According to the law, at least in Australia and the US, corporations do have essentially all the same rights that any permanent legal human resident would have. You say they were established by lawyers, but they were actually established by a combination of statutes/common law making corporations separate legal entities that act like persons as far as the law is concerned, the rights established in those statutes and the constitutions of the respective states/countries, and court rulings, which are legally binding. And those rulings are based upon plain readings of the relevant laws and basic logic (unlike QI, which has no basis in the text of the law itself). Changing the “terms of service”, insofar as it concerns constitutional rights and what the government can and cannot regulate, would require either the federal Supreme Court of that nation to overrule existing SC precedent in that country (which is unlikely and rarely ever happens) or for an amendment to that country’s constitution that explicitly excludes corporations from having those rights to be ratified, which is also rare and incredibly unlikely. Thus, as a practical matter, legislators cannot simply take those rights away whenever they want to.
Masnick has never expressed opposition to generally taxing these companies or companies in general. He has said that taxing links goes against the fundamentals of the internet and makes no sense to begin with, and he may be against singling out individual companies to be taxed differently, but he’s never been against Google, Facebook, Twitter, or any other company paying the taxes it lawfully owes or in increasing existing taxes on those companies. His opposition is narrowly towards link taxes, specifically, regardless of who’s paying them or to whom or how much.
Re: Re: With first paragraph, you express desire to restrict spe
By the way: long ago I stated Maz should restrict fanboy speech
to civil, and with my ally AdSense FORCED it on Techdirt! -- Yes, you kids now can't use the vile words you want to express complete disagreement with that, because if do you risk AdSense again with-holding payments from a "dangerous and derogatory" site!
Actually, neither the rules of discourse here nor the discourse itself have changed. Yes, AdSense did threaten to/did pull ads from articles with, shall we say for the sake of argument, less-than-civil comments, but no actual changes to the moderation policies nor the comments themselves actually occurred because of that. If I wanted to call you a fuckwit Nazi terrorist pedophile motherfucker or something and say that you’re better off killing yourself, the repercussions I would get if I did so now would be no different than if I had before that whole thing happened. Now, I would never do that, and I wouldn’t say that there’d be no consequences, but the fact is that those consequences would have nothing to do with that event.
You've not grasped that the corporate control of speech that you long advocated applies to you too!
Actually, yes we do. We just don’t whine about it or say that the law should be changed to stop it or claim that the law doesn’t protect it or anything like that.
Google has, and should have, every legal right to not put ads on articles if they or their comments sections are disagreeable to them or not put ads on this site at all if they don’t want to. They may threaten or actually use that power to put pressure on Techdirt to remove offending content, and that’s perfectly legal and should be outside of certain circumstances not at all relevant here. Techdirt can choose to cave, negotiate, push back, and/or find an alternative source of revenue, like soliciting and displaying ads without AdSense. What Google cannot do is moderate content on this site directly; only Techdirt is legally free to directly moderate (or not moderate) the actual content on this site as it wishes.
We are all well aware of these facts and their potential consequences.
No more will Timothy Geigner, aka Dark Helmet, target me out of the blue with unprovoked racist textual assaults such as this:
"There are white people, and then there are ignorant motherfuckers like you...."
1) That was, like, a decade ago. It was also an isolated case that has never repeated itself at all. Why do you still insist on whining about it? Just let it go already. You’re embarrassing yourself.
2) As was explained to you then and many times since then, that was not actually a statement referring to you. Geigner was just spamming quotes from Obama’s book in response to you repeating the same nonsense ad nauseum. They were not intended to have any actual meaning whatsoever. They were chosen at random, and most of them made no sense as an actual response to what was said before. That you found one of them offensive and misinterpreted it as referring to you is irrelevant and was pure chance.
3) I’m not sure that it is racist, but not having read the context of that in the actual book it was pulled from, it’s hard for me to say for sure either way.
Heh, heh. Go on, "prove" to me that you CAN write that!
Okay. Fine. It’s not something I’d normally say, but you did literally ask for this:
There are white people, and then there are ignorant motherfuckers like you.
There. I wrote it. So what?
In fact, you kinda undermined your own point by writing it yourself. You may claim that you were just quoting someone else, but so was Geigner at the time.
Re: Well that's one way to drive companies out of the country
I’m not entirely sure how that would be enforced, anyways. If they don’t have a residence in India, India would lack the ability to actually do anything to that company.
Read the articles and discussions about net neutrality, telecom companies, Hollywood, and intellectual property, then see if you can honestly say that “we always defend Big Business and always side with Big Business against America and Americans”.
Also, how is siding with users, smaller sites, and non-profits like Wikipedia “sid[ing] with Big Business”? It doesn’t look like you even bothered to read the comment you’re responding to, because there’s no connection between them.
I don’t click links unless there’s a clear description of what I can expect to find that explains its relevance and the point the poster is trying to make. You provided a bare link with the subject line, “suuuuuure they did”, which does none of that.
Re: Re: Re: Thanks for not being the Gestapo, I guess?
“[W]here people deliberately lie […] or where you deliberately push for violence or dangerous actions against people as a show of power“ is not even remotely equivalent to “whatever I disagree with”. A lie is where one deliberately tells a falsehood or says something that is so obviously false that no reasonable person could possibly believe it. He even gave the example of someone claiming that Sandy Hook was a false-flag operation as a deliberate lie. That is not a disagreement of viewpoint, nor is it a mere difference of opinion. That is an objectively false and hurtful claim that no reasonable person could reasonably believe to be true.
There is also a huge difference between 1) a private person holding the personal opinion that some speech should get spread less than others based upon certain criteria that places them as misinformation and/or hate, 2) a private company removing speech they find objectionable (possibly because it’s misinformation or hate speech) from their privately owned but publicly accessible platform, and 3) a government passing and enforcing so-called hate-speech laws. Personally preferable =/= morally right =/= morally acceptable =/= just =/= fair =/= ethical =/= legal, and a private individual =/= a private company =/= a government entity. One can find something objectionable or even immoral without believing it is or should be illegal or unlawful, and one can believe that it’s okay for a private individual or private company to do something but not okay for a government entity or agent to do the exact same thing. None of that is contradictory, hypocritical, or a double standard.
Re: Re: Re: Thanks for not being the Gestapo, I guess?
And I’m saying that to the extent Facebook has double-standards regarding political viewpoints, based on the information presented in this article, they tend to favor conservatives over liberals, not liberals over conservatives. I would also add that double standards in a private company with regards to enforcing its terms and conditions within its privately owned but publicly accessible property is completely different from government-enforced double standards, and that discrimination based on inherent traits (physical appearance, race, ethnicity, sex, gender identity, sexuality, disabilities, chronic diseases, mental disorders) is different from discrimination based on one’s own words and actions, at least those publicly made.
That is proves nothing and isn’t even true. People try to get others kicked off of the radio all the time, or at least did when radio was the biggest method of communication.
Stone said that it’s not a bad thing (or at least not illegal or unlawful or something that should be illegal or unlawful—not every bad thing is or should be illegal or unlawful), not that it is a good thing (not a bad thing =/= a good thing). Also, private companies doing as they see fit and removing those they find undesirable has historically been a conservative, pro-America viewpoint and non-authoritarian, quite the opposite of what you claim.
There is also insufficient proof of anti conservative bias by Big Tech, at least based on the evidence the claimants have presented. You have presented none, simply conclusorily said that Masnick knows that it’s true without giving any evidence at all, not even bad or false evidence.
If you have anything to add other than "OMG it was RUSSIA RUSSIA," maybe you should present it.
Neither Baron von Robber nor anyone else here has dismissed the Hunter laptop story because “it was Russia”. Baron von Robber didn’t even mention Russia. Whenever one of us has even suggested it was Russia, it was after already presenting reasons that it was at least likely to be false and were going further by speculating about where the laptop and email might have come from if not Hunter, again after having already shown why we don’t think the story was true, or at least likely to be true.
I could go on and on about reasons to find the report sketchy, but to name a few:
Why would Hunter Biden take his laptop to a computer repair shop so far away from his home?
Why would Hunter go out of his way save such incriminating emails to his laptop for so long after the fact?
Why would Hunter not go back to pick up his laptop later?
The computer repairman has, on social media, previously expressed strong support for Trump, strong opposition to Biden, and belief in a number of right-wing conspiracies and falsehoods.
Why would one of the first people the repairman contacted be Rudy Giuliani?
Why were the emails presented in the report in a format that doesn’t contain metadata that could be used to authenticate the emails and their contents as true and correct copies?
According to publicly accessible, verified, and verifiable data (Biden’s official calendar), the meeting alleged in the emails never actually took place.
The timing of the release, not long before an election in which Biden is running, is also suspicious.
The reporters for the NY Post, who are not always known for their journalistic integrity, refused to sign their names to the story, suggesting that they feel the story is likely false or at least has insufficient backing.
That last one actually hints at something important here: the burden of proof is on the one(s) making the claim. This story lacks a lot in the way of evidence supporting its authenticity. The only ones who could and did personally claim to have seen information proving the authenticity of the email and the laptop are also known to have a strong bias and lack credibility.
Now, without access to the laptop or original emails, we can’t definitively prove that the story is false, but the burden is on the claimant anyways, and there are so many things suspicious about the article’s contents that the story is very likely to be false. I can’t say with absolute, 100% certainty that it’s false or that it’s completely impossible for it to be true, but there is far too much doubt and not enough evidence to accept it at face value, and the further you dig, the less credible it seems. It’s certainly lacking enough credibility for any mainstream source to be willing to present it as likely to be true.
Furthermore, this is about bias. If you replace all mentions of Trump with Biden and vice versa, Rudy Giuliani with one of Biden’s attorneys, and Hunter Biden with Donald Trump, Jr., I still wouldn’t believe that the story was likely to be true, and I would feel the same way about Twitter or Facebook not wanting to host links to the article. I would also be unsurprised if Twitter and Facebook would have still taken the same action.
Re: Re: Re: Thanks for not being the Gestapo, I guess?
I’m sorry, but we’re talking about Facebook and, to a lesser extent, other social media platforms and Big Tech companies regarding their moderation practices as applied with respect to conservatives vs. non-conservatives.
And bigots and conspiracy theorists, including conservative ones, have spilt blood. Just look at the SC church shooting and the guy who ran over a protestor during the Boston March. There’s also the Jan. 6th riot, which caused the death of an LEO and injured numerous others and which intended to kill or arrest a number of lawmakers. And none of the various school shootings or mass shootings over the years were done by the powerful, either.
It's not that there "is no evidence" of anti-conservative bias, it's that all the evidence is dismissed by people on the far left by redefining terms and calling normal mainstream opinions "misinformation and hate," which of course will always be a subjective judgement.
While “misinformation and hate” are indeed subjective, of the examples provided to me of anti-conservative bias, most were very clearly in that category. Claims that COVID-19, Sandy Hook, other mass/school shootings, and/or the Jan. 6 attack were hoaxes/false-flag operations, that 5G causes COVID-19, that vaccines cause autism and/or are likely to cause severe nerve damage or death in most individuals, that chemicals in the water supply are turning frogs gay, that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, that there was substantial election and/or voter fraud in the 2020 election, that there was substantial voter fraud in the 2016 Presidential general election, that Donald Trump will become President in March 2021, and that there is a secret sex-trafficking ring operating out of a nonexistent basement in a DC pizzeria are all clearly misinformation. Saying that there is a Jewish/Islamic/gay/trans/queer/black/Hispanic conspiracy out to kill/imprison/kick out all white Americans, death threats, advocacy for genocide, harassment, doxxing or calling for people to be killed, fired, or imprisoned solely or primarily because of their religion (or lack thereof), skin color, ethnicity, birthplace, gender/sex, sexual preferences, gender identity, economic background, and/or mainstream-political-party affiliation (not to be confused with specific political beliefs), and using racial, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, antisemetic, and/or islamophobic slurs are all clearly hate speech.
Now, most of that is not (at least in America) and should not be necessarily illegal or unlawful except in specific cases (like a true threat, severe harassment, or an incitement to imminent lawless action), but that does mean that I have no problem with Facebook and other social media or big tech companies taking action against them within their respective platforms, and it does mean that it’s not anti-conservative bias unless conservatives who do those things are more likely to be punished than liberals who do the same thing. Which is the point: unless you have examples of non-conservatives doing something the same as or substantially similar to what those “conservatives” were punished for and those non-conservatives were not punished or were punished less severely for those same actions, no amount of examples of conservatives being punished by these companies will indicate any sort of bias.
Those examples aren’t being dismissed solely because they are misinformation and/or hate; there is no evidence that conservatives are being punished disproportionately more or more harshly than liberals for the same or equivalent behavior (that is, as a percentage of the members of each respective group who engage in so-called misinformation and hate).
We saw clearly when the tech oligarchs covered up for Biden when the story of Hunter's laptop came out, and the oldest newspaper outlet in the country (the New York Post) was banned from Twitter. The excuse was misinformation, there were phony statements that Russia was involved, but in fact even to this day there is no evidence that anything they reported was fake, or that there were any hacks involved.
The New York Post was not banned from Twitter; links to that one specific article were banned. The New York Post is also a bit of a tabloid (so not a terribly reliable source), I don’t think it has actually been disproven that Russians were involved (though that’s far from the most important issue, and I’m very uncertain that any Russians had a hand in any of it), the story was and still is extremely sketchy (for example, it’s uncertain that the laptop or the email were Hunter’s to begin with or if the presented email was actually found on the laptop, and the only sources we have on these things are quite biased and could plausibly have faked their evidence), and the thrust of the piece—that Hunter sold access to Biden to a foreign operative—was disproven by, among other things, Biden’s publicly accessible calendar, which shows that Biden did not meet with the person sending that email.
Also, Twitter did not claim they removed those links because it contained misinformation but because it contained possibly hacked information (which it likely did if the allegations of the proffered information are true; the repairman shouldn’t have had access to Hunter’s emails), and they have since rescinded that policy of removing tweets containing (links to) hacked information.
We also watched when Apple, Google, and Amazon appeared to collude by simultaneously cancelling the most popular app on Apple's platform, Parler, and deleting their services after January 6th. That in spite of evidence that the vast majority of coordination of rioters that day occurred on Facebook, not Parler.
Apple and Google did not and could not delete Parler’s services, and Amazon did not and could not cancel Parler’s app. Amazon stopped providing Parler with cloud-hosting information (which isn’t even deleting Parler’s services), and it wasn’t because of the Jan 6th riot alone but because Parler failed to meet Amazon’s terms and conditions regarding moderation. Google and Apple just removed (which I guess you could read as “cancelled”) Parler’s app from their respective storefronts for smart devices, again for a more general failure to moderate according to their terms & conditions, and this does not prevent you from side-loading the app onto your phone through other means or from just using a mobile browser app to access their web page directly, which is not substantially different from the app, anyways.
Also, as I recall, while Apple did announce that they were considering removing the Parler app from their App Store the same day that Google removed Parler from the Google Play store, Apple did not actually remove the app until days later. Amazon cancelled their cloud-hosting deal with Parler days before Google or Apple did anything regarding Parler. It all happened in the same week, I think, and it was during a period that came after the Jan. 6th riots, but they were not even close to simultaneous.
Furthermore, the general claims of anti-conservative bias had never previously been against digital storefronts or web- or cloud-hosting services; just Google Search, YouTube, and social media sites. (Well, and universities and mainstream media, but that’s a completely different subject.)
Yesterday Matt Crowder was suspended from Twitter for simply investigating voter addresses from voter roles and finding many of the addresses did not exist. Crowder made no claims of fraud or rigged election, only the facts that he uncovered of illegitimate addresses on the voter rolls.
I don’t know the details of Matt Crowder, but it’s still very insufficient evidence of anti-conservative bias if you can’t point to similar stuff from liberals that did not result in their suspension from Twitter or prove that investigating voter addresses is inherently and exclusively a conservative thing to do.
The most compelling evidence has been the numerous experiments where people took tweets from left-leaning accounts and repeated exactly the same tweet, but replaced "Trump" with "Biden" or "Cuomo" and watch their tweets deleted and their account suspended, while the original tweet using the same language stayed up weeks or months later.
What are the tweets? Context is important, and changing the person referred to can change the meaning.
Also, based on your phrasing, I’m assuming that they took tweets that said “Trump”, removed that name from the tweets, and then inserted “Biden” or “Cuomo” in the places that previous had “Trump”. If so, then that could mean a change from, say, “Trump is responsible for many deaths due to his mishandling of the pandemic,” to, “Biden is responsible for many deaths due to his mishandling of the pandemic.” Since Biden had no power to do anything more than speak out (which he did) regarding the pandemic, the latter statement would clearly be misinformation, while the former wouldn’t be. Similarly, a tweet saying, “Trump lost the 2020 election,” or, “Trump is still claiming there was massive election/voter fraud in the 2020 election,” would be true, but replacing “Trump” with “Biden” or “Cuomo” would make those statements clearly false and would likely be removed on that basis. Then there’d be a tweet saying, “Trump instigated a riot on Capitol Hill,” which would be very different from saying the same thing about Biden or Cuomo. (If you intended to say the other way around, there are other examples for that that I can think of that would work similarly.)
The point is, context is important. Without knowing the contents of the tweets themselves, this claim, even if true, is insufficient to prove the claim reasonably.
Another organization conducted an extensive study of Google search. One of the most compelling results of that study showed that for people that did searches that indicated they were Democrats started getting reminders about election day in the weeks running up to the election, while users posing as conservatives got no such notifications.
Again, context and details are important. I’d need a link or something for that study, or at least the name of the organization that conducted it so I could do my own search.
Regardless, based on your description, there seems to be a bit of a flaw there. See, as far as I can tell, Google Search doesn’t send reminders at all. There is also no correlation between what I see on Google Search and what I see on the one Google-run service that might possibly send reminders of anything: GMail. I do searches on Google Search that would tend to indicate that I am a Democrat, and I use a number of other Google-run services, including GMail, and yet I never got a reminder for Election Day, ever. As far as I can tell, Google doesn’t send reminders like that at all, at least not unless you explicitly tell it to. As such, I find it unlikely that Google sent reminders before Election Day reminding them to vote to anyone, let alone to suspected Democrats, so I find that finding to be quite suspect. I suppose I could be wrong about that, but I’m skeptical as that’s not really how Google’s services work.
Now, what’s possible is that the Democratic Party and/or some left-leaning organizations—whose ads and mailing-list emails would normally not be shown to suspected Republican users, regardless of the exact content—paid for ads to be shown and emails to be sent that would remind users to vote on or before Election Day, while organizations whose ads would normally be shown and emails to be sent to suspected Republican users did not pay for similar ads or send out similar emails. While this would lead to suspected Democrat users to receive reminders to vote in the weeks approaching Election Day while suspected Republicans wouldn’t, that would not be because of anti-conservative bias on Google’s part or in the algorithms Google uses for their search engine, ad service, or email service; that would just be because of how targeted ads and/or mailing lists work in general and a failure of right-leaning groups to use the same tools as left-leaning groups to send the same message.
Again, though, without seeing the actual study, it’s hard for me to say too much definitive stuff about that particular conclusion.
The question of whether social media companies harbor an anti-conservative bias can’t be answered conclusively because the data available to academic and civil society researchers aren’t sufficiently detailed. Existing periodic enforcement disclosures by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are helpful but not granular enough to allow for thorough analysis by outsiders.
Perhaps not, but the fact is that the data we have been shown by people claiming anti-conservative bias aren’t just not enough to conclusively answer the question; they fail to even present a truly compelling argument. We also have evidence, including the reports mentioned in this article, that Facebook, at least, has a bit of a pro-conservative bias regarding moderation and enforcement of its terms and conditions.
How are death threats, advocacy for genocide, the organization of an attack on the nation’s Capitol, claiming vaccines cause autism, claiming that there is a secret sex trafficking ring run by high-ranking Democrats in the nonexistent basement of a pizzaria in DC, claiming that Sandy Hook and other mass shootings were hoaxes, claiming that all/most homosexuals/bisexuals/transgender people/blacks/Hispanics/Jews/Muslims are out to destroy America and/or kill white Christian Americans, claiming that chemicals in the water are turning the frogs gay, claiming that COVID-19 is a hoax, etc. not misinformation or hate? How is treating American far-right people and their followers differently from literally everyone else not bending over backwards to create a special rule?
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Re: Re:
[citation needed]
On the post: The Best Summary Of Australia's News Link Tax / 'Bargaining Code'
Re: Yes, Maz, corporations must OBEY gov'ts.
According to the law, at least in Australia and the US, corporations do have essentially all the same rights that any permanent legal human resident would have. You say they were established by lawyers, but they were actually established by a combination of statutes/common law making corporations separate legal entities that act like persons as far as the law is concerned, the rights established in those statutes and the constitutions of the respective states/countries, and court rulings, which are legally binding. And those rulings are based upon plain readings of the relevant laws and basic logic (unlike QI, which has no basis in the text of the law itself). Changing the “terms of service”, insofar as it concerns constitutional rights and what the government can and cannot regulate, would require either the federal Supreme Court of that nation to overrule existing SC precedent in that country (which is unlikely and rarely ever happens) or for an amendment to that country’s constitution that explicitly excludes corporations from having those rights to be ratified, which is also rare and incredibly unlikely. Thus, as a practical matter, legislators cannot simply take those rights away whenever they want to.
On the post: The Best Summary Of Australia's News Link Tax / 'Bargaining Code'
Re: Re: Yes, Maz, corporations must OBEY gov'ts.
Masnick has never expressed opposition to generally taxing these companies or companies in general. He has said that taxing links goes against the fundamentals of the internet and makes no sense to begin with, and he may be against singling out individual companies to be taxed differently, but he’s never been against Google, Facebook, Twitter, or any other company paying the taxes it lawfully owes or in increasing existing taxes on those companies. His opposition is narrowly towards link taxes, specifically, regardless of who’s paying them or to whom or how much.
On the post: Tennessee Politicians Ask State Colleges To Forbid Student-Athletes From Kneeling During The National Anthem
Re: Re: With first paragraph, you express desire to restrict spe
Actually, neither the rules of discourse here nor the discourse itself have changed. Yes, AdSense did threaten to/did pull ads from articles with, shall we say for the sake of argument, less-than-civil comments, but no actual changes to the moderation policies nor the comments themselves actually occurred because of that. If I wanted to call you a fuckwit Nazi terrorist pedophile motherfucker or something and say that you’re better off killing yourself, the repercussions I would get if I did so now would be no different than if I had before that whole thing happened. Now, I would never do that, and I wouldn’t say that there’d be no consequences, but the fact is that those consequences would have nothing to do with that event.
Actually, yes we do. We just don’t whine about it or say that the law should be changed to stop it or claim that the law doesn’t protect it or anything like that.
Google has, and should have, every legal right to not put ads on articles if they or their comments sections are disagreeable to them or not put ads on this site at all if they don’t want to. They may threaten or actually use that power to put pressure on Techdirt to remove offending content, and that’s perfectly legal and should be outside of certain circumstances not at all relevant here. Techdirt can choose to cave, negotiate, push back, and/or find an alternative source of revenue, like soliciting and displaying ads without AdSense. What Google cannot do is moderate content on this site directly; only Techdirt is legally free to directly moderate (or not moderate) the actual content on this site as it wishes.
We are all well aware of these facts and their potential consequences.
1) That was, like, a decade ago. It was also an isolated case that has never repeated itself at all. Why do you still insist on whining about it? Just let it go already. You’re embarrassing yourself.
2) As was explained to you then and many times since then, that was not actually a statement referring to you. Geigner was just spamming quotes from Obama’s book in response to you repeating the same nonsense ad nauseum. They were not intended to have any actual meaning whatsoever. They were chosen at random, and most of them made no sense as an actual response to what was said before. That you found one of them offensive and misinterpreted it as referring to you is irrelevant and was pure chance.
3) I’m not sure that it is racist, but not having read the context of that in the actual book it was pulled from, it’s hard for me to say for sure either way.
Okay. Fine. It’s not something I’d normally say, but you did literally ask for this:
There are white people, and then there are ignorant motherfuckers like you.
There. I wrote it. So what?
In fact, you kinda undermined your own point by writing it yourself. You may claim that you were just quoting someone else, but so was Geigner at the time.
On the post: Tennessee Politicians Ask State Colleges To Forbid Student-Athletes From Kneeling During The National Anthem
Re: With first paragraph, you express desire to restrict speech!
I’m 99% sure that that was a joke, not a serious question. Also, it’s not our notions, per se; it’s our Constitution.
On the post: India's New Cyber Law Goes Live: Subtracts Safe Harbor Protections, Adds Compelled Assistance Demands For Intermediaries
Re: Well that's one way to drive companies out of the country
I’m not entirely sure how that would be enforced, anyways. If they don’t have a residence in India, India would lack the ability to actually do anything to that company.
On the post: Yet Another Story Shows How Facebook Bent Over Backwards To Put In Place Different Rules For Conservatives
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Thanks for not being the Gestapo, I
Actually, we knew about Sicknick’s death on the day of the event, and surveillance footage of it was released.
On the post: Various States All Pile On To Push Blatantly Unconstitutional Laws That Say Social Media Can't Moderate
Re: Re: Re:
Read the articles and discussions about net neutrality, telecom companies, Hollywood, and intellectual property, then see if you can honestly say that “we always defend Big Business and always side with Big Business against America and Americans”.
Also, how is siding with users, smaller sites, and non-profits like Wikipedia “sid[ing] with Big Business”? It doesn’t look like you even bothered to read the comment you’re responding to, because there’s no connection between them.
On the post: Various States All Pile On To Push Blatantly Unconstitutional Laws That Say Social Media Can't Moderate
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: 'Put up or shut up'
Also the descendants of slaves.
On the post: Yet Another Story Shows How Facebook Bent Over Backwards To Put In Place Different Rules For Conservatives
Re: suuuuuure they did
I don’t click links unless there’s a clear description of what I can expect to find that explains its relevance and the point the poster is trying to make. You provided a bare link with the subject line, “suuuuuure they did”, which does none of that.
On the post: Yet Another Story Shows How Facebook Bent Over Backwards To Put In Place Different Rules For Conservatives
Re: Re: Re: Thanks for not being the Gestapo, I guess?
“[W]here people deliberately lie […] or where you deliberately push for violence or dangerous actions against people as a show of power“ is not even remotely equivalent to “whatever I disagree with”. A lie is where one deliberately tells a falsehood or says something that is so obviously false that no reasonable person could possibly believe it. He even gave the example of someone claiming that Sandy Hook was a false-flag operation as a deliberate lie. That is not a disagreement of viewpoint, nor is it a mere difference of opinion. That is an objectively false and hurtful claim that no reasonable person could reasonably believe to be true.
There is also a huge difference between 1) a private person holding the personal opinion that some speech should get spread less than others based upon certain criteria that places them as misinformation and/or hate, 2) a private company removing speech they find objectionable (possibly because it’s misinformation or hate speech) from their privately owned but publicly accessible platform, and 3) a government passing and enforcing so-called hate-speech laws. Personally preferable =/= morally right =/= morally acceptable =/= just =/= fair =/= ethical =/= legal, and a private individual =/= a private company =/= a government entity. One can find something objectionable or even immoral without believing it is or should be illegal or unlawful, and one can believe that it’s okay for a private individual or private company to do something but not okay for a government entity or agent to do the exact same thing. None of that is contradictory, hypocritical, or a double standard.
On the post: Yet Another Story Shows How Facebook Bent Over Backwards To Put In Place Different Rules For Conservatives
Re: Re: Re: Thanks for not being the Gestapo, I guess?
And I’m saying that to the extent Facebook has double-standards regarding political viewpoints, based on the information presented in this article, they tend to favor conservatives over liberals, not liberals over conservatives. I would also add that double standards in a private company with regards to enforcing its terms and conditions within its privately owned but publicly accessible property is completely different from government-enforced double standards, and that discrimination based on inherent traits (physical appearance, race, ethnicity, sex, gender identity, sexuality, disabilities, chronic diseases, mental disorders) is different from discrimination based on one’s own words and actions, at least those publicly made.
On the post: Yet Another Story Shows How Facebook Bent Over Backwards To Put In Place Different Rules For Conservatives
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Evidence
That is proves nothing and isn’t even true. People try to get others kicked off of the radio all the time, or at least did when radio was the biggest method of communication.
On the post: Yet Another Story Shows How Facebook Bent Over Backwards To Put In Place Different Rules For Conservatives
Re: Re:
Stone said that it’s not a bad thing (or at least not illegal or unlawful or something that should be illegal or unlawful—not every bad thing is or should be illegal or unlawful), not that it is a good thing (not a bad thing =/= a good thing). Also, private companies doing as they see fit and removing those they find undesirable has historically been a conservative, pro-America viewpoint and non-authoritarian, quite the opposite of what you claim.
There is also insufficient proof of anti conservative bias by Big Tech, at least based on the evidence the claimants have presented. You have presented none, simply conclusorily said that Masnick knows that it’s true without giving any evidence at all, not even bad or false evidence.
On the post: Yet Another Story Shows How Facebook Bent Over Backwards To Put In Place Different Rules For Conservatives
Re: Re: Re: Evidence
Neither Baron von Robber nor anyone else here has dismissed the Hunter laptop story because “it was Russia”. Baron von Robber didn’t even mention Russia. Whenever one of us has even suggested it was Russia, it was after already presenting reasons that it was at least likely to be false and were going further by speculating about where the laptop and email might have come from if not Hunter, again after having already shown why we don’t think the story was true, or at least likely to be true.
I could go on and on about reasons to find the report sketchy, but to name a few:
Why would Hunter Biden take his laptop to a computer repair shop so far away from his home?
Why would Hunter go out of his way save such incriminating emails to his laptop for so long after the fact?
Why would Hunter not go back to pick up his laptop later?
The computer repairman has, on social media, previously expressed strong support for Trump, strong opposition to Biden, and belief in a number of right-wing conspiracies and falsehoods.
Why would one of the first people the repairman contacted be Rudy Giuliani?
Why were the emails presented in the report in a format that doesn’t contain metadata that could be used to authenticate the emails and their contents as true and correct copies?
According to publicly accessible, verified, and verifiable data (Biden’s official calendar), the meeting alleged in the emails never actually took place.
The timing of the release, not long before an election in which Biden is running, is also suspicious.
That last one actually hints at something important here: the burden of proof is on the one(s) making the claim. This story lacks a lot in the way of evidence supporting its authenticity. The only ones who could and did personally claim to have seen information proving the authenticity of the email and the laptop are also known to have a strong bias and lack credibility.
Now, without access to the laptop or original emails, we can’t definitively prove that the story is false, but the burden is on the claimant anyways, and there are so many things suspicious about the article’s contents that the story is very likely to be false. I can’t say with absolute, 100% certainty that it’s false or that it’s completely impossible for it to be true, but there is far too much doubt and not enough evidence to accept it at face value, and the further you dig, the less credible it seems. It’s certainly lacking enough credibility for any mainstream source to be willing to present it as likely to be true.
Furthermore, this is about bias. If you replace all mentions of Trump with Biden and vice versa, Rudy Giuliani with one of Biden’s attorneys, and Hunter Biden with Donald Trump, Jr., I still wouldn’t believe that the story was likely to be true, and I would feel the same way about Twitter or Facebook not wanting to host links to the article. I would also be unsurprised if Twitter and Facebook would have still taken the same action.
On the post: Yet Another Story Shows How Facebook Bent Over Backwards To Put In Place Different Rules For Conservatives
Re: Re: Re: Thanks for not being the Gestapo, I guess?
I’m sorry, but we’re talking about Facebook and, to a lesser extent, other social media platforms and Big Tech companies regarding their moderation practices as applied with respect to conservatives vs. non-conservatives.
And bigots and conspiracy theorists, including conservative ones, have spilt blood. Just look at the SC church shooting and the guy who ran over a protestor during the Boston March. There’s also the Jan. 6th riot, which caused the death of an LEO and injured numerous others and which intended to kill or arrest a number of lawmakers. And none of the various school shootings or mass shootings over the years were done by the powerful, either.
On the post: Yet Another Story Shows How Facebook Bent Over Backwards To Put In Place Different Rules For Conservatives
Re: Evidence
While “misinformation and hate” are indeed subjective, of the examples provided to me of anti-conservative bias, most were very clearly in that category. Claims that COVID-19, Sandy Hook, other mass/school shootings, and/or the Jan. 6 attack were hoaxes/false-flag operations, that 5G causes COVID-19, that vaccines cause autism and/or are likely to cause severe nerve damage or death in most individuals, that chemicals in the water supply are turning frogs gay, that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, that there was substantial election and/or voter fraud in the 2020 election, that there was substantial voter fraud in the 2016 Presidential general election, that Donald Trump will become President in March 2021, and that there is a secret sex-trafficking ring operating out of a nonexistent basement in a DC pizzeria are all clearly misinformation. Saying that there is a Jewish/Islamic/gay/trans/queer/black/Hispanic conspiracy out to kill/imprison/kick out all white Americans, death threats, advocacy for genocide, harassment, doxxing or calling for people to be killed, fired, or imprisoned solely or primarily because of their religion (or lack thereof), skin color, ethnicity, birthplace, gender/sex, sexual preferences, gender identity, economic background, and/or mainstream-political-party affiliation (not to be confused with specific political beliefs), and using racial, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, antisemetic, and/or islamophobic slurs are all clearly hate speech.
Now, most of that is not (at least in America) and should not be necessarily illegal or unlawful except in specific cases (like a true threat, severe harassment, or an incitement to imminent lawless action), but that does mean that I have no problem with Facebook and other social media or big tech companies taking action against them within their respective platforms, and it does mean that it’s not anti-conservative bias unless conservatives who do those things are more likely to be punished than liberals who do the same thing. Which is the point: unless you have examples of non-conservatives doing something the same as or substantially similar to what those “conservatives” were punished for and those non-conservatives were not punished or were punished less severely for those same actions, no amount of examples of conservatives being punished by these companies will indicate any sort of bias.
Those examples aren’t being dismissed solely because they are misinformation and/or hate; there is no evidence that conservatives are being punished disproportionately more or more harshly than liberals for the same or equivalent behavior (that is, as a percentage of the members of each respective group who engage in so-called misinformation and hate).
The New York Post was not banned from Twitter; links to that one specific article were banned. The New York Post is also a bit of a tabloid (so not a terribly reliable source), I don’t think it has actually been disproven that Russians were involved (though that’s far from the most important issue, and I’m very uncertain that any Russians had a hand in any of it), the story was and still is extremely sketchy (for example, it’s uncertain that the laptop or the email were Hunter’s to begin with or if the presented email was actually found on the laptop, and the only sources we have on these things are quite biased and could plausibly have faked their evidence), and the thrust of the piece—that Hunter sold access to Biden to a foreign operative—was disproven by, among other things, Biden’s publicly accessible calendar, which shows that Biden did not meet with the person sending that email.
Also, Twitter did not claim they removed those links because it contained misinformation but because it contained possibly hacked information (which it likely did if the allegations of the proffered information are true; the repairman shouldn’t have had access to Hunter’s emails), and they have since rescinded that policy of removing tweets containing (links to) hacked information.
Apple and Google did not and could not delete Parler’s services, and Amazon did not and could not cancel Parler’s app. Amazon stopped providing Parler with cloud-hosting information (which isn’t even deleting Parler’s services), and it wasn’t because of the Jan 6th riot alone but because Parler failed to meet Amazon’s terms and conditions regarding moderation. Google and Apple just removed (which I guess you could read as “cancelled”) Parler’s app from their respective storefronts for smart devices, again for a more general failure to moderate according to their terms & conditions, and this does not prevent you from side-loading the app onto your phone through other means or from just using a mobile browser app to access their web page directly, which is not substantially different from the app, anyways.
Also, as I recall, while Apple did announce that they were considering removing the Parler app from their App Store the same day that Google removed Parler from the Google Play store, Apple did not actually remove the app until days later. Amazon cancelled their cloud-hosting deal with Parler days before Google or Apple did anything regarding Parler. It all happened in the same week, I think, and it was during a period that came after the Jan. 6th riots, but they were not even close to simultaneous.
Furthermore, the general claims of anti-conservative bias had never previously been against digital storefronts or web- or cloud-hosting services; just Google Search, YouTube, and social media sites. (Well, and universities and mainstream media, but that’s a completely different subject.)
I don’t know the details of Matt Crowder, but it’s still very insufficient evidence of anti-conservative bias if you can’t point to similar stuff from liberals that did not result in their suspension from Twitter or prove that investigating voter addresses is inherently and exclusively a conservative thing to do.
What are the tweets? Context is important, and changing the person referred to can change the meaning.
Also, based on your phrasing, I’m assuming that they took tweets that said “Trump”, removed that name from the tweets, and then inserted “Biden” or “Cuomo” in the places that previous had “Trump”. If so, then that could mean a change from, say, “Trump is responsible for many deaths due to his mishandling of the pandemic,” to, “Biden is responsible for many deaths due to his mishandling of the pandemic.” Since Biden had no power to do anything more than speak out (which he did) regarding the pandemic, the latter statement would clearly be misinformation, while the former wouldn’t be. Similarly, a tweet saying, “Trump lost the 2020 election,” or, “Trump is still claiming there was massive election/voter fraud in the 2020 election,” would be true, but replacing “Trump” with “Biden” or “Cuomo” would make those statements clearly false and would likely be removed on that basis. Then there’d be a tweet saying, “Trump instigated a riot on Capitol Hill,” which would be very different from saying the same thing about Biden or Cuomo. (If you intended to say the other way around, there are other examples for that that I can think of that would work similarly.)
The point is, context is important. Without knowing the contents of the tweets themselves, this claim, even if true, is insufficient to prove the claim reasonably.
Again, context and details are important. I’d need a link or something for that study, or at least the name of the organization that conducted it so I could do my own search.
Regardless, based on your description, there seems to be a bit of a flaw there. See, as far as I can tell, Google Search doesn’t send reminders at all. There is also no correlation between what I see on Google Search and what I see on the one Google-run service that might possibly send reminders of anything: GMail. I do searches on Google Search that would tend to indicate that I am a Democrat, and I use a number of other Google-run services, including GMail, and yet I never got a reminder for Election Day, ever. As far as I can tell, Google doesn’t send reminders like that at all, at least not unless you explicitly tell it to. As such, I find it unlikely that Google sent reminders before Election Day reminding them to vote to anyone, let alone to suspected Democrats, so I find that finding to be quite suspect. I suppose I could be wrong about that, but I’m skeptical as that’s not really how Google’s services work.
Now, what’s possible is that the Democratic Party and/or some left-leaning organizations—whose ads and mailing-list emails would normally not be shown to suspected Republican users, regardless of the exact content—paid for ads to be shown and emails to be sent that would remind users to vote on or before Election Day, while organizations whose ads would normally be shown and emails to be sent to suspected Republican users did not pay for similar ads or send out similar emails. While this would lead to suspected Democrat users to receive reminders to vote in the weeks approaching Election Day while suspected Republicans wouldn’t, that would not be because of anti-conservative bias on Google’s part or in the algorithms Google uses for their search engine, ad service, or email service; that would just be because of how targeted ads and/or mailing lists work in general and a failure of right-leaning groups to use the same tools as left-leaning groups to send the same message.
Again, though, without seeing the actual study, it’s hard for me to say too much definitive stuff about that particular conclusion.
Perhaps not, but the fact is that the data we have been shown by people claiming anti-conservative bias aren’t just not enough to conclusively answer the question; they fail to even present a truly compelling argument. We also have evidence, including the reports mentioned in this article, that Facebook, at least, has a bit of a pro-conservative bias regarding moderation and enforcement of its terms and conditions.
On the post: Yet Another Story Shows How Facebook Bent Over Backwards To Put In Place Different Rules For Conservatives
Re: Thanks for not being the Gestapo, I guess?
How are death threats, advocacy for genocide, the organization of an attack on the nation’s Capitol, claiming vaccines cause autism, claiming that there is a secret sex trafficking ring run by high-ranking Democrats in the nonexistent basement of a pizzaria in DC, claiming that Sandy Hook and other mass shootings were hoaxes, claiming that all/most homosexuals/bisexuals/transgender people/blacks/Hispanics/Jews/Muslims are out to destroy America and/or kill white Christian Americans, claiming that chemicals in the water are turning the frogs gay, claiming that COVID-19 is a hoax, etc. not misinformation or hate? How is treating American far-right people and their followers differently from literally everyone else not bending over backwards to create a special rule?
On the post: Various States All Pile On To Push Blatantly Unconstitutional Laws That Say Social Media Can't Moderate
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: 'Put up or shut up'
Except none of the Big Tech companies do that, either. Especially the white genocide part.
On the post: The Bizarre Reaction To Facebook's Decision To Get Out Of The News Business In Australia
Re: Re: I wish Google had cut off Australian news
What resources does Facebook use up that it does not pay for?
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