Re: Song of the Day
 

Now I’m lost. What’s propaganda here?

Because if you’re suggesting the laptop story is propaganda, I agree you shouldn’t discuss that with me. You should take it up with the NYTimes, which would tell you otherwise.

Re: Song of the Day
 

Maybe I’m whiffing, but you do know you are asking Ty to agree it is wrong to delete posts on social media, when Ty is responsible for deleting way more posts on this board than Twitter ever has in total ?

Re: Song of the Day
 

The convo has been absurd:

“I think Twitter was biased on the laptop story preclusion.”

“No. It’s just making a business decision on that because ideologues complain and force its hand.”

“Hmmm. That makes some sense. I’m inclined to modify my position and agree that it was just making a business decision. A business decision which, as you suggest, it was compelled to make by woke employees and users… ideologues.”

“No, you moron! It just made a business decision in response to ideologues.”

“That’s what I just said.”

“Correlation is not causation!”

“Uh… your point is?”

Idk if he knows I’ve been agreeing with him for the last several posts. Whatevs.

Re: Song of the Day
 

Nope. Not a single word of that is what I said. Try again.

You appear to be fundamentally confused about what I'm saying, so if you think you've been agreeing with me, we are clearly disagreeing.

I do not think Twitter is run by ideologues. I do not think it's run by liberals. (P.S. -- I know more than my share of people who work there.) I do not think its policies are dictated by woke ideologues, whether employees or users.

I do think it is run as a business. For business reasons, non-ideological business reasons, they moderate posts. They agitate people of all stripes when they do this, and convince various people that there is viewpoint discrimination, even though that is not what is going on.

Re: Song of the Day
 

The very fact that we are talking about Hunter Biden at all is completely jacked, and telling me that the NYT political desk is giving credence to Trump campaign talking points does not change that.

Re: Song of the Day
 

Bullshit. The thread you cited, and you yourself, asserted that Twitter does not seek to craft consensus and does not desire to moderate anything. It merely reacts to complaints from right and left.

We agree on that. You just dislike the necessary extension of that, which is that in doing so, in reacting to those complaints, Twitter is reacting to ideologues.

It is. The exact same way that media companies bowed to Brent Bozell and the right wing boycott mob in the 80s.

Idk know why you refuse to concede that, other than once you think you’ve made a point, even if one agrees with you, you’ll insist they haven’t. That’s between you and your therapist.

Re: Song of the Day
 

Now you’re just totally full of shit and actually admitting bias.

It’s not a talking point. It was a valid story of public interest. That you or I don’t think it was terribly important doesn’t change that.

Re: Song of the Day
 

FWIW, there is even moderation, though very light, here. Once or twice a year, someone comes to me to ask that something be removed (almost always their own posts, almost always months or years old), and I always do it. I don't ask questions other than the parameter of the post(s) they'd like removed. I later confirm deletion, and that's the end of it. At least one entire account was deleted this way.

This place is unique in a) we have mutually agreed upon ground rules that are fundamental, mainly based on anonymity (though I'd say most of us are out to pretty much everyone else at this point), b) a very small population that has not increased in over 15 years, c) a deep seeded understanding that fucking up by pushing too far could destroy the whole place and no one really wants to do that.

That said, if one of you started issuing credible threats (death or otherwise, ie outing) to one of our community members, I'd probably get involved. I probably wouldn't do it unilaterally, but it would entirely depend on the circumstances.

ETA: Given the nature of the forum, banning people for spouting dangerous bullshit would pretty much eliminate the entire population.

Re: Song of the Day
 

I don't believe either the thread or I said Twitter reacts to complaints from right and left -- you are introducing ideology as the source of the complaints, and I disagree. You have this assumption that the only reason people object to tweets is ideological disagreement, but the express point of the thread, with which I agree, is that platform instead start moderating speech because it is causing some other real-world problem. To quote from the thread.

Do you see the difference between what he's saying and what you're saying? He's saying that the issue is not the ideology, it's the horrible behavior IRL.

eta: You now seem to be abandoning your "crafting consensus" BS, so that's something.

Re: Song of the Day
 

I have not heard anything about Hunter Biden yet that I think was of public interest.

Re: Song of the Day
 

So stuff people were interested in wasn’t of public interest?

Re: Song of the Day
 

Also, if someone wants to give me a few billion $ for Lawtalkers, I'm happy to talk.

Re: Song of the Day
 

Here's the thread:

All my left-wing woke friends are CONVINCED that the social media platforms uphold the white supremacist misogynistic patriarchy, and they have plenty of screenshots and evidence ...

... of times when the platform has made enforcement decisions unfairly against innocuous things they've said, and let far more egregious sexist/racist violations by the other side pass.

Woke friends: it's true, right? You have LOTS of examples.

All my alt/center-right/libertarian friends are CONVINCED the social media platforms uphold the woke BLM/Marxist/LGBTQ agenda and they ALSO have plenty of screenshots and evidence of times when...

... the platforms have made enforcement decisions unfair against them for innocuous things they've said merely questioning (in good faith) the woke orthodoxy, and let far more egregious violations by the other side stand.

Right-wingers and libertarians: it's true, right? You can remember PLENTY of examples.

Neither side is lying.

Mostly, it's really because enforcement is hard, and there are LOTS of errors.

The lab leak theory preclusion is something new. I was talking about Hunter Biden. There was no fear of imminent harm to anyone accruing from allowing a story about Hunter's sordid laptop. None. At all. It was just a salacious political story.

Moderation involves looking at each story discretely. The preclusion of the Biden story is indefensible. The preclusion of the lab leak story is defensible (I think very weakly, but still technically defensible).

You cannot defend the preclusion of the laptop story by lumping it in with the lab leak story. Very, very different things. And that thread's author, and your "umbrella" defense highlights a dishonesty in the censorship.

First, there's this defense that all or most moderation is precluding harm, a "Who will think of the children???" cudgel. This immunizes indefensible decisions like the Biden laptop preclusion by allowing the moderator to say, "We have to err on the side of safety." That's naked bullshit. The story on Biden's laptop involved zero public safety issues. It also allows the mod to say after the fact, as Dorsey has, "Oops. We goofed there."*

"Public safety" is a huge umbrella under which almost any content can be shoehorned (except things clearly outside it, like the Biden laptop). Mods can hide behind that all day long and abuse that privilege. One way to abuse it is to kowtow to the CCP by banning a lab leak story, while saying this was done to avoid having lunatics commit hate crimes against Chinese people.

I think the author of the thread was truthful and forthright about mistakes he sees in moderation. But I think he also highlights a system which, by his own admission, is riddled with ideologues (the woke) at lower levels, and is easily abused, with built in plausible deniability.

See above. That's a dangerous construct.

I take the thread author at his word. He seems unbiased. But again, he's a sane man atop a bevy of ideologues. If you doubt that, look at the hysteria over Musk buying Twitter.

When the Gen Xers retire, we're staring down the barrel of a minority of people in charge of platforms who think free speech is dangerous and something they should have the right to craft or curtail. There will be a woke CEO of a platform someday, and wrongthink will be banished.


______________
* What was truly loathsome in the Biden laptop debacle was our own intelligence community lying about how the story was Russian fiction. Clapper and Brennan made that argument everywhere they could, and it conveniently provided cover for Dorsey's awful decision. But I can't blame Brennan or Clapper. They are openly biased political actors. Dorsey, OTOH, had no basis to listen to those two men or their surrogates, as each of the two of them has been caught lying to serve their interests in the past (Clapper having done it before Congress in regard to NSA metadata collection).

Re: Song of the Day
 

The son of a presidential candidate who has been tied to numerous boards of energy companies in Ukraine (a nation recently the centerpiece of an impeachment of the sitting President, for seeking to use the release of arms in exchange for dirt on said son), for which he received Croesan sums, drops off a laptop full of extremely personal information at a computer store. This son obviously has terrible judgment, and the laptop is filled with not only pictures of him doing all sorts of scandal-sheet worthy stuff, but also information regarding his business dealings with Ukraine. The validity of this information is verified by sources who worked with this son. The son and his father, the presidential candidate, do not deny the laptop's authenticity.

And yet the contents of this laptop are not newsworthy?

This is not the hill on which to die. You aren't winning that argument in any forum that has ever existed or ever will. Except maybe Twitter in 2020.

Re: Song of the Day
 

This is the rare example of a perfect cornering in under a Tweet's length.