site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31658 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

9
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Part 2 of the Twitter Files have been released

https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601007575633305600

Instead of Matt Taibbi, Barry Weiss is doing the honors

Twitter suppressed the virality of certain accounts and hashtags of conservatives and covid-skpetics, such as Sanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who came out against mask mandates, and Dan Bongino. Twitter also has different tiers of moderation. Highly controversial, high-traffic accounts have an extra layer of oversight.

I thought it would be worse, but still makes twitter look bad.

A small note: the existence of shadowbans and search suggestion bans was already public knowledge.

The 'tweet thread' format sucks. It's hard to interpret this - how many conservative accounts had restrictions, how many non-conservative accounts did, what precisely were the restrictions, how many views were prevented, etc. Elon owns twitter, and could assign a few people to spend a week figuring that out. Given "the only condition was it first be published on twitter", hopefully there'll be more details in written form in the future.

So, twitter applied some restrictions to some conservatives - but how much in practice? What's the absolute decrease in views of conservative content this would've caused? Is it greater than 5%? 1%? .5%? .1%? It's hard to tell. We're shown a few accounts with restrictions, of thousands of 100k+ follower conservative accounts - do 1 in 5 conservatives have restrictions or 1 in 100? What does 'do not amplify' mean? Internal tools can have strange names. That could in principle mean 'never show to anyone who isn't a follower, and show at 20% rate to followers', or 'this account has botted retweets in the past - increase threshold for bot filter'. It probably did affect kirk's views, but it's hard to draw strong conclusions from three words on a picture of an angled computer screen. Twitter has the resources to tell us exactly what actions 'do not amplify' corresponded to! One of the examples is dan bongino (big conservative personality) search banned, with no other restrictions. He still is search banned.Search banning doesn't lower reach noticeably, as people don't search tweets that much relative to browsing, so did that materially affect him? And purely anecdotally, a lot of random high-follower twitter users just don't show up in search, how can one know this is a 'twitter targeting conservatives' as opposed to 'twitter moderation sucking'?

There's also the moldbuggian issue of asymmetry. Conservatives aren't suddenly going to win on an 'even playing field' (moral and political censorship for much of the 1900s was very conservative in today's sense, yet here we are). Getting twitter neutral and letting conservatives speak isn't going to win anything - conservative media had massive popular reach on twitter and facebook and TV and the web a year ago, the censorship didn't reduce it meaningfully, and twitter censoring less won't change that. So the significance of elon fixing that, or the practical harm to some cause from twitter shadowbanning kirk or libsoftiktok, isn't much.

Twitter's censorship hurt the far-right, covid-skeptics, and similar more clearly - instead of a few shadowbans, they're mass suspended every six months - so elon could let them liveWill recent moderation changes will let them stay on - is the mass unban (of e.g. bap, anglin, many others) tied to a looser moderation policy? Or is it a second chance for "incorrectly banned accounts" without any rule change, given there have been far-right banwaves after elon took over?

So, twitter applied some restrictions to some conservatives - but how much in practice? What's the absolute decrease in views of conservative content this would've caused

Just look at Steve Sailer's account.

This would be much more convincing if I haven't seen many similar graphs over the past few months, together with claims about censorship being lifted ... except with the inflection point in January or June. In general, single graphs like this have many causes, and drawing conclusions from them is hard.

There seemed to have been a bit of a thaw earlier, however, the recent increase is far more stronger, as far as I can tell.

I remember more comments about decreased throttling after Musk took over, not before.

Do you spend much time on twitter?

You are free to reply with these graphs though.

Yes, I look twitter constantly. I don't remember where I saw them unfortunately. As part of said constant use, every month I see a few 'twitter started censoring my views/followers: check out this chart' and sometimes a 'twitter stopped censoring my views/followers and i'm finally taking off, yay!'. And that was true well before musk.

As above, this doesn't mean he hasn't removed large shadowbans and it isn't causing rightwing accounts to grow rapidly - just that this doesn't really prove anything.

The info about throttling hasn't come out yet, and I believe you are going to be proven wrong.

There were various throttling methods employed on a lot of RW and GOP accounts. Some of it went away when Musk was buying Twitter, but some of it is still in play.

It takes some time until situation becomes equitable.

I believe you are going to be proven wrong

My claims here are measured though - I'm confident i'm right in the sense that "just steve sailer's graph isn't good evidence for concluding suppression". Compare to believing a n=7 unrandomized trial with p=.049 on the effect of st johns wort on anxiety, even if it does have an effect (the effect is probably much smaller).

I'm also not claiming that throttling isn't affecting RW and GOP accounts - although I claimed elsewhere that said throttling wasn't significantly restricting (e.g. ~ 10% to 20% of all views) the largest / mainstream conservative accounts, but more was applied to far-right accounts more (sailer being the latter). (from OP "Twitter's censorship hurt the far-right, covid-skeptics, and similar more clearly")

I'd end up being wrong in a related sense of "not being aware of something true" if it was shown that sailer was suppressed and that suppression was directly related to that specific view spike, even though the graph still is too little evidence. But there's no way musk or the journos will release detailed enough analyses to conclude that (even though twitter probably could technically).

So, twitter applied some restrictions to some conservatives - but how much in practice? What's the absolute decrease in views of conservative content this would've caused? Is it greater than 5%? 1%? .5%? .1%? It's hard to tell. We're shown a few accounts with restrictions, of thousands of 100k+ follower conservative accounts - do 1 in 5 conservatives have restrictions or 1 in 100? What does 'do not amplify' mean? I

I think the most damming thing is not that the censorship existed, but how it was ideologically enforced/biased . It does not matter if it was only a small amount of censorship or that it had no major material effect, it still occurred and makes the left look bad (if you look at this from a culture war angle). In the grand scheme of things, this does not change much, I agree.

Does the thread have any new information about 'how it was ideologically enforced/biased', though? There's just the photos of computer screens, and internal communication that you can read as referring to suppressing conservatives given what we already know, but don't really tell us anything new.

It is possible she is cherry-picking the data, and that the apparent bias is statistically insignificant. If there were a way to reach either Musk, Bari or Matt, this would be a great question to ask. I would need to see the raw data. ...good luck with that though.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats