Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
I think this steelman is hard to square with the part of the policy that says they'll ban you just for having the link in your Twitter bio.
If violations of this policy are included in your bio and/or account name, we will temporarily suspend your account and require changes to your profile to no longer be in violation. Subsequent violations may result in permanent suspension.
New Twitter policy just dropped:
Promotion of alternative social platforms policy
...
What is a violation of this policy?
At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL:
Prohibited platforms:
Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and Nostr
3rd-party social media link aggregators such as linktr.ee, lnk.bio
Examples:
“follow me @username on Instagram”
“username@mastodon.social”
“check out my profile on Facebook - facebook.com/username”
Accounts that are used for the main purpose of promoting content on another social platform may be suspended. Additionally, any attempts to bypass restrictions on external links to the above prohibited social media platforms through technical or non-technical means (e.g. URL cloaking, plaintext obfuscation) is in violation of this policy. This includes, but is not limited to, spelling out “dot” for social media platforms that use “.” in the names to avoid URL creation, or sharing screenshots of your handle on a prohibited social media platform.
It's like the man himself says
The acid test for any two competing socioeconomic systems is which side needs to build a wall to keep people from escaping? That’s the bad one!
ETA:
Seems like some large accounts are calling Twitter's bluff. Dril posted a link to their linktree hours ago and so far both post and account are still up.
ETA2:
Musk now polling whether he should step down as head of Twitter, Yes in the lead with 51.5% and just over a million votes cast at the time of this writing.
ETA3:
The link at the top of this post is now a 404, apparently a result of the policy being rescinded, but the internet never forgets.
Twitter now also seems to be preventing people from tweeting links to Mastodon and gives you an error claiming your profile description is malware if you try to put your Mastodon profile in your Twitter bio.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
It seems like the kind of technical paper that people here would be interested in. It didn't seem particularly Culture War relevant so it didn't seem like the right fit for the megathread.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
I still think it's a dumb policy. It seems to me there's tons of innocuous content that would be prohibited by it (say, tweeting you're at a concert with friends while at the concert) and it's not clear to me what the benefit is. Especially as this pertains to publicly available information. I think there situations where sharing someone's location can be problematic, but if I were writing the policy I'd probably require at least some kind of malicious intent element.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
Do you apply these standards consistently? When an account like @LibsOfTikTok posts about a drag event, is that a threat to the safety of those going to the event?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
I feel pretty confident my OP was about both hypocrisy and freedom of speech, and specifically Elon's hypocrisy with respect to his commitment to freedom of speech.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
I think it is too strong to say I don't care about hypocrisy. I do think hypocrisy is bad, but I would rather someone were a hypocrite who did good some of the time than be consistent and evil. There are (many!) worse things than being a hypocrite.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
Frankly, my opinion is the opposite as I mention in another comment. I would rather someone be hypocritically good than consistently evil. That seems like a no-brainer. There was definitely a period in my life where I would have cared more about the hypocrisy than whether it was good or bad, but not now. I feel a little bad about contributing to a lowering of political discourse with my OP, by appealing to hypocrisy rather than discussing why it was good or bad on its own merits.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
I mean, he's the one who publically committed to not banning that account. Nobody made him do that.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
I am actually inclined to agree and feel a little ashamed of my post. Accusations of hypocrisy appeal to the lowest denominator. No matter what one's object level positions are one can generally agree that hypocrisy is bad. This makes hypocrisy seem like the worst sin one can commit (both right and left think you're bad!) but actually I think having bad positions consistently is much worse than being a hypocrite if ones hypocrisy leads to one doing good.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
I am very interested in hearing how an automated account posting publically available flight plan information "want[s] to abolish free speech."
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
And? The ban was done according to the rule against sharing people's location data, so what more do you want? It's a private company, after all.
I'm not sure there's anything I "want" as such. I'm just amused by Elon's quick 180 on his own free speech commitments.
Can you point to an instance of you being upset about a non-leftist account being banned? Why do you care about this one?
I'm not sure I could point to an instance of my being outraged at a leftist account being banned, tbh. I care about this one because of its plain demonstration of Elon's lie about being committed to freedom of speech on Twitter.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
I think I was pretty clear in that post and I'll be clear now. Twitter has not violated the First Amendment in either its conduct in 2020/2021 nor by banning the @elonjet account. As @czr notes I am merely amused by the quick demonstration of Elon's own hypocrisy on the topic of free speech.
So, how's that whole Elon free speech Twitter thing going? Turns out, not great. An article from Mike Masnick over at TechDirt has the details. Basically, back in November, shortly after Elon finished buying Twitter, he noted his belief in free speech was so strong it extended even to leaving up the Twitter account @elonjet. For those who don't know the @elonjet Twitter account used publicly available data to Tweet whenever Elon's private plane flew somewhere. Elon tweeted:
My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk
The man behind the account, Jack Sweeney, also operated a bunch of other plane tracker accounts for other billionaires (including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and various Russian oligarchs). As of today it seems the @elonjet Twitter account, along with all the other plane trackers and even Sweeney's personal account, have been suspended. Apparently this suspension is pursuant to a new Twitter rule about sharing personal information:
Under this policy, you can’t share the following types of private information, without the permission of the person who it belongs to:
...
live location information, including information shared on Twitter directly or links to 3rd-party URL(s) of travel routes, actual physical location, or other identifying information that would reveal a person’s location, regardless if this information is publicly available;
It took a whole month for Elon to craft a policy to ban the account he specifically said he wouldn't ban due to his commitment to free speech. So much for the idea that the limits of Twitter moderation would be anything like "only illegal speech." It also seems (according to the TechDirt article, and I tried this myself) that you can't even tweet links to @elonjet accounts on other platforms (like Facebook or Instagram). Amusingly Elon's original tweet from November now has a Community Note on it noting what the account that was being mentioned in the tweet was and the fact that it's banned.
Twitter files dump about the internal deliberations on how this policy change and these bans came about when?
ETA:
Seems @elonjet was unsuspended. Apparently the new policy requires "slight" (no word on how long that is) delay before posting info. Although, at the time of this edit the account appears to be suspended again. Link.
ETA2:
Elon now claiming that legal action is being taken against Sweeney. Would love to hear what legal action he's alledgedly taking.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
So when you hear about a high profile case, does it matter if the person was specifically set up as a test case, and if it matters, why?
It doesn't really matter to me. The practice seems like a natural outgrowth of the Supreme Court's precedent that federal courts are courts of limited jurisdiction, only empowered to decide cases and controversies (narrowly defined) before them. If there were some other way to get a binding court ruling about the permissibility of some law or policy I would probably think manufacturing test cases was silly, but if there was some other way people also probably wouldn't do test cases.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
Both you and @Gillitrut have cited comparative advantage. I don't think that saves us here. Comparative advantage means you need to be willing to do some job for less than the cost of operating a robot to do that job.
This is a (common!) misunderstanding of comparative advantage. If humans could produce some good or do some job for a lower marginal cost than a robot then the humans don't just have a comparative advantage, they have an absolute advantage. A group (say humans) can have comparative advantage relative to some other group (say robots), even if the second group can produce everything more cheaply than the first group, as long as the second group cannot produce literally everything it needs.
In a high-automation world, that cost will be very cheap -- the robots are building robots. What I mean by "expected economic value of a typical human goes negative" is that the price someone would be willing to pay for a human to do that job is less than the price of the resources it takes to maintain a human life.
Imagine I'm Cyberpunk Genghis Khan. I have robots that produce everything of economic value to me, including art, food, and military might. I'm keeping Mongolia as a nature preserve, and some subsistence farmers are trying to live out in some forest. Why should I let them? They produce some valuable widget, but they need to be allowed to keep at least enough farmland to keep them alive. I could have my robots build that same widget while occupying half the space.
I detect a tension between these two sections. On the one hand, robots are so cheap we can mass manufacture them to do any new labor as the need arises. On the other hand, robots are so rare and expensive that only the rich own and have access to them. If robots are so cheap, why can't the workers making widgets (or farming, or whatever) buy robots to do their own jobs instead and profit thereby? If robots are so expensive, how is it there are enough to fill literally every labor demand?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
I think two different positions are being equated here.
First is the question of whether humans will be productive enough to sustain their own existence, that is, whether humans will create value in excess of what they consume. This has been the case for probably all of human history and it's hard for me to comprehend what could happen to the human species that would cause a massive decrease in productivity such that we would be unable to sustain ourselves by subsistence farming.
Second is the question of whether it will be more efficient to automate various kinds of labor as compared to having humans doing them. That is, whether it will be cheaper in price per unit output to have a robot farm some patch of land (or whatever) as compared to having a human laborer do it.
The key point is that both these things can be true. It can be the case, simultaneously, that (1) humans who engage in subsistence farming are net-EV positive and (2) robots doing subsistence farming instead would have a higher EV.
As long as humans have a comparative advantage (equivalently, as long as automation is not costless) there will be things we can find for humans to do. And if automation is costless, then why wouldn't everyone use it to fully satisfy their desires?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
The critical point is when the expected economic value of a typical human goes negative.
I'm a little confused. Would you agree that the expected economic value of a typical human is positive today? That is, the average human produces more output over the course of their lives than they consume. It seems like requiring this go negative is predicting a large decrease in the average human's economic productivity. Why do you think humans are going to be much less economically in a future with more automation than they are today?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
What evidence makes you think fraud hasn't been committed in the case of Binance? Does this evidence differ from evidence we had about FTX one year ago about whether they were committing fraud? Frankly, given the number of large volume crypto exchanges that have turned out to be frauds I kind of think "this exchange is committing fraud" is a pretty good prior.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
I read the section you're describing (it starts with the last paragraph on page 246 of the thesis, PDF page 259) and I don't think it's accurate to characterize Roth's statements as dismissing the concern as "impossible/problem on privacy grounds." Rather, while acknowledging the possibility Grindr may be "too lewd or too hook-up oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers" he's worried that underage users may still use the platform to network with other peers in ways that don't involve having sex and removing this platform for them to have those discussions. To which point he recommends Grindr take steps to separate the lewd/hookup purpose of the app from the more general discussion platform it enables. One illustrative page:
These accounts echo many of the classic tropes of online child safety narratives: the essentially dangerous nature of new media; the need to impose strict, top-down controls on how minors use the internet; a digital reincarnation of “stranger danger” in the figure of the older male sexual predator; and the importance of raising children to be safety-savvy and highly private. Yet, absent from these discussions is even a cursory recognition that the new medium of gay-targeted social networking may be a crucial social outlet for gay, bisexual, and questioning youth. While gay youth-oriented chat rooms and social networking services were available in the early 2000s, these services have largely fallen by the wayside, in favor of general-purpose platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat. Perhaps this is truly representative of an increasingly absent demand among young adults for networked spaces to engage with peers about their sexuality; but it’s worth considering how, if at all, the current generation of popular sites of gay networked sociability might fit into an overall queer social landscape that increasingly includes individuals under the age of 18. Even with the service’s extensive content management, Grindr may well be too lewd or too hook-up-oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers; but the fact that people under 18 are on these services already indicates that we can’t readily dismiss these platforms out of hand as loci for queer youth culture. Rather than merely trying to absolve themselves of legal responsibility or, worse, trying to drive out teenagers entirely, service providers should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr — including, possibly, their role in safely connecting queer young adults.
I'm also curious how this makes him a hypocrite.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
Here is Roth's dissertation, available for free for download.
Here's the abstract of the paper:
Since its launch in 2009, the geosocial networking service Grindr has become an increasingly mainstream and prominent part of gay culture, both in the United States and globally. Mobile applications like Grindr give users the ability to quickly and easily share information about themselves (in the form of text, numbers, and pictures), and connect with each other in real time on the basis of geographic proximity. I argue that these services constitute an important site for examining how bodies, identities, and communities are translated into data, as well as how data becomes a tool for forming, understanding, and managing personal relationships. Throughout this work, I articulate a model of networked interactivity that conceptualizes self-expression as an act determined by three sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting sets of affordances and constraints: (1) technocommercial structures of software and business; (2) cultural and subcultural norms, mores, histories, and standards of acceptable and expected conduct; and (3) sociopolitical tendencies that appear to be (but in fact are not) fixed technocommercial structures. In these discussions, Grindr serves both as a model of processes that apply to social networking more generally, as well as a particular study into how networked interactivity is complicated by the histories and particularities of Western gay culture. Over the course of this dissertation, I suggest ways in which users, policymakers, and developers can productively recognize the liveness, vitality, and durability of personal information in the design, implementation, and use of gay-targeted social networking services. Specifically, I argue that through a focus on (1) open-ended structures of interface design, (2) clear and transparent articulations of service policies, and the rationales behind them, and (3) approaches to user information that promote data sovereignty, designers, developers, and advocates can work to make social networking services, including Grindr, safer and more representative of their users throughout their data’s lifecycle.
Can you tell me, in what sense is the paper "about adult-child sex relations?"
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
I thought the people who still enjoyed Dave's comedy post-The Closer (when he got deemed transphobic by left-wing activists) would be indifferent, if not positive, towards Elon Musk.
I'd be interested to hear why you think this. I get the impression that there are loud voices on social media opposed to both Musk and Chappelle but I'm not sure that implies the converse, that people who like Chappelle must like Musk.
If you can link me to where I've expressed support for the previous Twitter management banning links to alternate social media websites I would be fascinated to read it. Otherwise this seems like equivocation.
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