Wish I could find a more neutral source, but this is what is available. I was surprised to see this, I had thought that shadowbans on twitter were like those on reddit, so only used for non-human bots.
It now seems populated with a combined 3 results between the two tabs linked. If it is a technical malfunction rather than a shadow ban, what do you suspect is happening?
EDIT: Adding archive links for proof, looks like 4 results combined:
In the eyes of the neoliberal, you're only supposed to use identity politics to attack your enemy, not as a means of stating basic facts such as she's Italy's first female PM.
nit: she is the head of the party that received most votes. She will probably be prime minister, but for now no government was proposed to the president, even the new parliament will not start for another week
I think ID Pol only includes using ones race, sex, gender, sexual orientation as proof of sound ideology and as a defense when criticized. Saying fascist and communist is a blanket insult to one's enemies, often heard in a screaming tone.
In her case, though, she’s literally been involved in neo-fascist politics since she was a teenager. She’s spoken glowingly about Mussolini and Almirante. Maybe it would be more accurate to call her a neo-fascist, but regardless, it’s not hyperbole.
Sometimes it's ascribing the worst possible motive to someone you disagree with - sometimes you disagree with someone who has the worst possible motives. You're saying it's the former, I'm saying recently we've seen a lot of the latter.
63% of the italian population turned up to vote. Of those 63%, just 26% voted for georgia melani’s party. She has a mandate from 16.4% of italians (26% of 63%).
Next you’ll be defending putin, you know he wins in a landslide every election right?
I'm guessing those numbers are fairly typical for the ruling party in Italy where elections are typically fairly fragmented and chaotic.
So that result is likely just as legitimate as any previous result.
I'm also guessing the overwhelming majority of people that voted in this election aren't nazis.
By your “look at the numbers, 50%” logic, putin is probably good (77% of the vote), and italy could easily have elected a fascist (26% of the vote or 16% of the population).
Turns out the “numbers” aren’t a very good indicator. I’d suggest we should look to what they say for signs of autocratic, kleptocratic, fascist, or nazi ideas.
As far as I'm aware, Italy has free and fair elections and Russia doesnt so apples, oranges etc
As to whether she is a "fascist" (your word) I'II wait and see.
I certainly wont pay any attention to the predictable left-wing, media-accelerated hyperbole.
1. The premise that ideologies exist in the world that are so extreme and violent in their nature that they should receive zero tolerance (e.g. nazism, fascism).
2. The premise that people who tolerate an ideology are tainted by that association.
3. That Georgia Meloni is a fascist.
Because 1 and 2 are not extremist views. They're held quite widely, and I don't think there are many people who believe you should sit down and listen when a nazi talks.
You say that my view is "My political opponents are Nazis" - but that's not what I've said at all. I believe that nazis are nazis, fascists are fascist, and these SPECIFIC ideas are beyond tolerance. Not just any idea I disagree with - there are plenty of ideas that I am politically opposed to that I strongly disagree with but I will gladly tolerate. Just not core premises like "do these people deserve to live" or "do these people deserve dignity".
> This is the democratically elected head of a state.
No, just a democratically elected member of Parliament. The head of state is the president, elected by the Parliament. That president picks a prime minister which needs to be approved by the parliament.
> Their first female PM.
Not yet. The Italian president has yet to name a PM candidate.
I can confirm I get the same results. Testing for other leaders, I get plenty of results for e.g. Emanuel Macron. Ironically, the first result is a speech of Meloni addressing Macron.
By the time they fix the "accidental bug triggered by anomalously high search volume" (or some similar excuse), the interest spike in Meloni will have passed, and her videos' reach will have been successfully stifled.
And they'll learn their lesson, and next time will just reduce the visibility of her and her associates' posts. Assuming they haven't already also done that.
+1 I was also shocked to hear in a news conference the EU president Ursula von der Leyen threaten the Italian voters right before the election. Seriously, I was shocked. So much for believing in democracy.
I am very liberal politically, but I 100% support people on the right wing who run into trouble with the Neoliberal overlords.
We need to have respect for all people's opinions (that are non-violent, etc.) and support all people's rights to vote as they wish. I think the Neoliberals must envy China's authoritarian control of their population, because that is what I think the Neoliberals want also.
BTW, I joined the World Economic Forum for a while just to read directly what they were up to.
Likewise, left leaning and i find it shocking. And as much as i want to not criticise the eu and its politics i simply can’t. Always sanctions and threats what happened to cooperation and mutual understanding?
During a conference on Thursday at Princeton University, an attendant pointed out to von der Leyen that “figures close to Putin” were among candidates for the upcoming legislative election on Sunday. “We’ll see,” she replied. “If things go in a difficult direction — and I’ve spoken about Hungary and Poland — we have the tools.” - https://www.politico.eu/article/italy-election-candidate-war...
> “If things go in a difficult direction — and I’ve spoken about Hungary and Poland — we have the tools.”
Please explain what led you to interpret this as a threat of any form. The Orban reference was pretty clear.
From the article:
> "This is a clear reference to the ability of the European Commission to cut funds allocated to member countries when they are deemed to be violating the rule of law."
They can't cut funding for "not voting the way they want". Funding can be held back if governments violate treaty obligations, after a lengthy process. (I.e. the other referenced examples have clear reasons why the process is running, and it's not because who the voters voted for ...)
And maybe von der Leyen will lobby for a stricter reading of those treaties if the wrong party gets elected, which is the subtext of her words, obvious to all but the most willfully obtuse.
So some lawyers will spend some extra years fighting over some edge cases, with very unclear results if its not something serious but a fishing operation as you suggest. Or some actual legal issues will have to be resolved. Scary.
Love that you finally admit they were threats, and now are just trying to minimize them. Go ask the Germans how empty Biden’s threats to end the gas pipelines they depended on were.
No, I merely argue that if you read them to be threats in that sense, they are pretty pointless threats. And it thus makes little sense to read them as such, because they would be such unimpressive threats.
Your US/Germany comparison doesn't work, since that's an entirely different situation. For starters, a state like the US can actually apply pressure or use force, because there isn't an established strong framework saying it can't nor anything directly enforcing what little there is. US enforced sanctions over the pipeline construction because it didn't like the pipeline, nothing Germany can do directly. (And if you want to assume the recent sabotage was the US, pretty much the same applies)
The commission is just not an independent state-level actor in that way. It's actually constrained by a state-like legal framework around it, granting it limited powers for specific purposes. Outside of those, it can and will be reigned in very quickly.
But who oversees the rule of law within the eu commission? Ursula is infamously corrupt, incompetent and rejected by germans, who sanctions the eu commission when it itself violates the “rule of law”? Dont get me wrong, i agree with the principle, but the eu needs reform. Each time anyone dares raise such desire they are either immediately pushed back or threatened with sanctions.
I know the theory but my question was more philosophical.
Corruption isnt just taking bribes. Urusula’s comments are akin to coercing voters into voting against their preference and are a clear violation of treaties whereby the eu has no right to intervene in the sovereign voting process of member states. Its not like italians were bribed or forced into voting a certain way. That means ursula is abusing a position of power in favour of certain political parties with the threat of cutting funding if their new leader isnt docile enough. That is corruption and the perfectly fine eu courts will never sanction her for it.
I think that's interpreting too much into the comment, especially with the reference to Poland and Hungary: It's saying that if the governments cause problems with EU law, the commission has tools to handle that. The commission does not have the power to just cut funding without a reason, and if it ever attempts to do so the EU courts will put a stop to it. The treaty violation processes are slow, intentionally. (And the majority of member states is quite happy with that, since most of them run into that occasionally, and also has all the reasons to not stand for that)
"We'll pay close attention if you stick to the laws" is pretty much the worst the commission can really threaten a government, which isn't really all that much if there is nothing serious to punish.
You could be right, lets see how things develop. But cornering the leader of a country from the get go can have the effect of rallying people around said leader and galvanising their position. You know, national pride and all. Instead ursula should have shown a bit more diplomacy and tact. The british have been rallied around brexiteers precisely because of a lack of diplomacy and tact on eu’s part. They basically said nein to any attempt of negotiation, voters put up their two fingers because of sovereign pride and all and here we are.
> My approach is that whatever democratic government is willing to work with us, we're working together," von der Leyen said at Princeton University in the United States on Thursday, responding to a question on whether there were any concerns with regard to the upcoming elections in Italy.
> "If things go in a difficult direction, I've spoken about Hungary and Poland, we have tools," she added.
So a liberal democratic organization is prepared to protect itself from sabotage from fascist organizations that are actively manipulated by external actors to undermine them. That's your threat.
I assumed that you were using "liberal democratic organization" in jest, but now I am not sure. Would you like to elaborate on your "actively maniuplated by external actors" statement? Is this something like the Russiagate hoax? Are you suggesting Italian voters aren't capable of voting in their own interests?
Which actually is worse for Draghi and the rest of the EU puppets— meaning the voters are so disaffected they couldn’t be bothered to even come out and vote for them.
A corrupt liberal democratic organisation that has no right to intervene in the democratic processes of sovereign member states that have formed an alliance to create the said organisation. I dont agree with polands or hungarys politics but that is not my business. The us is not sanctioning texas or florida for its politics and looney governors. Why is the eu which is not even a federal government daring make such interventions? Who gave them the right? Who voted ursula in in this so called “democracy”?
As much as i’d like the eu to be a federation it’s not quite there yet. At the moment it’s just a mechanism for europeans to dominate each other without starting wars.
Well op does have a point. A certain country is very active in supporting nationalist movements in europe and isolationist policies in the us. The age old divide and conquer. It is a real threat and not a right vs left issue. This is a matter of collective security as the motives behind division have been repeatedly stated: expansion and domination. But i do agree with your sentiment assumed from previous comments, neither right or left leaders have an effective solution to the bigger issue.
Von der Leyen did not refer to "sabotage", "fascist organizations", "external actors". There's a reason that she talks in vague terms about "things going in a difficult direction" and that is that there's nothing more concrete.
> There's a reason that she talks in vague terms (...)
She did not. You're trying to pass off a conspiracy theory by omitting context and taking quotes out of context, including erasing parts of the quote.
If you're still confused just go learn about Victor Orban and Hungary's recent regression into an totalitarian dictatorship that's profoundly illiberal and outright a sock puppet of external actors such as Putin's Russian federation. Go learn about it's destruction of Hungary's independent judiciary and attacks on fundamental human rights, which go against fundamental principles of the European Union, and learn about how the EU has been reacting to this sort of illiberal drift.
Another problem is the term Fascism that's been thrown around willy-nilly. I think next time one uses the term, it is probably worth looking up what Fascism really looks like.
She's bad for italy but shouldn't be banned on twitter as she hasn't actually done anything yet. That will likely be forthcoming in the coming months. You really should take a look at her party's history. She's a lot like trump. A bit moderate-rightish but she prefers strongmen type leaders like Putin and Berlesconi, which I think speaks for her future plans as to how government "should be run"
My point is that we should respect the people of italy and their choice. We should do the same for hungary and poland. Sanctions and threats polarise voters or may even help their cause.
Maybe there is a third option, other than appeasement or threats. Maybe we can try and understand why people of now a third eu member state chose such a political leader.
Cool, we need to figure out why people dont go out and vote while we do respect those that did. Not saying we should blindly agree with their choice, but it feels like there is so much going on beneath the surface that threats will only make things worse.
Because Biden's and his handlers approach is so much better. Things are great, everything is progressing so well, the morons currently in power have us on the brink of WW3. I'm begining to think that HN has the same bot count as twitter.
Coincidentally trump did threaten states with cutting funding for not voting members of his own party. A bit like our leftie ursula, indicating that political ideology is not the cause of the issue. Anyway i dont know much about us internal politics but i do know that however gets elected in the us affects us here in europe. And biden is doing a hell of a job in not appeasing putin. Not sure if his approach is good or bad but he definitely seems to put america firmly on our side. If it was up to our european allies, such as germany, ukraine would have entirely been part of russia today.
Oh but they are compared to republicans. I dont think the right in europe aligns with the right in the us. I think most centre right parties in europe would be seen as left in the us. But you are right the CDU is not left in strictly european terms. Thanks for pointing this out.
> We froze borders, expect by force where people were genocidal, or by diplomacy everywhere else, after world war two.
Who are "we"? How did you "froze" border, what does that even mean?
After the WWII the borders in Europe had shifted multiple times, from the union of eastern and western Germanies and dissolution of the Soviet Union, to the teardown of Yugoslavia, the Kosovo case being the most controversial one.
And that's just Europe, not even talking about the rest of the world.
> Crimea is Ukrainian. Since 1954 love.
In 1954 Crimea had been a part of the Soviet Union, legally an autonomous republic (Crimean Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic). I am not sure which part of it suddenly makes it Ukrainian.
Putin annexed Crimea under Obama's watch. He's just annex half of eastern Ukraine under Biden's watch. How much territory did Putin get under Trump's watch?? 0. Trump is way more on your side then the neocons like Nuland. You think Biden can actually form coherent thoughts? Do you think that Harris has any grasp of Geopolitics? The West has been horribly weakend by liberal democracies propped up by the WEF. Do you think any EU country has the stomach for war? Are you willing to send your sons to die on foreign soil for someone else's fight, because it sure as hell won't be US troops that get deployed.
I was talking to some the other day about why a certain city which has so many minorities vote conservative. Its funny how these celebrate diversity but the moment they vote conservative they lose the ingroup status of minority. The only concern is surface level diversity. True diversity is having some progressive and some conservative thought.
The people who make these decisions, who are the ones signing off on this sort of thing?
Somehow I doubt this went to the board of directors level to ask if they have sign-off on low-key blocking a head of state in a market publicly-traded Twitter Inc. is active in.
It's a VP level thing. Some lowly offshore "content watcher" flags suspicious posts, the important flags bubble up in a email chain to a VP, who makes the decision. That's for high visibility dissenters. This email chain is discoverable if anyone bothers to sue and convince the judge.
If a user/keyword/whatever gets negative karma because previously-blocked nazis fawn over it, newly posted Giorgia Meloni videos will carry a heavy burden, even if that particular video isn't anything to complain about. The ML will guess that the nazis are going to like it, and load the new videos with negative karma.
Thinking aloud, I suppose there are three kinds of bans:
1 - Actual, explicit bans (formal)
2 - Intentional shadowbans (decided by humans)
3 - De-facto shadowbans (unintentional artifacts of ML vertex weighting)
Note that the possibility of 3 occurs even if human intervention is needed to act upon the posts flagged by the ML --- the ML is, in effect, driving the 'attentional map' of the content moderator.
So this specific incident would probably be a case of #3, but it makes people angrier if you suggest it's #2, so that's what people are doing.
In the leaked Elon texts, there were mentions of a suspected cabal that would keep these kind of decisions from the board. So I'm not so sure that leaders trust their own censorship orgs to do the right thing.
Its surprising how effective media censorship can be. Anything the media wilfully chooses to ignore immediately becomes a "fringe conspiracy theory" no matter how real it might be. And any attempt to discuss the subject is viewed in this way.
No one has proved twitter shadow banned anything yet. It could have been a mistake. This is hype from the dailywire which is always full of garbage and is only the same level as breitbart or OAN. For examplet those sites are melting down over Lizza playing a flute own by James Madison (likely because she's a person of color)
Facebook and Twitter outright admitted to blocking content related to Hunter Biden's laptop before the election 2020. They claimed it was for privacy concerns. And then after the election, there was no worry so that rule went away. All of these decisions are of a neoliberal view of the world which is mainly "yes war, identity politics when convenient, block dissent otherwise". This will only continue.
Not sure why this is downvoted, Zuckerberg himself acknowledged the legitimacy* of the H. Biden laptop story and that it was mistakenly blocked. Something like "There was a lot of BS going around at the time and we had to make a call on it quickly and we were wrong." It was fairly level headed if I recall.
*to some extent. I know there were people claiming the laptop tied the Bidens into some sort of demon worshipping child eating cult or something, obviously that's a joke.
At the time it happened, I noted that a lot of goodwill tech companies managed to accumulate over the years will be squandered on an election drama. I agree that the post-fact discussion was better, but real-time panic was palpable. Just doing all that stuff in tandem with Twitter moved the story from conspiracy theory to a simple 'they are colluding so it must be true'.
It is nothing that an average information analyst would not predict. I can only assume reasonable voices were ignored.
HN is my fave place for intellectual discourse. However, I deleted the last line of my comment before posting: "I expect to get downvoted because HN does not tolerate negative discussion of the American Democratic Party". How a brilliant mind can be so beholden to a corrupt institution(s) (either leading American political party) is beyond me.
Litmus test for high IQ is if one can criticize their own party. Better if done in person, people completely fumble followed by a profound realization.
> Facebook and Twitter outright admitted to blocking content related to Hunter Biden's laptop before the election 2020. They claimed it was for privacy concerns. And then after the election, there was no worry so that rule went away.
Isn't that "story" pure bullshit propaganda fabricated in a desperate attempt to manipulate elections?
> It was later admitted by the Times that it was real.
No, not really. That opinion piece just refers to "Hunter Biden's business dealings", which is quite the strawman when compared to the original baseless accusations and conspiracy theories fabricated around hypothetical emails.
The bullshit propaganda fabricated around the laptop's conspiracy theory has bee extensively debunked and widely reported as being nothing more than propaganda.
That's the same trick used on the great replacement. Pick the most conspiratorial, unlikely version of it (evil Jews meeting in secret, plotting to cause immigration to turn whites into an oppressed minority in their own lands, and for no other reason), show that there is no evidence of that, the apply the label of "debunked" to anything that can be vaguely called replacement (relative demographic reduction of white population due to immigration policies enacted since the 1960s).
In other words, an offensive motte and bailey strategy. Attack the motte, then claim you've destroyed the bailey.
You meant the bullshit propaganda about it being some Russian intel plant was debunked, I presume? Because the contents were confirmed as legit, which makes sense since the Bidens never once denied they were authentic. Hunter's business dealings in Ukraine are quite well known and relevant to current events. ;-)
The contents were probably laundered from an iCloud hack if you consider the shady backstory and forensic analysis. Somebody seems to have dumped the rest of it a couple months ago. Of course that got even less attention outside of right wing tabloids.
The iCloud hack was separate. They found plenty on the laptop hard drive. The new stuff mostly just reinforces that he’s a failson, so idiotic or damaged that he films himself weighing his crack. The other notables being that the president was listed as Pedo Pete or something in his contacts list.
From the wiki:
As of 2022, Vox reported that no evidence had ever emerged "that the laptop's leak was a Russian plot."[12] In March 2022, The New York Times reported it had authenticated some emails "from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop."[12][13] Also in March, The Washington Post reported that two security experts authenticated thousands of the 129,000 emails, though the vast majority of the laptop contents, including most of its emails, could not be authenticated.[3] Among the emails that The Washington Post was able to authenticate was the Pozharskyi email that formed the basis of the New York Post's original article.[3]
Not trying to be a pain here, just trying to point out that there was some truth to the claims. I've been quick to dismiss such claims as conspiracy before so I was surprised to find some truth to them. I agree though that many outlets ran too far with the story and it was meme'd too much online. Also doesn't really seem to matter to the public discourse these days anyway with all the other problems the US and the world are facing.
The right always has this obsession with evil McGuffins on the left. Like Hillary’s emails or Hunter’s laptop. I don’t know why voters are able to steer towards caring about these weird objects.
The unfortunate bit is what'll happen is twitter will go "oops we made a mistake", but never acknowledge why this happened in the first place (which is likely because they were doing something nefarious to her ranking on twitter).
The only thing I'd like to see out of the whole Musk-Twitter affair is some transparency on how they actually "rank" things on their site. And I'm sure there's a lot of mud in there.
Of course it was intentional-- Twitter and the rest of the social media companies are infested with former (if not current) spooks, many hired for precisely this sort of work -- "content moderation" policy. Meloni is viewed as not "reliable" for pursuing the proxy war against Russia.
(https://www.mintpressnews.com/how-the-cia-has-infiltrated-so...)
Not sure why you are being downvoted. These are facts that came out in the whole Musk/Nudge fiasco. Everyone watches the matrix and thinks they are Neo, when infact, they are the f*ing battery.
Thanks for that clarification. Always thought it was stupid to go through all that hassle on the matrix infrastructure and simulated worlds just to adopt humans as batteries. Would have been easier to adopt nuclear power instead.
You can (and I personally do) disagree with Twitter banning her content. Even though her views are both offensive and threatening to me. But I don't see why this comment is being downvoted, because it's true. She has without a doubt made incredibly outlandish fascist statements. There's videos of her vehemently speaking at rallies how Istria and Dalmatia need to be reclaimed by Italy, and has had made really distasteful statements and positions against the LGBTQ community. There's... I guess right wing people who'll defend her positions as being patriotic or wanting to "preserve traditional Italian family values"
I've tested the same video search from a twitter account in Portugal and confirm the same (zero) results.
My country lived through a dictatorship not long ago where someone in power decided what citizens could read or not, for "our own good" of course.
To whoever supports this censoring: please remember to remain consistent when these platforms start to shadowban you.
I don't think Italy made a good choice here although I don't know the details. But just like Twitter I just don't know and people have a right to know or learn why she may be a bad choice. The recent strategy of large tech corporations is devastatingly bad, clearly demonstrating their inability to vet and validate content. The people that expect that to do just that are just as much a problem as Twitter itself is here.
Censoring these voices will not help, it will not make their ideas or wants to go away. On the contrary, any differences will become insurmountable.
> please remember to remain consistent when these platforms start to shadowban you.
The people supporting this deserve far more condemnation. They should know better and if they do not they are incapable to make such decisions in the first place. Far more likely is that they plainly spread US propaganda.
132 comments
[ 7.4 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadShadowbans only work against annoying humans that don’t pay attention.
https://twitter.com/search?q=Giorgia+Meloni+filter%3Avideos&...
https://twitter.com/search?q=giorgia%20meloni&f=video
https://twitter.com/search?q=giorgia%20meloni&f=image
It now seems populated with a combined 3 results between the two tabs linked. If it is a technical malfunction rather than a shadow ban, what do you suspect is happening?
EDIT: Adding archive links for proof, looks like 4 results combined:
https://archive.ph/0D8vt
https://archive.ph/Sg4WP
The article is referring to the former (as can be seen from the screenshot).
And the results seem to be changing - when before I got zero results for the video tab search, I now get exactly one - a video posted 3 hours ago.
This is the democratically elected head of a state. Their first female PM.
And yet you're not taking the extreme position there. Interesting how that works.
Next you’ll be defending putin, you know he wins in a landslide every election right?
I'm guessing those numbers are fairly typical for the ruling party in Italy where elections are typically fairly fragmented and chaotic. So that result is likely just as legitimate as any previous result.
I'm also guessing the overwhelming majority of people that voted in this election aren't nazis.
Turns out the “numbers” aren’t a very good indicator. I’d suggest we should look to what they say for signs of autocratic, kleptocratic, fascist, or nazi ideas.
As to whether she is a "fascist" (your word) I'II wait and see. I certainly wont pay any attention to the predictable left-wing, media-accelerated hyperbole.
1. The premise that ideologies exist in the world that are so extreme and violent in their nature that they should receive zero tolerance (e.g. nazism, fascism).
2. The premise that people who tolerate an ideology are tainted by that association.
3. That Georgia Meloni is a fascist.
Because 1 and 2 are not extremist views. They're held quite widely, and I don't think there are many people who believe you should sit down and listen when a nazi talks.
You say that my view is "My political opponents are Nazis" - but that's not what I've said at all. I believe that nazis are nazis, fascists are fascist, and these SPECIFIC ideas are beyond tolerance. Not just any idea I disagree with - there are plenty of ideas that I am politically opposed to that I strongly disagree with but I will gladly tolerate. Just not core premises like "do these people deserve to live" or "do these people deserve dignity".
No, just a democratically elected member of Parliament. The head of state is the president, elected by the Parliament. That president picks a prime minister which needs to be approved by the parliament.
> Their first female PM.
Not yet. The Italian president has yet to name a PM candidate.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/021/665/DpQ...
By the time they fix the "accidental bug triggered by anomalously high search volume" (or some similar excuse), the interest spike in Meloni will have passed, and her videos' reach will have been successfully stifled.
And they'll learn their lesson, and next time will just reduce the visibility of her and her associates' posts. Assuming they haven't already also done that.
I am very liberal politically, but I 100% support people on the right wing who run into trouble with the Neoliberal overlords.
We need to have respect for all people's opinions (that are non-violent, etc.) and support all people's rights to vote as they wish. I think the Neoliberals must envy China's authoritarian control of their population, because that is what I think the Neoliberals want also.
BTW, I joined the World Economic Forum for a while just to read directly what they were up to.
This is the very first time I've heard such a thing. Do you have a source showcasing what you claim to be threats?
Please explain what led you to interpret this as a threat of any form. The Orban reference was pretty clear.
From the article:
> "This is a clear reference to the ability of the European Commission to cut funds allocated to member countries when they are deemed to be violating the rule of law."
Your US/Germany comparison doesn't work, since that's an entirely different situation. For starters, a state like the US can actually apply pressure or use force, because there isn't an established strong framework saying it can't nor anything directly enforcing what little there is. US enforced sanctions over the pipeline construction because it didn't like the pipeline, nothing Germany can do directly. (And if you want to assume the recent sabotage was the US, pretty much the same applies)
The commission is just not an independent state-level actor in that way. It's actually constrained by a state-like legal framework around it, granting it limited powers for specific purposes. Outside of those, it can and will be reigned in very quickly.
EU courts are the judical oversight, and the EU parliament can remove the commission at any time (legislative oversight).
Corruption isnt just taking bribes. Urusula’s comments are akin to coercing voters into voting against their preference and are a clear violation of treaties whereby the eu has no right to intervene in the sovereign voting process of member states. Its not like italians were bribed or forced into voting a certain way. That means ursula is abusing a position of power in favour of certain political parties with the threat of cutting funding if their new leader isnt docile enough. That is corruption and the perfectly fine eu courts will never sanction her for it.
"We'll pay close attention if you stick to the laws" is pretty much the worst the commission can really threaten a government, which isn't really all that much if there is nothing serious to punish.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eus-von-der-leyen-deliv...
> My approach is that whatever democratic government is willing to work with us, we're working together," von der Leyen said at Princeton University in the United States on Thursday, responding to a question on whether there were any concerns with regard to the upcoming elections in Italy.
> "If things go in a difficult direction, I've spoken about Hungary and Poland, we have tools," she added.
So a liberal democratic organization is prepared to protect itself from sabotage from fascist organizations that are actively manipulated by external actors to undermine them. That's your threat.
The European Union is a federation of liberal democracies. It's not a Bond-like villain organization.
The bulk of EU's member states value human rights, including women's rights and individual rights and freedom.
You're putting up absurd strawmen to try to rationalize nonsense.
The irony of this comment!
She did not. You're trying to pass off a conspiracy theory by omitting context and taking quotes out of context, including erasing parts of the quote.
If you're still confused just go learn about Victor Orban and Hungary's recent regression into an totalitarian dictatorship that's profoundly illiberal and outright a sock puppet of external actors such as Putin's Russian federation. Go learn about it's destruction of Hungary's independent judiciary and attacks on fundamental human rights, which go against fundamental principles of the European Union, and learn about how the EU has been reacting to this sort of illiberal drift.
The term fascism is often misused, but I’d say not this time.
Maybe there is a third option, other than appeasement or threats. Maybe we can try and understand why people of now a third eu member state chose such a political leader.
If you don't like it, kick USA out of NATO. Soon, please.
Crimea was part of Russia. Since 1783.
Oh but i love it. If anything nato should expand. Which it does.
> Crimea was part of Russia. Since 1783.
And before that it was ottoman. And before that mongol. And before that greek.
We froze borders, expect by force where people were genocidal, or by diplomacy everywhere else, after world war two.
Crimea is Ukrainian. Since 1954 love.
Out of curiosity, how did you creep in here?
Who are "we"? How did you "froze" border, what does that even mean?
After the WWII the borders in Europe had shifted multiple times, from the union of eastern and western Germanies and dissolution of the Soviet Union, to the teardown of Yugoslavia, the Kosovo case being the most controversial one.
And that's just Europe, not even talking about the rest of the world.
> Crimea is Ukrainian. Since 1954 love.
In 1954 Crimea had been a part of the Soviet Union, legally an autonomous republic (Crimean Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic). I am not sure which part of it suddenly makes it Ukrainian.
When the SU had dissolved, being an autonomous republic, Crimea was supposed to become a whole independent state on its own. And it had been for 3 or so years https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Crimea_(1992–199...
It became de facto Ukraine only after Ukraine brought it forcibly under control in 1995, abolishing the status of republic.
Educate yourself, love.
Somehow I doubt this went to the board of directors level to ask if they have sign-off on low-key blocking a head of state in a market publicly-traded Twitter Inc. is active in.
If a user/keyword/whatever gets negative karma because previously-blocked nazis fawn over it, newly posted Giorgia Meloni videos will carry a heavy burden, even if that particular video isn't anything to complain about. The ML will guess that the nazis are going to like it, and load the new videos with negative karma.
Thinking aloud, I suppose there are three kinds of bans:
1 - Actual, explicit bans (formal)
2 - Intentional shadowbans (decided by humans)
3 - De-facto shadowbans (unintentional artifacts of ML vertex weighting)
Note that the possibility of 3 occurs even if human intervention is needed to act upon the posts flagged by the ML --- the ML is, in effect, driving the 'attentional map' of the content moderator.
So this specific incident would probably be a case of #3, but it makes people angrier if you suggest it's #2, so that's what people are doing.
*to some extent. I know there were people claiming the laptop tied the Bidens into some sort of demon worshipping child eating cult or something, obviously that's a joke.
It is nothing that an average information analyst would not predict. I can only assume reasonable voices were ignored.
Isn't that "story" pure bullshit propaganda fabricated in a desperate attempt to manipulate elections?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/all-the-news-thats-finally-fit-...
No, not really. That opinion piece just refers to "Hunter Biden's business dealings", which is quite the strawman when compared to the original baseless accusations and conspiracy theories fabricated around hypothetical emails.
The bullshit propaganda fabricated around the laptop's conspiracy theory has bee extensively debunked and widely reported as being nothing more than propaganda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...
In other words, an offensive motte and bailey strategy. Attack the motte, then claim you've destroyed the bailey.
Are you also in the business of pushing far-right conspiracy theories?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4926142/user-clip-joe-biden-u...
They can't be well known and relevant to the war. Has to be one or the other unless and until Western policy towards Ukraine is changed.
Not trying to be a pain here, just trying to point out that there was some truth to the claims. I've been quick to dismiss such claims as conspiracy before so I was surprised to find some truth to them. I agree though that many outlets ran too far with the story and it was meme'd too much online. Also doesn't really seem to matter to the public discourse these days anyway with all the other problems the US and the world are facing.
The unfortunate bit is what'll happen is twitter will go "oops we made a mistake", but never acknowledge why this happened in the first place (which is likely because they were doing something nefarious to her ranking on twitter).
In the movie they changed it to batteries because they thought the average audience was too stupid to know what a CPU is.
Humans as CPUs works so much better.
As CPUs makes far more sense.
Lol, what a world we live in
To whoever supports this censoring: please remember to remain consistent when these platforms start to shadowban you.
Censoring these voices will not help, it will not make their ideas or wants to go away. On the contrary, any differences will become insurmountable.
> please remember to remain consistent when these platforms start to shadowban you.
The people supporting this deserve far more condemnation. They should know better and if they do not they are incapable to make such decisions in the first place. Far more likely is that they plainly spread US propaganda.
I’m sick and tired of companies “fact checking” and shadowbanning content for my “safety.”