Comment by Jestar342
5 years ago
Erm, what? This is just not true, and is a false dichotomy. Moderation is hard. Always has been. Stuff will slip through the cracks.
POTUS has the most popular (and currently most controversial - note, that's _controversial_ not _extreme_ or some other morph) so it's easy to see why Twitter are on top of it. Other blue-checked accounts, whilst more "important" than unverified, just simply don't compare to the importance and prevalance of POTUS' account.
If most of the mistakes happen in one direction, then I would argue that there's some other mechanism at work than just "mistakes".
Update: data https://quillette.com/2019/02/12/it-isnt-your-imagination-tw...
Update: admission https://www.vox.com/2018/9/14/17857622/twitter-liberal-emplo...
Maybe right leaning users have a higher propensity to say offensive/harmful things?
I'm not being facetious. Isn't this something the right is actually proud of? I mean, they actually boast about not being "politically correct" (something the rest of the western world calls "common decency").
Offense and harm are not the same thing so IMHO you can't really make a sweeping statement about a group of people like that.
Also isn't political correctness subjective too? Or is there a canonical definition of what is and is not politically correct that I'm unaware of.
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You base that on what exactly?
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Offensive to whom? By definition, a conservative has a bias towards keeping things as they have been. As such, we should expect a conservative's sensibilities to be more along the lines of our parent's or grandparent's (or maybe even great-grandparent's) generation.
So look at it this way: are the things that conservatives say outside the bounds of common decency of the 1980s? 1950s? 1930s? Then ask if the kind of things that left-leaning users say are outside the bounds of common decency of the 1980s, 1950s, 1930s.
You say that political correctness is just common decency. Your grandparents probably had a different standard for common decency in their day.
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Maybe conservative america needs to appeal to people smart enough to start their own tech companies, so they can compete in the free market to do things the way they like.
They actually do, there is alt-right Twitter aka gab.ai, alt-right Youtube aka Bitchute, alt-right Facebook aka Vkontakte, a boatload of "bulletproof" hosters and domain registrars. They even have their own TV stations (OAN, parts of Fox News), radios and podcasts.
For just about anything you want the alt-right has their "free speech" alternatives. The thing they are whining about is that the reach of these alternatives is way, WAY lower than the reach of the companies/projects of the alt-right. Almost as if the free market actually works and people deliberately choose to not engage in platforms dominated by alt-right hate mongers...
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You mean people like Ellison and Thiel?
That’s already happened. Conservatives don’t do social media as much as the left. Voat and gab haven’t taken off.
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Maybe companies should be idelogical neutral instead? Or do you also think liberal America should start to appeal to conscientious and patriotical people so they can have their own armed forces and police?
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That's not really the point. Regardless of your political view the issue is the same.
If you want to be editorializing people's content then you are a publisher and then you are responsible for the content they write.
The point of social media is that each person is their own publisher and own their own words.
Oterwhise lets just regulate Twitter and FB and Youtube like a publisher and lets see them handle the lawsuits.
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I think the Quillette piece is overstating its evidence to make a rhetorical point. 1) They're only measuring the last enforcement step. 2) n=22 is really small. 3) They're measuring (suspended|trump) and are asserting the relationship is causal. If you download their dataset, you find these 4 people listed under the "supports trump" column: Alex Jones, American Nazi Party, David Duke, Richard Spencer. I think most everyone can agree these 4 weren't suspended because they are conservative or voted for Trump. (The other instances probably aren't partisan either, but not everyone will know about those people)
> database of prominent, politically active users who are known to have been temporarily or permanently suspended from the platform. … Of 22 prominent, politically active individuals who are known to have been suspended since 2005 and who expressed a preference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, 21 supported Donald Trump.
The Vox piece isn't an "admission" that their moderation is biased. Twitter's CEO is "admitting" that the politics of the developers is heavily liberal:
> “We have a lot of conservative-leaning folks in the company as well, and to be honest, they don’t feel safe to express their opinions at the company,” Dorsey said. “They do feel silenced by just the general swirl of what they perceive to be the broader percentage of leanings within the company, and I don’t think that’s fair or right.”
The link you've characterized as an admission discusses internal bias, and doesn't say anything about bias in moderating.
Would you not doubt an "internally racist" person to moderate a black community?
>Update: admission
This link doesn't say what you claim. It's Dorsey talking about the internal social environment at Twitter's offices, not Twitter's moderation policies.
I’m not convinced by the arguments from your first link. As stated by the article itself, a difference in the number of left-leaning vs right-leaning bans does not prove the standards for censorship are different depending on what side of the political spectrum you fall on. It could be that conservative content violates rules more frequently than liberal or centrist content.
It goes on to say this can’t be possible because it would mean that conservative content would have to violate rules at 4x the rate of others, and that statistically its highly improbable. Why? It’s a known problem that Twitter has a lot of accounts that are fake accounts from bad actors trying to sow discord in the US political system, and those tend to be right leaning. Didn’t Twitter relatively recently do a purge of a large number of accounts that were deemed fake? That could easily skew the numbers, especially because those accounts tend to engage in the kind of rhetoric that gets you banned.
And then the article points to cases where liberal leaning content doesn’t get banned even though it should. I can also find cases where conservative content violates the rules yet it didn’t face consequences, most prominently the president’s account. It’s not just liberals who get a free pass, so I’m not sure what that proves.
Is it possible there is a bias in how Twitter sensors content? Sure. But that article makes it sound like they have a data driven, mathematically rigorous proof that it’s true, and I don’t think they meet that mark.
>This is just not true, and is a false dichotomy. Moderation is hard.
It's absolutely true, and has absolutely nothing to do with moderation "being hard". As someone who absolutely opposes Trump, but also absolutely opposes our many wars and global bombings, I'm horrified on a daily basis (and have been since 2009 when I joined Twitter) by open calls for violence against a wide variety of countries from Syria to Venezuela to Iran. When has Twitter ever suspended anyone (let alone a public figure, or even Trump himself, who has called for violence against other countries many times) a single time for openly calling for violence against the people of any of the countries? The answer is never. Its beyond absurd, bordering on delusional, to pretend that Twitter's actions here weren't nakedly political and have absolutely nothing to do with a standard against, "fomenting violence".