Tech Censorship

[_honorentheos]

Anyway, your source you got in the form of 1's and 0's instead of real ink is exactly touches on just about everything I described above.

It is what I wrote, not what you wrote, that is described in that article.

Oh? Let's see.

"I think connecting the political desire to use anti-trust legislation against Facebook and Google with pressure to adopt "cancel culture" policies is somewhere between wildly ignorant and dishonest. The closest that comes to this is when some liberals who want anti-trust action against big tech connect not doing enough to censor dishonest ads like they incorrectly imagine occurs in other media to anti-trust action, and those arguments either never or almost never make it into the policy arguments."

Both sides want to see political discourse regulated in a way that favors their own political positions. Liberal advocates want to see more moderation of content that aligns with what some might call "cancel culture", demanding they be regulated or broken up through anti-trust laws. Conservatives want to see big tech broken up because they argue the people in charge of writing search algorithms and other decision makers are biased against conservative views. They argue there need to be alternatives to Google or Twitter where a conservative publication or group isn't being financially punished because the big players are antagonistic to their political views.

Article: On one side is the progressive left, whose members have been appalled by Facebook’s handling of pro-Trump Russian disinformation campaigns and Silicon Valley’s consolidated power. On the other side is the Trumpist right, whose members see the power of social media companies to ban content as censorship and worry that the arteries of communication are controlled by young liberals.

Hmm.

On Tuesday, that alignment will be evident at an antitrust hearing on Capitol Hill featuring executives from Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple, as well as policy experts like Mr. Wu. The hearing, held by the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, will examine “the impact of market power of online platforms on innovation and entrepreneurship.”

“To the bewilderment of many observers, the ascendant pressures for antitrust reforms are flowing from both wings of the political spectrum,” Daniel A. Crane, a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote last year in a paper called “Antitrust’s Unconventional Politics.”

...

Regulation of online speech is not exclusively an antitrust concern, but today these threads are becoming interwoven. Critics argue that big tech companies need to be broken up or regulated because they are suppressing speech.

I guess the article can speak for itself. Oh, wait...

The article also displays naïvété or indifference about conservative motives taking by them at their word which skirts exploring underlying motives that don't take much scratching at the surface to see.

There it is. It reflects your views except it doesn't because it's also naïve of what people who know things know. Right.

[_EAllusion]

Article: On one side is the progressive left, whose members have been appalled by Facebook’s handling of pro-Trump Russian disinformation campaigns and Silicon Valley’s consolidated power. On the other side is the Trumpist right, whose members see the power of social media companies to ban content as censorship and worry that the arteries of communication are controlled by young liberals.

Hmm.

That's what you think "cancel culture" is Honor? Ok. I'm used to cancel culture not referring to wanting to stop Russian disinformation, but rather wanting famous people deplatformed for engaging in immoral conduct or saying socially taboo things especially as it relates to social justice issues. That's why I contrasted it with connecting regulation to accuracy in media advertising rather than cancel culture.

I guess you said, "what some may call" and "some" can refer to just about anyone. Maybe even you. That passive term can be used to refer to just about anything, though, and misleads when the "some people" don't know what they're talking about. In this case, the misleading implication is that liberals are trying to break up big tech companies because those companies aren't doing enough to censor people based on traditional social justice concerns. But that's not really an accurate understanding of what's going on. As far as the push in liberal leadership to wield anti-trust law against big tech goes, you have traditional anti-trust arguments updated for how tech firms create barriers to entry mixed with arguments more at the margins about truth-in-advertising that are based on some dubious comparisons to other media.

There it is. It reflects your views except it doesn't because it's also naïve of what people who know things know. Right.

It's naïve because there's a clear story here that's being avoided in preference for taking notoriously dishonest people at their word without analyzing their statements and actions to see if their motives match their branding. I offered a clear analogy on concerns about voter fraud as a sham justification for polices meant to suppress voting that you ignored to make the point. But, I suppose, there's a chance I'm also calling you naïve here depending on what it is you think, and we can't have that, now can we? Gotta maintain the balance of both sides.

I said it touches on the specific issues I brought up in this thread, which it does. I then said, in direct response to you reference to "cancel culture" and my reference to " some liberals who want anti-trust action against big tech connect not doing enough to censor dishonest ads" where the article clearly is describing the latter and not the former. But hey, "some people" might call that cancel culture, right? It's a writerly get out of jail free card.

[_EAllusion]

Here's two recent Facebook stories from Jeff Legum:

1) https://popular.information/p/the-dirty-secret ... n-shapiros

Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire outlet is massively successful on Facebook. It has more engagement and broader reach than many traditional media sources despite being a a thinly staffed aggregator with sketchy content. It achieves this by partnering with a firm called Mad World News that exploits Facebook's engagement algorithms by re-purposing old stories on incendiary topics encouraging racial and religious bigotry and violence. It creates a fake coordinated web of story amplification. This is a direct violation of Facebooks rules, enforced against others, where you are required to disclose if you are posting content for money and bans artificial boosting of content.

Facebook investigated and said it was fine. Mark Zuckerberg has been relying on Ben Shapiro on a personal level as a story of his engagement with diverse opinions.

2) https://popular.information/p/Facebook-creates ... -exemption

In response to criticism of Facebook for amplifying false and disinformation, Facebook developed an outsourced "fact checking" system to flag potentially misleading content. That system is deeply flawed and filled with serious problems of bias, but this story involves an interesting example.

The Washington Examiner posted an climate denialist article widely shared on Facebook. After a review by a group of scientists, one of Facebook's fact checkers, Science Feedback, found that the article contained "false factual assertions, cherry-picking datasets that support their point, failing to account for uncertainties in those datasets, and failing to assess the performance of climate models in an objective and rigorous manner." The article was rated "false" by Science Feedback and logged in Facebook's system.

A group affiliated with the author of the article, "the CO2 Coalition" appealed and won. The false rating was removed despite the article being crazy-false. But that's not where it ends. Facebook deemed the climate change content to be "opinion" and therefore immune to its fact checking system going forward. Facebook doesn't have a public-facing policy on this, but climate science appears to exist in a loophole opinion zone of fact checking.

Facebook's social policy is run almost entirely by former Republican operatives.

What I will suggest to you is that when conservative politicians and thought leaders threaten to break up big tech because of "bias" what they really are saying is they want more of this or else. It's more about wanting censorship for thee, but not for me with a desire to boost their content. They don't want to break up anything. That's the stick. They want an agreement to do this in exchange for favorable regulation. It's not really different in character than when alt-right types freak out about free speech in response to campus de-platforming on the one hand, but try to get college professors fired for expressing opinions they dislike on the other. It's not a robust commitment to free speech at work here.

And, on a related note, Bill Barr is personally overseeing a fast-tracked anti-trust investigation against Google. Anyone with eyes to see knows what Google needs to do to get a favorable outcome. This is not normal nor is it what liberal democracy looks like.

[_Icarus]

I come across these Ben Shapiro links all the fricken time on Facebook and every time I click just to see what the idiot has to say, I hit a pay wall. I had no idea Facebook was run by Republicans. That explains much.