When your revolution against "platforms" is led by people who host all their code on GitHub and have a public LinkedIn profile, you're not paying attention to your surroundings and will inevitably be taken advantage of.
i host, like, maybe two percent of my code on github. what's there is just for show. and i am no great fan of linkedin, that is for sure. same with facebook. but i am not quite such a big deal that i can afford to ignore all of those big bad platforms. i am not quite ready to go live in a cabin in the woods, in other words.
So, in essence, you don't have anything meaningful to respond with. You're perfectly fine with using centralized platforms when it's convenient and their ownership aligns with your ideology. You might say you don't like them, but you like them well enough to put links to them on your personal website.
you seem to be advocating for absolutism: these things are bad, so abandon them completely. i don't think that's reasonable, or workable. there is basically no corporation in the world who has clean hands. i don't think it's possible to divest myself of all of them.
I think it's not advocating for absolutism as much as moral consistency. You cannot in one stroke suggest that people who stay on Twitter are behaving immorally and supporting, among other things, the banning of journalists, while at the same time excusing your own use of Microsoft and Meta platforms with "[nobody] has clean hands".
He is half-correct, but not in a good way. When people on the left say something that goes against new-left agenda, they get suppressed too. That is not a redeeming quality of the system or an indicator of fairness. It simply shows that the ideology driving moderation is even more narrow-minded and intolerant of dissent than most observers assume at first sight.
At the same time, it's trivial to demonstrate that YouTube and Twitter (easy examples) primarily target conservatives with their "moderation". Just look at who primarily uses major alternative platforms.
But that's besides the point, because it's much simpler than that. You don't need elaborate analysis to see that people tired of Twitter "moderation" filled 4 other platforms: Gab, Parler, Minds and Truth Social. Literally all of them are characterized as right-wing by the same left-wing media outlets that claim that Twitter is impartial in moderation.
I'm tired of gaslighting around this issue. Just within replies to my above comment I've gotten two contradictory statements. One, that there is no bias in Twitter moderation, because conservatives are actually targeted less. Two, that there is no bias because conservatives are more likely to break rules, so they should be banned more often. We have two diametrically opposite descriptions of reality that nevertheless converge on the same conclusion. This is ideology-driven reasoning at its worst.
I said that at best it is impartial, and if anything, is more permissive to conservatives.
The fact that your "logic" is that extremists like KKK and other rightwing nut jobs are not allowed on twitter and thus have to create their own sites is proof of a double standard is absolutely insane.
You're so busy with your persecution fetish you cannot even see simple reason.
Or consider that perhaps the right in particular tends to harbor and support people who lean more towards disinformation, hate speech, and incitement to violence.
>No one argues that speech must have value to be allowed (c.f. shitposting).
>Hereʻs the answer everyone knows: there IS no principled reason for banning spam.
The whole threads seems like it revolves around this line of reasoning, which strawmans what free speech advocates are actually arguing for. I've never heard of any of them, no matter how principled, fighting for the "right" of spammers to spam.
There is an obvious difference between spam moderation and content suppression. No recipient of spam wants to receive spam. On the other hand, labels like "harmful content" are most often used to stop communication between willing participants by a 3d party who doesn't like the conversation. They are fundamentally different scenarios, regardless of how much you agree or disagree with specific moderation decisions.
By ignoring the fact that communication always has two parties you construct a broken mental model of the whole problem space. The model will then lead you stray in analyzing a variety of scenarios.
In fact, this is a very old trick of pro-censorship activists. Focus on the speaker, ignore the listeners. This way when you ban, say, someone with millions of subscribers on YouTube you can disingenuously pretend that it's an action affecting only one person. You can then draw false equivalency between someone who actually has a million subscribers and a spammer who sent a message to million email addresses.
It's not a mistake. It's a PR strategy. Social media companies are training people to blame content and each other for the effects that are produced by design, algorithms and moderation. This reassigns blame away from things that those companies control (but don't want to change) to things that aren't considered "their fault".
Its really all media not just social media that profits from propaganda. Turn on CNN. You might agree with what they are saying versus what the talking heads on fox news are saying, but they use the same state of constant panic style of reporting because that works really well to fix eyeballs on advertisements, both overt ones and the more subtle ones that happen during the programming.
That is very much a problem in the US (AFAIK) where news and entertainment are merged. Other countries have laws to ensure that news are presented emotionless and factual.
Crazy conspiracy theories, eh? People running those companies routinely talk to one another. When it seems they act together, it's often because they actually do act together.
This is just 2nd order gaslighting. For many, many years Google was denying obvious problems with how their search system worked. Denial and gaslighting was clearly their marketing strategy. It kind of worked too, at least in terms of public opinion in tech space. Now something has changed and they're suddenly pretending to care. Problem is, this effectively gaslights people about their prior gaslighting.
Why was the company blatantly denying obvious issues for so many years? What has changed? Why should I trust their judgment all of a sudden?
It's kind of like someone who is a pathologic liar having been caught in various lies for many years, swearing to tell you the truth, but not admitting to the past lies.
Hm, after reading the title I monetarily thought the article would talk about the implosion of Union Pacific and complications of switching to a different provider. FYI:
TLDR version. UP switched to some fancy "efficient" system several years ago, laid off thousands of employees. At the time many people predicted collapse of the company in a couple of years. Three years later it is plagued by rampant theft and trash on the tracks. This year it refused to ship fertilizer during planting season. It also refused to ship additives to diesel fuel earlier this year (amidst general truck shipping issues and skyrocketing fuel costs). Meanwhile the CEO is smiling like a Cheshire Cat and giving out Bloomberg interviews about efficient management.
Blatantly incorrect. Google engages in egregious political censorship all the time. Including censorship for Russian government and censorship of US anti-war voices.
Considering the importance of the topic, and provided the linked articles actually contained examples of Google censoring anti-war propaganda, I believe the swipe would have been fully justified.
Highly emotional tone changes how the data affects the reader. If he is right, I would surely better remember next time that Google is in the same ballpark due to the insult hitting hard. If he is wrong, I will know better to ignore such claims in the future without a direct quote or something else that consumes less time than reading an entire linked article.
There is a difference between "Google does not censor anti-war content" and "Google does censor anti-war content, but usually has an excuse I find acceptable".
When a company puts Jon Lennon's Merry Xmas (War is Over) behind age restriction banner[1], the question stops being "Is there censorship?" and becomes about the logic of such censorship.
>The third one was temporary until Google stopped operating in Russia altogether.
They've censored other things on behest of the Russian government for years[2]. Again, I cannot fathom how people on a tech website like HN can be unaware of such things. This is common knowledge broadly covered on mainstream websites.
Precisely zero of what you mentioned so far is censoring anti-war content.
Even in the translation case (which I assume you mean by your "excuse" remark) the original source is still available as is. I am not even sure from the description what translation team it was talking about and what does it have to do with Google exactly. "translate company text for the Russian market" this passage sounds like it talks about translating Google's own interfaces, help pages, press releases, or support articles to Russian. E.g. no external voice is being censored.
Just because you think some issues is "inevitable" in the future doesn't mean you should spend academic resources to make it happen faster, while simultaneously making it easier to exploit.
