Personally no, but consistency and impartiality in their moderation would at the very least be a heap of a lot better than where they're at now where there's just overt hypocrisy in what they choose to ban and allow on their own whims. I should clarify that a person can vehemently disagree with someone or find their position on something to be horrendous while still supporting their right to share said view -- I've seen a lot of people at this point take the stance that if I don't want to ban people with offensive views then I must also share those views and that couldn't be further from true. It's a very "If you're not with me you're my enemy" type of statement that. My own preference would be that all of those would be allowed and in addition that users with differing points of view from those subs would also be able to comment their disagreement there without being removed (so long as they're on topic -- as it is now those subs are/were echo chambers where people who disagree with the world view they purport are kicked out), but that scenario doesn't seem likely to happen. Your original question seeking examples I took to mean, "What evidence do we have that these social media tech giants would not be impartial in moderating content". My understanding is that we already know they manipulate what trends (e.g. what users have put in front of them) and we also know that they're not consistent in applying their own rules therefore it's a valid concern to worry about letting them be the arbiters of free speech and misinformation. That was the point I was attempting to make and what I at least thought I was responding to. I'd say I personally see it this way, yeah. Usually I'd wager if someone says something truly idiotic, it should be trivial for other people to pick their arguments apart in the replies. The problem there is that often dissent is kept out and I see that as a problem too -- so long as the posts/replies are correctly categorized, someone disagreeing with a sub/forum's stance isn't grounds for getting kicked in my mind, but I see it happen all the time. Imo people need thicker skin and to be able to stomach other people disagreeing with them even on core beliefs.
It seems to have gotten pretty bad, yeah. The left have their news networks and the right have theirs. The left have their forums and the right have theirs (though on most mainstream social media sites it seems the bigger communities tend to be left leaning has been my observation -- correct me if I'm wrong there, but I'm thinking mainly the big ones like Reddit and Twitter off the top of my head). From a distance at least it seems like this isn't healthy in the long run, but what can we do eh? I hear you, I think those points of yours seem reasonable to me. I would file the "threatening harm" example under "illegal content" which I can understand being removed from a given platform. Your differentiation there makes sense to me.
US government may reevaluate Section 230: “No provider of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider”.
I’m sure he has genuine supporters out there, but painting in broad strokes my impression is that most people don’t like Biden per se, but rather preferred him to Trump (of course Trump has been a very divisive figure depending on who you ask). Maybe tangentially related, I don’t know for certain who I should blame for the insane inflation recently, but I am very unhappy about that myself. I effectively received a big pay cut since my company only dole out 1 or 2% raises annually (like many companies do by design I expect). Inflation typically averages around 2.5% from what I read and it’s been much much worse lately so companies taking that approach are essentially using inflation to pay their employees less then pocket the difference (as they raise their own prices to keep pace with inflation). This is probably a big part of why they say the only way to get ahead is to hop jobs every couple years I expect. But I’ve gotten off topic eh?
Only on the internet and a few crazies on TV. Everyone I actually talk to is pretty chill about it all. I mean the media celebrates editing out funny lines in Spider-man, so we've got no real problems apparently.
I cut out all the irrelevant inconsistency stuff we aren't talking about. The issue with your argument is that we know - and you know - for a fact, that it is not "trivial" for other people to pick their arguments apart. It always always always requires SIGNIFICANTLY more effort to counter misinformation and disinformation than it does to spread it. It doesn't even stand up to really basic scrutiny, right? I tell you I didn't steal a cookie. It takes me 2 seconds to formulate the lie, say the lie, and now we have a disagreement. I'm focusing on lies because they're simple, but it also works if you just forgot you ate the cookie, or didn't know what you ate was a cookie, right? Anyway, now we have a disagreement, so what do we do? Either I: Accept your lie (or omission or forgetfulness, whatever) and go on with my life, living with a cookie thief, accepting that occasionally cookies are going to go missing or I spend a lot of time proving you ate the cookie. Maybe I set up a camera, takes me hours and money to find and select. Maybe I interrogate you for 10 minutes and you break down at the end of it. Maybe I simply ask if you're lying and you say yes. In every single one of these examples, it takes me longer to prove you're a liar than it takes you to say the lie, even in the most charitable one where you immediately give up. Another perfect example is your single line here. I've spent an entire post debunking this single line because we KNOW it to be untrue. It only took you a single line to say it. It resonates with people (and you) because they desperately want it to be true because wouldn't it be so great if everyone in the world could just come to the marketplace of ideas, lay out their wares, and we select the right ones. But that's just not how it works. And if you really think about it even the analogy to a marketplace would show you that. Would you go to a place with corner stalls of shady merchants with knock off goods who disappear into the shadows after they take your money? Where no store has a name, or an address, or anything identifiable? Where the goods look like real goods but when you get them home they're filled with packing peanuts or bricks? It's the same here. Billions of users in the world. All of them purposefully or accidentally, constantly posting verifiably untrue things. And the only prescription you have is to spend the rest of your life arguing with ghosts while you're slowly overwhelmed because I want to be clear - the misinformation war is being lost. It's not debatable. 35% of Americans think an election was stolen without a single piece of evidence. None whatsoever. Marketplace of ideas is failing. "Calling out" truly idiotic things, and I'm not sure how you can get more idiotic than trying to overthrow a government based on literally nothing, has failed. And now we come to the reason I asked for specifics I still haven't gotten. When we talk about people who are "censored" it's usually pretty telling that the conversation only takes on generalities - vaguely alludes to some nebulous "people" who are being "silenced" for their perfectly rational beliefs. The reason I ask that question about specifics is not so you can talk about inconsistency, it's so you can put a real face to what we're actually talking about. And the things we're actually talking about, as I alluded to in my previous post, are almost always Nazis and ***** adjacent people like Nick Fuentes. We're talking about people who deal in provable lies like Alex Jones. We're talking about "doctors" who claim Ivermectin can cure COVID. Politicians who tell you elections have been stolen with absolutely zero proof. We're talking about people who are trying to tear down our society in exchange for a few dollars for themselves. These people have no place in the "marketplace of ideas". The damage they do requires orders of magnitudes more time to undo than they spend doing it. It requires teams of people to debunk while they need only themselves. It is fundamentally tearing our society apart - and for what? So until we're talking about something specific, and I've obviously laid out multiple specific cases here, any of which we can go over (covid, alex jones, fuentes, etc) - I'm done with the conversation. It's too hard to argue against wisps of ideas
What you're getting at I've heard referred to in the past as the "Bullshit Asymmetry Principle" where it takes an order more magnitude of effort to debunk bullcrap than it does to produce it. Initially I thought that phrase was a clever way to describe it, but I don't think it's always true. In many cases debunking a false statement is very simple to do -- in other cases it's not, it depends. For example, if someone brings up Covid and says it's a conspiracy where the disease is akin to the common cold it takes me about 1 minute to Google for a CDC study covering death and hospitalization rates which I can then post a reply with. Now, when I reply with that, they most likely are not gonna believe it would be my bet -- a lot of people are very cemented in their own insular communities and hold the beliefs associated with said community. But the point of replying isn't necessarily for them, other people that saw their original post and were on the fence can also see the replies. Another example would be anytime someone makes one of the common logical fallacies -- for example on reddit, it seems the first line of defense most places is to start hurling Ad Homs or to just misrepresent the opposition (strawman) has been my observation and I think these kinds of things are very easy to point out when they happen. Other times I agree that you're right -- if someone says, "oh but what about the findings of some obscure doctor" it gets a bit trickier. At that point my go to reply would be to ask for a direct citation to whatever study or person they're referring to, but it would definitely take time to parse and find problems with you're correct (though sometimes it's as simple as asking for a source and when they don't have one or state a terrible one most people just kinda rolls their eyes and that's that). The question at that point is which is preferable -- to have the government/big tech decide for everyone "what is true" and then remove any claims to the contrary or do you let people see everything and decide for themselves (where many people will often be wrong as a result)? Personally I think this is a valid question to argue about. Clearly you're more in the former camp and I'm more in the latter camp, but I'd personally advocate for a "middle ground" approach (in between removing whatever big tech/government deem to be misinformation and wild west no moderation at all I mean). For that like I said in a prior comment I have no issue at all with moderators 1) removing illegal content and 2) hiding posts they've flagged as misinformation/hateful/what have you by default and labeling them with a warning such as "Warning: our moderation team deemed this post to be misinformation based on X citation, are you sure you want to view this?". Now, of course it takes a lot of effort for them to parse through all the bajillions of posts but they already they do this now, the difference is they just take them down entirely where I would propose leaving them with a warning/manual opt in view approach. The upside to a more open platform is that sometimes you do get genuine corrections and valuable viewpoints/information you would not get otherwise. That, and it helps to somewhat combat echo chambers since people are more or less forced to see/interact with opposing viewpoints. You just also get a mountain of garbage along side it, but to me that's a cost that beats the alternative. Personally I'm skeptical that banning people and removing their posts has done much to curb people believing nonsense -- if anything it's probably only fueled conspiracy since people think to themselves "What are they hiding?". For many people it does not matter how much evidence or how thoroughly you debunk their position, they "know" they're right and aren't gonna change their mind. But what does that matter? Unless they are threatening my way of life, I really couldn't care less if they believe a lot of nonsense and want to shout to the rooftops about it. I disagree with this -- I have already provided some specific examples in my prior comments. Beyond that generalities can help give a big picture of what a given problem is and from there you can go to specific examples if people aren't familiar. Sometimes a generality is enough if you're describing a problem that could plausibly happen (e.g. Could big tech/government manipulate social media to sway the public to their own whims? Even if they hadn't done this yet, this is still a reasonable question -- specific examples make the case much stronger, but I don't think it's worthless without them). Since you're looking for further examples to those I listed in my prior comment, another one that applies to Reddit (probably also Twitter from what I gather) relates to recent the trans/pronoun movement. For that/painting in broad strokes there are two camps -- the strict traditionalists and the modernists I'll call them. It seems to me that whole debate really comes down to how you define the underlying terms (man/woman/sex/gender/etc) and what one thinks the function of pronouns is in the English language (are they third party descriptors, do they represent a person's biological sex, do they describe identity? etc). Another question people are arguing about right now is related to sports on that front. Of course these two camps of people do not agree with each other at all when it comes to these questions/definitions and thus end up with very different conclusions, but the actual debate itself is valid seems to me. Twitter/Reddit/California at large has taken their stance with the modernist camp which would be fine, but they take it further and frequently ban anyone that doesn't agree and states so on their platform under the guise of "hate". Now, sometimes they're probably right in fairness and people are just being assholes, but other times people are genuinely trying to have a good faith debate about it and they get removed anyway for not towing the platform holder's own viewpoint (I see this kind of thing happen on Reddit constantly). Merely disagreeing with someone even on something core to their beliefs is not hate and this is something Cali big tech has consistently gotten wrong in their approach to content moderation. It seems like you're more concerned with individuals spreading misinformation and less concerned with big tech/government being manipulative where I'm seeing it the other way around. At the very least something should be done to force their hand on consistently and impartially moderating content.
Most disgusting thing I've seen anywhere when ppl try to correct misinformation with verifiable, proven facts is when some bozo replies "fake news".
Yeah, often times how it goes is: 1) Person submits incorrect statement 2) Other people reply with citations describing how/why said statement is wrong 3) Original person from step 1 is immovable "fake news" is indeed a weak come back, it doesn't argue or prove anything one way or the other. In general a lot of those types of replies irk me when instead of formulating an actual reply people will just say "fake news" or "touch grass" or call people names, you get the idea.
https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/explore?q=44 billion dollars in rupees&date=now 7-d This is a very weird statistical analysis of search terms...why did so many people commit a search to convert $44Bn into Rupees?
But what if "fake news" is Fake?....and then it cost billions of dollars/countless man-hours to prove that in fact it was fake?
I'm sure there is some portion of fake news, but in such a case what I'd prefer to see is why a person thinks it's fake as opposed to just replying with "fake news" and moving on. It just doesn't really seem to provide much information on its own as I see it. I think I might be misunderstanding you perhaps? When you mention the expense of disproving certain statements, did you mean something in particular? Sorry, I think I'm missing something.
I get a dead link 404 error when I click that for some reason. EDIT: Oh whoops, I misunderstood you -- what it probably means is that a lot of people in countries using the Rupee as currency were reading the news of Elon buying Twitter and wanted to know much money it was in their own currency.
Great, we have some real examples of reasons people are banned. I'm going to list out the ones you list here. I also want to make a distinction, a distinction you've up to now been content to blur over, between tech company/government moderation and the moderation of regular unpaid, user admins like on Reddit. We're not talking about those kind of volunteer moderators who are clearly free to moderate their communities in whatever way they see fit provided they operate within the rules of reddit. So stop bringing these examples up. We're talking about tech companies, their moderation policies, what freedom of speech is or should mean, and what should be done about large social media platforms. 1. What one thinks the function of pronouns in the English language should be No one has ever been banned for discussion the functions of pronouns in English. If you can find me a single person who was simply debating how pronouns should be used on any social media platform, who was banned for that discussion I will immediately concede everything and go re-read John Stuart Mill. Now, have people been banned for mocking someone's pronouns, or otherwise being hostile, sure. But no one has ever been banned for debating the "functions of pronouns" this is you, again, using flowery language and generalities to cover up behavior that isn't easy to defend. 2. Trans sports No one has been banned for simply expressing their opinion about trans people in sports. We need only look at everyone's favorite TERF, JK Rowling, who is definitely not banned, or cancelled, on Twitter or elsewhere who regularly posts about how trans people are tricking young girls into being trans in order to erase women. It's trivially easy to find this conversation on twitter by accounts that are definitely not banned. That people are being banned en masse for general good faith discussions of these topics that go against the status quo is a fantasy you and others have made up, or bought into. It's trivially disprovable with just a few google searches. And I want to be clear that I didn't try to find hidden tweets. A number of those have thousands of likes or retweets; they were noticed and undoubtedly reported. This is why I demand specifics, because when you finally give them up, we can start talking about what all modern conversations are about: Whether or not you're even describing a real phenomenon. The goal isn't to change the mind of the banned person, its to prevent them access to scores of people who they can convert and reduce their problematic behaviors. See: CoonTown's ban decreasing hate speech by 80% See: Election misinformation mentions dropping over 70% post-Trump ban. See: Reddit banning FPH which drastically reduced hate directed towards fat people on reddit. I take issue with your framing here; I think it's a subtle tactic to reframe the issue as something that fits closer to a platitude we all generally believe, that touches on tropes like 1984 whether you realize it or not, and uses that to amplify the point. But no one here is advocating the government to decide was is true and remove all other claims. We're talking about removing what is obviously false. There's a distinct difference in type and scope here that your subtle wording difference tries to slip past people. I don't want tech companies or governments to decide truth, philosophy, really anything at all. But there are simple facts, not debatable ones, it is not debatable that covid is not a flu, it is not debatable that the election was stolen, the other examples we have given are not "debatable" points and I DO think these companies should be removing things that uncontrovertibly untrue. The rest of your post I won't go in depth on. Most of it hinges on dissenting opinions being banned which I think I've illustrated that they generally are not; we have multiple tweets here with thousands of likes that honestly if you'd asked me before this convo, even I would've thought would be banned...But there they are - bigotry and all, just out there. And if those aren't getting banned, you really have to wonder what it takes to actually lose your account, and what kinds of behaviors you're actually trying to defend here.
