Comment by nomilk
8 hours ago
I hope for the good of mankind, all sides of politics unite against deplatforming and oppressing opposing viewpoints.
It's sad that certain topics (anti-ICE, Epstein) neutered on a social media platform, but this went on for years when the politics were reversed.
Let everyone have their say, I say.
But the thing is people aren’t having “their say”. Social media companies are amplifying voices and viewpoints. They are not acting as “common carriers” letting quality sift to the top. It is curated and crafted.
Now they're thumbing down the scale for censorship.
“Letting quality sift to the top” implies that there is a way for this to happen without curation.
Pure user vote driven things like Reddit are a failure (echo chambers, emotional appeals, bot rings, etc). So I’m curious what you think would let that happen?
Even HN is heavily moderated to maintain topics.
Moderation is not amplification.
I am not sure why this was flagged but I don’t think it’s wrong. I am not sure if it’s a uniquely American thing but the internet has caused an unfortunate case of brigading for almost anything. I like to think I sit fairly middle in a lot of American topics I lean left on some items, taxes, healthcare, free school lunches and right on others but I remember how easy it was a number of years ago to be labeled a racist. You really cannot have an opinion about much these days without someone labeling you something unfavorably. It’s unfortunate.
Ironically, "labelling" someone else is an act of free speech as much as anything else.
I don’t think it’s ironic and my point was not the act of labeling itself but more of how America has become a brigading culture. Free speech should be protected, even for things that we know are wrong but we have this decay of the internet and culture where you are either with someone or against them.
6 replies →
"Labelling" is different than censorship though, no?
I think it’s all part of the same culture of brigading. My comment was more an extension of thought to the parents that America has gone down a hole where dialogue no longer exists.
> but I remember how easy it was a number of years ago to be labeled a racist
Centrist my ass
I am going to vouch for this comment because this is a great example of what I was describing. People jump to whatever conclusion they want and you are either with them or without. It’s sad what has come to be in society.
7 replies →
You can't have all side of politics unite when one side is doing that thing you want to unite against.
I don't know.
I think that over the years, bad faith actors in the world of geopolitics have taken advantage of this in a very nefarious way in order to sow chaos, bad-faith/purposefully-inaccurate "talking points" and capture the hearts and minds of the ignorant, the stupid, and the willfully delusional masses who are desperate to cling to a conspiracy if it fits their worldview which is in turn reinforced by said bad actors.
Is it a potentially unconstitutional slippery slope? yes, absolutely. Is it something we need to tackle as adults and citizens? yes, absolutely. Should the desires of SV tech bro billionaires have any input in those discussions? no, absolutely not.
To me, the media is/are nothing more than drug sellers at this point. They have their weapon "of truth" sold to the very people you listed above. I do my absolute best to not consume any media because I know it is twisted and often wrong (eg. AI generated content). The best I can do is simply not participate in their war. Reddit, TikTok, X, etc are definitely supplying heavy drugs to anyone who wants to be hooked.
At some point, we definitely need a cooling-off period where people from both sides refrain from inciting anger from the masses.
[dead]
Yeah except when it comes to what this was really about, in which case "all sides" happily go along with it. As it turns out censorship to protect our precious zionist ethnostate is something everybody agrees with.
the right wing furor about deplatforming and media bias was always just a bad faith rhetorical tactic. When Musk bought Twitter, it became clear that there was no conspiratorial algorithmic suppression -- in fact, the code showed that the only thumb on the scales was to promote Musk's own account. The right wing owned essentially all the media before, and within the last few years they also own Twitter, Facebook, The Washington Post, TikTok, Paramount, CBS, and are trying to grab CNN.
There isn't an all-sides argument here; there's one side in almost total control of the entire discourse, whining about being victims, and promotingly increasingly insane viewpoints.
"it became clear that there was no conspiratorial algorithmic suppression". Yes, the Twitter files showed that the suppression was done mostly by humans.
the twitter files, what a laugh. Can you point to a particular part of the twitter files that was not obviously overblown, wrong, or subsequently thoroughly discredited that supports your claim of conspiratorial right wing suppression? Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
Not to mention, the largest media distributors / syndicates were parroting increasingly right-wing talking points instead of staying neutral or simply presenting the facts and letting the viewer come to their own conclusions.
there is no left-wing media machine that even comes within a billion light years of the strength of the right-wing machine. Effectively, the entire spectrum is owned by hard-right billionaires.
Media has fallen victim to the need for continuous profits (because they have been targeted over and over by bad faith right wing actors) and the journalistic integrity of the 4th estate has effectively been weaponized by the people who need to be named and shamed.
[flagged]
More nuanced laws can prevent such behaviour without impacting free expression. For example, Public Nuisance laws. That way the content itself isn't legislated again, just the appropriateness of the time and place, and the society isn't prevented from having fictional works, history texts, art containing the banned topic.
Thank you, Godwin.
Godwin's law is not a useful heuristic, and Godwin himself regrets it. Every universal principle should have its extreme cases tested. If you claim it should be fine to say anything at all, then you have to test that against the limits like HH, or North Korean propaganda, or death threats, etc.
Yes. Now you don't know who to watch. Forcing conversations under ground just requires a larger intelligence network. Let them say things on Reddit and the like to simply keep track using simple tools.
Even better than tracking them, reason with them (à la Daryl Davis [0]), even if only a few minds are changed, it's a big win for society.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis
[dead]