Delay decisions, set up a committee... wow, that was fast, he's already becoming Jack.
[EDIT:] The problem is that a "council with widely diverse viewpoints" is not going to come to consensus on moderation. They're inevitably going to disagree, just like in politics. So then what? How is lack of consensus not the inevitable outcome of a widely diverse committee?
I think what the parent comment is talking about and what you might have missed out on (though maybe your remark is tongue in cheek as well) is the challenge isn't building something with Twitter's functionality, but building something with its feature fit, timing, and growth. The core platform (while impressive engineering helps keep it running) is a fairly rudimentary idea, but execution is always a totally different story.
You were probably including the following in your meaning for "feature fit, timing, and growth", but just to echo / amplify your comment: two extremely difficult things in building a community of Twitter's size (neither of which are technical / implementation in nature) are a) achieving network effects [1], and b) solving the Eternal September problem [2]. Both these hurdles are much more strategic than technical in nature. Andrew Chen's "The Cold Start Problem" goes into some fascinating detail about this [3].
wouldn't be surprised if he went to jack for ideas, we've seen how he texts, and not that long ago he didn't even appear to have a concrete plan on how to improve twitter
The best theory is that this analogous to Facebook's Oversight Committee, whose purpose in practice is to serve as a scapegoat for the really tough or unpopular moderation decisions. (e.g. Trump reinstatement, which ironically the Facebook Oversight Committee refused to rule on)
> How is lack of consensus not the inevitable outcome of a widely diverse committee?
That sounds fine to me if there’s actually a diverse set of view points. Getting censored should require a wide swathe of agreement. Not just a vocal minority.
Imagine trying to explain this complex of a voting system to the folks whose argument the election was rigged sometimes boiled down to "I saw more Trump signs, so Biden can't have gotten votes".
The more complex the system, the less it'll be trusted; something with "quadratic" in the name is gonna make eyes glaze over.
I feel like this "content moderation council" would be a fine idea if there weren't a large segment of the US population (the country which will almost certainly dominate the council) still living in a complete fantasy land where Trump won the 2020 election by a landslide and explaining the continuing effects of racist policies of the past is secretly a plot to kill off white people.
Those people might not be a majority, but they certainly aren't a "vocal minority" that can safely be ignored, either.
How do you decide which diverse view points are worthy of including and which aren't? Do we need a neo-nazi, an ISIS supporter, a 9/11 truther, a creationist, and a flat earther on the committee for the sake or intellectual diversity? I guess people will want conservatives on the committee, but are you happy with a normie Reagan republican or do we have to add a QAnoner and JFK Jr guy for the sake of representation?
This makes sense, but only in a world where we can trust that almost everyone is operating in good faith. Does that sound like contemporary American political discourse to you?
Those from “our side” on the committee can just unite to block anyone from “our side” from being banned. And those on “their side” can do the same. In fact, anyone who doesn’t do this will probably be branded a sellout. I just don’t see how to do this in a way that actually functions and also promotes broad-based faith that it’s a fair system.
Fair enough. I still think conservatives (and liberals, for different reasons) are vastly overestimating how much Musk will protect free speech. Slurs will obviously still be banned (likely automatically; I don't see why the platform relies on human moderation in those cases). These people are just getting a fast-track ticket to not-allowed-on-Twitter.
There's no real point discussing the way the site is run - they're not interested in user input and a lot of people like the idea of "reddit for professionals and VC bros". Causing trouble will just net you getting rate limited or a shadow ban.
I'm surprised because I thought there was a passionate but healthy debate about the matter, unlike what you'd see on Twitter or Reddit. A lot of opinions were expressed but I didn't see anybody calling out names, using epithets, shutting people down, etc.
HN's treatment of controversial topics generally is more respectful than elsewhere, which is why it is disappointing to see them shut down or buried here, when much more toxic discussions get promoted on other sites.
As someone who sits on some local boards and some committees, some people will never be happy and unfortunately people like that tend to be loud. However, I feel like the vast majority of people not only enjoy, but love the way HN is run & managed.
I would like to say thanks for all the work you guys do, few folks take the time to say thank you.
> The HN story about Babylon Bee is off the top 5 pages despite generating 100+ points and 300 comments in 4 hours. HN seems to have its own "moderation council" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33371795
I hear you, and I appreciate you stepping in to explain. But I think if you read the comments, they were quite respectful considering the level of controversy about this topic. Certainly a more civil treatment than Reddit or Twitter. If we can't debate here, the only outlets become much more toxic communities.
We moderate HN threads by the HN guidelines, not by what's going on on the rest of the internet. By HN standards it is certainly a flamewar. Hard-nosed ideological battle and name-calling are not what we want here. The flamewar detector got it right.
I hope the detector does more than decreasing the visibility of topics on which there is more disagreement than usual (higher quantity of downvotes?). I think quite a few important discussions would have that feature (but also flamewars, which probably makes the distinction difficult).
This sort of justifies the viewpoint that despite all his bluster, Elon will probably run Twitter the way a "reasonable executive" would. Not just release the hounds.
Keep the advertisers happy, but try to reduce the reliance on advertisers. Keep moderating content to reduce abuse, maybe eliminate the high profile banning but a person on the ground will have largely the same experience. (probably less action on more contentious issues, but you still can't use racial epithets and call for violence). Evaluate most employees or teams on the merits, there will be layoffs, probably big layoffs but they'll be managed incremental and strategic. Build more products and pivot the product strongly but again, not in the image of a Parler or a Truth Social.
Twitter won't become a cesspool because he understands that people need to be able to control what they see or they'll leave. Essentially try to create more safe spaces on twitter, not less.
A bunch of accounts like The Babylon Bee and Ye have been unbanned w/o input from any such committee of diverse viewpoints. I don't have much faith that Musk will not act unilaterally in service of his friends and allies.
He's been dishonest (in both small, and large things) with such frequency, that we're going to need independent verification before anything he says can be believed.
Were they? I know I can see their pages, but I don't see any new content from them. realdonaldtrump is still suspended, I imagine we'll just have to wait to see what happens.
It's called a temporary suspension. Twitter asks you to acknowledge your tweet was bad by deleting it yourself. If you do, you get a time-out in the naughty corner for 12 hours, or a week, or whatever, and then you can tweet again. If you don't, you stay in the naughty corner. Whoever designed this process could stand to learn how to treat people like adults, in my opinion.
If you're referring to HN policy then for an established account it's not really shadowbanning, because dang will tell you that you're banned and why. Being treated as a useless noob until proven otherwise is being treated as an adult.
Twitter is different (although perhaps more different than it needs to be). Seeing as you ask, here is how to handle content deletion on Twitter without infantilizing users.
Don't ask a user to "delete" a tweet – something which has no effect on that tweet's visibility anyway. Just hide it and tell him why. If the user chooses to appeal, that appeal can go forward without restricting the use of the account. Give time-outs sparingly. They should be more of a final warning than a routine measure. If it's necessary to give a time-out, start the clock immediately, not when the user takes some action.
It only matters when you're trying to determine if Musk or someone else at Twitter actually un-banned or un-twitter-jailed someone. If the account was merely restricted then it's possible the account owner themselves did whatever is required to un-restrict their own account (i.e., deleted some offending tweet).
If we're dreaming big here, how about a slider that users can adjust for how much free speech they want to be exposed to? Or perhaps separate toggles for if they want to opt-in to seeing election misinformation, antivax conspiracies, bigotry against various groups, etc.
I think one reasonable policy could be "form a council of diverse viewpoints and only ban someone if they all (or mostly all) agree the person should be kicked off" and another reasonable policy could be "form a council fo diverse viewpoints and ban someone if one (or a couple) think the person should be kicked off.
I think its fair to say the committee will end up being a scapegoat - but to be charitable to the idea in general its pretty clear that not 100% or even 75% of the population thinks that Babylon Bee should be banned. If you have a system where one voice on the committee can ban someone then most liberal comedians would be banned for played up reasons, too.
Sure. But ultimately there is some level of arbitrary lines where you have a trade-off of overbanning or underbanning.
Say you have a committee of 9 people? What's your cut-off? There isn't a clear answer - especially as norms change a bit and the committee members change.
I honestly don’t think it matters. The committee will answer to one person who can arbitrarily overrule the committee, whether formally or not.
It’s his company and he can do what he wants with it. Any rules can be changed at any time without recourse.
I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Well, it might be bad for Twitter the service, but as far as legal governance, it’s the way it works. The only limit will really be what advertisers will support. It is a business after all.
But any type of council should be considered advisory at best.
Twitter has become the de facto standard, so IMHO moderation should only ask one question: "is this tweet legal?" If the answer is 'yes' then it should be allowed.
Of course, a corollary is that they should be able to filter content on a per country basis because, obviously, what's legal differs from country to country, but I think there is no escaping that for any platforms which claim to be global.
Sounds like a great way to foster a community filled with racist, unwelcoming, and generally toxic but perfectly legal content. Just like every other "free speech" platform devolves into.
Not sure what there is to discuss? I wholly disagree with your idea. There's plenty of other social network sites that have a similar moderation policy and they are overrun by people who wish to turn it into a platform to spread hate.
Any content moderation needs to extend beyond "Legal? (Y/N)" unless your main goal is to drive any real community away.
You're obviously ignoring 'de facto standard', which makes Twitter pretty much a utility in my opinion, hence my comment.
Anyway, it is simply shocking that so many think it is the 'correct way' to disallow what they don't agree with and that they are, like you, so aggressive about it to the point of shutting down any dissenting opinions, as is happening here.
It's a big regression from the heights of the enlightenment, or just the recent past, IMHO.
Some would go as far as claiming that this is "little red guard" behaviour and they wouldn't be completely wrong.
Not only that but also transparently disingenuous. I don't know r/conservative (my comments are not about liberal vs conservative and I find odd that you and others immediately frame them that way) but a dedicated 'conservative' subreddit is obviously not the same as Twitter, which, again as become the de facto standard for most political and news communication.
It's a fair assumption. The free speech absolutist crowd very much tends to trend conservative.
I think most reasonable people would reject the assertion that twitter is the de facto standard. It isn't even in the top 10 for social media platforms by active monthly users, and usage and value of a platform varies way too much depending on age and gender. While twitter is possibly the de facto standard for gen-x + millennials and certain career groups such as politicians and journalists, it certainly won't be for 18-25 year olds. Facebook still has nearly 10x the monthly active users of twitter, in fact Twitter barely beats out Quora.
Ignoring the argument about it being the de facto standard, Twitter is a business. I expect that Elon would like to make money off of his $44B investment. In the battle between the free market and free speech, the free market will almost always win. If twitter goes the extreme free speech route, users who are often targeted by loud jerks, trolls and harassers will leave the platform. It will create bad press both in the form of people complaining about harassment as well as other businesses pulling ads where their customers or potential customers were harassed.
> Not only that but also transparently disingenuous
I notice you didn't mention Parler, though. That one's a bit harder to dance around. The "Premier Global Free Speech App". Surely that should allow all legal speech, right?
I disagree with your assertion that Twitter is a public utility then. There's plenty of ways to communication with other people on the internet. Twitter has less daily active users than Pinterest, if you want to shout out your opinion on the internet then play by Twitter's rules or find another platform.
What about “this pattern of tweets is sufficiently correlated with declining user engagement”. Should Twitter make decisions based on the health of the business?
I would stay well within the law if I would reply to your post with "oh fuck off you retarded cunt!!!"
This would obviously fall well within the protections of free speech for many countries, certainly those of the U.S. And if you really wanted to you can go much nastier than that.
But I don't think it should be allowed here, or even on Twitter. Even using as an example here already feels iffy, but I feel adding it makes the point clearer.
> But you are not making any points here, just basically a stunt.
My point is that allowing "anything that's within the law" will lead to some pretty unpleasant stuff.
> If Twitter is the de facto standard and akin to an utility why should they make decisions on what's allowed beyond lawfulness?
I don't think Twitter is the "de-facto standard" or akin to an utility, and the problem is that by allowing such content you would drive away a lot of people who would rather not be buried with insults and nastiness every time they post something.
There are loads of places where speech is regulated in some way, and you can't just go off on a expletive-laden rant at any moment. If I go to a Biden or Trump Q&A townhall meeting and start shouting abuse at him I will be removed as well.
> You're still attempting to take my comments to the extreme instead of making a substantial reply on any of my points (unfortunately).
That was not my intention; I'm genuinely trying to engage constructively and in good faith.
You stated that "anything that's within the law should be allowed", and I'm trying to examine what that would mean and what effects it would have. With an extreme example, yes, but that is the sort of stuff that would be allowed under your proposed policy. Now, if you think that's an acceptable trade-off: fair enough, I can't argue with that. But I don't think it can merely be brushed aside with "that's extreme", because in my experience things like that will be posted, usually by a small (but very active) group of people.
> In addition, whether a certain moderation approach would "drive away people" is a strawman. This is not the question.
The question is what effect this policy would have. This is, in my opinion, one of them.
If you don't ban anyone, pretty soon the people who advertisers like leave the platform and you're left with free speech purists, hatemongers, and not too much else. Those people don't bring $$.
So in this case, free speech and the free market are at odds.
Ostensibly Twitter has to make money, and most companies do not want their ads to be seen next to blatant antisemitic messages.
In the crazy clown world in which we live, Twitter could theoretically kick off all the advertisers and become Elon Musk's self-promotion platform (which it already is), but I doubt the other investors would go along with this.
for the same reason you don't see laundry detergent ads on pornhub. most advertisers don't want their ads next to certain kinds of content. Whether for their own moral objections or fear of negative customer reaction they won't pay for ad space near it. As advertising pays the bills for this service you have to only host content that advertiser are willing to allow their ads near. It not about whats legal its about whats practical and profitable.
>>>for the same reason you don't see laundry detergent ads on pornhub. most advertisers don't want their ads next to certain kinds of content.
Hmmm, if I had a laundry detergent company I'd totally support tailored ads for Pornhub. "Forgot to take your dress off before the bukkake scene? Don't worry! DirtBlaster Detergent can handle even the crustiest of stains!"
You've actually got me thinking about the viability of this across a spectrum of common consumer products.....
Let's avoid disinfo. Neither account was banned to begin with. Both accounts were restricted, which could be lifted after the user deletes the offending tweet. It's overwhelmingly likely Musk had nothing to do with either case (and he said so himself).
That's often not the point of analogies like this. So for the analog to be valid, the seriousness of the situation described doesn't have to be on similar levels. If you look up the definition of "analogy" on merriam-webster.com it says: "resemblance in some [my emphasis] particulars between things otherwise unlike"
Yeah, I know what an analogy is. It's a bloody stupid analogy because it's making a mountain out of a mole hill, when we all know that moles dig tunnels.
No, that is like saying someone should remove some obscene clothing before entering a private establishment and here you are comparing it to be tortured.
If the offending element is one's personality or one's beliefs, then yes, one can come back by removing that, but it's the same thing as not coming back.
Not really: we see on Reddit all the time how subreddits quickly descend into herds that can only upvote accepted ideas and instantly downvote to oblivion or ban anything even neutral (much less antagonistic to the subreddit’s worldview).
Anybody who comes by with a different take immediately loses interest in the group and so there’s a self-perpetuating system that makes the group more and more fanatical about right-think and wrong-think.
On Twitter, deleting tweets for wrong-think has largely the same chilling effect and self-perpetuating descent into an echo chamber.
Never because you own it and have rights just like the Supreme Court has established that most private businesses has the right to kick people out. If people don't like that then they should petition the government to take over Twitter and make it a utility or government service.
It seems you're coming at it from the other side. If it were up to me, I'd remove the "lock" feature that seems too much like a struggle session (as noted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33371795), and just have tweets be taken down without needing users to admit guilt. I also would oppose banning either Kanye or the Bee.
But if someone is arguing that it was a ban, and that it shows Musk unbanned them and is lying, then that's wrong. I was addressing that argument.
...or an employee who felt unshackled from the previous management and knew they would have air-support by the time anyone else realized what had happened.
Just my opinion. But why would you lie about what will become a fairly big piece of news right before you are about to go through and be cutting a bunch of jobs. It would be almost certain to leak.
Babylon Bee being suspended was one of the dumber things the previous Twitter rules had done. It's a satire site, it's right leaning, nothing in the piece they said was hateful or even an unpopular view. Kanye's ban, he's just a mentally ill person. I don't think he meant "death con" he just didn't know that it's actually "def con." His remarks are still reprehensible.
Twitter's whole moderation problem has been it is very, very inconsistent. I've seen accounts from certain political persuasions be banned or suspended, but then I have seen someone openly tell someone to kill themselves (or that they deserve to be killed or beaten) and the tweet was never removed, and the person was never suspended/banned because of the account it was aimed at. The Onion has had some questionable pieces that weren't any better than what Babylon Bee had, and they were never touched. The moderation has to be consistent; I don't think a council is a bad idea, especially for bigger account bans.
All that said, I hope Trump is never allowed back, but he probably will be. In any case, things have to be equally applied and that has not been the case to anyone paying attention. Even the doxing rules have basically been completely ignored if it were aimed at -some- people.
Then, there are things like the Taliban, Russia, China, etc which have at times actively cheered on social media about the death of Americans or an American defeat... having active accounts but then you ban sitting members of the US government? (I think Trump deserved it, but there are others.) How does that make any sense at all?
The electoral college is still democratic. You're confusing direct democracy with democracy in general. The US is a Republic, which is democratic with general safeguards to prevent mob rule. I can't stand Trump but this is and always will be such a weak argument. If you can control the Senate you can win the electoral college and both parties have done so in the past 20 years back and forth very consistently. Trump would have lost to basically any other candidate, the Democrats have only themselves to blame.
> You're confusing direct democracy with democracy in general.
No, you're confusing semantics. A Wyoming voter's vote counts several times more than a California's vote for the same position. Land borders shouldn't change your vote, that's _anti_-democratic and in favor of an unequal distribution of voting rights. We should call a spade a spade, and here the spade of the electoral college is clearly _not_ democracy when we no longer have to send state delegates across the barren frontier.
You can toot the representative republic horn all you want, which is what the system is, but it is in error to call the existing system democratic or a democracy _until_ the electoral college is gone. It should be. It serves no purpose other than to suppress what the majority of the people want. Likewise for state-specific regulations for cross-union office, like for President.
Do what you want for your own state representation (e.g. senator, governor) but the President should be the one person actually elected by a majority without shenanigans, whereas none is today.
Because only democracy gives us the chance to recover from our mistakes. This seems clearer to me in this last year than in any other year of my >40 on this earth.
See, when you live a privileged and safe life these are some of the lies you believe. You are protected by your position in wealth, race, and maybe location. You're not black, or Jewish, or a unionist, and its all a big surprise when the angry mob does come for you. You yell "this is against the law!" And then only realize the person posting the hateful redeoric online was the officer that should be protecting you.
The fascists call for violence is always a joke to them, until the moment it is not.
Through the fog of purple prose and judgment based on your assumptions and theories of ethnic classification, you seem to be claiming that the police will protect us from speech but not from violence. I don't see how that could possibly add up.
I don't think a bunch of attention seeking lunatics holding a banner over a bridge counts as "real-world damage". Especially when it seems to have galvanized everyone in power to denounce them and pledge their support to fight against similar groups.
>Babylon Bee being suspended was one of the dumber things the previous Twitter rules had done. It's a satire site, it's right leaning, nothing in the piece they said was hateful or even an unpopular view.
Twitter banned the Babylon Bee for targeting a random and rather anonymous bureaucrat that likely isn't among the 1000 most powerful people in government in the US for the sole purpose that she is trans. This targeting by the Babylon Bee and other conservative media has led to her getting death threats. Being a satire site doesn't mean we can laugh off all their behavior as a joke. Their behavior was a part of a harassment campaign against someone who is largely a private citizen in this instance. Stopping that doesn't seem like a mistake to me.
The piece satirized the confusion between sex and gender. It has only been very, very recently that we have gone from "gender is a social construct" to "sex is a social construct." It's still a highly debated topic and well within the public sphere of debate. Also, this person was a public official and was in the news from general news outlets (named Woman of the Year) which puts them well within the public realm of ridicule, even if you or I don't agree with it. If the piece had advocated physical harm that would be much much different.
Some people believe sex is a spectrum, or that it can be changed, but it’s super-fringe and mostly reflects ignorance of the difference between sex and gender rather than being a serious philosophical position.
It may be fringe in the sense that people don't state what they actually believe out of fear, but it is not fringe on official policies and the direction they are heading. If you don't agree with the statement "Trans women are women", and all the conclusions that leads to, ie. trans women in sports, then you risk being cancelled.
Binary means 0 and 1. It does not mean 0, 1, or 2 1.7% (or even 0.018%) of the time.
Of course, the word "binary" is a social construct, and "spectrum" is a social construct as well. However I would expect that in a forum focused on computers, binary generally means 0 or 1 with no other values possible even 0.0000001% of the time.
"Some men choose to identify as women." Really? This is not a serious statement that engages with the science behind gender transition.
The word "error" is a social construct. I prefer "variation", which also is a social construct, but doesn't imply a judgment. (Of course, judgments are social constructs.)
It seems cruel to use a metaphor of "manufacturing error" to describe intersex people. Humans make "errors", nature just does whatever it wants mindlessly and deals with it.
While I think "sex is a spectrum" is perhaps not how I would phrase it because it lets people muddy these kinds of arguments together, I think it's pretty well-accepted that there are people who are neither fully male nor female, i.e. intersex.
From a biological perspective, what if you were born biologically male but have no androgen sensitivity and basically develop biologically female? Your genitals appear to be male but you've undergone all the puberty that someone female would: I don't think you can cleanly carve a sex binary here. Actually, maybe as a larger point, I don't think even "biological sex" is as clear cut as people try to make it: do you consider it all of genitalia, chromosomes, hormones, or only some?
For what it's worth, don't take my comment as any argument about gender as a spectrum one way or another because I don't want to get into the culture war aspect of it: I only want to point out that people who are resolutely "sex is a binary" are being overly prescriptive about it.
Bingo. This is what scientific terminology aspires to. Except “sex is pretty darn binary” is a useful, meaningful simplification, while “sex is a spectrum” is at best a fundamental misunderstanding of what a spectrum is, and at worst a politically motivated conflation of intersex conditions with gender variation.
Eh, I think you can get various axes on a biological sex spectrum even if you consider the the definition of biological sex: if someone has male gonads and XY chromosomes but has undergone sex reassignment surgery and is undergoing estrogen hormone replacement theory, would you still classify them strictly biologically male if they don't meet two of the four generally used criteria for sex? And in the case you don't believe that all those criteria should be used for determining biological sex, then that's another thing people need to agree on. I think characterizing biological sex as a spectrum can be a useful way of thinking it, but I think people end up dragging the culture war debate into it.
> if someone has male gonads and XY chromosomes but has undergone sex reassignment surgery and is undergoing estrogen hormone replacement theory, would you still classify them strictly biologically male if they don't meet two of the four generally used criteria for sex?
Yes, because sex is a description of an observed natural phenomenon, not a taxonomy of medical interventions.
Not everyone agrees with that interpretation of sex, though, and reasonable people can choose to interpret sex as a collection of biological traits, medical interventions or not.
If a computer system produced the values 0 or 1 most of the time, and 2 a small percentage of the time, we wouldn't call it "pretty darn binary".
Plenty of intersex people are gender variant as well. See for example Dana Zzyym, who is intersex and uses they/them pronouns. They fought for nonbinary gender markers in passports.
I think they’re being glib, but sex absolutely is a social construct. What exactly constitutes THE properties of the female and male sex is defined by society more than biology. For example, people who have androgen insensitivity syndrome develop perfectly normal looking “female” bodies, but their genetic sex is “male”. People generally still consider those individuals to be “female”. If you want to get down to it, all words are socially defined. They usually attempt to describe or capture reoccurring details about the observable world, but nature (especially biology) has too much variety and weird exceptions for any simple linguistic model to perfectly match the physical world. That’s doubly true for a linguistic model used in everyday life as opposed to scientific discourse.
That’s not to say that “sex isn’t real” or some absurd position like that. There is a real phenomenon in biology where genetic and phenotypical variance tends to follow a limited set of patterns. Biologists call those patterns “sex”. But, the idea that “sex” as we use it in normal day-to-day life is a rigidly defined system based on hard biological facts is laughably false. When was the last time you insisted on seeing someone’s genetic karyotype test results? When was the last time you asked someone to drop their pants so you could examine their genitalia and determine their sex?
The phrase “sex is a social construct” is technically true in the same way that “chairs are a social construct” is true. The word describes a fuzzy subset of the set of all things, and what we consider in or out of the set is largely based on what we think should belong to it, and that is absolutely influenced by societal expectations. Where do chairs end and tables begin? Where does the female sex end?
Once you get to that point, the phrase almost has no meaning. If all word definitions are social constructs, then that’s table stakes and it doesn’t make sense to call out a specific word as having that property. Surely the phrase “is a social construct” must mean something more than “is like any other word”. Indeed, the meaning of that phrase is larger than what it literally says. There is a socially defined meaning that is attached to it. That phrase implies the word in question “is arbitrarily defined (more than most words)” and “is up for interpretation (more than most words)”.
If you agree with me this far, then the right way to frame this discussion is “should we pin ‘sex’ as it is used in every day life to specific physical properties or should we allow it to be more porous?”. This isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. If we pin it, for example, to genetic karyotype, then we need to stop using it in contexts where the genetics of the person are unknown and must admit the existence of several additional sexes (e.g. X, XXY) AND recognize it’s no longer useful for describing the phenomenon of what a person looks like or how their body works. If we make it porous, then we will endlessly debate about whether boundary cases fall into one bucket or the other and possibly hurt some feelings along the way.
The fun thing is that we get to pick what words mean, and we get to pick what we do with “sex”. Language is, after all, a social construct.
> What exactly constitutes THE properties of the female and male sex is defined by society more than biology.
This might be true for the incredibly tiny minority of intersex individuals who defy categorization, but for >99.9% of people it’s not true at all, and challenging the meaningfulness of a word based on such rare edge cases is a huge overstatement of how controversial this is.
Intersex conditions being rare or not doesn’t really matter for my argument. There could be literally be just one person with AIS in the history of humanity, and the statement “if you consider this person to be female then your definition of female is based on more than just their sex chromosomes” would still be true.
No, gender-sex separation has always been an oversimplification. The fact is that gender identity is driven by complex interactions between biology and society. There is no better explanation for why regret rates for gender affirming surgeries are the lowest across all of medicine.
The satisfaction rate for gender-affirming surgery is in a completely different league from the rest of medicine. (And I have a lot of sympathy for the few people that do regret them -- I'm good friends with one such person.)
I found these articles to be a good overview on this topic --- the change of interpretation between "sex" and "gender", and defining characteristics of "woman" within the context of feminist philosophy:
For what it’s worth, I’m a trans woman, and I’m well aware of some of the discourse around this topic already (both positions that are pro- and anti- “trans women are women”). I tried very hard to avoid injecting any of those details into it, though. I wanted to do a “reasoning from first principles” sort of analysis of the idea rather than try to recap the discussions that are happening in feminist spheres.
All language is a social construct. We recognize patterns in the real world and assign words to them, but patterns in complex systems like human biology have all kinds of exceptions.
Social construct doesn't mean fake, though. It's real, and it describes a real thing, but is a simplified model of it. The fight is over which model is better.
>It has only been very, very recently that we have gone from...
Would you have said the same thing about ridiculing someone for being openly gay in government 30 years ago, being Catholic in government 60 years ago, or being Black in government 80 years ago?
No, because those aren't even remotely similar things. It wouldn't be a "hate crime" to call a Catholic a Protestant, or a Gay person a Straight person or a Black person a white person. It would be a hateful to deny them rights or to call for abuse. In this instance the "hate crime" is merely saying someone's biological sex is x, even if they say they are y. However, If I called a non-trans woman a man or a non-trans man a woman, that's not a hate crime. So, the whole idea is fairly inconsistent.
I still think it's very much up for debate, unlike the instances you listed. I have trans friends, and while I can't speak for them, I don't believe they think the debate is as settled on some of these issues, especially in regard to "misgendering" being a hate crime. Hell, I've misgendered one of my non-binary friends constantly by accident and we're still friends. I'm not banned and haven't been charged with a hate crime. Would I want someone intentionally misgendering them just to get to them? No, I think that's cruel, and I'd defend my friend; but I don't think that person should automatically lose their account or be arrested (which has happened outside the US.) There's an important distinction there and it's an important debate.
This is ridicule, quite clearly. I won't get into the "is it or is it not a hate crime" bit, but this isn't "merely" stating anything. The term "biological sex" doesn't even appear in the article. The point the reader is supposed to take from this article is quite clearly not "mere" information about Rachel Levine's gender and/or "biological sex". It's that Rachel Levine's presented gender was very funny to the authors and that we should laugh at her for it.
> Would I want someone intentionally misgendering them just to get to them? No, I think that's cruel
Seems like you're putting an awful lot of weight on the distinction between "hate" and "cruel" to me.
What about here on HN? Do you think it's OK for users here to be "cruel" to others, or should dang ban them? Because HN bans people for being cruel, probably every day. Why is Twitter different?
I'm going to reply to my own comment to extend the last point, because I think it's important to point out:
I think it's clear, and that everyone would agree, that if you showed up here on HN making fun of another commenter for their gender in exactly the way that the Bee did, using exactly the same words, that you'd be banned. And we'd all agree that you should be banned.
I think the logical trap that the "free speech" folks are falling into here is that this doesn't "feel" targetted in the same way. It's a "media organization" making fun of a "public figure" and neither the Bee nor Levine are part of "your community". So Twitter banning them doesn't feel like community enforcement of norms, it feels political. And since the Bee is on "your side" you feel like they must have been wronged.
So maybe you should be constructing arguments around whether or not Twitter consitutes a "community" with "norms"? Maybe it doesn't, I'm willing to hear arguments. But the idea that the article wasn't hateful jut doesn't fly as I see it. It was awful, and the only way to see otherwise is to get into a headspace where Levine isn't part of "your community" and thus her feelings don't matter.
I agree with this, but I would emphasize something you glossed over, which is that the target is a "public figure." It's normative to be cruel to "public figures" in ways that would be totally unacceptable in any normal interpersonal relationship. I personally think that's fucked up, but it really is normative.
So singling out e.g. cruelty specifically about trans people's gender presentation seems targeted and political, because it's completely commonplace to say cruel things about someone if they made bad art, or if they disagree with you about some political policies, and rarely do people get banned from anything about it.
This is a perspective thing. But I just don't see that. I mean, sure, there are Internet Yahoos everywhere who run around calling people Nazis and whatnot. But do you have any examples of major abuse directed by big accounts with big audiences (i.e. the ones that attract the censors' attention) that should have been banned but weren't?
The Bee went way out on a limb with that article as I see it. And they got banned. Certainly other similar accounts (the Onion, say) aren't nearly as hateful.
I don't actually use Twitter, so I don't really have specific examples of huge Twitter accounts tweeting nasty things? I am just thinking of what's clearly considered normal among my peers. For example, here is a random thing I find if I Google "mean tweets about donald trump": https://twitter.com/dadsaysjokes/status/1062806755229474824?...
> What's the difference between Donald Trump and a worm? One of them is a slimy, loathsome creature incapable of complex thought; the other one actually shows up when it rains.
I'm claiming that most people would think that it's totally okay to say that about Donald Trump in public, even though it's an absurdly mean thing to say. (I am sure I could find similar jokes about Joe Biden, too.) I don't think that this would be deleted from Twitter if people reported it. But I also don't think it's really much different from what the Bee wrote. I think people would treat the Bee's article as different mainly if they think that being trans is a special category that is taboo to be cruel about.
The notable difference is that one insult is criticizing behavior, while the other is criticizing the person for their core identity (and no, I don't count political affiliation as being central to identity).
From my perspective it's OK to criticize Trump (or Biden) for their policies and conduct, but I don't think people should fat-shame Trump, for example, or make fun of Biden's occasional stutter.
The issue isn't that people are being mean, it's that they're trying to ostracize people for aspects of their being that are out of their control. That's why, generally, trying to cast someone out for being of a certain race, gender, or sexual orientation are considered unacceptable, but criticizing their political opinions or corrupt or otherwise slimy behavior are fair game.
Which aspect of this video convinced you that when men like Levine identify as women, they actually are women, not just men who want to be women? I watched the whole piece and didn't find a persuasive argument in favor of this.
Also their discussion on the Forstater case is out of date; that original judgement they cite was overturned on appeal, and the subsequent employment tribunal found that Forstater had indeed been discriminated against for her gender critical beliefs.
This seems like an agree-to-disagree situation, but I found their framing of gender identity to be convincing.
Regarding whether Levine is a woman or "man who wishes he's a woman", the question feels like crawling way way into someone else's head to tell them they're wrong about how they feel about something? If you told me you disliked a certain food, I dunno, say, broccoli, I think a reasonable response would be for me to say, "Weird. I really like it." An unreasonable response might be, "Do you really dislike broccoli, or are you just a broccoli lover who's being difficult and seeking attention?" The answer to that question, if the question even makes sense, doesn't have any impact on me whatsoever.
To my eyes, the core of modern-day conservatism is being bothered by the existence of the type of people I don't like. See, for example, the governor of Florida being bothered by immigrants to the point where he felt the need to go four states away just to find some to be bothered by.
I think a lot of people bothered by trans women are having the same sorts of feelings, and I can't help but notice that in almost all cases, the trans women who bother them are people who have undergone either incomplete or otherwise unconvincing transitions, or, let's be honest, people who through no fault of their own happen to be ugly. I have never once seen people expressing these opinions about beautiful trans people, which strengthens my conviction that what it's really all about is "I just don't like that type of person". Which, I'd like to add, is an opinion or preference in itself and maybe even can't be helped and so who cares, but it feels needlessly cruel to express it to the people you feel that way about (imagine two people getting onto an elevator with you, and one of them sizes you up and says to the other, "I just don't like the look of this person"). And it becomes actually dangerous when they have a large audience prone to violence, and the person they're expressing their distaste for is someone who is already an outcast not because of their behavior but because they happen to not like broccoli, and it sometimes happens that people like them are literally murdered for it.
In any case, I'm not here to try to prove you wrong; just expressing my view because you asked. I'll also add that I think one of the problems we have on the left is the idea that if you're wrong about some issue it means you're evil, and I try to be wary of that, and I thought the video did a good job of navigating its argument without wallowing in that sort of spite. I like to imagine we're both here trying to figure stuff out in good faith.
> Can this really be considered a core identity though?
Levine thinks it is. Some of us agree. What's the origin of the term "core identity" in your eyes, and in which bodies has our civilization invested the authority to regulate them? It sounds from your invocation of "fraud" like you think this should be a legal issue?
I mean, sorry, but this is an open and shut libertarian argument. It's no one else's business, especially the government's, to decide who you are. Period. If being a woman or a man (by whatever standards you want to use) isn't hurting anyone, and it clearly isn't, then our job is just to shut up about it.
I mean, seriously: there are people walking around all over the place with Y chromosomes. I have one too. We're everywehre! If my Y isn't hurting you now, how could that possibly change if I put a skirt on it?
> I am just thinking of what's clearly considered normal among my peers.
OK, so that gets directly to my point. You have a community. It has norms. You presumably police it according to those norms. Some things are OK, some aren't. I'm not going to judge it, because it's not my community (though I dearly hope you aren't trafficking in the kind of hate the Bee did).
But Twitter is a community too, and it has different rules.
As for the joke you found. Y'know what, I think that's pretty borderline. I can see some forums (here, for example) finding that banworthy, and I wouldn't be shocked if Twitter did too. But it's also a rando comment with sub-1000 engagement numbers. If this was horrifically offensive to Trump supports, not many of them seem to have been complaining about it. The Babylon Bee had many millions of followers and this was a very controversial article.
There aren't public figures on HN like this, and people make fun of some public figures here sometimes regardless. You also can't compare a massive platform like Twitter that has a broad range of discussions and allowances with HN which is a very niche forum on very niche topics that surround tech.
It's like comparing someone being banned from your school chess club for being mean vs banning someone from the entire school district for being mean. It's not comparable. Twitter and Facebook are massive public forums, to the point where they are nearly public utilities that are privately owned.
An example: you would have your post removed if you posted that topless Elon photo with his weird body structure and made a comment about it, but on Twitter/Facebook that flies...because they aren't niche forums.
What do you think is the fundamental joke the article is making?
The only joke I see is "a trans person exists". The article isn't about her policies, her performance in her job, or even complexities in our evolving definition of either sex or gender like you are implying. The joke is that this person is trans. The message of that joke is the existence of a trans person in public is worthy of mockery. Therefore the only way to stop the mockery is to stop being trans or retreat from public life. I think refusing to stop that mockery until the target does one of those two things qualifies as harassment.
Generally we consider jokes to be cruel when they mock an affliction that someone didn’t choose to have. You can just about get away with making such jokes about the abstract idea of an affliction, but when you name someone directly it crosses a line.
Whether you think this particular example was cruel depends ultimately on whether you think it is targeting the individual’s gender dysphoria (the thing they didn’t choose to have), or whether it is targeting their claim to be something they objectively are not.
One might argue that there is no difference, if one believes that gender affirmation is the only treatment for gender dysphoria, and that everyone is obliged to participate in that treatment, and to do otherwise amounts to mockery of the unchosen affliction.
Personally I think it’s wrong to joke about people with schizophrenia, but equally wrong to tell them the voices in their head are real.
I take your point, but would suggest the joke is more pointedly aimed at society generally, and the magazine specifically.
What makes the joke funny and culturally relevant — as opposed trivial cruelty — is that it represents a simple, forbidden truth for which one will be subject to severe public censure and deplatforming.
Comedy is a final bulwark against uncritical thinking, and can be used to deflate ludicrous ideas that are otherwise culturally unassailable.
>Comedy is a final bulwark against uncritical thinking, and can be used to deflate ludicrous ideas that are otherwise culturally unassailable.
Comedy can inspire thoughfullness and push back against societal norms. Comedy can also be a way to normalize bullying marginalized people. Being a troll and saying 'But wait, I'm being funny!' still makes you a troll. It's not like the account in question was trying to generate thoughtful discussion. Punch-down comedy is just dressed up hatefullness.
You’re not punching down when the near entirety of all cultural institutions, journalists, and technology platforms have mobilized to protect your target from all question and criticism.
When you can be censured, deplatformed, and even lose your job for stating an objective truth like “men cannot get pregnant”, your words, by any possible definition, are punching up.
>You’re not punching down when the near entirety of all cultural institutions, journalists, and technology platforms have mobilized to protect your target from all question and criticism.
Unfortunately that isn't really true. Trans folks, especially trans women face discrimination and violence on a daily basis in society. You see, they actually exist in the real world and somehow Twitter mods can't keep people from saying and doing terrible things in real life.
>When you can be censured, deplatformed, and even lose your job for stating an objective truth like “men cannot get pregnant”, your words, by any possible definition, are punching up.
Spare me and your culture war nonsense. I'm sure you believe that white men are under attack and marginalized.
The wider philosophical point is, if a man has gender dysphoria, does that mean he is a woman, or just wants to be a woman?
If the latter, there should be no issue in a satirical publication making the point that a man who wants to be a woman getting awarded a "Woman of the Year" accolade is nonsensical.
Like I said, low-effort humor at the expense of marginalized people is just bullying. You can read a lot into the Bees "joke" but none of it is there. It's just low-effort and doesn't speak to any larger social issues.
The editors shouldn't go to jail, but its obviously the type of hate content that will drive away users and advertisers and twitter was wise to ban it. It adds nothing to the discussion.
Someone appointed to a highly responsible and prestigious government role after a highly successful career, as Levine has, can hardly be described as marginalized.
The Bee's article is more broadly a commentary on how accolades intended for women are now going to men who identify as women - which rather undermines the point of having such awards in the first place. The humor is in inverting this:
"The Babylon Bee has selected Rachel Levine as its first annual Man of the Year. Levine is the U.S. assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where he serves proudly as the first man in that position to dress like a western cultural stereotype of a woman."
Criticizing male dominance like this is very much a 'punching up' type of comedy.
>Someone appointed to a highly responsible and prestigious government role after a highly successful career, as Levine has, can hardly be described as marginalized.
Only if you are completely clueless on what marginalization means, which by the rest of your comment, it appears you are.
Trans people, especially trans women are treated poorly. They have less economic opportunity, have a high incidence of being victims of crime, and face violence from society.
Being successful in spite of being marginalized doesn't somehow magically make you no longer marginalized.
Just like there are successful Black people, but they still experience systemic and social racism. Success doesn't magically change that.
I'm guessing you don't believe in systemic racism though, so its probably a non-starter
It's cool how HN discussions predictably get distracted from the main point.
The main point was that the claims made by the new owner are demonstrably false.
The new owner claimed that unbanning decisions would be made by a new moderation council. While he was saying this, a slew of right-wing and conspiracy accounts were reinstated even though the council does not yet exist.
Meanwhile here we are, debating gender and sexuality.
> he only joke I see is "a trans person exists". The article isn't about her policies, her performance in her job, or even complexities in our evolving definition of either sex or gender like you are implying. The joke is that this person is trans. The message of that joke is the existence of a trans person in public is worthy of mockery. Therefore the only way to stop the mockery is to stop being trans or retreat from public life. I think refusing to stop that mockery until the target does one of those two things qualifies as harassment.
meh.
Twitter allowed much worse things that joking about someones self-identified gender.
It's a satire site: it's exactly what it says on the tin. If you leave political affiliation out of it, then, yes, twitter has been taking sides.
The joke of the article was that she was named "Woman of the Year," so they named her "Man of the Year" to point out the ridiculousness of such an award for her. You can disagree with that, or you can agree with that, but it's still a very tame joke. I don't think the debate on transsexualism is a closed case in many regards. There are important topics to discuss on it; and satire, even if you don't find it funny, is important to that debate.
I mean the idea that a trans-woman could actually feel and experience the challenges a biological woman faces...is pretty controversial; or the fact that many base their identity on media stereotypes rather than the very diverse experiences of womanhood, also is a pretty important debate, especially among feminists.
We can't just close the debate off and disallow any discussion on it (or jokes about it), and call anything against it a hate crime. That's not how things work. It could also have massive political fallout if Progressives are unwilling to join in the debate and stifle any attempts at it.
>The joke of the article was that she was named "Woman of the Year," so they named her "Man of the Year" to point out the ridiculousness of such an award for her.
The award is only ridiculous if you think trans people shouldn't exist in public as openly trans. I mean you even referred to her as "her" so you seemingly recognize that her being eligible for "Woman of the Year" is more appropriate than "Man of the Year". The perceived ridiculousness comes from the same fundamental concept underlying the joke, the existence of trans people is funny and their desire to simply live their life as they see fit is worthy of mockery.
>I mean the idea that a tran-woman could actually feel and experience the challenges a biological woman faces...is pretty controversial; or the fact that many base their identity on media stereotypes rather than the very diverse experiences of womanhood, also is a pretty important debate, especially among feminists.
No one is arguing that here. This is a person identifying as a woman and being recognized in public as a women. That is the only political statement being challenged. You are free to continue debating whether trans women and cis women have the same experience or whatever, but neither the USA Today or the Babylon Bee was making a statement in that debate.
>We can't just close the debate off and disallow any discussion on it (or jokes about it), and call anything against it a hate crime. That's not how things work. It could also have massive political fallout if Progressives are unwilling to join in the debate and stifle any attempts at it.
I don't know why this is framed as progressives shutting down the debate on the topic. The conservatives viewpoint that the Babylon Bee seems to subscribe to is that gender and sex are they same thing and they are binary. There is no way to debate against that viewpoint. There is no possible compromise position. It denies the very existence of someone like Levine. There is nothing Levine could have said to the Babylon Bee to stop them from targeting her specifically because they weren't criticizing any of her beliefs or actions. They were criticizing an innate quality of her being.
> The award is only ridiculous if you think trans people shouldn't exist in public as openly trans.
This is simply your skewed view and not how many people read the joke. She was named as "woman of the year" BECAUSE she was trans, not because she was/is a woman. That's the joke. USA Today itself probably doesn't care if she is or isn't a woman, the award was issued to get engagement.
> I don't know why this is framed as progressives shutting down the debate on the topic.
Because that is how Progressives have treated the topic in general (at least publicly, privately not so much.)
> It denies the very existence of someone like Levine.
This is not true, it denies how this person views themselves, not their existence; and your existence isn't whatever reality you have chosen for yourself. For example, being gay is something you don't force society to see, you are simply attracted to the same sex. When you change your sex or gender, you are asking for a societal buy-in. That is much different.
> You are free to continue debating whether trans women and cis women have the same experience or whatever, but neither the USA Today or the Babylon Bee was making a statement in that debate.
Actually, both are very much connected, because the idea that you could not experience what a naturally born biological female could is perceive in the eyes of many as to why you cannot yourself ever be a biological female...when you were born male. These are very integrated topics.
>This is simply your skewed view and not how many people read the joke. She was named as "woman of the year" BECAUSE she was trans,
Fine, and this is "simply your skewed view". Yours is not inherently more right than mine.
>Because that is how Progressives have treated the topic in general (at least publicly, privately not so much.)
You completely skipped my point. Progressives have treated this topic this way because there is no compromise position. What concession can a progressive hope to accomplish debating someone who believes that sex and gender are the same and binary?
>This is not true, it denies how this person views themselves, not their existence; and your existence isn't whatever reality you have chosen for yourself. For example, being gay is something you don't force society to see, you are simply attracted to the same sex. When you change your sex or gender, you are asking for a societal buy-in. That is much different.
Trans people don't need "societal buy-in" any more than any other group. They just want to live their life how they see fit. A trans person choice's don't impact you any more than a gay person's choice. Just leave them all alone and mind your own business.
>Actually, both are very much connected, because the idea that you could not experience what a naturally born biological female could is perceive in the eyes of many as to why you cannot yourself ever be a biological female...when you were born male. These are very integrated topics.
This has no relevance to the issue at hand. They weren't awarding the Cis Woman of the Year Award. They were awarding the Woman of the Year Award. Trans women should be just as eligible for that as cis women. This isn't a weightlifting competition. There is no reason to exclude trans women from this type of award.
> You completely skipped my point. Progressives have treated this topic this way because there is no compromise position.
Isn't the compromise position to tolerate everybody's own personal words and definitions? That certainly used to be the progressive position, at least up to about a decade ago.
Your "own personal words and definitions" don't matter. That is inconsequential to most trans people's live. What does impact them is the government. What definitions will they use?
I don’t understand your point then. If the Babylon Bee can use their own definitions, so can Twitter. What grounds does that leave to object to a suspension based off Twitter’s definition?
I don't understand how your question relates to my point.
The compromise position is that you tolerate people's personal definitions and words, e.g., you would not demand they be punished for having or using them.
I'm not saying there is some legal "grounds" you could use to bar somebody from being intolerant of what you say or think, you just asked what a compromise position would be, and tolerance is one and it's what the progressive position was for a long time.
We don't agree on that. Pretty disingenuous and infantile that you claim that's the conclusion of my comment now, wasn't it? Do you want to actually have a conversation about this or just come up with some vapid "gotcha"?
It's fundamental to democracy and a healthy public discourse that people be allowed to voice their opinions including disagreements. It's quite extremist to believe that people who disagree with us must stop talking about it. That is not what tolerance means.
What's the end game? Ban and censor and silence until nobody complains, disagrees, speaks out, or satirizes The Truth™ ?
I already said I don't understand your viewpoint. You seem to be saying the Babylon Bee is free to challenge progressives', USA Today's, and Twitter's definitions of these words. However, you also seem to be saying that neither progressives nor Twitter can challenge the Babylon Bee's definition.
The everyone should just be tolerant of other people's definitions solution kind of relies on everyone being tolerant of other people's definitions.
I already said twice that I didn't understand whatever point you were trying to make. If you "want to actually have a conversation" like you say, you could try either directly addressing my comment or at least rephrasing and expanding on your point.
You said everyone should be tolerant of everyone else's definitions. Doesn't everyone include progressive, conservatives, USA Today, Twitter, and the Babylon Bee? If so, aren't you suggesting they should all stop complaining about the definitions the other groups use?
I'm not saying or suggesting any such thing as you insinuate and a really basic reading of what I wrote makes that very clear. If and when you are ready to have a grownup conversation, I'll be here. Until then, snarky content-free "zingers" don't interest me in any way. I literally do not care in the slightest and certainly won't dignify it with a response. Nobody else is reading this or being swayed by these comments, so if you don't want to try to have a constructive and polite conversation just move on. I hear twitter is a great place if you want to bait people with that kind of comment though.
>I'm not saying or suggesting any such thing as you insinuate and a really basic reading of what I wrote makes that very clear. If and when you are ready to have a grownup conversation, I'll be here.
How many times do I have to say that I do not understand what point you are trying to make? I'm not saying that like I think your opinion is bad. I am saying I don't understand how you are applying your principle of tolerance in this situation. Either directly tell me why my summary of your position is wrong or stop playing this "grownup conversation" card. A grownup way to approach this situation would be to actually engage in the conversation rather than repeatedly complaining that I am having this conversation wrong.
And how many times do I have to tell you I do not respond to that kind of rhetoric? I literally do not care about it. And that includes the high horse you're on now, doesn't work with comments like "Ok, I’m glad we agree that the Babylon Bee should stop complaining about how other people define these words." in the thread.
The point I am trying to make, which I made from the very beginning, is that tolerance to peoples' different opinions is a possible compromise position and it was the progressive position for a time. That's it, that's the point. You asked about what compromise position there would be vs shutting down debate from people who believe sex and gender are the same thing and binary, and that's an answer for you.
You may not understand what tolerance means and want to ask more about that, you may have other questions, you may dispute that was ever the progressive position, or you may argue that it is not a viable compromise, but not by asking some nonsensical rhetorical question about what I am saying, or what I agree with. If you are not capable of addressing the comment without snide digs at the messenger, just take it elsewhere. As I said, nobody else will ever read this so the performantive "I won" style of internet-arguing is pointless. And I'm not getting the impression by now that you are interested an answer to your question. So why even waste any more time here?
>You may not understand what tolerance means and want to ask more about that, you may have other questions
I understand what tolerance means. I don't understand who you are expecting tolerance from in this situation.
The Babylon Bee's article is not tolerant of Levine's or WaPo's definitions. The BB's refusal to remove the tweet is not tolerant of Twitter's definitions. People aren't objecting to the BB's definition in a vacuum. They are reacting to the lack of tolerance from the BB.
The problem doesn't originate with a lack of progressive tolerance. It originates from the BB's intolerance.
> The Babylon Bee's article is not tolerant of Levine's or WaPo's definitions.
Please explain your reasoning. I think this is getting to your fundamental misunderstanding about what tolerating speech and opinions you disagree with means.
> The BB's refusal to remove the tweet is not tolerant of Twitter's definitions.
This is not a correct use of the meaning of tolerance. You could say they didn't tolerate twitter's terms of service or moderation demands, but not that they didn't tolerate twitter's "definitions", so it's just muddying the waters here I think because of the asymmetric positions of the two parties when we're talking about speech on twitter's platform. So we should focus on how BB is not tolerating Levine or WaPo first.
> People aren't objecting to the BB's definition in a vacuum. They are reacting to the lack of tolerance from the BB.
> The problem doesn't originate with a lack of progressive tolerance. It originates from the BB's intolerance.
People most certainly object to different definitions, but the interesting thing I think is how you are using the word (in)tolerance here. The way you are using it certainly does not match the use of the word in the former progressive position that I was referring to.
>Please explain your reasoning. I think this is getting to your fundamental misunderstanding about what tolerating speech and opinions you disagree with means.
Levine and USA Today (I mistakenly said WaPo before) are using a definition of women that includes trans women. The Babylon Bee disagree with them. There are a few different ways the BB could react.
The most tolerant way would be to not say anything because Levine and USA Today's definitions don't impact them.
A less tolerant way would be to denote their disagreement through a related article that doesn't directly address Levine or USA Today. They could have had a cat winning at the Westminster Dog Show or whatever. That gets their point across without confrontation.
They chose an even less tolerant response. They directly mocked Levine and USA Today with derision and indirectly made Levine a target for future harassment. That behavior isn't tolerant.
Compare this to a scenario in which the tolerance debate is about a more discreet moral/immoral issue. Imagine I am anti-Semitic and hated when Bernie Sanders ran for President. The most tolerant response would be to keep that hate to myself and just vote for someone else. The less tolerant response would be to maybe write some webcomic in which the Happy Merchant meme disastrously runs for President to indirectly mock Sanders. The most intolerant response would be to name that webcomic character Bernie Sanders and reply to all his tweets with a link to the comic. That is what the Babylon Bee effectively did by directly promoting Levine as a target for ridicule to an audience that they had to know would harass her.
>This is not a correct use of the meaning of tolerance. You could say they didn't tolerate twitter's terms of service or moderation demands, but not that they didn't tolerate twitter's "definitions", so it's just muddying the waters here I think because of the asymmetric positions of the two parties when we're talking about speech on twitter's platform. So we should focus on how BB is not tolerating Levine or WaPo first.
Twitter's ToS on this issue use a definition of women that includes trans women. Otherwise, misgendering someone wouldn't be against Twitter's rules.
> Levine and USA Today (I mistakenly said WaPo before) are using a definition of women that includes trans women. The Babylon Bee disagree with them. There are a few different ways the BB could react.
> The most tolerant way would be to not say anything because Levine and USA Today's definitions don't impact them.
> A less tolerant way would be to denote their disagreement through a related article that doesn't directly address Levine or USA Today. They could have had a cat winning at the Westminster Dog Show or whatever. That gets their point across without confrontation.
> They chose an even less tolerant response. They directly mocked Levine and USA Today with derision
That's simply not what tolerating the words and opinions of others means though. It doesn't mean that you can't disagree, you can't voice your disagreement, or you can't mock or satirize.
> and indirectly made Levine a target for future harassment. That behavior isn't tolerant.
Satirizing that USA Today award is not intolerant of their speech, because it is not calling for or taking action against an individual or group and their right or ability to speak.
And everybody's opinions and disagreements and speech can have good and bad intended and unintended consequences. People who believe sex and gender are the same and trans is a mental illness can be made subject to harassment by people who argue against them or mock them in public too. You can argue that's not that's a good thing and whether or not tolerance of speech and opinions promotes that (more than intolerance would), but you can't just call it intolerance just because you don't like it.
>That's simply not what tolerating the words and opinions of others means though. It doesn't mean that you can't disagree, you can't voice your disagreement, or you can't mock or satirize.
>Satirizing that USA Today award is not intolerant of their speech, because it is not calling for or taking action against an individual or group and their right or ability to speak.
Does that mean that you would consider mocking Jewish beliefs and calling them lies to be tolerant because it isn't calling for action against Jewish people? If not, how is it different from mocking Levine's identity?
> People who believe sex and gender are the same and trans is a mental illness can be made subject to harassment by people who argue against them or mock them in public too.
True, but that is the paradox of tolerance. No one cares what your personal definition is if you keep it to yourself. Those people will only get met with intolerance when they voice their own intolerance.
> Does that mean that you would consider mocking Jewish beliefs and calling them lies to be tolerant because it isn't calling for action against Jewish people? If not, how is it different from mocking Levine's identity?
No, I would not call any kind of speaking being tolerant, because that's not what tolerance means. You seem to be struggling badly with this simple concept, or at least pretending to be. It could be intolerant, if you were calling for some action against a person, but it doesn't make sense to call it tolerant just because it's not intolerant.
Tolerance does not mean anybody's ideas or opinions or beliefs are sacred and protected from disagreement or mockery. It's almost implied in the word really, I don't see why this is such a struggle - tolerance [for opinions I don't agree with].
Should Christians or Muslims or Atheists have protection from criticism or mockery? No, so I'm definitely about equality when it comes to Jews. How about you?
> True, but that is the paradox of tolerance.
Tolerance is not a magical silver bullet that has no problems.
> No one cares what your personal definition is if you keep it to yourself. Those people will only get met with intolerance when they voice their own intolerance.
That's still not what intolerance means, but sure censoring or banning or threatening people who voice opinions you disagree with is an alternative to tolerance, which you seemed to be talking about in the original comment I replied to. It goes both ways, right?
I'm not trying to catch you with some gotcha trick question. I am trying to find some consistency to your opinion. Are you saying your definition of tolerance is purely based on action or at least incitement to action and not based on speech? Any speech that stops short of calling for action qualifies as tolerant? Does that mean someone can be an open bigot and still be considered tolerant if they don't act on that bigotry or incite anyone else to act on it?
No I'm not saying that. I'm saying what I said (although I did edit it a couple of times, I never included anything that should have remotely given you that impression).
If speech is not intolerant that does not mean it's tolerant. It's not one or the other, and they are entirely independent concepts.
> Does that mean someone can be an open bigot and still be considered tolerant if they don't act on that bigotry or incite anyone else to act on it?\
It's possible they could be that and still be tolerant of other people voicing different opinions. It does get pretty complicated with what exactly constitutes bigotry, and where the line is from robust opinions and disagreements to assault, harrassment, intimidation, etc.
Let's take the Clintons and Obamas for example -- they are homophobic bigots who disagreed with the rights of gay people to get married and campaigned on hateful platforms of marriage being between a man and a woman, and yet they (as far as I know) did not censor or attack or intimidate those who disagreed with them on that issue, so we could say they were tolerant of different opinions being voiced, despite their bigotry and intolerance for gay marriage rights itself. Did they attract hateful supporters emboldened by their speech? Perhaps. Were their voters and supporters complicit in resulting discrimination and attacks on LGBTQI+ peoples? Maybe. It's a pretty tough problem though isn't it. Should they have been silenced, barred from office, imprisoned for what they said? No I don't think so.
I don't pretend there is a simple formula for it that everybody can follow without disagreement. There are no alternatives where that is the case though, except for the old "everybody who disagrees with sig will be punished" dictatorship.
Is there any objective evidence that censorship and intolerance would have better outcomes?
>If speech is not intolerant that does not mean it's tolerant. It's not one or the other, and they are entirely independent concepts.
Well I guess that is the heart of our disagreement. The prefix in- means not. Intolerant literally means not tolerant. Not intolerant speech is by definition tolerant speech.
> Well I guess that is the heart of our disagreement. The prefix in- means not. Intolerant literally means not tolerant. Not intolerant speech is by definition tolerant speech.
That is absolutely not the heart of the disagreement, just a weird definition that you're wrong about. The disagreement is fundamentally about whether tolerance for speech means allowing people you disagree with to speak.
Tolerant means you are tolerant toward others. Speaking is not itself an act of tolerance toward other people. I could make a post about Linux programming on Hacker News, that would not be tolerant toward trans people for example. It wouldn't be intolerant, it's just that it wouldn't be tolerant because I am not "tolerating" anybody when making such a post.
Or let's take another example in the strange gotcha twitter style you seem to be most comfortable communicating with: You posted an earlier comment which was "Yeah, insiders not knowing the full details of Musk's plan because Musk doesn't have a detailed plan yet seems more likely than WaPo just making some stuff up." There was nothing in that comment that showed an intolerance to Nazis attacking Jews, so you are saying you tolerate Nazis attacking Jews when you made that comment, right?
And there is nothing about the in- prefix of the word or anything else about it that means everything must be either tolerant or intolerant, that's ridiculous. Insoluble is the opposite of soluble, meaning it can't be dissolved. Does that mean your comment is insoluble because it is not soluble?
Tolerant: willing to accept behavior and beliefs that are different from your own, although you might not agree with or approve of them.[1]
Intolerant: disapproving of or refusing to accept ideas or ways of behaving that are different from your own.[2]
These are the definitions from Cambridge Dictionary and show these words are direct opposites of each other. We can look at it like boolean logic.
True == !False
!True == False
NULL != True
NULL != False
NULL != !True
NULL != !False
Tolerant == Not Intolerant
Not Tolerant == Intolerant (the literal definition of the word)
NULL != Tolerant
NULL != Intolerant
NULL != Not Tolerant
NULL != Not Intolerant
The Musk example is not "not tolerant". It is NULL. It is making no comment about Nazism. The Babylon Bee article was not a NULL value because it was directly commenting on the acceptance of trans people.
A possible alternative position is tolerance for others' words and definitions, and this was the mainstream progressive position up to about 10 years ago.
That is not using your creative definition of the word tolerance, but the common one and the one which was used by progressives when they advocated for that position. So there's an answer for your question I originally answered.
That's easily explained: citing a dictionary definition doesn't mean you know the meaning or how to apply it in a context. The man of the year award is not intolerant, just like giving a trans woman a woman of the year is not intolerant toward biological women who believe they are not the same gender as a trans woman. Tolerance does not mean forbidding all disagreement and satire.
But I am glad you have understood that a comment is not necessarily tolerant or intolerant. That's great progress, it took a while, but I applaud the effort and persistence. Good luck with the rest of the journey.
> Fine, and this is "simply your skewed view". Yours is not inherently more right than mine.
Yes, exactly, which is why banning/suspending them is wrong. A joke can hit or land based on who is hearing it. You not liking it doesn't mean it's inherently hateful.
> You completely skipped my point. Progressives have treated this topic this way because there is no compromise position.
No, Progressives treat it this way because they are scared of their base. If you talk to many in private there are serious questions that they are too scared to raise. But I'm telling you, if they don't raise them, they could politically suffer from it.
> Trans people don't need "societal buy-in" any more than any other group.
This is just factually wrong. It requires you to allow them in women's sports despite tremendous advantages, in women/men's bathrooms (probably the lesser controversial ones,) to be legally held responsible for misgendering, to chemically/hormonally alter children, etc. That is societal buy-in. That is not the same as allowing a Jewish person to practice their Sabbath, employing a black person, or allowing a gay man to get married. I can't even think of anything remotely comparable.
> This has no relevance to the issue at hand. They weren't awarding the Cis Woman of the Year Award. They were awarding the Woman of the Year Award. Trans women should be just as eligible for that as cis women. This isn't a weightlifting competition.
It is actually very relevant and the fact that you can't see that is frustratingly hilarious. It's also funny you say it's not a weight-lifting competition, when a person born a male could theoretically enter a women's weight-lifting competition and completely dominate...and it would be unquestionably supported by some people.
>Yes, exactly, which is why banning/suspending them is wrong. A joke can hit or land based on who is hearing it. You not liking it doesn't mean it's inherently hateful.
This logic doesn't work for moderation. There ultimately needs to be a judge. Otherwise, "I was just joking" becomes a get out of jail free card for any Twitter moderation.
>No, Progressives treat it this way because they are scared of their base. If you talk to many in private there are serious questions that they are too scared to raise. But I'm telling you, if they don't raise them, they could politically suffer from it.
You are still skipping over my point. You are placing the blame for not compromising on progressives, so tell me what they should do. What do think is the middle ground between progressives and conservatives who think trans people are mentally ill and shouldn't be allowed to express their trans identity in public? How do you compromise with people with that view?
>This is just factually wrong. It requires you to allow them in women's sports despite tremendous advantages, in women/men's bathrooms (probably the lesser controversial ones,) to be legally held responsible for misgendering, to chemically/hormonally alter children, etc. That is societal buy-in. That is not the same as allowing a Jewish person to practice their Sabbath, employing a black person, or allowing a gay man to get married. I can't even think of anything remotely comparable.
We are not even debating any of those issues because the belief that the Babylon Bee is putting forward is so extreme as to be unwilling to concede on any of it. Levine wasn't competing in a high school girls soccer game. She wasn't trying to use a public women's room. She isn't threatening legal action based off being misgendered. She is simply doing her job the same way all her colleagues are and yet she is subject of public ridicule and death threats for simply existing.
How do you think that gets fixed? Do you think there is some negotiation to be hard in which progressives promise to give up arguing about high school sports and conservatives will stop sending death threats to any openly trans public person?
>It is actually very relevant and the fact that you can't see that is frustratingly hilarious. It's also funny you say it's not a weight-lifting competition, when a person born a male could theoretically enter a women's weight-lifting competition and completely dominate...and it would be unquestionably supported by some people.
Fine, explain the relevancy. Tell me how that USA Today article supports "the idea that a tran-woman could actually feel and experience the challenges a biological woman faces" or challenges "the fact that many base their identity on media stereotypes rather than the very diverse experiences of womanhood".
And yes, I specifically was referencing weightlifting as an issue in which nuance can exist. I was contrasting that with an issue in which no nuance can exist, the idea that sex and gender are the same and both are binary. You either believe that or you don't.
> The conservatives viewpoint that the Babylon Bee seems to subscribe to is that gender and sex are they same thing and they are binary. There is no way to debate against that viewpoint. There is no possible compromise position.
No, the conservative position is that sex is objective and factual, while gender is a subjective facet of personality that is socially constructed. The compromise position is to destigmatize gender nonconformance within the category of “man” in a way that does not set up a conflict of rights with women.
> The award is only ridiculous if you think trans people shouldn't exist in public as openly trans. I mean you even referred to her as "her" so you seemingly recognize that her being eligible for "Woman of the Year" is more appropriate than "Man of the Year".
One issue with people being coerced into using wrong-sex pronouns is that it restricts discussion on this topic.
In this case, for example, if you believe that he shouldn't have been awarded a "Woman of the Year" accolade because he is really a man, but have to refer to him as "her" to be able to say this such that other people can read this - i.e. to avoid your comment being removed or your account banned - then it undermines the entire point being made.
I think the debate on misgendering being a "hate crime" is a bit pedantic. A lot of normal things between friends, lovers, acquaintances, colleagues pr strangers can be considered criminal or normal depending on circumstances / context. The idea that you're going to be jailed by accidentally misgendering your buddy is just moral panic at the expense of trans folks.
If I walked around the office calling my male co-worker by some random female name as a form of ridicule I'd end up on those cheesy videos they make you watch for sexual harassment training.
I guess I could have said 62 years, but yes I was specifically referencing JFK. His Catholicism was a major topic at the time of his election. Many people questioned whether he would defer political decisions and general loyalty to the Pope. He had to give speeches professing his belief in the separation of church and state. However by the time we got ready to elect our second Catholic, no one seriously questioned Joe Biden about it.
Where did I claim there was? You can philosophically believe that free speech (and also know that the 1st Amendment does not apply to private companies, but that the "right" to it is a general philosophy outside of government) should exist while holding the position that you can be held accountable for some things.
The question is how much a public forum should allow or not, especially one that has advertisers but is also an important forum for our democracy. That's very important and just saying everything under the sun is hate speech is not a good debate starter, especially when it's unevenly applied, and the rules are written by one viewpoint.
I think the "downvote" system which does eventually hide comments (until you request them) is a feature that already exists in beta. I think that's better than the "shadow banning" and suspensions in some instances. Obviously, you still can't tolerate some things, such as calls for violence, rioting, etc. Moderation is very difficult, but I err on the side of more openness than locking things down and stifling speech and debate.
> It has only been very, very recently that we have gone from "gender is a social construct" to "sex is a social construct."
I don’t think I’ve seen anyone say that sex is a social construct. Gender yes. And that gender and sex are orthogonal. And that gender is a spectrum but sex in humans is binary.
Maybe I missed the evolution of the conversation but I don’t think I’ve seen any volume of argument that sex is a social construct. I’m open to be convinced.
I would say 'orthogonal' is used for conceptually independent, not causally independent nor statistically independent (uncorrelated). So i would say that sex and gender are conceptually independent, although in reality statistically highly correlated.
There are many pieces now that proclaim biological sex (not gender) is a social construct. There are pieces in Forbes, Psychology Today, Professor curriculum, etc that are now saying this. I would say it was fringe if it weren't for the fact that it's been elevated by major publications.
When I was younger "gender is a social construct" mostly meant that if you were a man you were allowed to enjoy feminine things and if you were a woman, you could be a tomboy, etc. It also applied to trans individuals. However, that has shifted heavily over the last few years to be something very different and has gone so far as to go fully to the extent that sex (not gender) at birth is up for debate (even outside of Turner Syndrome or Intersex births.)
The earliest most popular publication that posited that "sex is a social construct" might be Butler's Gender Trouble. This article is a pretty good overview on the evolution of the discourse on this topic:
That list looks pretty "random and anonymous" to me. How many people on that list do you think an average person would recognize? I can't imagine it is more than 2 out of the 11 award recipients and many won't know a single one?
Levine was very prominent among conservative media, not due to being trans, but due to being a prominent part of Biden's Covid response alongside Fauci. It wasn't a random targeting.
Babylon Bee was not first to “target” Levine. Washington Post, for example, has run an article on Levine before Bee, also for the sole purpose of Levine being trans:
But I absolutely don't want Twitter to decide which organisations are like the NAACP and which are like the Klan. This is regardless of who runs Twitter.
I don't think the problem is whether Twitter is readable. The problem is whether it is advertisable for Twitter: whether advertisers will complain about being placed next to a tweet.
You aren't going to read what anyone thinks because the deluge of nonsense and junk in an unmoderated environment will render it useless for such purposes.
I very much want to. I've been on the net long enough to have noticed that ultimately what makes a discussion platform worth using is the right sort of moderation. Without moderation any large enough community quickly degenerates. The best platforms tend to be stringently moderated to keep up the quality -- not only kick out the wrong people, but discourage the low effort and pointless content enough that most of what's going on is worth reading.
For instance I absolutely wouldn't be using NH if it wasn't moderated in a way I happen to like. There are the various chan-derived boards and such, but I don't see any value in even finding out which still exist, because it's just not worth it my time to wade through mountains of garbage.
She's involved in politics at a fairly high level; that's not "a private citizen" or "just a bureaucrat". Furthermore, making a few jokes is neither "harassment" nor "a campaign"; by that standard Twitter should ban a hell of a lot of folk. That people can't be jokes about folks merely because other people are also excessively mean-spirited about them is one of the more baffling ideas of the modern American left.
The real problem, however, is that you don't need to dig very far to see people engage in all sorts of behaviour that's not exactly in accordance with the Twitter rules, ranging from stuff like "just fucking deport the Christians already!!" to "would be a real shame if their face got smashed in with a brick winkwink" and that ... doesn't get moderated. I've reported a bunch of posts like that: always "no action needed, doesn't violate our community terms".
I think a lot of people would have significantly less trouble with Babylon Bee's ban if Twitter didn't let the platform be such a quagmire of nastiness, and then occasionally cherry-pick an example.
> Their behavior was a part of a harassment campaign against someone who is largely a private citizen in this instance.
What you call a "harassment campaign" happens constantly on Twitter, driven by Twitter's own site and algorithms. Twitter frequently has a "main character" of the day, driven by the "What's Trending" sidebar on the home page, as well as quote Tweets by people with thousands or millions of followers that encourages and incentivizes the dragging of people who have little power. If this is a bannable offense, Twitter should ban itself.
We should be allowed to satirize almost everything that is part of our society, so to speak, satire that avoids the hot societal topics isn't really satire (see SNL). The trans discussion is really a hot topic inside the US, for better of for worse, so a satirical website talking about it is how things should be.
> Babylon Bee being suspended was one of the dumber things the previous Twitter rules had done. It's a satire site, it's right leaning, nothing in the piece they said was hateful or even an unpopular view.
They didn’t even make a joke. They just called trans woman a man. It was hate speech, pure and simple.
I am very afraid for the future of twitter now. Hate speech is going to run rampant on that platform now.
Not to mention that the person who attacked Pelosi's husband with a hammer was also posting transphobic crap (along with a lot of other right-wing garbage). Hate online definitely has real world impact.
There’s a lot of hate in the history books, 99% of it predating the internet.
Are those that engage in hate online more or less likely to act on it than those who engage in person? Are these interactions compelling them to use their voice off-line?
That's very common. There are a number of mass shooters in the US that targeted minorities who explicitly say in their manifesto or interrogation tape, that they were radicalized in online forums, and not offline.
saying it’s hate speech gives me Alice in Wonderland and 1984 vibes, 2+2=5 or you’re guilty and must be punished, regardless of what your senses tell you
> They didn’t even make a joke. They just called trans woman a man. It was hate speech, pure and simple.
It’s not a crime nor hate speech to acknowledge someone’s biological sex. That’s what we do in sports and when we select partners for example. Most, if not all heterosexual men would not consider a “trans woman” to be an actual woman. Our way of selecting partners is proof of that. To punish a natural, and biologically based viewpoint that most of humanity hold and follow is tyrannical and unsustainable.
How are we this far into the modern trans rights movement and people still haven't wrapped their brains around sex and gender being two distinct concepts?
All categories are arbitrary distinctions that someone made up at some point, including the categories of biological sex, race, and your birth name. At the very least it would be bullying behavior for me to single you out and call you a different name or different racial group to what you actually are (as defined by the constructs that society has agreed upon).
Sex is an emergent property of multiple genetic networks. This doesn't mean that it doesn't exist or that it is not bi-modal, but it is far from simple.
The fact that we don't go around performing genetic testing on people before we interact with them also raises questions about whether sex itself matters, or whether there must be different definitions for sexed categories dependent on policy purpose. (e.g. based on genitals when the concern is sexual violence; based on fertility for the purposes of reproductive medicine; based on gender performance; based on hormone levels, etc.)
Gender as a concept distinct from sex is a way of describing an existing social phenomenon. Gender, though traditionally tied to biological sex, changes over time. What we define as "masculine" and "feminine" traits change as society changes, and can even differ between societies, despite the fact that male and female chromosomes have not changed. Just because no one had described this distinction before the last century doesn't mean it isn't legitimate.
The terminology of the debate gets confused a bit because while indeed the expectations of people’s behavior, dress, etc. based on their sex is indeed a social construct and has been probably since the beginning of humanity, that wasn’t what “gender” meant until very recently. As far as I can tell, “gender” and “sex” were completely synonymous until 50 years ago, even in niche academic communities, and until maybe 10 years ago among the general public.
I will agree that the terminology could probably be better. But my original point is that this is a pretty high-profile issue and has been for a while, so anyone taking a hardline stance of "I'm gonna deny trans people until someone makes a good argument why gender and sex are different" is willfully ignorant at best.
Maybe because the person who came up with that idea is a crazy pedophile who drove 2 young boys to suicide. Yes, really. Maybe we should not blindly accept all of his ideas.
I “still” haven’t wrapped my head around it because not once have I been presented with non-tautological replacement definitions for “man” and “woman”.
I will immediately change my mind and recant my views — here and now! — if someone provides:
- A specific definition of what “gender” is, if not a synonym for “sex”
- Non-tautological definitions of “man” and “woman” that are consistent with your definition of “gender”
Gender is all about social interactions. For example, blue and pink being "masculine" and "feminine." Is there any relation to male or female chromosomes that would make blue appropriate for someone with X and Y chromosomes, and pink appropriate for someone with 2 X chromosomes? Of course not. Same goes for wearing makeup or high heels. At a different time in history, those things would have been considered "manly" but over time that's changed. None of the social flags that we use to determine a person's gender have anything to do with their genitalia or chromosomes, because we generally don't have that information when we see people in public. If gender and sex were really the same, it might be a bit more difficult for pre-op trans people to pass for a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth.
What about wanting to quit their jobs and take care of babies? That’s social/behavioral, so part of what you’d call gender. But it’s also rooted in biology.
It's not just cis women who want to do that though. And there are many cis women and trans men who don't. Not to mention, part of why it might be the case that women tend to quit their jobs and raise kids is because there's a lot of societal pressure to do that, and until relatively recently women (in the US at least) haven't really had the right to be independent at all.
Women not only do, but express the preference to, stay home with kids at much higher rates than men. It's quite likely there is a biological reason for that, and that the social construct derives from that instead of the other way around.
The fact that some women don't want to stay home and some men do doesn't mean it's a social construct. Many biologically-rooted differences between men and women are expressed in the population as overlapping but not coextensive normal distributions. E.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00421-006-0351-1
Non-tautological definitions of “man” and “woman” that are consistent with your definition of “gender”
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re looking for, but this seems like a non-attainable standard to me. Language is _so_ fuzzy. Do many nouns have ‘non-tautological’ definitions? Like, could you define ‘house’ or ‘boat’ ‘non-tautologically’?
Most people are not on-board with that at all. Most people also feel you can do whatever, including be a man or woman if you so desire, but the whole ideological stuff surrounding that: yeah ... not really. This includes many progressives on the left.
The entire concept of "treating me as a {man,woman} and also agree to my particular ideas about sex and gender or otherwise you're a hateful bigot!" is quite remarkable. It's like "you must agree with my preferred theory about the origins of homosexuality or else you're homophobic!"
The problem is that it's not at all straight-forward. It doesn't help that the word "gender" has been used to name a number of different and conflicting concepts.
The distinction between sex and gender leads to interesting problems of performing gender and what it means for gender (and sex) to be socially constructed. And if both are socially constructed can the divide be upheld without requiring counter-intuitive definitions?
The haziness of the term "woman" seems to be a popular target for mockery among conservatives. And phrased as an ontological question ("what is a woman?") it is unsurprisingly baffling to many people who haven't kept up with feminism and who are not personally affected by the outcome of this philosophical debate. Equally unsurprising then for these people to consider "The Left" to be out of touch.
Expressing exasperation at our collective failure to wrap our brains around these concepts is an understandable reaction from someone well-read, but it does nothing to change minds.
It's funny how "KillAllMen" trended on Twitter and that wasn't considered hate speech, but calling a woman a man is?
Actually I guess that's consistent, if you think men are lesser beings who deserve to be killed, then it makes sense you would also think that the worst possible thing you can do to a woman is call them a man.
Exactly. Several types of deep hate, sometimes even death threats, are allowed on Twitter: general hate towards all men, all whites, specifically white men. It also matters who expresses the hate, more is allowed from non-whites, trans people, feminists, etc.
I really don’t think Kanye is mentally ill or anti-Semitic, people are just claiming both or either of those as a way of “poisoning the well” about what he’s actually saying, check out this recent interview with ex-CNN Cuomo: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kQwaOfBb-s8
Ok, I bit. At 6:50 he explicitly decides to "call out" all Jewish people, and makes a claim that he's a victim of their behaviour.
> "And what I'm doing, I'm calling out the Jewish community as a whole to say. People say to me, all, we grew up on Ye. Talk to your brother, ask him why is Ye upset? Everybody, all they [the Jewish Community] want to do is silence and shoot the messenger."
At the end of the interview he clarifies what he meant, he’s frustrated with apparent nepotism within an industry. I would be shocked if he claimed that he had a problem with a randomly chosen person who happened to be Jewish, it doesn’t make sense.
If it is I think the term needs to be reviewed. In fact if people want to get sensitive about their racial identity then they need to focus on the actual words and tone.
Especially when it seems like alot of the time people are called racist or sexist for sharing a viewpoint that in their view is accurate.
For example, whenever I run into drivers that don’t react to a light change I have noticed it tends to be a woman with a phone in her hand.
I’m sure someone would take issue with my experience listed above, but I feel like I should have the right to make such a comment without backlash, because in my experience that observation holds true.
My point is I feel like context and history are important.
I'm Jewish (feel free to believe me or not) and I disagree. I choose to ignore the overt bigotry and focus on addressing the underlying distrust.
What he said represents quite common black nationalist views and were espoused by most Black Power activists in the 60s. Those views are still highly relevant in the black community today, due to things like this[0], promoted by popular thinkers like Prof. James Small. Yes, they can be hurtful, but I believe the proper response is to make the sports and music contracts transparent and re-do them so they don't screw over black talent, as Kanye says, to address the underlying distrust, and rebuild proper ties between the Jewish and Black communities. Conflict is sometimes healthier when it's out in the open and gets addressed, rather than repressed and buried.
There's enormous dangers in following the "destroy Kanye" route; it makes everything worse, and the impulse to ban anyone who doesn't "talk right" will eventually lead to historic catastrophe as resentments get buried and build up, rather than getting hashed out.
There's a huge difference to me between people with zero grievances (except being incels) turning to hate, versus being with huge legitimate historical and current grievances where I just disagree with how they express it. I still view it as my (and our) duty to address those grievances; we can address the distrust between communities afterwards once they're solved.
> I believe the proper response is to make the sports and music contracts transparent and re-do them so they don't screw over black talent
Why would you assume there's anything wrong with the contracts? He has the burden of proof and he hasn't shown it. Kanye believes he is being victimized by everyone. It's typical narcissist behavior. When someone says that everyone is an asshole, then they're probably the asshole.
I assume there's something wrong with the contracts, because it's obvious to anyone following the industry, and it's been widely and thoroughly covered for decades (see links at the bottom or search the press, university publications, or ProQuest). It's true for all these contracts, and especially those with black artists and athletes.
Kanye made specific points that the contracts are unfair, with 'talent' not being paid fairly, and having their creative freedom restricted. He also argues that control over distribution is essential, and black people are underrepresented both as record label owners, and as distributors, therefore leading to a huge power imbalance. All those facts are true without needing to go into the 'Jewish' stuff.
People who focus on that controversy are helping these scum-of-the-earth industries survive for longer than they should. Artists should own their output. They need managers and agents, but those should be employees and contractors, not "owners".
I personally don't care to psychoanalyze Kanye, it's none of my business and none of yours. He has objectively been victimized, and became successful in spite of it. I empathize with him and hope what he points out will be resolved.
The speed of your response indicates you haven't read the links.
You want him to publish his contract? Ooops, he tried that. It showed that Kanye's deal is "standard" for the industry, which doesn't mean it's in any way fair.[0] He's also explicitly said he's doing this for black artists in general, not just himself.
You want him to try to change his contracts privately? Oops, he tried that; his label has deep pockets and just settled privately rather than changing anything.
Many others have tried and they just get buried in lawsuits, sometimes blackmailed (their next releases won't get promoted),[1] and even if they get out, their past albums are still owned by others.
Burden of proof is for exceptional claims. In an industry where egregiously unfair contracts are the norm, the exceptional claim is that Kanye's contracts are fair.
> What he said represents quite common black nationalist views and were espoused by most Black Power activists in the 60s. Those views are still highly relevant in the black community today, due to things like this[0], promoted by popular thinkers like Prof. James Small. Yes, they can be hurtful, but I believe the proper response is to make the sports and music contracts transparent and re-do them so they don't screw over black talent, as Kanye says, to address the underlying distrust, and rebuild proper ties between the Jewish and Black communities.
This reads not like you disagree with whether or not its antisemitic, but rather that you're justifying tolerance of some antisemitism on the basis of it being a common black nationalist view.
Which I don't find acceptable. I won't tolerate ethnic or racial prejudice.
> I still view it as my (and our) duty to address those grievances; we can address the distrust between communities afterwards once they're solved.
That's entirely possible without also tolerating hatred.
We can say both that Ye is wrong to be antisemitic _and_ agree that the music industry is exploitative.
It's not about supporting or tolerating views, it's about empathizing with people who reached the wrong conclusion based on positive intentions. It makes me uncomfortable to write people off when their pain is legitimate.
From what I can see, most people who support Kanye are uncomfortable with the way he said it, but support his crusade against labels and distributors. Most (not all) of the people who oppose Kanye don't give a shit about labels or distributors beyond lip service, and are themselves exploitative (like Ari Emmanuel, who IMO contributed more to antisemitism than Kanye ever could). These people are not motivated by principles of tolerance, they're just trying to bury the issue. It's easy for me to choose where to stand, and I'm perfectly comfortable with my choice.
> We can say both that Ye is wrong to be antisemitic _and_ agree that the music industry is exploitative.
I say both too. But on the chessboard, sometimes you need to move pieces you don't want to. Rhetoric which is already extremely widespread doesn't bother me much; systematic and institutional discrimination against some of the people I admire most, bothers me highly. Fixing those industries is hard enough, and I don't want to make it any harder for him by joining the mob. I'll take issue with his comments once his fight is won.
I'm not sure most people here have seen the corner of Twitter known as "black Twitter." This is the part of Twitter where people (most of them from racial minorities) discuss things like "the Jews are keeping minorities poor," and "abortion is racist eugenics."
I don't know how they don't all get banned, but they somehow have a very vibrant community.
The level of antisemitism that Kanye (no, I will not call him "Ye") posted is not beyond the pale for people in black Twitter. I'm not sure he ever expected it to go this viral or get this much backlash.
Anti-Semitism and anti-Asian views are pretty popular in the black community (I can't say to what degree but high enough that it shows up in hate crime stats), just as much as it exists in the white community. It gets swept under the rug and never really addressed; I've even seen that the idea that minorities can't be racist (even towards other minorities) being actively perpetuated on social media. I think that should change. Kanye is a big voice, but he's hardly a lone voice.
Isn't this just a long way to saying you think this is the right decision, but doesn't change the fact that it was arbitrary? Except I'm not even sure the decision actually happened. There still aren't any recent posts from them. You might need to wait a bit to know
> Then, there are things like the Taliban, Russia, China, etc which have at times actively cheered on social media about the death of Americans or an American defeat
Soleimani. He helped the U.S. fight the Taliban. The U.S. later killed him in "self-defense" (no, really, that's what the U.S. Ambassador to the UN said). Scholars and the UN said the assassination was illegal. Do people who cheered his death deserve a ban?
That's not a trick question or whataboutism. At an international scale, principles have to be rigorously and fairly applied.
Babylon Bee was never unbanned (because they were never banned in the first place, just suspended and continue to be suspended) and Ye was unbanned before Elon Musk ever took over.
> "The Babylon Bee was tossed in Twitter jail 7 months ago for a joke that referred to an adult male as a man. We could have restored our account at any time by deleting the tweet, but we refused. It was the right call. Never censor yourself, and never apologize for speaking truth."
That's not the topic I'm talking about. I'm talking about the factual events of what occurred. The comment is neutral on whether it should have been suspended or not. The comment is just stating that Babylon Bee was never banned, the account still exists and it's status has not changed since that initial event and Elon Musk has had nothing to do with it.
>maybe eliminate the high profile banning but a person on the ground will have largely the same experience
It's either going to be a double standard or not. I moderated a busy gaming site for years. Users have nothing to do but re-post what got someone else banned and then complain things aren't consistent.
I would find the idea that a politician gets to say things, but I don't completely absurd.
I mean, if you think that “everyone is happy with Elon’s content moderation strategies” was one of the possible outcomes, well then I disagree, I think Elon is going to take heat for content moderation across the political spectrum.
Yep. Much harder to be the one bearing the responsibility of the calls being made than being an armchair commentator complaining about the decisions. I don't anticipate that he'll be any more successful at this than other leadership teams of social media companies. There's no way of "winning" at this game: damned if you do, damned if you don't.
If you moderated the 18-25, huge respect, I’m just adding background info: it’s a huge piece of French culture among geeks, like the 4chan, except most of the interesting website exists within the lapse between posting and being censored. It’s everything-ist and very bad taste. The rest is uninteresting, if it stays on, then it means it doesn’t say anything of any relevance. Moderators are kept to believe they’re administering a gaming forum with occasional slip-ups, whereas “being 410ed” became a colloquial word among teens (410 means your post returns HTTP-410, i.e. it was deleted). It’s like Snapchat, nothing lives for eternity (18-25 stands for the age, it’s not a 13-52 ratio, that would be banned). The 18-25 is a piece of ephemeral art.
I don’t understand. Are you saying that they repost something that got someone banned, they don’t get banned, and then they complain that it’s inconsistent? Why not ban the reposters?
> I would find the idea that a politician gets to say things, but I don't completely absurd.
That’s been Twitter’s official policy since they got criticized a lot for giving Trump passes on generally applicable rules in the runup to and just after thrbe 2016 election: they changed the rules so governments and sufficiently prominent public figures have wider latitude.
Musk selectively loosening restrictions on those who already have the loosest restrictions would be... well, not at all surprising.
At some point big social media might have to be made a utility and or nationalized, assuming we want a de-jure government to be our real government, and not a constellation of corporations acting as a de-facto one.
I don't disagree, but the people most angry about being kicked off Twitter are also the people who insisted that net neutrality was "Obamacare for the Internet".
Based upon his build up, this will be a fig leaf/scapegoat .
I don't see anything in his behaviour which would justify your "optimistic" outlook. Sure it won't degenerate in one of those gutter platforms right away but I doubt he'll be able to maintain an acceptable level as long as he's directly involved. He just doesn't make the the impression of an adult person.
imho this may end up being really good for the rest of the internet if it drives away interesting and important people to other platforms.
This is one of the problems with putting rich and successful people like Musk on a pedestal--it makes it seem like they can't make dumb, ego-driven mistakes. Irrational behavior gets interpreted as some 4D chess move that us mortals can't wrap our head around.
Exactly. It's like when people thought it was some amazing play so he could sell loads of tesla stock without tanking it. No, because if it was he would have given himself loads of getouts. Instead he gave up rights to all DD. Just arrogance IMO and he had to pay the price.
Now it's operation "get money back". He'll probably hold it for 5-10 years until tech stocks recover then IPO to try to foist it on his gullible fanboys. Until then he just needs to not scare off advertisers and cut costs enough to afford his debt repayments.
> He just doesn't make the the impression of an adult person.
No, obviously not. Ramping up his car company from roughly nothing to major global presence, kickstarting the world on electric traffic, and setting up private space rocketeering on the side. Oh, and becoming the supposedly richest person on the planet in the process. How insufferably childish of him.
As far as I remember it's: being born rich, getting lucky on one investment and than chewing up ideas of other people and having them sweat his bullshit out to keep their jobs sounds more like the true history here. Didn't get much better in the recent years.
I mean Trump made it to the president of the US of A and I wouldn't consider him an adult person either. History looks pretty similar. Just a different time with the appropriate difference in methods.
>Elon will probably run Twitter the way a "reasonable executive" would. Not just release the hounds.
Is there a list of how many different institutions and investors have money in Twitter now? Because I remember Musk taking in a lot of money for this takeover. And those people probably had the smarts to give them an exit in case Musk decided to release the hounds.
Earlier this year he seemed pretty set on the idea of allowing whatever's legal, making Twitter all about free speech. But now it'll just get some minor changes? If it's true, why the change of heart?
As your namesake understood intimately, we can’t know it’s in someone’s heart. And as a reasonable modern observer should understand, Elon makes frequent course adjustments. Not only don’t we know how it’s going to work out, my guess is he doesn’t know either at the moment.
Don't see it happening in his lifetime...unless he changes it radically and just bought it for the user base, which honestly is probably closer to the truth.
Even if he fired everyone, and got free hosting, it would take nearly a decade to get that back. But that's obviously not realistic.
I think his goal is to figure out how to do this and keep it sane and keep the advertisers and grow the membership. It will take a long time to get there, and Twitter will have to look very different to get there.
It may be time to consider the possibility that you have been reading far too much in to the inane witterings of one of the world's most prolific compulsive liars and fantasists.
"Keep the advertisers happy, but try to reduce the reliance on advertisers."
I actually think the opposite is going to happen. He's already said he wants Twitter to be the most prolific site for advertisers saying that he thinks advertising can "delight, entertain, and inform you."
If he introduces a subscription model TikTok will pull ahead and take over the entire social media space.
Yeah, I'll be curious to see, now this is not first hand, but I was referencing this pitch deck to investors which seems like the most honest version of Elon?
Since it's directly connected to the money, but who knows.
From advertisers perspective TikTok has already won in the social media space. It’s going to take another year or so for advertisers and TikTok to figure it all out but from talking to the guys who do focus on brands social media spends they can’t get on TikTok fast enough.
Through from what I have heard TikToks handling of ad money (how it goes to the creator) is bad and their handling of copyright is even worse.
On the other hand YouTube shorts can already technically do most things TikTok can, and handles copyright okay (from the pov of the big copyright holders) and has licenses for a lot of music and stuff and created an ad model making it much more interesting for people to create shorts then TikToks and allows using shorts as a way to get someone hooked for longer videos. And there are GeoPolitical reasons why regulators might want to push YouTube over TikTok e.g. by how they create regulations.
So there is a realistic chance that in the next 1 or two years YouTube Shorts will eat up TikTok due to better quality Shorts for the user and better monetization/money making chances for the creators.
I think TikTok will likely have to rework their method for paying creators. But they have a platform that’s made for creators to work directly with advertisers who will see more revenues that way.
That’s why I said there’s a lot they have to work out. They don’t want to fall into a model like Instagram where the bulk of ad revenues go to the largest influencers. But I would not be surprised to see them rework their payout scheme to something more predictable like YouTubes. The “big pot of money, split evenly” was a simple way to start but now is getting stretched.
One thing I find interesting about TikTok is they have one of the best, completely in App, ways of targeting users. The short format videos allows them to assemble a ton of data points very quickly on user interests and more and more product and recommendation searches are being done on their platform.
I could be wrong but I don’t see YouTube shorts catching up anytime soon TikTok has too much of the social Zeitgest going their way and it’s far easier for new creators to get noticed there as well.
Oh, I see. I have no idea. My intuition is that it's like a standard loan, as in he can do whatever he wants but if he doesn't pay it back then they'll come after his other assets he supposedly put up as collateral. That's just me guessing. I have no idea how that works at that scale of financing.
Debt financing is different than buying shares in the company. There is no fiduciary responsbility in the strict sense of the meaning. But, there is an obligation to pay back the loan with interest.
He doesn't have any duties to debt investors beyond what's explicitly in a contract with them. If he has equity co-investors (which he was certainly attempting to syndicate at one point) then those are indeed shareholders (private rather than public, but still shareholders) and he'll have duties to them.
On the contrary, LBO debt investors typically have clauses to be able to convert their debt to equity and basically force liquidation/sale etc to recover the money they put in if their debt is defaulted on.
The 13 billion in loans are secured not complete junk.
Of course if cash flows become too low to service the debt (I.e. default), musk can always inject[1] more capital and keep the debt serviced he can afford to do that by leveraging (or selling)TSLA and SpaceX stock easily or use other financing options
(1) he could also buy the debt directly himself without changing capital structure, or refinance it by lending the company money personally
or have one of his other companies lend Twitter money,
he did this between spaceX and Tesla once , it is more difficult with TSLA today- he will get sued . However he controls the board and has the power. He did force TSLA by solarCity and won the lawsuit as well so not implausible.
None of that contradicts what I said. Yes, there may be various terms that take effect if he defaults on the debt and some of them may cause him to take on fiduciary obligations (although I find it hard to imagine converting to equity would be desirable in that case - normally in that scenario the equity is getting zeroed). But he has no such obligations unless and until he's getting close to default.
Not all shareholders have been bought out , notably the saudi investment continues and is rolled forward as equity shares into the new structure, they retain the same amount of ownership as before .
Also he raised equity investment commitments from a16z , Sequoia , Ellison and few others as well who likely come in as new investors.[1]
So he still has a few shareholders but those who are accredited and have much higher risk appetite and long term view unlike not qtr to qtr of typical public companies so twitter wont be buffeted with market forces like FB is now when trying something radical.
[1] while some of 7B equity investment secured backed out since April , few publicly affirmed their intent to participate recently, no one knows how much was still on table and how much musk took.
I don't see anything in Elon Musk's past operation of businesses as CEO that suggests to me he's going to have a better sense of how to run a social network than the previous operators.
I predict the best case scenario is that he does no worse.
The most likely result seems to be he sells it within 5 years after making zero meaningful changes and taking a massive loss. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad result.
I don't think he'd sell. At this point, I think it's more of a "crown jewel" for him—like the tech nerd equivalent of owning a baseball or a basketball team.
I guess so, maybe? Though I can barely think of a less interesting tech-y thing to own than something like Twitter when you already own SpaceX and Tesla. In terms of Tech-y-ness, Twitter is a spectacular downgrade.
He will definitely make a lot of changes to the user experience of Twitter, and add a lot of features. He has already outlined some of the features he wants to add around billing and commerce, similar to super apps in China like Wechat. He has been thinking about this for a long time under the X banner.
I fully expect the logo and UI to change, but he isn’t going to suddenly prevent people from following people, sending / reading tweets or do anything else that would drive most users away because that would just be setting billions of dollars on fire.
"Forced into buying it" is really not an accurate way to think about it. It makes it sound like he never wanted to buy Twitter, when in fact he did want to buy it for less money because he knew the valuation was too high (because of bot farms, managerial bloat, &c.)
> he knew the valuation was too high (because of bot farms, managerial bloat, &c.)
"He knew the valuation was too high" is really not an accurate way to think about it. It makes it sound like he successfully proved those claims, when in fact he failed to present compelling enough evidence in court when he tried to use legal action to back out.
44bn is a lot for a social media company. Westinghouse was sold off for 7.9bn. They make nuclear reactors as opposed to distributing short text messages over the Internet.
It was mismanaged according to *me*. I posted my opinion. It may be incorrect. That's true of most posts on the internet.
Twitter has 7,500 employees. It doesn't take that many to run a Twitter. Most Twitter employees I know use their positions to work on things weakly aligned with the success of Twitter, such as random political or nerdy projects. That's a small sample set, but the things I hear raise my eyebrows.
If Twitter were private, and management aligned to shareholder value, the value could increase by a lot. I'm not sure if Musk can do that, or if it isn't overvalued in the first place, but that's my opinion on Twitter management from where I sit.
It's not uncommon for public companies, especially older ones, by the way. In many cases, almost every employee, right up through the CEO, is there to maximize their income, to maximize their future career prospects, and to have fun. That doesn't always align well with shareholder value.
Big room for middle ground in there of "Elon is good at some things, bad at others, Twitter muddles around as a net negative for the world."
I wouldn't be so quick to assume that Musk's ~15 recent years of experiences with mechanical/aerospace/production-engineering businesses is gonna translate perfectly to whatever Twitter is supposed to be.
Musk's MO is in creating new markets in ambitious new areas. I see no evidence of his ability in turning round failing old companies with old, below-par products.
Maybe being forced to buy it (it's probably already halved in value at least) will make him think twice before gobbing off in future though.
Twitter is basically an internet scale public bathroom wall with everyone scrawling short hot takes onto the walls. The best case scenario has always been that it shut down and I hope we are one day closer to that eventuality.
It is ironic and laughable that Elons post to advertisers is done with screenshots of text. After 20+ years of mainstream networked computing this is what passes as a state of art platform and user experience to communicate to n audience.
The bulk of the problems Twitter faces today are amplified and directly inflicted by the essential design of the product.
What's wrong with screenshots of text? They're easily readable. The white background makes things stand out more than just posting text on stock Twitter. It's one reason Insta story posts and even slides have text.
Technological progress doesn't mean making user-hostile design. If users like a format or medium, you can offer it to them even if your platform is capable of greater things.
Mostly the fact that they completely ignore accessibility.
In fact, if Twitter did want to improve the user experience, automatic OCR of such text and generation of the corresponding alt tag would be a practical improvement. In fact, general recognition of the content of an image and auto generation of an ALT tag would be a significant improvement.
... But that require them to do actual machine learning as opposed to being the internet's bathroom stall wall.
Tesseract has a horrific API and decades of technical debt. Add to this, it's also very sensitive to fonts. So... yeah, OCR is 'solved', but that doesn't mean it's easy.
> What's wrong with screenshots of text? They're easily readable. The white background makes things stand out more than just posting text on stock Twitter. It's one reason Insta story posts and even slides have text.
The fact you defend it as more readable than actual twitter design says a lot
Screenshots of text are popular because people don't seem to be able to copy and save data anymore. Social media apps don't let users download pictures anymore. I can only share intra-platform links to content. The Instagram app won't even let me select text. People get around this insanity by screenshotting the whole screen and saving a poor quality version of the data in image form. This is actually a lossy format conversion and will happen multiple times as people encounter resistance when they try to copy, save and share. It's not just images of text, it's screenshots of screenshots of of screenshots of text.
This is what computing has degenerated to. People can't do basic actions like copying and downloading anymore so they just use screen shots and screen recorders to get around software limitations. I've seen so many videos that end with the user manipulating the interface to stop the recorder. And then there's the people reduced to taking pictures of another screen with their phone cameras.
> Social media apps don't let users download pictures anymore.
These aren't problems with screenshots of text (although others have done a pretty good job in listing those) or even problems with computing. These are problems with shitty social media platforms that want to take control from their users, and with the users who accept those kinds of limitations. Stop using bad user-hostile platforms and they'll either improve to win back users or they'll become obsolete and die as people flock to better alternatives.
> Stop using bad user-hostile platforms and they'll either improve to win back users or they'll become obsolete and die as people flock to better alternatives.
There's no point in migrating to some perfect encrypted federated free software platform and being alone because everyone I know is still using Instagram.
Maybe just stop using social media. If you're interesting your friends will contact you still. If you're not interesting, go get a hobby and become interesting.
Usually this site is the only place I care about but there's a presidential election in my country tomorrow. I'm not gonna stop using social media right now. Future of my country is at stake.
> There's no point in migrating to some perfect encrypted federated free software platform and being alone because everyone I know is still using Instagram.
If everyone went by that logic no one could ever stop using the social media sites they are using today. If you've found a good platform your best bet is to get people to use it in addition to the bad ones they use now and as more people join and use the better platform people could find themselves using the old ones less frequently. By enjoying and getting used to having the benefits of the new platform they could grow increasingly frustrated by the limitations of the older ones.
As long as the perfect encrypted federated free software platform is at least as easy to join and use as the old one asking a friend to add one more app to their rotation wouldn't be putting a huge burden on them.
Don’t even get me started with screen recording on a phone. At least on Apple if any Apple Music is playing that you don’t own the mp3 for, gets scrubbed out. I only know this from trying to make a cool thing for my son. I’m so tired of the nanny shit and wish I could just go back to android.
> At least on Apple if any Apple Music is playing that you don’t own the mp3 for, gets scrubbed out.
Yeah. Next year I'll be reading about how the camera apps are detecting copyrighted content and refusing to take pictures too.
> wish I could just go back to android
Don't count on Android. Stakeholder lock down is increasing there too. Remote attestation is already a thing, soon we won't be able to run most apps if we "tamper" with the device by owning it.
Google's SafetyNet. It either has or will have support for hardware attestation. This can't be circumvented by software like Magisk.
Apps will insist that you run unmodified software. Bank apps will require attestation because of "fraud". WhatsApp will require attestation because of "terms of service". Streaming apps will require attestation because of "piracy". Games will require attestation because of "cheating". Every app in the Play Store will find a bullshit reason to require it and the result is we can't use their software if we own the machine, we have to let the corporation own it.
Yes, completely agree. The sibling comments already explained the technical limitations in detail so I just left it implict in my "lossy conversion" point.
screenshots of text on twitter exist primarily because people still want to post long segments of text on a platform that explicitly disallows it. screenshots of text are worse than actual text in every way i can think of. they do not:
- allow clicking hyperlinks
- allow copying content to paste elsewhere
- adhere to device display preferences. you wanted dark mode? fuck you, my screenshot's black on white, dwi
- support screen readers. i loled hardcore at the other post suggesting twitter OCR them--i mean sure, as a practical matter, they should given the status quo, but YOU COULD HAVE JUST USED TEXT TO BEGIN WITH
- scale properly when zoomed in or out
- display all the text up front. virtually all of these require you click through each image because the thumbnail is cropped (if not too small to read anyway)
idk what reason you'd ever actually want to use them unless you desperately needed to show off the cool font you used. saying they're easily readable is like saying the abhorrent mandatory training videos featuring some extremely bored person reading a script over a static background for 30 minutes, with no option to speed up playback or fast-forward, are perfectly understandable. like, yeah, sure, they _are_, but also you could have provided a set of text bullet points about how not to violate USFCPA that any literate person could read in about 2 minutes and we'd all learn the same damn thing
A lot of accounts on Twitter screenshot text in order to circumvent notifications to the accounts they cite... This allows people to hijack content, and to arrange brigades without having a clear path back to the source of where they started.
One of the most important things for Elon to understand is that no matter how many programmatical measures are put into place to prevent abuse, there will always eventually be a workaround for people on a very public and open site. Protecting users and their content rights should be a goal of the platform as well, too many of these social sites see copycat behavior as fair game, and they reward people who steal and hijack content, that needs to be discouraged among several other bad social media behaviors.
> Twitter is basically an internet scale public bathroom wall with everyone scrawling short hot takes onto the walls. The best case scenario has always been that it shut down and I hope we are one day closer to that eventuality.
I really don't see a problem with having an internet scale public bathroom wall for people to scrawl all over. Sure, Twitter is mostly spam and garbage, but so what? Every comment, however useless/offensive/entertaining/banal/silly/poetic/helpful/etc that isn't breaking the law isn't really a problem and no one is forcing you to read it.
I don't have much trouble ignoring Twitter entirely most of the time and the main issues I have with it aren't even about Twitter itself but with how people try to use it for things it is poorly suited for. It's the "journalists" who copy/paste tweets then call that an article I take issue with. Twitter is absolutely no place for presidential records, and shouldn't be the only place for any kind of important or official notification, or the only way to reach a company to get customer service.
There are certainty far better platforms for blogging, but lots of people like Twitter and find it useful. I don't see why Twitter should go away.
Many Twitter employees think Elon Musk can do better, especially with bolder decisions on obvious things. Source: several friends working there.
1. Spams and bots are rampant. Now I understand it's hard, but eliminating the obvious ones is not hard. A verified account impersonating people and selling crypto is just insane.
2. I used to ask for verification and get this. Twitter doesn't agree with verifying myself. What is this idiotic policy? I am myself.
3. People should allow to tweet as long as it's not illegal, especially from high profile accounts. Moderation might not go away, but it should be minimal.
My opinion is that, if twitter enables widespread verification where a lot more people can be verified, twitter's convo will get 10x better (e.g. now they can rank replies, people will act more reasonably).
So, create a court system basically that decides on free speech issues. Got it. Likely will arrive at the same conclusion as the legal system that’s been operating for over 200 years.
There’s a reason the legal system said free speech is out to the point of direct imminent harm. It was the arrogance of 20 year old programmers in silicon valley who thought they could create a better legal system.
That's one big problem with these (US based) companies. They don't apply the spirit of the laws in their own home country that allowed/allows them to exist.
Zuckerberg has even claimed that fb is a "digital town square".
They don't mind enforcing speech laws of other countries, lowest common denominator.
No tears would be shed if they were broken up, nationalized, etc.
So I believe your comment to be in good faith but it's overly optimistic.
First, whenever it comes to "free speech" 99% of the time people make that argument they're not arguging for "all speech". They're talking about "my speech". And most of that time they really just want to utter hate speech.
Second, the idea of what's normal or acceptable is built on deeply ingrained beliefs that typically aren't rational. You see this whenever Elon talks about the "far left". This is such a laughable concept. The "far left" in American politics quite often simply means "we should let trans people exist" (eg [1]). Even suggesting things like everyone deserves access to healthcare is viewed as an extreme left position in the US.
So when Elon argues he's a centrist, the calibration is off because your choices in mainstream American politics are mostly between extreme right (often called the "alt right") being the party of Trump and the center right in the form of the Democratic Party (eg [2]). There is no "left" in American politics. The takeover of neoliberalism in the US is near-total.
As for Elon's plans for Twitter, he's put a lot of money on the line and the letter to advertisers I think gives a good signal of where this is going. I predict Elon will simply cut costs, unban a few conservatives as a token gesture and wait a couple of years to take the company public again and get out. He may as well start making a "Mission Accomplished" banner now and book the aircraft carrier. This is basically the private equity playbook.
I would agree that the (economic) policy of the democrats is center-right, but culturally the party definitely has a far-left voice. Radical feminism, postmodernism, anti-racism Mao struggles, gender puzzles. And to use the overused term "wokism".
Wokism is culturally dominant, but widely rejected all the way from center-left to anything to the right of that.
Republicans are economically right (so not extreme right), yet have a far-right outing, as you say.
> You see this whenever Elon talks about the "far left". This is such a laughable concept. The "far left" in American politics quite often simply means "we should let trans people exist"
Look I’m probably somewhere between center and far left depending on your perspective and maybe that’s the point. For better or for worse(probably worse) the functioning of society is based on relative, not absolute belief.
”(probably less action on more contentious issues, but you still can't use racial epithets and call for violence)”
This hasn’t been the case until now. Just as an example lot of radical leftists, BLM activists etc. have openly called for extermination of white people and contantly used racist rhetoric without any consequences. Meanwhile a lot of convervatives, libertarians etc. have been banned/suspended from Twitter due to false ”hatespeech” reporting.
No one has ever asked for ”hounds to be released”. No one sane wants Twitter to become another 8chan. What people want is the one-sided 1984 experiment to end.
> This sort of justifies the viewpoint that despite all his bluster, Elon will probably run Twitter the way a "reasonable executive" would. Not just release the hounds.
He literally just had every engineer print out the last 3 months of code lol
I understand he also laid off the entire data engineering team, that news being sourced from Messrs. Ligma & Johnson, two prankster nerds who went to the vicinity of Twitter HQ and walked around carrying cardboard boxes.
Yes, I saw that. The reporter behind this story says he has 4 sources and screenshots. I can't say it's 100% true but it seems much more likely than the Ligma/Johnson bit.
Because he’s usually self deprecating? I didn’t think this was a particularly kind analysis, my assessment was basically he’ll do whatever makes him the most money (or loses him the least)
Populism from the far right has adopted a strategy of re-defining key terms such as nation, citizen, fairness, representation.
Under these conditions, a highly diverse council will either not be able to decide or will need to decide in favor of maximum leniency.
By the way, Adam Curtis made this point in his documentary "HyperNormalisation", where he argued that Trump had hijacked "fair and balanced" reporting.
True, it's not entirely new. But re-defining concepts that are fundamental to democracy has bad consequences. Jan-Werner Müller has written about this in his book "Democracy Works":
“Now, it’s true that populists, when in opposition, criticize sitting governments (and, usually, also other parties). But, above all, they do something else, and that is crucial: in one way or another, they claim that they, and only they, represent what they often refer to as the “real people” or also the “silent majority.”
At first sight, this might not look particularly nefarious; it does not immediately amount to, let’s say, racism or a fanatical hatred of the European Union or, for that matter, the declaring of judges and particular media “enemies of the people.” And yet this claim to a distinctly moral monopoly of representation has two detrimental consequences for democracy. Rather obviously, once populists assert that only they represent the people, they also charge that all other contenders for office are fundamentally illegitimate. This is never just a matter of disputes about policy, or even about values; such disagreements, after all, are completely normal and, ideally, even productive in a democratic polity. Rather, populists assert that their rivals are corrupt and simply fail to serve the interests of the people on account of their bad, or indeed “crooked,” character. ”
If you take a quick scroll through the quote-retweets of Musk's "the bird is freed" tweet [1], there are a lot of slurs and bigotry. Musk might or might not be bigoted himself, but lots of bigots seem awfully happy at the prospect of him in charge.
Lots of people get happy when their "enemies" are unhappy and whinging about it. This implies nothing about whether the changes will be good for them too.
I think this (at least the first part) is fairly bang-on.
There is a difference between diversity of "the place where you are forming an opinion", and diversity of what that opinion is.
By saying that a council needs to equally represent diversity of opinions completely ignores how widespread those opinions actually are. Decisions about action to take about going "defcon 3 on the jews" should not need to be decided by a council where you're focusing on equity of diverse opinions; ie, 50% of people think anti-semitism is bad, and 50% think anti-semitism is good. It's a bastardization of the word "diversity" in order to support whatever fringe belief is up for discussion.
It's important to note here, and to the comment you replied to, that Trump won an election, and currently has higher approval ratings than Biden. That's a problem if your belief system relies on your being part of an oppressed majority, or to use the original term, a "moral majority."
That's why it's important to remove appeals to popularity from moral reasoning.
> The word "Diverse" has been successfully appropriated and destroyed by the right.
If anything, it has been successfully appropriated and destroyed by intersectionalists on the left, where diverse means anything but diversity of opinions and where people's diversity is just evaluated by racial, religious, sexual and sexual orientation characteristics.
The fact that the "head of diversity" of Apple, a black woman was fired for pointing that out is a proof of the existence of that monopoly by the left.
The term was popularized by leftists, but coopted by corporations and oligarch-media who have emptied the word of its meaning, turning it into a buzzword that is said in every press release and at every opportunity.
The news of Ms Smith being fired pained me when it came out; the people behind that "outcry" should be ashamed. The mob won again.
> The only "diverse" opinion that has not been represented in Twitter moderation is the opinion of straight white males upset they can't spread vaccine misinformation, election misinformation, and deadnaming trans people without being reported and muted.
There is evidence that Twitter has been actively colluding with large pharmaceutical giants to target and purposefully ban those for being skeptical of them and the vaccine. [0] So one is not allowed to be skeptical and criticize that?
Perhaps everything on what is being read out on the news is the absolute truth then. Surely they can never be wrong. /s If we question the media and companies like PayPal or Twitter dislike that, then say goodbye to your account without giving a reason of what was violated [1] and in the case of the former you must pay a $2,500 fine for what they call 'misinformation'.
> The word "Diverse" has been successfully appropriated and destroyed by the right.
I don't think one political coalition has a monopoly over the words it uses
Looking at college campuses, I see a lack of diversity of perspective
Looking at executive boards, I see a lack of ethnic diversity (and also diversity of perspective)
> So anyone that is celebrating this Musk announcement is telling on themselves
Just like how anyone who's upset about it is upset that they have less space to shove their insipid beliefs down the throats of others. Maybe reddit is a better choice for them?
>The word "Diverse" has been successfully appropriated and destroyed by the right.
>It USED to mean "include representation of those not from the mainstream - those that don't typically have major representation, but whose opinions are valuable to be included"
The majority of Twitter moderation staff appear to be more left wing than the mainstream. Allowing more center and right wing people on the decision making would be allowing a marginalized group within Twitter to have a voice.
It would be amazing if a council with diverse viewpoints could even sit together without killing each other in this day and age. Does this exist anywhere?
The article you linked seems to show that it did, in fact, have a moderating effect?
> NORC surveyed the group before the conference, and again on the same questions at the end; the results were compared with a similar panel of voters who did not get an intense dose of deliberative democracy in the interim. Voters at the event on both the left and the right appeared to edge toward the center. Democratic support receded for a $15 federal minimum wage and for “Medicare for all”; Republican support grew for rejoining the Paris climate agreement and for protecting from deportation immigrants brought to the United States as children.
In the real world, sure. The Internet would have us believe that civil war is imminent. We need to stop letting the 1% of people who bother to post online drive our national dialog. We have put the crazies in charge of the asylum.
Supreme Court justices, despite their huge partisan differences and passionate disagreements on many individual cases, often talk about how they personally enjoy working with each other. My impression is that this is true of many Congressional committees as well, although it's less legible there because most congressmembers find it politically advantageous to talk about how mad they are at the other party.
There's a huge amount of history there, though. It didn't just get formed this week. It's got some members who have been on the court since the early 90s. Some since the late 90s and others in the aughts. The SCOTUS has long-lived institutional memory and norms of behavior. It's members also tend to become somewhat isolated from what's going on in the culture outside.
Interesting! Glancing at the board, there is a clear makeup of highly educated, decorated, democratic, liberal-ish people. I would be hard pressed to call this setup one that focuses on "wildly diverse viewpoints".
I actually don't think this is the case. Almost all of these in the US are largely bipartisan, not nonpartisan. In some cases they also tend to self select for people that favor certain viewpoints. NIMBYism is prevalent in local government, for example.
They're optimized to serve the interests of the two prevailing parties in the US, which aren't the only two legitimate viewpoints.
I’ve had better experiences and I also find that issues that aren’t neatly D or R weigh more heavily on them in smaller or more local jurisdictions. I think there is a good case to be made for a similar dynamic on a social media’s board, where the mechanics of good moderation and guidance, combined with cordial operating principles, should be too front-and-center to ignore.
I am not super familiar with US judicial bodies and what their mandate actually entails, but, in general, what judges do fundamentally revolves around interpreting laws and/or constitutions.
Twitter does, of course, also have to comply with law. In regards to this council we are however specifically focusing on an area, that is not already decided by law. Coming up with a decision in a "wildly diverse group" without the need to argue along law (because that is not what your mandate asks for), is a very, very different setup.
I feel the other examples are problematic for other reasons, i.e. "city councils": In the EU people get elected into these positions and no one mechanism will be placed for them to have "wildly different viewpoints". They get elected to get something done, which will then revolve around making compromises, or just not being involved in the process.
Interesting. In the US councils represent different areas of their city or county, and those areas have different political party leanings as well as different economic and community goals, and that’s what brings the diversity to the governing body. There are cities that are too uniform for this to work well, of course.
> The Internet would have us believe that civil war is imminent.
The person who could arguably be considered the third most powerful politician in the US just had their own broken into and their spouse assaulted in a suspected act of domestic terrorism. I wouldn't say "imminent" but if you don't think the possibility is at least somewhere on the table I would consider that being naive.
And you have Bernie supporters shooting up GOP softball games, democrats setting fire to court houses, and radical groups running over Christmas parades attendees because they were white.
There’s a key difference: Darrell Brooks didn’t launch his attack for Democratic goals and no Democrat supports his actions. The protesters in Portland did not have the support of Democratic leaders and tended to criticize them almost as heavily they do Republicans. James Hodgkinson was definitely a leftist but his actions got immediate and complete rejection from Democratic leaders, including Bernie Sanders unequivocal condemnation.
Contrast this with the way Republican politicians and media are hesitant to condemn the January 6th attack or cross Trump on almost any topic, and calls for political violence have been the subject of jokes and outright support from leaders & candidates for years. Those topics poll favorably with far too many Republicans to consider them fringe issues.
That’s scary for anyone who believes in fair elections or the rule of law because, as we’ve seen, those people feel emboldened and are expanding. There are a large number of election deniers running for office this year and they’re all members of one party, with almost no internal pushback.
Now do all the crazy shit that democrats were saying during the "mostly peaceful" BLM riots that did $2,000,000,000 in damage, hurt thousands of cops, hurts thousands of civilians, destroyed thousands of buildings, tens of thousands of cars, and wrecked thousands of American lives - many of them the minorities that BLM claim to support - even though they spent millions on questions "jobs" for family members and millions more on lavish mansions. All of the prominent democrats were behind the BLM violence 100%. Even our VP was bailing out bad actors who would just end up getting arrested again.
Ah election deniers...
Like:
Joe Biden, 2019: “I absolutely” agree that Trump is an “illegitimate president.”
Hillary Clinton, 2019: The election was “stolen.”
Jimmy Carter, 2019: “Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election and was put into office because the Russians interference on his behalf.”
Kamala Harris, 2019: “Absolutely right” that Trump “didn’t really win.”
Karine Jean-Pierre, 2016: It was a “stolen election.”
Jerry Nadler, 2017: It was a “tainted” and “illegitimate” election.
I really don't think there's a straight line from this kind of lone-wolf domestic terrorism to civil war. A civil war happens when people who aren't mentally unstable, normal people just like you and I, decide that suchandsuch political objective is so important that our fellow citizens have to be shot in order to achieve it. If that seems like a crazy idea to you (it certianly does to me!) then a civil war isn't yet on the table.
A period of severe unrest like we had in the 60s? That's definitely a possibility.
It's not lone wolf terrorism though, it's an organized + well funded movement to end US democracy. They control a bit over 50% of the Republican party, and a growing percentage of the courts (including the supreme court).
Heck; Biden is would be considered right wing in most developing countries, and here's his take:
> Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.
Now, I want to be very clear — (applause) — very clear up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology.
I know because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans.
But there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.
These are hard things.
But I’m an American President — not the President of red America or blue America, but of all America.
And I believe it is my duty — my duty to level with you, to tell the truth no matter how difficult, no matter how painful.
And here, in my view, is what is true: MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people.
They refuse to accept the results of a free election. And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.
Again, this sounds very different from a scenario where a civil war is on the table. Biden's concern with "MAGA Republicans" is that they might win political power locally and use it to subvert national election results, not that they might shoot him and seize power by force. (Scare quotes because I find the term unhelpful, not because I disagree that such a group exists.)
> They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.
They look at the mob that stormed the United States Capitol on January 6th — brutally attacking law enforcement — not as insurrectionists who placed a dagger to the throat of our democracy, but they look at them as patriots.
And they see their MAGA failure to stop a peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election as preparation for the 2022 and 2024 elections.
They tried everything last time to nullify the votes of 81 million people. This time, they’re determined to succeed in thwarting the will of the people.
That’s why respected conservatives, like Federal Circuit Court Judge Michael Luttig, has called Trump and the extreme MAGA Republicans, quote, a “clear and present danger” to our democracy.
This seems like paranoid thinking. The Supreme Court has shifted ideologically to the right, but I haven’t seen any evidence they are part of a conspiracy to end democracy.
Nobody has ‘thrown out’ the voting rights act. That’s an opinion. Part of it has not been upheld as constitutional.
The decision on gerrymandering is real.
But you seem to be thinking this is evidence of a conspiracy to end democracy rather than just normal bias. Even that piece admits that gerrymandering was invented by the democrats. This is just normal US politics at work.
"Nobody has ‘thrown out’ the voting rights act. That’s an opinion. Part of it has not been upheld as constitutional."
Semantics.
"The decision on gerrymandering is real."
Yes. It is.
"But you seem to be thinking this is evidence of a conspiracy to end democracy rather than just normal bias. Even that piece admits that gerrymandering was invented by the democrats. This is just normal US politics at work."
Do you not understand the difference between democratic and Democratic? Otherwise, what's the relevance of gerrymandering having been invented by Democrats. The court upholding it is anti democratic
> Do you not understand the difference between democratic and Democratic? Otherwise, what's the relevance of gerrymandering having been invented by Democrats.
That it's a normal part of US politics engaged in by all political parties.
> The court upholding it is anti democratic.
Is it? If it's a normal part of US politics, that is far from clear.
The point is that it's not evidence of a conspiracy to end democracy.
OK, if you don't believe commentators or legal analysts, then read the actual supreme court rulings and the case matter for the upcoming case. They are public record.
They did already? There was a court case when the legislatures gave themselves the power to throw out elections. It went to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court ruling lets them throw out elections.
Prior attempts by states to do this in 2020 and 2000 failed in court, or led to the winning candidate (Gore) conceding, respectively. The 2020 standards that caused the election results to be upheld no longer apply in the states that changed their laws to take advantage of the new supreme court ruling.
I don't want to call it insignificant, but the US has a long history of more significant political violence that did not signal impending civil war. With a nation of 330M people, there are going to be a rather large number (in absolute numbers) that are unhinged.
If anything, it's kind of amazing that the combination of a large population, low regulation, and easy access to firearms hasn't resulted in more violence than it has.
In 2020 in Ottawa, a man rammed through the gates of the Prime Minister's residence with a vehicle. He was in body armour and carrying multiple firearms. He claims he just wanted to meet with the PM, who thankfully wasn't home at the time. Is Canada on the verge of civil war?
Multiple US presidents have been assassinated! Political violence is shocking but not actually so rare that we should latch on to any specific incident with particular meaning. It's particularly meaningless when it is the act of a single person who is somewhat deranged. If an organized group takes out a politician or other official, and this act had some support with the public, then we should start worrying.
In Arizona, bands of visibly-armed thugs are parking themselves around mail-in voting points taking videos and pictures...and even following people in their cars to see where they go. There's a 75 foot distance law, but that doesn't mean much.
What happens if the also-armed liberals get sick of this crap, and the confrontations escalate?
It's not civil war, but it can lead to ugly conflicts.
So, the difference between the two countries is that this viewpoint in Canada is a fringe one, while in the United States, it enjoys popular support among mainstream politicians and media. Oh, they don't directly endorse violence, but they are very happy to call for someone to 'remove this turbulent priest'.
That's the difference between fringe lunacy (present in every country, shit happens, you deal with it and move on), and the peaceful political process unraveling.
Just a reminder - one of the presidential candidates in the past two elections has yet to concede that he lost the popular vote in 2016, as well as the popular vote and the electoral college in 2020[1]. This sort of insanity is so far beyond the political pale in Canada, I can't even envision it.
[1] My state's gubernatorial candidate has also yet to concede that he lost 43-56 in 2020. Why even have elections if the losers don't accept the results?
Also a reminder - a left-wing nut shot Scalise during a baseball game. Rand Paul was attacked at his home and had his ribs broken. There was an assassination plot against a conservative-leaning Supreme Court justice.
The right does not own the monopoly on violent nutjobs among their ranks. Sadly, they exist everywhere, left, right, and center.
In Rand Paul's case it was just a conflict with his neighbour over leaves in the garden or some such incredibly stupid thing like that, right? I don't believe there was a political motive behind that one.
No, they haven't. The left used to have people like the Weathermen, the civil rights movement used to have the Black Panthers. Nowadays, there aren't any groups with their reach or methods, whereas their equivalents on the right have exploded in popularity, mindshare, and political reach.
That explosion is what made Jan 6th possible two years ago, and what will give legs to the next try.
The thing isn't so much that there are incidents of violence, but rather that there are ideas where violence is both logical and even moral.
Let's take Trump's election fraud claims for example; if you genuinely believe that the election was stolen then violence would be a very reasonable and even moral action in literal defence of democracy. I sure hope a lot of people would rise up if such an event would ever actually happen. Of course, Trump's claims are a load of utter nonsense, but my point is that people seem to genuinely believe it and that violence is a logical and moral result.
This is what worries me. That there's the occasional nutjob or conflict that gets out of hand: yeah, that's "normal". But these kind of ideas ... I'd say not so much. That we haven't seen more violence leads me to suspect many "election deniers" don't actually believe Trump's claims as strongly as they say they do.
American society was far closer to breaking down in 1968 than it is today. Riots in multiple cities, political assassinations, the polarization over the war in Vietnam, violence in the south over segregation and civil rights, crime waves in most large cities, and urban decay that was so bad people don't believe it when they see the photos today...
There's merit in that comparison but there was nothing like an armed group storming the Capitol with a goal of preventing a fair and honest election. What makes the civil war questions more worrisome to me is how bare-knuckle politics has become so accepted by mainstream Republicans: when Nixon's misconduct came out, his party support eventually declined and had he not resigned, most members of his party would almost certainly have voted for impeachment. Today we're seeing the results of a generation of ideological purges where more significant acts have been met instead with near-unanimous agreement to hold the line and the few dissenters have been evicted from the party.
"With real names" is not the same as "in the real world."
There is a massive difference between me seeing a stranger's real name next to a Facebook post about how abortion is evil, and me having a conversation with a good friend of 10 years, or my mom, and it comes up that they're pro-life.
We might have a long debate, but in the end, they're still my friend or family.
You only see videos of the out of control ones because they're the weird ones.
If you only view the world through the snippets that are noteworthy enough to make headlines or get a lot of votes on Reddit, you end up with a very skewed view of what the world is like.
> If you only view the world through the snippets that are noteworthy enough to make headlines or get a lot of votes on Reddit, you end up with a very skewed view of what the world is like.
I think this very much depends on where you live. I'm not responding to reddit videos, I'm responding to events that my family and some friends who are in public education.
No it isn't. Small online communities are generally run as a dictatorship. If you disagree with the mods, well screw you.
In the real world it's a bit more nuanced because people care more about conflict in the real world. But even so there's usually a core group of people with similar beliefs and outsiders are pushed away.
In the corporate world conflicting viewpoints in e.g. religion or politics are generally dealt with by making talking about them taboo or explicitly banning it.
When you don't do that you get the mess that Google has found itself in several times recently where someone makes some comment that the majority disagree with (positive discrimination is bad, AI is sentient, etc) and other employees call for them to be fired.
I can't think of many groups that actually manage to get people with opposing viewpoints to get on with each other without just banning talking about them. Universities maybe. The army perhaps?
Tbh, it's worse in the real world, at least in the U.S., with the Democratic-Republican divide. I've personally witnessed extreme rage, foul language yelled at very loud voices, when folks from these two sides met (and talked about anything that was even slightly contentious).
So it seems people don’t say in public what they really think? Would that explain why we have very different votes during democratic elections compared to what media wants?
People beat others or kill others over difference of opinion. And sometimes, the "difference of opinion" is that some people think a this or that minority should be killed while minority disagree.
Have you been anywhere near a university lately? There’s a contingent of super militant students, supported by certain faculty, that spend their time policing who is allowed to have a “platform” and what’s acceptable speech.
Maybe that's part of the plan. They can livestream the council meetings on Twitter's new streaming service. That's their first show. Every season starts in the boardroom but ends on Twitter Island. It's a real life hybrid of The Hunger Games and Squid Game.
The future of entertainment is a modern twist on old school gladiators. Elon Musk is our Augustus.
And conversely the US is one of the most restrictive nations on earth when it comes to speech that supposedly infringes Copyrights or can be interpreted as defamation/slander. The premise that US has anything resembling freedom of speech is completely untrue.
> the most restrictive nations on earth when it comes to speech that supposedly infringes Copyrights
That's absolutely true.
> or can be interpreted as defamation/slander
That's absolutely false. The United States tends to be much harder to press a defamation/slander case than many other territories. Perhaps you're thinking of the United Kingdom? They have much looser libel laws than the United States.
Libel/slander are famously hard to prove in the US. Sure you're not thinking of the UK?
Are peer nations substantially more liberal on copyright infringement than the US? I haven't really heard of that. Really, it seemed like other countries like Japan and Germany were stricter.
Didn’t an entertainer in the US recently get sued for millions of dollars over Defamation simply for repeating a popular internet conspiracy theory on his show-that some public figures were supposedly “crisis actors”? (Peoples who’s names he never even mentioned, at that..)
If calling public figures actors is all it takes for them to successfully sue for millions, the bar seems incredibly low.
> Didn’t an entertainer in the US recently get sued for millions of dollars over Defamation simply for repeating a popular internet conspiracy theory on his show-that some public figures were supposedly “crisis actors”?
No.
First, the Sandy Hook parents were not public figures.
Second, Jones and Infowars did significantly more than just make claims about people being crisis actors (though, that in itself absolutely can be defamatory in that it was a false statement of fact). There were also claims that some parent's fabricated their daughter's identify and then faked her death in order to steal money from hard-working Americans.
Third, this was not a matter of Jones simply making an assertion once. He repeated these claims for years, which led to a significant and ongoing harassment of the family.
Fourth, Jones refused to participate in the lawsuit itself, deliberately and repeatedly not complying with repeated discovery orders. This led to a default judgement against him.
Fifth, an entire trial was held on how much damage Jones' defamatory statements and unfair trade practices caused. A jury of his peers determined that Jones' defamatory actions caused $965 Million dollars in damages.
So, I think your characterization of it as "an entertainer simply repeating a popular internet conspiracy theory on his show" is an absolutely incomplete summary of what happened, and why he was found to be liable for his actions.
Which jurisdiction(s) do you think would have afforded more protections to Jones' defamatory conduct?
The USA has the concept of both fair use and public domain, which is lacking in many other countries copyright laws. The idea that the USA is uniquely IP owner friendly is commonplace in the tech community but wrong.
"Very permissive" seems an odd way to put it. It's a human right. The way this is stated is just as if giving women the right to do everything men can do was "very permissive."
We're not just talking about basic political speech freedoms, there's plenty of gray area about.
For example, the US and UK both have laws on libel/slander (I think most countries do), but the US is much more permissive than the UK, in the sense that it's a lot harder to prove that someone committed libel/slander.
Is it a "human right" to maliciously and publicly lie about whether some other person, say, killed a child for fun? You could certainly argue "people should be able to say whatever they want whenever they want", but I think most people would agree that some restrictions on that kind of speech is reasonable, because it ends up harming others.
Before we can call free speech a human right we have to have a working definition of free speech, which is not actually easy
It’s definitely not “anyone can say anything any time”, even this is not allowed in the USA. Libel, defamation, lying under oath, these things are not covered under free speech, nor should they be.
In my opinion, there’s no such thing as freedom of speech. It’s like freedom in general. Freedom from choice is also one.
The EU doesn't have worldwide jurisdiction over prohibited speech. Why should an American company have to take down anything that's legal here, even if it wouldn't be there?
I'm sure that already existed. Unless he intends to expand the diversity into the realm of racism or other types of bigotry or conspiracy beliefs. In my observation, Twitter is extremely permissive in what kind of speech it allows, drawing a line only at abject hate speech, threats or deliberate disinformation. None of that suffers from lack of diversity of viewpoints. Musk is either intending to allow a lot more shit flinging or he's really deluding himself that he can solve this problem. I'd honestly be more optimistic if he was bringing OpenAI in to do moderation.
Right, so the game becomes making your viewpoint as extreme as possible to shift the window of the council in your favour. What could possibly go wrong.
Not all viewpoints are equally valid. Just finding the middle of the viewpoints that exist isn't moderate because you can't just pretend that all sides have equal numbers of extremists and that somehow their views automatically "cancel out".
With the context of Elon saying it, yes. Diverse views where the views are all reasonable is one thing, allowing extremists a platform to misinform and radicalise is not. Elon has made it clear he thinks extremist rhetoric such as Trump's should be allowed.
It will be, if Elon implements effective agent-based clustering, such as with K-Means Clustering.
"Solving" content moderation is a losing battle -- there is no way to humanly moderate anything at the rate it can be produced, and Elon knows this. It's insane, so he probably won't do it.
But, allowing content to be produced, but making sure no real person ever sees it, until the content producer earns their way into "your" group -- now that can be automated. Also, then the police and FBI could use all the evil content to "do their job" (but, I'm not holding my breath).
Elon has access to Exascale hardware, so K-means Clusters with arbitrarily large dimensionality is at his disposal. The algorithms are linear in complexity, so should be parallelizable.
I'd be interested to learn how you think kmeans helps either diversity or hate speech detection.
I don't think it helps with any of either, as people's behavior, the context, the language used and sensibilities change across cultures and over time. What you call hate speech now may not be in the future and may not have been in the past.
The best you could hope for is creating a fuzzy representation of the most visible problematic behavior and try to outrun model-world dealignment by constantly updating it.
The clustering responds to which tweets are up- and down-voted by the agent.
And, the agent is moved closer to the clusters they like tweets from, and further from the clusters they dislike tweets from.
The more diverse your likes (likes tweets in many other clusters), the broader and less restrictive your cluster weighting is -- the more variety you see. The more restrictive your selection, the less variety.
You decide how much of an "echo chamber" you're in. But, if you don't like $BAD_THING, and you downvote enough tweets of $BAD_THING, the less you'll see tweets by people in groups where they like $BAD_THING.
Recommender systems for news and social media have been tried, and I don't doubt that there may be niches where they succeed.
But large platforms have two massive problems:
(1) what people want is popular content, sometimes even content they would downvote. This destroys clustering by creating fuzzy centralized bridges and erodes the usefulness of recommenders
(2) people over time have lost trust and interest in highly personalized feeds, see facebook or the revolt against instagram's feed sorting.
Two cases that seem to work for now are music recommendation and tiktok. I'm not holding my breath though, because spotify might end up driving people away with too many monetized podcasts and tiktok could succumb to the generational migration. But we'll see!
Sentiment analysis can solve the first. If the algo notices that someone only engages negatively with another cluster, cut it off; they're not entitled to pollute that.
And the second point was a mostly abstract intellectual debate in the early 2010s, but people have proven that they absolutely prefer to stick with their own, and have close-to-zero tolerance for dissent or disagreement (see, "the hivemind"). Twitter is far more prone to this than Facebook, since it's founded on communities (i.e. clusters) rather than just friends. Twitter just needs to stop putting junk into people's feeds; and silo them better to reduce harassment.
That would also reduce polarization, since a yuge cause for polarization (far-right, antifa) is a knee-jerk reaction to the very worst content from the other side. Stop promoting that, and you'll stop the "Brainwashing Of My Dad" effect (the film), where a conservative from Texas gets upset because of bathroom laws in California, or where a liberal gets upset because of a few 4chan trolls.
It's the psychological phenomenon of "enmeshment": remove the boundaries between people, and you make their relationship very toxic and conflictual. Enforce better boundaries, and their relationship will be far healthier. Twitter promoted the former; Musk can avoid most of the upcoming "hell" being predicted by doing the latter.
How does this work with things like "ratio-ing" or "dunking" or libsoftiktok that intentionally take clusters of media from one group and shoving it into their group explicitly to hate them?
How does that help? The whole problem is that twitter provides a platform to legitimize hate speech by spreading it to like-minded people and thereby emboldening them. clustering does exactly that, but shields bad actors with a cloak of secrecy.
There's no secrecy. The FBI can (and should) infiltrate these groups (just like their tweets, and you're in), and then arrest them for their illegal behavior. And, limited in-real-life moderation of illegal posts can be focused on where the crazy people hang out. It should be a win.
If anything is clear from the texts that came up during discovery, it's that Elon Musk hasn't thought anything through with this deal.
Long Covid brain fog? Marijuana-induced schizophrenia? Has he just been stupid and lucky all along? I haven't spent enough time thinking about this to figure out why.
There are people who enjoy reasoned debate, even if they don't agree with the counterparty. They won't downvote those tweets. Their cluster weight will be gently moving in the direction of others like them, and its weight will let through a wide variety of other gently weighted groups.
Others are compelled to screech and foam at the mouth if someone argues for a $WRONGTHINK - even in jest or as a devil's advocate, and will downvote them instantly. Their weightings will be heavy, and will exclude most other groups. They will see only what they want to see, and won't see what they don't want to see -- reasoned debate from groups they disagree with, for example.
This is a personal choice, and mirrors physical group dynamics.
If someone "in your group" starts talking crazy, they will begin to separate from the group (by mutual down-voting), and migrate to a different group. You (and the rest of your group) won't be affected much.
Do you not see how that same type of hate is already directed at white people? Sanity has lost if you have to be some sort of "crazy right winger" to see the blatant hate and racism directed at white people.
I'm writing this from a country that currently has a giant nationwide chain store that has a public "No Whites, Blacks Only" hiring policy.
Why not? In my country, these opinions are uttered so openly and commonly that it does not even raise an eyebrow. Infact these are cherished religious beliefs, even.
Yet, there are viewpoints that would be considered so utterly innocent in the west as to be as unnoticeable as punctuation, that have led to actual mob violence and lynchings, and I am talking this decade, not some old era bygones.
Such speech is considered equivalent to yelling "Fire" in an open theater, to use a common internet retort on free speech, because of the effect it has on the masses, and we have laws on blasphemy specifically for this.
> Such speech is considered equivalent to yelling "Fire" in an open theater, to use a common internet retort on free speech, because of the effect it has on the masses, and we have laws on blasphemy specifically for this.
Just FYI, the "fire in a crowded theater" is actually a widely-spread yet terrible example, as it was actually overturned in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969. So, yelling fire in a crowded theater is actually legally not addressed by either decision and the famous quote is part of an overturned ruling.
I am indeed in Pakistan, and the point I am trying to make is, why not? "Diverse" council, right? My region comprises of a BILLIONS people, and twitter is a global website, why do you expect Twitter to ban hate speech acc to what average American internet person wants, but not acc to rules of other countries?
Remember, I am not talking merely about legally limited speech, I am talking about stuff that causes societal discomfort.
If it's a "diverse" council, then there are bound to be people from this part of the world. And if they give, with a straight face, the examples you see in the funzies link as example of hate speech they would like to be moderated....
How would you feel, if your tweet was blocked, and the reason given is something you, and any body from your part of the world, would personally consider to be as offense as not ending your sentence with a fullstop would be to a grammar nazi...but to the council it was considered as offensive as perhaps saying the N-word?
I am talking from a purely academic point of view, but you have to realise the scope of these matters. Pakistan might not be able to affect Twitter moderation, but India? definitely, too big a market to ignore. The Gulf Countries are already investors alongside Musk, so them too. EU has already given the halt signal.
My personal opinion and absolutely dissociated from my employer: I am not going to talk about economic decisions or market pressure, but free speech standards should also be not framed around India's standards. A diverse council shouldn't have to include viewpoints that are wrong. Defining wrong is certainly a difficult measure to elaborate, but free speech standards that include some religious persecution are definitely in that wrong category. Bigots will always say that they aren't bigots.
Isn't that the point they're making? Not that the specific utterances matter but that the freedom to utter them matters, any or all of them, your blasphemies and mine. Then we can try to have a grown up conversation about it because we've taken oppression/suppression and hence violence off the table.
Yeah it’s almost like moderation is a really hard problem that requires serious people to think deeply about it, not something that can be solved with vague platitudes about freedom.
but that's absolutely the wrong example, to take your analogy, YOU are the news station, YOU are the content generator, and Twitter is perhaps like.... the cable company?
Twitter isn't providing you and a platform for free; it sells ads alongside it. And if its moderation is too strict, then it's not an effective platform.
which goes to my original question, strict according to whom?
Nope. News stations don't generate content, they report it. If you think YOU are the news station because you generate content you're watching too much Fox News.
God, stop, don't give me that much hope. Elon blowing 44 billions on a site worth maybe 5, before making it unavailable to half its userbase ? As well as reducing the amount of russian propaganda (that Elon does like to regurgitate all on his own anyways) that can be spewed on social networks ? This could be the biggest waste of money since the Tumblr acquisition, I'd love to help set records.
Facebook also touted this. But they would never do it, as it would almost immediately spawn a competing copycat substitute service that would receive a massive userbase for free at its inception, risking creating a formidable competitor.
Or even worse - no substitute service would even spring up, giving a strong signal that people don't actually need the service FB/Twitter offer at all!
They only stand to loose for exiting a market as a protest.
If this is a reference to twitter following European law, I don't see why they wouldn't.
People's complaints about Twitter moderation aren't about the law, they're about governments being able to indirectly make de facto, unconstitutional law through either informal demands and threats to, or overly chummy and profitable relationships with, media companies. It's not hard to figure out why media and payment consolidation and monopolies are allowed/encouraged. They're ideal for government.
I don't understand how orchestrated bans across media companies and payment processors can be allowed when price-fixing isn't. They're behaving as trusts.
I'm curious what diverse viewpoints even means. Is it "diverse" for twitter?
Is that even diverse?
In the US there's a very defined almost meme level concept of right or left and folks absolutely want to toss people into those buckets and make all the usual assumptions. Online it's almost impossible for me not to be told what group I fit into ... I'm often told one way one day, the other the next.
Is that all there will be? What happens if say 6 people perceived as on the left and 3 on the right and 4 other people are on there? Will it be credible, or does this al have to match some twitter-ish concept of "diverse"?
A rando executive making decisions and some twitter-ish idea of "diverse" doesn't seem any more likely to be "fair".
jokes aside. there actually could be some opportunity to do some really cool stuff like some kind of experimental political science. like, mechanisms for population clustering and distribution of representation.
like, running human clustering algorithms and then using the size of those clusters to allocate representation. a blueprint for future attempts at stable democracy that don't rely on gerrymanderable geographic hand drawn borders or hand picked classifications.
Twitter isn't a government entity. If anything, simply removing algorithms and stop suggesting content and let people set rules on how much or what type of content by other users is seen is sufficient.
content moderation in any form is policy, is political, is governance. they're talking about setting up a council with diverse viewpoints, that's an attempt at representative government!
they already support blocklists and most of the content it suggests is directly related to your activity on the site. it seems they have a small random factor, but it's pretty easy to ignore or block if you don't like it.
but honestly, that's not really the issue. i think it's more a matter of a change in the fabric of how humans communicate and organize. everyone can see that it's powerful, nobody is quite sure or agrees on what the adoption curve looks like. some think you just throw it out there and wait for the dust to settle, others think that's a path to armageddon and that a dampened rollout is necessary. who knows what's right, but there's a good chance we're about to find out.
No there isn't. Twitter isn't the bastion of communication for human connection. It is a place for people seeking attention to spew their PR snippets. For God's sake, please go out into nature and then take a walk somewhere with people before suggesting that Twitter is the place for humans to communicate and organize.
i didn't say it was a bastion of communication for human connection, i said it (the internet) represents "a change in the fabric of how humans communicate and organize."
the number of edges per node in the walk in the woods with friends graph is much smaller than the number of edges per node in the social media universe, with twitter being a crazy power law distribution.
That makes so much sense as to why the OG nazis were only stopped once they ended their long standing stance of keeping their rhetoric on the undermensch hidden from the world
That's the case if they aren't a group. Propaganda bots, state sponosored propoganda (look at the Chinese officals on covid.. you'll need to see the archives for that.. they'll directly claim that covid is the fault of the US Navy), professional troll army, state sponsored stalking groups, and extremist groups have been running rampant and in the open on twitter. (They have also been on Hacker News, Reddit, and Facebook)
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Neonazis on social media is an ACTUAL PROBLEM that is relevant in a lot of contexts today, for example one of Putin's absurd false justifications for his invasion is to 'clean nazis out'. Don't just see the word 'nazi' and flip out. Nazis are back and making real strides in many countries and spaces.
In which case, silencing them makes them martyrs and makes them feel important, which generally never works. People love being members of a secret "in-group" - just look at cults. Plus, it's not like it won't stop them - after all, the original Nazis did not need social media, or the internet, to obtain power.
I say bring it out in daylight, and let them loose every debate they have so they look like idiots instead of martyrs.
If you are exposed to things on Twitter that are tweeted by people not personally known to you, IMHO you are using Twitter incorrectly. I have no idea why anyone gives a damn what the content moderation policies might be. Speaking for my own account I have never once seen anything said by Trump, Kanye, the pillow guy, any neo nazis, any anti-vaxxers, or anything like that. In what way are people using Twitter that makes them care?
I think you have to do that manually for each tweet. The setting isn't persistent.
Anyway, you can also make your account protected, so that nobody can see or reply to your tweets unless you approve. However, I would say it's not fair to claim that "you are using Twitter incorrectly" if you don't make your account protected, or if you don't restrict replies to every tweet you write.
Even if you restrict replies, people can still quote-tweet dunk on you.
What's the point of a "social network" if you use all the most "antisocial" settings?
How do you even acquire an online social network unless you use Twitter "incorrectly" according to the OP?
> How can someone quote tweet dunk you if your tweets are private?
They can't. Taking your account private was supposed to be the reductio ad absurdum conclusion of using Twitter "correctly". I mean that if your account is still public, but you restrict replies, people can still QT.
> I have no idea why anyone gives a damn what the content moderation policies might be.
Because falling afoul of them doesn't just make your tweets not show up in Discover to people who don't know you. It means you can't tweet to your friends either.
To be clear, your post has completely valid reasons to not care if moderation is too lax, but you do still need to care if it's too strict.
Right. The best balance is to be more lenient on speech moderation, but have fewer algorithmic recommendations and push less "controversial" or popular content onto users' feeds.
I'm not referring to the "X liked this tweet" feature, which is from my circle.
Twitter added a Topics feature, where it promotes popular tweets. I'll often see random tweets with >100k likes inserted into my feed, though none of the people I follow liked it, and it's not in my interests.
You'll also see such "popular tweets" when you click on any tweet and scroll past the replies. Doesn't always show (especially when there's tons of replies), but it gives you random tweets from outside your circle.
One interesting feature is the "What's happening" (formerly Trends/Hashtags) section on the right, which shows random news stories. They're not determined by popularity, but by fiat; the list is now manually populated by Twitter employees. (They removed plain hashtags and switched to an editorialized list because Trump supporters managed to get "too many" hashtags going during the 2016 campaign. It still shows hashtags occasionally, but they have to get pre-approved before they appear IIRC.) Many of these new Trends don't show all tweets that match a keword; they just show you tweets from a few people selected by Twitter. These[0] is a good example from today. It's a great feature. Musk could create a Twitter News service (like Google News) and expand on that; it would cut off the "cross-silo" communication further, and would reduce polarization and controversy.
> Twitter added a Topics feature, where it promotes popular tweets.
I have never seen this. It turns out to be buried under a "more" menu, so I maintain that this is a niche feature that you'd need to go out of your way to suffer.
> You'll also see such "popular tweets" when you click on any tweet and scroll past the replies.
No, I don't. I don't see anything like that. I just get to the bottom of the replies. When do you see this? I don't even see it on a tweet with zero replies. No random tweets, just blank space.
> It turns out to be buried under a "more" menu, so I maintain that this is a niche feature that you'd need to go out of your way to suffer.
I never turned it on or tapped on it, and don't follow any topics. It still intersperses "Comedy", "Crypto", and "Movies" tweets (labelled as such) into my main timeline.
And I don't know why you don't see "popular tweets" (it's actually "More tweets", I misspoke). I've been seeing those for years in the exact same context I described.
Oh! I know what the difference is. You are using the Twitter "Home" view and I am using the "Latest Tweets" view. I highly recommend switching, at least if you want to not see things from outside your followed accounts.
"But for many women, Twitter is a platform where violence and abuse against them flourishes, often with little accountability. As a company, Twitter is failing in its responsibility to respect women’s rights online by inadequately investigating and responding to reports of violence and abuse in a transparent manner.
The violence and abuse many women experience on Twitter has a detrimental effect on their right to express themselves equally, freely and without fear. Instead of strengthening women’s voices, the violence and abuse many women experience on the platform leads women to self-censor what they post, limit their interactions, and even drives women off Twitter completely."
Your assumption is that legal speech has no negative real-world consequences.
But look at the mass shooter Dylan Roof, among others. They targeted minorities and were solely radicalized in online forums according to their manifestos. Or, look at the strain on hospitals that anti-vaxxers put us through. These people were partly influenced by online misinformation.
Concerns about speech in the age of social media have little to do with A's speech impacting person B. It's A's speech influencing person X, Y and Z which then has an unpredictable negative impact on person B.
This wasn't a big problem 15 years ago before social media. It's a new problem and many people haven't updated their paradigm given the new environment we're now in.
This cross-post seems pretty relevant to have here given the amount of discussion about this whole acquisition -- one of the key points in the submitted article is that "content moderation is the product":
This is going to be an interesting claim considering that he's pro letting Trump back on the platform.
That guy, despite being the president, repeatedly said things that got other people banned with their rules. Some how other leaders claimed this was a said day that he finally got punished for it.
I think Twitter should have a concept of silent ban i.e. only people that are following the account can see someone's tweet and other's could see that only by opening full link and not through search. While it was obvious that Trump's tweet was causing negative emotions in people, it is also clear that Trump had other sources in which he could express opinions and it was liberal newspaper who are the first to report that he said something wrong.
With facebook dying, twitter getting bought out, reddit's eutrophication, and tiktok on the rise, it seems like things have unsettled quite a bit
The next couple years are going to be very interesting. Facebook will probably get bought out or something. For twitter, I can't really say. Reddit is probably going to become even more repulsive (and hopefully gets replaced). Hopefully tiktok goes away also :/
Also interesting to see the phrase "diversity of viewpoint" catching on so quickly
“Eutrophication is the process by which an entire body of water, or parts of it, becomes progressively enriched with minerals and nutrients, particularly nitrogen and phosphorus. It has also been defined as "nutrient-induced increase in phytoplankton productivity"
Toxic algal blooms like crimson tide can tend to choke off and kill all other life in a body of water that experiences eutrophication. It's actually such a regular thing in the Salton Sea from nearby fertilizer runoff that you could drive by and see rotting fish carcasses littering the shoreline. Probably means something analogous to that.
One missing part of the definition is that the increased nutrients cause algae to overgrow and reduce oxygen supply in the water, killing the fish
The process is similar to what's happened to reddit: new users come in like agricultural runoff, which leads to overgrowth of more suffocating aspects of the site culture
It seems like if these general purpose social networks aren’t resilient to the population growing and diversifying…. I mean, I’m not saying there isn’t plenty of evidence to suggest this is hard if not impossible (ahem twitter) but it also seems like a real crisis to wha the internet should be.
On the one hand a social network that appeals to everyone will appeal to no one, on the other hand an internet built on the idea of exclusivity just seems. Incompatible? I’m not sure what the word is but there’s a paradox here somewhere.
An easy place to see this is reddit.com/r/ar_mr_xr it used to be a lot of people in the field with great info in the comment sections, but now it's a bunch of vrchat kids who fanboy zuck like some kind of messiah.
It's been around for a while. "Viewpoint diversity" has been on the rise since the early 2010s at least, especially among thinktank Republicans and the intellectual/philosophical fringe of the liberal elite.
I recall hearing the phrase a lot in the context of overbearing DEI initiatives (now commonplace) that were criticized for being too superficial in their concern with diversity of "race" rather than diversity of opinion.
This is the most ignorant thing I have read in awhile. Adversity is adversity, white males face it, women face it, PoC face it.
What you don't think there are white kids with single moms? Or white kids that had dads that beat them? Or white kids that were molested? Or white kids that got harassed by police? Or white kids that were told to give up, or that they wouldn't amount to anything?
Your view of white people is completely detached from reality. Anyone who has been through adversity (most people), can empathize with anyone else who has gone through adversity even if the circumstances of that adversity weren't exactly the same.
Interesting. I imagine that means you're a real champion of improving opportunities for minorities, and spend a substantial amount of your time taking action to try and solve that problem, since adversity is adversity.
Good for you. Do you spend time actually researching systematic racism? Since we’re all just people perfectly capable of advocating for the same justice im sure you do.
To echo the person you're responding to, what have you actually done to date to "improv[e] opportunities for minorities, and spend a substantial amount of your time taking action to try and solve that problem"?
Saying you will take hypothetical action is easy, but all that matters is what you've actually done and are doing.
If you haven't taken any substantial action to date then perhaps consider that may be a sign that you are not as motivated and understanding about the oppression of others as your initial comment may have indicated.
If on the other hand you have been involved in a significant amount of anti-racist activism that's genuinely awesome.
I am not saying I will take hypothetical action. I will take real action. But I need evidence that systemic racism exists, you need to point to something and say “that right there is a racist law/policy”. I have thus far seen no such laws or policies. And please, don’t start with a conclusion (there are only X number of PoC CEO’s or something) and then go on a witch hunt to prove your conclusion. That is not how reason and science works. Until evidence is brought forth I cannot accept the systematic racism theory (and that is all it is without evidence). And since I suspect no such evidence actually exists, and since I am not inclined to go in witch hunts, why is the burden of proof on me? No, you show me the proof, I have enough things to worry about. Not to mention, laws and policies are public information, if there were racist ones it shouldn’t be hard to find and would have likely already come to light, yet no one can point me to one.
This is no different than when someone claims God is real, the burden of proof is on the person making the claim, not the person denying the existence of God.
What you’re doing is essentially demanding I prove God doesn’t exist.
So you went from saying that those who have experienced adversity can naturally empathize with the adversity others have faced, to now saying you do not accept that systemic racism exists?
Do you see how those two statements strongly contradict one another?
Anyway, if your position is genuinely that systemic racism doesn't exist, given all the information you have access to in this day, then I don't think there's any evidence I could show you that would ever sway you. That said, it's worth a shot, here's a tiny grain of sand on the nearly infinite beach of facts supporting the continued existence of racism - people with white sounding names are 50% more likely to receive a callback for a job interview.[1]
> Do you see how those two statements strongly contradict one another?
Nope, no contradiction at all. You can have adversity and not have systemic racism. I don’t have the foggiest clue how you can think that is a contradiction.
> people with white sounding names are 50% more likely to receive a callback for a job interview.[1]
Fair enough, but how is this remotely “systemic”? Do you really think there are company policies that promote this? Or is this individual (I.e. not systemic) biases?
Unless the company policy is to prefer the resumes with white sounding names then I don’t see how this is systemic.
What you say is far from being obvious.
What is the ground mechanism that, according to you, will make "adversity recognize adversity even if the circumstances are different"?
In fact, from what I see, it's usually the opposite: people who have faced adversity will have a strong bias to consider their adversity was worse than the adversity of others who face a different kind of adversity.
This is the same kind of bias as "the grass is always greener ...": it is very difficult to understand the bad aspect of the situation when from the outside, and when someone has faced adversity, this will be amplified by that: they had first hand experience vs. an adversity that they need to just imagine.
It reminds me of, for example, those guys who are saying "if women were whistling at me in the street, I would take it as a complement": amongst those guys, a bunch have probably faced strong adversity. Still, they cannot understand why women dislike being whistled at and jump to the conclusion that these women don't know how good they have it. The fact that they have faced adversity amplify the fact that they don't recognize adversity: "why are they telling it's adversity, they are just soft, if they lived what I've lived, they will know what real adversity is".
edit: hm, while I'm not a fan of the "systemic racism" thing, depicting it as a "boogie man in the sky" does not make you look like prone to really open to understand adversity of others. I'm sure you decided that "they are just complaining, they don't know "real adversity"" while you have no idea what it is really like.
Can you tell me what me being an arab and a muslim has anything to with my reaction to musk's purchase? Try answering without resorting to racial essentialism
You can have the latter and have a echo chamber of a single narrative, which is exactly twitter was. Then pat your self on the back "OH we are so inclusive look at the the different skin tones!" Yeah but everyone has the same boring ideas so what the fuck does that matter?
If the same boring ideas of that diverse group of men, women, LBGTQ people and PoC are that we need to strive for equality between all of these groups... that is exactly the point.
> that we need to strive for equality between all of these groups
That is fucking terrifying and most centrality undesirable, unless you mean equality of opportunity, then absolutely. But equality of outcome is the worst possible thing anyone could ever strive for.
Yes, I am saying we need to neurally castrate every intelligent person to be no smarter than the dumbest person. We need to cut the tendons of every person who is more athletically capable than the most disabled person. We need to burn down everyone's houses so that we can all share cardboard boxes alongside the homeless.
Yes. Yes. This is what the position is. Don't let anyone ever try to tell you otherwise.
There is no equality of opportunity for groups of people that have had generation after generation of systemic oppression, exclusion and poverty.
You don't do that to an entire subculture of people for hundreds of years, and then think you can snap your fingers and say "Okay cool, segregation is over so now we all have equal opportunity!"
There is so much that goes into being a successful person that is subtle, environmental, learned through exposure, enabled by connections and passed down through generations. Same goes for the flipside which is called the cycle of poverty.
There's a lot of damage that needs to be undone, which will take active investment on behalf of society at large to accomplish.
I'm too tired to write out an essay on the history of racism in the US and why that history is still a massive burden on the descendants of those people today. This information is widely available if you genuinely want to understand.
You quite obviously can. For what idea can you not find a person with Black skin who supports it?
You've got Black centre-rightists like me, Far Rightists like Clarence Thomas, Barack Obama in the middle, and quite a range of voices on the Left - I'll pick Ta-Nehisi Coates as a very talented example over there.
Thank you. I hope this is a truly diverse council composed of different races and ages. Maybe Trump, Rubio, Thomas, Crenshaw, Boebert would be diverse enough for you?
Looking forward to the diverse and valuable ideas on whether or not the Earth is round, climate change is real, and jewish people should or should not have people going death con on them.
Diversity is both of these things. It is true that you can have more diversity in a room of people of one race than a room of people of all different races, but it's more common that you will find diversity across lines like race, gender, age, etc.
>It is true that you can have more diversity in a room of people of one race than a room of people of all different races
Since it's clear that diversity without race differences can exist, but diversity without different ideas can't exist, then why care about race at all?
Because people have major blindspots to experiences they haven't lived through themselves. The sum total of all human experience has not yet been recorded in books, and those hypothetical books are not required reading for all humans, and even if they were, some people just wouldn't absorb the information due to their own biases.
I am not against diversity of skin color, but I also don't think that should be the goal. You assemble a group of people that have a diversity of ideas, if the group you end up with happens to be diverse in skin color and sexual orientation, then fine who cares? But those aren't the defining characteristics or the ultimate goal, a broad spectrum of ideas is.
"how can twitter be truly unbiased in how we allow our most wealthy users to go 'death com 3' on all marginalized people and not just one small group of marginalized people"
It’s amazing to me that the HN hive mind has decided that somehow one of the most successful people on the planet, who’s built a successful electric car company, a private rocketry company and was part of the people who laid foundation for a “payment system for the internet” is somehow doomed to fail in his new venture.
The excitement for this new move seems not just low here but overwhelmingly negative.
“It can’t be done” is the overall sentiment. Really? Or are we just the people saying an electric car company can’t be done, a private rocketry company can’t be done, etc etc.
This one of the most successful people who has ever lived on this planet. And yet HN doesn’t seem to see any advantage to him leading twitter in a new direction, a company that overwhelmingly could be agreed before had no real direction and wasn’t making any progress anywhere.
But somehow a pretty smart billionaire taking it over doesn’t trigger any outpouring of sympathy and excitement but of disdain and condescension. Really? What happened ? When did we become so calcified against change?
Also; For anyone who says “twitter/facebook gave us trump” well, no. The unleashing of mass cognitive warfare as a consequence of the availability of micro targeting in these platforms gave you Trump/Bolsonaro/Meloni. For all the details on that, read “Mindfuck” by Christopher Wylie and “Targeted” by Brittany Kaiser.
What happened? The "pretty smart billionaire" started calling anyone who slighted him a pedophile. The "pretty smart billionaire" continues to commit fraud with false promises over at Tesla. The "pretty smart billionaire" seems to have a disdain for his lowly peasant employees.
There is still animus between musk and certain groups of thought. Certain people always see the negative and worst case scenario. Others see opportunities with various levels of risk aversion.
Clearly Musk is in the latter camp.
I said earlier that twitter has been hemorrhaging money to tune of nearly 2 billion over the last 2.5 years.
While possible, its likely that Musk can't possibly do worse than the former leadership.
Obviously it is a gamble, but what isn't a gamble? And what do such men gain without nothing ventured?
Because the tech market crashed right after his pledge and it makes no good financial sense to go through with a deal that includes a massive loss from the outset unless you're absolutely compelled to.
I don't see the causal connection people are drawing between this and his motivations and his vision for twitter, it's purely a financial logical decision to try to renegotiate or cancel the deal given the current market conditions.
i've said it before, there's much easier money to be made than better against Musk. When presenting a big idea he's pretty much been laughed out of every room he's ever walked into. Then, much to everyone's dismay, he does it. I'm withholding judgment for a few years...
I too enjoy commuting to work using my city's hyperloop while charging my self-driving cybertruck with my solar roof.
An objective assessment of Musk's batting average requires considering the big ideas that flop, never materialize, or fall far short of what was promised. Once you do that, Twitter seems like it could go either way from here. That's not even considering how split his attention must be at this point.
I don't think he has presented any big idea regarding Twitter. In case I missed it, I'd be happy to learn what his big idea for Twitter is. By all impressions, he was dragged kicking and screaming into finalizing the deal - that doesn't exactly inspire confidence that he has bold ideas he'd like to try.
To be fair, he hasn't delivered on most of his promises, and it's the trade-off for taking risks.
On the other hand, with that amount of wealth, the average intelligent person probably feels that they could do better, and I'm not sure they'd be completely wrong.
Tesla is a battery company, not a car company. GM, Ford, Toyota, and all of the other automakers will be buying batteries from Tesla gigafactories, not the other way around. The bluster around FSD is a smoke screen. I believe that it's just R&D for vehicles operating off planet, like the robots.
SpaceX delivers boost to orbit at a cost that beats every other major player.
Firstly, I don't think it's a hive mind. All of the threads I've read through have been absolutely split between people who broadly think he's over-estimating himelf/underestimating the problem and people who think everyone else is over-estimating the problem and under-estimating him.
I think the crux of it for me, is that whilst Musk comes at this fresh, he's not proposing fresh solutions. He has repeatedly suggested things that people have already tried, and then pivoted away from - realising the mistakes. It's very difficult to see this news today and not say "Oh, ok, so you're going to replicate Facebook's oversight board?"
I agree with you, he's acheived a lot. At the end of the day though 2+2=4 no matter who you are, and if we're shooting for 5, I might hope Elon can produce 5, but if I hope he's going to produce 5, and his big idea is 2+2, then I'm going to be skeptical. it's not that I think he's an idiot, it's that he's proposing things that are well trodden paths.
I think you need to be more specific than that. Before twitter was private, it was run by a group of people who were generally pro free speech but who had experience to know the real conseuences of inaction, and therefore had put in a framework to ensure that they could stay advertiser friendly. Musk has declared he also wants to be advertiser friendly, but also has big business interests in national defence, and in China. Surely, if anything he's more prone to being influenced than the previous team.
>It’s amazing to me that the HN hive mind has decided that somehow one of the most successful people on the planet, who’s built a successful electric car company, a private rocketry company and was part of the people who laid foundation for a “payment system for the internet” is somehow doomed to fail in his new venture.
It has been interesting to read it today.
Fundamentally elon has simply called for politically neutral content moderation. I expect he's never going to allow calls to violence or incitement type things; who exactly thinks this is a bad decision? This is to solve the ongoing problem of censorship.
Yet the people see the above as a nightmare scenario. So what exactly are we missing? Is giving the republicans their voice back and allowing them to speak really such a nightmare? I don't think these people are upset about this. I suspect it's not a nightmare scenario if the republicans getting the ability to speak back results in landslide elections in their favour. Like we are potentially seeing now in midterm polling.
What if that's not the case. What if this is indeed a nightmare scenario? What exactly is the unsaid explanation?
I don't see the cause for concern let alone it being a nightmare scenario.
> I expect he's never going to allow calls to violence or incitement type things; who exactly thinks this is a bad decision? … Is giving the republicans their voice back and allowing them to speak really such a nightmare?
Well let’s see… last time the former President was using his voice on Twitter, he was inciting and directing an insurrection against the government. So if Musk wants to reverse that ban, and Trump decides to continue his rhetoric which already caused violence (which he will because he hasn’t stopped since 1/6), then yeah, that’s a nightmare.
>Well let’s see… last time the former President was using his voice on Twitter, he was inciting and directing an insurrection against the government. So if Musk wants to reverse that ban, and Trump decides to continue his rhetoric which already caused violence (which he will because he hasn’t stopped since 1/6), then yeah, that’s a nightmare.
I'm not american and just an outside observer. I believe the republicans/trump would not agree with your assessment. There is certainly a huge irreconcilable divide on how January 6th is viewed on either side.
Which certainly agrees with you. Lets not forget Hillary Clinton has always held Trump stole the election and she even reiterated a few days ago the republicans are planning to do it again: https://twitter.com/IndivisibleTeam/status/15834963547345387...
425 bills in 49 states the republicans pretty much universally didn't believe a free election occurred; so they want to restrict the vote and prevent people from voting for the democrats.
More importantly the election in mere days will indicate to politicians exactly what the populous believes. When the democrats win midterms easily, it will be the people telling the republicans they aren't popular and democrats genuinely represent the will of the people.
Do we even need to consider what the people are saying in the unlikely event republicans win midterms?
From inside I feel pretty certain that the Republicans will win decisively. The economy, inflation, and general stress levels are just too high right now for the party in power to stay in office. Not the outcome I'm hoping for, but the world is feeling pretty bitey lately.
>From inside I feel pretty certain that the Republicans will win decisively. The economy, inflation, and general stress levels are just too high right now for the party in power to stay in office. Not the outcome I'm hoping for, but the world is feeling pretty bitey lately.
So lets say the republicans win decisively as you predict. What does that mean, what do you think the populus is telling the democrats?
Is it the people believe the election was stolen? Much akin to republican's clear response in the one link?
I don't know what link you’re referring to, but I think it just means that people are afraid they won’t be able to afford food, gas, or rent, and they think voting for the other party will somehow fix it. I definitely don’t think it has to do with bogus claims of a stolen election for anyone but people on the fringe.
> There is certainly a huge irreconcilable divide on how January 6th is viewed on either side.
Yes, insurrectionists typically see their actions as justified, and will frame them as such. What happened was an insurrection though, and the 1/6 committee and DOJ have done much to prove that.
> Lets not forget Hillary Clinton has always held Trump stole the election
She’s free to feel however she wants. But note she didn’t go to Twitter to foment insurrection.
> she even reiterated a few days ago the republicans are planning to do it again
Probably a safe bet, given Trump hasn’t even given up trying to steal the 2020 election.
>Yes, insurrectionists typically see their actions as justified, and will frame them as such. What happened was an insurrection though, and the 1/6 committee and DOJ have done much to prove that.
I have no skin in this game, just curious what you think.
Why do you think trump said, "I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!"
Kind of a pretty terrible insurrection as well, a bunch of unarmed idiots in costumes ransacked a few offices. Normally an insurrection is more of a 'round up the politicians and execute them' type thing.
Or was it perhaps not an insurrection and it was instead a riot, not unlike the 2 years of racial riots, that got out of hand?
>I wasn't aware Republicans were being suppressed for their desire for a more conservative economic policy, smaller government, and lower taxes.
That would be a pretty simplistic view of the republicans. Sure seems to be a faulty generalization fallacy to me.
>Or...which Republican ideas do you see being suppressed online.
Not many anymore. They realized their voices were suppressed and moved to new platforms. Now their voices aren't suppressed and oh boy midterms not going well for the democrats.
It's not that we decided that Elon will fail. It's that there is no agreement on what success looks like. More freedom of speech for some means more abuse and bigotry for others. Both 4chan (no moderation) and HN (moderation) have succeeded by some metric and have a loyal audience. Twitter tried to satisfy too many parties for too long and now is facing a backlash from everyone. If Elon decides to prioritize one of the parties - the other groups will protest. And vice versa.
1,043 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 381 ms ] thread[EDIT:] The problem is that a "council with widely diverse viewpoints" is not going to come to consensus on moderation. They're inevitably going to disagree, just like in politics. So then what? How is lack of consensus not the inevitable outcome of a widely diverse committee?
“I can build a twitter clone in a weekend” is famous for a reason.
Edit: I was being sarcastic. I meant to add /s
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September 3. https://www.amazon.com/Cold-Start-Problem-Andrew-Chen/dp/006...
That sounds fine to me if there’s actually a diverse set of view points. Getting censored should require a wide swathe of agreement. Not just a vocal minority.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting
The more complex the system, the less it'll be trusted; something with "quadratic" in the name is gonna make eyes glaze over.
Those people might not be a majority, but they certainly aren't a "vocal minority" that can safely be ignored, either.
Those from “our side” on the committee can just unite to block anyone from “our side” from being banned. And those on “their side” can do the same. In fact, anyone who doesn’t do this will probably be branded a sellout. I just don’t see how to do this in a way that actually functions and also promotes broad-based faith that it’s a fair system.
If you view the 4chan forums, they're already plotting racist, anti-semitic content and rejoicing. Advertisers will not be happy real quick.
It is going to be fun watching it implode.
A small minority will always be the one to fark up things for others - see griefing in MMO and why moderators and banning is needed.
[1] https://twitter.com/ncri_io/status/1586007698910646272
HN's treatment of controversial topics generally is more respectful than elsewhere, which is why it is disappointing to see them shut down or buried here, when much more toxic discussions get promoted on other sites.
I would like to say thanks for all the work you guys do, few folks take the time to say thank you.
It may or may not be suspended from tweeting. There are still no tweets since March.
Compare the Wayback Machine link from that comment to @realDonaldTrump, which still says "Account suspended".
It set off the flamewar detector.
Keep the advertisers happy, but try to reduce the reliance on advertisers. Keep moderating content to reduce abuse, maybe eliminate the high profile banning but a person on the ground will have largely the same experience. (probably less action on more contentious issues, but you still can't use racial epithets and call for violence). Evaluate most employees or teams on the merits, there will be layoffs, probably big layoffs but they'll be managed incremental and strategic. Build more products and pivot the product strongly but again, not in the image of a Parler or a Truth Social. Twitter won't become a cesspool because he understands that people need to be able to control what they see or they'll leave. Essentially try to create more safe spaces on twitter, not less.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586073042534297601
They were in Twitter jail (or whatever the term is). The account is there but they couldn’t publish new tweets.
That’s the change to watch for.
He could unban Trump, say he kept his promise, but keep the account locked so that Trump couldn’t actually tweet.
As a hypothetical example.
So, simply shadow ban them, then?
Twitter is different (although perhaps more different than it needs to be). Seeing as you ask, here is how to handle content deletion on Twitter without infantilizing users.
Don't ask a user to "delete" a tweet – something which has no effect on that tweet's visibility anyway. Just hide it and tell him why. If the user chooses to appeal, that appeal can go forward without restricting the use of the account. Give time-outs sparingly. They should be more of a final warning than a routine measure. If it's necessary to give a time-out, start the clock immediately, not when the user takes some action.
I think its fair to say the committee will end up being a scapegoat - but to be charitable to the idea in general its pretty clear that not 100% or even 75% of the population thinks that Babylon Bee should be banned. If you have a system where one voice on the committee can ban someone then most liberal comedians would be banned for played up reasons, too.
Say you have a committee of 9 people? What's your cut-off? There isn't a clear answer - especially as norms change a bit and the committee members change.
It’s his company and he can do what he wants with it. Any rules can be changed at any time without recourse.
I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Well, it might be bad for Twitter the service, but as far as legal governance, it’s the way it works. The only limit will really be what advertisers will support. It is a business after all.
But any type of council should be considered advisory at best.
Of course, a corollary is that they should be able to filter content on a per country basis because, obviously, what's legal differs from country to country, but I think there is no escaping that for any platforms which claim to be global.
Frog's Law of Social Media: free speech or advertising revenue - choose one.
It's shocking that HN commenters could be so toxic, indeed.
Any content moderation needs to extend beyond "Legal? (Y/N)" unless your main goal is to drive any real community away.
Anyway, it is simply shocking that so many think it is the 'correct way' to disallow what they don't agree with and that they are, like you, so aggressive about it to the point of shutting down any dissenting opinions, as is happening here.
It's a big regression from the heights of the enlightenment, or just the recent past, IMHO.
Some would go as far as claiming that this is "little red guard" behaviour and they wouldn't be completely wrong.
Good day.
Or r/conservative banning people who have posted on any one of a number of other subreddits, sometimes before they've even posted in r/conservative?
Edit:
Not only that but also transparently disingenuous. I don't know r/conservative (my comments are not about liberal vs conservative and I find odd that you and others immediately frame them that way) but a dedicated 'conservative' subreddit is obviously not the same as Twitter, which, again as become the de facto standard for most political and news communication.
What I'm asking you is if you think that those forums should also be required to say "Legal (Y/N)?" and if not, why not?
I think most reasonable people would reject the assertion that twitter is the de facto standard. It isn't even in the top 10 for social media platforms by active monthly users, and usage and value of a platform varies way too much depending on age and gender. While twitter is possibly the de facto standard for gen-x + millennials and certain career groups such as politicians and journalists, it certainly won't be for 18-25 year olds. Facebook still has nearly 10x the monthly active users of twitter, in fact Twitter barely beats out Quora.
Ignoring the argument about it being the de facto standard, Twitter is a business. I expect that Elon would like to make money off of his $44B investment. In the battle between the free market and free speech, the free market will almost always win. If twitter goes the extreme free speech route, users who are often targeted by loud jerks, trolls and harassers will leave the platform. It will create bad press both in the form of people complaining about harassment as well as other businesses pulling ads where their customers or potential customers were harassed.
I notice you didn't mention Parler, though. That one's a bit harder to dance around. The "Premier Global Free Speech App". Surely that should allow all legal speech, right?
This would obviously fall well within the protections of free speech for many countries, certainly those of the U.S. And if you really wanted to you can go much nastier than that.
But I don't think it should be allowed here, or even on Twitter. Even using as an example here already feels iffy, but I feel adding it makes the point clearer.
If Twitter is the de facto standard and akin to an utility why should they make decisions on what's allowed beyond lawfulness?
My point is that allowing "anything that's within the law" will lead to some pretty unpleasant stuff.
> If Twitter is the de facto standard and akin to an utility why should they make decisions on what's allowed beyond lawfulness?
I don't think Twitter is the "de-facto standard" or akin to an utility, and the problem is that by allowing such content you would drive away a lot of people who would rather not be buried with insults and nastiness every time they post something.
There are loads of places where speech is regulated in some way, and you can't just go off on a expletive-laden rant at any moment. If I go to a Biden or Trump Q&A townhall meeting and start shouting abuse at him I will be removed as well.
In addition, whether a certain moderation approach would "drive away people" is a strawman. This is not the question.
That was not my intention; I'm genuinely trying to engage constructively and in good faith.
You stated that "anything that's within the law should be allowed", and I'm trying to examine what that would mean and what effects it would have. With an extreme example, yes, but that is the sort of stuff that would be allowed under your proposed policy. Now, if you think that's an acceptable trade-off: fair enough, I can't argue with that. But I don't think it can merely be brushed aside with "that's extreme", because in my experience things like that will be posted, usually by a small (but very active) group of people.
> In addition, whether a certain moderation approach would "drive away people" is a strawman. This is not the question.
The question is what effect this policy would have. This is, in my opinion, one of them.
So in this case, free speech and the free market are at odds.
In the crazy clown world in which we live, Twitter could theoretically kick off all the advertisers and become Elon Musk's self-promotion platform (which it already is), but I doubt the other investors would go along with this.
Hmmm, if I had a laundry detergent company I'd totally support tailored ads for Pornhub. "Forgot to take your dress off before the bukkake scene? Don't worry! DirtBlaster Detergent can handle even the crustiest of stains!"
You've actually got me thinking about the viability of this across a spectrum of common consumer products.....
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/technology/kanye-ye-twitt...
"No offensive t-shirts" is not the same thing as being banned lol
Anybody who comes by with a different take immediately loses interest in the group and so there’s a self-perpetuating system that makes the group more and more fanatical about right-think and wrong-think.
On Twitter, deleting tweets for wrong-think has largely the same chilling effect and self-perpetuating descent into an echo chamber.
When did this happen? Are you referring to tweets that promote anti-semetism like Ye's? Or to tweets advocating for political violence, like Trump's?
But if someone is arguing that it was a ban, and that it shows Musk unbanned them and is lying, then that's wrong. I was addressing that argument.
...or an employee who felt unshackled from the previous management and knew they would have air-support by the time anyone else realized what had happened.
Im not a elon fan. At all. but the knee jerk reaction he gets at this point is kind of deserved… however you’re better off not falling into that trap.
Twitter's whole moderation problem has been it is very, very inconsistent. I've seen accounts from certain political persuasions be banned or suspended, but then I have seen someone openly tell someone to kill themselves (or that they deserve to be killed or beaten) and the tweet was never removed, and the person was never suspended/banned because of the account it was aimed at. The Onion has had some questionable pieces that weren't any better than what Babylon Bee had, and they were never touched. The moderation has to be consistent; I don't think a council is a bad idea, especially for bigger account bans.
All that said, I hope Trump is never allowed back, but he probably will be. In any case, things have to be equally applied and that has not been the case to anyone paying attention. Even the doxing rules have basically been completely ignored if it were aimed at -some- people.
Then, there are things like the Taliban, Russia, China, etc which have at times actively cheered on social media about the death of Americans or an American defeat... having active accounts but then you ban sitting members of the US government? (I think Trump deserved it, but there are others.) How does that make any sense at all?
Why?
No, you're confusing semantics. A Wyoming voter's vote counts several times more than a California's vote for the same position. Land borders shouldn't change your vote, that's _anti_-democratic and in favor of an unequal distribution of voting rights. We should call a spade a spade, and here the spade of the electoral college is clearly _not_ democracy when we no longer have to send state delegates across the barren frontier.
You can toot the representative republic horn all you want, which is what the system is, but it is in error to call the existing system democratic or a democracy _until_ the electoral college is gone. It should be. It serves no purpose other than to suppress what the majority of the people want. Likewise for state-specific regulations for cross-union office, like for President.
Do what you want for your own state representation (e.g. senator, governor) but the President should be the one person actually elected by a majority without shenanigans, whereas none is today.
Trump is an autocrat with goals to become a monarch. He proactively eroded democracy during his term, and continues to attempt to.
That has very large influence and is spreading and inspiring hate [1]. Mentally ill or not, he's causing real-world damage.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/banner-kanye-right-los-...
The police "again, that's the 23rd time today"
This kinda breaks down at the global scale. I can call for violent acts at your front door from a continent away with impunity.
The fascists call for violence is always a joke to them, until the moment it is not.
Twitter banned the Babylon Bee for targeting a random and rather anonymous bureaucrat that likely isn't among the 1000 most powerful people in government in the US for the sole purpose that she is trans. This targeting by the Babylon Bee and other conservative media has led to her getting death threats. Being a satire site doesn't mean we can laugh off all their behavior as a joke. Their behavior was a part of a harassment campaign against someone who is largely a private citizen in this instance. Stopping that doesn't seem like a mistake to me.
What? Since when is sex a social construct?
https://areomagazine.com/2022/01/05/race-is-a-spectrum-sex-i...
Of course, the word "binary" is a social construct, and "spectrum" is a social construct as well. However I would expect that in a forum focused on computers, binary generally means 0 or 1 with no other values possible even 0.0000001% of the time.
"Some men choose to identify as women." Really? This is not a serious statement that engages with the science behind gender transition.
>A genetic condition in which a male is born with an extra copy of the X chromosome
So still a male, got it.
The word "error" is a social construct. I prefer "variation", which also is a social construct, but doesn't imply a judgment. (Of course, judgments are social constructs.)
shocked realization
"Of course! Number of sides of a coin is a spectrum!"
In any case the number of sides of a coin is not a binary. It's just 2.
While I think "sex is a spectrum" is perhaps not how I would phrase it because it lets people muddy these kinds of arguments together, I think it's pretty well-accepted that there are people who are neither fully male nor female, i.e. intersex.
From a biological perspective, what if you were born biologically male but have no androgen sensitivity and basically develop biologically female? Your genitals appear to be male but you've undergone all the puberty that someone female would: I don't think you can cleanly carve a sex binary here. Actually, maybe as a larger point, I don't think even "biological sex" is as clear cut as people try to make it: do you consider it all of genitalia, chromosomes, hormones, or only some?
For what it's worth, don't take my comment as any argument about gender as a spectrum one way or another because I don't want to get into the culture war aspect of it: I only want to point out that people who are resolutely "sex is a binary" are being overly prescriptive about it.
Bingo. This is what scientific terminology aspires to. Except “sex is pretty darn binary” is a useful, meaningful simplification, while “sex is a spectrum” is at best a fundamental misunderstanding of what a spectrum is, and at worst a politically motivated conflation of intersex conditions with gender variation.
Yes, because sex is a description of an observed natural phenomenon, not a taxonomy of medical interventions.
Plenty of intersex people are gender variant as well. See for example Dana Zzyym, who is intersex and uses they/them pronouns. They fought for nonbinary gender markers in passports.
That’s not to say that “sex isn’t real” or some absurd position like that. There is a real phenomenon in biology where genetic and phenotypical variance tends to follow a limited set of patterns. Biologists call those patterns “sex”. But, the idea that “sex” as we use it in normal day-to-day life is a rigidly defined system based on hard biological facts is laughably false. When was the last time you insisted on seeing someone’s genetic karyotype test results? When was the last time you asked someone to drop their pants so you could examine their genitalia and determine their sex?
The phrase “sex is a social construct” is technically true in the same way that “chairs are a social construct” is true. The word describes a fuzzy subset of the set of all things, and what we consider in or out of the set is largely based on what we think should belong to it, and that is absolutely influenced by societal expectations. Where do chairs end and tables begin? Where does the female sex end?
Once you get to that point, the phrase almost has no meaning. If all word definitions are social constructs, then that’s table stakes and it doesn’t make sense to call out a specific word as having that property. Surely the phrase “is a social construct” must mean something more than “is like any other word”. Indeed, the meaning of that phrase is larger than what it literally says. There is a socially defined meaning that is attached to it. That phrase implies the word in question “is arbitrarily defined (more than most words)” and “is up for interpretation (more than most words)”.
If you agree with me this far, then the right way to frame this discussion is “should we pin ‘sex’ as it is used in every day life to specific physical properties or should we allow it to be more porous?”. This isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. If we pin it, for example, to genetic karyotype, then we need to stop using it in contexts where the genetics of the person are unknown and must admit the existence of several additional sexes (e.g. X, XXY) AND recognize it’s no longer useful for describing the phenomenon of what a person looks like or how their body works. If we make it porous, then we will endlessly debate about whether boundary cases fall into one bucket or the other and possibly hurt some feelings along the way.
The fun thing is that we get to pick what words mean, and we get to pick what we do with “sex”. Language is, after all, a social construct.
This might be true for the incredibly tiny minority of intersex individuals who defy categorization, but for >99.9% of people it’s not true at all, and challenging the meaningfulness of a word based on such rare edge cases is a huge overstatement of how controversial this is.
Compare this to:
Prostrate surgery: https://www.europeanurology.com/article/S0302-2838(08)00764-... (19%)
Knee surgery: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6961288/#:~:tex... (6-30%)
Mastectomy for breast cancer: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/964824 (8% -- and this is presented as very low!)
The satisfaction rate for gender-affirming surgery is in a completely different league from the rest of medicine. (And I have a lot of sympathy for the few people that do regret them -- I'm good friends with one such person.)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-gender/ https://aeon.co/essays/do-analytic-and-continental-philosoph...
For what it’s worth, I’m a trans woman, and I’m well aware of some of the discourse around this topic already (both positions that are pro- and anti- “trans women are women”). I tried very hard to avoid injecting any of those details into it, though. I wanted to do a “reasoning from first principles” sort of analysis of the idea rather than try to recap the discussions that are happening in feminist spheres.
Social construct doesn't mean fake, though. It's real, and it describes a real thing, but is a simplified model of it. The fight is over which model is better.
Would you have said the same thing about ridiculing someone for being openly gay in government 30 years ago, being Catholic in government 60 years ago, or being Black in government 80 years ago?
I still think it's very much up for debate, unlike the instances you listed. I have trans friends, and while I can't speak for them, I don't believe they think the debate is as settled on some of these issues, especially in regard to "misgendering" being a hate crime. Hell, I've misgendered one of my non-binary friends constantly by accident and we're still friends. I'm not banned and haven't been charged with a hate crime. Would I want someone intentionally misgendering them just to get to them? No, I think that's cruel, and I'd defend my friend; but I don't think that person should automatically lose their account or be arrested (which has happened outside the US.) There's an important distinction there and it's an important debate.
That's mischaracterizing what was said. Here's the actual article: https://babylonbee.com/news/the-babylon-bees-man-of-the-year...
This is ridicule, quite clearly. I won't get into the "is it or is it not a hate crime" bit, but this isn't "merely" stating anything. The term "biological sex" doesn't even appear in the article. The point the reader is supposed to take from this article is quite clearly not "mere" information about Rachel Levine's gender and/or "biological sex". It's that Rachel Levine's presented gender was very funny to the authors and that we should laugh at her for it.
> Would I want someone intentionally misgendering them just to get to them? No, I think that's cruel
Seems like you're putting an awful lot of weight on the distinction between "hate" and "cruel" to me.
What about here on HN? Do you think it's OK for users here to be "cruel" to others, or should dang ban them? Because HN bans people for being cruel, probably every day. Why is Twitter different?
I think it's clear, and that everyone would agree, that if you showed up here on HN making fun of another commenter for their gender in exactly the way that the Bee did, using exactly the same words, that you'd be banned. And we'd all agree that you should be banned.
I think the logical trap that the "free speech" folks are falling into here is that this doesn't "feel" targetted in the same way. It's a "media organization" making fun of a "public figure" and neither the Bee nor Levine are part of "your community". So Twitter banning them doesn't feel like community enforcement of norms, it feels political. And since the Bee is on "your side" you feel like they must have been wronged.
So maybe you should be constructing arguments around whether or not Twitter consitutes a "community" with "norms"? Maybe it doesn't, I'm willing to hear arguments. But the idea that the article wasn't hateful jut doesn't fly as I see it. It was awful, and the only way to see otherwise is to get into a headspace where Levine isn't part of "your community" and thus her feelings don't matter.
So singling out e.g. cruelty specifically about trans people's gender presentation seems targeted and political, because it's completely commonplace to say cruel things about someone if they made bad art, or if they disagree with you about some political policies, and rarely do people get banned from anything about it.
The Bee went way out on a limb with that article as I see it. And they got banned. Certainly other similar accounts (the Onion, say) aren't nearly as hateful.
> What's the difference between Donald Trump and a worm? One of them is a slimy, loathsome creature incapable of complex thought; the other one actually shows up when it rains.
I'm claiming that most people would think that it's totally okay to say that about Donald Trump in public, even though it's an absurdly mean thing to say. (I am sure I could find similar jokes about Joe Biden, too.) I don't think that this would be deleted from Twitter if people reported it. But I also don't think it's really much different from what the Bee wrote. I think people would treat the Bee's article as different mainly if they think that being trans is a special category that is taboo to be cruel about.
From my perspective it's OK to criticize Trump (or Biden) for their policies and conduct, but I don't think people should fat-shame Trump, for example, or make fun of Biden's occasional stutter.
The issue isn't that people are being mean, it's that they're trying to ostracize people for aspects of their being that are out of their control. That's why, generally, trying to cast someone out for being of a certain race, gender, or sexual orientation are considered unacceptable, but criticizing their political opinions or corrupt or otherwise slimy behavior are fair game.
Can this really be considered a core identity though? When a man such as Levine assumes an identity of a woman, is this not a form of identity fraud?
https://youtu.be/6Avcp-e4bOs
Also their discussion on the Forstater case is out of date; that original judgement they cite was overturned on appeal, and the subsequent employment tribunal found that Forstater had indeed been discriminated against for her gender critical beliefs.
Regarding whether Levine is a woman or "man who wishes he's a woman", the question feels like crawling way way into someone else's head to tell them they're wrong about how they feel about something? If you told me you disliked a certain food, I dunno, say, broccoli, I think a reasonable response would be for me to say, "Weird. I really like it." An unreasonable response might be, "Do you really dislike broccoli, or are you just a broccoli lover who's being difficult and seeking attention?" The answer to that question, if the question even makes sense, doesn't have any impact on me whatsoever.
To my eyes, the core of modern-day conservatism is being bothered by the existence of the type of people I don't like. See, for example, the governor of Florida being bothered by immigrants to the point where he felt the need to go four states away just to find some to be bothered by.
I think a lot of people bothered by trans women are having the same sorts of feelings, and I can't help but notice that in almost all cases, the trans women who bother them are people who have undergone either incomplete or otherwise unconvincing transitions, or, let's be honest, people who through no fault of their own happen to be ugly. I have never once seen people expressing these opinions about beautiful trans people, which strengthens my conviction that what it's really all about is "I just don't like that type of person". Which, I'd like to add, is an opinion or preference in itself and maybe even can't be helped and so who cares, but it feels needlessly cruel to express it to the people you feel that way about (imagine two people getting onto an elevator with you, and one of them sizes you up and says to the other, "I just don't like the look of this person"). And it becomes actually dangerous when they have a large audience prone to violence, and the person they're expressing their distaste for is someone who is already an outcast not because of their behavior but because they happen to not like broccoli, and it sometimes happens that people like them are literally murdered for it.
In any case, I'm not here to try to prove you wrong; just expressing my view because you asked. I'll also add that I think one of the problems we have on the left is the idea that if you're wrong about some issue it means you're evil, and I try to be wary of that, and I thought the video did a good job of navigating its argument without wallowing in that sort of spite. I like to imagine we're both here trying to figure stuff out in good faith.
Levine thinks it is. Some of us agree. What's the origin of the term "core identity" in your eyes, and in which bodies has our civilization invested the authority to regulate them? It sounds from your invocation of "fraud" like you think this should be a legal issue?
I mean, sorry, but this is an open and shut libertarian argument. It's no one else's business, especially the government's, to decide who you are. Period. If being a woman or a man (by whatever standards you want to use) isn't hurting anyone, and it clearly isn't, then our job is just to shut up about it.
I mean, seriously: there are people walking around all over the place with Y chromosomes. I have one too. We're everywehre! If my Y isn't hurting you now, how could that possibly change if I put a skirt on it?
OK, so that gets directly to my point. You have a community. It has norms. You presumably police it according to those norms. Some things are OK, some aren't. I'm not going to judge it, because it's not my community (though I dearly hope you aren't trafficking in the kind of hate the Bee did).
But Twitter is a community too, and it has different rules.
As for the joke you found. Y'know what, I think that's pretty borderline. I can see some forums (here, for example) finding that banworthy, and I wouldn't be shocked if Twitter did too. But it's also a rando comment with sub-1000 engagement numbers. If this was horrifically offensive to Trump supports, not many of them seem to have been complaining about it. The Babylon Bee had many millions of followers and this was a very controversial article.
It's like comparing someone being banned from your school chess club for being mean vs banning someone from the entire school district for being mean. It's not comparable. Twitter and Facebook are massive public forums, to the point where they are nearly public utilities that are privately owned.
An example: you would have your post removed if you posted that topless Elon photo with his weird body structure and made a comment about it, but on Twitter/Facebook that flies...because they aren't niche forums.
The only joke I see is "a trans person exists". The article isn't about her policies, her performance in her job, or even complexities in our evolving definition of either sex or gender like you are implying. The joke is that this person is trans. The message of that joke is the existence of a trans person in public is worthy of mockery. Therefore the only way to stop the mockery is to stop being trans or retreat from public life. I think refusing to stop that mockery until the target does one of those two things qualifies as harassment.
That a man was voted “Woman of the Year”.
By any non-tautological definition of “woman” and “man”, that’s objectively true.
Are we not allowed to point out obvious truths when people claim the opposite?
Whether you think this particular example was cruel depends ultimately on whether you think it is targeting the individual’s gender dysphoria (the thing they didn’t choose to have), or whether it is targeting their claim to be something they objectively are not.
One might argue that there is no difference, if one believes that gender affirmation is the only treatment for gender dysphoria, and that everyone is obliged to participate in that treatment, and to do otherwise amounts to mockery of the unchosen affliction.
Personally I think it’s wrong to joke about people with schizophrenia, but equally wrong to tell them the voices in their head are real.
What makes the joke funny and culturally relevant — as opposed trivial cruelty — is that it represents a simple, forbidden truth for which one will be subject to severe public censure and deplatforming.
Comedy is a final bulwark against uncritical thinking, and can be used to deflate ludicrous ideas that are otherwise culturally unassailable.
Comedy can inspire thoughfullness and push back against societal norms. Comedy can also be a way to normalize bullying marginalized people. Being a troll and saying 'But wait, I'm being funny!' still makes you a troll. It's not like the account in question was trying to generate thoughtful discussion. Punch-down comedy is just dressed up hatefullness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8yV8xUorQ8
When you can be censured, deplatformed, and even lose your job for stating an objective truth like “men cannot get pregnant”, your words, by any possible definition, are punching up.
Unfortunately that isn't really true. Trans folks, especially trans women face discrimination and violence on a daily basis in society. You see, they actually exist in the real world and somehow Twitter mods can't keep people from saying and doing terrible things in real life.
>When you can be censured, deplatformed, and even lose your job for stating an objective truth like “men cannot get pregnant”, your words, by any possible definition, are punching up.
Spare me and your culture war nonsense. I'm sure you believe that white men are under attack and marginalized.
If the latter, there should be no issue in a satirical publication making the point that a man who wants to be a woman getting awarded a "Woman of the Year" accolade is nonsensical.
The editors shouldn't go to jail, but its obviously the type of hate content that will drive away users and advertisers and twitter was wise to ban it. It adds nothing to the discussion.
The Bee's article is more broadly a commentary on how accolades intended for women are now going to men who identify as women - which rather undermines the point of having such awards in the first place. The humor is in inverting this:
"The Babylon Bee has selected Rachel Levine as its first annual Man of the Year. Levine is the U.S. assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where he serves proudly as the first man in that position to dress like a western cultural stereotype of a woman."
Criticizing male dominance like this is very much a 'punching up' type of comedy.
Only if you are completely clueless on what marginalization means, which by the rest of your comment, it appears you are.
It would make for a more substantive discussion if you explained why you disagree with my comment - could you elaborate further?
": to relegate (see relegate sense 2) to an unimportant or powerless position within a society or group"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/marginalize
Trans people, especially trans women are treated poorly. They have less economic opportunity, have a high incidence of being victims of crime, and face violence from society.
Being successful in spite of being marginalized doesn't somehow magically make you no longer marginalized.
Just like there are successful Black people, but they still experience systemic and social racism. Success doesn't magically change that.
I'm guessing you don't believe in systemic racism though, so its probably a non-starter
The main point was that the claims made by the new owner are demonstrably false.
The new owner claimed that unbanning decisions would be made by a new moderation council. While he was saying this, a slew of right-wing and conspiracy accounts were reinstated even though the council does not yet exist.
Meanwhile here we are, debating gender and sexuality.
They remain locked out of their account until they agree to delete a tweet about the story we’re discussing, which they’ve refused to do.
meh.
Twitter allowed much worse things that joking about someones self-identified gender.
It's a satire site: it's exactly what it says on the tin. If you leave political affiliation out of it, then, yes, twitter has been taking sides.
I mean the idea that a trans-woman could actually feel and experience the challenges a biological woman faces...is pretty controversial; or the fact that many base their identity on media stereotypes rather than the very diverse experiences of womanhood, also is a pretty important debate, especially among feminists.
We can't just close the debate off and disallow any discussion on it (or jokes about it), and call anything against it a hate crime. That's not how things work. It could also have massive political fallout if Progressives are unwilling to join in the debate and stifle any attempts at it.
The award is only ridiculous if you think trans people shouldn't exist in public as openly trans. I mean you even referred to her as "her" so you seemingly recognize that her being eligible for "Woman of the Year" is more appropriate than "Man of the Year". The perceived ridiculousness comes from the same fundamental concept underlying the joke, the existence of trans people is funny and their desire to simply live their life as they see fit is worthy of mockery.
>I mean the idea that a tran-woman could actually feel and experience the challenges a biological woman faces...is pretty controversial; or the fact that many base their identity on media stereotypes rather than the very diverse experiences of womanhood, also is a pretty important debate, especially among feminists.
No one is arguing that here. This is a person identifying as a woman and being recognized in public as a women. That is the only political statement being challenged. You are free to continue debating whether trans women and cis women have the same experience or whatever, but neither the USA Today or the Babylon Bee was making a statement in that debate.
>We can't just close the debate off and disallow any discussion on it (or jokes about it), and call anything against it a hate crime. That's not how things work. It could also have massive political fallout if Progressives are unwilling to join in the debate and stifle any attempts at it.
I don't know why this is framed as progressives shutting down the debate on the topic. The conservatives viewpoint that the Babylon Bee seems to subscribe to is that gender and sex are they same thing and they are binary. There is no way to debate against that viewpoint. There is no possible compromise position. It denies the very existence of someone like Levine. There is nothing Levine could have said to the Babylon Bee to stop them from targeting her specifically because they weren't criticizing any of her beliefs or actions. They were criticizing an innate quality of her being.
This is simply your skewed view and not how many people read the joke. She was named as "woman of the year" BECAUSE she was trans, not because she was/is a woman. That's the joke. USA Today itself probably doesn't care if she is or isn't a woman, the award was issued to get engagement.
> I don't know why this is framed as progressives shutting down the debate on the topic.
Because that is how Progressives have treated the topic in general (at least publicly, privately not so much.)
> It denies the very existence of someone like Levine.
This is not true, it denies how this person views themselves, not their existence; and your existence isn't whatever reality you have chosen for yourself. For example, being gay is something you don't force society to see, you are simply attracted to the same sex. When you change your sex or gender, you are asking for a societal buy-in. That is much different.
> You are free to continue debating whether trans women and cis women have the same experience or whatever, but neither the USA Today or the Babylon Bee was making a statement in that debate.
Actually, both are very much connected, because the idea that you could not experience what a naturally born biological female could is perceive in the eyes of many as to why you cannot yourself ever be a biological female...when you were born male. These are very integrated topics.
Fine, and this is "simply your skewed view". Yours is not inherently more right than mine.
>Because that is how Progressives have treated the topic in general (at least publicly, privately not so much.)
You completely skipped my point. Progressives have treated this topic this way because there is no compromise position. What concession can a progressive hope to accomplish debating someone who believes that sex and gender are the same and binary?
>This is not true, it denies how this person views themselves, not their existence; and your existence isn't whatever reality you have chosen for yourself. For example, being gay is something you don't force society to see, you are simply attracted to the same sex. When you change your sex or gender, you are asking for a societal buy-in. That is much different.
Trans people don't need "societal buy-in" any more than any other group. They just want to live their life how they see fit. A trans person choice's don't impact you any more than a gay person's choice. Just leave them all alone and mind your own business.
>Actually, both are very much connected, because the idea that you could not experience what a naturally born biological female could is perceive in the eyes of many as to why you cannot yourself ever be a biological female...when you were born male. These are very integrated topics.
This has no relevance to the issue at hand. They weren't awarding the Cis Woman of the Year Award. They were awarding the Woman of the Year Award. Trans women should be just as eligible for that as cis women. This isn't a weightlifting competition. There is no reason to exclude trans women from this type of award.
Isn't the compromise position to tolerate everybody's own personal words and definitions? That certainly used to be the progressive position, at least up to about a decade ago.
The compromise position is that you tolerate people's personal definitions and words, e.g., you would not demand they be punished for having or using them.
I'm not saying there is some legal "grounds" you could use to bar somebody from being intolerant of what you say or think, you just asked what a compromise position would be, and tolerance is one and it's what the progressive position was for a long time.
It's fundamental to democracy and a healthy public discourse that people be allowed to voice their opinions including disagreements. It's quite extremist to believe that people who disagree with us must stop talking about it. That is not what tolerance means.
What's the end game? Ban and censor and silence until nobody complains, disagrees, speaks out, or satirizes The Truth™ ?
The everyone should just be tolerant of other people's definitions solution kind of relies on everyone being tolerant of other people's definitions.
You said everyone should be tolerant of everyone else's definitions. Doesn't everyone include progressive, conservatives, USA Today, Twitter, and the Babylon Bee? If so, aren't you suggesting they should all stop complaining about the definitions the other groups use?
How many times do I have to say that I do not understand what point you are trying to make? I'm not saying that like I think your opinion is bad. I am saying I don't understand how you are applying your principle of tolerance in this situation. Either directly tell me why my summary of your position is wrong or stop playing this "grownup conversation" card. A grownup way to approach this situation would be to actually engage in the conversation rather than repeatedly complaining that I am having this conversation wrong.
The point I am trying to make, which I made from the very beginning, is that tolerance to peoples' different opinions is a possible compromise position and it was the progressive position for a time. That's it, that's the point. You asked about what compromise position there would be vs shutting down debate from people who believe sex and gender are the same thing and binary, and that's an answer for you.
You may not understand what tolerance means and want to ask more about that, you may have other questions, you may dispute that was ever the progressive position, or you may argue that it is not a viable compromise, but not by asking some nonsensical rhetorical question about what I am saying, or what I agree with. If you are not capable of addressing the comment without snide digs at the messenger, just take it elsewhere. As I said, nobody else will ever read this so the performantive "I won" style of internet-arguing is pointless. And I'm not getting the impression by now that you are interested an answer to your question. So why even waste any more time here?
I understand what tolerance means. I don't understand who you are expecting tolerance from in this situation.
The Babylon Bee's article is not tolerant of Levine's or WaPo's definitions. The BB's refusal to remove the tweet is not tolerant of Twitter's definitions. People aren't objecting to the BB's definition in a vacuum. They are reacting to the lack of tolerance from the BB.
The problem doesn't originate with a lack of progressive tolerance. It originates from the BB's intolerance.
I don't think you do.
> The Babylon Bee's article is not tolerant of Levine's or WaPo's definitions.
Please explain your reasoning. I think this is getting to your fundamental misunderstanding about what tolerating speech and opinions you disagree with means.
> The BB's refusal to remove the tweet is not tolerant of Twitter's definitions.
This is not a correct use of the meaning of tolerance. You could say they didn't tolerate twitter's terms of service or moderation demands, but not that they didn't tolerate twitter's "definitions", so it's just muddying the waters here I think because of the asymmetric positions of the two parties when we're talking about speech on twitter's platform. So we should focus on how BB is not tolerating Levine or WaPo first.
> People aren't objecting to the BB's definition in a vacuum. They are reacting to the lack of tolerance from the BB.
> The problem doesn't originate with a lack of progressive tolerance. It originates from the BB's intolerance.
People most certainly object to different definitions, but the interesting thing I think is how you are using the word (in)tolerance here. The way you are using it certainly does not match the use of the word in the former progressive position that I was referring to.
Levine and USA Today (I mistakenly said WaPo before) are using a definition of women that includes trans women. The Babylon Bee disagree with them. There are a few different ways the BB could react.
The most tolerant way would be to not say anything because Levine and USA Today's definitions don't impact them.
A less tolerant way would be to denote their disagreement through a related article that doesn't directly address Levine or USA Today. They could have had a cat winning at the Westminster Dog Show or whatever. That gets their point across without confrontation.
They chose an even less tolerant response. They directly mocked Levine and USA Today with derision and indirectly made Levine a target for future harassment. That behavior isn't tolerant.
Compare this to a scenario in which the tolerance debate is about a more discreet moral/immoral issue. Imagine I am anti-Semitic and hated when Bernie Sanders ran for President. The most tolerant response would be to keep that hate to myself and just vote for someone else. The less tolerant response would be to maybe write some webcomic in which the Happy Merchant meme disastrously runs for President to indirectly mock Sanders. The most intolerant response would be to name that webcomic character Bernie Sanders and reply to all his tweets with a link to the comic. That is what the Babylon Bee effectively did by directly promoting Levine as a target for ridicule to an audience that they had to know would harass her.
>This is not a correct use of the meaning of tolerance. You could say they didn't tolerate twitter's terms of service or moderation demands, but not that they didn't tolerate twitter's "definitions", so it's just muddying the waters here I think because of the asymmetric positions of the two parties when we're talking about speech on twitter's platform. So we should focus on how BB is not tolerating Levine or WaPo first.
Twitter's ToS on this issue use a definition of women that includes trans women. Otherwise, misgendering someone wouldn't be against Twitter's rules.
> The most tolerant way would be to not say anything because Levine and USA Today's definitions don't impact them.
> A less tolerant way would be to denote their disagreement through a related article that doesn't directly address Levine or USA Today. They could have had a cat winning at the Westminster Dog Show or whatever. That gets their point across without confrontation.
> They chose an even less tolerant response. They directly mocked Levine and USA Today with derision
That's simply not what tolerating the words and opinions of others means though. It doesn't mean that you can't disagree, you can't voice your disagreement, or you can't mock or satirize.
> and indirectly made Levine a target for future harassment. That behavior isn't tolerant.
Satirizing that USA Today award is not intolerant of their speech, because it is not calling for or taking action against an individual or group and their right or ability to speak.
And everybody's opinions and disagreements and speech can have good and bad intended and unintended consequences. People who believe sex and gender are the same and trans is a mental illness can be made subject to harassment by people who argue against them or mock them in public too. You can argue that's not that's a good thing and whether or not tolerance of speech and opinions promotes that (more than intolerance would), but you can't just call it intolerance just because you don't like it.
>Satirizing that USA Today award is not intolerant of their speech, because it is not calling for or taking action against an individual or group and their right or ability to speak.
Does that mean that you would consider mocking Jewish beliefs and calling them lies to be tolerant because it isn't calling for action against Jewish people? If not, how is it different from mocking Levine's identity?
> People who believe sex and gender are the same and trans is a mental illness can be made subject to harassment by people who argue against them or mock them in public too.
True, but that is the paradox of tolerance. No one cares what your personal definition is if you keep it to yourself. Those people will only get met with intolerance when they voice their own intolerance.
No, I would not call any kind of speaking being tolerant, because that's not what tolerance means. You seem to be struggling badly with this simple concept, or at least pretending to be. It could be intolerant, if you were calling for some action against a person, but it doesn't make sense to call it tolerant just because it's not intolerant.
Tolerance does not mean anybody's ideas or opinions or beliefs are sacred and protected from disagreement or mockery. It's almost implied in the word really, I don't see why this is such a struggle - tolerance [for opinions I don't agree with].
Should Christians or Muslims or Atheists have protection from criticism or mockery? No, so I'm definitely about equality when it comes to Jews. How about you?
> True, but that is the paradox of tolerance.
Tolerance is not a magical silver bullet that has no problems.
> No one cares what your personal definition is if you keep it to yourself. Those people will only get met with intolerance when they voice their own intolerance.
That's still not what intolerance means, but sure censoring or banning or threatening people who voice opinions you disagree with is an alternative to tolerance, which you seemed to be talking about in the original comment I replied to. It goes both ways, right?
If speech is not intolerant that does not mean it's tolerant. It's not one or the other, and they are entirely independent concepts.
> Does that mean someone can be an open bigot and still be considered tolerant if they don't act on that bigotry or incite anyone else to act on it?\
It's possible they could be that and still be tolerant of other people voicing different opinions. It does get pretty complicated with what exactly constitutes bigotry, and where the line is from robust opinions and disagreements to assault, harrassment, intimidation, etc.
Let's take the Clintons and Obamas for example -- they are homophobic bigots who disagreed with the rights of gay people to get married and campaigned on hateful platforms of marriage being between a man and a woman, and yet they (as far as I know) did not censor or attack or intimidate those who disagreed with them on that issue, so we could say they were tolerant of different opinions being voiced, despite their bigotry and intolerance for gay marriage rights itself. Did they attract hateful supporters emboldened by their speech? Perhaps. Were their voters and supporters complicit in resulting discrimination and attacks on LGBTQI+ peoples? Maybe. It's a pretty tough problem though isn't it. Should they have been silenced, barred from office, imprisoned for what they said? No I don't think so.
I don't pretend there is a simple formula for it that everybody can follow without disagreement. There are no alternatives where that is the case though, except for the old "everybody who disagrees with sig will be punished" dictatorship.
Is there any objective evidence that censorship and intolerance would have better outcomes?
Well I guess that is the heart of our disagreement. The prefix in- means not. Intolerant literally means not tolerant. Not intolerant speech is by definition tolerant speech.
That is absolutely not the heart of the disagreement, just a weird definition that you're wrong about. The disagreement is fundamentally about whether tolerance for speech means allowing people you disagree with to speak.
Tolerant means you are tolerant toward others. Speaking is not itself an act of tolerance toward other people. I could make a post about Linux programming on Hacker News, that would not be tolerant toward trans people for example. It wouldn't be intolerant, it's just that it wouldn't be tolerant because I am not "tolerating" anybody when making such a post.
Or let's take another example in the strange gotcha twitter style you seem to be most comfortable communicating with: You posted an earlier comment which was "Yeah, insiders not knowing the full details of Musk's plan because Musk doesn't have a detailed plan yet seems more likely than WaPo just making some stuff up." There was nothing in that comment that showed an intolerance to Nazis attacking Jews, so you are saying you tolerate Nazis attacking Jews when you made that comment, right?
And there is nothing about the in- prefix of the word or anything else about it that means everything must be either tolerant or intolerant, that's ridiculous. Insoluble is the opposite of soluble, meaning it can't be dissolved. Does that mean your comment is insoluble because it is not soluble?
Intolerant: disapproving of or refusing to accept ideas or ways of behaving that are different from your own.[2]
These are the definitions from Cambridge Dictionary and show these words are direct opposites of each other. We can look at it like boolean logic.
True == !False
!True == False
NULL != True
NULL != False
NULL != !True
NULL != !False
Tolerant == Not Intolerant
Not Tolerant == Intolerant (the literal definition of the word)
NULL != Tolerant
NULL != Intolerant
NULL != Not Tolerant
NULL != Not Intolerant
The Musk example is not "not tolerant". It is NULL. It is making no comment about Nazism. The Babylon Bee article was not a NULL value because it was directly commenting on the acceptance of trans people.
[1] - https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/toler...
[2] - https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/intol...
A possible alternative position is tolerance for others' words and definitions, and this was the mainstream progressive position up to about 10 years ago.
That is not using your creative definition of the word tolerance, but the common one and the one which was used by progressives when they advocated for that position. So there's an answer for your question I originally answered.
But I am glad you have understood that a comment is not necessarily tolerant or intolerant. That's great progress, it took a while, but I applaud the effort and persistence. Good luck with the rest of the journey.
Yes, exactly, which is why banning/suspending them is wrong. A joke can hit or land based on who is hearing it. You not liking it doesn't mean it's inherently hateful.
> You completely skipped my point. Progressives have treated this topic this way because there is no compromise position.
No, Progressives treat it this way because they are scared of their base. If you talk to many in private there are serious questions that they are too scared to raise. But I'm telling you, if they don't raise them, they could politically suffer from it.
> Trans people don't need "societal buy-in" any more than any other group.
This is just factually wrong. It requires you to allow them in women's sports despite tremendous advantages, in women/men's bathrooms (probably the lesser controversial ones,) to be legally held responsible for misgendering, to chemically/hormonally alter children, etc. That is societal buy-in. That is not the same as allowing a Jewish person to practice their Sabbath, employing a black person, or allowing a gay man to get married. I can't even think of anything remotely comparable.
> This has no relevance to the issue at hand. They weren't awarding the Cis Woman of the Year Award. They were awarding the Woman of the Year Award. Trans women should be just as eligible for that as cis women. This isn't a weightlifting competition.
It is actually very relevant and the fact that you can't see that is frustratingly hilarious. It's also funny you say it's not a weight-lifting competition, when a person born a male could theoretically enter a women's weight-lifting competition and completely dominate...and it would be unquestionably supported by some people.
This logic doesn't work for moderation. There ultimately needs to be a judge. Otherwise, "I was just joking" becomes a get out of jail free card for any Twitter moderation.
>No, Progressives treat it this way because they are scared of their base. If you talk to many in private there are serious questions that they are too scared to raise. But I'm telling you, if they don't raise them, they could politically suffer from it.
You are still skipping over my point. You are placing the blame for not compromising on progressives, so tell me what they should do. What do think is the middle ground between progressives and conservatives who think trans people are mentally ill and shouldn't be allowed to express their trans identity in public? How do you compromise with people with that view?
>This is just factually wrong. It requires you to allow them in women's sports despite tremendous advantages, in women/men's bathrooms (probably the lesser controversial ones,) to be legally held responsible for misgendering, to chemically/hormonally alter children, etc. That is societal buy-in. That is not the same as allowing a Jewish person to practice their Sabbath, employing a black person, or allowing a gay man to get married. I can't even think of anything remotely comparable.
We are not even debating any of those issues because the belief that the Babylon Bee is putting forward is so extreme as to be unwilling to concede on any of it. Levine wasn't competing in a high school girls soccer game. She wasn't trying to use a public women's room. She isn't threatening legal action based off being misgendered. She is simply doing her job the same way all her colleagues are and yet she is subject of public ridicule and death threats for simply existing.
How do you think that gets fixed? Do you think there is some negotiation to be hard in which progressives promise to give up arguing about high school sports and conservatives will stop sending death threats to any openly trans public person?
>It is actually very relevant and the fact that you can't see that is frustratingly hilarious. It's also funny you say it's not a weight-lifting competition, when a person born a male could theoretically enter a women's weight-lifting competition and completely dominate...and it would be unquestionably supported by some people.
Fine, explain the relevancy. Tell me how that USA Today article supports "the idea that a tran-woman could actually feel and experience the challenges a biological woman faces" or challenges "the fact that many base their identity on media stereotypes rather than the very diverse experiences of womanhood".
And yes, I specifically was referencing weightlifting as an issue in which nuance can exist. I was contrasting that with an issue in which no nuance can exist, the idea that sex and gender are the same and both are binary. You either believe that or you don't.
No, the conservative position is that sex is objective and factual, while gender is a subjective facet of personality that is socially constructed. The compromise position is to destigmatize gender nonconformance within the category of “man” in a way that does not set up a conflict of rights with women.
One issue with people being coerced into using wrong-sex pronouns is that it restricts discussion on this topic.
In this case, for example, if you believe that he shouldn't have been awarded a "Woman of the Year" accolade because he is really a man, but have to refer to him as "her" to be able to say this such that other people can read this - i.e. to avoid your comment being removed or your account banned - then it undermines the entire point being made.
This thoughtful essay discusses some other repercussions of being coerced to use wrong-sex pronouns: https://fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/
If I walked around the office calling my male co-worker by some random female name as a form of ridicule I'd end up on those cheesy videos they make you watch for sexual harassment training.
That's not what trust is supposed to mean between friends.
If someone stabs a friend they can't claim that since it's between friends, it's ok.
This is how you know laws such as what you're discussing are ridiculous.
Does it make you an asshole to crack a rude gay joke in front of someone who is gay? yes. Should it be criminal? absolutely not.
you mean like the then current president John f Kennedy?
That would be a more appropriate analogy to what this official is doing.
I say give users the moderation power and let aggregate voting dictate content that remains visible.
No one wants public control of democracy though. What these guys want is a business friendly soapbox.
The question is how much a public forum should allow or not, especially one that has advertisers but is also an important forum for our democracy. That's very important and just saying everything under the sun is hate speech is not a good debate starter, especially when it's unevenly applied, and the rules are written by one viewpoint.
I think the "downvote" system which does eventually hide comments (until you request them) is a feature that already exists in beta. I think that's better than the "shadow banning" and suspensions in some instances. Obviously, you still can't tolerate some things, such as calls for violence, rioting, etc. Moderation is very difficult, but I err on the side of more openness than locking things down and stifling speech and debate.
I don’t think I’ve seen anyone say that sex is a social construct. Gender yes. And that gender and sex are orthogonal. And that gender is a spectrum but sex in humans is binary.
Maybe I missed the evolution of the conversation but I don’t think I’ve seen any volume of argument that sex is a social construct. I’m open to be convinced.
When I was younger "gender is a social construct" mostly meant that if you were a man you were allowed to enjoy feminine things and if you were a woman, you could be a tomboy, etc. It also applied to trans individuals. However, that has shifted heavily over the last few years to be something very different and has gone so far as to go fully to the extent that sex (not gender) at birth is up for debate (even outside of Turner Syndrome or Intersex births.)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-gender/#SexGenDi...
(I linked straight to the section on sex as a social construct, but the whole article is worth a read.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/10/19/levine-tran...
If WaPo can bring out “random bureaucrats” to public attention for sole reason of being trans, why can’t Bee do the same?
For instance I absolutely wouldn't be using NH if it wasn't moderated in a way I happen to like. There are the various chan-derived boards and such, but I don't see any value in even finding out which still exist, because it's just not worth it my time to wade through mountains of garbage.
The real problem, however, is that you don't need to dig very far to see people engage in all sorts of behaviour that's not exactly in accordance with the Twitter rules, ranging from stuff like "just fucking deport the Christians already!!" to "would be a real shame if their face got smashed in with a brick wink wink" and that ... doesn't get moderated. I've reported a bunch of posts like that: always "no action needed, doesn't violate our community terms".
I think a lot of people would have significantly less trouble with Babylon Bee's ban if Twitter didn't let the platform be such a quagmire of nastiness, and then occasionally cherry-pick an example.
What you call a "harassment campaign" happens constantly on Twitter, driven by Twitter's own site and algorithms. Twitter frequently has a "main character" of the day, driven by the "What's Trending" sidebar on the home page, as well as quote Tweets by people with thousands or millions of followers that encourages and incentivizes the dragging of people who have little power. If this is a bannable offense, Twitter should ban itself.
Why does that matter?
>has led to her getting death threats
OK, punish the people who did the illegal thing. Imagine having personal responsibility!
>Being a satire site doesn't mean we can laugh off all their behavior as a joke
Yes, yes that's exactly what it means.
>Their behavior was a part of a harassment campaign against someone who is largely a private citizen in this instance
No, one article is not a harassment campaign.
They didn’t even make a joke. They just called trans woman a man. It was hate speech, pure and simple.
I am very afraid for the future of twitter now. Hate speech is going to run rampant on that platform now.
There’s a lot of hate in the history books, 99% of it predating the internet.
Are those that engage in hate online more or less likely to act on it than those who engage in person? Are these interactions compelling them to use their voice off-line?
This perfectly encapsulates the problem. So-called 'hate speech' is in the eye of the beholder and incredibly, just incredibly subjective.
It’s not a crime nor hate speech to acknowledge someone’s biological sex. That’s what we do in sports and when we select partners for example. Most, if not all heterosexual men would not consider a “trans woman” to be an actual woman. Our way of selecting partners is proof of that. To punish a natural, and biologically based viewpoint that most of humanity hold and follow is tyrannical and unsustainable.
Sex is an emergent property of multiple genetic networks. This doesn't mean that it doesn't exist or that it is not bi-modal, but it is far from simple.
https://www.nature.com/articles/518288a
The fact that we don't go around performing genetic testing on people before we interact with them also raises questions about whether sex itself matters, or whether there must be different definitions for sexed categories dependent on policy purpose. (e.g. based on genitals when the concern is sexual violence; based on fertility for the purposes of reproductive medicine; based on gender performance; based on hormone levels, etc.)
I will immediately change my mind and recant my views — here and now! — if someone provides:
- A specific definition of what “gender” is, if not a synonym for “sex”
- Non-tautological definitions of “man” and “woman” that are consistent with your definition of “gender”
The fact that some women don't want to stay home and some men do doesn't mean it's a social construct. Many biologically-rooted differences between men and women are expressed in the population as overlapping but not coextensive normal distributions. E.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00421-006-0351-1
Same for a lot of what trans activists want to pass as facts.
Tolerance and fighting discrimination is important but bullying people into a set of beliefs is doomed to fail, except on Twitter until today ;)
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re looking for, but this seems like a non-attainable standard to me. Language is _so_ fuzzy. Do many nouns have ‘non-tautological’ definitions? Like, could you define ‘house’ or ‘boat’ ‘non-tautologically’?
The entire concept of "treating me as a {man,woman} and also agree to my particular ideas about sex and gender or otherwise you're a hateful bigot!" is quite remarkable. It's like "you must agree with my preferred theory about the origins of homosexuality or else you're homophobic!"
See https://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/84795/ (copy available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZHkN2EYkl0v1oxhbd-5mnp9Fn1V...) for a discussion of the different concepts and the resulting confusion from a so-called gender critical perspective.
The distinction between sex and gender leads to interesting problems of performing gender and what it means for gender (and sex) to be socially constructed. And if both are socially constructed can the divide be upheld without requiring counter-intuitive definitions?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-gender/#SexGenDi...
The haziness of the term "woman" seems to be a popular target for mockery among conservatives. And phrased as an ontological question ("what is a woman?") it is unsurprisingly baffling to many people who haven't kept up with feminism and who are not personally affected by the outcome of this philosophical debate. Equally unsurprising then for these people to consider "The Left" to be out of touch.
Expressing exasperation at our collective failure to wrap our brains around these concepts is an understandable reaction from someone well-read, but it does nothing to change minds.
Actually I guess that's consistent, if you think men are lesser beings who deserve to be killed, then it makes sense you would also think that the worst possible thing you can do to a woman is call them a man.
"Trans rights are human rights!"
Okay, great! And then on the next wall, in the same colour so presumably by the same people:
"Kill all men!"
He also seems to basically cites a lot of things that Black Israelites and Farrakhan say/believe, who are openly anti-Semitic.
> "And what I'm doing, I'm calling out the Jewish community as a whole to say. People say to me, all, we grew up on Ye. Talk to your brother, ask him why is Ye upset? Everybody, all they [the Jewish Community] want to do is silence and shoot the messenger."
That's plainly antisemitism.
> And what I'm doing, I'm calling out the Jewish community as a whole ...
Imagine calling out an entire ethnicity for your woes, and being surprised that people find that offensive.
Especially when it seems like alot of the time people are called racist or sexist for sharing a viewpoint that in their view is accurate.
For example, whenever I run into drivers that don’t react to a light change I have noticed it tends to be a woman with a phone in her hand.
I’m sure someone would take issue with my experience listed above, but I feel like I should have the right to make such a comment without backlash, because in my experience that observation holds true.
My point is I feel like context and history are important.
What he said represents quite common black nationalist views and were espoused by most Black Power activists in the 60s. Those views are still highly relevant in the black community today, due to things like this[0], promoted by popular thinkers like Prof. James Small. Yes, they can be hurtful, but I believe the proper response is to make the sports and music contracts transparent and re-do them so they don't screw over black talent, as Kanye says, to address the underlying distrust, and rebuild proper ties between the Jewish and Black communities. Conflict is sometimes healthier when it's out in the open and gets addressed, rather than repressed and buried.
There's enormous dangers in following the "destroy Kanye" route; it makes everything worse, and the impulse to ban anyone who doesn't "talk right" will eventually lead to historic catastrophe as resentments get buried and build up, rather than getting hashed out.
There's a huge difference to me between people with zero grievances (except being incels) turning to hate, versus being with huge legitimate historical and current grievances where I just disagree with how they express it. I still view it as my (and our) duty to address those grievances; we can address the distrust between communities afterwards once they're solved.
[0]: https://www.972mag.com/%E2%80%9C2pac-killed-by-jewish-gangst...
Why would you assume there's anything wrong with the contracts? He has the burden of proof and he hasn't shown it. Kanye believes he is being victimized by everyone. It's typical narcissist behavior. When someone says that everyone is an asshole, then they're probably the asshole.
Kanye made specific points that the contracts are unfair, with 'talent' not being paid fairly, and having their creative freedom restricted. He also argues that control over distribution is essential, and black people are underrepresented both as record label owners, and as distributors, therefore leading to a huge power imbalance. All those facts are true without needing to go into the 'Jewish' stuff.
People who focus on that controversy are helping these scum-of-the-earth industries survive for longer than they should. Artists should own their output. They need managers and agents, but those should be employees and contractors, not "owners".
I personally don't care to psychoanalyze Kanye, it's none of my business and none of yours. He has objectively been victimized, and became successful in spite of it. I empathize with him and hope what he points out will be resolved.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3gmjw/bad-deals-are-baked-i...
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-55366694
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/music-industry...
He hasn't met the burden of proof for this claim.
You want him to publish his contract? Ooops, he tried that. It showed that Kanye's deal is "standard" for the industry, which doesn't mean it's in any way fair.[0] He's also explicitly said he's doing this for black artists in general, not just himself.
You want him to try to change his contracts privately? Oops, he tried that; his label has deep pockets and just settled privately rather than changing anything.
Many others have tried and they just get buried in lawsuits, sometimes blackmailed (their next releases won't get promoted),[1] and even if they get out, their past albums are still owned by others.
Burden of proof is for exceptional claims. In an industry where egregiously unfair contracts are the norm, the exceptional claim is that Kanye's contracts are fair.
[0]: https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/kanye-west-record-...
[1]: https://www.okayplayer.com/music/rappers-bad-contracts.html
This reads not like you disagree with whether or not its antisemitic, but rather that you're justifying tolerance of some antisemitism on the basis of it being a common black nationalist view.
Which I don't find acceptable. I won't tolerate ethnic or racial prejudice.
> I still view it as my (and our) duty to address those grievances; we can address the distrust between communities afterwards once they're solved.
That's entirely possible without also tolerating hatred.
We can say both that Ye is wrong to be antisemitic _and_ agree that the music industry is exploitative.
From what I can see, most people who support Kanye are uncomfortable with the way he said it, but support his crusade against labels and distributors. Most (not all) of the people who oppose Kanye don't give a shit about labels or distributors beyond lip service, and are themselves exploitative (like Ari Emmanuel, who IMO contributed more to antisemitism than Kanye ever could). These people are not motivated by principles of tolerance, they're just trying to bury the issue. It's easy for me to choose where to stand, and I'm perfectly comfortable with my choice.
> We can say both that Ye is wrong to be antisemitic _and_ agree that the music industry is exploitative.
I say both too. But on the chessboard, sometimes you need to move pieces you don't want to. Rhetoric which is already extremely widespread doesn't bother me much; systematic and institutional discrimination against some of the people I admire most, bothers me highly. Fixing those industries is hard enough, and I don't want to make it any harder for him by joining the mob. I'll take issue with his comments once his fight is won.
I don't know how they don't all get banned, but they somehow have a very vibrant community.
The level of antisemitism that Kanye (no, I will not call him "Ye") posted is not beyond the pale for people in black Twitter. I'm not sure he ever expected it to go this viral or get this much backlash.
Soleimani. He helped the U.S. fight the Taliban. The U.S. later killed him in "self-defense" (no, really, that's what the U.S. Ambassador to the UN said). Scholars and the UN said the assassination was illegal. Do people who cheered his death deserve a ban?
That's not a trick question or whataboutism. At an international scale, principles have to be rigorously and fairly applied.
Asking honestly, why?
I am genuinely curious to understand the reasoning behind this line of thinking.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586073042534297601
> restore sanity to science and biology based cultural agreement
What does this mean, like scientific studies on how to get people to agree?
> "The Babylon Bee was tossed in Twitter jail 7 months ago for a joke that referred to an adult male as a man. We could have restored our account at any time by deleting the tweet, but we refused. It was the right call. Never censor yourself, and never apologize for speaking truth."
[0]: https://twitter.com/SethDillon/status/1585633678977544192?s=...
What's wrong with unbanning a satirical account?
It's either going to be a double standard or not. I moderated a busy gaming site for years. Users have nothing to do but re-post what got someone else banned and then complain things aren't consistent.
I would find the idea that a politician gets to say things, but I don't completely absurd.
The difference now is that Elon went from being one of the loudest members of the peanut gallery to the guy running the show.
https://m.jeuxvideo.com/forums/0-51-0-1-0-1-0-blabla-18-25-a...
Every scenario you can imagine happens.
That’s been Twitter’s official policy since they got criticized a lot for giving Trump passes on generally applicable rules in the runup to and just after thrbe 2016 election: they changed the rules so governments and sufficiently prominent public figures have wider latitude.
Musk selectively loosening restrictions on those who already have the loosest restrictions would be... well, not at all surprising.
If the contents of a law violates Twitter's TOS, can we not disseminate it on Twitter?
Take your originally intended actions and obscure responsibility for them until risks of accountability are sufficiently mitigated?
I don't see anything in his behaviour which would justify your "optimistic" outlook. Sure it won't degenerate in one of those gutter platforms right away but I doubt he'll be able to maintain an acceptable level as long as he's directly involved. He just doesn't make the the impression of an adult person.
imho this may end up being really good for the rest of the internet if it drives away interesting and important people to other platforms.
> scapegoat
Now it's operation "get money back". He'll probably hold it for 5-10 years until tech stocks recover then IPO to try to foist it on his gullible fanboys. Until then he just needs to not scare off advertisers and cut costs enough to afford his debt repayments.
He signed a very clear contract to buy Twitter, he meant to do this.
He started to try and reneg when stocks dropped and his financing was looking extremely shaky.
No, obviously not. Ramping up his car company from roughly nothing to major global presence, kickstarting the world on electric traffic, and setting up private space rocketeering on the side. Oh, and becoming the supposedly richest person on the planet in the process. How insufferably childish of him.
As far as I remember it's: being born rich, getting lucky on one investment and than chewing up ideas of other people and having them sweat his bullshit out to keep their jobs sounds more like the true history here. Didn't get much better in the recent years.
I mean Trump made it to the president of the US of A and I wouldn't consider him an adult person either. History looks pretty similar. Just a different time with the appropriate difference in methods.
Sums it up in the best possible way.
Is there a list of how many different institutions and investors have money in Twitter now? Because I remember Musk taking in a lot of money for this takeover. And those people probably had the smarts to give them an exit in case Musk decided to release the hounds.
Earlier this year he seemed pretty set on the idea of allowing whatever's legal, making Twitter all about free speech. But now it'll just get some minor changes? If it's true, why the change of heart?
He has to deal with actual issues if he's bought Twitter, I agree, but I don't know if the financial incentive is so key, even with borrowed money.
Even if he fired everyone, and got free hosting, it would take nearly a decade to get that back. But that's obviously not realistic.
I expect Twitter to continue canceling people for holding the wrong opinions, it's just that the definition of wrong will flip.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-twitter-takeover-see...
- Elon Musk
I actually think the opposite is going to happen. He's already said he wants Twitter to be the most prolific site for advertisers saying that he thinks advertising can "delight, entertain, and inform you."
If he introduces a subscription model TikTok will pull ahead and take over the entire social media space.
https://www.pymnts.com/news/investment-tracker/2022/musks-pi...
On the other hand YouTube shorts can already technically do most things TikTok can, and handles copyright okay (from the pov of the big copyright holders) and has licenses for a lot of music and stuff and created an ad model making it much more interesting for people to create shorts then TikToks and allows using shorts as a way to get someone hooked for longer videos. And there are GeoPolitical reasons why regulators might want to push YouTube over TikTok e.g. by how they create regulations.
So there is a realistic chance that in the next 1 or two years YouTube Shorts will eat up TikTok due to better quality Shorts for the user and better monetization/money making chances for the creators.
That’s why I said there’s a lot they have to work out. They don’t want to fall into a model like Instagram where the bulk of ad revenues go to the largest influencers. But I would not be surprised to see them rework their payout scheme to something more predictable like YouTubes. The “big pot of money, split evenly” was a simple way to start but now is getting stretched.
One thing I find interesting about TikTok is they have one of the best, completely in App, ways of targeting users. The short format videos allows them to assemble a ton of data points very quickly on user interests and more and more product and recommendation searches are being done on their platform.
I could be wrong but I don’t see YouTube shorts catching up anytime soon TikTok has too much of the social Zeitgest going their way and it’s far easier for new creators to get noticed there as well.
No it won't. A lot of people simply aren't interested in short form video.
I think there will be another app that is half way between Twitter and LinkedIn.
TikTok is not taking over the entire social media space any time soon.
Isn't this his duty to shareholders as long as Twitter is (still) a publicly traded company?
Crappy link but it tells you the basics: https://www.zeni.ai/blog/debt-financing-for-startups
The 13 billion in loans are secured not complete junk.
Of course if cash flows become too low to service the debt (I.e. default), musk can always inject[1] more capital and keep the debt serviced he can afford to do that by leveraging (or selling)TSLA and SpaceX stock easily or use other financing options
(1) he could also buy the debt directly himself without changing capital structure, or refinance it by lending the company money personally
or have one of his other companies lend Twitter money,
he did this between spaceX and Tesla once , it is more difficult with TSLA today- he will get sued . However he controls the board and has the power. He did force TSLA by solarCity and won the lawsuit as well so not implausible.
Also he raised equity investment commitments from a16z , Sequoia , Ellison and few others as well who likely come in as new investors.[1]
So he still has a few shareholders but those who are accredited and have much higher risk appetite and long term view unlike not qtr to qtr of typical public companies so twitter wont be buffeted with market forces like FB is now when trying something radical.
[1] while some of 7B equity investment secured backed out since April , few publicly affirmed their intent to participate recently, no one knows how much was still on table and how much musk took.
I predict the best case scenario is that he does no worse.
"He knew the valuation was too high" is really not an accurate way to think about it. It makes it sound like he successfully proved those claims, when in fact he failed to present compelling enough evidence in court when he tried to use legal action to back out.
We know this because he decided not to go to court to prove that Twitter had hidden information.
Twitter has 7,500 employees. It doesn't take that many to run a Twitter. Most Twitter employees I know use their positions to work on things weakly aligned with the success of Twitter, such as random political or nerdy projects. That's a small sample set, but the things I hear raise my eyebrows.
If Twitter were private, and management aligned to shareholder value, the value could increase by a lot. I'm not sure if Musk can do that, or if it isn't overvalued in the first place, but that's my opinion on Twitter management from where I sit.
It's not uncommon for public companies, especially older ones, by the way. In many cases, almost every employee, right up through the CEO, is there to maximize their income, to maximize their future career prospects, and to have fun. That doesn't always align well with shareholder value.
either elon musk is the business genius a lot of people think he is (I think he is this) and he turns Twitter around and it's awesome.
else twitter fails and doesnt exist. net positive for the world and net negative for Elon, also good for humanity .
I wouldn't be so quick to assume that Musk's ~15 recent years of experiences with mechanical/aerospace/production-engineering businesses is gonna translate perfectly to whatever Twitter is supposed to be.
Maybe being forced to buy it (it's probably already halved in value at least) will make him think twice before gobbing off in future though.
It is ironic and laughable that Elons post to advertisers is done with screenshots of text. After 20+ years of mainstream networked computing this is what passes as a state of art platform and user experience to communicate to n audience.
The bulk of the problems Twitter faces today are amplified and directly inflicted by the essential design of the product.
Tl/Dr; nothing of value was lost.
Technological progress doesn't mean making user-hostile design. If users like a format or medium, you can offer it to them even if your platform is capable of greater things.
In fact, if Twitter did want to improve the user experience, automatic OCR of such text and generation of the corresponding alt tag would be a practical improvement. In fact, general recognition of the content of an image and auto generation of an ALT tag would be a significant improvement.
... But that require them to do actual machine learning as opposed to being the internet's bathroom stall wall.
The fact they haven't done this just shows how inept their employees are.
The fact you defend it as more readable than actual twitter design says a lot
Screenshots of text are popular because people don't seem to be able to copy and save data anymore. Social media apps don't let users download pictures anymore. I can only share intra-platform links to content. The Instagram app won't even let me select text. People get around this insanity by screenshotting the whole screen and saving a poor quality version of the data in image form. This is actually a lossy format conversion and will happen multiple times as people encounter resistance when they try to copy, save and share. It's not just images of text, it's screenshots of screenshots of of screenshots of text.
This is what computing has degenerated to. People can't do basic actions like copying and downloading anymore so they just use screen shots and screen recorders to get around software limitations. I've seen so many videos that end with the user manipulating the interface to stop the recorder. And then there's the people reduced to taking pictures of another screen with their phone cameras.
These aren't problems with screenshots of text (although others have done a pretty good job in listing those) or even problems with computing. These are problems with shitty social media platforms that want to take control from their users, and with the users who accept those kinds of limitations. Stop using bad user-hostile platforms and they'll either improve to win back users or they'll become obsolete and die as people flock to better alternatives.
There's no point in migrating to some perfect encrypted federated free software platform and being alone because everyone I know is still using Instagram.
If everyone went by that logic no one could ever stop using the social media sites they are using today. If you've found a good platform your best bet is to get people to use it in addition to the bad ones they use now and as more people join and use the better platform people could find themselves using the old ones less frequently. By enjoying and getting used to having the benefits of the new platform they could grow increasingly frustrated by the limitations of the older ones.
As long as the perfect encrypted federated free software platform is at least as easy to join and use as the old one asking a friend to add one more app to their rotation wouldn't be putting a huge burden on them.
Yeah. Next year I'll be reading about how the camera apps are detecting copyrighted content and refusing to take pictures too.
> wish I could just go back to android
Don't count on Android. Stakeholder lock down is increasing there too. Remote attestation is already a thing, soon we won't be able to run most apps if we "tamper" with the device by owning it.
Do you have any evidence of this ? I think samsung has done something with knox, but that is the only case I know of.
Apps will insist that you run unmodified software. Bank apps will require attestation because of "fraud". WhatsApp will require attestation because of "terms of service". Streaming apps will require attestation because of "piracy". Games will require attestation because of "cheating". Every app in the Play Store will find a bullshit reason to require it and the result is we can't use their software if we own the machine, we have to let the corporation own it.
- allow clicking hyperlinks
- allow copying content to paste elsewhere
- adhere to device display preferences. you wanted dark mode? fuck you, my screenshot's black on white, dwi
- support screen readers. i loled hardcore at the other post suggesting twitter OCR them--i mean sure, as a practical matter, they should given the status quo, but YOU COULD HAVE JUST USED TEXT TO BEGIN WITH
- scale properly when zoomed in or out
- display all the text up front. virtually all of these require you click through each image because the thumbnail is cropped (if not too small to read anyway)
idk what reason you'd ever actually want to use them unless you desperately needed to show off the cool font you used. saying they're easily readable is like saying the abhorrent mandatory training videos featuring some extremely bored person reading a script over a static background for 30 minutes, with no option to speed up playback or fast-forward, are perfectly understandable. like, yeah, sure, they _are_, but also you could have provided a set of text bullet points about how not to violate USFCPA that any literate person could read in about 2 minutes and we'd all learn the same damn thing
Ok I want to copy paste one of the sentences he said to send to my friend but not the whole message. Oh wait
One of the most important things for Elon to understand is that no matter how many programmatical measures are put into place to prevent abuse, there will always eventually be a workaround for people on a very public and open site. Protecting users and their content rights should be a goal of the platform as well, too many of these social sites see copycat behavior as fair game, and they reward people who steal and hijack content, that needs to be discouraged among several other bad social media behaviors.
I really don't see a problem with having an internet scale public bathroom wall for people to scrawl all over. Sure, Twitter is mostly spam and garbage, but so what? Every comment, however useless/offensive/entertaining/banal/silly/poetic/helpful/etc that isn't breaking the law isn't really a problem and no one is forcing you to read it.
I don't have much trouble ignoring Twitter entirely most of the time and the main issues I have with it aren't even about Twitter itself but with how people try to use it for things it is poorly suited for. It's the "journalists" who copy/paste tweets then call that an article I take issue with. Twitter is absolutely no place for presidential records, and shouldn't be the only place for any kind of important or official notification, or the only way to reach a company to get customer service.
There are certainty far better platforms for blogging, but lots of people like Twitter and find it useful. I don't see why Twitter should go away.
It's like saying that if you own a Lamborghini you can be a great manager at Lada.
Yeah maybe it helps a little but the vast majority of your decisions is still going to be determined by analysis on your users, not your experience.
1. Spams and bots are rampant. Now I understand it's hard, but eliminating the obvious ones is not hard. A verified account impersonating people and selling crypto is just insane.
2. I used to ask for verification and get this. Twitter doesn't agree with verifying myself. What is this idiotic policy? I am myself.
3. People should allow to tweet as long as it's not illegal, especially from high profile accounts. Moderation might not go away, but it should be minimal.
My opinion is that, if twitter enables widespread verification where a lot more people can be verified, twitter's convo will get 10x better (e.g. now they can rank replies, people will act more reasonably).
There’s a reason the legal system said free speech is out to the point of direct imminent harm. It was the arrogance of 20 year old programmers in silicon valley who thought they could create a better legal system.
They don't mind enforcing speech laws of other countries, lowest common denominator.
No tears would be shed if they were broken up, nationalized, etc.
First, whenever it comes to "free speech" 99% of the time people make that argument they're not arguging for "all speech". They're talking about "my speech". And most of that time they really just want to utter hate speech.
Second, the idea of what's normal or acceptable is built on deeply ingrained beliefs that typically aren't rational. You see this whenever Elon talks about the "far left". This is such a laughable concept. The "far left" in American politics quite often simply means "we should let trans people exist" (eg [1]). Even suggesting things like everyone deserves access to healthcare is viewed as an extreme left position in the US.
So when Elon argues he's a centrist, the calibration is off because your choices in mainstream American politics are mostly between extreme right (often called the "alt right") being the party of Trump and the center right in the form of the Democratic Party (eg [2]). There is no "left" in American politics. The takeover of neoliberalism in the US is near-total.
As for Elon's plans for Twitter, he's put a lot of money on the line and the letter to advertisers I think gives a good signal of where this is going. I predict Elon will simply cut costs, unban a few conservatives as a token gesture and wait a couple of years to take the company public again and get out. He may as well start making a "Mission Accomplished" banner now and book the aircraft carrier. This is basically the private equity playbook.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/17/elon-musk-should-apologize-f...
[2]: https://twitter.com/cnbc/status/1471615893411090433?lang=en
Wokism is culturally dominant, but widely rejected all the way from center-left to anything to the right of that.
Republicans are economically right (so not extreme right), yet have a far-right outing, as you say.
Look I’m probably somewhere between center and far left depending on your perspective and maybe that’s the point. For better or for worse(probably worse) the functioning of society is based on relative, not absolute belief.
This hasn’t been the case until now. Just as an example lot of radical leftists, BLM activists etc. have openly called for extermination of white people and contantly used racist rhetoric without any consequences. Meanwhile a lot of convervatives, libertarians etc. have been banned/suspended from Twitter due to false ”hatespeech” reporting.
No one has ever asked for ”hounds to be released”. No one sane wants Twitter to become another 8chan. What people want is the one-sided 1984 experiment to end.
He literally just had every engineer print out the last 3 months of code lol
https://twitter.com/leahculver/status/1586145696163373056
Definitely a story to be careful on
You make it sound like this has been proven many times, examples?
Populism from the far right has adopted a strategy of re-defining key terms such as nation, citizen, fairness, representation.
Under these conditions, a highly diverse council will either not be able to decide or will need to decide in favor of maximum leniency.
By the way, Adam Curtis made this point in his documentary "HyperNormalisation", where he argued that Trump had hijacked "fair and balanced" reporting.
I'm a big admirer of Adam Curtis's films!
“Now, it’s true that populists, when in opposition, criticize sitting governments (and, usually, also other parties). But, above all, they do something else, and that is crucial: in one way or another, they claim that they, and only they, represent what they often refer to as the “real people” or also the “silent majority.” At first sight, this might not look particularly nefarious; it does not immediately amount to, let’s say, racism or a fanatical hatred of the European Union or, for that matter, the declaring of judges and particular media “enemies of the people.” And yet this claim to a distinctly moral monopoly of representation has two detrimental consequences for democracy. Rather obviously, once populists assert that only they represent the people, they also charge that all other contenders for office are fundamentally illegitimate. This is never just a matter of disputes about policy, or even about values; such disagreements, after all, are completely normal and, ideally, even productive in a democratic polity. Rather, populists assert that their rivals are corrupt and simply fail to serve the interests of the people on account of their bad, or indeed “crooked,” character. ”
This is exactly the sort of tone that improving balance is intended to counter.
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1585841080431321088
There is a difference between diversity of "the place where you are forming an opinion", and diversity of what that opinion is.
By saying that a council needs to equally represent diversity of opinions completely ignores how widespread those opinions actually are. Decisions about action to take about going "defcon 3 on the jews" should not need to be decided by a council where you're focusing on equity of diverse opinions; ie, 50% of people think anti-semitism is bad, and 50% think anti-semitism is good. It's a bastardization of the word "diversity" in order to support whatever fringe belief is up for discussion.
That's why it's important to remove appeals to popularity from moral reasoning.
If anything, it has been successfully appropriated and destroyed by intersectionalists on the left, where diverse means anything but diversity of opinions and where people's diversity is just evaluated by racial, religious, sexual and sexual orientation characteristics.
The fact that the "head of diversity" of Apple, a black woman was fired for pointing that out is a proof of the existence of that monopoly by the left.
https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-lasts-j...
The news of Ms Smith being fired pained me when it came out; the people behind that "outcry" should be ashamed. The mob won again.
There is evidence that Twitter has been actively colluding with large pharmaceutical giants to target and purposefully ban those for being skeptical of them and the vaccine. [0] So one is not allowed to be skeptical and criticize that?
Perhaps everything on what is being read out on the news is the absolute truth then. Surely they can never be wrong. /s If we question the media and companies like PayPal or Twitter dislike that, then say goodbye to your account without giving a reason of what was violated [1] and in the case of the former you must pay a $2,500 fine for what they call 'misinformation'.
Exciting times ahead! /s
[0] https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/pfizer-board-member-scot...
[1] https://twitter.com/llsceptics/status/1567658400573448192
I don't think one political coalition has a monopoly over the words it uses
Looking at college campuses, I see a lack of diversity of perspective
Looking at executive boards, I see a lack of ethnic diversity (and also diversity of perspective)
> So anyone that is celebrating this Musk announcement is telling on themselves
Just like how anyone who's upset about it is upset that they have less space to shove their insipid beliefs down the throats of others. Maybe reddit is a better choice for them?
>It USED to mean "include representation of those not from the mainstream - those that don't typically have major representation, but whose opinions are valuable to be included"
The majority of Twitter moderation staff appear to be more left wing than the mainstream. Allowing more center and right wing people on the decision making would be allowing a marginalized group within Twitter to have a voice.
(It was covered by the Times but paid for by a non-partisan group, with researchers participating)
> NORC surveyed the group before the conference, and again on the same questions at the end; the results were compared with a similar panel of voters who did not get an intense dose of deliberative democracy in the interim. Voters at the event on both the left and the right appeared to edge toward the center. Democratic support receded for a $15 federal minimum wage and for “Medicare for all”; Republican support grew for rejoining the Paris climate agreement and for protecting from deportation immigrants brought to the United States as children.
Can you point at one? A council with "widely diverse viewpoints" that is actually an effective, tie-braking decision maker?
oversightboard.com/decisions
They're optimized to serve the interests of the two prevailing parties in the US, which aren't the only two legitimate viewpoints.
Twitter does, of course, also have to comply with law. In regards to this council we are however specifically focusing on an area, that is not already decided by law. Coming up with a decision in a "wildly diverse group" without the need to argue along law (because that is not what your mandate asks for), is a very, very different setup.
I feel the other examples are problematic for other reasons, i.e. "city councils": In the EU people get elected into these positions and no one mechanism will be placed for them to have "wildly different viewpoints". They get elected to get something done, which will then revolve around making compromises, or just not being involved in the process.
The person who could arguably be considered the third most powerful politician in the US just had their own broken into and their spouse assaulted in a suspected act of domestic terrorism. I wouldn't say "imminent" but if you don't think the possibility is at least somewhere on the table I would consider that being naive.
Still not as bad or unstable as the 1960s.
Worse than the 1960s.
Contrast this with the way Republican politicians and media are hesitant to condemn the January 6th attack or cross Trump on almost any topic, and calls for political violence have been the subject of jokes and outright support from leaders & candidates for years. Those topics poll favorably with far too many Republicans to consider them fringe issues.
That’s scary for anyone who believes in fair elections or the rule of law because, as we’ve seen, those people feel emboldened and are expanding. There are a large number of election deniers running for office this year and they’re all members of one party, with almost no internal pushback.
Ah election deniers...
Like:
Joe Biden, 2019: “I absolutely” agree that Trump is an “illegitimate president.”
Hillary Clinton, 2019: The election was “stolen.”
Jimmy Carter, 2019: “Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election and was put into office because the Russians interference on his behalf.”
Kamala Harris, 2019: “Absolutely right” that Trump “didn’t really win.”
Karine Jean-Pierre, 2016: It was a “stolen election.”
Jerry Nadler, 2017: It was a “tainted” and “illegitimate” election.
A period of severe unrest like we had in the 60s? That's definitely a possibility.
Heck; Biden is would be considered right wing in most developing countries, and here's his take:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/20...
> Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.
Now, I want to be very clear — (applause) — very clear up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology.
I know because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans.
But there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.
These are hard things.
But I’m an American President — not the President of red America or blue America, but of all America.
And I believe it is my duty — my duty to level with you, to tell the truth no matter how difficult, no matter how painful.
And here, in my view, is what is true: MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people.
They refuse to accept the results of a free election. And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.
(Sept 1, 2022)
> They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.
They look at the mob that stormed the United States Capitol on January 6th — brutally attacking law enforcement — not as insurrectionists who placed a dagger to the throat of our democracy, but they look at them as patriots.
And they see their MAGA failure to stop a peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election as preparation for the 2022 and 2024 elections.
They tried everything last time to nullify the votes of 81 million people. This time, they’re determined to succeed in thwarting the will of the people.
That’s why respected conservatives, like Federal Circuit Court Judge Michael Luttig, has called Trump and the extreme MAGA Republicans, quote, a “clear and present danger” to our democracy.
This seems like paranoid thinking. The Supreme Court has shifted ideologically to the right, but I haven’t seen any evidence they are part of a conspiracy to end democracy.
They ruled to allow state legislatures to override voters by changing state law to allow that:
https://news.yahoo.com/analysis-supreme-court-tilted-electio...
and an upcoming case to watch, where they're expected to further undermine laws:
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/30/1106866830/supreme-court-to-t...
These are opinion pieces.
> They ruled to allow state legislatures to override voters by changing state law to allow that
No they didn’t. Nothing in the pieces linked states this.
> and an upcoming case to watch, where they're expected to further undermine laws:
This isn’t a meaningful sentence.
That refer to facts such as throwing out the voting rights act, and the decision on gerrymandering? Maybe try reading the opinion pieces??
The decision on gerrymandering is real.
But you seem to be thinking this is evidence of a conspiracy to end democracy rather than just normal bias. Even that piece admits that gerrymandering was invented by the democrats. This is just normal US politics at work.
Semantics.
"The decision on gerrymandering is real."
Yes. It is.
"But you seem to be thinking this is evidence of a conspiracy to end democracy rather than just normal bias. Even that piece admits that gerrymandering was invented by the democrats. This is just normal US politics at work."
Do you not understand the difference between democratic and Democratic? Otherwise, what's the relevance of gerrymandering having been invented by Democrats. The court upholding it is anti democratic
That it's a normal part of US politics engaged in by all political parties.
> The court upholding it is anti democratic.
Is it? If it's a normal part of US politics, that is far from clear.
The point is that it's not evidence of a conspiracy to end democracy.
Debatable. It's facially anti-democratic. That it's something that can be engaged in a partisan matter doesn't support your argument.
Prior attempts by states to do this in 2020 and 2000 failed in court, or led to the winning candidate (Gore) conceding, respectively. The 2020 standards that caused the election results to be upheld no longer apply in the states that changed their laws to take advantage of the new supreme court ruling.
What am I missing?
You seem fairly literate. Why would you ask this?
If anything, it's kind of amazing that the combination of a large population, low regulation, and easy access to firearms hasn't resulted in more violence than it has.
Multiple US presidents have been assassinated! Political violence is shocking but not actually so rare that we should latch on to any specific incident with particular meaning. It's particularly meaningless when it is the act of a single person who is somewhat deranged. If an organized group takes out a politician or other official, and this act had some support with the public, then we should start worrying.
What happens if the also-armed liberals get sick of this crap, and the confrontations escalate?
It's not civil war, but it can lead to ugly conflicts.
So, the difference between the two countries is that this viewpoint in Canada is a fringe one, while in the United States, it enjoys popular support among mainstream politicians and media. Oh, they don't directly endorse violence, but they are very happy to call for someone to 'remove this turbulent priest'.
That's the difference between fringe lunacy (present in every country, shit happens, you deal with it and move on), and the peaceful political process unraveling.
Just a reminder - one of the presidential candidates in the past two elections has yet to concede that he lost the popular vote in 2016, as well as the popular vote and the electoral college in 2020[1]. This sort of insanity is so far beyond the political pale in Canada, I can't even envision it.
[1] My state's gubernatorial candidate has also yet to concede that he lost 43-56 in 2020. Why even have elections if the losers don't accept the results?
The right does not own the monopoly on violent nutjobs among their ranks. Sadly, they exist everywhere, left, right, and center.
That explosion is what made Jan 6th possible two years ago, and what will give legs to the next try.
The left might not be as crazy as they were in the 60s or whatever, but things are more heated today than at any point in my 30 year memory.
Let's take Trump's election fraud claims for example; if you genuinely believe that the election was stolen then violence would be a very reasonable and even moral action in literal defence of democracy. I sure hope a lot of people would rise up if such an event would ever actually happen. Of course, Trump's claims are a load of utter nonsense, but my point is that people seem to genuinely believe it and that violence is a logical and moral result.
This is what worries me. That there's the occasional nutjob or conflict that gets out of hand: yeah, that's "normal". But these kind of ideas ... I'd say not so much. That we haven't seen more violence leads me to suspect many "election deniers" don't actually believe Trump's claims as strongly as they say they do.
It's only on pseudonymous mega-sites like Twitter, Reddit and HN where jumping down people's throats for having an opposing viewpoint is even a thing.
There is a massive difference between me seeing a stranger's real name next to a Facebook post about how abortion is evil, and me having a conversation with a good friend of 10 years, or my mom, and it comes up that they're pro-life.
We might have a long debate, but in the end, they're still my friend or family.
You only see videos of the out of control ones because they're the weird ones.
If you only view the world through the snippets that are noteworthy enough to make headlines or get a lot of votes on Reddit, you end up with a very skewed view of what the world is like.
/s
I think this very much depends on where you live. I'm not responding to reddit videos, I'm responding to events that my family and some friends who are in public education.
In the real world it's a bit more nuanced because people care more about conflict in the real world. But even so there's usually a core group of people with similar beliefs and outsiders are pushed away.
In the corporate world conflicting viewpoints in e.g. religion or politics are generally dealt with by making talking about them taboo or explicitly banning it.
When you don't do that you get the mess that Google has found itself in several times recently where someone makes some comment that the majority disagree with (positive discrimination is bad, AI is sentient, etc) and other employees call for them to be fired.
I can't think of many groups that actually manage to get people with opposing viewpoints to get on with each other without just banning talking about them. Universities maybe. The army perhaps?
https://coralproject.net/blog/five-myths-of-community-design...
It's the politicians and similar race-baiters who benefit from convincing citizens that they should hate eachother.
The future of entertainment is a modern twist on old school gladiators. Elon Musk is our Augustus.
will still have to oblige. Definitely no "hate speech, incitement to terrorism and child sexual abuse."
For his part, Musk has said he wouldn’t allow illegal content on the platform.
That's absolutely true.
> or can be interpreted as defamation/slander
That's absolutely false. The United States tends to be much harder to press a defamation/slander case than many other territories. Perhaps you're thinking of the United Kingdom? They have much looser libel laws than the United States.
Are peer nations substantially more liberal on copyright infringement than the US? I haven't really heard of that. Really, it seemed like other countries like Japan and Germany were stricter.
If calling public figures actors is all it takes for them to successfully sue for millions, the bar seems incredibly low.
No.
First, the Sandy Hook parents were not public figures.
Second, Jones and Infowars did significantly more than just make claims about people being crisis actors (though, that in itself absolutely can be defamatory in that it was a false statement of fact). There were also claims that some parent's fabricated their daughter's identify and then faked her death in order to steal money from hard-working Americans.
Third, this was not a matter of Jones simply making an assertion once. He repeated these claims for years, which led to a significant and ongoing harassment of the family.
The original complaint is here, though I'll note that it's from 2018 and much more evidence was discovered since the complaint was filed: https://civilinquiry.jud.ct.gov/DocumentInquiry/DocumentInqu....
Fourth, Jones refused to participate in the lawsuit itself, deliberately and repeatedly not complying with repeated discovery orders. This led to a default judgement against him.
Fifth, an entire trial was held on how much damage Jones' defamatory statements and unfair trade practices caused. A jury of his peers determined that Jones' defamatory actions caused $965 Million dollars in damages.
So, I think your characterization of it as "an entertainer simply repeating a popular internet conspiracy theory on his show" is an absolutely incomplete summary of what happened, and why he was found to be liable for his actions.
Which jurisdiction(s) do you think would have afforded more protections to Jones' defamatory conduct?
The entire docket can be found here: https://civilinquiry.jud.ct.gov/CaseDetail/PublicCaseDetail....
For example, the US and UK both have laws on libel/slander (I think most countries do), but the US is much more permissive than the UK, in the sense that it's a lot harder to prove that someone committed libel/slander.
Is it a "human right" to maliciously and publicly lie about whether some other person, say, killed a child for fun? You could certainly argue "people should be able to say whatever they want whenever they want", but I think most people would agree that some restrictions on that kind of speech is reasonable, because it ends up harming others.
It’s definitely not “anyone can say anything any time”, even this is not allowed in the USA. Libel, defamation, lying under oath, these things are not covered under free speech, nor should they be.
In my opinion, there’s no such thing as freedom of speech. It’s like freedom in general. Freedom from choice is also one.
Not all viewpoints are equally valid. Just finding the middle of the viewpoints that exist isn't moderate because you can't just pretend that all sides have equal numbers of extremists and that somehow their views automatically "cancel out".
Simply stating a council will have diverse views is enough for people to ring the fire alarm these days.
What makes you think your viewpoint is valid?
It's intellectually weak and morally dubious to take such a stupid position.
"Solving" content moderation is a losing battle -- there is no way to humanly moderate anything at the rate it can be produced, and Elon knows this. It's insane, so he probably won't do it.
But, allowing content to be produced, but making sure no real person ever sees it, until the content producer earns their way into "your" group -- now that can be automated. Also, then the police and FBI could use all the evil content to "do their job" (but, I'm not holding my breath).
Elon has access to Exascale hardware, so K-means Clusters with arbitrarily large dimensionality is at his disposal. The algorithms are linear in complexity, so should be parallelizable.
I figure he might have thought this through...
(That's probably a big reason why he wants subscription fees to take over advertiser revenue dominance.)
I don't think it helps with any of either, as people's behavior, the context, the language used and sensibilities change across cultures and over time. What you call hate speech now may not be in the future and may not have been in the past.
The best you could hope for is creating a fuzzy representation of the most visible problematic behavior and try to outrun model-world dealignment by constantly updating it.
And, the agent is moved closer to the clusters they like tweets from, and further from the clusters they dislike tweets from.
The more diverse your likes (likes tweets in many other clusters), the broader and less restrictive your cluster weighting is -- the more variety you see. The more restrictive your selection, the less variety.
You decide how much of an "echo chamber" you're in. But, if you don't like $BAD_THING, and you downvote enough tweets of $BAD_THING, the less you'll see tweets by people in groups where they like $BAD_THING.
But large platforms have two massive problems:
(1) what people want is popular content, sometimes even content they would downvote. This destroys clustering by creating fuzzy centralized bridges and erodes the usefulness of recommenders
(2) people over time have lost trust and interest in highly personalized feeds, see facebook or the revolt against instagram's feed sorting.
Two cases that seem to work for now are music recommendation and tiktok. I'm not holding my breath though, because spotify might end up driving people away with too many monetized podcasts and tiktok could succumb to the generational migration. But we'll see!
And the second point was a mostly abstract intellectual debate in the early 2010s, but people have proven that they absolutely prefer to stick with their own, and have close-to-zero tolerance for dissent or disagreement (see, "the hivemind"). Twitter is far more prone to this than Facebook, since it's founded on communities (i.e. clusters) rather than just friends. Twitter just needs to stop putting junk into people's feeds; and silo them better to reduce harassment.
That would also reduce polarization, since a yuge cause for polarization (far-right, antifa) is a knee-jerk reaction to the very worst content from the other side. Stop promoting that, and you'll stop the "Brainwashing Of My Dad" effect (the film), where a conservative from Texas gets upset because of bathroom laws in California, or where a liberal gets upset because of a few 4chan trolls.
It's the psychological phenomenon of "enmeshment": remove the boundaries between people, and you make their relationship very toxic and conflictual. Enforce better boundaries, and their relationship will be far healthier. Twitter promoted the former; Musk can avoid most of the upcoming "hell" being predicted by doing the latter.
If you don't want people chuckling at you, don't talk crazy.
If you really, really get annoyed at something and mash the downvote button, it'll eventually go away, and you'll be left in your warm, cozy bubble.
Everyone wins!
Your delicate sensitivites about $SOMETHING don't affect anyone else.
Long Covid brain fog? Marijuana-induced schizophrenia? Has he just been stupid and lucky all along? I haven't spent enough time thinking about this to figure out why.
There are people who enjoy reasoned debate, even if they don't agree with the counterparty. They won't downvote those tweets. Their cluster weight will be gently moving in the direction of others like them, and its weight will let through a wide variety of other gently weighted groups.
Others are compelled to screech and foam at the mouth if someone argues for a $WRONGTHINK - even in jest or as a devil's advocate, and will downvote them instantly. Their weightings will be heavy, and will exclude most other groups. They will see only what they want to see, and won't see what they don't want to see -- reasoned debate from groups they disagree with, for example.
This is a personal choice, and mirrors physical group dynamics.
If someone "in your group" starts talking crazy, they will begin to separate from the group (by mutual down-voting), and migrate to a different group. You (and the rest of your group) won't be affected much.
I'm writing this from a country that currently has a giant nationwide chain store that has a public "No Whites, Blacks Only" hiring policy.
Yet, there are viewpoints that would be considered so utterly innocent in the west as to be as unnoticeable as punctuation, that have led to actual mob violence and lynchings, and I am talking this decade, not some old era bygones.
Such speech is considered equivalent to yelling "Fire" in an open theater, to use a common internet retort on free speech, because of the effect it has on the masses, and we have laws on blasphemy specifically for this.
You would think, oh surely I would never say anything offensive to any group, but for Funzies, have a scroll here: https://twitter.com/search?q=blasphemy%20(from%3ASAMRIReport...
So, whose blasphemies are considered sacred, mine or yours?
Be careful when asking for diversity. You might get it.
----
Americans do seem to take free speech for granted.
Just FYI, the "fire in a crowded theater" is actually a widely-spread yet terrible example, as it was actually overturned in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969. So, yelling fire in a crowded theater is actually legally not addressed by either decision and the famous quote is part of an overturned ruling.
I don't think we should frame free speech standards based on Pakistan, if your bio is correct.
Remember, I am not talking merely about legally limited speech, I am talking about stuff that causes societal discomfort.
If it's a "diverse" council, then there are bound to be people from this part of the world. And if they give, with a straight face, the examples you see in the funzies link as example of hate speech they would like to be moderated....
How would you feel, if your tweet was blocked, and the reason given is something you, and any body from your part of the world, would personally consider to be as offense as not ending your sentence with a fullstop would be to a grammar nazi...but to the council it was considered as offensive as perhaps saying the N-word?
I am talking from a purely academic point of view, but you have to realise the scope of these matters. Pakistan might not be able to affect Twitter moderation, but India? definitely, too big a market to ignore. The Gulf Countries are already investors alongside Musk, so them too. EU has already given the halt signal.
My personal opinion and absolutely dissociated from my employer: I am not going to talk about economic decisions or market pressure, but free speech standards should also be not framed around India's standards. A diverse council shouldn't have to include viewpoints that are wrong. Defining wrong is certainly a difficult measure to elaborate, but free speech standards that include some religious persecution are definitely in that wrong category. Bigots will always say that they aren't bigots.
Real progress can then be made.
Try forcing your way in front of a camera at your nearest news station and see how that works out for you.
Twitter isn't providing you and a platform for free; it sells ads alongside it. And if its moderation is too strict, then it's not an effective platform.
which goes to my original question, strict according to whom?
https://radiolab.org/episodes/facebooks-supreme-court
Can we nuke Facebook on the way too ?
It twitter abandons the European market, people will use something else.
Yes, and then be disconnected from the rest of the world.
Or even worse - no substitute service would even spring up, giving a strong signal that people don't actually need the service FB/Twitter offer at all!
They only stand to loose for exiting a market as a protest.
People's complaints about Twitter moderation aren't about the law, they're about governments being able to indirectly make de facto, unconstitutional law through either informal demands and threats to, or overly chummy and profitable relationships with, media companies. It's not hard to figure out why media and payment consolidation and monopolies are allowed/encouraged. They're ideal for government.
I don't understand how orchestrated bans across media companies and payment processors can be allowed when price-fixing isn't. They're behaving as trusts.
Is that even diverse?
In the US there's a very defined almost meme level concept of right or left and folks absolutely want to toss people into those buckets and make all the usual assumptions. Online it's almost impossible for me not to be told what group I fit into ... I'm often told one way one day, the other the next.
Is that all there will be? What happens if say 6 people perceived as on the left and 3 on the right and 4 other people are on there? Will it be credible, or does this al have to match some twitter-ish concept of "diverse"?
A rando executive making decisions and some twitter-ish idea of "diverse" doesn't seem any more likely to be "fair".
jokes aside. there actually could be some opportunity to do some really cool stuff like some kind of experimental political science. like, mechanisms for population clustering and distribution of representation.
like, running human clustering algorithms and then using the size of those clusters to allocate representation. a blueprint for future attempts at stable democracy that don't rely on gerrymanderable geographic hand drawn borders or hand picked classifications.
they already support blocklists and most of the content it suggests is directly related to your activity on the site. it seems they have a small random factor, but it's pretty easy to ignore or block if you don't like it.
but honestly, that's not really the issue. i think it's more a matter of a change in the fabric of how humans communicate and organize. everyone can see that it's powerful, nobody is quite sure or agrees on what the adoption curve looks like. some think you just throw it out there and wait for the dust to settle, others think that's a path to armageddon and that a dampened rollout is necessary. who knows what's right, but there's a good chance we're about to find out.
the number of edges per node in the walk in the woods with friends graph is much smaller than the number of edges per node in the social media universe, with twitter being a crazy power law distribution.
It obviously isn't anywhere near as effective as we would like, but I can't think of any legal tactic that actually works better.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
I say bring it out in daylight, and let them loose every debate they have so they look like idiots instead of martyrs.
False accusations of Nazism are indeed really common and a big problem today. Actual Nazism is next to nonexistent.
No, it's just easy ratings when the media can find examples of Neo-Nazis.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Big Tech is doing great.
The problem if living conditions don't improve, things get extreme regardless.
Anyway, you can also make your account protected, so that nobody can see or reply to your tweets unless you approve. However, I would say it's not fair to claim that "you are using Twitter incorrectly" if you don't make your account protected, or if you don't restrict replies to every tweet you write.
Even if you restrict replies, people can still quote-tweet dunk on you.
What's the point of a "social network" if you use all the most "antisocial" settings?
How can someone quote tweet dunk you if your tweets are private?
> How can someone quote tweet dunk you if your tweets are private?
They can't. Taking your account private was supposed to be the reductio ad absurdum conclusion of using Twitter "correctly". I mean that if your account is still public, but you restrict replies, people can still QT.
https://www.techadvisor.com/article/741472/how-to-turn-off-r...
Because falling afoul of them doesn't just make your tweets not show up in Discover to people who don't know you. It means you can't tweet to your friends either.
To be clear, your post has completely valid reasons to not care if moderation is too lax, but you do still need to care if it's too strict.
> fewer algorithmic recommendations and push less "controversial" or popular content onto users' feeds.
There is not ANY 'algorithmic' content on my Twitter feed. Zero! What are you referring to?!
Twitter added a Topics feature, where it promotes popular tweets. I'll often see random tweets with >100k likes inserted into my feed, though none of the people I follow liked it, and it's not in my interests.
You'll also see such "popular tweets" when you click on any tweet and scroll past the replies. Doesn't always show (especially when there's tons of replies), but it gives you random tweets from outside your circle.
One interesting feature is the "What's happening" (formerly Trends/Hashtags) section on the right, which shows random news stories. They're not determined by popularity, but by fiat; the list is now manually populated by Twitter employees. (They removed plain hashtags and switched to an editorialized list because Trump supporters managed to get "too many" hashtags going during the 2016 campaign. It still shows hashtags occasionally, but they have to get pre-approved before they appear IIRC.) Many of these new Trends don't show all tweets that match a keword; they just show you tweets from a few people selected by Twitter. These[0] is a good example from today. It's a great feature. Musk could create a Twitter News service (like Google News) and expand on that; it would cut off the "cross-silo" communication further, and would reduce polarization and controversy.
[0]: https://twitter.com/i/events/1585823974868414464 and https://twitter.com/i/events/1586015934141153284
I have never seen this. It turns out to be buried under a "more" menu, so I maintain that this is a niche feature that you'd need to go out of your way to suffer.
> You'll also see such "popular tweets" when you click on any tweet and scroll past the replies.
No, I don't. I don't see anything like that. I just get to the bottom of the replies. When do you see this? I don't even see it on a tweet with zero replies. No random tweets, just blank space.
I never turned it on or tapped on it, and don't follow any topics. It still intersperses "Comedy", "Crypto", and "Movies" tweets (labelled as such) into my main timeline.
And I don't know why you don't see "popular tweets" (it's actually "More tweets", I misspoke). I've been seeing those for years in the exact same context I described.
The violence and abuse many women experience on Twitter has a detrimental effect on their right to express themselves equally, freely and without fear. Instead of strengthening women’s voices, the violence and abuse many women experience on the platform leads women to self-censor what they post, limit their interactions, and even drives women off Twitter completely."
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2018/03/online-vi...
But look at the mass shooter Dylan Roof, among others. They targeted minorities and were solely radicalized in online forums according to their manifestos. Or, look at the strain on hospitals that anti-vaxxers put us through. These people were partly influenced by online misinformation.
Concerns about speech in the age of social media have little to do with A's speech impacting person B. It's A's speech influencing person X, Y and Z which then has an unpredictable negative impact on person B.
This wasn't a big problem 15 years ago before social media. It's a new problem and many people haven't updated their paradigm given the new environment we're now in.
- HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33371297
- Submitted article: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitt...
That guy, despite being the president, repeatedly said things that got other people banned with their rules. Some how other leaders claimed this was a said day that he finally got punished for it.
Often they even stop showing to followers, you just get blended out of the algorithm
A shadow ban makes your post invisible to all but the poster.
But if I went to their profile I would still see them
The next couple years are going to be very interesting. Facebook will probably get bought out or something. For twitter, I can't really say. Reddit is probably going to become even more repulsive (and hopefully gets replaced). Hopefully tiktok goes away also :/
Also interesting to see the phrase "diversity of viewpoint" catching on so quickly
What is happening to Reddit?
The process is similar to what's happened to reddit: new users come in like agricultural runoff, which leads to overgrowth of more suffocating aspects of the site culture
On the one hand a social network that appeals to everyone will appeal to no one, on the other hand an internet built on the idea of exclusivity just seems. Incompatible? I’m not sure what the word is but there’s a paradox here somewhere.
I recall hearing the phrase a lot in the context of overbearing DEI initiatives (now commonplace) that were criticized for being too superficial in their concern with diversity of "race" rather than diversity of opinion.
I think it's fair to say that ideas/viewpoints are very important, but to ignore the reality of groups of people frequently targeted is silly.
He clearly isn’t.
What you don't think there are white kids with single moms? Or white kids that had dads that beat them? Or white kids that were molested? Or white kids that got harassed by police? Or white kids that were told to give up, or that they wouldn't amount to anything?
Your view of white people is completely detached from reality. Anyone who has been through adversity (most people), can empathize with anyone else who has gone through adversity even if the circumstances of that adversity weren't exactly the same.
Saying you will take hypothetical action is easy, but all that matters is what you've actually done and are doing.
If you haven't taken any substantial action to date then perhaps consider that may be a sign that you are not as motivated and understanding about the oppression of others as your initial comment may have indicated.
If on the other hand you have been involved in a significant amount of anti-racist activism that's genuinely awesome.
This is no different than when someone claims God is real, the burden of proof is on the person making the claim, not the person denying the existence of God.
What you’re doing is essentially demanding I prove God doesn’t exist.
Do you see how those two statements strongly contradict one another?
Anyway, if your position is genuinely that systemic racism doesn't exist, given all the information you have access to in this day, then I don't think there's any evidence I could show you that would ever sway you. That said, it's worth a shot, here's a tiny grain of sand on the nearly infinite beach of facts supporting the continued existence of racism - people with white sounding names are 50% more likely to receive a callback for a job interview.[1]
[1]https://archive.is/fdUuy
Nope, no contradiction at all. You can have adversity and not have systemic racism. I don’t have the foggiest clue how you can think that is a contradiction.
> people with white sounding names are 50% more likely to receive a callback for a job interview.[1]
Fair enough, but how is this remotely “systemic”? Do you really think there are company policies that promote this? Or is this individual (I.e. not systemic) biases?
Unless the company policy is to prefer the resumes with white sounding names then I don’t see how this is systemic.
edit: hm, while I'm not a fan of the "systemic racism" thing, depicting it as a "boogie man in the sky" does not make you look like prone to really open to understand adversity of others. I'm sure you decided that "they are just complaining, they don't know "real adversity"" while you have no idea what it is really like.
"That's ok when WE do it".
That is fucking terrifying and most centrality undesirable, unless you mean equality of opportunity, then absolutely. But equality of outcome is the worst possible thing anyone could ever strive for.
Yes. Yes. This is what the position is. Don't let anyone ever try to tell you otherwise.
There is no equality of opportunity for groups of people that have had generation after generation of systemic oppression, exclusion and poverty.
You don't do that to an entire subculture of people for hundreds of years, and then think you can snap your fingers and say "Okay cool, segregation is over so now we all have equal opportunity!"
There is so much that goes into being a successful person that is subtle, environmental, learned through exposure, enabled by connections and passed down through generations. Same goes for the flipside which is called the cycle of poverty.
There's a lot of damage that needs to be undone, which will take active investment on behalf of society at large to accomplish.
I'm too tired to write out an essay on the history of racism in the US and why that history is still a massive burden on the descendants of those people today. This information is widely available if you genuinely want to understand.
You've got Black centre-rightists like me, Far Rightists like Clarence Thomas, Barack Obama in the middle, and quite a range of voices on the Left - I'll pick Ta-Nehisi Coates as a very talented example over there.
Diversity is both of these things. It is true that you can have more diversity in a room of people of one race than a room of people of all different races, but it's more common that you will find diversity across lines like race, gender, age, etc.
Since it's clear that diversity without race differences can exist, but diversity without different ideas can't exist, then why care about race at all?
Which makes for a stable state of echo chamber extremists.
The excitement for this new move seems not just low here but overwhelmingly negative.
“It can’t be done” is the overall sentiment. Really? Or are we just the people saying an electric car company can’t be done, a private rocketry company can’t be done, etc etc.
This one of the most successful people who has ever lived on this planet. And yet HN doesn’t seem to see any advantage to him leading twitter in a new direction, a company that overwhelmingly could be agreed before had no real direction and wasn’t making any progress anywhere.
But somehow a pretty smart billionaire taking it over doesn’t trigger any outpouring of sympathy and excitement but of disdain and condescension. Really? What happened ? When did we become so calcified against change?
Also; For anyone who says “twitter/facebook gave us trump” well, no. The unleashing of mass cognitive warfare as a consequence of the availability of micro targeting in these platforms gave you Trump/Bolsonaro/Meloni. For all the details on that, read “Mindfuck” by Christopher Wylie and “Targeted” by Brittany Kaiser.
Do you have any proof of fraud? If so, you should turn it into the SEC.
Musk is not known to give hugs. So what?
Not sure what reporting it again would do.
Edit: I'm guessing GP was referring to the continued potentially fraudulent FSD promises - there was a lot of HN discussion on that yesterday I think.
Clearly Musk is in the latter camp.
I said earlier that twitter has been hemorrhaging money to tune of nearly 2 billion over the last 2.5 years.
While possible, its likely that Musk can't possibly do worse than the former leadership.
Obviously it is a gamble, but what isn't a gamble? And what do such men gain without nothing ventured?
Is he actually thought? If so, why did he try to maneuver out of the deal right up until it was clear he would not be able to?
He also could have been trying for a better price, which any buyer is foolish not to at least try.
Or he wanted to box them into a deal with a take-away, forcing twitter to publicly state intentions to complete the deal.
All of this, (yours & mine), are still purely speculative.
I don't see the causal connection people are drawing between this and his motivations and his vision for twitter, it's purely a financial logical decision to try to renegotiate or cancel the deal given the current market conditions.
An objective assessment of Musk's batting average requires considering the big ideas that flop, never materialize, or fall far short of what was promised. Once you do that, Twitter seems like it could go either way from here. That's not even considering how split his attention must be at this point.
On the other hand, with that amount of wealth, the average intelligent person probably feels that they could do better, and I'm not sure they'd be completely wrong.
SpaceX delivers boost to orbit at a cost that beats every other major player.
Clearly, he's done nothing. /rolls-eyes
I think the crux of it for me, is that whilst Musk comes at this fresh, he's not proposing fresh solutions. He has repeatedly suggested things that people have already tried, and then pivoted away from - realising the mistakes. It's very difficult to see this news today and not say "Oh, ok, so you're going to replicate Facebook's oversight board?"
I agree with you, he's acheived a lot. At the end of the day though 2+2=4 no matter who you are, and if we're shooting for 5, I might hope Elon can produce 5, but if I hope he's going to produce 5, and his big idea is 2+2, then I'm going to be skeptical. it's not that I think he's an idiot, it's that he's proposing things that are well trodden paths.
It has been interesting to read it today.
Fundamentally elon has simply called for politically neutral content moderation. I expect he's never going to allow calls to violence or incitement type things; who exactly thinks this is a bad decision? This is to solve the ongoing problem of censorship.
Yet the people see the above as a nightmare scenario. So what exactly are we missing? Is giving the republicans their voice back and allowing them to speak really such a nightmare? I don't think these people are upset about this. I suspect it's not a nightmare scenario if the republicans getting the ability to speak back results in landslide elections in their favour. Like we are potentially seeing now in midterm polling.
What if that's not the case. What if this is indeed a nightmare scenario? What exactly is the unsaid explanation?
I don't see the cause for concern let alone it being a nightmare scenario.
Well let’s see… last time the former President was using his voice on Twitter, he was inciting and directing an insurrection against the government. So if Musk wants to reverse that ban, and Trump decides to continue his rhetoric which already caused violence (which he will because he hasn’t stopped since 1/6), then yeah, that’s a nightmare.
I'm not american and just an outside observer. I believe the republicans/trump would not agree with your assessment. There is certainly a huge irreconcilable divide on how January 6th is viewed on either side.
Here's a left-wing viewpoint on the 'second american civil war': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_American_Civil_War
Which certainly agrees with you. Lets not forget Hillary Clinton has always held Trump stole the election and she even reiterated a few days ago the republicans are planning to do it again: https://twitter.com/IndivisibleTeam/status/15834963547345387...
Lets not forget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_efforts_to_restrict...
425 bills in 49 states the republicans pretty much universally didn't believe a free election occurred; so they want to restrict the vote and prevent people from voting for the democrats.
More importantly the election in mere days will indicate to politicians exactly what the populous believes. When the democrats win midterms easily, it will be the people telling the republicans they aren't popular and democrats genuinely represent the will of the people.
Do we even need to consider what the people are saying in the unlikely event republicans win midterms?
Here's a pretty good podcast on the topic, if you're interested: https://slate.com/podcasts/political-gabfest/2022/10/democra...
So lets say the republicans win decisively as you predict. What does that mean, what do you think the populus is telling the democrats?
Is it the people believe the election was stolen? Much akin to republican's clear response in the one link?
What do you think it means?
Yes, insurrectionists typically see their actions as justified, and will frame them as such. What happened was an insurrection though, and the 1/6 committee and DOJ have done much to prove that.
> Lets not forget Hillary Clinton has always held Trump stole the election
She’s free to feel however she wants. But note she didn’t go to Twitter to foment insurrection.
> she even reiterated a few days ago the republicans are planning to do it again
Probably a safe bet, given Trump hasn’t even given up trying to steal the 2020 election.
I have no skin in this game, just curious what you think.
Why do you think trump said, "I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!"
Kind of a pretty terrible insurrection as well, a bunch of unarmed idiots in costumes ransacked a few offices. Normally an insurrection is more of a 'round up the politicians and execute them' type thing.
Or was it perhaps not an insurrection and it was instead a riot, not unlike the 2 years of racial riots, that got out of hand?
I wasn't aware Republicans were being suppressed for their desire for a more conservative economic policy, smaller government, and lower taxes.
Or...which Republican ideas do you see being suppressed online.
Be specific :)
That would be a pretty simplistic view of the republicans. Sure seems to be a faulty generalization fallacy to me.
>Or...which Republican ideas do you see being suppressed online.
Not many anymore. They realized their voices were suppressed and moved to new platforms. Now their voices aren't suppressed and oh boy midterms not going well for the democrats.