appear to be doing.
I'm sure this is how they perceive themselves and I'm sure they spend at least a few hours to talk about this stuff. But in my experience, the SNR is low. It's hard to find the new MKULTRA hidden in the pizzagate, qanon, and birtherism.
And ultimately, that's it. But be my guest: go be informed about subtle government interference by the guys who are convinced that Democrats are injecting old people with SARS-CoV-2 so they can steal their identities to vote.
And obviously the 'you' is a "generic you"¹. It doesn't mean you specifically, dude. Substitute with "one" m.m. if you find it confusing. It's not an insult targeted at you. It is an insult targeted at the loons that seem to populate every one of these "free speech" sites: voat, gab, whatever.
I didn't know that strawmanning is the way to the truth /sarcasm.
I put conspircy theorists in quotes because the news organisations label people as such when they look away from an official narrative. This is known as dissent. If you are an American your country is founded on dissent.
That why I gave you the the Rothbard quote (not a conspiracy theorist btw but an Anarcho Capitalist) because it specifically talks about how dissenters are dismissed. You are doing exactly that. You should be very worried when large media organisations and news are talking about "fact checking" and "stopping mis-information". What they are really saying is that they wish to silence dissenters.
I'm not interested in who large media say are dissenters or conspiracy theorists because I can make that judgment myself: it being trivial on first listen.
Like I don't actually need someone to tell me Qanon dudes are crazy. I just have to listen to the Qanon dudes themselves. Of course they are convinced they are dissenters exposing the corruption in Big Pizza. Heroes, I'm sure.
That's the funny part. You keep bringing up this Big Media Telling You Who Is Real thing like Big Brother is in charge when I kinda don't really need Big Brother. When this guy comes walking up to me saying that Joe Biden has a secret sex dungeon where he keeps children he abuses that he farms using mutant tadpoles, I kinda really don't need CNN to tell me anything about this guy.
> I'm not interested in who large media say are dissenters or conspiracy theorists because I can make that judgment myself: it being trivial on first listen.
Yet you are repeating exactly the same things as they do in the same manner by focusing on the crazy people.
I have said many times in this thread that are always those that are on the fridge and they do not represent the whole.
Dismissing all dissent (which is what you are doing) as crazy people is wholly disingenous.
> Like I don't actually need someone to tell me Qanon dudes are crazy. I just have to listen to the Qanon dudes themselves. Of course they are convinced they are dissenters exposing the corruption in Big Pizza. Heroes, I'm sure.
Again you keep on strawmanning by saying that everyone is a crazy and ignoring the very prescient point about dissent. It is very tiresome when people engage like you do.
> That's the funny part. You keep bringing up this Big Media Telling You Who Is Real thing like Big Brother is in charge when I kinda don't really need Big Brother.
Then why are you repeating what they say point for point? Odd that.
> When this guy comes walking up to me saying that Joe Biden has a secret sex dungeon where he keeps children he abuses that he farms using mutant tadpoles
I am 100% certain this event didn't happen. So you are basing your stance on a falsehood. That must be fallacious.
> Then why are you repeating what they say point for point?
For the obvious reason that if you go read voat and gab that's, um, literally what those dudes are saying. Like, I didn't make up the shit about pizzas, man. Sometimes some things are just fact.
I'm sure it must be very convincing that I am in cahoots with CNN weather because we both think it's a sunny day in San Francisco today. Or maybe Big Calendar and I are conspiring to decide that today is Nov 15, a Saturday. After all, we're saying the same thing. Coincidence? I THINK NOT!
And who cares if you don't believe any of this. It doesn't really matter. The SNR is everything. One guy here or there is a speck of dust on the vinyl.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go attend to my master. His nictitating membrane is giving him some trouble this morning. And I've got to learn from him what day we're going to decide tomorrow is.
Lots more Strawmen you have built. You must like building them.
> For the obvious reason that if you go read voat and gab that's, um, literally what those dudes are saying. Like, I didn't make up the shit about pizzas, man. Sometimes some things are just fact.
I've been on Gab in the past and while there were some that said that stuff like that, most weren't.
> Like, I didn't make up the shit about pizzas, man.
Again keep on bringing up the crazy stuff while ignoring the stuff that is plausible. That is very disingenous.
> I'm sure it must be very convincing that I am in cahoots with CNN weather because we both think it's a sunny day in San Francisco today. Or maybe Big Calendar and I are conspiring to decide that today is Nov 15, a Saturday. After all, we're saying the same thing. Coincidence? I THINK NOT!
I never that you were in cahoots with a news media. I said that you were repeating the same lines in the same manner. It is obvious that you are just repeating what they've said and then pretending on here that you are not.
> Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go attend to my master. His nictitating membrane is giving him some trouble this morning. And I've got to learn from him what day we're going to decide tomorrow is.
Can't engage in an honest manner at all can you. It is all very tiresome.
Big Tech and Big Media really overplayed their hand this time, IMO. Millions and millions of people are now skeptical and looking for an alternative, even from Fox News. It might not be to Parler, or to the next site after that, but fragmentation will continue to happen. Facebook and media at large only have power if they have viewers, which is a far less stable resource than iron, or oil, or other corporate mainstays.
A decade from now, I think we’ll view the 2020 election as the tipping point.
2020, or more likely 2016 will perhaps be seen as a turning point in the fortunes of the US Republic, when the democracy began to unravel, the law was used as a weapon against enemies, and the rule of law was replaced by mob rule with different factions warring in the streets.
The parallels between the US at this moment and pre-war Europe or Rome at the time of the Catiline conspiracy are striking - the centre cannot hold, and the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Exactly. Many of the people who make civil war/anti south jokes are the same people who want California to secede, which makes no sense.
In its simplest form, the civil war wasn't fought because the north thought slavery was bad. It was fought because several states tried to leave the United States.
Hint: Most of the secession declarations include language like this:
> But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution.
Sigh, I never made a claim as to why the south left. Slavery is not the reason for the war, secession is. You can easily make the case that slavery was the reason for secession, which isn't wrong, but a moot point. If states had seceded because they didn't like tea, we'd still have had a war.
It's a constitutional republic / representative democracy. Republics and democracies aren't mutually exclusive. It's certainly not a direct democracy, but that doesn't make it not a democracy.
In a pure democracy there is no such thing as a constitution, as in the underlying principles can be changed by the majority in power. Having a constitution leads to more stability.
It’s curious that the country/federation that introduced the concept of self-determination doesn’t allow self-determination for its constituent states.
> country/federation that introduced the concept of self-determination doesn’t allow self-determination for its constituent states
Individual self determination.
If a local majority secedes every time it wants to trample on a minority, or in the case of the civil war, an oppressed majority, two things happen: one, politics devolve into fractured feudalism. Local elites have a mechanism for wresting absolute control. That, not the Constitution or a Bill of Rights or elections, becomes the basic unit of power.
Two, our two-plus century record of peace on the homeland shatters. Every election or court case found unseemly by a contiguous local majority prompts a Twitter and existential crisis. Foreign adversaries hammer the wedge and split the nation into warring vassal states and too-small-to-matter opposing countries.
It sort of does, in theory anyways. The constitution states that the government can be dissolved when the people feel it's necessary. That's not based on a single state though. But, the states should have a lot of power within their boarders, but it seems the 10th ammendment is often ignored and the judiciary fails to check the legislature on its overreach.
Even if it was made legally possible for states to secede, I doubt it would help much - we're all too mixed up with each other. The Bluest states all have a lot of Red in their more rural areas, and the Reddest states all have a lot of Blue in their biggest cities.
If such a thing were to happen, the states that ended up on each side would probably end up doubling down on the oppression of those in the other tribe who are still in their state, to encourage them to move to a state that's on their side.
I would not lose sleep over a world war. The social classes (globally) that are flooring the accelerator have no desire to glow in the dark. And we're not in lockdown globally so that the elite can spend time in bunkers deep underground.
We're in lockdown so that elite privileges ("Grand Tour", etc.) can be restored, while the "common man" is put in his or her place, with strict regiments governing thought, speech, action, and movement. It is wise to ignore the cultural and political stun and smoke grenades, and pay attention to what is actually happening in real world. As usual, follow the money.
It's funny, there's a scene at the beginning of the play "an inspector calls" (set just before WW1) that mirrors exactly what you just said. I think it was a historical callback to a real, commonly held opinion at the time ("the interests of capital" was how he phrased it).
I don't think our elites particularly want a world war either. I think they're perfectly prepared to push us in that direction in an attempt to cling on to their wealth and power though. They will prefer liberalism but they'll support far right populist who protects their property if that fails to garner popular support.
Hm.. perhaps in the faceless namespace that is the Internet, but much of that interaction hasn't yet percolated into every day life of the vast majority of individuals. Any person not participating in these exchanges and these networks might not even recognize that these heated interactions are happening.
Another part of the complication (fortunately) is that there is also no "real life" external markers that separate us on these issues. You may know where people stand on the Internet about issues, but step outside and it's a sea of ambiguity with every individual you meet. And at that point, people just go about their day treating everyone with respect. (At least in the same amount they have been the last 60 years, which in some cases is not much respect)
Masks are becoming that. Considering the science of how much a cloth mask can do to save us from a virus, its hard not to suspect the social signal might be the point.
> the democracy began to unravel, the law was used as a weapon against enemies, and the rule of law was replaced by mob rule with different factions warring in the streets.
I think a lot of those are good things and things we’ve been taught to over-value, without regard for their dangers and without an appreciation for the attendant responsibilities. The country was founded with a HEAVY skepticism of democracy. It allowed for some democratic influence, but the constitution goes to great lengths to restrain, channel, and temper the will of the people. It was adopted at a time when voting was highly regulated and limited to people who were considered best qualified to handle the responsibility. Even today the Constitution contemplates that presidents should be elected, not by the people directly, but by their state legislators. The whole idea of allowing direct democracy in presidential elections is a cop-out by legislators who’ve found a way to avoid that responsibility.
Same with using the law as a sword... that’s largely how it’s supposed to work. This idea that the FBI should be independent flies in the face of having 3 branches. It’s impractical. They’re humans, they also have axes to grind. The difference is that they’re appointed and not easily removed. Leadership is human and will therefore always enforce the law according to whatever axe they have to grind. The goal of a successful republic should be to accept, channel, and utilize that human nature.
However, I agree that there is an overarching crisis in the form of the internet which is destabilizing entrenched powers the same way the printing press did (leading to the renaissance).
A lot of it also comes from the renaissance itself and traditional media. It remains true that there are people who are responsible and learned enough in maters of government to be able to vote, and others who aren’t. However the old rules of racism and sexism have - for all their terrible faults - also lost their utility in this respect. You government can’t count on “white landowning men of good character” to be a ‘superior’ pool to draw insight from. Since our economy is no longer 99.9% agricultural, being “a landowner” is no longer a guarantee that landowners are among the most prosperous and responsible individuals. Now many of our most informed and influential people own little to no land, and those that own modest acreage may be far less knowledgeable.
Women and non-whites are (rightfully) now allowed to be and actually are very well educated and experienced in having serious responsibilities, etc.
So it’s very hard to effectively discriminate between high-quality and low-quality voters...
Meanwhile everyone is almost socially required to care about politics, to be informed, hold opinions, vote, speak out, etc. when there are frankly a lot of people in the world who have other shit going on in their lives and who don’t have the time and resources to waste worrying about politics. Simply not knowing and not caring is viewed as some sort of sin, by both sides, because they view these people a potential votes they could win. I think this is where a lot of the pandering and vitriol is created, because things have to seem super clear to get people - who don’t want to care - to care. Even if you don’t know the first thing about politics, you know the nazis are the bad guys and the communists are the bad guys... Soo, yes, that’s who the other side is!
State legislatures do not elect the president in any state in this country. The constitution gives them the power to determine the manner of selecting the electors. Under this power, all states have laws created by the legislature to delegate the power to select the electors via popular vote of all resident citizens.
Historians actually point to Vietnam as the point when the average American gave up on their government.
Once that happened, the government gave up on the average American, allowed middle class jobs to disappear, and spent more time joining global virtue signaling parties and subsidizing bombs in Yemen than fixing lead pipes in cities.
It is not really historians and it does not really push the narrative of government "given up on citizens as reaction to them not trusting government".
Government and citizens are not even two super distinct entities, government are citizens and is put in place by citizens.
Generally one side of America so gave up on government that a guiding principal of ‘starve the beast’ (that has done so much damage to our young) became dominant.
Once people with that world view actually enter government, they don’t have a lot of desire to use government for what it could be used for in terms of helping citizens instead of consolidating powers as a function of lobbying dollars.
Why is there some conspiracy for the US government to allow good jobs to leave? They didn't have to do anything, all that happened was that the rest of the world had rebuilt their bombed out factories and gotten their economy on track. Once the oil crises hit, that was that.
The government allowed companies to lower environmental and worker safety standards by outsourcing overseas without including tariffs as a function of said standards.
See, the things we buy wouldn’t be so cheap if we didn’t let some companies in china dump toxic waste for free.
I sort of agree with you about using tariffs (at least for issues of global effect, like climate change), but do you think the US government should have a policy goal of making products more expensive for American consumers and/or reducing the amount of toxic waste dumped in China?
Not more expensive per se, but more truthfully priced.
E.g. cheap rare earth minerals from China are only cheap because we are borrowing from the future people who will pay to clean up the mess.
When we more accurately price the real cost of goods by quantifying damage to the worker’s health, global environment, etc. then outsourcing would not look nearly as attractive.
> more time joining global virtue signaling parties
Could you give some examples of these parties and an estimate of how much time was spent on them? I could try to guess what you're referring to, but I don't want to put words into your mouth.
(An uncharitable interpretation of what you said would lead me to believe that you're objecting not to "virtue signaling" but to virtue itself, which is not a helpful assumption for me to make).
...when the democracy began to unravel, the law was used as a weapon against enemies, and the rule of law was replaced by mob rule with different factions warring in the streets.
This could have easily been written about the late 1960s / early 1970s, though - the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Hoover's FBI and COINTELPRO, the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and Watergate.
The top wobbled but righted itself; perhaps it will do so again.
I have to agree that big tech really messed this one up. Their attempt at regulating speech on their platforms (entirely their own right to do however they want) has resulted in both sides being pissed. I had commented on this a while ago that it was like War Games - the only way to win this game was not to play at all. The second they started being the arbitrator of speech they were guaranteed to piss people off. Then they tried to adjust and pissed another group off.
And even before all that crap below up, they had the gov't taking a long and hard look at the anti-trust problem. The platform censorship just threw gasoline on that smoldering fire.
The smartest move now is to fire all their public relations and government affairs folks. They handled this about as poorly as they could.
Except one side is pissed at them not doing it enough while the other is pissed at being on the receiving side of the censorship. There is a party of authoritarianism at the moment.
Don't forget "fact checks are a form of censorship".
How did we, as a species, drop so low that to say that the thing a person says is disputed gets blown up into a huge issue.
I have no problem with people of ANY political persuasion being fact checked - is it perfect? No. But is it better than nothing? On balance, it appears so.
I dont think Big Tech got every call right, but I really don't see how they please both sides here.
Especially when one side, from the top down, considers everything other than sycophantic praise for its leader to be 'fake news', and the other side has some people opining that even reporting things the other side says without qualification is irresponsible journalism.
If anything, I'd say hindsight makes some of their more dubious decisions (slapping content warnings on stuff deemed to be aimed at undermining the democratic process) look better.
I have to disagree. It’s not about pleasing both sides; it’s about being a fair and unbiased platform. And on that front I think big tech absolutely blew it this time across the board.
Our society is fractured. There is so much hate and whining online. So much righteousness and loathing. And big tech has only amplified the problem. At times they even fan the flames, what with dubious fact checkers and their “hate speech” bans.
I can’t even go on Reddit anymore. I find myself disagreeing with absolutely everyone now that the dissenting opinions have been pushed out and banned.
I mean, I was replying to someone who defined their failure explicitly in terms of it pissing off both sides. Which was always going to happen, unless they unequivocally took one side.
But I have absolutely no doubt that whatever you consider to be 'fair and unbiased' others will regard as unfair, unbalanced and unpleasant.
I tend to have a similar mindset - I have an allergy to groupthink, and when I see groups of people saying false things, even if I generally normally agree with the spirit of the group, I have to at least 'fact check' with a response. But in this strange new bifurcated reality, you get pinned as 'Other' as in, I must be the 'Other side' and thus subject to to some sort of retaliation.
I don't get 'banned' but I get downvoted - as I did on this thread with no real explanation.
I have absolutely no problem with "Fact checking" because at least it shows the original thing. I have a big problem with shadow banning, deleting and outright banning. The latter is censorship.
I agree. I don't envy the position these platforms were put in. The platforms already had policies, but those did not foresee a time when the POTUS would act this way. When someone on the platform with the reach and power of POTUS says things that are objectively false (and potentially dangerous), how should those be handled? I'm not talking about dissenting opinions or a favorable way to look at a topic, but the equivalent of 1+1=3.
There was this ideal of the internet with information being freely distributed and available, that people would seek out truth. What we have seen though is that large groups of people just believe whoever has the bigger microphone.
> The platforms already had policies, but those did not foresee a time when the POTUS would act this way
Yes they did. In fact, in Twitter's case, they explictly altered their policies so that the failure to take action against this very same POTUS would no longer be a blatant failure to enforce it's generally-applicable policies.
Twitter has apparently had something of a change of heart about that blatant favoritism, and adopted completely new rules to reign in the monster their own rule change created on their platform, but it is not at all the case that the rules that were in place until recently were not crafted with this kind of Presidential action in mind; not only was it generally in minf, the rules were, in fact, created to license this kind of action for the benefit of this specific President, without allowing a level playing field for his opponents.
Lets not forget that much of the 2016 fake news boom on Facebook was agitated for by US conservatives.
Facebook had a news team that hand-curated top stories (to stop obvious lies going viral). As was the nature of these young news teams, they were more liberal than the average viewer of Fox News. Prominent media personalities on Fox News, as well as US senators agitated that this was biased against conservatives.
Facebook then fired all the editors, and obvious fake news took over the site, with predictable results (who would have thought that the Pope would endorse Trump?).
This incident is important context. Also note that the most engaging content on FB is right-wing conservative content, not left-wing content.
Like, FB tried desperately hard to avoid regulating speech on their platform, but both sides demanded it, leaving them in a position where both groups of partisans think they are biased towards the other side.
> And even before all that crap below up, they had the gov't taking a long and hard look at the anti-trust problem. The platform censorship just threw gasoline on that smoldering fire.
The conflation of these two things makes me very said. There are 100% huge anti-trust concerns around Big Tech, but the censorship crap is a sideshow that will end up preventing any bi-partisan action on this (if I was a super-cynical policy exec at these companies I might even say, just as planned....).
The problem is- that they never invested in growing healthy engagement instead of enragement. Instigating a tribal warfare climate to push adds is just to easy of a business model.
Then the goat was chosen to moderate the cabbage and here we are. If the predictions hold, the ironic end will be, some CEOs blown up by a terrorism wave they helped to create.
Thus ended the lesson and the revolution can now eat its kids
Calling a vague group of entities 'Big X' isn't as useful as people think. It's not like there is a strong definition, or that everyone identifies the same with it. It's also not helpful to personify a vague group of even more groups (of business entities) and then assume they all had some concerted 'hand to play'.
It's possible that there is some emergent behaviour in markets with large companies and it might even seem like it's a single 'person', but it's not and it makes discussing specifics really hard. Perhaps it's an american thing, but it seems really odd looking from the outside in.
So you think they are not a combination of a a lot of people working in different locations at different times under different policies, and that it must be one big 'person' doing one thing?
If we're going to be that far removed from reality you might as well live in the woods and fling poo at each other.
In mid October I deleted almost all my tweets and likes (but Twitter being so shit they are still showing my likes except it’s not liked anymore lol) and have not been tweeting anything anymore.
I found Twitter too toxic, it made me angry with people for no reason, so I deleted all my tweets and the app. No more notifications, no more “just checking Twitter quickly”.
I now go to Twitter like once a day just to have a look what is going and and oh my god, the more I am absent the more I see how rotten Twitter is and all of its users. Everyone is so negative, pessimistic, judgemental, sarcastic in tone, confrontational, and self righteous. People are posting so much shit it’s unbelievable how much time they waste of their lives there. One huge thread after another, people crying for attention.
Everyone just posting negative stuff to make other people feel bad, down or guilty about something. I was part of the problem too.
Lots of this:
> “When I was a kid, I once had to work at my uncle’s shop. Let me tell you about <insert bullshit here>. A thread...”
I don’t know what Parler is, but Twitter is THE WORST of social media and if Parler is an alternative then it’s going to be equally bad!
I think it’s down to who you follow. First, never ever read “trends” or random tweets. Never trust Twitters official app to show you anything useful. Using third party apps also saves you from ads.
Second and most importantly, follow a set of users that are interesting, friendly, and who don’t engage publicly with trolls. It’s a magnificent tool for staying up to date with a narrow topic like a niche technology.
Just unfollow or block the negative people and trolls.
People seem to get furious about being blocked. I’ve seen people post publicly the name of the person who blocked them demanding an explanation. It seems to escalate things rather than calm them down.
I published all my blocks with rationales to whyiblockedyou.com for a while. Then I decided to get serious about just banning networks of white nationalists en masse instead of blocking one user at a time.
Doesn't that just reinforce the echo chamber? I don't actually use Twitter or Facebook, and I deleted my Reddit, so I'm not the one to talk. But my wife uses Twitter a lot and has managed to get into conversations that are very hard to keep civil. She has found several approaches that work without blocking.
1. Only enable notifications and DMs from mutual follows. People who get into pile ons don't tend to follow their "arch enemies" to do so (because their followers would not like them to follow "the wrong people"). You have full control over who can pester you.
2. Walk away from conversations if your get harrassed, bored or annoyed, but be clear that you are doing it. "This is going nowhere and it's getting late. I'm muting this thread". Again, you have control. If you imagine getting into a heated debate in the pub, this is the equivalent of leaving the table to talk to another group. It gives you the ability to peacefully walk away, and deny someone the opportunity to keep arguing with you against your will.
3. Realise that people don't change their minds during an argument. Always give them room to back down. A cornered animal will always lash out, and we are just animals.
4. Always be clear and civil. Be generous. Don't assume that people are acting out of malice.
5. In sometime is a toxic person who causes pile ons, quote tweets you, intentionally misrepresents you by cherry picking your comments out of context, doxes etc, block the fuck out of them.
Yes. Twitter is fantastic only if you accept that you can’t have arguments on it. It’s just not a good idea. But not all conversation requires disagreement.
Also: I use Twitter as a news feed. I don’t tweet, just read. For me it’s the successor of rss.
>> [block early, block often]
> Doesn't that just reinforce the echo chamber?
No, I think there's a big difference between an echo chamber constructed by algorithms that push content upon you without your consent or knowledge, and an "echo chamber" constructed by yourself when you actively curate and trim the media you consume.
You and your wife's suggestions are really good ideas, but for them to be effective, it's essential that you exercise control over what hits your eyeballs. Twitter, in particular, is a hot mess. I use the "muted words" feature to filter out tweets that contain words that raise my blood pressure, it's now well over 200 words since late 2016. Is that a making a bubble? Perhaps, but I've found it's better to engage with that subject matter in a time and context of my own choosing rather than having it dropped into "my feed".
"No, I think there's a big difference between an echo chamber constructed by algorithms that push content upon you without your consent or knowledge, and an "echo chamber" constructed by yourself when you actively curate and trim the media you consume."
Well presumably the parent to my comment is implying that echo chambers are only problematic if they are "imposed" upon you by "the algorithm", which I would disagree with.
The problem is that people have become hyper-partisan en masse and whether they arrived there because of "the algorithm" or because they intentionally filter out sources they disagree with ... it doesn't really matter.
The real problem (in my humble opinion) is that there is too much news and it's almost all intentionally biased to some extent. It's therefore not practical for people to keep up with the news without entering an echo chamber. You would have to, for each instance of "news", read at least 3 versions of it to ensure you are considering all perspectives. No one is going to do that.
Do people want to consume net unbiased news? Everyone says they do but consumption patterns says otherwise. Is it commercially viable to produce unbiased news? It used to be favorable but now distribution is cheap and there is more competition so the incentives are to be more biased and find a niche.
I don't think this is a solvable problem, the genie is out of the bottle. This is just a price we pay societally for having the Internet.
Absolutely. Apparently CSPAN's coverage of the US election was far more even-handed, but people want to watch Fox or CNN because they're drawn to the smell of blood from the tribal war. People love to band together with their tribe to hate other tribes. It's sad because when you look at the basic needs of all people, they're the same. And when you put a reasonable Democrat into a room with a reasonable Republican, ban any talk of party affiliations and just discuss those basic needs they'll agree more than they disagree. The internet is a marvel, but humans didn't evolve the ability to stay rational in large numbers, so ultimately I think we're better off without it.
> whether they arrived there because of "the algorithm" or because they intentionally filter out sources they disagree with ... it doesn't really matter.
At the end of the day, we're each responsible for making sense of the world from news sources. People get too hung up on the concept of "unbiased". I think that's an unrealistic ideal when it comes to politics. It's like wanting to eat fruit but always expecting it to be peeled for you, meticulously, and placed on your plate without blemishes or bruises.
While it's certainly possible to responsibly and critically "consume a feed" that has been algorithmically generated for you based on your history of media consumption behavior and your social network attributes-- it's much more efficient to seek out high quality sources of information.
That doesn't mean block out everything you disagree with, but it does mean block out noise and consider what you give your attention to. You can't do that easily when a third party is dumping garbage onto the page for the sake of motivations that have little to do with informing you.
I don't think there is anything wrong with a limited viewpoint or an echo chamber but I haven't actually seen one operate (plenty of clutched pearls though).
I have a simple rule: I won't block or defollow based on your ideas, but I will do it very quickly if you are obnoxious, boring, trying to build an audience on twitter to sell products or build a brand or otherwise act stupid.
It is easier to follow my "don't say stupid things" if we already agree on most things, so I relax it a bit for those whom I disagree with to only include not denying reality and being non-stupid within their world view (e.g I am not going to follow someone who posts about 5G covid, but I have followed people who are against abortions.
Isn't there the problem where your favorite "celebrity"
you follow posts nice stuff but when election or some other event is happening they start posting a ton of "off-topic" stuff ?
If you don't like the stuff they post, don't follow them. This includes things that you don't think they should post - you know, the "off-topic" stuff.
Them posting that stuff isn't a "problem" just because you do not appreciate some of the content.
I don’t use any client from Twitter (such as the official Twitter app or the Twitter dot com website) and I’d probably rather stop using Twitter than use one of them.
That’s my point: Twitter isn’t half as good if using the official clients.
Not only is it not the default, it switches back after an arbitrary amount of time (they do say they'll do that when you switch, but they aren't specific on how long and don't alert you when it's gone back)
Absolutely. You follow humans. Whole humans. They have every right to attract followers with technical tweets and then suddenly anger half their followers by being political come election year.
I don’t think it’s possible to create a safe space from opinions you disagree with. What happens on twitter could happen with your friend or uncle. On Twitter it’s at least easy to unfollow someone and it’s not a personal tragedy like it is if you need to break from a relative because they turn out to believe in conspiracy theories.
It could happen, but it doesn’t happen nearly so often. I’ve had to mute one of my best friends on Twitter, because his posts are just filled with toxic bile that I’ve never seen reflected when I talk to him in person.
You can probably generalize to something like "technologically mediated assholism", but there is more than one thing happening here, such as:
+ Filter bubbles/homogeneous in-group opinions lead people to becoming more extreme in their views.
+ Observing some rando (it doesn't have to be an authority figure, although that helps) "say the quiet part out loud" is validating, to say the least.
+ Lack of f2f contact leads to thinking of individuals as impersonal abstractions, and in particular, as the "other".
+ The pathetic fallacy applies to groups just as it does to inanimate objects.
+ Text communication often causes people to misread tone.
+ The affective fallacy (the assumption that the effect of an action was the intent behind it) becomes particularly powerful because of the former two points.
+ The affective fallacy seems to operate in reverse too: Someone informing you of an outcome seems like they are making a claim about your intent.
+ No-one is a villain in their own story. On the internet, everything is a story, and if the story is about someone like you, obviously they can't be a villain either.
+ Exposure to information that conflicts with (even weakly held) beliefs tied to a person's identity often triggers defensive rejection of the new information and strengthens those beliefs.
+ Group dynamics are in play for public interactions, so there is always a performative aspect even for ostensibly 1-to-1 communications. This often doesn't get turned off for private electronic channels such as email.
And so on. A lot of these mental quirks are like ratchets that only ever tighten. Although each in isolation is often self limiting, the limiter can be bypassed by some other quirk, after which the ratchet can tighten some more.
The above poster is right on. That your favorite poet or whoever can fly off the handle with their toxic political faction-war delusions or whatever is a direct contradiction to the common idea where Twitter is useful for following your favorite X.
It often sucks the fun out of things you like and it’s a good reason to not use it at all. Nobody is pitching “safe spaces” here. But it’s a good time to ask yourself how much a toxic one is going to enrich your life.
Getting off Twitter and Reddit are two great life upgrade tips.
I don't think that could help, because you have a person with many followers and in their mind they think they are doing a good thing to spread "the message" so they would push their message to as many people as possible.
I was thinking you could have say a way to tag your posts or shares so your professional posts and personal posts could be separated but the "activist" would ignore the tags so they push their message to everyone. So as other suggested you would need a filter on client side to get around people that attempt to push some to everyone.
>It’s a magnificent tool for staying up to date with a narrow topic like a niche technology.
A blog/website with an RSS feed is even better, IMO. And for in-depth discussions traditional forums (or even subreddits) beat Twitter easily.
Twitter is the king of low-effort posting.
Twitter does a good job of highlighting the important posts someone makes rather than requiring I curate for myself. It also has brought to my attention the important people in the network of those I follow introducing me to insightful people I might not have otherwise known.
I prefer twitter's method to RSS feeds. I need curation with the amount of content that my list publishes.
Actually, if your goal is to stay up-to-date on specific topics, tools like Discord and Slack are much better IMO because of the way they work to allow two-way communication. Even Reddit is offering a similar setup now.
If you do want to continue in Twitter, change your location. I used to follow key topics (like Go and Flutter) on Twitter, but couldn't avoid the nasty "trends" Twitter throws at you that (IMO) are very biased. So, I set my location as Iceland (I live in the US), and after that life has been good. :)
> "Wonder if shaping discourse via a site where performativity is rewarded, single lines can be taken out of context from qualifying threads and piled on, pithy takes are amplified over nuance, and everyone is either Good or Bad, was overall a positive or negative development"
I'm a longtime lurker on Twitter, the list of people I follow is well-curated. If someone looks like they cause me more trouble than insights, I unfollow or even block them with little hesitation. In this form, Twitter is working great for me. Needless to say that I stay away from politics (and related topics) as much as possible.
I tried that hard for quite some time but never managed to get a purely on-topic timeline. Follow 10 experts who post mostly about topic X and you'll constantly find at least one of them posting something different at any point.
For example you can't subscribe to grugq for political-infosec content without some IRA memes. And I don't mean that other people shouldn't post stuff they want, just that I'd like to see a filtered view of their posts most of the time. After a few iterations I gave up Twitter almost completely.
That's the problem with Twitter, you can't follow only a subset of tweets of a person that is related to a particular interest of that person. You only can follow everything the person tweets, likes, and retweets (albeit randomly filtered by Twitter's AI logic). Which makes it hard to exclude various nonsense from the feed.
I wish Twitter allowed people to tweet into different personal channels, and I could only subscribe to the personal channels I'm interested in.
Social networks badly need to evolve. What they are currently is quickly eroding the social fabrics.
On Twitter I also mainly lurk. I've found it to be the best place to get the detailed news I want (for example, Wasserman or Cohn for election result), but know to avoid comments unless I'm looking for pure entertainment.
But, I have all Twitter alerts turned off, and only check every few days. I rarely look at my own Twitter timeline and instead go directly to people's timeline who I have found will have the news I'm interested in.
Did you read what I said? I have stopped using Twitter. I don't tweet, I don't have the app, I don't engage in anything what happens there now.
I just occasionally peek in to see if I'm missing out on anything and surprisingly I don't. As a result I see myself (unconsciously) check Twitter less and less.
When I switch TV programs I might view a program for 1 minute before I decide that I don’t like the content. The next day when I look for something to watch I might tune into the same TV station again for a minute before moving on. I am not a “user” (viewer) of that TV station despite checking it out for approximately a minute each.
My current Twitter “usage” is the same concept. You decide if you call this a Twitter user or not.
To be fair, we're all "using" Twitter somehow now. It became impossible to ignore when mainstream news would now lead based on what people have tweeted.
That's the thing: it's become extremely deeply embedded in our society, since it's damn catnip to 24-hour news (which, IMO, was the originator of this problem - they need content, now, and anything which provides is thrown up there).
With mainstream news being so propagandist, only way to keep up with actual news is Twitter: people bypassing curators and directly & efficiently stating what happens.
It s still a good way to follow current events by following specific people or journalists.
Switching to chronological mode, aggressively unfollowing the rude people who think that their technical knowledge allows them to plaster their opinions on your face, and changing my location to burundi did it for me.
No more trending topic suggestions. Apparently nothing happens in burundi which is great. It also stopped suggesting me local politicians but i m not sure it's related
This is where the major problem lies and you don't even realize you're complicit in it. The "current events" blasted out on Twitter are curated by Twitter admins to only show what they want to show. They place heavy over-weighting on events and discussion that they want everyone to see. They hide hashtags they don't want trending. They don't show a pure list of what's actually trending. They shadow-ban users that talk about topics they don't want talked about. They give priority to media outlets that are also involved in heavy censorship, therefore adding extra fake credibility to false narratives. And the latest is the whole "Fact check" thing, where they only fact check the discussion that they want discredited (even if it's 100% true).
You are an example how censorship is so powerful. When people believe they've found a "good way to follow current events", and refuse to question the accuracy of the medium, they quickly become prone to believing false narratives. Currently, the elites who own the media are doing everything in their power to further the left's agenda. (The active campaign is their attempt to cover up and discredit any discussion of election fraud. Also, you probably didn't hear that Zuckerberg donated half a billion dollars towards democrat vote-counting strategies) Many people want to bury their head in the sand because it aligns with their political beliefs. Hopefully this is a wake up call to some.
> current events" blasted out on Twitter are curated by Twitter admins
I didnt even know that it exists. I meant twitter users that cover current events (like wars), that you can find by searching or through other social media. It works like a telegraph office. I agree that algorithms range from plain bad and lazy to dangerous. If one thinks that what's trending on twitter is reality, they are delusional
“The couple initially gave $250 million to the nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which has set up a grant program that funds local government efforts to expand voter access, including drive-through voting, temporary staffing support, equipment to process ballots and applications and nonpartisan voter educations”
God forbid people be able to exercise the right to vote.
“A conservative legal group, Thomas More Society, has filed lawsuits in eight states, including the presidential battlegrounds of Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Iowa, seeking to block the grants from going through”
So let me get this straight, your response to my criticism of left-wing censorship is to quote an article from a major left-wing media outlet who actively participates in censorship & altered-framing of news topics? And on top of that, you provide a smug response that misses the underlying point? This thought-cycle is common, and is deepening the divide in America. I urge you to diversify your news sources, and think critically about issues rather than believing everything you read.
Also, donations towards partisan strategies meant to directly impact election results aren't allowed.
"Mr. Landry said one way the grant money could be used would be to send out prepaid return ballots in heavily Democratic districts around New Orleans, “while some guy in a rural parish [a conservative area] still has to buy his 50-cent stamp.”"
"Though the CTCL maintains it is a non-partisan organization that offers “free and low-cost resources for local election administrators” with no regard to political leaning, the group’s founders each boast records in progressive and pro-Democratic circles. Prior to creating the CTCL, all three founding members – Tiana Epps-Johnson, Donny Bridges and Whitney May – held top positions with the New Organizing Institute, described by the Washington Post in 2014 as “the left's think tank for campaign know-how.” Epps-Johnson also remains a fellow at the Obama Foundation, her LinkedIn page shows."
"In Philadelphia, long a Democratic stronghold, money provided by the center is to be used to establish 800 polling places, an increase of 76% the number of polling places"
Since you provided no citation about Zuckerberg’s grants to 50 states but chose to frame it as a “democrat” conspiracy, I thought other readers could use some context.
Curiously, the right (and you) have no problem with 42 other states having access to those grants, but god forbid any purple states get that money. The fact that Joe Bob lives in a rural parish that wont apply for grants is on your team, not those sneaky lefties.
“800 polling places”
Why do people loathe making voting accessible? What does it matter how many there are? That’s the best you can do on a site that loathes Zuck?
Has the Moonie Times found Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate yet? See, I do read it, and I have a very long memory. Thx for playing.
You clearly don't understand my primary point. You don't even understand why I provided those specific examples. (e.g. 800 polling places is completely fucking unnecessary and is setting the stage for fraud in a historically fraudulent city). Not worth my time explaining to someone not interested in understanding.
I'm sorry for triggering you with non thought-police compliant dialogue. You may re-enter your safe echo chamber now where your participation awards are waiting.
And people get addicted to that thing. I remember when Twitter used to have a tweet counter on people's profiles, and for some people it was running into the tens of thousands.
Twitter can feel like YouTube without the videos, just the comments.
I especially despise the “trends” sections. It ignores any keywords and sites that you’ve blocked and seems designed to inflame. Dorsey at one point made a big statement about trying to change the tone but I’ve seen little evidence of it.
I have a small list of people that I actually follow who tend to keep things civil
I had a similar experience with Facebook: I was pretty good at not feeding trolls, but I'd get involved in these long discussions on political topics with apparently well-meaning people and inevitably, someone in the thread would start arguing from either bad faith or an "alternative facts" perspective -- and I'd end up angry and exhausted and having convinced nobody.
Now I haven't used Facebook for six weeks (I still use Instagram and Messenger). I don't miss it at all. If I'm bored or tired, every once in a while I'll reflexively start to open it in a browser tab but so far I have always caught myself and not gone into the Zuckerworld.
I'm not active on Twitter but I imagine it's more of the same.
I doubt if some Alternabook that lets conspiracy theorists go nuts in their own little bubble will make the world a better place, but I'm not convinced it'll be any worse than what Facebook and Twitter have been doing.
I am beginning to wonder if social media may have had its heyday. Specifically I’m curious as to whether Facebook and Twitter will start to be used less and less by people, but who won’t abandon it completely.
I do wonder if this might make them less useful for advertisers.
I've long held the opinion that Twitter and Facebook are just content in the medium, a bit like complaining about Sky, CNN or Fox on TV without looking at television itself and the impact it had on communication.
The internet has brought communication to everyone that travels at incredible speed. This has the effect of causing emotive responses, rather than reasoned. Requires no effort at all to respond, and encourages the toxicity you describe. What gains most traction are those posts that are the most emotive. It used to be "if it bleeds, it leads", but I suspect these days it's more akin to "emotion deserves promotion".
Speed carries a number of other implications. For example, it allows a cheap, steady stream of constant information that can be completely irrelevant at best to you, plus it's information about which you often can do nothing about, except hit the reply button. This can only make things worse, because people feel powerless except in this superficial way.
The other effect is the quantity of information, and it's impossible now for a user of the internet to wade through it, or even validate it without incredible effort. Our current techniques for filtering that information is essentially populist individualism: we rely on what other people have liked, linked to, or shared, but at the same time, read what is presented to us based on our previous interactions.
I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that I perhaps pessimistically feel that these things are fundamentally baked into the medium, in much the same way that Neil Postman felt entertainment was intrinsically baked into television. Hopefully I'm wrong, and there are solutions to these things. Not sure what they are myself.
That and you can instantly find a huge tribe. In the past you had to deal with others around you as well, which challenged ideas. Now you plug in to this huge tribe of anonymous people around the world and assume you’ve found the truth.
I think this is a misunderstanding. Social platform users have little reason to leave one platform for another. Censorship is one of those few reasons. Censorship 8s at a very simple level telling those with different thoughts to go start a tribe somewhere else.
Twitter isn't making good decisions. The killed Vine and gave Musicaly and then TikTok oxygen. Their censorship is giving rise to competitors.
Parler censors energetically also, it's just that it's owned by Breitbart rather than amoral profit-seeking VCs. The VCs censor whatever gets anyone upset, especially powerful people who can cause them legislative, legal, or tax trouble. Parler's owners censor sex and other things that don't agree with their ideological line, probably anti-racism, anti-military/police and positive depictions of the socialized functions of government (which can probably all be neatly grouped under "terrorism.")
VC funded Twitter is a de-facto left activist outlet. CEO Jack Dorsey has admitted as much, though I don't see much action into fixing the blatant bias in their hiring pipeline. For all the 'diversity problem' they like to complain about, their workforce is a 99% left echo chamber. 'Diversity and inclusion' is a political shibboleth used to keep out people with different perspectives, excluding half the country that is conservative, and being intentionally biased into hiring and promoting individuals from the 8% of the country that qualifies as 'progressive activist'.
> Twitter employees donated $347,270, or 98.99% of total federal donations, to Democrats, making individual donations of $200 or more. Meanwhile, only $3,556, or 1.01%, of federal donations from Twitter employees went to Republicans.
Yes and Twitter is FAKE NEWS. It is a known STATED LAW that electorates decide the president. This system was designed by Hamilton to prevent a popular but unfit candidate from becoming president. When somebody stated this on Twitter, Twitter gave this is information may not be correct warning. It is the LAW. Twitter fact checked the law.
If Twitter was willing to mind its own business, Parler wouldn't exist.
The popular candidate that the Electoral College prevented from becoming President was Clinton, it just turns out it's easier for an unfit candidate to win via the Electoral College than it is for an unfit candidate to win via the poplar vote.
...but Parler launched over 2 years ago? I guess you could argue that it wouldn't receive an influx of new users recently, but it'd still be very much here, even without Twitter's fact-check.
The system was designed by Hamilton alone (or nearly so).
The system was designed to prevent a popular but unfit candidate.
You seem to be arguing that because one of those three is inarguably correct that Twitter shouldn’t be giving a “this tweet may not be correct” warning. That’s not how it should work, IMO.
The Internet just taps into the primal (that is, of primate) instincts of humans. We're just a bunch of apes with technology, and the Internet is just a conduit for our lackluster emotional brains to connect to each other.
There is no way around it because humans are deeply emotionally flawed, and these flaws are amplified by our technology. No amount of technology will fix it, as it will just be another catalyst.
Looking elsewhere in the branches of life for intelligence, such as octopuses, whales, in particular orcas, and elephants, we see different types. Are they more or less emotional? The communal spirit of elephants and that of orcas, the latter of which showcase particularly striking examples of cooperation, does make you wonder. But then it again, it makes you wonder if all higher forms of intelligence lead you to take advantage of a greater amount of situations and why we even bother trying to establish ourselves out there for other intelligent lifeforms to find.
To some extent the top voted post at the moment displays an inherent issue with a lot of people of these platforms. If the message is not pleasant to the reader, either they will engage with it in a reactionary way, or seek to further isolate themselves in information bubbles. (Notwithstanding abusive behaviour, which should not be tolerated)
You can unfollow people you know. I make it a point to unfollow or mute anyone who's too negative. There's some value in Twitter, but it requires curation.
The only thing you've actually told us with this comment is you follow people who post a lot of drama. Presumably because you like reading it. I have no sympathy.
Since then, my favorite instance was killed by a bunch of irony-poisoned instances ganging up on it to convince others it was a toxic hell (projection!) and defederate from it. The instance was basically dead within a week as people migrated off to avoid losing contact with friends on the fediverse.
The default is 500 characters. Some compatible implementations of ActivityPub have longer limits. Mastodon hides longer posts from those instances behind a link to open the toot[1] and show the whole thing.
[1] Instances choose how to render things delivered over ActivityPub. So (for example) Mastodon would render a write.as post as a toot, while write.as might render replies to that toot as comments on a blog post.
The way I see it, the problem with social media is that you surround yourself with like-minded people, which diminishes your tolerance to different views. People become self righteous and can't take criticism lightly. Compare this to how things were 15 years ago, or how they are in here, where everyone and their dog can challenge your opinion. You become more open minded long term, and can handle criticism in a more mature way.
"I'd say that has more to do with the HN platform and its rules"
Isn't that what we are discussing - platforms, their rules, and how that influences discussions? I'm just saying that there are plenty of people, in my experience on here, that would rather downvote an opposing opinion rather than start a discussion about it or answer a question about their own position.
I routinely even get downvoted when asking why the previous comment was downvoted. To me, these behaviors are akin to mob-driven censorship of minority opinions - downvote it so it moves down and greys out.
It's so interesting...there is this well known phenomenon where ~everyone has at least some bias the vast majority of the time, and in a forum thread where this phenomenon is the specific topic of discussion (say, a psychology paper discussing subconscious bias, and the associated psychological/neurological phenomena that enable it), any significant disagreement (including whether each one of us suffers from it) with this general notion is typically very rare.
But then switch over to a different thread where the topic of discussion is not some abstract idea like this, but rather an object level idea, say just for example a news story about conservative leaning people switching to a new social media platform to escape what they consider to be censorship, and something very curious occurs. In such threads, it is rare to encounter much talk about this phenomenon of psychological bias, and if it does come up, it is ~always only about the obvious bias suffered by those who are in the ~"general outgroup" of the forum community. In those cases, it is common to read numerous anecdotal observations of how people in the outgroup(s) are cognitively flawed in that they exhibit signs of "living in a bubble", and "just(!) won't listen to reason or consider ideas that are contrary to their worldview".
But then if one is to initiate a conversation with a person in one of these threads, and make a reference to the formerly non-controversial abstract idea (from the psychology thread) that ~all people suffer from some bias, at ~all times, it seems as if all knowledge of that phenomenon has somehow become cognitively inaccessible, that the individual has no knowledge whatsoever of the phenomenon.
Conversely, if one is to mention (say, in a different subthread in the same overall thread) this exact same phenomenon, except switching the object of reference away from the person (who was making a biased comment about their outgroup), over to members of the outgroup, this formerly inaccessible knowledge then becomes accessible once again.
Just for the sake of discussion (a mental experiment of sorts), let us imagine that there is some significant truth to this theory - let's (temporarily) assume(!) it to be True, at least to a significant degree. In this purely hypothetical scenario, might this phenomenon offer some logical explanation for the amount of extreme polarization of opinion that can be witnessed in the world, this "crisis of epistemology" we talk about where different tribes seem to live in completely different realities from each other, with each reality having significantly different sets of facts? To me, this seems not only reasonable, but quite consistent with objectively observable reality.
I am not talking about marketing. I am talking about a very specific neurological/psychological phenomenon, that is highly suggestive that memory access is dynamic, that it varies on the topic, that it varies based on perspective (abstract vs real-time object level), and that it occurs here on HN.
My claim is also contrary to a claim higher in the thread:
>>> Compare this to how things were 15 years ago, [or how they are in here, where everyone and their dog can challenge your opinion]. [You become more open minded long term, and can handle criticism in a more mature way].
Now it's true that on a relative basis, HN is superior to many other forums, and also that it is true to some degree that certain opinions can be challenged, and subsequent discussions will be handled in a mature way.
This is far from comprehensively true though. And also, it can be observed that people seem to not like to discuss this idea (that certain topics cannot be maturely discussed on HN, including the the abstract idea that certain topics cannot be maturely discussed on HN).
Consider the theory that aliens intent on causing strife are using mind control rays to affect people’s political opinions en masse.
Just for the sake of discussion (a mental experiment of sorts), let us imagine that there is some significant truth to this theory - let's (temporarily) assume(!) it to be True, at least to a significant degree. In this purely hypothetical scenario, might this phenomenon offer some logical explanation for the amount of extreme polarization of opinion that can be witnessed in the world etc.?
The answer is yes. If people’s political opinions were being manipulated by aliens en masse (assumed as a premise), then it would be very likely that the amount of polarization in the world would have some connection to that.
But assuming arbitrary premises like this this doesn’t seem like a very useful way to learn about the real world.
> But assuming arbitrary premises like this this doesn’t seem like a very useful way to learn about the real world.
See this comment is interesting, here are two ways (there may be more):
1. You have made a rather significant change in the topic.
I was talking about: "It's so interesting...there is this well known phenomenon where ~everyone has at least some bias the vast majority of the time, and in a forum thread...."
But you switched the topic, to the examination an attribute: arbitrariness
2. You have described a hypothetical scenario, focused attention one one single attribute, and then suggested/implied that the two scenarios are ~"the same". Also, in doing so, you are treating "arbitrary" as a boolean, which might cause a reader to not realize that the degree of arbitrariness is not even close to the same. This technique would generally fall under the Strawman Argument category.
These are really enjoyable conversations, let me know if you have more ideas.
There's actually a handbook (can't remember the name at the moment) of some sort floating around the internet that goes through lots of these techniques, in case you're interested in this sort of thing.
I agree with your statement, but took a long time to decide whether the best way to endorse it was to upvote or downvote your comment. (For what it's worth, I went with upvote).
I take the contrarian viewpoint here. I think the division is good. There's no reason people in the valley should have to live by the cultural rules of the people in Jackson Mississippi or vice versa. That's exactly what happens right now under our political system. The US has at least two distinct cultures and the more they grow to despise one another the sooner we can have an amicable divorce and allow each group to live freely. There can never be mutual respect when we toggle back and forth between who is forcing their will on the other.
If we're not striving for some modicum of cultural unity, then yes, we need to get over our insistence that every solution be implemented at the federal level.
Yeah, I agree. I still occassionaly read some people I follow on Twitter, but I rarely comment and never read notifications.
I also entirely stopped using Reddit for the same reason. IMHO it's even more toxic than Twitter.
And don't get me started about Facebook. What is it about politics that takes relatively sane friendly people who you've known for years and transforms them into raging psychopaths? When my own sister found out I didn't think Trump was a literal Nazi, she then proceeded to call me a racist, with all her douchebag "online friends" cheering her on. And before Facebook, we used to get along really well. But now it's like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.
Every occurrence of "twitter" in the top level comment could have any other social media site substituted and it would read the same and still be entirely accurate (HN is one of the rare exceptions obv.)
I've ditched the lot, deleted my reddit and twitter accounts, configured my pihole to block the domains for the occasions that my willpower fails me and my life has improved dramatically.
I’m only a very light Twitter user, but I cull and curate my feed. It’s mostly funny, positive people in fintwit now, and it’s a good experience. I almost always learn something while flicking through.
But yes, I’ve found that without careful curation, it quickly turns into a depressing cesspit. Then again, that’s not unique to Twitter. I culled my contacts in the real world when in high-school and college for the same reasons and to the same effect.
I find that some of my professional colleagues are some of the most toxic posters. I've got many active filters in place, but in some cases, I've simply muted/blocked some of them.
Done the same on Facebook, which I use mostly for family communication and posting dad jokes. But again, as hard as I try to separate work / family life, colleagues want to connect and they spew the same tired BS I see elsewhere.
So, on FB, I can permanently mute them. Which, I do.
If twitter's business model was to be a toxic stew of partisan talk and censorship of "incorrect views", yeah, they nailed it.
I noticed same thing some years back. Don't let the social medias work ON you, push trends on you. Ignore all suggestions. Keep it minimal and use only for your personal goals. Importantly stop notifications on cell phone.
Facebook I stopped using a while back. It gives me the feeling of universal garbage bag where everyone in a race to impress others. On twitter I follow top people from my domain and ignore everything. No political BS. In LinkedIn, I literally removed all HR connections and started to follow people whom I really adore and take direction from their career path.
I had the same experience that leads me to delete my account entirely.
You have to see it for what it is: An online digital slot machine. The stakes are, well your time and your life. And just like in real life, the house always wins.
Wow, that's rather shocking to me. I find Twitter to be a fantastic news source, with higher concentration of good links than HN, and often see stuff there far before it shows up ok HN.
The thing about Twitter is that it is entirely about who you follow, and what those people talk about and retweet. So if somebody is a source of toxicity, unfollow them. I have a very low threshold for both following and unfollowing.
This part, curating your feed, is not trivial, but it is what determines 100% of your experience. I don't blame you at all for having a bad experience and not wanting to use Twitter again! But also realize that it's not the only experience to be had there, and I think that for many, and hopefully most people, it's a positive experience.
The default Twitter lets you select from lists of topics, none of which are very toxic unless you ease into confrontational politics.
If this default is "horrible" can you say more about that?
> fake emotional output of a single user's anecdotal experience
What do you mean by this? What is the emotional output and what is fake? Are you talking about my single user's experience, or that of the person I replied to?
> Everyone is so negative, pessimistic, judgemental, sarcastic in tone, confrontational, and self righteous. People are posting so much shit it’s unbelievable how much time they waste of their lives there. One huge thread after another, people crying for attention.
> I was part of the problem too.
Not to be overly personal here, but doesn't this post veer close to describing itself?
Look at how many negative words are in this post of yours and hopefully see the irony of what you’re saying. Twitter isn’t magic, it can only give you what it thinks you want from what you give it!
I am not a twitter user really. I check it maybe once every 2-3 weeks at most. But,.... It really depends on who you follow. I follow a few indie game dev friends and unfollow if one of them starts posting political stuff. My feed is mostly cool info about indie games in unity, unreal, pico-8, some graphics info. Very little bad stuff except for twitter itself with it inserting ads and trying to get me to follow "popular" people I have zero interest in or posting "trending" crap. Some of that I've managed to ublock origin away though of course it's extremely frustrating that both twitter and facebook obfuscate their css
If you’re seeing Tweets that make you angry, unfollow that person. It’s really as simple as that.
If someone doesn’t have the willpower to avoid anger-inducing follows and tweets, deleting Twitter entirely is a good option. For everyone else, it’s really not difficult to curate your feed to be more reasonable.
It took me a while to realize what Twitter was. At first, it was described as "micro blogging" and it sorta looked like people just text messaging to the world with shades of IRC.
But I eventually realized what it really is: a gossip site. With all the mean gossip anyone could ever want.
I look at twitter discussions and it honestly like like a lot of people are just shouting past each other. I don't think anyone is out to win hearts and minds out there...
I haven't used Twitter or Facebook since about 2007. People say they need to use these platforms to stay on top of what's happening in the world, but I have not found that to be true at all. If something is important, I hear about it about an hour after everyone else, and then read up on it if I want to.
What gets thrown out by that filter is all the inconsequential news, and gossip, and speculation, and learning people's knee-jerk reactions before you've had a chance to make up your own mind. You can still seek out all that stuff if you have the impulse, but you aren't being fed it intravenously all the time.
This is all by way of saying that the cost of just cutting these platforms out of your life altogether is pretty low, and there are some benefits.
Twitter is a hellfire, but it still has value if well controlled. I use a third-party client and added dozens of muted word (eg anything political or covid related) and it's amazing; it's a bit of a escape even. Once I realized I don't have any obligation to mind the Latest Piece of Shitty News 24/7, I'm a much better online social media user.
I still read the news every day (Feedly) and know what's going on, but it's compartmentalized.
I long for the old IRC days...when you can open a room on DalNet and talk to a small group of like minded people about what you are interested in and curious about..invite/kick those who get obnoxious. It was cozy and I’d give anything to get an online community where we all get along and where it’s ok to be open to new ideas.
Most of the BBS and IRC rooms I frequented had little to no moderation. Flamewars occurred, but everyone eventually calmed the fuck down..you just have to let it burn out almost like how you’d allow a child to have his tantrum and then it’s back to life as usual.
I think moderation and rules are making communication worse. Anyone who has been in a marriage or a relationship can maybe attest to the fact that in the fiery instances where we don’t sit down and ‘figure out rules of engagement’ burn out fast. When there are rules for the emotional pressure valves to be released, arguments and disagreements become nested and multi layered.
In today’s world..we are all toddlers and/or married to each other on social media and Twitter, FB et al have become our nannies creating and putting out meltdowns and tantrums at the same time.
Having said that, IG is still my favourite. Except that they are allergic to images of certain parts of the human anatomy and sometimes even onions can be too sexy for their nipple detection algorithms..but otherwise it’s brimming with joy and positivity.
I miss those days too! I used to spend a lot of time in #efnet and #dalnet, speaking to strangers about things like #skateboarding and other random topics. It was kind of cool because back then most people didn't know what irc was, nor did they have the prowess to download, install, and configure a client. Mirc was the jam.
I'm working on a new open chat site, https://sqwok.im, and hoping to recapture some of that essence. Particularly the simplicity, and lack of overly strict moderation like you describe. Irc never hit mainstream because the majority of users would never download and install a client, but it's neat that with modern web technology we can finally build these experiences in a way that general users can enjoy.
Checked it out. I like the simplicity of the design. The font/size is a little odd for my eyes but I can get used to it.(maybe because I am seeing it on my phone)
I am unsure tho how to navigate to get to the chat rooms.
ETA: ahhh! I got it! Will there be some form of indexing?
Eta2: can I describe it this way: the author of a topic of discussion is the moderator of the topic?
So the key thing is on Sqwok each post has a built-in chat room instead of comments, meaning that creating your own chat and sharing it with anyone else is as easy as sharing the url for your post. It currently works on mobile and desktop web.
> can I describe it this way: the author of a topic of discussion is the moderator of the topic?
yes this is accurate! I'm still actively building out some key features including ability to do some basic moderation, but that's the plan!
I like that there are no "engagement" or "proofing" indicators like likes and hearts, or other mechanisms signaling approval and consent-of-the-crowd(like votes/points/karma).
Do you intend to keep it this way? (Please say yes)
Yes! I wanted to build a place that's mission focused on conversation, and tries to mimic the real world as much as possible. There are no plans to add likes, voting, or public "karma", and I'm split on whether or not to show follower count. In real life people "vote" by either walking away from a conversation, or chiming in with an alternate viewpoint. The relevance algorithm is based on conversation metrics such as activity and publish date, and I'd like to explore further ideas around that.
Outstanding! I've signed up and am already having a few interesting chats about space launches :) Really interesting experiment you've made here, I hope it succeeds
hey, thank you & thanks for checking it out, appreciate it!
hmm, that seems like a bug! the username limit is set at 20 but maybe I accidentally copied that validation onto the password field, I'll remove it, thanks for reporting!
it was #atheism for me on dalnet. quarter century since, i still am friends with my chat buddies there. what does that tell you? "social media' as a platform these days, is laughable. i will laugh my arse off one of these days.
haha yep, that's about the time I was hanging out on there, although I mostly remember hanging out in quake gaming channels, #skaters on efnet, maybe a few others. It was a fun time because due to the slight obstacle of figuring out how to get online, there was a certain exclusiveness to it. Plus it was the first time I had ever used something like that other than AOL chatrooms (which I think were around at the time of the aol cdrom you would install)
edit: forgot there was #undernet too.. dang, what a fun time. I remember there were a bunch of other servers on top of those but I can't remember them
I've aggressively sanitized my Twitter and Instagram to make sure it's little more than an easy way to see posts about computing, video games, vinyl records, or whatever nerdity I'm into at the moment. The moment one of those accounts posts something related to the outrage du jour, it's an almost immediate unfollow. It doesn't matter whether I agree with the content of the post or not.
I'm sure I miss a few from time to time, but you get the point.
I've unfollowed lots of tech luminaries I admire, lots of musicians whose music I love, lots of brands that make good products. And I still buy some of the books and albums and products they produce. I might even miss the occasional awesome announcement from one of those outlets. But the resulting sanity and focus of my social media feeds is worth it.
That's the frustrating thing. I was convinced to try using a twitter account by a friend who talked about how great it is to follow interesting tech people. For some cases, I guess it could be. But the problem is, everyone seems to also tweet about current political stuff, and I have no interest in seeing that at every turn. I know "stop talking about politics everywhere" is trite, but stop talking about politics everywhere.
It shouldn’t be seen as trite to want rest and reprieve from the psychologically exhaustive nature of “always on” political engagement[1]-especially in times such as these, but I completely understand what you’re getting at, and to my own individual extents: I agree with you.
Just to bring to levity to this discussion, your quote very much brings to mind the hilarious and ever-relevant Four Yorkshiremen[0] sketch from Monty Python.
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing 'Hallelujah.'
You seem to have engaged with this content and followed networks of people who also engage. My twitter is a very engineering-forward happy place. Sorry you got the you know what end of the algorithm stick. I feel in some way this was self-fulfilling?
Anyone think this is an operation to gather info on voters of a certain category? Seeing the investors and the fact that you need a real telephone number to register seems like a big red flag.
Meh, so what. There's been tons of platforms in the past that rise up because of disagreements over moderation policy (voat anyone). Maybe they will succede maybe they won't. Not sure what the fuss is about.
As much as I would like to see this happen, I don't think it is going to happen this time around either... or ever.
We've seen this movie before. Minds, Gab, Patreon alternatives, Voat, all of this has been done with no success.
Whatever you open to the public will be infiltrated by the enemy. I think the new model is to do it secretly in closed groups away from the public, preferably local groups where you meet with people in person, have strict rules and only sign up new users via strong referrals: family members, close friends etc. Once some of them work well, they can be franchised. A very good example of this is Freemasonry.
Yes, such social networks will be much slower and decentralized but they will be much more effective and better for the members long-term.
The problem is that all the alternatives are open to the same line of attacks that the current platforms are.
The people who run the platforms directly or those who help them operate via partnerships, investments, can be threatened, bought or invited to the current equivalent of the Epstein's island... and they'll eventually have to get in line.
The current assumption that these tech companies work the way they do because of the ideology of people who own them or work for them is either very incomplete or completely flawed.
I guess it depends on the bottom line for the company. Who their customers are.
Nike shoes is an interesting recent example. They embraced the controversial NFL player Colin Kaepernick in various advertising campaigns, playing in his bravery for kneeling during the National Anthem of the United States. However this was not some sort of altruistic, egalitarian business campaign. It was a cold calculation from their data which said young people buy their products and young people are sympathetic to his cause and therefore we will sell more shoes going with this endorsement. It helped make Nike, a company with a very spotty humanitarian history and questions of exploitive labor practices, a corporation their audience of largely young progressive people felt identified with them.
Advertising is about as cynical as it gets. For some companies it will make sense to “choose a side” which when thinking about it is as absurd and ridiculous as something could be. What would Adam Smith make of this?
888 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 365 ms ] threadIt's not free speech. It's one-sided.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/parler-ted-cruz-approved-free-speec...
Edit: this post is getting downvoted like crazy. People have strong opinions about this.
I've said it about twitter and I'll say it about parler. Freedom of association is also a first amendment right. Speech is being exercised by the owners of a platform when they edit/curate/annotate posts, and association is being exercised when they ban/shadowban users.
It sounds like they were banned for being antagonistic assholes, not for being liberals.
The circle never ends.
Call Parler what it is - a right-wing circle jerk, for aggrieved snowflakes who think that "free speech" means that you can say whatever and whenever, as long as it's sufficiently conservative, and not only can the government not punish you, but those big meanie private companies can't either.
It obvious that "we want to allow someone to say anything they could say on twitter+(spout conspiracy theories and implicit/explicit racist shit)" is both freer than twitter, and not as free as previous+harass people.
I really don't think allowing right wing nuts to voice their opinion but not letting users harass each other makes a hypocrite?
As it should. It's one thing to claim space lizards are controlling Facebook, it's another to start saying you want to shoot up busses full of Facebook workers.
Unconvincing? Replace "Facebook" with "Democrats" and you get worryingly close to Parler.
But there is another problem. These sites don't just happen. If they were bottom-up spontaneous forums - someone starting with phpBB and taking it from there - they'd be tolerable. (And likely less extreme.)
They aren't. These are deliberate attempts to farm and concentrate certain kinds of people with certain kinds of sentiments so they can be used as political leverage for certain interests.
They're not free speech at all - they're farmed speech.
That is the problem. The people who farm them are knowingly and maliciously using them to spread lies and enflame violent sentiment so they can profit from both, financially and politically.
>dog whistle
to be reductive, yes far right and even fascist ideas would fall under the umbrella of free speech as would... literally everything else.
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/11/02/huckster-hack-uk-govt-rep...
/r/TheDonald was notorious for brigading other subreddits, manipulating votes and other TOS violations then crying censorship when they got banned.
IANAL, but we already have laws against libel, slander, and defamation.
Section 230 / communications decency could be modified. New laws could be created to prevent amplified spread of factually incorrect information. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom to broadcast that speech.
I'm not advocating for this, but I see it as a possibility.
A handful of exceptions do exist to the First Amendment, but free speech absolutists tend to be skeptical of the comparison you make in your post, because historically there have been some serious legal wrongs performed in the name of said crowded theater.
A) Government. Some years liberals will supress conservatives, when the power is switch conservatives will supress back. The whole concept of free speech was specifically designed to not have the government dictate what you can say or not say.
B) The press. Which one, CNN or Fox News? The trust on the media is an all-time low and they clearly have earned that reputation.
C) The judicial system? Again, most of them are appointed by the government.
D) Tech lords. I really hope no one is advocating for this.
I am not American, I wish to live in a country where I can criticize anyone, even the President, without fear of getting arrested for a bogus claim of defimation. Is sad to see that most Americans don't value their own freedoms.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-merc...
Is it? I could not find a proper reference documenting both the average and median wealth of voters of both parties.
What's more, I've also read the Wall Street Journal article on the subject which made it even clearer.
"Ms. Mercer, in a post on Parler after a version of this article was published, said that her father had no involvement or ownership of the company."
https://parler.com/post/6e474ef190344fdbab8557b3ebf85ade
https://parler.com/post/90d032f4e22243fd82f7dd9a5b27208d
Another responded “Yeah it’s a new app for right wing circle jerk”
That alone is the reason Parler exist. Anything that goes against the views of the liberal left is automatically deemed trash/conspiracy.
This is more then a handful of disaffected basement keyboard Nazis. It's millions of people. Many of them reasonably upset at censorship and ultimate determination of truth by a group of 20-30 something high-top sneaker wearing San Francisco people.
* I'm not a liberal but..
* I'm not a conservative but..
* Twitter may be a private company, but..
* Freedom of speech but...
If there is a new view point on how to analytically break such news down that would be great to hear indeed!
The black box is always going to optimize for the worst aspects of humanity. The best aspects simply aren’t worth enough money.
Trump told what are generally considered incorrect opinions on corona virus prevention. Eg: Hydroxy Chloroquine works, masks don't and so on...
His followers then parroted and posted these comments on social media and were promptly defunded, suspended and even banned for breaking Eula terms. Because Covid is serious and far too important to risk endangering others lives with misinformation like that...fair enough.
The campaign rolls on only now a significant portion of Trump's most vocal supporters are no longer able to voice their support and encourage people to vote for him due to being punished for spreading false info that Trump told them regarding Covid, or is that the real reason? Maybe the plan was to silence the right's voice all along but Covid presented itself at an oppertune time, the left leaning social media companies took full advantage and Trump and his followers walked right into the trap!
Could that be why right wing supporters might want to find a new forum to express themselves? Somewhere that they wont have their voices taken away right before an election that they feel passionate about?
Just a different thought from an outside observer with no skin in the game.
But maybe they are also just hoping to be neutral. Maybe it's good business to not alienate half of your marketplace. Maybe there's some aspect of genuine principle there. If you believe that can't exist, how is it possible that right leaning state governments ever can verify the election in favor of a left leaning candidate? I'm naive in so many ways, but I need some hope to stay alive.
Truth is I can still see both sides of the political argument, possibly even more so the libratarian point of view, which is a fairly safe place to be ATM.
I believe for bad or worse though that many people have gotten caught up in the frenzy a bit too much during this election cycle and have made morality comprimising decisions on both sides. Maybe it's the Rona driving it, after all so many people have died from it, and the US went to war over 911. Rona is literally exponentially worse as far as the death toll goes, so IDK what is to come but emotions are raw for sure.
I have tried to stay out of the discussions, (taken Dang's advice and waited for things to cool down) then a hit job story about another platform comes out like this one and tries to politicize Parler. So unfortunately I got sucked into the politics too and foolishly weighed in.
I'm sure they do want a forum to express their views and claim they're silenced. But they need to stop and think about why everyone else has deemed them so toxic.
You're right about hitting a subject they cared about..that's right now I remember it was HB's laptop story that brought about the bannings.
Check and Mate I guess. Good luck sorting that mess out, hopefully You get a few weeks rest after the Georgia runnoffs before the campaigns start up again but I fear the media has found a cash cow in political outrage and will be milking it for every drop from now until the endof time(or twitter).
Most of the vocal support for political candidates comes from the minority of voters, on both sides. That doesn't change the situation.
The point is wether real or not there is a perception that powers that control social media are activist, woke or whatever other lable You want to give them.
These are private companies, right wing supporters do not believe in heavy handed government, so what else are they to do but find new venues to expresd their views? Do You realky expect them to just shut up and take it? That will never happen.
Social media is neither Left nor Right leaning, nor are the rules. But if the people enforcing said rules have bias, then problems arise, isn't that the point BLM was making about the Police?
With the work of ADL and many prominent Jewish figures in the past century, anti-semitism had kind of a special status where it’s taboo even when it’s very nuanced, on both the left and right sides of the aisle.
It’s drowning in the cultural discourse now. When 70 million voters are labeled “racist” - or at least supporting “racist policies” - the word loses its deterrence altogether.
US voters want to express themselves but they lack information and critical thinking;
Not all information is good; Journalism is dying and the advertising business distorts people's perceptions for profit;
Taxes are needed but the lucid, rational discourse needed to make good public policy is absent;
It is hard to cultivate the citizenry in the above conditions; the political system is starved of courageous and intelligent politicians; panderers have a significant demographic to exploit.
tldr: US public discourse has attained a toxic equilibrium. But it is profitable for some.
That dynamic will help platforms like Parler. Whether or not the ideas are good ones, the people there going to be people who were pushed off Twitter because they had compelling or persuasive ideas.
Can't meet bad ideas by silencing people. It doesn't work, people just get the impression that the ideas have power.
https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/contenu/menu/droit-national-e...
2. Instead of changing people’s minds (isn’t the evidence overwhelmingly conclusive that people rarely change political viewpoints?), people flock to “community bubbles” like Parler, TheDonald, etc where they feel welcome.
3. This marginalisation leads to increasing extremism; going from the likes of “immigrants bad” we saw in 2016 to disputing and attempting to overturn democracy.
If you’ve ever participated in one of the banned subreddits; you’ll know “hate speech” or “doxxing” are a big fat lie. WE are the ones getting doxxed and brigaded!
It’s not too different to police using marijuana laws to target Black communities. In a free-to-join community of thousands to millions of people, you will get people breaking the rules. Moderators clean them up. The only difference is unwelcome viewpoints get their subreddit banned with this as the pretext.
Source: moderator of 3 banned subreddits; from political to sexual kinks like consensual rape fetishes (which 31% of women say they have fantasises; just FYI).
Admins have never; ever, ever engaged with us during my tenures.
Also, he attacked accepting refugees from certain high-risk countries (which had been designated as such by the Obama administration).
He didn’t say “immigrants bad.”
> Kaine has embellished the controversy by saying Trump has said "all Mexicans are rapists." The Democrat doesn’t come close to proving his claim; all of the Trump quotes Kaine’s campaign sent us pertain to unauthorized immigrants crossing the Mexican border into the U.S.
Also, it’s not like Clinton didn’t spend four years “disputing ... democracy.” See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum...
> Hillary Clinton dismissed President Trump as an “illegitimate president” and suggested that “he knows” that he stole the 2016 presidential election in a CBS News interview to be aired Sunday.
Journalists can’t help allowing their point of view to influence their reporting. But when someone can just pull up as transcript and say “well he didn’t really say that” that damages the credibility of the media. Even if what he actually said was wrong or bad on its own merits. This is what drives people to alternative media silos, and that’s bad because people are no longer operating from the same facts.
I don't believe Clinton ever attacked the integrity of the election process itself. She did claim (and as far as I'm aware the investigations more or less supported the claims) that the Trump campaign colluded with foreign governments to influence the election.
Seems like Trump has taken her advice.
At this point she really should just retire from politics and spend her hundreds of millions of dollars living the good life. She doesn’t do Democrats any favors.
Hillary said this might drag out for a while... and she was right, it is. That’s fine. We have a process for this; no need to be melodramatic.
Biden has almost assuredly won, but first there will be some court cases and recounts simply because it was extremely close. That’s a good thing for Democracy.
The trump campaign is literally putting forth the unfounded conspiracy theory that Democratic-party-affiliated groups some how placed fraudulent ballots, and that this is the only reason Trump lost.
> Biden has very likely won, but first there will be some court cases and recounts simply because it was extremely close.
There aren't actually. Biden doesn't need to carry any states with recounts to win. Pennsylvania isn't going to a recount, nor is Arizona. Even if GA and Wisconsin flip on a recount, Biden has carried the electoral college. All of the court cases so far have have been thrown out or withdrawn.
Despite this, Trump continues to claim that there was election fraud (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13277501276798894...), even after his own lawyers have dropped suits in Arizona and Pennsylvania, and have yet to, in any suit in any state, provide an example of fraud. There's no substance to his claims, and when in front of a judge, the lawyers admit that. And yet.
There've been 6 elections over the last ~20 years.
Popular vote count
1. Obama-08 7.27%
2. Obama-12 3.86%
3. Biden-20 3.4%
4. Bush-04 2.46%
5. Bush-00 −0.51%
6. Trump-16 −2.09%
By Elector College
1. Obama-12 365
2. Obama-16 332
3. Biden-20 306
4. Trump-16 302
5. Bush-04 286
6. Bush-00 271
That was a difference of around 500 votes out of nearly 6 million, which was around 0.009%. That's well within the range you can get with just the ordinary counting error. It is not at all uncommon for a recount to reverse a lead that small.
In addition, Florida at the time was using a lousy ballot marking system that caused many ballots to fail to register that the voter had tried to vote in the Presidential race. Neither side disputed this. The dispute was over how to address it.
Are you really comparing that to trying to challenge in several states where the difference is well outside ordinary counting error and there is no evidence of sufficient voting irregularities to come anywhere near changing the winner in those states?
> But there's a danger to Mr. Gore's eventual legitimacy too, if this extraordinary story eventually results in his election. The recounts will now go forward in three counties--Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade. That at least was the situation as of last night. All three of those jurisdictions are heavily Democratic and voted heavily for Mr. Gore; the recount is thus tilted in his favor.
Gore’s tactics got very ugly including objecting to counting military ballots: https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/documents...
> The Gore campaign, however, viewed the absentee mili- tary ballots received between Election Day and November 17 as a lethal threat. Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican candi- date, who had lost Florida, nonetheless had received a hefty majority of the military absentee vote. Bush would likely top 60 percent at a time when he already enjoyed a 300-vote margin, which Gore was seeking to erase with selective recounts.
So recount all the counties.
But that's beside the point, which was that we know there were severe problems with the 2000 Florida vote due to a large number of dimpled or hanging chads, meaning that votes were being counted by the machines as being omitted where the voter intended to and thought they had voted, and poorly designed butterfly ballots that appear to have led to many people to mix up the Gore hole and Buchanan hole (and led about 19k people to punch both holes, since both were next to Gore).
There's nothing like that for 2020, where Trump is claiming the vote was fraudulent but keeps failing to actually bring up any evidence in court.
There was a statewide machine recount, and Bush won that too. Gore never asked for a statewide recount. He pursued a selective recount strategy, and in the process burned half the time available to certify the results. https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/05/bush-v-gore-fake-news...
> But that's beside the point, which was that we know there were severe problems with the 2000 Florida vote due to a large number of dimpled or hanging chads, meaning that votes were being counted by the machines as being omitted where the voter intended to and thought they had voted
That sort of thing happens in every election. An MIT analysis found that about 2% of ballots in a large sample set from 1988-2000 showed no vote for President: https://news.mit.edu/2001/voting1
Normally that doesn’t matter. As long as you apply a uniform standard, like the machine count, the error affects all parties equally.
What Gore did was turn that fact of vote counting into an election strategy. He realized that by demanding hand recounts under subjective standards, he could gin up more votes from that pool of 2%. And by demanding hand recounts only in Democratic counties, he could ensure that these new votes would disproportionately go to him. And even when the Florida Supreme Court smacked him down and ordered a statewide recount, he vigorously pursued a strategy of convincing Democratic counties to adopt looser counting standards, and indeed standards that shifted mid-count: http://electoralcollegehistory.com/electoral/florida/00837-2...
See also: https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/partisanship-my...
> In Palm Beach, if the hand counters saw a card with several punches on it, and a dimple near Al Gore’s name, the election officials did not count it because that voter knew how to punch a card and did not punch a hole next to Mr. Gore. The machine worked correctly when it did not read it.
> Not so in Broward County. If some of the vote counters saw several clean punches for Democrats and no punch for Gore, not even an indentation, but they saw a “scratch” near his name, they called it for Gore
> The state attorney general, a Gore elector, argued that “never before the present election had a manual recount been conducted on the basis of the contention that ‘undervotes’ [ballots with no punches on them] should have been examined to determine voter intent.”
That’s why all this stuff about hanging chads and pregnant chads and whatnot mattered at all. Ordinarily, those errors should cancel out. It’s only when you try to get a selective recount, or pursue different counting standards in different counties, that this matters.
Ultimately, Gore handed the Supreme Court a giant mess. The Justices agreed 7-2 that the recount that was ongoing at Gore’s request was unconstitutional.
> and poorly designed butterfly ballots that appear to have led to many people to mix up the Gore hole and Buchanan hole (and led about 19k people to punch both holes, since both were next to Gore).
The butterfly ballot could have been better designed, but there was an arrow clearly pointing to what hole voters were supposed to punch: https://static-propublica-org.cdn.ampproject.org/ii/w820/s/s...
Also worth mentioning that, while I can't find the full clip of the quote anywhere, some of the reporting on it seems to imply that the question she was responding to was if Biden should concede on election night, and the answer was under no circumstances. That really strains the whole "disputing democracy" thing.
Russia Collusion itself is an attack on the legitimacy of Trumps presidency - just like election fraud is an attack on the legitimacy of a Biden presidency.
Collusion was not proven, and the left-wing media went completely overboard on this.
Did Russia want Hillary Clinton to lose? Yes.
Did the Trump campaign meet with Russian operatives? Yes.
Did they collude with Russians? No, not in a legal sense.
Was the determining factor in the election Russian interference? No, it was almost certainly the NYT covering the James Comey investigation into Hillary's emails in the last week.
Mind you, if I were a Russian disinformation specialist, I would be very proud of how the American people took up my insanities (on both sides) and ran with them.
Keep in mind the entire Hillary's emails thing may have stemmed from Russian foreign intelligence work.
Like, I'm not American (and I would have voted for Sanders twice if I was), but the core issue here is that people are focusing on conspiracy-like theories to explain their loss in elections, rather than trying to understand where the other side is coming from.
Yeah liberals did with Russiagate in 2016, then Trump supporters will probably run with something into 2020. It's a convenient distraction from material policies.
How else is one to take this? He said some are good people implying the majority are not despite evidence to the contrary.
You brought up a non-sequitor, re Judge Curiel. He has provided legal representation for a hispanic-supremacist organization named La Raza (meaning "the race" in Spanish), which has a public political opinion on matters such as the wall on the southern border. Perhaps Trump should have mentioned the group "La Raza", however the point stands that Judge Curiel has racial-supremacist political affiliations, was in-explicitly hostile in the lawsuit, & Trump called it out as a theory.
https://thenewamerican.com/judge-in-trump-university-case-ti...
For many, the "Orange Man Bad" & "all white people are racist" narrative will probably kick in & they will reject what I'm saying outright because it does not fit their narrative; however this interpretation better fits Occam's razor, considering that Trump has also worked with certain people of all ethnicities in a harmonious fashion, while having rocky relationships with certain people from all ethnicities. The differences have to do with political worldview rather than ethnicity. Unfortunately, the political left has a habit of editorializing worldviews according to race, so other explanations are rendered moot according to the worldview of the political left, which views the world according to race.
Most "good people" don't have to cross the border illegally. They can get a U.S. visa and never leave. The people who will definitely not get a U.S. visa to do that is those have a criminal record in their own country, so their only option is to cross the border illegally.
Similarly, there is little proof that a significant fraction of the people crossing the border have criminal records for things other than immigration law.
Now, let's get back to what Trump said. Right after he said what you quoted in that speech, he said: "I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They're sending us not the right people."
He's constantly repeating how good the Mexicans and Japanese and everyone else is... (as opposed to the American leaders back then)... but the best ones among the Mexicans are not the ones coming in to the U.S. by crossing the border illegally. If you look at the context, he is clearly saying that Mexico has great people in general, the leaders are smarter and they have some terrible people who they're sending across the border illegally.
His opponents, which were all of the media back then, because he was neither liked by either party, attacked him for it. It was even a part of the attack strategy by Jeb Bush's campaign because he has a Mexican wife. They did it by taking the quote out of context, as anybody would do. If I was a political strategist, I would happily do the same. It was a easy hand to play and would potentially sway voters away from him.
Since the election is over, I'm assuming you're not one of Media Matters bots and I think, like a lot of people, you genuinely believe that those remarks were what the media told you they were... which is why I'm having this conversation.
Have a nice day!
The part you quoted is sandwiched between two statements that make that clear. Right before, he says:
> When do we beat Mexico at the border?
Right after the part you quoted, he says:
> But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They're sending us not the right people.
The reference to what “border guards” are “telling him” makes quite clear he’s characterizing their descriptions of illegal border crossers. That is how Factcheck.org interpreted the statement (see above) as well.
There is a fair criticism of Trump here—most people who immigrate illegally are “good people” (other than the fact they broke the law in crossing the border). On the other side, there is a truth to his point. We have MS-13 operating in Northern Virginia now where I grew up. They don’t arise there organically.
1. Tech platforms were too slow with limiting extremist viewpoints
2. Instead of keeping extremist views isolated, this allowed them to pick up more support. These groups continue to move more and more extreme, and more popular.
3. Delays in taking action to prevent the spread of these views allowed the combination of extremism and popular support that empowered people to make outrageous claims.
Of course, the presidential bully pulpit being used to stoke these ideas didn't help. We could argue about which of these mis more likely all day.
I certainly do take issue with extreme views on the other side, but those views are usually things like crystal healing, not Coups.
I think many on the right under estimate how much slack the right really do get from Twitter and YouTube. Refusing to ban bannon after he called for the execution of the FBI director (does that count as anti police?)
To play devil's advocate a little: BLM's ideology (the core activists, not the average supporter) is based on a specific view of anti-racism — critical race theory. CRT is not the only way to think about race, and many would argue it's a bad way to think about it: it's illiberal, divisive, wedded to ideologically left-wing ideas about power and social relations, and not particularly amenable to evidence-based thinking. In fact, it could be argued that the CRT is a huge misrepresentation.
Furthermore, while each of the "inciting incidents" did happen, so did hundreds more involving every racial combination of police and victim you can think of. It is a misrepresentation to focus on a subset of incidents because it moves focus from the actual cause of the problem. It is not racist police. It is poorly trained, unaccountable, and psychologically unsuited police officers. You could drum every racist police officer out, make every one of them take the knee and attend endless mandatory bias classes until only dyed-in-the-wool CRT advocates are left, and these incidents would keep happening until training and recruitment undergo a radical change.
Moderate right-wing people don't oppose or fear "anti-racism" or the support it receives in the corporate world because they are racist, but because they think i) It doesn't work and can't work, ii) it's a bad diagnosis, iii) it leads to socially damaging second order effects.
All I've heard of CRT has been misrepresentation by its opponents. I'm not sure what actual proponents say about it.
The problem goes further than the police into the prosecutors, too. Hence the refusal to prosecute in cases of murder by police of black people.
> make every one of them take the knee
This is not what is being asked for and itself is a common misrepresentation.
Yes.
> Hence the refusal to prosecute in cases of murder by police of black people.
No. They refuse to prosecute cases of murder by police regardless of race. The race of the person killed is largely irrelevant, which is the point I was making in the previous comment. Black officers aren't prosecuted, white officers aren't prosecuted. They aren't prosecuted when they kill white people or people of color. The problem is that police (and the prosecutors) aren't accountable, and they know it.
You make it about race rather than accountability and the problem will not be fixed.
I mean they're anti-union.
I'm also not clear about the equivocation you're making. Being anti-capitalist or "anti-American-police", even if we take those at face value, while certainly extreme in the modern American political sphere, aren't on a global scale, nor is it advocating for political violence (which we've seen not only advocation for, by both the Trump and his supporters), but actual real-world attempts at smaller-scale violent coups[0].
This runs into the philosophical questions of what "extremism" is, and whether or not it's socially constructed, and I think an important takeaway is that there are tons of reasonable, "objective" measures, by which abstract anti-capitalist sentiment is fine, and calls for defunding the police are fine, while false claims of election fraud are not. A platform choosing an independent, objective measure by which to judge extremism and then having one group go off the deep end doesn't make the platform biased against that group, it makes that group more extreme by the objective measures.
Even if a person doesn't understand Critical Race Theory, or is afraid of the "socialism" boogeyman or whatever, people advocating for socialism, modern anarchism, or critical approaches in politics[1] aren't usually doing so violently, and those that do are usually deplatformed as well.
Like in your followup to another user you get into the weeds on CRT, and your conclusion was "You make it about race rather than accountability and the problem will not be fixed." Which okay, that's a fair view. Ultimately I disagree. I think a rising tide lifts all boats, and among white-middle class people police apologia is so strong that you're never going to get popular support. So gathering support among minorities is the best you can do (and I'll add, reasonable levels of support amongst Republicans and white people as well, Black Lives Matter is, if I'm reading the polling correctly, more popular than Joe Biden). But even ignoring all of that, so what? Does that mean that a site should remove that content? Does it at all compare to right wing content that is removed?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_pl...
[1]: which are really just a lighter version of the modern anarchism take and, I should add, should be super popular on HN because they resemble libertarianism a surprising amount
Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s many of these large companies billed themselves as open platforms where you can express yourself. Twitter's Jack Dorsey said in 2012 that "We are the free speech wing of the free speech part". Now he says it was joke.
The terms of service on these platforms appears to be enforced selectively, information appears to be selectively censored and a lot of the time it appears to be based on their politics. Also a lot of internet jokes that have been around for years are being censored because the people doing the moderation don't understand the odder internet subcultures.
So It isn't just tech platforms being uncomfortable with certain viewpoints. It a combination of things that make it seem that these companies are censoring viewpoints (some not even that extreme) on one side of the political spectrum. That is what people are complaining about.
> people flock to “community bubbles” like Parler, TheDonald, etc where they feel welcome.
This isn't true. People are removed from platforms and go to another service where they won't be censored or banned and then a bubble forms.
> 3. This marginalisation leads to increasing extremism; going from the likes of “immigrants bad” we saw in 2016 to disputing and attempting to overturn democracy.
This is a strawman of what these people believe. The vast majority of American conservatives and Trump supporters I know don't say "immigrants are bad". They said "Illegal Immigrants are bad". There is a very important difference. The former is clearly xenophobia, the latter is not.
As for "over turning democracy". They see that there was a lot of odd things that seemed to happening upto and including election night. They feel that there has been voter fraud. Whether that is true or not I have no idea and it looks like it will be settled in court. But they believe they are preserving democracy not overturning it.
I’m not sure the bulk of the people currently flocking to Parler were ones who were removed from Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit. Especially when they use those sites to announce their move.
So I am quite sure that there is a good bulk of people that are going there for those reasons. In anyevent it feels that a line has been crossed.
Wow, seems like the people who voted for a candidate who said that mail-in voting was a hive of fraud for six months before an election were less likely to vote by mail, leading to a huge number of mail-in ballots being cast for the opposing candidate. Odd.
Like I'm not sure where these people were getting their news, but literally every news paper pointed out that this would happen, and it did.
That isn't what they are complaining about though e.g There are saying that some areas have very high turnout (over 95%) in specific counties. Even in countries with mandatory voting you don't get past 95% of the population voting. I haven't looked into these claims myself. So I have no idea if they are true.
They don't say illegal immigrant is bad as a legal status (so that merely changing the law to make everyone legal would make it ok).
They say that illegal immigrants are bad for the same reason that the lawmakers made a distinction between legal and illegal immigrants: to place quota, immigration criteria, and so on.
For the most part, those "viewpoints" are verifiable falsehoods, conspiracy theories, and other types of disinformation and misinformation. For instance, the recent migrations to Parler are chiefly people who want to deny the legitimate US presidential election result and spread false claims of widespread vote fraud.
Using the term "viewpoint" like you did is misleading, since it has the effect of making literal lies sound like legitimate differences of opinion.
> 3. This marginalisation leads to increasing extremism; going from the likes of “immigrants bad” we saw in 2016 to disputing and attempting to overturn democracy.
Eh, not so much. A lot of the recent "increasing extremism" (for instance QAnon and Boogaloo Bois), occurred on mainstream social networks like Facebook and Twitter. While pushing crazies and extremists to places like Gab and Parler probably radicalizes many of them further, it also isolates them from the wider community, which helps reduce their ability to recruit new people into their lunacy.
Btw: I think conspiracy theories are good indicators for what certain people want to believe. I personally don't want to be disconnected from these indicators.
And they are, but if they want to do it on Twitter, Twitter gets to have its say as well. However, the conspiracy theorists don't seem to like it when Twitter exercises its rights by labeling their tweets, like in this case.
As for why this matters, people who want to live in functioning democracies have a strong interest in making sure the truth prevails in public discourse, and that lies find the habitat difficult.
Part of making sure "truth prevails" is having open discourse about topics. That involves people with "Wrong" ideas the ability to talk.
When platforms like Facebook and Twitter become the arbiter of what's "right"? Then people will leave those platforms because lawfully they have the "right" to censor their platform... but people WILL talk about it elsewhere.
Facebook/Twitter may win this "battle" by purposefully influencing an election by hiding disinformation they disagree with (while allowing disinformation they are okay with)... but they'll lose the war as other platforms gain momentum and legitimacy.
The internet will route itself around the censorship.
Because life isn't as simple as "2+2=7"... it's opinions and people saying "my opinion is valid and yours is banned from open discussion".
Because I can find plenty of examples of stuff that isn't as clear as flat-earthers or pizzagate that's being blocked from public discorse.
For example: There is a climate crisis. This is a scientifically proven fact, not an opinion. Yet people deny it, often with the argument "I'm entitled to this opinion." No. You are not, because it is not an opinion; at most it is a delusion, at worst it is a lie (that you might honestly believe in). This is a 2+2=4 situation, or as near as one can get; yet one that even heads of "modern" states keep saying that is anything but 4.
Once we start from the basis that "there is a climate crisis", we can move forward, make choices and so on. A choice might be "it's there, but we're not going to do anything against it, because our economy". That is effective. (albeit something I would have a strong opninion about). At least others can still move forward.
But stating it does not exist (which is provably untrue) really harms effectiveness a lot.
But I am assuming that doesn't count in your utopia.
Legally, maybe the distinction doesn't need to be made, but I think users of social media deserve to know up front what they're in for.
Yes, but for that to work, the discourse has to between people who are actually seeking out the truth and who have the ability to recognize it. Dead-enders and nutjobs fighting to spread (often obvious) lies do not qualify.
And that's why they are exercising their right to move away from Twitter.
ask jim watkins or weev or dick masterson about that. alternative platforms get to exist on a small scale as long as they maintain obscurity, but as soon as old media releases a black pr scarepiece, they get Esther Aronowitz'ed pretty quickly.
>people who want to live in functioning democracies have a strong interest in making sure the truth prevails in public discourse, and that lies find the habitat difficult.
i think you will find that every conspiratorial thinker completely agrees with that sentiment.
Twitter is a publisher and should be responsible for all that it publishes including calls for violence which it regularly features.
Nobody can fact check for you. You need to make your own opinions based on the knowledge you have, and suppressing information does not make you more informed.
I might be out of touch but isn't it fairly established at this point that - for certain definitions of "collusion" - it was factually true?
i.e. not "Trump got together with Putin and hatched a plan" true but "both sides obliquely acknowledged the interests of the other with a nod and a wink" true?
Surely there is a meaningful distance between that and your formulation?
Not to mention this essentially public attempt at it from 2016 which for some reason everyone laughed off as "a joke": https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/us/politics/trump-russia-... (footage of the moment included in the article).
Literally the only reason "oh it was just not true" is a prevailing bit of logic is because no one in power has cared to do a single thing about it, or even so much as announce that it's in no way acceptable.
That would have easily been labeled misinformation and disinformation 10 years ago.
But it's like people saying "MS is selling all your behaviour data" today, which is likely partially true, but not quite in that way. And when they take that extreme position without having something to back it up, it's hard to / not worth discussing.
If someone said "that's a lie", it would likely have been viewed as disinformation, but it would have been the truth.
I already know I sinned by trying to have a productive conversation of twitter, however when "talking" with a few self proclaimed communists (no, I don't think they were joking) they basically implied the "rich" deserve to die, they were morally allowed to kill them, etc. IIRC, this was on a post about a teachers union displaying a guillotine and I pretty much said "yea, lets not be like this." There was also some racism thrown in there, I guess for good measure. They seem to have even developed their own "secret language", calling white people 'mayos' and 'yts' - maybe to get around filters? Or just to be extra edgy.
I would argue that pushing some justification of murdering fellow citizens because of their net worth is just as dangerous as the insane conspiracies about lizard people... if not more. Yet, I don't think these things are shut down or given the same standards as what you're thinking of.
I wish for twitter (and everyone else's sake) they equally applied their "TOS". I have no need to go to those sites you mentioned... in fact I can't think of anything less productive but on the flip side of the coin, I've pretty much deleted twitter for the same reason.
We know which side is crazy though.
"For the most part"
But incredibly, disinformation and misinformation like "the Hunter Biden story is a Russian plot" doesn't get censored, despite absolutely no proof and in fact, evidence to the contrary.
Funny that is.
There were huge threads here about this for literally a week. Seems like a bad job was done on supressing that information.
That's despite intelligence agencies saying that "there is no evidence it's Russian disinformation".
The one intelligence agencies are in fact definitely claiming is being targeted by Russian disinformation?
However, if we want to go deeper into the rabbit hole, if there was a coup to steal the election I'd expect there to be ample fake claims of election stealing that would be easy to debunk.
This is 100% gaslighting by mainstream media. Immigration _per se_ isn't bad. I say so as an immigrant myself. Trump is married to an immigrant. But unrestricted low-skill illegal migration in tens of millions is most definitely bad, and it leads to modern day slavery, while at the same time depressing the wages of the working poor and making them dependent on welfare. That's why Kochs want it so much. So bad, in fact, that Barack Obama deported a lot more illegal migrants than Trump ever did. So long standing that Bill Clinton highlighted the issue in his 1995 State of the Union: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IrDrBs13oA. So severe that Hillary Clinton voted for a border wall: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/jun/27/cal-thomas.... Immigration from countries where one can't even meaningfully do a background check is also bad. Skilled immigration program abused to get H1B wage slaves to the detriment of US grads who are drowning in debt is very bad indeed.
> disputing and attempting to overturn democracy
Nobody is "attempting to overturn democracy". There are hundreds of sworn affidavits and abundant video evidence of election irregularities. This needs to be followed up on, for the same reason why Nancy Pelosi was calling for the same in 2017: https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/864522009048494080. She spent _4 years_ undermining the choice of the American people, and by extension "democracy". Presenting evidence in the court of law is democracy. If evidence is shit (as it was in Pelosi's case), the court will throw it out. If it's not you should be just as interested in hearing about it, because such things tend to backfire, just like Harry Reid's filibuster fiasco did.
Here's an explanation of what happened to you that will alleviate your cognitive dissonance somewhat: https://twitter.com/astateofEmily/status/1327079491760361472
This has happened in all the lawsuits so far, I believe?
You're being gaslit about that too, although yes, some motions were denied and some lawsuits were rejected outright. Watch the last link in my original post. It explains the propaganda barrage perfectly.
There are a bunch of deadlines and appellate levels baked into this process for a reason. If Al Gore could hold things up for over a month over a few hundred votes, all the concerns about following lawful process are null and void. Same with histrionics about "overturning democracy".
The choice is pretty simple even to Trump voters: either Trump finds the smoking gun and deservedly gets a second term, or he's full of shit and he doesn't deserve a second term. Nobody on the right will set cities on fire either way.
Literally 10 seconds in DuckDuckGo. Notice that where lawsuits are rejected they are mostly rejected over lack of standing, and will be re-filed elsewhere with stronger evidence, or dropped outright due to insufficient evidence. This is what the legal system is for - to establish the veracity of claims, and obtain relief when due. Still more lawsuits will be filed next week. The current crop are just the small fry ones that could be filed quickly.
None of this constitutes "overturning democracy" in any shape or form.
I do recommend that you watch the video though.
>"Coming for Blacks and Indians first welcome to the New World Order."
at their rallies.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-anchor-pauses-mid-segment-...
Don't make the mistake of assuming these decisions are informed by anything except estimates of what will make them the most money.
I think free speech is important and I think that social media platforms can be a bit overzealous in their moderation of the content of its users. I just don't think you can sell a platform on it alone. It should be a feature of your platform, not the only thing going for it.
And it can’t be a coincidence that “Gaming” with a capital G is the only topic that I saw suggested for me to follow.
What you're saying is irrelevant at this point. That ship sailed in late 2019.
Leftists/Marxists will remain on Twitter and Youtube, and the right must move to alternate platforms like Parler.
For example, MRAs mostly use YT to announce their alternative platform links now, since they can be yanked at any time by the SJW moderators working at YT.
Netflix doesn't carry it in my country.
Star Trek Discovery is awful for many reasons.
How do they intersect?
So they could segregate every side into their own little recommendation bubble, if they have the content range for it. Seems to work for youtube.
Besides this, there's a clear feedback loop that happens regardless of the intent of the service's creators. The people most likely to get kicked off of social media platforms nowadays seem to be far-right kooks. So when they are looking for a new platform, they'll go somewhere that advertises for no moderation. What happens next is pretty obvious; the more those sort of people migrate to the service, the more visible their content will be to any visitor. And that content tends to be pretty effective at driving away non-kooky users, which leads to a reinforcing cycle that, over time, turns you into yet another take on Voat.
That's because you're on the side of those doing the censoring. If it was the 80s and it was the conservatives doing the censoring, you'd say the opposite...
The fact is that every decision is a balance of consequences.
The general talk of free speech and censoring is not really useful here without specifics. Just like someone can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater, there are other things we are finding that may be similar in nature. I think a more useful discussion could be around the specifics. Should the POTUS be able to communicate anything they want? Should platforms be forced to carry it?
Notice also I didn't say Trump, but POTUS in general. What do we want to do here going forward? Should the POTUS be treated differently than a private citizen?
What this current period reminds me of historically is McCarthyism, except we have the POTUS lobbing baseless claims instead of a senator. I don't think McCarthyism impacted the general public as much as claims undermining the election does though.
I think the "POTUS actively undermining democracy" is a gaslighting / pearl clutching for what is a crass person but otherwise business as usual in the White House...
Apparently Patriot Act, mass surveillance, Guantanamo, the "WMD", Echelon, trillion dollar bailouts, false congress testimonies, etc weren't "undermining democracy", but an old guy tweeting some braggadocio/BS is.
And those that designed, established, and voted those things (e.g. Clinton, Bush, and Obama) are all love for each other, and all stand "united" against the "big threat" that is this guy...
Talk about a circus...
Treating everything as if there were only two sides is part of the problem. But I see dissent within the democrat party over these issues - and not within the republican party, who have supported everything that Trump has said and done.
This greatly saddens me. Can't there be some way to build a platform that encourages intelligent, reasonable, polite debate? Discussions of ideas based on their merits instead of personal attacks and tribal allegiances? Some way to provide free speech without providing free amplification? Has society devolved to a point where this is no longer possible?
Start everyone off with a maximum influence credit of say 10 people, like in your local neighborhood.
As you contribute to thoughtful discussion, as determined by the diversity and ratio of up/down arrows, your maximum influence credit grows as a function of your geography.
What if there were separate dimensions for: Factually accurate, Morally agreeable, and Polite?
A machine learning algorithm could quickly work out which groups of users have different ideological positions, and which topics are likely to devolve into flame wars, so it could require that users have a minimum politeness score to be able to participate in a debate.
It could also, as you say, check for echo chambers forming and incentivise people with differing opinions to enter a discussion to balance it out.
The reason is you're inappropriately applying an technical solution to a social problem.
You also make at least one critical error:
> As you contribute to thoughtful discussion, as determined by the diversity and ratio of up/down arrows
Upvotes/downvotes pretty much never measure "thoughtfulness," because for them to do so would require a level of social cohesion that would probably make upvotes/downvote unnecessary.
Yes. They are called journals and academic conferences.
Most people aren't interested in these things and if you build forums for everybody, it definitely will not turn into scholarly debate.
Twitter allows (and promotes?) hate mobs while Parler supposedly doesn't.
There’s no hate in the KKK. They are all white. Why would they hate each other?
See the problem with this construction?
You are implying that hating people based on something they cannot control (e.g. ethnicity) is normal.
That said, since you bring it up, the history of humanity is largely the history of war between different ethnic groups. So yes, hating people based on ethnicity has been the norm for most of human history. It's still largely the case in varying degrees in different parts of the world.
Nice try.
> So yes, hating people based on ethnicity has been the norm for most of human history
There you go.
And yet history proves you wrong, starting with the roman empire and the middle ages.
You did. Right here: "e.g. ethnicity". That's a quote from you. I mentioned in-group, you added ethnicity.
> There you go. And yet history proves you wrong, starting with the roman empire and the middle ages.
At this point I wonder if you are trolling. The roman empire waged war on pretty much every single other ethnic group around them and enslaved them. Which the other ethnic groups around them were also trying to do at the time. Then we have the middle ages with the crusades and such... etc etc etc
Unless you provide proof, there is no reason to discuss this.
But on the internet, this is easy - it's a damn service you can buy and it scales on the orders of 1-to-1000 or (usually much more) voices.
CAPTCHA's don't solve it - because this is also a service - breaking CAPTCHA's by the hundred and supply account keys in bulk.
You simply cannot have a digital space which works like a physical one, and as such you cannot meaningfully not moderate it because human participants cannot out-pace bots and sockpuppet accounts. Facebook's entire, unearned initial trust was because notionally it solved this problem - people forget it was initially limited to student's with student email addresses at school's it knew. It was very much, initially, exclusive enough that it kept something of a lid on this problem.
The feeling about it has persisted far beyond the now non-existence of this mechanism.
I haven't seen a lot of evidence of this. If anything, it's the opposite. For example, David Pakman, Youtube political pundit and liberal grifter, joined Parler (I think just because Parler's CEO offered $20k to the first progressive with >50k twitter followers to signup) and he received very kind comments from people who largely dislike his politics.
https://parler.com/profile/dpakman/posts
Naturally, despite the warm welcome, Pakman never used the site. Because like most leftists, he's not interested in freedom of speech or reaching out to new audiences. He knows who his audience is, which are fringe leftists who hate anything like Parler, so he knows he has nothing to gain by using it.
edit: oops pasted wrong thing!
Totally agree with this. It should be baked in, not the defining feature.
My Facebook feed was full of pins, shirts, mugs, and posters of Ruth Bader Ginsberg with a tacky Notorious B.I.G. crown on her head for weeks after her death. Sometimes they’d even say “Rest In Power” whatever that means.
They must have been selling like hot cakes.
I expect they made lots of money there if they outsourced to print on demand.
During the Ron Paul craze I had some Gold adverts printing money.
And that was in a kinder, gentler age, when more of the arguments were about tax policy and the political management of South and Central America. In today's considerably more polarized era...
In an amazing coincidence, people who believe that masks have 5G chips in them to allow Soros/Gates to perform mind control (or is it via the chemtrails?) and that climate change scientists are being manipulated by Big Solar turn out to be easy to sell things to. Who would have thunk it?
But more likely it’s a scheme to create a platform to deliver ideas to a specific target group. Or a way of attacking the established actors and regulation in the space. Or a way of simply creating division. Or (my guess) all of the above.
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
I do wonder what the mainstream's response will be when this website inevitably actualises its witch-coven destiny (though it may already have according to some). Based on the apparent billionaire backing, it may not depend on payment processors (which otherwise seem to be among the most willing pieces of infrastructure to summarily cut off "extremist" customers), but it will probably still require Cloudflare to weather DoS attacks, a DNS record and carriers willing to provide it connectivity.
It would probably be a terrible place to live physically, but not necessarily a terrible place to visit online. Places such as the ones SSC refers to are terrible places to visit for people who get deeply emotionally hurt when they see hateful discourse and for people who lack the skill of filtering low-value content in search of high-value content. However, both the skill of being unaffected by hateful discourse and the skill of rapidly finding high-value content in an ocean of low-value content can be learned. I think that learning those skills is worthwhile because in strongly free speech areas, one can often find high-value content that is difficult or impossible to find in thought-policed places.
>I think that learning those skills is worthwhile because in strongly free speech areas, one can often find high-value content that is difficult or impossible to find in thought-policed places.
i have had far more positive experiences & formed some of the most valuable connections in my life on 'toxic' freespeech sites than i ever have on twitter. it's actually shocking sometimes how much more caustic and genuinely awful twitterposters are than anons. you see the same thing in online games. free for alls tend to breed a certain amount of community enforced values while games with heavy oversight & no shit talk end up being much more miserable experiences.
(On the other hand, one could argue that the seven zillion persecuted religious fanatics that formed many of the earlier strata of immigrants did in fact have an adverse effect on the country where they got concentrated. Is the provenance of midwestern millenarians, https://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/19/open_the_gates_that_t..., Scientology and other UFO cults entirely coincidental?)
More precisely, if you say that in an internet comment, the default is that it comes across as a personal swipe, for example as a judgment of incoherence. If you actually mean that you would like to understand the other person better, that needs to be expressed more explicitly, in a way that disambiguates from the internet default.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
doesn't matter because the msm will tell you it did either way and you'll believe them without a second thought and then post midwit pisstakes when yet another independent community inevitably gets deplatformed by chokepoint monopolies. because we still totally have free speech right? just don't say the wrong things 4head!
Let these people go there and convince each other of their fringe conspiracy theories. Freedom of association and all that. If they will stop polluting normal places with their crackpottery we're all better off.
I wonder if this new not so nuanced view has anything to do with conservatives leaving Twitter?
So yeah, everyone is welcome to their parler too. I'm not signing up to find out.
And to be honest, I'm curious about what your definition of conservative is?
To me, there's only two way to define it. Either the old way, where conservative means you are a feudalist, monarchist, theocrat, oligarch, autocrat, statist, fascist, etc. Basically you want to go back to a pre-liberal establishment style of society, and are opposed to a liberal democracy.
In this definition, as you see, all these today are generally known as morally bad. Jew hating tin foil crackpot would fall under here, or any other form of A hates on B, since all prior forms of government are about having a ruling individual or class over others, thus a way for A to rule over B.
So in that definition, being conservative means being against liberal democracy, thus against democracy, reason, liberty and equality.
Or the new way, where conservative means liberal but not progressive. In this sense, you believe and value liberal democracy, thus democracy, reason, liberty and equality, but you are content with the implementation of government that we currently have to drive and uphold those liberal values. Therefore you oppose yourself to progressives who think that we're not doing a good enough job at implementing liberal values, in that you believe it is either too risky to change the current implementation or that the proposed changes would result in a worst realization of liberalism.
As you see, in the second categorization, you're still a liberal, so it doesn't make sense to speak about conservative vs liberal in that second one. And because in the US I see people put liberal and conservative at opposite ends, I tend to assume the first categorization. Which would imply that conservatives, to me, are a huge treat to democracy, reason, liberty and equality.
So I'm genuinely looking for clarity. Is there some miscommunication here? How do you categorize "conservative".
I ask because it is very confusing to me. You speak of nuance, and I want to understand that nuance, so would love an explanation.
By conservative here i meant really anyone who is not 100% onboard with democratic party doctrine, which is enough to be ostracized in SV today.
I listed a lot of known alternatives, you could value ultranationalism with strict traditional societal and economic rule like fascists do, or you could value white supremacy and rule over other races like nazis, or you could value biblical rule of Christian interpretation like theocrats, etc.
Now you seem to say, no it's none of the many alternatives I listed, okay, but what is it?
And yes, I actually can't imagine what else you could be than one of the many non-liberal alternative I listed.
> You simply cannot imagine that someone could be a non-liberal without being evil
That's because it is hard for me to think that someone who doesn't value democracy, doesn't value reason, doesn't value liberty, doesn't value equality, will be willing to accept that I live my life as I please, with a fair chance at opportunity, riches, power, and happyness. So it seems anyone without those value will be trying to have authority and rule over me one way or another, and not with my best interest at heart. It seems natural to consider evil someone whose likely to do you wrong.
> By conservative here i meant really anyone who is not 100% onboard with democratic party doctrine, which is enough to be ostracized in SV today
So by conservative, you mean a republican voter? Why not say republican party voter or something super clear and unambiguous then? Why does the article say "conservative" ? Is it not because republican are conservative? And now I'm back at my original confusion, what kind of conservative is the republican party? Liberal conservative? Or anti-liberal?
I find the narrative against liberalism dangerous. Liberalism is what the western democracies, including the US are based on, and it's what made them prosper and a great place to live. So am I suppose to believe there is a strong anti-liberal movement in the US? Pushing for a return to nazism, facism, monarchies, theocracies, oligarchies, feudalism, etc. ? If not, it only takes people to say, hey woa, hold on, you got.it all wrong, we're full on liberal, just conservative as in my second definition above. But the fact that even when I ask people don't say that, but seem to circle around and evade the question, makes me feel it might be the former.
It makes sense that you want to exclude them from social media and public discourse in general, since they don’t have the one true faith.
I've been very transparent and upfront. I value democracy, reason, liberty and equality above all else. I have good reasons to do so, one of which is that its proved itself historically to create some of the most peaceful and prosperous societies. But I also have phylosophical reasons for it, such as believing that individually we're better off working collaboratively on equal footing with others, than in a constant battle of the fittest for supremacy. And as I brought up the individual, I believe that individual rights are very important to stability, and should be respected even against a majority, for the betterment of each individual and society as a whole.
I don't believe anyone is of lesser worth and value than me, that would go against liberal values to do so. It's quite the contrary in fact, I'm strongly against anyone who'd try to suggest A is lesser than B narratives, or A is more deserving than B narratives.
Now being against someone doesn't mean I believe they are lesser, but simply that they are a liability to what I value, thus a risk towards democracy, reason, liberty and equality. And I am prepared to hope to change their minds, or go to war for it, if it came to that. It would be quite unamerican not too:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" - United States Declaration of Independence
Edit: And just so there's no misunderstanding, I'm not talking about democrats or republicans. I'm talking about liberalism and democracy. I don't have any issue with any political party who'd simply disagree on how best to uphold liberalism and democracy in practice. But I will have issue with one who tries to destroy democracy, take away my liberty, increase inequality, and employ illogical and irrational justifications and strategies. And I'm not saying the republican party is trying to do so, but it's never been less clear to me if they are or not then now.
I've got better things to do with my time, like telling you how I don't have time to do that other thing.
Unsurprisingly, It turns out that both of them still have their extreme crack-pots and Parler is no exception; which is just another one of them, so nothing new here on the subject of 'randos' and 'crackpots'.
Of course, I won't argue against your deletion of the accounts.
I also remember seeing a ton of racism against whites and (ironically) anti-semitic comments and conspiracies that would be alarmingly praised (likes and retweets) which I assume weren't really taken down if they were able to get thousands of impressions.
I like places like stack and HN because you're able to usually escape it... but its hard to find any social network that pretty much doesn't turn into an echo chamber of one side or the other.
I'd love to see what part of twitter would be merely a different flavor to "Jews are secretly lizard people manipulating the elections". There's an important difference between the mere existence of an echo chamber and the contents of the chamber. Let's not "both sides" this when comparing to anti-semitism.
BLM UK got in a lot of trouble for saying that discussion of antisemitism was being stifled in British politics, and it looks like they still have their twitter account. Nick Cannon looks like he still has his twitter account as well, though his comments were made on air iirc.
> I've largely stopped using twitter due to the incessant politics, pretty much what you described above but just in a different flavor
I'm not saying there aren't crazy takes in many corners of Twitter, but OP made a very far reaching claim here that I can't imagine holding water from my experience. The examples you bring up seem pretty fringe at best and not representative of common activity on Twitter.
ahah, just a little funny because it literally is ironically "Jewish people keep us down because reasons" - admittedly, I don't know too much because I didn't get into it but its still just as absurd.
If you want just a taste, look at how much "support" Nick Cannon has on twitter.
I just typed on twitter "nick cannon fired" and like the 3rd tweet down: https://twitter.com/UGHKYNZ/status/1290516640925442048
Someone complaining he got fired for racism, then they literally just say "I hate white people"
this is the 5th tweet: https://twitter.com/answerasiaf/status/1295029696896409600
Thinks nick cannon got fired for "telling the truth" -- and what is that truth? Apparently it is "Jewish people, white people, Europeans" — “are a little less" and have a “deficiency” that historically caused them to act out of fear and commit acts of violence to survive."
It gets worse the more you go down the rabbit hole but I'd argue this is just as bad as the lizard people stuff because it is less outlandish, perhaps making it more "believable" for some.
If you really want, I can go through and find the tweets that had thousands of upvotes, defending the antisemitism and "discussing" how Jews control everything (especially sports and music).
>There's an important difference between the mere existence of an echo chamber and the contents of the chamber. Let's not "both sides" this when comparing to anti-semitism.
I can agree on this. The problem is the contents of the twitter echo chamber are pretty bad too and its only seems to have gotten worse.
Of course not using it is a good option but ultimately what you get from Twitter is what you put in.
Sure. It does depend on who you follow and if you choose to click on things so again it is my original sin to try to have productive conversations... so yes, if I choose to put myself in a bubble on twitter, I probably wouldn't see that stuff... but I tend to click on articles or discussions on any social media. I "try" to use it as intended.
Just look up "mayos" or "yts" or "white people" in the search bar and you'll instantly see racism.
Click any articles about start ups or business or billionaires that make their way to the "general population" of twitter and you'll see tons of hatred.
I just wanted you to have the information that there are certain ways to use the tool to get good SNR. If you decide that using the tool in those ways is not worth it to you, that would be reasonable as well and I won't try to convince you otherwise. If you already had that information, then it was just wasted effort on my part, which I'm willing to accept.
Nah I know I could get away with "unfollowing" certain people. I mean, eventually people will post new articles and I would click on them and be met with that vitriol. Mostly because I followed a lot of business related accounts and it seems like if any of those get picked up by the "general population" of twitter its open season on anyone that feels business/capitalism/startups aren't pure evil.
I do get your point though, it wasn't lost on me. I might give it another shot eventually.
Then they instructed me to tell you this so that it would cast ridicule on the notion of lizardmen overlords.
And they then instructed me to do that last one to sow confusion.
This is always a good rule - when your theory is that half of the population are "crack pots", the issue might be you, not them.
I don't think that is representative of users of Parler. I would agree with you if you said Gab.
This may surprise you but the vast vast majority people are joking about the likes of the lizard people. It is a bit of fun because of how ridiculous the idea is.
> Let these people go there and convince each other of their fringe conspiracy theories. Freedom of association and all that. If they will stop polluting normal places with their crackpottery we're all better off.
From "Anatomy of the State" by Murray Rothbard pages 27 and 28:
> It is also important for the State to inculcate in its subjects an aversion to any “conspiracy theory of history;” for a search for “conspiracies” means a search for motives and an attribution of responsibility for historical misdeeds. If, however, any tyranny imposed by the State, or venality, or aggressive war, was caused not by the State rulers but by mysterious and arcane “social forces,” or by the imperfect state of the world or, if in some way, everyone was responsible (“We Are All Murderers,” proclaims one slogan), then there is no point to the people becoming indignant or rising up against such misdeeds. Furthermore, an attack on “conspiracy theories” means that the subjects will become more gullible in believing the “general welfare” reasons that are always put forth by the State for engaging in any of its des-potic actions. A “conspiracy theory” can unsettle the system by causing the public to doubt the State’s ideological propaganda.
When large news organisations that are owned by the rich or the state are telling you that they need to "stop mis-information and conspiracy theories" on platforms where anyone can post anything that means some of those theories might not be as soo fringe as you like to make out.
Online it's not so easy to walk away, so I prefer that you have alligator man conversations with other alligator man enthusiasts.
Except most of the so called "conspiracy theorists" don't talk about that stuff at all. They normally talk about how "this information Y is being supressed from the public because this will undermind the governments policy on X".
People always bring up the crazy the stuff to discredit the other things that could be legitiment. It must be some form of strawmanning.
> Online it's not so easy to walk away, so I prefer that you have alligator man conversations with other alligator man enthusiasts.
I don't have alligator man conversations at all. I just don't strawman the other side position to feel morally superior like you appear to be doing.
And ultimately, that's it. But be my guest: go be informed about subtle government interference by the guys who are convinced that Democrats are injecting old people with SARS-CoV-2 so they can steal their identities to vote.
And obviously the 'you' is a "generic you"¹. It doesn't mean you specifically, dude. Substitute with "one" m.m. if you find it confusing. It's not an insult targeted at you. It is an insult targeted at the loons that seem to populate every one of these "free speech" sites: voat, gab, whatever.
¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you
I put conspircy theorists in quotes because the news organisations label people as such when they look away from an official narrative. This is known as dissent. If you are an American your country is founded on dissent.
That why I gave you the the Rothbard quote (not a conspiracy theorist btw but an Anarcho Capitalist) because it specifically talks about how dissenters are dismissed. You are doing exactly that. You should be very worried when large media organisations and news are talking about "fact checking" and "stopping mis-information". What they are really saying is that they wish to silence dissenters.
Like I don't actually need someone to tell me Qanon dudes are crazy. I just have to listen to the Qanon dudes themselves. Of course they are convinced they are dissenters exposing the corruption in Big Pizza. Heroes, I'm sure.
That's the funny part. You keep bringing up this Big Media Telling You Who Is Real thing like Big Brother is in charge when I kinda don't really need Big Brother. When this guy comes walking up to me saying that Joe Biden has a secret sex dungeon where he keeps children he abuses that he farms using mutant tadpoles, I kinda really don't need CNN to tell me anything about this guy.
Yet you are repeating exactly the same things as they do in the same manner by focusing on the crazy people.
I have said many times in this thread that are always those that are on the fridge and they do not represent the whole.
Dismissing all dissent (which is what you are doing) as crazy people is wholly disingenous.
> Like I don't actually need someone to tell me Qanon dudes are crazy. I just have to listen to the Qanon dudes themselves. Of course they are convinced they are dissenters exposing the corruption in Big Pizza. Heroes, I'm sure.
Again you keep on strawmanning by saying that everyone is a crazy and ignoring the very prescient point about dissent. It is very tiresome when people engage like you do.
> That's the funny part. You keep bringing up this Big Media Telling You Who Is Real thing like Big Brother is in charge when I kinda don't really need Big Brother.
Then why are you repeating what they say point for point? Odd that.
> When this guy comes walking up to me saying that Joe Biden has a secret sex dungeon where he keeps children he abuses that he farms using mutant tadpoles
I am 100% certain this event didn't happen. So you are basing your stance on a falsehood. That must be fallacious.
For the obvious reason that if you go read voat and gab that's, um, literally what those dudes are saying. Like, I didn't make up the shit about pizzas, man. Sometimes some things are just fact.
I'm sure it must be very convincing that I am in cahoots with CNN weather because we both think it's a sunny day in San Francisco today. Or maybe Big Calendar and I are conspiring to decide that today is Nov 15, a Saturday. After all, we're saying the same thing. Coincidence? I THINK NOT!
And who cares if you don't believe any of this. It doesn't really matter. The SNR is everything. One guy here or there is a speck of dust on the vinyl.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go attend to my master. His nictitating membrane is giving him some trouble this morning. And I've got to learn from him what day we're going to decide tomorrow is.
> For the obvious reason that if you go read voat and gab that's, um, literally what those dudes are saying. Like, I didn't make up the shit about pizzas, man. Sometimes some things are just fact.
I've been on Gab in the past and while there were some that said that stuff like that, most weren't.
> Like, I didn't make up the shit about pizzas, man.
Again keep on bringing up the crazy stuff while ignoring the stuff that is plausible. That is very disingenous.
> I'm sure it must be very convincing that I am in cahoots with CNN weather because we both think it's a sunny day in San Francisco today. Or maybe Big Calendar and I are conspiring to decide that today is Nov 15, a Saturday. After all, we're saying the same thing. Coincidence? I THINK NOT!
I never that you were in cahoots with a news media. I said that you were repeating the same lines in the same manner. It is obvious that you are just repeating what they've said and then pretending on here that you are not.
> Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go attend to my master. His nictitating membrane is giving him some trouble this morning. And I've got to learn from him what day we're going to decide tomorrow is.
Can't engage in an honest manner at all can you. It is all very tiresome.
Exactly. Today's social media is a humourless place. No-one can take a joke, or perhaps even see one.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...
A decade from now, I think we’ll view the 2020 election as the tipping point.
The parallels between the US at this moment and pre-war Europe or Rome at the time of the Catiline conspiracy are striking - the centre cannot hold, and the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
It is a democracy after all.
In its simplest form, the civil war wasn't fought because the north thought slavery was bad. It was fought because several states tried to leave the United States.
Hint: Most of the secession declarations include language like this:
> But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution.
Citation needed.
Individual self determination.
If a local majority secedes every time it wants to trample on a minority, or in the case of the civil war, an oppressed majority, two things happen: one, politics devolve into fractured feudalism. Local elites have a mechanism for wresting absolute control. That, not the Constitution or a Bill of Rights or elections, becomes the basic unit of power.
Two, our two-plus century record of peace on the homeland shatters. Every election or court case found unseemly by a contiguous local majority prompts a Twitter and existential crisis. Foreign adversaries hammer the wedge and split the nation into warring vassal states and too-small-to-matter opposing countries.
If such a thing were to happen, the states that ended up on each side would probably end up doubling down on the oppression of those in the other tribe who are still in their state, to encourage them to move to a state that's on their side.
I have a dreadful feeling that the turning point for all of this societal dysfunction will be following the aftermath of a world war.
We're in lockdown so that elite privileges ("Grand Tour", etc.) can be restored, while the "common man" is put in his or her place, with strict regiments governing thought, speech, action, and movement. It is wise to ignore the cultural and political stun and smoke grenades, and pay attention to what is actually happening in real world. As usual, follow the money.
I don't think our elites particularly want a world war either. I think they're perfectly prepared to push us in that direction in an attempt to cling on to their wealth and power though. They will prefer liberalism but they'll support far right populist who protects their property if that fails to garner popular support.
Another part of the complication (fortunately) is that there is also no "real life" external markers that separate us on these issues. You may know where people stand on the Internet about issues, but step outside and it's a sea of ambiguity with every individual you meet. And at that point, people just go about their day treating everyone with respect. (At least in the same amount they have been the last 60 years, which in some cases is not much respect)
I think a lot of those are good things and things we’ve been taught to over-value, without regard for their dangers and without an appreciation for the attendant responsibilities. The country was founded with a HEAVY skepticism of democracy. It allowed for some democratic influence, but the constitution goes to great lengths to restrain, channel, and temper the will of the people. It was adopted at a time when voting was highly regulated and limited to people who were considered best qualified to handle the responsibility. Even today the Constitution contemplates that presidents should be elected, not by the people directly, but by their state legislators. The whole idea of allowing direct democracy in presidential elections is a cop-out by legislators who’ve found a way to avoid that responsibility.
Same with using the law as a sword... that’s largely how it’s supposed to work. This idea that the FBI should be independent flies in the face of having 3 branches. It’s impractical. They’re humans, they also have axes to grind. The difference is that they’re appointed and not easily removed. Leadership is human and will therefore always enforce the law according to whatever axe they have to grind. The goal of a successful republic should be to accept, channel, and utilize that human nature.
However, I agree that there is an overarching crisis in the form of the internet which is destabilizing entrenched powers the same way the printing press did (leading to the renaissance).
A lot of it also comes from the renaissance itself and traditional media. It remains true that there are people who are responsible and learned enough in maters of government to be able to vote, and others who aren’t. However the old rules of racism and sexism have - for all their terrible faults - also lost their utility in this respect. You government can’t count on “white landowning men of good character” to be a ‘superior’ pool to draw insight from. Since our economy is no longer 99.9% agricultural, being “a landowner” is no longer a guarantee that landowners are among the most prosperous and responsible individuals. Now many of our most informed and influential people own little to no land, and those that own modest acreage may be far less knowledgeable.
Women and non-whites are (rightfully) now allowed to be and actually are very well educated and experienced in having serious responsibilities, etc.
So it’s very hard to effectively discriminate between high-quality and low-quality voters...
Meanwhile everyone is almost socially required to care about politics, to be informed, hold opinions, vote, speak out, etc. when there are frankly a lot of people in the world who have other shit going on in their lives and who don’t have the time and resources to waste worrying about politics. Simply not knowing and not caring is viewed as some sort of sin, by both sides, because they view these people a potential votes they could win. I think this is where a lot of the pandering and vitriol is created, because things have to seem super clear to get people - who don’t want to care - to care. Even if you don’t know the first thing about politics, you know the nazis are the bad guys and the communists are the bad guys... Soo, yes, that’s who the other side is!
Once that happened, the government gave up on the average American, allowed middle class jobs to disappear, and spent more time joining global virtue signaling parties and subsidizing bombs in Yemen than fixing lead pipes in cities.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-g... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/... https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/how-ame... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/opinion/sunday/vietnam-th...
Government and citizens are not even two super distinct entities, government are citizens and is put in place by citizens.
Once people with that world view actually enter government, they don’t have a lot of desire to use government for what it could be used for in terms of helping citizens instead of consolidating powers as a function of lobbying dollars.
See, the things we buy wouldn’t be so cheap if we didn’t let some companies in china dump toxic waste for free.
E.g. cheap rare earth minerals from China are only cheap because we are borrowing from the future people who will pay to clean up the mess.
When we more accurately price the real cost of goods by quantifying damage to the worker’s health, global environment, etc. then outsourcing would not look nearly as attractive.
Could you give some examples of these parties and an estimate of how much time was spent on them? I could try to guess what you're referring to, but I don't want to put words into your mouth.
(An uncharitable interpretation of what you said would lead me to believe that you're objecting not to "virtue signaling" but to virtue itself, which is not a helpful assumption for me to make).
This could have easily been written about the late 1960s / early 1970s, though - the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Hoover's FBI and COINTELPRO, the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and Watergate.
The top wobbled but righted itself; perhaps it will do so again.
Every generation thinks they have it the worst.
And even before all that crap below up, they had the gov't taking a long and hard look at the anti-trust problem. The platform censorship just threw gasoline on that smoldering fire.
The smartest move now is to fire all their public relations and government affairs folks. They handled this about as poorly as they could.
How did we, as a species, drop so low that to say that the thing a person says is disputed gets blown up into a huge issue.
I have no problem with people of ANY political persuasion being fact checked - is it perfect? No. But is it better than nothing? On balance, it appears so.
Especially when one side, from the top down, considers everything other than sycophantic praise for its leader to be 'fake news', and the other side has some people opining that even reporting things the other side says without qualification is irresponsible journalism.
If anything, I'd say hindsight makes some of their more dubious decisions (slapping content warnings on stuff deemed to be aimed at undermining the democratic process) look better.
Our society is fractured. There is so much hate and whining online. So much righteousness and loathing. And big tech has only amplified the problem. At times they even fan the flames, what with dubious fact checkers and their “hate speech” bans.
I can’t even go on Reddit anymore. I find myself disagreeing with absolutely everyone now that the dissenting opinions have been pushed out and banned.
And it’s only getting worse.
But I have absolutely no doubt that whatever you consider to be 'fair and unbiased' others will regard as unfair, unbalanced and unpleasant.
I don't get 'banned' but I get downvoted - as I did on this thread with no real explanation.
I have absolutely no problem with "Fact checking" because at least it shows the original thing. I have a big problem with shadow banning, deleting and outright banning. The latter is censorship.
Then if you go the way of Reddit you will please one side and make the other even more angry.
I think the problem is that we see what is happening in the US with poverty and the middle class, but instead we focus on tribalism.
Not sure what the solution is here.
There was this ideal of the internet with information being freely distributed and available, that people would seek out truth. What we have seen though is that large groups of people just believe whoever has the bigger microphone.
Yes they did. In fact, in Twitter's case, they explictly altered their policies so that the failure to take action against this very same POTUS would no longer be a blatant failure to enforce it's generally-applicable policies.
Twitter has apparently had something of a change of heart about that blatant favoritism, and adopted completely new rules to reign in the monster their own rule change created on their platform, but it is not at all the case that the rules that were in place until recently were not crafted with this kind of Presidential action in mind; not only was it generally in minf, the rules were, in fact, created to license this kind of action for the benefit of this specific President, without allowing a level playing field for his opponents.
That's why the fact they even tried, at least in my mind, guaranteed they would fail.
The other side has outright banned questioning important tribal narratives. (That I happen to agree with those tribal narratives is besides the point)
Facebook had a news team that hand-curated top stories (to stop obvious lies going viral). As was the nature of these young news teams, they were more liberal than the average viewer of Fox News. Prominent media personalities on Fox News, as well as US senators agitated that this was biased against conservatives.
Facebook then fired all the editors, and obvious fake news took over the site, with predictable results (who would have thought that the Pope would endorse Trump?).
This incident is important context. Also note that the most engaging content on FB is right-wing conservative content, not left-wing content.
Like, FB tried desperately hard to avoid regulating speech on their platform, but both sides demanded it, leaving them in a position where both groups of partisans think they are biased towards the other side.
> And even before all that crap below up, they had the gov't taking a long and hard look at the anti-trust problem. The platform censorship just threw gasoline on that smoldering fire.
The conflation of these two things makes me very said. There are 100% huge anti-trust concerns around Big Tech, but the censorship crap is a sideshow that will end up preventing any bi-partisan action on this (if I was a super-cynical policy exec at these companies I might even say, just as planned....).
Then the goat was chosen to moderate the cabbage and here we are. If the predictions hold, the ironic end will be, some CEOs blown up by a terrorism wave they helped to create. Thus ended the lesson and the revolution can now eat its kids
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/is-meaningful-section-230...
It's possible that there is some emergent behaviour in markets with large companies and it might even seem like it's a single 'person', but it's not and it makes discussing specifics really hard. Perhaps it's an american thing, but it seems really odd looking from the outside in.
If we're going to be that far removed from reality you might as well live in the woods and fling poo at each other.
A public platform is the only solution that fixes our free speech problem.
I found Twitter too toxic, it made me angry with people for no reason, so I deleted all my tweets and the app. No more notifications, no more “just checking Twitter quickly”.
I now go to Twitter like once a day just to have a look what is going and and oh my god, the more I am absent the more I see how rotten Twitter is and all of its users. Everyone is so negative, pessimistic, judgemental, sarcastic in tone, confrontational, and self righteous. People are posting so much shit it’s unbelievable how much time they waste of their lives there. One huge thread after another, people crying for attention.
Everyone just posting negative stuff to make other people feel bad, down or guilty about something. I was part of the problem too.
Lots of this:
> “When I was a kid, I once had to work at my uncle’s shop. Let me tell you about <insert bullshit here>. A thread...”
I don’t know what Parler is, but Twitter is THE WORST of social media and if Parler is an alternative then it’s going to be equally bad!
Second and most importantly, follow a set of users that are interesting, friendly, and who don’t engage publicly with trolls. It’s a magnificent tool for staying up to date with a narrow topic like a niche technology.
Just unfollow or block the negative people and trolls.
Because your peers will only get their side of the story while they're criticising you.
> This isn’t high school.
Sorry not sure what you mean here. What does school have to do with it?
1. Only enable notifications and DMs from mutual follows. People who get into pile ons don't tend to follow their "arch enemies" to do so (because their followers would not like them to follow "the wrong people"). You have full control over who can pester you.
2. Walk away from conversations if your get harrassed, bored or annoyed, but be clear that you are doing it. "This is going nowhere and it's getting late. I'm muting this thread". Again, you have control. If you imagine getting into a heated debate in the pub, this is the equivalent of leaving the table to talk to another group. It gives you the ability to peacefully walk away, and deny someone the opportunity to keep arguing with you against your will.
3. Realise that people don't change their minds during an argument. Always give them room to back down. A cornered animal will always lash out, and we are just animals.
4. Always be clear and civil. Be generous. Don't assume that people are acting out of malice.
5. In sometime is a toxic person who causes pile ons, quote tweets you, intentionally misrepresents you by cherry picking your comments out of context, doxes etc, block the fuck out of them.
Yes. Twitter is fantastic only if you accept that you can’t have arguments on it. It’s just not a good idea. But not all conversation requires disagreement.
Also: I use Twitter as a news feed. I don’t tweet, just read. For me it’s the successor of rss.
I'm not sure where John Cleese would be, but I don't think it would help
No, I think there's a big difference between an echo chamber constructed by algorithms that push content upon you without your consent or knowledge, and an "echo chamber" constructed by yourself when you actively curate and trim the media you consume.
You and your wife's suggestions are really good ideas, but for them to be effective, it's essential that you exercise control over what hits your eyeballs. Twitter, in particular, is a hot mess. I use the "muted words" feature to filter out tweets that contain words that raise my blood pressure, it's now well over 200 words since late 2016. Is that a making a bubble? Perhaps, but I've found it's better to engage with that subject matter in a time and context of my own choosing rather than having it dropped into "my feed".
What is the difference?
The problem is that people have become hyper-partisan en masse and whether they arrived there because of "the algorithm" or because they intentionally filter out sources they disagree with ... it doesn't really matter.
https://www.allsides.com/filter-bubbles
The real problem (in my humble opinion) is that there is too much news and it's almost all intentionally biased to some extent. It's therefore not practical for people to keep up with the news without entering an echo chamber. You would have to, for each instance of "news", read at least 3 versions of it to ensure you are considering all perspectives. No one is going to do that.
Do people want to consume net unbiased news? Everyone says they do but consumption patterns says otherwise. Is it commercially viable to produce unbiased news? It used to be favorable but now distribution is cheap and there is more competition so the incentives are to be more biased and find a niche.
I don't think this is a solvable problem, the genie is out of the bottle. This is just a price we pay societally for having the Internet.
At the end of the day, we're each responsible for making sense of the world from news sources. People get too hung up on the concept of "unbiased". I think that's an unrealistic ideal when it comes to politics. It's like wanting to eat fruit but always expecting it to be peeled for you, meticulously, and placed on your plate without blemishes or bruises.
While it's certainly possible to responsibly and critically "consume a feed" that has been algorithmically generated for you based on your history of media consumption behavior and your social network attributes-- it's much more efficient to seek out high quality sources of information.
That doesn't mean block out everything you disagree with, but it does mean block out noise and consider what you give your attention to. You can't do that easily when a third party is dumping garbage onto the page for the sake of motivations that have little to do with informing you.
I have a simple rule: I won't block or defollow based on your ideas, but I will do it very quickly if you are obnoxious, boring, trying to build an audience on twitter to sell products or build a brand or otherwise act stupid.
It is easier to follow my "don't say stupid things" if we already agree on most things, so I relax it a bit for those whom I disagree with to only include not denying reality and being non-stupid within their world view (e.g I am not going to follow someone who posts about 5G covid, but I have followed people who are against abortions.
Isn't there the problem where your favorite "celebrity" you follow posts nice stuff but when election or some other event is happening they start posting a ton of "off-topic" stuff ?
Them posting that stuff isn't a "problem" just because you do not appreciate some of the content.
I just see tweets from those I follow, in chronological order, with no ads.
If I saw ads, “recommended” or “trending” etc., I’d get off that client in a hurry.
That’s my point: Twitter isn’t half as good if using the official clients.
I don’t think it’s possible to create a safe space from opinions you disagree with. What happens on twitter could happen with your friend or uncle. On Twitter it’s at least easy to unfollow someone and it’s not a personal tragedy like it is if you need to break from a relative because they turn out to believe in conspiracy theories.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
Except it isn't actually anonymity (or pseudonymity) per-se, as the phenomenon has long existed in many other contexts as well:
https://youtu.be/kFHT1lw3vSI
You can probably generalize to something like "technologically mediated assholism", but there is more than one thing happening here, such as:
+ Filter bubbles/homogeneous in-group opinions lead people to becoming more extreme in their views.
+ Observing some rando (it doesn't have to be an authority figure, although that helps) "say the quiet part out loud" is validating, to say the least.
+ Lack of f2f contact leads to thinking of individuals as impersonal abstractions, and in particular, as the "other".
+ The pathetic fallacy applies to groups just as it does to inanimate objects.
+ Text communication often causes people to misread tone.
+ The affective fallacy (the assumption that the effect of an action was the intent behind it) becomes particularly powerful because of the former two points.
+ The affective fallacy seems to operate in reverse too: Someone informing you of an outcome seems like they are making a claim about your intent.
+ No-one is a villain in their own story. On the internet, everything is a story, and if the story is about someone like you, obviously they can't be a villain either.
+ Exposure to information that conflicts with (even weakly held) beliefs tied to a person's identity often triggers defensive rejection of the new information and strengthens those beliefs.
+ Group dynamics are in play for public interactions, so there is always a performative aspect even for ostensibly 1-to-1 communications. This often doesn't get turned off for private electronic channels such as email.
And so on. A lot of these mental quirks are like ratchets that only ever tighten. Although each in isolation is often self limiting, the limiter can be bypassed by some other quirk, after which the ratchet can tighten some more.
The above poster is right on. That your favorite poet or whoever can fly off the handle with their toxic political faction-war delusions or whatever is a direct contradiction to the common idea where Twitter is useful for following your favorite X.
It often sucks the fun out of things you like and it’s a good reason to not use it at all. Nobody is pitching “safe spaces” here. But it’s a good time to ask yourself how much a toxic one is going to enrich your life.
Getting off Twitter and Reddit are two great life upgrade tips.
You follow Twitter accounts. Those can be thematic slices of humans, whole humans, aggregates of humans, or lots of different things.
I was thinking you could have say a way to tag your posts or shares so your professional posts and personal posts could be separated but the "activist" would ignore the tags so they push their message to everyone. So as other suggested you would need a filter on client side to get around people that attempt to push some to everyone.
A blog/website with an RSS feed is even better, IMO. And for in-depth discussions traditional forums (or even subreddits) beat Twitter easily. Twitter is the king of low-effort posting.
https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/
I prefer twitter's method to RSS feeds. I need curation with the amount of content that my list publishes.
If you do want to continue in Twitter, change your location. I used to follow key topics (like Go and Flutter) on Twitter, but couldn't avoid the nasty "trends" Twitter throws at you that (IMO) are very biased. So, I set my location as Iceland (I live in the US), and after that life has been good. :)
> "Wonder if shaping discourse via a site where performativity is rewarded, single lines can be taken out of context from qualifying threads and piled on, pithy takes are amplified over nuance, and everyone is either Good or Bad, was overall a positive or negative development"
For example you can't subscribe to grugq for political-infosec content without some IRA memes. And I don't mean that other people shouldn't post stuff they want, just that I'd like to see a filtered view of their posts most of the time. After a few iterations I gave up Twitter almost completely.
I wish Twitter allowed people to tweet into different personal channels, and I could only subscribe to the personal channels I'm interested in.
Social networks badly need to evolve. What they are currently is quickly eroding the social fabrics.
But, I have all Twitter alerts turned off, and only check every few days. I rarely look at my own Twitter timeline and instead go directly to people's timeline who I have found will have the news I'm interested in.
It's a blazing fast way of accessing Twitter content.
Did you read what I said? I have stopped using Twitter. I don't tweet, I don't have the app, I don't engage in anything what happens there now.
I just occasionally peek in to see if I'm missing out on anything and surprisingly I don't. As a result I see myself (unconsciously) check Twitter less and less.
> I just occasionally [use Twitter] to see if . . .
Hm.
My current Twitter “usage” is the same concept. You decide if you call this a Twitter user or not.
That's the thing: it's become extremely deeply embedded in our society, since it's damn catnip to 24-hour news (which, IMO, was the originator of this problem - they need content, now, and anything which provides is thrown up there).
Switching to chronological mode, aggressively unfollowing the rude people who think that their technical knowledge allows them to plaster their opinions on your face, and changing my location to burundi did it for me.
This is where the major problem lies and you don't even realize you're complicit in it. The "current events" blasted out on Twitter are curated by Twitter admins to only show what they want to show. They place heavy over-weighting on events and discussion that they want everyone to see. They hide hashtags they don't want trending. They don't show a pure list of what's actually trending. They shadow-ban users that talk about topics they don't want talked about. They give priority to media outlets that are also involved in heavy censorship, therefore adding extra fake credibility to false narratives. And the latest is the whole "Fact check" thing, where they only fact check the discussion that they want discredited (even if it's 100% true).
You are an example how censorship is so powerful. When people believe they've found a "good way to follow current events", and refuse to question the accuracy of the medium, they quickly become prone to believing false narratives. Currently, the elites who own the media are doing everything in their power to further the left's agenda. (The active campaign is their attempt to cover up and discredit any discussion of election fraud. Also, you probably didn't hear that Zuckerberg donated half a billion dollars towards democrat vote-counting strategies) Many people want to bury their head in the sand because it aligns with their political beliefs. Hopefully this is a wake up call to some.
I didnt even know that it exists. I meant twitter users that cover current events (like wars), that you can find by searching or through other social media. It works like a telegraph office. I agree that algorithms range from plain bad and lazy to dangerous. If one thinks that what's trending on twitter is reality, they are delusional
God forbid people be able to exercise the right to vote.
“A conservative legal group, Thomas More Society, has filed lawsuits in eight states, including the presidential battlegrounds of Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Iowa, seeking to block the grants from going through”
Also, donations towards partisan strategies meant to directly impact election results aren't allowed.
"Mr. Landry said one way the grant money could be used would be to send out prepaid return ballots in heavily Democratic districts around New Orleans, “while some guy in a rural parish [a conservative area] still has to buy his 50-cent stamp.”"
"Though the CTCL maintains it is a non-partisan organization that offers “free and low-cost resources for local election administrators” with no regard to political leaning, the group’s founders each boast records in progressive and pro-Democratic circles. Prior to creating the CTCL, all three founding members – Tiana Epps-Johnson, Donny Bridges and Whitney May – held top positions with the New Organizing Institute, described by the Washington Post in 2014 as “the left's think tank for campaign know-how.” Epps-Johnson also remains a fellow at the Obama Foundation, her LinkedIn page shows."
"In Philadelphia, long a Democratic stronghold, money provided by the center is to be used to establish 800 polling places, an increase of 76% the number of polling places"
Reference: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/oct/29/zuckerberg-...
Curiously, the right (and you) have no problem with 42 other states having access to those grants, but god forbid any purple states get that money. The fact that Joe Bob lives in a rural parish that wont apply for grants is on your team, not those sneaky lefties.
“800 polling places”
Why do people loathe making voting accessible? What does it matter how many there are? That’s the best you can do on a site that loathes Zuck?
Has the Moonie Times found Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate yet? See, I do read it, and I have a very long memory. Thx for playing.
I'm sorry for triggering you with non thought-police compliant dialogue. You may re-enter your safe echo chamber now where your participation awards are waiting.
I especially despise the “trends” sections. It ignores any keywords and sites that you’ve blocked and seems designed to inflame. Dorsey at one point made a big statement about trying to change the tone but I’ve seen little evidence of it.
I have a small list of people that I actually follow who tend to keep things civil
Now I haven't used Facebook for six weeks (I still use Instagram and Messenger). I don't miss it at all. If I'm bored or tired, every once in a while I'll reflexively start to open it in a browser tab but so far I have always caught myself and not gone into the Zuckerworld.
I'm not active on Twitter but I imagine it's more of the same.
I doubt if some Alternabook that lets conspiracy theorists go nuts in their own little bubble will make the world a better place, but I'm not convinced it'll be any worse than what Facebook and Twitter have been doing.
I do wonder if this might make them less useful for advertisers.
The internet has brought communication to everyone that travels at incredible speed. This has the effect of causing emotive responses, rather than reasoned. Requires no effort at all to respond, and encourages the toxicity you describe. What gains most traction are those posts that are the most emotive. It used to be "if it bleeds, it leads", but I suspect these days it's more akin to "emotion deserves promotion".
Speed carries a number of other implications. For example, it allows a cheap, steady stream of constant information that can be completely irrelevant at best to you, plus it's information about which you often can do nothing about, except hit the reply button. This can only make things worse, because people feel powerless except in this superficial way.
The other effect is the quantity of information, and it's impossible now for a user of the internet to wade through it, or even validate it without incredible effort. Our current techniques for filtering that information is essentially populist individualism: we rely on what other people have liked, linked to, or shared, but at the same time, read what is presented to us based on our previous interactions.
I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that I perhaps pessimistically feel that these things are fundamentally baked into the medium, in much the same way that Neil Postman felt entertainment was intrinsically baked into television. Hopefully I'm wrong, and there are solutions to these things. Not sure what they are myself.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
I agree there may not be a solution, given the technology we now have and the minds we'll never improve upon in our lifetimes.
But I think we have to try...
Twitter isn't making good decisions. The killed Vine and gave Musicaly and then TikTok oxygen. Their censorship is giving rise to competitors.
https://www.vox.com/2018/9/14/17857622/twitter-liberal-emplo...
> Twitter is so liberal that its conservative employees ‘don’t feel safe to express their opinions,’ says CEO Jack Dorsey.
https://www.vox.com/2018/10/31/18039528/tech-employees-polit...
> Employee donations to midterm candidates by party
> Twitter 98.7% Democratic
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/facebook-twitter-employees-...
> Twitter employees donated $347,270, or 98.99% of total federal donations, to Democrats, making individual donations of $200 or more. Meanwhile, only $3,556, or 1.01%, of federal donations from Twitter employees went to Republicans.
https://psmag.com/news/the-seven-political-tribes-of-america
Progressive Activist 8%
If Twitter was willing to mind its own business, Parler wouldn't exist.
Whoops!
The system is a law.
The system was designed by Hamilton alone (or nearly so).
The system was designed to prevent a popular but unfit candidate.
You seem to be arguing that because one of those three is inarguably correct that Twitter shouldn’t be giving a “this tweet may not be correct” warning. That’s not how it should work, IMO.
There is no way around it because humans are deeply emotionally flawed, and these flaws are amplified by our technology. No amount of technology will fix it, as it will just be another catalyst.
Looking elsewhere in the branches of life for intelligence, such as octopuses, whales, in particular orcas, and elephants, we see different types. Are they more or less emotional? The communal spirit of elephants and that of orcas, the latter of which showcase particularly striking examples of cooperation, does make you wonder. But then it again, it makes you wonder if all higher forms of intelligence lead you to take advantage of a greater amount of situations and why we even bother trying to establish ourselves out there for other intelligent lifeforms to find.
Since then, my favorite instance was killed by a bunch of irony-poisoned instances ganging up on it to convince others it was a toxic hell (projection!) and defederate from it. The instance was basically dead within a week as people migrated off to avoid losing contact with friends on the fediverse.
https://twitter.com/DamienGranz/status/1314710715635204103
It's not much different from people ganging up on someone on Twitter to report them into an automated suspension.
[1] Instances choose how to render things delivered over ActivityPub. So (for example) Mastodon would render a write.as post as a toot, while write.as might render replies to that toot as comments on a blog post.
Imho this is one thing that Slashdot does better: it let's you indicate the reason for your vote.
Isn't that what we are discussing - platforms, their rules, and how that influences discussions? I'm just saying that there are plenty of people, in my experience on here, that would rather downvote an opposing opinion rather than start a discussion about it or answer a question about their own position.
I routinely even get downvoted when asking why the previous comment was downvoted. To me, these behaviors are akin to mob-driven censorship of minority opinions - downvote it so it moves down and greys out.
But then switch over to a different thread where the topic of discussion is not some abstract idea like this, but rather an object level idea, say just for example a news story about conservative leaning people switching to a new social media platform to escape what they consider to be censorship, and something very curious occurs. In such threads, it is rare to encounter much talk about this phenomenon of psychological bias, and if it does come up, it is ~always only about the obvious bias suffered by those who are in the ~"general outgroup" of the forum community. In those cases, it is common to read numerous anecdotal observations of how people in the outgroup(s) are cognitively flawed in that they exhibit signs of "living in a bubble", and "just(!) won't listen to reason or consider ideas that are contrary to their worldview".
But then if one is to initiate a conversation with a person in one of these threads, and make a reference to the formerly non-controversial abstract idea (from the psychology thread) that ~all people suffer from some bias, at ~all times, it seems as if all knowledge of that phenomenon has somehow become cognitively inaccessible, that the individual has no knowledge whatsoever of the phenomenon.
Conversely, if one is to mention (say, in a different subthread in the same overall thread) this exact same phenomenon, except switching the object of reference away from the person (who was making a biased comment about their outgroup), over to members of the outgroup, this formerly inaccessible knowledge then becomes accessible once again.
Just for the sake of discussion (a mental experiment of sorts), let us imagine that there is some significant truth to this theory - let's (temporarily) assume(!) it to be True, at least to a significant degree. In this purely hypothetical scenario, might this phenomenon offer some logical explanation for the amount of extreme polarization of opinion that can be witnessed in the world, this "crisis of epistemology" we talk about where different tribes seem to live in completely different realities from each other, with each reality having significantly different sets of facts? To me, this seems not only reasonable, but quite consistent with objectively observable reality.
I am not talking about marketing. I am talking about a very specific neurological/psychological phenomenon, that is highly suggestive that memory access is dynamic, that it varies on the topic, that it varies based on perspective (abstract vs real-time object level), and that it occurs here on HN.
My claim is also contrary to a claim higher in the thread:
>>> Compare this to how things were 15 years ago, [or how they are in here, where everyone and their dog can challenge your opinion]. [You become more open minded long term, and can handle criticism in a more mature way].
Now it's true that on a relative basis, HN is superior to many other forums, and also that it is true to some degree that certain opinions can be challenged, and subsequent discussions will be handled in a mature way.
This is far from comprehensively true though. And also, it can be observed that people seem to not like to discuss this idea (that certain topics cannot be maturely discussed on HN, including the the abstract idea that certain topics cannot be maturely discussed on HN).
Just for the sake of discussion (a mental experiment of sorts), let us imagine that there is some significant truth to this theory - let's (temporarily) assume(!) it to be True, at least to a significant degree. In this purely hypothetical scenario, might this phenomenon offer some logical explanation for the amount of extreme polarization of opinion that can be witnessed in the world etc.?
The answer is yes. If people’s political opinions were being manipulated by aliens en masse (assumed as a premise), then it would be very likely that the amount of polarization in the world would have some connection to that.
But assuming arbitrary premises like this this doesn’t seem like a very useful way to learn about the real world.
See this comment is interesting, here are two ways (there may be more):
1. You have made a rather significant change in the topic.
I was talking about: "It's so interesting...there is this well known phenomenon where ~everyone has at least some bias the vast majority of the time, and in a forum thread...."
But you switched the topic, to the examination an attribute: arbitrariness
2. You have described a hypothetical scenario, focused attention one one single attribute, and then suggested/implied that the two scenarios are ~"the same". Also, in doing so, you are treating "arbitrary" as a boolean, which might cause a reader to not realize that the degree of arbitrariness is not even close to the same. This technique would generally fall under the Strawman Argument category.
These are really enjoyable conversations, let me know if you have more ideas.
There's actually a handbook (can't remember the name at the moment) of some sort floating around the internet that goes through lots of these techniques, in case you're interested in this sort of thing.
I also entirely stopped using Reddit for the same reason. IMHO it's even more toxic than Twitter.
And don't get me started about Facebook. What is it about politics that takes relatively sane friendly people who you've known for years and transforms them into raging psychopaths? When my own sister found out I didn't think Trump was a literal Nazi, she then proceeded to call me a racist, with all her douchebag "online friends" cheering her on. And before Facebook, we used to get along really well. But now it's like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.
I've ditched the lot, deleted my reddit and twitter accounts, configured my pihole to block the domains for the occasions that my willpower fails me and my life has improved dramatically.
But yes, I’ve found that without careful curation, it quickly turns into a depressing cesspit. Then again, that’s not unique to Twitter. I culled my contacts in the real world when in high-school and college for the same reasons and to the same effect.
Done the same on Facebook, which I use mostly for family communication and posting dad jokes. But again, as hard as I try to separate work / family life, colleagues want to connect and they spew the same tired BS I see elsewhere.
So, on FB, I can permanently mute them. Which, I do.
If twitter's business model was to be a toxic stew of partisan talk and censorship of "incorrect views", yeah, they nailed it.
Facebook I stopped using a while back. It gives me the feeling of universal garbage bag where everyone in a race to impress others. On twitter I follow top people from my domain and ignore everything. No political BS. In LinkedIn, I literally removed all HR connections and started to follow people whom I really adore and take direction from their career path.
You have to see it for what it is: An online digital slot machine. The stakes are, well your time and your life. And just like in real life, the house always wins.
The thing about Twitter is that it is entirely about who you follow, and what those people talk about and retweet. So if somebody is a source of toxicity, unfollow them. I have a very low threshold for both following and unfollowing.
This part, curating your feed, is not trivial, but it is what determines 100% of your experience. I don't blame you at all for having a bad experience and not wanting to use Twitter again! But also realize that it's not the only experience to be had there, and I think that for many, and hopefully most people, it's a positive experience.
Thus, Twitter is horrible, no matter the fake emotional output of a single user's anecdotal experience.
If this default is "horrible" can you say more about that?
> fake emotional output of a single user's anecdotal experience
What do you mean by this? What is the emotional output and what is fake? Are you talking about my single user's experience, or that of the person I replied to?
> I was part of the problem too.
Not to be overly personal here, but doesn't this post veer close to describing itself?
Look at how many negative words are in this post of yours and hopefully see the irony of what you’re saying. Twitter isn’t magic, it can only give you what it thinks you want from what you give it!
If you’re seeing Tweets that make you angry, unfollow that person. It’s really as simple as that.
If someone doesn’t have the willpower to avoid anger-inducing follows and tweets, deleting Twitter entirely is a good option. For everyone else, it’s really not difficult to curate your feed to be more reasonable.
Use the unfollow button liberally.
But I eventually realized what it really is: a gossip site. With all the mean gossip anyone could ever want.
I pretty much just ignore it now.
What gets thrown out by that filter is all the inconsequential news, and gossip, and speculation, and learning people's knee-jerk reactions before you've had a chance to make up your own mind. You can still seek out all that stuff if you have the impulse, but you aren't being fed it intravenously all the time.
This is all by way of saying that the cost of just cutting these platforms out of your life altogether is pretty low, and there are some benefits.
I still read the news every day (Feedly) and know what's going on, but it's compartmentalized.
Most of the BBS and IRC rooms I frequented had little to no moderation. Flamewars occurred, but everyone eventually calmed the fuck down..you just have to let it burn out almost like how you’d allow a child to have his tantrum and then it’s back to life as usual.
I think moderation and rules are making communication worse. Anyone who has been in a marriage or a relationship can maybe attest to the fact that in the fiery instances where we don’t sit down and ‘figure out rules of engagement’ burn out fast. When there are rules for the emotional pressure valves to be released, arguments and disagreements become nested and multi layered.
In today’s world..we are all toddlers and/or married to each other on social media and Twitter, FB et al have become our nannies creating and putting out meltdowns and tantrums at the same time.
Having said that, IG is still my favourite. Except that they are allergic to images of certain parts of the human anatomy and sometimes even onions can be too sexy for their nipple detection algorithms..but otherwise it’s brimming with joy and positivity.
I'm working on a new open chat site, https://sqwok.im, and hoping to recapture some of that essence. Particularly the simplicity, and lack of overly strict moderation like you describe. Irc never hit mainstream because the majority of users would never download and install a client, but it's neat that with modern web technology we can finally build these experiences in a way that general users can enjoy.
I am unsure tho how to navigate to get to the chat rooms.
ETA: ahhh! I got it! Will there be some form of indexing?
Eta2: can I describe it this way: the author of a topic of discussion is the moderator of the topic?
So the key thing is on Sqwok each post has a built-in chat room instead of comments, meaning that creating your own chat and sharing it with anyone else is as easy as sharing the url for your post. It currently works on mobile and desktop web.
> can I describe it this way: the author of a topic of discussion is the moderator of the topic?
yes this is accurate! I'm still actively building out some key features including ability to do some basic moderation, but that's the plan!
Do you intend to keep it this way? (Please say yes)
will post the link since I'm going to be hanging out there watching the SpaceX Crew 1 launch :D
https://sqwok.im/p/QGSQH214bPZbBQ
hmm, that seems like a bug! the username limit is set at 20 but maybe I accidentally copied that validation onto the password field, I'll remove it, thanks for reporting!
edit: forgot there was #undernet too.. dang, what a fun time. I remember there were a bunch of other servers on top of those but I can't remember them
For starters, here's a good maintained list: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/...
I'm sure I miss a few from time to time, but you get the point.
I've unfollowed lots of tech luminaries I admire, lots of musicians whose music I love, lots of brands that make good products. And I still buy some of the books and albums and products they produce. I might even miss the occasional awesome announcement from one of those outlets. But the resulting sanity and focus of my social media feeds is worth it.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/10/reading-t...
Welcome to planet earth. We hope you enjoy your stay.
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing 'Hallelujah.'
[0]: https://youtu.be/ue7wM0QC5LE
We've seen this movie before. Minds, Gab, Patreon alternatives, Voat, all of this has been done with no success.
Whatever you open to the public will be infiltrated by the enemy. I think the new model is to do it secretly in closed groups away from the public, preferably local groups where you meet with people in person, have strict rules and only sign up new users via strong referrals: family members, close friends etc. Once some of them work well, they can be franchised. A very good example of this is Freemasonry.
Yes, such social networks will be much slower and decentralized but they will be much more effective and better for the members long-term.
Can you explain what you mean by this? I wouldn't have thought that the average user of social media had that many enemies, but i could be wrong.
In fact, one can do much more damage to an online community, specially if it can have anonymous users.
This is a hell of a take on free speech.
> Freemasonry
Ah, by "enemy" do you just mean "women and Catholics?"
The people who run the platforms directly or those who help them operate via partnerships, investments, can be threatened, bought or invited to the current equivalent of the Epstein's island... and they'll eventually have to get in line.
The current assumption that these tech companies work the way they do because of the ideology of people who own them or work for them is either very incomplete or completely flawed.
One reason of censorship becomes so prevailing is because of advertising. The advertisers ultimately defines what is 'toxic' and what not.
If Parler can stick to its current path and manage to survive, it would pretty significant to the internet ecosystem.
Nike shoes is an interesting recent example. They embraced the controversial NFL player Colin Kaepernick in various advertising campaigns, playing in his bravery for kneeling during the National Anthem of the United States. However this was not some sort of altruistic, egalitarian business campaign. It was a cold calculation from their data which said young people buy their products and young people are sympathetic to his cause and therefore we will sell more shoes going with this endorsement. It helped make Nike, a company with a very spotty humanitarian history and questions of exploitive labor practices, a corporation their audience of largely young progressive people felt identified with them.
Advertising is about as cynical as it gets. For some companies it will make sense to “choose a side” which when thinking about it is as absurd and ridiculous as something could be. What would Adam Smith make of this?