Still very much needs to be discussed. Now that they've opened the can of worms of being a political entity, it most certainly was a political decision not to find cases like this within their own systems that they should know about. Are they really prepared or are they going to further cave to the Saudis?
My understanding is that there isn't an abundance of people around at Xitter these days to do that kind of due diligence. "Nobody had time to go through and unblock all the people blocked under the old policy" doesn't sound fishy to me at all.
Having lots of Chinese friends, whenever I see the letter X at the start of a word, I instinctively try to pronounce the X as a "Sh" sound. And this definitely isn't the first time this happened. Every time these Twitter/X threads comes up I have to laugh at some of these spellings :)
Because one side of the aisle proposed solutions for COVID like ivermectin, or "inject bleach," and said things like "it'll blow over by March" and "if we stop measuring the numbers will go down."
Both sides might have said incorrect things about COVID, but only one was responsible for politicizing it to death, and it's the side that tried to pretend it didn't exist while it was massacring Americans.
I mean your statement right there is full of misinformation. No one said to inject bleach and no one massacred Americans, unless you mean by housing the infected in old folks homes, which killed far more than any right wing shenanigans like ivermectin.
No one ever said “inject bleach” please stop. It was only Harvard that inserted bleach into the conversation via tweet.
“I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute,” Trump said. “One minute! And is there a way we can do something, by an injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that. So, that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.”
Please don’t inject bleach or drink disinfectant. Bleach injections cause hemolysis (where your red blood cells that carry OXYGEN break apart) and cause liver damage, and many disinfectants can cause dangerous burns or bleeding in your stomach. This tweet IS medical advice
— Harvard Toxicology (@Harvard_Tox) April 24, 2020
It turns out, Ivermectin was helpful.. and nobody legitimately suggested bleach other than in jest. As for massacres, it's Democrat governors that thought it was a good idea to house infected with the most at risk (seniors) and killed countless people.
When did everyone become so afraid of what other people might say? Or maybe it's when did it become so fashionable to be afraid of what other people might say?
When people realized that violent speech can be considered violent action as random people took the fearmongering and attacked other people or threatened to bomb hospitals and libraries in stochastic terrorist attacks.
Violence is the use of physical force to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy.
Writing and speech does none of those things. It may inspire people to take those actions, but that does not make it violence in and of itself.
We can discuss the morality of speech and writing that stimulates others to violent action without the coercive construction of attempting to convince people they are the same thing.
If it creates a pervasive atmosphere of fear that results in physical violence or calls people to violence directly or indirectly, then I'd say speech can be violent. I disagree with free-speech absolutism that pretends speech is simultaneously capable of moving the world and also either not an action or an action that cannot be violent.
There are ways to accomplish allocation of responsibility (or blame) that don't include muddying the waters by declaring equivalence.
Alice tells Bob to kill Charlie. Bob murders Charlie with a knife. Bob is a moral agent and is the one who committed the violence. Alice instigated it. The questions that must be answered as to how much or how little Alice is to blame are:
1. Does Alice have authority or coercive power over Bob, making her urging carry more weight? (Was it a command that Bob had some degree of need to carry out?)
2. Is Bob's moral reasoning (will) impaired, and does Alice know this?
3. Did Alice know that her urging would result in Charlie's death?
4. Did Alice intend for Charlie to be harmed?
The answers to these questions attach guilt of varying levels to Alice. They also weigh on the punishment. If Alice is a commander ordering troops to commit war crimes, she's absolutely culpable. She has not been violent, but she is responsible.
If however, Alice is a stranger on the ground who shouts at Bob to push Charlie off a ledge at random, Bob bears the majority of the responsibility. Alice is still to blame, but Bob made the decision to act and should bear the brunt of the punishment.
This has nothing to do with free speech absolutism. It has everything to do with clarity. Yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater is not violence, but it is morally wrong, and punishable by law. Speech can cause violence, but that doesn't mean that it is violence, nor does it have to be seen as violence in order to attach blame and consequences.
If only the world were so simple and clear as your ABC example. However, I agree with your last paragraph so, to reframe, the kinds of speech I'm referring to, which I would call violent speech, but are not necessary to be understood as violence, fit into the category of morally wrong and should be punishable by law. At the very least, a private platform (like X or Reddit or whatever) can and should make choices about whether to allow speech that creates an atmosphere that fosters violence.
Risk of imminent harm due to panic. Fundamentally different from saying something and someone deciding to act based on that a while after hearing/reading it.
I'm not so sure it's fundamentally different. I've been seeing a lot of violence that, while premeditated, seems to very much trace back to speech causing panic.
That's a quote from Schenck v. United States which was decided in 1919, and overturned by Bandenburg v. Ohio in 1969. It's by no means the law (it came 150 years after the law was written), and it was never a particularly good analogy.
Oliver Wendell Holmes was talking about handing out anti-war pamphlets as akin to "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" and thus ruled that the First Amendment didn't protect protests during wartime—a decision even today's most anti-free-speech advocates would probably disagree with. He later backtracked on it.
Using "fire in a crowded theater" to justify suppressing speech is like quoting Pope Urban VIII as support for your argument that the sun revolves around the Earth.
We haven't figured out a great solution yet, but bad actors and the cognitively challenged have been handed a megaphone in the Internet and social media algorithms have given them echo chambers. Speech informs action, so bad speech will hurt some number of people. It hurts flat-earthers to people drinking bleach
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
I don't know how Twitter will reimplement content moderation, but I'd support something like what Google has whenever somebody mentions 9-11 or COVID, etc, there is a factual blurb there to attempt to moor readers to reality.
One explanation I've seen is it's the need for emotional, and now intellectual comfort. The average mind is small and can deal with few ideas at a time. When such a mind is exposed to a different idea, it's already overwhelmed with the few it already has, and instinctively rejects the new idea.
The use of a spam filter suggests that some moderation is widely acceptable. Another problem is how disinformation spreads, which can cause significant harm when it influences people's perspectives to not get the whooping cough vaccine, for a fairly controversial example.
They often do block content from the people you have explicitly followed/subscribed to.
But suppose they write a generic algorithm that tries to show people what it think they will like. Then they find that some people like sexiness and political memes from The Other Tribe, so they modify the algorithm to not show those things to people even if it's what they want to see. Clearly and intentionally censorship.
You could even plausibly argue that not allowing the user to substitute an algorithm of their own (or one of their choosing from an independent third party) is censorship, if the only way to receive the data on that platform is through their algorithm which will not show you information that you want.
By this definition, censorship is in the eye of the beholder? I understand the slippery slope argument, but I don't think I have much of an issue with the vast majority of stuff that gets highlighted as being blocked. Spam, antivaxxers, Nazis... all content I don't want to receive.
It's not in the eye of the beholder. It's blocking which is not in the control of the recipient. There is nothing wrong with a filter that tries to block anti-vaxxers, as long as you're explicitly aware that it's happening and can freely and easily turn it off.
Everyone is waiting on an alternative; Threads has basically not had any features rolled out since it launched. Still no trends, web interface, DMs, etc. Don't really know why they even bothered rolling it out at all if they weren't going to have those features out quickly.
How much did the emerald
mine produce? Who cares what his father says. Would you care if Bill or Steve’s dad was a liar or lied about business deals? No? Okay.
Imagine getting “facts” off a family member “setting the record straight” to a tabloid.
So, his father "owning a share of an emerald mine in an african country" is apparently what consists of not owning an emerald mine? Also love the assertion that your family being wealthy could not possibly have helped you in later life. I would believe that to be mostly true, since Errol himself is not exactly fond of his son, but Elon also called the following "accurate":
"Errol said that Elon "once walked the streets of New York with emeralds in his pocket." His brother Kimbal was with him when the two brothers sold two of the gems to Tiffany & Co. for $2,000, according to their father."
The idea that $2000 from an african emerald doesn't help in america is laughable. For millions of americans, that would put food on the table, but for elon, that kind of support is why he could drop out of college and participate in the dot com boom to become very wealthy off of paypal.
Meanwhile your average american could not drop out of college in the 90s and become very wealthy, simply because they did not have the option of failing and going home if things went south. Having a rich family is a boon, even if they never send you a dime.
The person alleged to have owned the mine apparently does not think it's a rumor
"Well, according to Errol Musk, the unsurprisingly eccentric — and in one major way, extremely creepy — father of Elon, the mine definitely exists. And come to think of it, he'll take that Dogecoin, thanks!
"When I read that, I wondered, 'Can I enter, because I can prove it existed," Errol told The Sun in a new interview, referring to his son's Dogecoin tweet. "Elon knows it's true. All the kids know about it."
I feel no social obligation to cooperate with a private for profit corporation's marketing strategy. If I ever have legal documents relating to Twitter I will use whatever their legal name is. Until then, they're Twitter.
The day I will stop taking it first to mean X11/X.org will be a sad day for me. With this publicity I imagine more people visiting x.org. I wonder what will happen to it in a couple of decades.
80 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] thread'According to X, the account had been labeled as political in 2020 "when political ads were prohibited"'(prior to Musk's takeover)
I don't see the reason for deliberately doing it.
Is this the “woke mind virus”?
Your version sounds like they just asked and the ban was lifted because it was an error.
That's not what happened.
Both sides might have said incorrect things about COVID, but only one was responsible for politicizing it to death, and it's the side that tried to pretend it didn't exist while it was massacring Americans.
“I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute,” Trump said. “One minute! And is there a way we can do something, by an injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that. So, that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.”
Please don’t inject bleach or drink disinfectant. Bleach injections cause hemolysis (where your red blood cells that carry OXYGEN break apart) and cause liver damage, and many disinfectants can cause dangerous burns or bleeding in your stomach. This tweet IS medical advice — Harvard Toxicology (@Harvard_Tox) April 24, 2020
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/24/trump-disinf...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
Writing and speech does none of those things. It may inspire people to take those actions, but that does not make it violence in and of itself.
We can discuss the morality of speech and writing that stimulates others to violent action without the coercive construction of attempting to convince people they are the same thing.
Alice tells Bob to kill Charlie. Bob murders Charlie with a knife. Bob is a moral agent and is the one who committed the violence. Alice instigated it. The questions that must be answered as to how much or how little Alice is to blame are:
1. Does Alice have authority or coercive power over Bob, making her urging carry more weight? (Was it a command that Bob had some degree of need to carry out?)
2. Is Bob's moral reasoning (will) impaired, and does Alice know this?
3. Did Alice know that her urging would result in Charlie's death?
4. Did Alice intend for Charlie to be harmed?
The answers to these questions attach guilt of varying levels to Alice. They also weigh on the punishment. If Alice is a commander ordering troops to commit war crimes, she's absolutely culpable. She has not been violent, but she is responsible.
If however, Alice is a stranger on the ground who shouts at Bob to push Charlie off a ledge at random, Bob bears the majority of the responsibility. Alice is still to blame, but Bob made the decision to act and should bear the brunt of the punishment.
This has nothing to do with free speech absolutism. It has everything to do with clarity. Yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater is not violence, but it is morally wrong, and punishable by law. Speech can cause violence, but that doesn't mean that it is violence, nor does it have to be seen as violence in order to attach blame and consequences.
Oliver Wendell Holmes was talking about handing out anti-war pamphlets as akin to "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" and thus ruled that the First Amendment didn't protect protests during wartime—a decision even today's most anti-free-speech advocates would probably disagree with. He later backtracked on it.
Using "fire in a crowded theater" to justify suppressing speech is like quoting Pope Urban VIII as support for your argument that the sun revolves around the Earth.
I don't know how Twitter will reimplement content moderation, but I'd support something like what Google has whenever somebody mentions 9-11 or COVID, etc, there is a factual blurb there to attempt to moor readers to reality.
People are monkeys. Monkey see, monkey do.
(This also implies that a spam filter that can't be configured or disabled by the user can result in censorship.)
This is only true if these companies only ever show you content from the people you have explicitly followed/subscribed to.
But suppose they write a generic algorithm that tries to show people what it think they will like. Then they find that some people like sexiness and political memes from The Other Tribe, so they modify the algorithm to not show those things to people even if it's what they want to see. Clearly and intentionally censorship.
You could even plausibly argue that not allowing the user to substitute an algorithm of their own (or one of their choosing from an independent third party) is censorship, if the only way to receive the data on that platform is through their algorithm which will not show you information that you want.
Imagine getting “facts” off a family member “setting the record straight” to a tabloid.
No thanks.
"Errol said that Elon "once walked the streets of New York with emeralds in his pocket." His brother Kimbal was with him when the two brothers sold two of the gems to Tiffany & Co. for $2,000, according to their father."
The idea that $2000 from an african emerald doesn't help in america is laughable. For millions of americans, that would put food on the table, but for elon, that kind of support is why he could drop out of college and participate in the dot com boom to become very wealthy off of paypal.
Meanwhile your average american could not drop out of college in the 90s and become very wealthy, simply because they did not have the option of failing and going home if things went south. Having a rich family is a boon, even if they never send you a dime.
It's still fine. Some things are better, some are worse. Overall my experience hasn't changed much.
But, Elon's unpredictable, so who knows. I know for a fact I don't care for Twitter/X to be the "everything app".
https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...
"Well, according to Errol Musk, the unsurprisingly eccentric — and in one major way, extremely creepy — father of Elon, the mine definitely exists. And come to think of it, he'll take that Dogecoin, thanks!
"When I read that, I wondered, 'Can I enter, because I can prove it existed," Errol told The Sun in a new interview, referring to his son's Dogecoin tweet. "Elon knows it's true. All the kids know about it."
https://futurism.com/elon-musk-dad-emerald-mine
From Snopes:
A story about Musk's father once owning an emerald mine evolved into a larger rumor that had no evidence to support its central claim.
Not X.
See also: Google/Alphabet, Blackwater/MurderInc/Whatevertheyrecallednow
Though for me personally, if someone changes their name, I usually try to call them by that name. But usually not the easiest, I admit.
Socially they are not.
I feel no social obligation to cooperate with a private for profit corporation's marketing strategy. If I ever have legal documents relating to Twitter I will use whatever their legal name is. Until then, they're Twitter.
Your lord and xavior is never going to notice you. get the fuck over it.