Twitter's barrier wasn't that it was technically hard - it was that it was free and had critical mass. There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it, except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's political views
Musk is the least of my concerns, I can ignore his account if I cared that much. I can't really ignore that a lot of higher quality accounts have been interacting less because Twitter has become a technical mess, fucking up their timelines and notifications. This sort of loss is quiet, and slow. You only really notice it when it's too late, when your feed is nothing but mindless ads and random accounts you never followed shilling the latest thing on amazon.
The only reason most larger accounts are still "active" is because nobody wants to have to rebuild elsewhere without strong commitment from platform owners - and outside of Tumblr, nobody has really done that. Except maybe now with Substack, we'll see.
Indeed. Twitter recently killed off the apps and RSS feeds used by twitter power users. Those users who were likely to post widely viewed content on twitter or those who would embed tweets in news articles.
Very few people produce on any platform. Musk has the value relationship exactly backwards. The creators do get value from twitter, but they generate the bulk of the business value Twitter has and they can easily move to other platforms.
> Musk is the least of my concerns, I can ignore his account if I cared that much.
You really can't tho. Even if you block him, he'll still routinely show up in your timeline when people tweet a jpg of his tweets. Even if you somehow ignore all that, he'll still do random shit like change the Twitter logo to a dog to make sure you don't forget it's his playground, and you're just an NPC in his main character existence.
Pretty easy to attract spambots, just mention "metamask instagram account hijack unban sugar daddy glock". There's a lot of other-language spam too, some of it from state actors trying to hide news in the search results.
You are ignoring the whole Verification process. It was the only platform where users could have interactions with prominent people in a variety of fields and know the interaction was legitimate. That mattered! Killing the verification system chased away many blue checks, who happened to generate a huge amount of traffic for the site.
Musks politics on their own didn’t create problems. However, Musk’s tolerance for hate speech sure as hell did. There aren’t many major advertisers were willing to risk having their ad show up next to hard core hate speech.
As somebody who used to do anti-abuse engineering for Twitter, maybe I'm biased here. But I don't think his politics are separable from his tolerance for hate speech. I think they're closely related.
The tricky part here is, as you point to, not wanting to see people abused is turning out to be good business. That's why Twitter came around on hate speech, harassment, and the like. Claiming to be the "free speech wing of the free speech" party sounds great, and it's appealing certain types of people. But at the end of the day, a place has to choose. Either you keep the people who want to shout racial epithets or you keep the people who they're shouting at plus the ones who don't want to be around that. It's the that nazi bar Twitter thread, but at scale: https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-swiftly-k...
But back to politics. Racial resentment waxes and wanes in American history. Most of us know it went into decline after the civil war, during the Reconstruction. Many don't hear, though, that there was an upswing, known as the Nadir [1] that peaked in the early 1900s with events like the Tulsa Massacre [2]. This period includes the only time an American government was violently overthrown [3]. It waned and we eventually got the Civil Rights Movement, sometimes known as the Second Reconstruction.
We're now in a period that some call the Second Nadir. Racial resentment has increased, and the US's political parties have sharply diverged on levels of racial resentment. One of the biggest political divides is around being "woke", which noted liberal Ron DeSantis defines as "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." The agreement with that also sharply diverges by party. And Musk has very much chosen a side, repeatedly rejecting "wokeism".
Most people can dodge or ignore questions of systemic issues; it's bigger than their choices. But Musk just spent $44 billion to buy control of a major system for conversation. In Twitter's CEO seat, there are a lot of switches to flip, and few of them have a "neutral" position. E.g., You have to pick between the Nazis or the people they like to harass. Same deal for the people who hate black people, women, Mexicans, trans people, queer people, et cetera, ad nauseam. The "woke" move is pretty clear here: you decide you want your platform to be a reasonably humane and inclusive space. The anti-"woke" move is also clear: you gut the anti-abuse efforts and turn the terrible people loose (perhaps occasionally nuking a few accounts when they cause too much bad press). All in the name of freedom, of course.
The problem for Musk is that's terrible for business. Even if you don't care at all about systemic injustice, most people find distasteful the ugliness that drives ethnic cleansing campaigns, digital and otherwise. The US consumer economy is diverse enough that businesses can no longer focus exclusively on the (shrinking) white audience; they want all the eyeballs. He's supposedly a business genius, so we'll see which breaks first: Twitter's financials or his anti-"woke" politics.
> which noted liberal Ron DeSantis defines as "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them."
That's not a quote from Ron DeSantis. From [0]:
> Ryan Newman, DeSantis’s general counsel, said the term referred to “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”
Technically true. But Newman said it on the stand, under oath, an a case where DeSantis was being sued for firing a "woke" prosecutor. So I think that's as close to an official answer as we're going to get from DeSantis.
There's no technically true - there's what you wrote, which was untrue, and what I wrote, which was true. Technically is entirely unnecessary in that assessment, especially when you go on to admit that DeSantis hasn't actually given an answer.
I get your point. But politicians are not lone individuals; they are effectively teams. They have all sorts of people thinking and speaking for them. This is about a topic where most of the anti-"woke" crowd will absolutely never given an answer, because to answer accurately about it gives the game away. For example, consider the example of Bethany Mandel, a person who wrote a whole anti-"woke" book, who somehow can't define it when asked: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2023/03/16/anti-w...
But if we're being extremely precise, something you are apparently very excited about, you'll note that I didn't say that Ron DeSantis said those words. I said that DeSantis "defined" it that way. Given that this was one of his closest legal advisors speaking under oath to a judge, I think it is entirely correct to say that this is their true definition of "woke".
I’m going to remain “excited” for, what is for most people, the most basic level of truth, by attributing quotes to the correct people, yes, which somehow you seem to think is “extreme precision”. The only question for me is whether the somehow is because of your obvious dislike of DeSantis or whether it’s a general attitude.
As to whether the “anti-woke crowd” will never give an answer, I’ve seen plenty of answers given. (Cherry) Picking out one person who panicked[0] on television isn’t going to invalidate the many other times answers have been given. Again, I prefer the truth of the matter to fallacy.
She didn't just panic on TV. She failed to define it in the book, too. If that's panic, I guess she panicked for 18 months given she "spent a year and a half researching, writing, and editing"? Sounds exhausting. And here, in the article defending herself, she had plenty of time for one-sided boo-hooing and why-is-the-mean-liberal-hurting-my-children nonsense, but I don't see her defining it there either. (I guess she panicked again!) Something I note you conspicuously failed to do here, despite how you totally saw it defined by your Canadian girlfriend.
The reason anti-woke people generally avoid defining it is because once they do, they look at best ridiculous. Merriam-Webster has it as, "aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)". Wikipedia has it as "being conscious of racial discrimination in society and other forms of oppression and injustice". That is not far off the Team DeSantis definition. But to people outside the far-right epistemic bubble, that just doesn't sound particularly bad. So to keep fundraising (and book sales) up, no useful definition must be given.
It's the same style of smear you see from the Civil Rights era, where MLK and the Freedom Riders were decried as communists. Were they? That wasn't the point. The point was to get people mad at vague and shadowy things. It was and is to activate tacitly racist whites against a boogeyman that is socially acceptable to froth about. So it's the literal truth that "anti-woke" means anti-"being conscious of racial discrimination".
The irony of someone claiming I'm lying in a thread where they've been shown to be so divorced from the idea of what truth is (which is edifying in itself) that they think stating the actual truth is somehow a technicality.
Here's one of my Canadian girlfriends defining woke, that I saw just the other day.
Already you have chosen a path of such tribalism that if anyone opposes anything you say - no matter how wrong you clearly are - means that you have to cast childish aspersions that are easily countered. Perhaps it's time to, shall we say wake up to yourself.
> You have to pick between the Nazis or the people they like to harass.
Nice rhetoric, but no you still do not get to censor people.
> The US consumer economy is diverse enough that businesses can no longer focus exclusively on the (shrinking) white audience
On your "woke", "humane", "inclusive spaces", I hope that celebrating the "shrinking" of the black population of any country on Earth would put you in the category of the terrible people... Double standards etc.
That isn't rhetoric. It's an inescapable fact of running a platform. You have to choose. If you choose the maximalist free speech position, you get the Nazis. You lose the speech of the people they harass, because a lot of them will either leave or stay and shut up. So the maximalist no-moderation position also ends up with a lot of speech suppressed. Plus, as a business reality, a platform that is smaller and with much lower ad revenue.
> hope that celebrating the "shrinking"
I'm not celebrating it. Again, it's just a business reality. In the Jim Crow era, businesses could ignore the non-white market, even be hostile to it. See, e.g., the Negro Motorist's Green Book. But most national-scale businesses can no longer do that, because the non-white market is much larger, as is the chunk of the white market that is reluctant to associate with open bigotry. And that part, I'm happy to celebrate.
Twitter has ample restrictions on harassing people. You are talking about censoring views, not harassment/insults. You core argument, that anyone is taking a "maximalist free speech" allowing people to harass others, is a lie.
> Twitter has ample restrictions on harassing people.
Twitter has never had adequate restrictions on harassment. The were approaching it asymptotically for a while, but that's now in retreat.
> You are talking about censoring views, not harassment/insults.
Yes, I am also talking about censoring views. For example, views like, "the [ethnic group] must be exterminated to ensure white survival" do not belong on Twitter. For many reasons including both that they help shift the Overton Window toward genocide [1], and because it's really bad for Twitter as a business to have that shit running rampant.
> You core argument, that anyone is taking a "maximalist free speech" allowing people to harass others, is a lie.
Nope. It's sincerely held, so at the very worse I could be wrong. But I'm not.
Some free-speech absolutists are absolutely pro-harassment. Every banned jackass has a deep believe that their free speech trumps absolutely everything else.
A good chunk of the rest are just indifferent to harassment, generally because they're comfortable white men who do not normally experience harassment as a means of social control. Many in this group may be inclined to use it themselves when one of the lesser orders is out of line, but they probably wouldn't recognize it as harassment when they do it. See e.g., Manne's "Down Girl" for more.
And the remainder just haven't thought it through. They fail to see it as balanced with other rights, like freedom of association or freedom from harm. Typically, this is the adolescent (or frozen adolescent) view, where they don't have a theory of rights much beyond "YOU'RE NOT MY DAD YOU CAN'T MAKE ME". Which is, y'know, a start on an ethical understanding, but they haven't yet gotten to things like Rawls's Veil.
Regardless, anybody who takes a maximalist position on free speech, by which I mean an expressed or implied view that it trumps all other rights, is in effect pro harassment. Because any sort of platform that tries to follow it, as Twitter did in its early years, will be absolutely full of it.
An insane slippery slope, from "Non-inclusive Language" straight to genocide! This is laughable...
> they're comfortable white men
What a weird thing to say. You're not like the other comfortable white men, that's what you mean right?
> Typically, this is the adolescent (or frozen adolescent) view, where they don't have a theory of rights much beyond "YOU'RE NOT MY DAD YOU CAN'T MAKE ME".
Belittling people does not make you superior. It makes you sound full of fear and resentment, which by the way is still not justification for pro-censorship positions.
> Regardless, anybody who takes a maximalist position on free speech, by which I mean an expressed or implied view that it trumps all other rights, is in effect pro harassment.
Yes, and anyone who is pro-cars, is in effect pro-car accidents!
> Nice example of speech that is currently not allowed on Twitter.
It is an example of speech that free-speech absolutism would permit. And example of the sort of view that I would not permit on a platform I am running. And yes, Twitter and most platforms ban it for good reason.
> An insane slippery slope, from "Non-inclusive Language" straight to genocide! This is laughable...
A great example of the way free-speech absolutists don't engage with the consequences of their views. Which is why I'm done here.
> And yes, Twitter and most platforms ban it for good reason.
Thanks for pointing out that you are wrong in pretending that Twitter is governed by this "free-speech absolutism" strawman.
> A great example of the way free-speech absolutists don't engage with the consequences of their views.
Calling normal people nazis doesn't mean normal people are nazis, it just means that you have a serious problem. It might also indicate, depending on how much control you want to exert on said normal people, that you are a totalitarian.
> Which is why I'm done here.
Cool! This was always allowed. At least, on platforms with freedom of expression.
Interesting how you provided a direct counter example and your comment got flagged for it. I thought the free speech absolutist crowd wouldn’t mind someone disagreeing with them
> There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it, except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's political views
Most of the people I follow have moved off it. They use Twitter largely for announcements when they've put out something new but all their casual, unfiltered thoughts are going in Mastodon. Every time I check in on Twitter now it seems the noxious behavior to signal ratio gets worse.
In the artistic/creative space, a crapload of the best artists on twitter are trans. Musk is a loud and proud transphobe, and has implemented his politics into Twitter's moderation.
You don't have to be LGBTQ to see how important trans people are to Twitter's health. Many are still there because business is business, but many trans people and their allies have left because the new owner seems to hate them on a deeply personal level, and they have the professional wiggle room to ditch that promotional space.
Edit: W00t deep negatives for affirming that trans people exist and for stating the obvious that Musk hates them.
> W00t deep negatives for affirming that trans people exist and for stating the obvious that Musk hates them.
People aren't downvoting your post for trans affirmation or that Elon doesn't like trans people. They're downvoting it because you are inflating the value of the trans population on Twitter as integral to Twitter itself. I would not be surprised if there is a higher percentage of trans people using Twitter relative to the general population, but I find it unlikely that they make up a significant enough portion of its users to even move the needle if they all migrated away to Tumblr, Mastodon, or another social network.
I'd say it's probably more of a canary effect. They'll just be the first ones targeted by the type of general obnoxiousness that Musk's moderation pivot fosters. Everyone else will be put off by it too, albeit less severely, and there will be a bit of a positive feedback loop if the value of the platform (stuff from people you follow) is progressively diminished as people you follow leave because people they followed left because. . .
>There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it, except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's political views
There ISN'T? Ever since Musk stepped in it's riddled with bugs and changes for the worse. As an example very recently and as of now Twitter Circles are broken and tweets that should be private only for a select few are visible to anyone in the "For You" tab. This is MASSIVE and probably even a breach of GDPR.
It was always riddled with bugs, I'm not sure why people are blaming that on Musk as that is surely the least applicable of any of the criticisms that get thrown his way. Are people's memories that short that they thought it was a bug free experience up till a few months ago?
> Are people's memories that short that they thought it was a bug free experience up till a few months ago?
Hilarious how people here have tolerated all garbage and bugs from pre-Musk Twitter takeover for years and now they all complain about them now.
It is selective memory based on the current villain of the year to hate. Twitter has always been an outrage capital with a strong network effect. It is just that for the 220M+ daily active users, it is better than the sea of worse alternatives out there.
Many HNers here won’t admit it, but the reality is that network effects are real hence the difficulty in creating a viable alternative, No anecdote, short term hype or subjective responses such as ‘for me it is’ refutes that.
I honestly think people were resigned to the previous poor level of the app/website, and of course you are right, they now can use it and any regressions that have been actually introduced as a stick to beat an ideological opponent with.
Even a cursory search of HN brings up absurd bugs[1]:
> Slightly related but very interesting: the 2010 Twitter bug where simply tweeting "Accept [username]" would automatically force them to follow you.
From what Musk has told us since he took over, and others it sounds like an unholy mess behind the scenes. From [2]:
> In Tuesday's hearing, which ran for more than two hours, Zatko painted a portrait of a company plagued by widespread security issues and unable to control the data it collects. Calm and measured, he stuck closely to his expertise, unpacking technical details of Twitter's systems with real-world examples of how information held by the company could be misused.
> "It's not far-fetched to say that an employee inside the company could take over the accounts of all of the senators in this room," he warned.
From [3], a Twitter engineer on the work ethic:
> “If you’re not feeling it, you can take a few days off,” he was recorded saying. “People have taken months off.”
> “I basically went to work like four hours a week last quarter,” he added. “And it’s just how it works in our company.”
Which tells me a lot. And should we forget about this doozy from Dorsey's days in charge?[4]
> Oh, and while he was in charge, there was no backup of Twitter’s database.
I could go on for a long time but it's clear that people are being selective with their memories.
Is your contention that now you've been shown a more serious bug than you'd experienced previously that it's an indication that there were not similar or worse bugs in existence before the takeover?
Even if I myself hadn't experienced more serious bugs than those prior to the takeover, it'd still seem a stretch.
Private tweets aren't private, they're limited audience. If you're saying something defamatory behind "private" tweets then, I hate to break it to you, it's still defamation. You might get some mitigation from limiting the audience but that's it.
I would hazard that they weren’t in a position to know or be sure, given the whistleblower’s revelations, but also that they wouldn’t be publicising random bugs from their bug tracker without reason.
I honestly don't care about his political views in my choice of social media (and I'm not aware of any views he holds that I would find extremely objectionable in any case).
I care about being able to choose between "For You" and "Following". I don't want an algorithmically curated feed which includes things I have consciously chosen not to look at. And I don't want people who follow me not to be able to see things I link to because of a pissing contest between tech companies.
There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it, except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's political views
This says so much more about you than about anyone leaving Twitter.
I'm a person of colour. Do I have not have a reason to leave a web site that platforms people who espouse the belief that my children are a disease that needs to be eradicated with fire?[1] Of course I do, and you know that. I do not have a "disdain for Musk's political views," to put it like that is to suggest that white supremacy is a view no different than believing in universal healthcare.
Your rhetoric is a shallow and obvious attempt to invalidate and dismiss other people's concerns.
And while you have a right to your beliefs, no matter how much they lack empathy, no matter how much they are divorced from a belief that other people are not NPCs and are truly entitled to their own world views...
This type of talk is not in the best traditions of Hacker News, a site that yes, has a far more Libertarian slant than I personally hold, but also yes, attempts to hold its discussions and debates to a higher standard than you display in this comment.
———
[1] Other people of colour take a different view on whether to use Twitter, and that's the entire point of not dismissing other people's views. They have their own strategies for making the world a better place, and I don't have to dismiss their choices as posturing, I can respectfully make different choices for myself.
I am a person of colour too. And I don't get what is wrong with what the person you replied to said.
I mean, if you wish to signal your disdain for Musk's political views, you can leave Twitter. How is that an "attempt to invalidate and dismiss people's concerns" ?
And radical "woke" folks have been tweeting about killing and murdering white people on twitter for ages without much blowback. I always found it strange that was tolerated in the woke twitter days.
If Twitter fails - which it may definitely do - it will be because Musk screwed up and fired a lot of good engineering folk and got rid of power user features - which has made a lot of creators angry. But "racism" is un-likely to be the primary driving cause. It has always existed on Twitter.
You are arguing that people should share your disdain for Musk's political views. You are not arguing against the claim that this is the only really strong reason why people would want to leave.
Second, libertarian ideals around free speech say that fairly engaging people whose views you disagree with is a better way to change minds than deplatforming them. That is because deplatforming them just encourages them to migrate to cesspools like Truth Social, which then become echo chambers for extremist views. Therefore there are reasons to allow offensive people to remain on a platform other than agreement with their offensive views.
Speaking personally, I am firmly of the belief that the obvious political censorship applied to social networks, including by the previous management of Twitter, is one of the CAUSES of the extremism that lead to the Jan 6 insurrection. You might dislike that there are people who think your children are a disease. But surely you'd dislike it rather more if we slid into an authoritarian dictatorship where people like that are the ones in charge. Therefore it is worth looking past your good reasons for taking offense, and asking seriously what is most likely to keep violent extremist networks forming that are in a position to do just that.
Note that multiple countries in Latin America copied the US Constitution's idea of separation of powers. A common pattern is that they wound up as authoritarian regimes after a powerful executive solved gridlock through declaring a state of emergency. It could happen here. In fact, it nearly did.
And finally, I find the comment that you're responding to far more in the best traditions of Hacker News than your reply. Hacker News has a tradition of polite and reasoned discussion of controversial positions between people of diverse points of view. I would rather keep that tradition alive, rather than implying that people who disagree with you are horrible people who might not mind your children being eradicated with fire.
@freejazz - I understand your point, but there is a similar counter example which I believe is powerful.
The gay community made large strides as a movement to allow a civil discourse and transparent conversations with others who opposed their lifestyles by deciding to be open rather than secret. When people meet face to face, and realize we're all really similar - people tend to soften their views to be "human".
Who is stopping them? Twitter? Twitter isn't the public square - it's just a website. It's full of advertising money that twitter controls and takes. It might be LIKE a public square, but it's not the public square.
It's legitimizing the notion that it's even a response to the thing you claim it is. I totally dispute that.
Let's look at the things the jan 6 rioters took grievances with: Mike Pence not overturning the election, nancy pelosi's existence, the federal court system which completely rebuked Trump's stolen election narrative, ALL of the media, the LIBERAL media, media in GENERAL, twitter, twitter moderation, george soros, jews, hunter biden, the crack he smoked, his penis, people who were verified on twitter, hollywood, jews, the thought that racism still exists...
if someone tells me the said they did something, and it's because of a ghost, and I accept their reasoning, then I am legitimizing the connection they allege. I dispute this connection. that's what I'm accusing you of legitimizing, their 'rationality'. they might call it rationality, but I don't have to. and maybe that's not what you meant, but I fairly took you to mean it, because you are apparently taking them at their word.
Meh. You still seem like you're so fixed on making your point that you're entirely missing mine.
My point is that the way that they were censored made it easier for them to find a likeminded echo chamber that helped them become radicalized extremists. And now rather than dealing with obnoxious idiots with a few bad ideas, we've got an armed rabble. Which is far worse.
Whether or not this dynamic happened is completely independent of the specific extremist rhetoric that they absorbed. But having been on the receiving end of a liberal conspiracy to censor information which might be supportive of Trump, it was easier for them to take everything that Trump said to its illogical extremes. And it was easy to discount all information coming from any source which denied the existence of the conspiracy that they experienced.
The result is that they were convinced that powerful liberal forces had subverted democracy and were trying to shut down the truth that Trump presented. This made Trump's lies about a stolen election very believable to them. And they got fired up enough about such conspiracy theories that it came to seem reasonable to them to ensure that the TRUE will of the American people prevail, even if that required undoing electoral fraud by tying down representatives with zipties and making them recognize Trump as President. And executing those at the heart of enabling this fraud to destroy democracy.
If we don't like this outcome then it is on us to decide how to handle such extremists. My position is that it is best to undo the conditions that encourage the creation of extremism. An alternative position is to fight fire with fire, to become as extreme in opposing the extremists as they are in fighting for what they believe.
However I fear that the alternative position, as emotionally satisfying as it might be, is a recipe to turn political polarization into political unrest and potentially into a civil war down the road. Enough other countries have gone down that road to project what it would be likely to happen then. And it isn't pretty.
Everything that I've said is part of an argument about how to best respond to the potential for extremism. None of it legitimizes extremism or extremist positions.
"But having been on the receiving end of a liberal conspiracy to censor information which might be supportive of Trump, it was easier for them to take everything that Trump said to its illogical extremes."
Yeah... this is what I'm talking about when I say legitimizing. And hiding it in everything else you wrote doesn't make me not see your point. Clearly the opposite is going on.
You seem to be assuming bad faith. And then seize on anything you object to as a gotcha to disregard everything else.
That's a dishonest and unproductive approach to conversation. So I'm not going to bother with you for much longer.
But I'll address the point you objected to. In 2020, a whole infrastructure was created across multiple organizations to fight misinformation. Their method was to pick topics, create fact checks, and then proactively hunt down and block misinformation and those who posted it. The existence of this infrastructure and its intended goals can be confirmed from a variety of sources, across the political spectrum.
As soon as it was created, it became a natural target for anyone who wished to manipulate things for political purposes. And it was quickly so used. For example see https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-... for how Peter Damask managed to use it to suppress the lab leak story for about a year.
Now, as you'll undoubtably agree, Trump is a propaganda machine for whom lying is as natural as breathing. As a result the fact checking machine developed a knee-jerk response of fighting back against anything Trump had to say. But a stopped clock is still right 2x a day. And when Trump was actually right (eg kids don't spread COVID, Hunter Biden's laptop), the fact checking engine still classified his claims as misinformation, and still worked to suppress it.
But the problem is that when you tell people something that they can verify to be a lie, they will see EVERYTHING you see as a potential lie. And now it doesn't matter how often you tell them that X is a lie - they won't believe you. Which becomes a real problem when X actually is a lie.
Which brings us to our current situation. Somewhere around 40% of the USA currently believes that the 2020 election was stolen, and also have learned to distrust all of the news sources that could properly inform them. Obviously primary responsibility for this situation rests with Trump. But he wouldn't have succeeded so well without actions taken by groups including social media and mainstream media organizations that made his lies seem more plausible to his target audience. And it is those actions that I object to - exactly because they have helped fuel a politics-over-truth narrative on BOTH sides that I fear will lead to a really bad outcome in the end.
"You seem to be assuming bad faith. And then seize on anything you object to as a gotcha to disregard everything else."
How can you take me to assume bad faith, when I quite clearly assume you in good faith meant exactly what you wrote? What about my post indicates I think you are in bad faith? This is literally the exact opposite of what bad faith means.
>In 2020, a whole infrastructure was created across multiple organizations to fight misinformation. Their method was to pick topics, create fact checks, and then proactively hunt down and block misinformation and those who posted it. The existence of this infrastructure and its intended goals can be confirmed from a variety of sources, across the political spectrum.
Weird, I don't see the words "censorship" or "right wing" here... yet it's how you describe it later. This part I agree with, I don't agree with the rest of your characterization and I think it legitimizes what is an otherwise completely made-up grievance phenomenon of not liking it when people disagree with you. The irony of course being, this is exactly what you accused me of doing.
You don't seem to get the point that I'm making, which is that we don't make policy around boogymen. So you can describe the boogeyman phenomena any way you want. It fundamentally does not change the fact that its a boogeyman and we shouldn't be shaping society around feelings of boogeymen. But of course you didn't just disagree with that, you were rude and presumptive and pejorative to me.
I just looked back at this thread and realized I never responded.
The reason why I say you are assuming bad faith is that you continually cherrypicked items to assert that I'm legitimizing extremists that I oppose. And therefore disregard anything that I have to say about strategies to reduce extremism.
To the contrary not only do you continue to assert that I'm "legitimizing" them, you dismiss my concerns as "boogeymen". Which is one of many ways that your complaining that I've been rude and presumptive and pejorative to you looks to me like the pot calling the kettle black.
Now to the facts. You agree with the fact that there was an infrastructure created across multiple organizations to fight misinformation. But here are key points that I think you are not considering.
First, those organizations overwhelmingly lean left. For example look at https://www.vox.com/2015/9/29/9411117/silicon-valley-politic.... They do not fit perfectly within the Democratic party, but they generally have an overwhelming preference for Democrats over Republicans.
Second, the infrastructure created to fight misinformation WAS a method of censorship. Whether it is reducing reach (eg by shadowbanning), blocking links, or deplatforming people, all of the available tools are tools of censorship. Just intended for a good purpose.
Third, its actions were not politically neutral. Obviously, if mostly left-wing people censor mostly right wing misinformation, this puts a thumb on the ideological scale. Likewise most of the mistakes will show the same bias. We more easily notice what is wrong with what we politically oppose than what we politically support.
Fourth, not all involved acted in good faith. This is clearly seen in the Twitter Files. Political activists on the left and right immediately recognized that there was a useful tool to manipulate here. Given existing ideological biases, political activists on the left were more successful in doing so. The whole Hamilton 68 debacle demonstrates how easily a left-wing disinformation narrative was able to get widely reported and had tremendous influence despite the fact that Twitter internally knew it to be disinformation.
And now we get to the most important point to me. Media like the NY Times like to think of themselves as a neutral arbiter of truth. By their own actions, they aren't. And to the extent that they have an obvious and demonstrable bias, they SHOULD be distrusted by those that they are biased against.
It is true that the main alternatives are objectively less trustworthy. But NOBODY can be trusted here. And that is a problem.
@a4isms We probably just have very different streams, based on who we follow and what they retweet, etc. I follow a very small amount of strictly business / technology / economy as technical topics and cull if they strayed from that (as it was my intended use). I don't see the more broad universe of content many see on Twitter due to that curation.
