I don’t know. Some say yes others say no. I’m sure good arguments exist for either. Do you think T-Nation should ban people for linking fake news? Making plans to kill the Vice President? Should Twitter?
Who is currently being “silenced?” Are people really limited in their access to information?
Veiled personal attacks already? If I was the President I could call Fox News and have an interview tonight to complain about it. Who is being silenced? Is that even remotely possible in 2021? With thousands of forums, social media sites, comment sections, far right and far left websites and more moderate ones. Blogs. Who has a viewpoint in 2021 that can’t be put out there?
It’s an observation, not an insult. You just said it yourself…
You are the same way with gun control. You have strong opinions on the subject but lack the vocabulary and knowledge to discuss it in meaningful depth. Yet you still feel compelled to argue with people who understand the subject.
The questions you ask distract from the core issues. The questions I ask shine a light on them. This is also my thread, and we’re here to discuss social media censorship with Jon Stewart as a jumping off point. You could at least do the courtesy of answering my questions if you are sincere about participating in the discussion.
The list of topics I’m ignorant about is quite long, which is why I don’t bother chiming in on topics I don’t understand well enough to form a strong opinion on.
That’s just me though. Maybe I’ll venture out of my wheelhouse and start arguing with bodybuilders about bodybuilding. Seems like it could be fun for me. Who cares if it pollutes the conversation?
I’d just like to point out that you’re working at least in part from a premise that isn’t particularly true. Unless I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying.
The reason I know that a lot of people believe the virus originated in the Wuhan lab, was that there was a shit ton of open speculation, on social media (and other media) that the virus originated in the Wuhan lab. It was all over social media, and I don’t know anyone who was banned for that. We all know that a handful of videos and links were banned at times last year, but as far as I’m aware, just posting about the idea that the virus may have been made in a lab was not a thing that was resulting in bans.
So basically I’m disagreeing that this bit would have gotten anyone banned from anything a year ago.
I didn’t do any actual research for this post, so if there is evidence of a lot of censorship related specifically to this covid origination theory, feel free to share it and I will correct my opinion.
Who’s arguing? Is this not a discussion board? It seems as if you’re wanting to silence me which is odd in a thread where you’re complaining about “censorship.”
Not really. I merely said I don’t think someone like the President is silenced. And that I don’t see why if t-nation has terms and conditions Twitter can’t. Seems like that was a pretty simple question.
You probably shouldn’t post then. Two jar is an expert on this apparently and he created a thread for only experts. Right wing circle jerk only I guess. Any discussion of anything else should be censored as should all questions. Doesn’t take people long to come around to that I guess! I mean look at that completely unbiased expert post on Section 230. It’s clear that it’s incredibly well studied and absent of any bias. No mentions of fixes or what the language should be but a reminder that the establishment was wrong about Trump.
But hey I shouldn’t post on this anymore. I’ve been asked to stay silence. This dang cancel culture.
This is factually incorrect. It was a hard strike for any content providers on YouTube. I haven’t reviewed twitter policy yet, but all of the big tech giants tend to row in the same direction.
Unlike other posters in this forum, I’m always ready to state my case in the clearest terms I can muster, back it up with examples and admit it when I am wrong about something. That’s because you and I have good character and know how to participate in and add to a good-faith discussion.
EDIT: I might have been wrong about the time frame. I’m unsure if the policy was in full effect exactly one year ago. So please, allow me to revise the dates on my claim. You would have been banned from facebook for advancing the Lab Leak theory between February 9th and May 26th. If you didn’t get banned before, you would get ridiculed as a conspiracy nut and called racist, as President Trump was when suggesting the lab might be responsible.
Here’s the requested info, straight from facebook. You can see the policy change quite clearly.
Update on May 26, 2021 at 3:30PM PT:
In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps. We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge.
Update on February 8, 2021 at 10:00AM PT:
Removing More False Claims About COVID-19 and Vaccines
Today, we are expanding our efforts to remove false claims on Facebook and Instagram about COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines and vaccines in general during the pandemic. Since December, we’ve removed false claims about COVID-19 vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts. Today, following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), we are expanding the list of false claims we will remove to include additional debunked claims about the coronavirus and vaccines. This includes claims such as:
I’d also like to address this point, because it is pertinent.
None of these platforms are casting a comprehensive net that removed every Tom, Dick and Harry the moment they posted something against the terms of service. They had some algorithms automatically pop up “fact checks” and even flagged posts for review, but we’re talking about billions of posts.
THey don’t care what your cousin Ricky thinks about the coronavirus, nor do they particularly care how many people read his howling at the moon posts. What they do is actively work to silence mainstream voices, all of whom happen to be conservative or otherwise run contrary to the narratives they want to advance at the time, like COVID being from nature.
Steven Crowder is about as mainstream conservative as mainstream conservative gets. His livestream of the election had the most viewers of any program online or in traditional broadcast news.
He’s currently only active on YouTube due to a court injunction. This is absurd. He runs a Daily Show for conservatives, harming nobody by doing so.
There’s also the case of every social media giant working in tandem to ban a sitting President of the United States.
There’s also Jon Stewart, who is beating us over the head with reality, which is why he’s always been funny no matter who has been in office.
I counted ten, including this one. And yes, your questions do distract from the core issue.
Feel free to re-join the conversation if you can participate in good faith. You could start by answering the pertinent and clear questions I posed.
Please try to keep in mind that an overwhelming and increasing majority of people get their news from social media over the internet. I couldn’t find recent data, but it was 62 percent five years ago. I’m sure it is closer to 75-80 or higher now. These questions do not exist in a vacuum, but inside a system of laws that play out in the real world.
I think that this is not a simple case of Facebook is a private company and can tell anybody to get lost for any reason.
Social media platforms provide a channel with terms of service. It’s well recognized that a large social media audience is valuable to the one who has access to that audience. Moreover, it is common practice to put significant resources into building an audience. Once resources have been invested, the argument that social media platforms are private companies and can do what they want begins to be tenuous. Indeed, this is not a first amendment issue, but there are important contract, implied contract, and business practice issues that don’t make it as simple as the social media platforms can do whatever they want, whenever they want. I am not a lawyer to make the exact case, but I see this as somewhat analogous to someone who is leasing and improving land that is owned by another. The idea of squatter’s rights even begin to come into play here.
Obviously, this is relatively new legal ground and the answers are not settled or obvious. The point I am making here is just that legal analogies don’t seem to necessarily make it a simple case for social media platforms having absolute control and, moreover, I don’t think most people want them to.
Social media platforms are under government regulation and, as such, a first amendment argument does start to come into the picture, albeit in a somewhat roundabout way. If congress, by threat of regulation and oversight, can coerce social media platforms into abridging free speech in ways that congress dictates, the situation is not functionally different from congress abridging free speech. This is, in practice, how free speech infringement works in many totalitarian regimes. TV stations might be independent on paper, but they know that if they don’t push and support the state narrative while silencing dissent, the state will shut them down and replace them with more compliant so-called independent run TV stations.
Even in the US, this is already not a hypothetical situation. For instance, https://thehill.com/…/535342-democrats-urge-tech-giants…. Urging tech giants to change algorithms that facilitate the spread of extremist content only sounds benign if you don’t stop to consider that “extremist content” is neither well defined nor likely to be consistently applied.
In the case of COVID, we know that Zuckerberg actively invited Fauci, a government bureaucrat, to have input into what Facebook would ban, remove, or shadowban. This isn’t a hypothetical. It’s already happening.
Facebook “fact checking” is abysmal. In part, this is a result of the system where fact checking is extended to allow rulings such as “misleading” or “lacks context.” Literally everything posted on the internet can be ruled to lack context as long as there is some fact related to the topic that has not been shared in the original posting (this is always true, as long as the definition of “related” is not very strictly narrow). In practice, “lacking context” is applied by Facebook “fact checkers” to mean that the fact checkers would like to link a post that presents an opposite point of view because they don’t agree with the first point of view. When they do this is entirely arbitrary.
Similarly, “misleading” basically just means that the fact presented in the post lead to a conclusion that the fact checkers don’t agree with and thus they think it is misleading. There is no consistent standard.
More disturbing than the deplatforming of Trump in the aftermath of January 6th, was the deplatforming of Parler. The free market argument that if you don’t like Facebook and Twitter was always a bit tenuous when you consider that social media works by having a critical mass. (Google+, anyone?). But if you add on the fact that existing social media and tech companies actually control much of the infrastructure needed to make a new social media platform, the argument borders on the absurd.
It is true, to some extent, that alternate social media platforms such as Parler are somewhat populated by those people who didn’t feel welcome on the more mainstream social media platforms. And some of those people are a bit outside the Overton window, to put it mildly. However, free speech is only meaningful when you can say offensive things. If you can’t say offensive things, free speech is now regulated by whomever controls the definition of offensive.
As a practical consideration, I’m not sure what forcing extremists into an echo chamber with themselves is supposed to accomplish. In actual fact, much of the coordination and outreach that led to the January 6th capitol incursion was carried out on conventional social media platforms. AWS didn’t use it as an excuse to shut down Twitter. Apple didn’t pull the Twitter and Facebook apps.
Section 230 has become much too broad in its application and scope. We need to separate the control of IT infrastructure from the control of web platforms. What we have now would be akin to a company owning both the power grid and a grocery store chain. And then they would rule that a rival grocery store chain had violated the electricity contract and stop electric service. The other company could sue, but not before the milk goes sour. It sounds absurd, but that is the sort of situation we have in tech right now.
This is how discussions work. This is a discussions board. Unless you were really just looking for everyone to say “yeah Twitter bad force them to do what I want.” And then a fit when someone doesn’t give it. I asked who was silenced and how and some other questions that are very pertinent to the discussion. If a discussion is what you were after. Perhaps I read your post wrong as the diatribe about Dems, ministry of truth, or whoever else is currently the worst thing that ever happened.
I participated in good faith from the beginning. Then I got attacked and told I wasn’t intelligent enough to discuss it. You tend to say people aren’t participating in good faith when they disagree with you.
@Silyak Thank you for the insightful and thoughtful post. Anyone interested in having a good conversation about this topic ought to read, understand and consider what you just posted. Especially what was done to Parler.
To be clear, I am ENCOURAGING anyone who wants to make the case for the status quo to speak up. Please, by all means, state your case. I think a good starting point is an explanation of all of the harm prevented by the censorious actions of social media tech giants. Or benefit gained.
However you frame it, I would love to hear someone make the case for the status quo.
I would agree with this. Though I would maintain you can do this in countless places across the internet. What some people seem to be mad about is some of the popular places have taken a stand against some of this. But to me silenced is quite the stretch. I can’t post on Facebook is not the same thing as being silenced. When I can use probably hundreds of thousands of other
T-Nation isn’t popular enough to have terms and services, but Facebook is too popular to have them? What’s the magical amount of popularity where you lose control?
I agree with this. It’s not consistent and it’s borderline impossible to check all facts anyways. Most of my Facebook friends are Republicans since I’ve lived in Kansas my whole life. So months of masks are bad and the election was stolen. Some stuff highlighted for fact checking and some not. Sometimes even the same stuff.
It’s just such a different time and I think depending on the angle one looks at things matter. If I’m a loony in 1900 saying stuff who can I really effect? The people on the block? In the town at best?
But now I can edit information, edit pictures, edit video. And maybe try to convince millions of people of potentially harmful things. So the question becomes is that harmless free speech that should be protected at all cost? Or is it a public safety issue? Because if it’s the former we would say don’t do anything. But if it’s the latter some would say you have an obligation to do something.
I don’t claim to know the right answer. And I don’t pretend I’m an expert just because I read a few articles. But I think it’s all worthy of discourse.
My thoughts are that if facebook bends backwards for governments in other countries wrt to censorship of their own content, then section 230 shouldn’t apply to them anymore. If they had just decided to pull out of these countries or let them ban them altogether, it would be a different story.
That’s another good point to highlight regarding section 230. It’s almost as if the international tech conglomerates who just so happen to control the flow of most people’s information about the world are accidentally working in tandem with governments because their interests just so happen to align.
Of course, reasonable people trust our trusted information gatekeepers, along with dutifully dismissing crazy conspiracies like the Wuhan Lab Leak that only racist wackos would even consider.
Stop the steal! You know they are just hoarding it for themselves right? Have you seen the videos of them counting plazma jugs? Me neither so what are they hiding. Somehow a bunch of plazma just happened to disappear?
I’ve written before that I only believe in social welfare…
LOL your post appeared just when I was typing something about this. Not kidding.
Ok what I was saying is that I would be a complete free market guy IF government involvement with corporations was truly minimal. In reality, it’s not. I’ve posted a couple of studies showing the resultant income gap today being a direct result of this before in previous and current developing nations.
So, imo, if the government has a hand in causing the problems by creating such a system, they also have the responsibility to fix them through this system. It’s a shitty situation to me and definitely not what I would want in a perfect world, but this is reality and I can’t think of any better solutions.
I live across the globe! The fucker didn’t give me enough lead time to make plans for travel! He writes in parables.
EDIT:
A good point that @Silyak brought up is the improperly defined rules and definitions of things like “extremist” or “hate” speech which inevitably trickle down to lessor “offenses”. It’s too open to subjectivity. There are actual laws in some countries like that and even top lawyers can’t figure that shit out lol.
But, while judges (where jury systems don’t exist) are properly educated in, and trained to interpret such laws, and there is a good amount of literature pertaining to them, corporations have nothing similar for the ones doing the moderation.
This is a CORE issue. Hate speech laws are offensive to me.
IMO our government generally has this correct already. Short of direct calls to incite violence or clear harm, you should feel free to speak your mind in the way you find appropriate.
I don’t see a problem with someone reading a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi’s thoughts on Twitter. I don’t see a problem with letting the Nazi do it and letting people conclude what they will about the individual, the people who liked the post, shared the post or failed to speak out against the post.
I want to see the worst ideas get highlighted, just like I want to see someone earnestly make the case for the status quo regarding online censorship. By all means, state your case. Put it out in the open.
Let us not squander the possibilities that having both an America and an internet present.
I’d like to make it clear that IF social media corporations had NO government involvement in any way, shape or form, I’d absolutely be for letting them do whatever the fuck they want. But this clearly isn’t the case today.
While I do not know much about the US, I DO KNOW that in other places, corporations are only able to this big with at least partial support from governments or through passing various flawed legislation meant to curb certain undesirable activities without regard for the bigger picture which end up preventing competitors from entering the market mostly due to unforeseen factors for the latter.