Comment by efitz
5 years ago
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.
>Offense and harm are not the same thing
Correct, but it's disingenuous to suggest they're not strongly correlated at the group level.
You base that on what exactly?
>You base that on what exactly?
Just about every other editorial on right leaning outlets that complain and moan about political correctness?
Oh, and actual self-identified right leaning HN/Redit users. Just ask, many of them will be quick to tell you (some version of) "political correctness is BS".
(To be clear, I know not all right-leaning people think this way, but a very large proportion do).
Just so I'm clear, are you arguing that avoiding political correctness is not a core tenet of a large part of the conservative base? I thought it was a badge of honor for many?
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Almost the entire American right wing media is continually hate- and fearmongering about their perceived political opponents, actively and/or knowingly spreading disinformation, and has been for my entire adult life, at least as long as I've been paying attention, which is going on several decades. That's their only move, give people enemies so they don't actually have to propose solutions to anything. It's easy to give people enemies, much harder to actually solve complicated problems that require getting everyone on board. There used to be a more intellectual, reality-focused American right wing (and still is, but to a vastly smaller degree than just a few years ago). But now Alex Jones has replaced William F. Buckley and modern Republicans are much more likely to know about Rush Limbaugh than Edmund Burke. Buckley and Burke would get tarred and feathered as RINOs nowadays and that's really saying something.
That's not an opinion or a judgement, that's just reality, as much as 1+1=2 or the sky being blue. It doesn't require interpreting anything or contextualizing anything. It's obvious and plain as day, and eyes and ears and integrity and maturity are all that are required to perceive it. I absolutely believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that any reasonable application of any reasonable rules of moderation concerning threats, abuse, and misinformation would have much more impact on a typical Trump supporter in 2020 than anyone else (still faithful in 2020 folks, that's the type of person we're talking about here), and that that would be almost certainly the fault of the individual, and not biased moderation. The only way moderation would affect both sides equally would be if both sides were the same, or composed of the same sort of people.
But both sides have never been the same, and that's more true now than at any time since the Civil War. Except that now Republicans identify with Confederates instead of Lincoln and his ideals, and somehow Democrats flipped from representing Evangelical rural Southerners to representing the industrialized, urban, and successful parts of America, that were represented by Republicans in Lincoln's day.
FWIW I agree with George Washington that political parties themselves are the poison pill that repeatedly divides and screws up America, and that our current system is fatally flawed because it naturally leads to a two-party system, and that two-party systems by definition lead to more corruption and shittier governance. Just because one party is clearly criminally corrupt doesn't make the other party the goodguys, but until (if ever) we get rid of FPTP voting, it's a "pick the lesser evil" situation, and hoo boy is one evil obviously lesser than the other one.
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The Quillette article posted as evidence above says exactly that:
"Perhaps conservatives are simply more likely to violate neutral rules regarding harassment and hate speech. In such case, the observed data would not serve to impugn Twitter, but rather conservatives themselves."
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.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply.
The overall trend is that justice and respect for human dignity has steadily, undeniably, increased over the last several hundred years. Therefore, generally speaking, I would say that yes, a modern 30-something has more "decency" than one of 50, 75 or 100 years ago.
To be totally clear, I don't fault my grandparents or other people that are products of these eras. They aren't necessarily bad people. And certainly, the measure of "common decency" would, of course, be different then.
I just can't wrap my head around longing for a time when society was more constrained/repressive/intolerant. Yes, there are things I think were better in the past, but they are the exception.
(side note: this is not to say I don't think political correctness can go too far, it certainly can. There are exceptions to everything).
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I really don't understand the intuition behind using a prescription on American conservatism. It's like if I wanted to explain the Tories or the Whigs to you, I began with some lofty statement about intellectual principles.
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...
Or the other more logical reason being that free speech platforms are typically only clones of more poput platforms which don't offer any more features or increase ease of use.
I think it's completely possible for a popular pro free speech platform to exist provided it is able to be more user friendly or have some other killer feature.
Conservative is not the same as alt-right. Most conservatives wouldn't go anywhere near Gab.
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.
The problem with the offshoots is that they instantly turn into cesspools. I don't think it's that conservatives do social media less it's that associating themselves with values they disagree with isn't popular. Even the conservatives that agree with the people "saying the quiet bits out loud" know that it's tactically dumb to align yourself with them.
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?
You can't rule that 'corporations are people' when it suits you, and can donate to political campaigns...
... and then say "no, they need to be ideologically neutral" when they act in ways you dislike.
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Companies have some of the same rights as people. Why should we expect companies to be neutral when we don't expect people to be neutral? Governments must be neutral, including armed forces and police, but even then neutrality doesn't mean letting one group break rules (laws in the case of government) with impunity just because they're the ones who most frequently break those rules.
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Why should they be neutral and how would you enforce that? What does "ideological neutral" even mean?
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Maybe companies should be allowed to do whatever they want on their own websites
Companies cannot be neutral. They have a base just like any politician. Twitter has acutely recognized - I believe - that their base is libera, and it's important to go along with that base. Would Twitter be as popular if a conservative was running it?
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Ideological neutral by whose standards? If conservatives tend to violate TOS more frequently and get blocked/banned, then that is neutral. They are simply enforcing their TOS based on the content.
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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.
There's a difference between "editorializing" and "omitting". They're not changing the hate speech, they're just not showing it.
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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.