I am trying to think through this from a neutral standpoint. After all, some of the tech world has put in significant effort to silence conservatives on platforms at scale. It's somewhat painful to see even if I am not a conservative.
Personally, I only follow things I like on Twitter which means I don't see any hate speech. It's hard for me to anecdotally say if things have changed. But it's not hard to imagine that chronically-online groups who have hate for Elon and his companies would try to crumble his social network because they don't agree with his approach.
This feels like a really slippery slope. Hard to weigh in honestly.
There's the Babylon Bee deplatforming that led to Musk buying Twitter. The Babylon Bee called a public official who is a biological man a 'man'. So Twitter deplatformed the Babylon Bee.
> Twitter locked the account of a right-leaning parody site, The Babylon Bee, after it awarded Rachel Levine, the transgender Biden administration official, the title of “man of the year.”
There’s a very obvious difference between holding and expressing a personal opinion on gender identity and launching a public attack against a specific person.
This is the way these complaints always go. “conservatives are being censored!” becomes “well sure, they were censored because they violated the terms and conditions of the site in a distasteful way but why is that important?!”
If I Tweet "Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine is evil and wrong, and also he is a bad person and his armpits stink!" am I making a personal attack that should get me banned from the platform?
You really think that a personal attack on the head of state for Russia and an assistant secretary for health are equivalent? How much harassment do you think Putin would be subject to as a result of you (assuming you have the 1.3m followers the Babylon Bee has, which you don’t) attacking him?
We both know you don’t think they’re equivalent. You’re just trying to find technicalities to excuse abhorrent behaviour.
Specifically, Levine is the Assistant Secretary for Health—a senior political appointee, chosen by the President and confirmed by the Senate, reporting directly to the Cabinet-level Secretary for Health and Human Services. Also a uniformed four-star admiral (2 ranks below Commander-in-Chief) in the world's most powerful military. Oversees thousands of government employees, millions of dollars in taxpayer funds, influences major policy decisions that affect the lives of millions. In free societies, writers are allowed to criticize, and even mock, powerful political and government officials. But perhaps you prefer the Russian system?
They were satirising USA Today honoring him with a 'Woman Of The Year' award.
It was rather on point:
> 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.
Just highlights how absurd it is for him to be receiving accolades that should be reserved for women, doesn't it.
A female is a living organism possessing (or having once possessed, if they were removed or destroyed through illness or injury) sexual organs designed to produce ova. A human is a member of the genus homo.
> So what sex/gender are people born without reproductive organs?
Yes, biology is complicated, and a small fraction of a percent of humans are born with genitalia that are either absent/nearly absent or very close to midway between male and female. (Most people considered "intersex" are still pretty clearly male or female, and often genitalia that look ambiguous at birth will become less so as a person matures). In these rare cases, sex determination can be genuinely difficult/somewhat arbitrary (and I don't claim to be an expert).
However, even in the ambiguous cases there are often factors that can favor one or another determination. In humans, sex develops as a response to various hormones. Everyone has at least one X chromosome which on its own induces the production of hormones/signaling factors leading to the development of female sexual organs secondary sexual characteristics. In people with a Y chromosome in addition to the X, that behavior is overridden by genes on Y to instead produce male genitalia and secondary sexual characteristics. In some intersex people, the genitalia are ambiguous but the presence or absence of Y chromosome expression still e
affects secondary sexual characteristics to an extent that one sex assignation makes somewhat more sense than the other.
But in any case, the extremely rare exceptions don't invalidate the general rule of human sex.
As for gender, that's a purely grammatical concept. Nouns and pronouns can have gender, people don't. Or at least that was the original meaning of the word, before pedophile John Money appropriated it in the 1950s. A pre-50s Google Books search may surprise you: https://www.google.com/search?q=gender&sca_esv=562865996&tbs...
> Who or what is the designer?
The blind process of natural selection. Perhaps the word choice of "designed" wasn't the most correct, but it's shorter than "most similar to a structure that would allow it to do the thing."
> Things aren’t as clean cut as you desire them to be.
Things are exactly how they are, wishing for human nature to be different is a pointless enterprise that I try my best to avoid.
> I don’t know how rare you think this stuff is but I’m fairly confident it isn’t that rare.
Luckily, a simple Internet search can settle the question for you!
> Why do you care so much about gender?
I don't care much about gender, it's just a grammatical concept (honestly, less interesting than verb tenses or noun declensions). I care a lot about sex, because it's intimately linked to reproduction, which is the strongest human instinct, without it human life would not exist. Kind of like how people care about "food" and "water".
I never referred to Admiral Levine's sex anywhere in this thread before this comment—you may be confusing me with another commenter. He is in fact a man, because he is a human with male genitalia (optimized for producing sperm). If I were to claim he was not a man, I would be lying, and lying is wrong.
It is an argument in bad faith. His comments and submissions are full of anti-trans language. The fact he wants to define what women are and what they can do with their bodies speaks of having only theoretical knowledge of women.
It's the developmental pathway for the female reproductive system. My wording was chosen carefully to avoid the usual nitpicking that happens in these sort of discussions, e.g. what if the ovaries have since been removed, what if the ovaries are functionally impaired, etc.
>It's the developmental pathway for the female reproductive system.
That's pretty immediately a circular dependency though? The more important question is why anyone should take your reasoning over any other about what "Man" and "Woman" mean.
Actually the most important question what makes something a "developmental pathway"? How do you define such? How do you distinguish two similar but different "developmental pathways"?
> That's pretty immediately a circular dependency though?
By the female reproductive system, I meant the type that produces large gametes, and so on. Versus the male one that produces small gametes.
> Actually the most important question what makes something a "developmental pathway"? How do you define such? How do you distinguish two similar but different "developmental pathways"?
Funnily, my alternative comes from the same "authority" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9341318/ though to be specific it does not in any way disagree with your citation, as yours deals with sexual organs. The NIH is clear that "Sex" and "Gender" are two different things.
Though my actual alternative is: Why should I care about specific definitions of "Man" and "woman"? I prefer duck typing for human stuff, because we are messy and every "line" is more like a fuzzy spectrum, and each and every time we have tried to place an arbitrary line, it's been wrong. I'm especially keen to this as a programmer, who is well aware that things people tend to think are "clear", like names, gender, time, etc, rarely are.
I'm unclear as to what your alternative actually is. Your claim seems to be that the concepts of "woman" and "man" are too difficult to define, but then, what next? Please could you elaborate on your view.
"But but that's just my opinion and disagreeing with my opinion in a perfectly legal way by making a statement in retort is somehow a violation of my free speech rights!!!!"
Reddit banning all the gender-critical feminist subreddits, and anyone expressing these viewpoints. Twitter of old doing similar.
I agree with you that this isn't about silencing conservatives, but rather anyone who refuses to accept the ideological stance that men can be women and vice versa.
If by old fashioned you mean US 1950s conformism, OK. If by old fashioned you mean in the context of history to the best of our non-bowdlerized knowledge, then, no. It's just historically uninformed.
the absurdity of “we’re being censored for our conservative views” is that the primary target of banning hasnt been a “conservative viewpoints”.
for example, if someone is banned for saying “death to non-whites”, theres a pretty good chance they’re being banned for advocating genocide, not because they’re conservative.
or if someone was banned for denying that covid was real, they weren’t banned for “conservative views”. whether we agree with the reasoning or not, they were banned for denying covid when the sites had made clear this topic would result in a ban.
i’ll repeat what i’ve said many times before. this idea that banning is somehow new, or is some creepy definition of censorship is nonsense. site owners and moderators have had rules for their online spaces since the beginnings. and just like real world spaces, people get removed constantly. it’s not new. it’s not weird. it’s not shocking.
> for example, if someone is banned for saying “death to non-whites”, theres a pretty good chance they’re being banned for advocating genocide, not because they’re conservative.
I think you will find that people have been getting banned for rather less harsh statements, like "maybe Covid was man-made", "Hunter Biden is corrupt", and "men cannot be women."
Most of the tech billionaires are conservatives (Musk, Thiel, Graham, Ellison, etc.)...are you suggesting that they are for some reason conspiring to silence themselves?
The billionaire executives are much more conservative than middle managers, HR, corporate drones. But even at the top level you have plenty of liberals (Omidyar, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Pichai…)
>> some of the tech world has put in significant effort to silence conservatives
It's true, but that would be within Twitter and Meta's rights. The real issue was that they did so at the behest of the incoming administration, in behind-the-scenes meetings. It's the involvement of government officials that may have broken laws and trampled the First Amendment. Also egregious and painful to see was that they shadow-banned accounts rather than banning them outright.
But I don't see how that has anything to do with a private, non-government advocacy group making their feelings known to advertisers. It happens all the time. Conservative groups call to boycott Budweiser, liberal groups call to boycott Chik-fil-A. It's not illegal.
However, it's effective as a stunt for Elon, because saying that a Jewish advocacy group has the power to shut down his business implies, as subtext, the unspoken bit about Jews controlling the world. The statement and the choice of target leans on that implication. And the quote where he jokes that they're a defamation organization, as opposed to "anti-", reminds me of Sartre's quote which is worth repeating in full:
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
> But I don't see how that has anything to do with a private, non-government advocacy group making their feelings known to advertisers. It happens all the time. Conservative groups call to boycott Budweiser, liberal groups call to boycott Chik-fil-A. It's not illegal.
Definitely not. But if (not asserting this happened) the ADL threatened to defame as antisemitic any advertiser that didn't participate in a boycott, that could be illegal.
> It's true, but that would be within Twitter and Meta's rights. The real issue was that they did so at the behest of the incoming administration, in behind-the-scenes meetings. It's the involvement of government officials that may have broken laws and trampled the First Amendment. Also egregious and painful to see was that they shadow-banned accounts rather than banning them outright.
I don't believe there is any evidence for any of these claims. Rather the opposite: pro-freedom pro-business anti-regulation conservatives have been crying wolf for years now, demanding special meetings with tech companies, demanding special treatment, demanding government intervention, demanding that they be allowed to say anything without consequences.
Modern US conservatives are a minority. How big of a minority depends on how you draw the lines. Republican policy proposals are often (but not always) even more unpopular. Cognitive dissonance (or just good old fashioned politicking) demands some conservatives insist otherwise and see everything as some kind of suppression effort or conspiracy.
It's the whole "conservatism can't ever fail... it can only be failed" thing at work. Or the Simpsons Skinner meme: "Am I Out of Touch? No, it's the voters who are wrong!" If only the big mean tech companies weren't suppressing my clearly superior views everyone would agree with me. No... maybe your views are just way less popular than you think. Maybe instead of being shadow banned people just think you're an asshole.
> “We were under pressure from the administration and others to do more,” responded a Facebook vice president in charge of content policy, speaking of the Biden administration. “We shouldn’t have done it.”
> The discussion took place three months after Facebook, which is owned by Meta Platforms META -0.14%decrease; red down pointing triangle, decided to stop banning posts asserting that Covid-19 was man-made or manufactured, in light of increasing debate about the virus’s origin.
So, you mean to tell me the gov't wanted them to continue to ban covid disinformation even though Meta decided it wouldn't? and then changed it's mind? Seems like Meta did the right thing. I'm not sure I come to the same inference that you do, where covid disinformation is some form of speech that is protected by the 1st amd as opposed to the other numerous forms of speech that the gov't does have the power to regulate, such that you get to the conclusion that this is somehow antithetical to the purpose of the 1st amd. I'm no "free speech absolutist" because there is no such actual thing nor ever was in american jurisprudence
"In light of increasing debate about the virus’s origin" — as in, the government has changed it mind and now certain branches believe COVID-19 might be man-made after all. So the "disinformation" may have been true.
i tend to agree with you, there isn’t a free-speech absolutist who wouldn’t fire someone if that person went on a rant cussing them out at work. free-speech absolutism is absurd.
if a free-speech “consequence free” absolutist were to berate their wife and call her disgusting every day, we could ask them how seriously anyone takes their “i have free speech” as she walks out the door with their kids.
> there isn’t a free-speech absolutist who wouldn’t fire someone if that person went on a rant cussing them out at work.
> if a free-speech “consequence free” absolutist were to berate their wife and call her disgusting every day, we could ask them how seriously anyone takes their “i have free speech” as she walks out the door with their kids.
> But I don't see how that has anything to do with a private, non-government advocacy group making their feelings known to advertisers. It happens all the time
It might be perfectly fine, but why should the target of this campaign- also a private entity- refrain from denouncing this and retaliating with bad publicity for the involved advocacy group? Twitter/ X lives off ad revenue, and the ADL lives off its reputation of a non-partisan organisation pursuing a laudable cause. If ADL can erode X's advertising revenue, I don't see why X shouldn't fight back by trying to weaken the ADL's reputation, as long as it is done in the open and by legal means.
It's a bit of a high-risk strategy, isn't it? If one accuses the ADL of saying untrue harmful things about them and those things turn out to be true, then not only is one now carrying the initial bad actions on one's reputation, but one now has the added reputation of trying to legally bury knowledge of those actions. Not a great look.
Yes, but it works also the other way around. If the ADL accuses one of doing something nefarious and then it turns out not to be true, their reputation is also compromised. The ADL must accept that there is a risk in moving its accusations, otherwise they would have no accountability.
And even assuming that from a risk standpoint X should rather comply to whatever the ADL demands; what is the effect of companies never fighting back purely because of risk aversion? Wouldn't this end up making the activist organisation less accountable and even encourage further demands?
But X would need to prove that the ADL made defamatory statements - presumably in private to said advertisers, because Elon's contention is that he's "heard from advertisers" about it. Then X would need to prove that those statements were false, and then prove that they financially harmed X. I'm dubious that X wants to, or can, do that. If Musk wants to go on a crusade to test whether the ADL makes up lies about antisemitism out of left-wing partisan hate for him personally (and if he really believes that), then fine, try to hold the ADL accountable. Why not? But the reason I quoted Sartre in that post is that I believe there is no sincerity to this. Selecting a Jewish organization as the source of his financial woes is simply a dog whistle to his increasingly radical rightwing fan base.
Of course if they went to court, X would have to prove what they claim. And ADL would probably have to do the same. It's the normal course of things between private entities.
In the meantime, the ADL has already threatened X with reputational damage, and now Musk is doing the same with the ADL- by spreading the idea that their motives are not necessarily laudable. I see a perfect symmetry in the situation.
> the reason I quoted Sartre in that post is that I believe there is no sincerity to this. Selecting a Jewish organization...
Basically what you're saying here is that your judgement of the situation is biased by the fact that the ADL is a Jewish organisation. Should Jewish organisations not be engaged directly or asked to be accountable for their actions?
The poster is clearly saying that Elon is full of shit and chose a Jewish org as a dog whistle to his fanbase, it's beyond my understanding how you came to the conclusion that the poster meant that jewish organizations are beyond accountability...
Note that the ADL is not the first organisation singled out by Musk: a month ago X filed a lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a non-Jewish organisation. So the argument that he chose a Jewish org is weaker given it's not the only one or the first one.
As for the accountability, it seems obvious to me that if accusing a Jewish organisation of wrongdoing automatically exposes you to such a terrible suspicion as that of making antisemitic dogwhistles, then these organisations get free rein to say whatever they want because even challenging them produces an unacceptable reputational damage.
Not sure that it was the only interaction- but the Keith Woods' tweet was a link to an article critical of the ADL written by a renowned Jewish scholar, Norman Finkelstein. What is important, who tweets the link, or the link's contents?
Both. While avoidance of ad hominem is a useful rule for sophists using argumentation as an intellectual game or to better their ability to argue in a Greek court of law, in the modern world there is content of the topic but also, very much, the reason a particular channel chose to share it and the reason a particular influential individual chose to reshare it. Even in our modern law courts, it is germane to question not just the testimony of a witness but the character of said witness.
The critique in the article can be considered on its own. The fact that it comes to us via Elon Musk resharing Keith Woods, and not as an original link from Musk, tells us volumes about how Musk is willing to be publicly portrayed and who he appears to be listening to, which are also relevant information for the topic at hand.
Let's just also stipulate that Norman Finkelstein is not a renowned Jewish scholar. He is a profound antisemite whose Jewish ethnicity makes him a favorite prop for neo-nazis to trot out.
It's besides the point because Musk's targeting of the ADL occurs while he also boosts anti-semitism on his platform.
>As for the accountability, it seems obvious to me that if accusing a Jewish organisation of wrongdoing automatically exposes you to such a terrible suspicion as that of making antisemitic dogwhistles, then these organisations get free rein to say whatever they want because even challenging them produces an unacceptable reputational damage.
I'm not sure how they are any less accountable than he is. If he wants to sue them, he can. There is nothing stopping that because the ADL is a Jewish organization. What accountability do you think there is aside from that? The ADL can't force anything to happen, they can just advocate for their side as he does.
You are being purposefully obtuse. Musk isn't being called an antisemite because he's singled-out the ADL, it's because he's amplified antisemitism and doesn't seem to care about it.
> But it's not hard to imagine that chronically-online groups who have hate for Elon and his companies would try to crumble his social network because they don't agree with his approach.
You're imagining a vast anti-Elon conspiracy (with no apparent motive), instead of the much more boring explanation that an organization that tries to combat antisemitism is upset at antisemitism.
> We are confident that the vast majority of American tourists will avoid a country whose reputation is associated with Nazism, even if that association is not justified.
This is one of those cases where saying really shitty things is still not considered “legally” wrong.
“It was just a joke” smh
“ In various conversations, the Quigleys refer to attaching images of oven doors to the Aronsons' house, of burning their children and of wishing their Jewish neighbors had been blown up in a terrorist attack in Israel.”
The Quigleys may have been assholes but getting into a feud with your neighbors, wiretapping their phone, and then publicizing the contents of their conversations about you should probably be discouraged by the law.
Be that as it may, your comment runs the risk of being contrary to the HN guidelines ("eschew flamebait").
It is interesting to see how different organizations eventually get subsumed by those more interested in the power and prestige of the organization itself (and by extension, their own power and prestige), rather than the stated, foundational values of the organization.
> CTS has previously written about the phenomenon of “stochastic harassment” on Twitter, or how influential accounts act as nodes for harassment even when not explicitly directing their followers to harass anyone.
> CTS found 60 examples of direct replies to reinstated accounts and 127 examples of threaded replies (i.e., replies to tweets in the same conversation, but not directly replying to the reinstated account’s tweet) that our machine learning classifier assigned high antisemitism scores to during the period we collected data
So, they hate people who aren't actually harassing anyone, nor calling for any harassment, but who get replies that their machine learning classifier thinks are anti-semitic.
This is absurd. They literally call you an anti-semite if you say something mundane and then someone else replies with something that a machine thinks is anti-semitic, at any point in a thread, even if the reply is to someone else entirely. By that standard they deserve to lose any lawsuits heading their way, and lose them badly.
I thought they couldn't make themselves look any worse, but then they presented their examples of "anti-semitic tweets". It's a guy who was involved in conservative politics, who replied to one of the ADLs tweets and criticized them. The ADL post he was replying to was calling Trump an anti-semite. For disagreeing with this he himself is now supposedly an anti-semite.
This is a blatant attempt to shut down criticism of the ADL itself, as an institution. They aren't even trying to hide what they're doing here.
Unfortunately that is all totally standard nowadays. Many groups have complained about this. Left wing activist orgs go after newspapers, TV channels, social networks, all of it. Any organization that isn't explicitly left wing gets attacked like this. They have a goal of making disagreement either outright illegal or impossible via private sector control, hence why they always go after advertisers, payment processors and other "nodes" as they put it. Their goal is very clear by now, it is the obliteration of any and all ideological disagreement.
I'm a christian who is active in movements against capital punishment & human euthanasia: groups in this area tend to have a lot of overlap or even shared mission with anti-abortion activists so I'm familiar with the range and complexity of these issues and the groups working within them. FRC is absolutely a hate group and SPLC is correct to list them as one.
SPLC having problems with racism and harassment internally is not surprising, as these dynamics are part of our culture and institutions free of them are incredibly rare. It certainly doesn't bolster their credibility but neither does it, by itself, make them a hate group.
> still down 60%, primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL
Sounds like something he ought to be able to substantiate pretty simply, so why not do so?
I normally hesitate any comparisons between Musk and Trump but the lack of self reflection and baseless threats of legal action are a real commonality. He surely knows he’d have no leg to stand on but still wants to drum up some drama.
> Sounds like something he ought to be able to substantiate pretty simply, so why not do so?
Isn't that exactly what he's going to do if he sues the ADL? Or where did you expect him to substantiate it first? Seems a bit strange to accuse him of not doing what he just started doing.
How would it be simple to substantiate that? He'll be hearing this from advertisers probably via back channels or in verbal conversation only. To understand what the ADL is doing would require discovery, which requires a lawsuit.
Because CMOs typically don't formally write to business partners, "I'd like to confirm in writing that we'd spend lots of money with you but the ADL is bullying us"? I mean, sure, it's possible that these conversations were in written form even if unlikely, but then what's Musk supposed to do, put private emails from potential customers out in the open? And why would the ADL itself put this stuff in writing?
If he gets discovery against the ADL then he can see how widespread it is using things like internal documents too, and build the case directly with that, instead of having to go via whatever scraps other businesses will give him.
Either you are a public square and you gain protection from your users commenting but you can't delete or moderate their content (sans actual spam/child p/etc), or you can moderate/curate your users content but you are no longer protected/can be held liable for things your users post.
This worse of both worlds we have going on here results in these alphabet soup agencies/ngos having a place on the boardroom directly affecting people's speech.
What does 230 have to do with this at all? 230 is pretty limited in regards to what it protects against anyway. and the ADL isn't threatening him with action, so what does 230 have to do with it?
The ADL is getting advertisers to drop Twitter since Twitter won't delete the posts they don't like. That seems like action to me. Also the ADL and similar orgs had a direct line of access to content moderation teams in the previous twitter leadership.
Getting companies to not delete posts if they want to not be held liable for stuff their users posts helps prevent this issue.
This is just more of the same "Independent entities invoking their legal right to free speech and association in a way I don't like is an impingement on my free speech" bullshit. It's telling they don't understand section 230 since they don't seem to understand 2/3rds of the first amendment either, and that's only a few sentences.
If you want to require private companies to publish your content, you have to overturn the first amendment, or at the very least, replace the current supreme court with one open to extreme "interpretation" of the text, but maybe don't then complain when they ban guns.
> Getting companies to not delete posts if they want to not be held liable for stuff their users posts helps prevent this issue.
If you return to the “any effort to moderate lawful content at all gives you publisher-style liability over the whole service” rule that existed pre-230, you destroy all commercial UGC sites pretty quickly. Because flawless moderation at scale isn't possible, and the market for unmoderated sites is pretty limited. (Especially because either way you have to respond to reports of certain potentially unlawful content to avoid criminal liability, and that rule creates a huge risk that a slight error in that response suddenly opens you up to unlimited civil liability for other content.)
We know this because that was the emerging situation that Section 230 was the response to.
The ADL cannot hold ANYONE "liable" for anything. They can make a statement of their opinion, and advertisers are free to listen to that.
Musk is mad that advertisers don't like being seen next to posts calling for violence, and are using their first amendment right of free association to NOT associate with a platform with a lot of calls to violence.
Invoking 230 here is off-topic but reforming it the way you propose would destroy most communities, especially smaller niche ones. It will also bring down a wave of massive censorship and moderation to sites that try to continue.
In the real world when someone is a loud asshole people generally avoid them. They don't invite them to parties. They don't hang out with them. Online is no different. Communities overrun with loud assholes drive away normal users.
Again a real-world analogy: what you are proposing is that Starbucks, as a business that caters to the public, should not be allowed (by law) to eject or ban someone who comes in and starts screaming obscenities because they think it is funny. If they attempt to regulate the speech of patrons then Starbucks becomes directly liable for everything their patrons say. There are only two outcomes: Starbucks goes out of business because trolls show up and annoy people who don't want to hang out in a loud coffee shop with super annoying people who harass them... or Starbucks prohibits talking in their store to avoid liability.
I can also come up with many ways for bad faith actors to cause huge problems in your proposed scheme. Imagine a competing electric car maker paying shills to invade all the Tesla owner forums to get them shut down or harass everyone into leaving. Or imagine a rival political party doing the same. It isn't that difficult to create 100 bot accounts that flood every thread with non-spam posts that are nevertheless not useful content and not posted in good faith.
For that matter HN's posting policies would be prohibited under your own rules. It wouldn't take long for the usefulness of this site to disappear in that case.
I'm sure X has nothing to worry about. Maybe a very public fight with the ADL over whether X is, at best, Nazi-user-apologetic will hurt their advertising revenue, but I don't imagine it'll hurt their other business model...
... collecting biometric and employment history on every user.
I'm not seeing how threatening to sue the anti-defamation league is in and of itself antisemitic? Or did he say something else? I think I remember he said something about Soros once, and Soros conspiracies seem way more antisemitic than saying you want to sue the ADL...
I'm not seeing how threatening to sue the anti-defamation league is in and of itself antisemitic?
The suing? Nah, that's probably not it. But blaming "the Jews" because your advertising revenue is down? Eh, it's gets a little more questionable at that point. In isolation, maybe not. But come...on...given past behavior and everything else going on with xitter, you're willing to give benefit of the doubt? I'm not. My ears might not be what they used to be (thanks, rock n' roll!), but I can still hear dog whistles.
120 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadPersonally, I only follow things I like on Twitter which means I don't see any hate speech. It's hard for me to anecdotally say if things have changed. But it's not hard to imagine that chronically-online groups who have hate for Elon and his companies would try to crumble his social network because they don't agree with his approach.
This feels like a really slippery slope. Hard to weigh in honestly.
> some of the tech world has put in significant effort to silence conservatives
That doesn’t strike me as a neutral statement! What does “conservatives” mean in this context? Always reminds me of this tweet:
—-
Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views
Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?
Con: LOL no...no not those views
Me: So....deregulation?
Con: Haha no not those views either
Me: Which views, exactly?
Con: Oh, you know the ones
https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...
In any case, that’s not “conservatives”. That’s a very specific issue.
Dorsey era's Twitter, Reddit.
https://nypost.com/2022/03/21/twitter-suspends-babylon-bee-o...
That’s pretty obviously a personal attack.
There’s a very obvious difference between holding and expressing a personal opinion on gender identity and launching a public attack against a specific person.
This is the way these complaints always go. “conservatives are being censored!” becomes “well sure, they were censored because they violated the terms and conditions of the site in a distasteful way but why is that important?!”
We both know you don’t think they’re equivalent. You’re just trying to find technicalities to excuse abhorrent behaviour.
Specifically, Levine is the Assistant Secretary for Health—a senior political appointee, chosen by the President and confirmed by the Senate, reporting directly to the Cabinet-level Secretary for Health and Human Services. Also a uniformed four-star admiral (2 ranks below Commander-in-Chief) in the world's most powerful military. Oversees thousands of government employees, millions of dollars in taxpayer funds, influences major policy decisions that affect the lives of millions. In free societies, writers are allowed to criticize, and even mock, powerful political and government officials. But perhaps you prefer the Russian system?
It was rather on point:
> 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.
Just highlights how absurd it is for him to be receiving accolades that should be reserved for women, doesn't it.
So your assertion is that they aren't a woman because they were born with a penis? What is a woman then?
Also, what does it mean for an organ to be "designed" to do something? Who or what is the designer?
Yes, biology is complicated, and a small fraction of a percent of humans are born with genitalia that are either absent/nearly absent or very close to midway between male and female. (Most people considered "intersex" are still pretty clearly male or female, and often genitalia that look ambiguous at birth will become less so as a person matures). In these rare cases, sex determination can be genuinely difficult/somewhat arbitrary (and I don't claim to be an expert).
However, even in the ambiguous cases there are often factors that can favor one or another determination. In humans, sex develops as a response to various hormones. Everyone has at least one X chromosome which on its own induces the production of hormones/signaling factors leading to the development of female sexual organs secondary sexual characteristics. In people with a Y chromosome in addition to the X, that behavior is overridden by genes on Y to instead produce male genitalia and secondary sexual characteristics. In some intersex people, the genitalia are ambiguous but the presence or absence of Y chromosome expression still e
affects secondary sexual characteristics to an extent that one sex assignation makes somewhat more sense than the other.
But in any case, the extremely rare exceptions don't invalidate the general rule of human sex.
As for gender, that's a purely grammatical concept. Nouns and pronouns can have gender, people don't. Or at least that was the original meaning of the word, before pedophile John Money appropriated it in the 1950s. A pre-50s Google Books search may surprise you: https://www.google.com/search?q=gender&sca_esv=562865996&tbs...
> Who or what is the designer?
The blind process of natural selection. Perhaps the word choice of "designed" wasn't the most correct, but it's shorter than "most similar to a structure that would allow it to do the thing."
Things aren’t as clean cut as you desire them to be. I don’t know how rare you think this stuff is but I’m fairly confident it isn’t that rare.
Question for you: why do you care so much about gender?
Things are exactly how they are, wishing for human nature to be different is a pointless enterprise that I try my best to avoid.
> I don’t know how rare you think this stuff is but I’m fairly confident it isn’t that rare.
Luckily, a simple Internet search can settle the question for you!
> Why do you care so much about gender?
I don't care much about gender, it's just a grammatical concept (honestly, less interesting than verb tenses or noun declensions). I care a lot about sex, because it's intimately linked to reproduction, which is the strongest human instinct, without it human life would not exist. Kind of like how people care about "food" and "water".
So you think the existence of trans people will end sexual reproduction? Could you be a little more clear?
I never even mentioned transsexualism, don't know where you are getting that from?
Female humans have this in common with other female mammals, and a wide variety of other species too. The gonochoric ones anyway.
What is the ovarian pathway? Is it merely the existence of ovaries?
That's pretty immediately a circular dependency though? The more important question is why anyone should take your reasoning over any other about what "Man" and "Woman" mean.
Actually the most important question what makes something a "developmental pathway"? How do you define such? How do you distinguish two similar but different "developmental pathways"?
By the female reproductive system, I meant the type that produces large gametes, and so on. Versus the male one that produces small gametes.
> Actually the most important question what makes something a "developmental pathway"? How do you define such? How do you distinguish two similar but different "developmental pathways"?
It's a very interesting question, here's what is known about this in humans, if you are curious: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK279001
> The more important question is why anyone should take your reasoning over any other about what "Man" and "Woman" mean.
What's your alternative, and why?
Though my actual alternative is: Why should I care about specific definitions of "Man" and "woman"? I prefer duck typing for human stuff, because we are messy and every "line" is more like a fuzzy spectrum, and each and every time we have tried to place an arbitrary line, it's been wrong. I'm especially keen to this as a programmer, who is well aware that things people tend to think are "clear", like names, gender, time, etc, rarely are.
Yikes dude.
I agree with you that this isn't about silencing conservatives, but rather anyone who refuses to accept the ideological stance that men can be women and vice versa.
for example, if someone is banned for saying “death to non-whites”, theres a pretty good chance they’re being banned for advocating genocide, not because they’re conservative.
or if someone was banned for denying that covid was real, they weren’t banned for “conservative views”. whether we agree with the reasoning or not, they were banned for denying covid when the sites had made clear this topic would result in a ban.
i’ll repeat what i’ve said many times before. this idea that banning is somehow new, or is some creepy definition of censorship is nonsense. site owners and moderators have had rules for their online spaces since the beginnings. and just like real world spaces, people get removed constantly. it’s not new. it’s not weird. it’s not shocking.
I think you will find that people have been getting banned for rather less harsh statements, like "maybe Covid was man-made", "Hunter Biden is corrupt", and "men cannot be women."
It's true, but that would be within Twitter and Meta's rights. The real issue was that they did so at the behest of the incoming administration, in behind-the-scenes meetings. It's the involvement of government officials that may have broken laws and trampled the First Amendment. Also egregious and painful to see was that they shadow-banned accounts rather than banning them outright.
But I don't see how that has anything to do with a private, non-government advocacy group making their feelings known to advertisers. It happens all the time. Conservative groups call to boycott Budweiser, liberal groups call to boycott Chik-fil-A. It's not illegal.
However, it's effective as a stunt for Elon, because saying that a Jewish advocacy group has the power to shut down his business implies, as subtext, the unspoken bit about Jews controlling the world. The statement and the choice of target leans on that implication. And the quote where he jokes that they're a defamation organization, as opposed to "anti-", reminds me of Sartre's quote which is worth repeating in full:
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
Definitely not. But if (not asserting this happened) the ADL threatened to defame as antisemitic any advertiser that didn't participate in a boycott, that could be illegal.
I don't believe there is any evidence for any of these claims. Rather the opposite: pro-freedom pro-business anti-regulation conservatives have been crying wolf for years now, demanding special meetings with tech companies, demanding special treatment, demanding government intervention, demanding that they be allowed to say anything without consequences.
Modern US conservatives are a minority. How big of a minority depends on how you draw the lines. Republican policy proposals are often (but not always) even more unpopular. Cognitive dissonance (or just good old fashioned politicking) demands some conservatives insist otherwise and see everything as some kind of suppression effort or conspiracy.
It's the whole "conservatism can't ever fail... it can only be failed" thing at work. Or the Simpsons Skinner meme: "Am I Out of Touch? No, it's the voters who are wrong!" If only the big mean tech companies weren't suppressing my clearly superior views everyone would agree with me. No... maybe your views are just way less popular than you think. Maybe instead of being shadow banned people just think you're an asshole.
Your belief is incorrect. To give one isolated example (out of many): https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-bowed-to-white-house-p...
> The discussion took place three months after Facebook, which is owned by Meta Platforms META -0.14%decrease; red down pointing triangle, decided to stop banning posts asserting that Covid-19 was man-made or manufactured, in light of increasing debate about the virus’s origin.
if a free-speech “consequence free” absolutist were to berate their wife and call her disgusting every day, we could ask them how seriously anyone takes their “i have free speech” as she walks out the door with their kids.
> if a free-speech “consequence free” absolutist were to berate their wife and call her disgusting every day, we could ask them how seriously anyone takes their “i have free speech” as she walks out the door with their kids.
Of course! Both the insulted boss and battered wife have freedom of association. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_association
It might be perfectly fine, but why should the target of this campaign- also a private entity- refrain from denouncing this and retaliating with bad publicity for the involved advocacy group? Twitter/ X lives off ad revenue, and the ADL lives off its reputation of a non-partisan organisation pursuing a laudable cause. If ADL can erode X's advertising revenue, I don't see why X shouldn't fight back by trying to weaken the ADL's reputation, as long as it is done in the open and by legal means.
And even assuming that from a risk standpoint X should rather comply to whatever the ADL demands; what is the effect of companies never fighting back purely because of risk aversion? Wouldn't this end up making the activist organisation less accountable and even encourage further demands?
In the meantime, the ADL has already threatened X with reputational damage, and now Musk is doing the same with the ADL- by spreading the idea that their motives are not necessarily laudable. I see a perfect symmetry in the situation.
> the reason I quoted Sartre in that post is that I believe there is no sincerity to this. Selecting a Jewish organization...
Basically what you're saying here is that your judgement of the situation is biased by the fact that the ADL is a Jewish organisation. Should Jewish organisations not be engaged directly or asked to be accountable for their actions?
As for the accountability, it seems obvious to me that if accusing a Jewish organisation of wrongdoing automatically exposes you to such a terrible suspicion as that of making antisemitic dogwhistles, then these organisations get free rein to say whatever they want because even challenging them produces an unacceptable reputational damage.
The critique in the article can be considered on its own. The fact that it comes to us via Elon Musk resharing Keith Woods, and not as an original link from Musk, tells us volumes about how Musk is willing to be publicly portrayed and who he appears to be listening to, which are also relevant information for the topic at hand.
>As for the accountability, it seems obvious to me that if accusing a Jewish organisation of wrongdoing automatically exposes you to such a terrible suspicion as that of making antisemitic dogwhistles, then these organisations get free rein to say whatever they want because even challenging them produces an unacceptable reputational damage.
I'm not sure how they are any less accountable than he is. If he wants to sue them, he can. There is nothing stopping that because the ADL is a Jewish organization. What accountability do you think there is aside from that? The ADL can't force anything to happen, they can just advocate for their side as he does.
You are being purposefully obtuse. Musk isn't being called an antisemite because he's singled-out the ADL, it's because he's amplified antisemitism and doesn't seem to care about it.
You're imagining a vast anti-Elon conspiracy (with no apparent motive), instead of the much more boring explanation that an organization that tries to combat antisemitism is upset at antisemitism.
>dedicated to advancing a certain political agenda (antisemitism bad)
>is upset that a major platform (site formerly known as twitter)
>allows speech opposing that angenda. (calls for another holocaust)
Yeah, that's what they do. They oppose antisemitism.
What pogrom has Al sharpton lead pray tell?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definist_fallacy
> We are confident that the vast majority of American tourists will avoid a country whose reputation is associated with Nazism, even if that association is not justified.
The NBC News article quotes Jews and Muslims living in Iceland at the time of the proposal.
The NYT article notes that even the Roman Catholic church was opposed to the proposal.
https://jweekly.com/2000/05/12/judge-fines-adl-10-5-million-...
"On April 28 [2000], the jury found most of the charges leveled by the ADL, based on the tapes, to be 'not substantially true.'"
“It was just a joke” smh
“ In various conversations, the Quigleys refer to attaching images of oven doors to the Aronsons' house, of burning their children and of wishing their Jewish neighbors had been blown up in a terrorist attack in Israel.”
It is interesting to see how different organizations eventually get subsumed by those more interested in the power and prestige of the organization itself (and by extension, their own power and prestige), rather than the stated, foundational values of the organization.
> CTS has previously written about the phenomenon of “stochastic harassment” on Twitter, or how influential accounts act as nodes for harassment even when not explicitly directing their followers to harass anyone.
> CTS found 60 examples of direct replies to reinstated accounts and 127 examples of threaded replies (i.e., replies to tweets in the same conversation, but not directly replying to the reinstated account’s tweet) that our machine learning classifier assigned high antisemitism scores to during the period we collected data
So, they hate people who aren't actually harassing anyone, nor calling for any harassment, but who get replies that their machine learning classifier thinks are anti-semitic.
This is absurd. They literally call you an anti-semite if you say something mundane and then someone else replies with something that a machine thinks is anti-semitic, at any point in a thread, even if the reply is to someone else entirely. By that standard they deserve to lose any lawsuits heading their way, and lose them badly.
I thought they couldn't make themselves look any worse, but then they presented their examples of "anti-semitic tweets". It's a guy who was involved in conservative politics, who replied to one of the ADLs tweets and criticized them. The ADL post he was replying to was calling Trump an anti-semite. For disagreeing with this he himself is now supposedly an anti-semite.
This is a blatant attempt to shut down criticism of the ADL itself, as an institution. They aren't even trying to hide what they're doing here.
Unfortunately that is all totally standard nowadays. Many groups have complained about this. Left wing activist orgs go after newspapers, TV channels, social networks, all of it. Any organization that isn't explicitly left wing gets attacked like this. They have a goal of making disagreement either outright illegal or impossible via private sector control, hence why they always go after advertisers, payment processors and other "nodes" as they put it. Their goal is very clear by now, it is the obliteration of any and all ideological disagreement.
Am rooting for Musk in this fight.
SPLC having problems with racism and harassment internally is not surprising, as these dynamics are part of our culture and institutions free of them are incredibly rare. It certainly doesn't bolster their credibility but neither does it, by itself, make them a hate group.
Sounds like something he ought to be able to substantiate pretty simply, so why not do so?
I normally hesitate any comparisons between Musk and Trump but the lack of self reflection and baseless threats of legal action are a real commonality. He surely knows he’d have no leg to stand on but still wants to drum up some drama.
_Because it is nonsense_, come on, we all know this.
Isn't that exactly what he's going to do if he sues the ADL? Or where did you expect him to substantiate it first? Seems a bit strange to accuse him of not doing what he just started doing.
Why do you presume that? Even if that’s the case, why wouldn’t he say that?
If he gets discovery against the ADL then he can see how widespread it is using things like internal documents too, and build the case directly with that, instead of having to go via whatever scraps other businesses will give him.
[Background on the new leader of the ADL and some suspicious activity with Al Sharpton]
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/al-sharpton...
[A review of a documentary on anti-semitism that touches on political influence from the ADL]
https://www.npr.org/2009/11/24/120452232/exploring-the-polit...
[An article on how Facebook caved to leftist groups like the ADL]
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/07/03/activists-...
Either you are a public square and you gain protection from your users commenting but you can't delete or moderate their content (sans actual spam/child p/etc), or you can moderate/curate your users content but you are no longer protected/can be held liable for things your users post.
This worse of both worlds we have going on here results in these alphabet soup agencies/ngos having a place on the boardroom directly affecting people's speech.
Getting companies to not delete posts if they want to not be held liable for stuff their users posts helps prevent this issue.
>Getting companies to not delete posts if they want to not be held liable for stuff their users posts helps prevent this issue.
There's no circumstance here where twitter is being attempted to be made liable for their users posts, so what relevance is 230?
If you want to require private companies to publish your content, you have to overturn the first amendment, or at the very least, replace the current supreme court with one open to extreme "interpretation" of the text, but maybe don't then complain when they ban guns.
Or speech, for that matter. There's never a guarantee that an activist court rules in the way a person wants them to rule.
If you return to the “any effort to moderate lawful content at all gives you publisher-style liability over the whole service” rule that existed pre-230, you destroy all commercial UGC sites pretty quickly. Because flawless moderation at scale isn't possible, and the market for unmoderated sites is pretty limited. (Especially because either way you have to respond to reports of certain potentially unlawful content to avoid criminal liability, and that rule creates a huge risk that a slight error in that response suddenly opens you up to unlimited civil liability for other content.)
We know this because that was the emerging situation that Section 230 was the response to.
Musk is mad that advertisers don't like being seen next to posts calling for violence, and are using their first amendment right of free association to NOT associate with a platform with a lot of calls to violence.
In the real world when someone is a loud asshole people generally avoid them. They don't invite them to parties. They don't hang out with them. Online is no different. Communities overrun with loud assholes drive away normal users.
Again a real-world analogy: what you are proposing is that Starbucks, as a business that caters to the public, should not be allowed (by law) to eject or ban someone who comes in and starts screaming obscenities because they think it is funny. If they attempt to regulate the speech of patrons then Starbucks becomes directly liable for everything their patrons say. There are only two outcomes: Starbucks goes out of business because trolls show up and annoy people who don't want to hang out in a loud coffee shop with super annoying people who harass them... or Starbucks prohibits talking in their store to avoid liability.
I can also come up with many ways for bad faith actors to cause huge problems in your proposed scheme. Imagine a competing electric car maker paying shills to invade all the Tesla owner forums to get them shut down or harass everyone into leaving. Or imagine a rival political party doing the same. It isn't that difficult to create 100 bot accounts that flood every thread with non-spam posts that are nevertheless not useful content and not posted in good faith.
For that matter HN's posting policies would be prohibited under your own rules. It wouldn't take long for the usefulness of this site to disappear in that case.
"Have you ever seen a microservice drink a glass of water, Mandrake?"
... collecting biometric and employment history on every user.
... uh oh!
"Elon Musk comes around to blaming the Jews" as a headline.
Yep this will work really well :).
The suing? Nah, that's probably not it. But blaming "the Jews" because your advertising revenue is down? Eh, it's gets a little more questionable at that point. In isolation, maybe not. But come...on...given past behavior and everything else going on with xitter, you're willing to give benefit of the doubt? I'm not. My ears might not be what they used to be (thanks, rock n' roll!), but I can still hear dog whistles.