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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31645 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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So, uh, the latest Twitter Files just dropped. This one is about Trump and his removal.

Taibbi claims the following.

  1. Twitter post-Trump-ban was now willing to carry forward a policy of "the president can be banned" no matter what.

  2. At least 1 executive did not consider Trump's tweets in isolation i.e they considered the context surrounding the man, his policies, and supporters as well, and they were discussing this with Gadde.

  3. Trust and Safety team members were meeting with the FBI and DHS regularly during this time period.

  4. Twitter was actively engaging in fact-checking against some class of tweets (the particular example is whether Trump's claim about a rigged election would count as a violation if the supporting facts were wrong).

  5. Twitter was aware that they would not necessarily look good if it came out that they were partnering with the FBI/DHS to evaluate misinformation.

In my opinion, this one is somehow even weaker than the first reveal. Most of this was already known through other sources, it just gives additional information to existing claims about bias. Nothing new was revealed, which is now an argument many are using to claim that this is all a waste of time.

I'm totally down to believe that Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi had to post their reveals on Twitter, but the theatrical nature of the reveals is, in my opinion, actively hurting whatever points they want to make. The discussions are increasingly becoming about how the information is being handled over what, if anything, is being shown to us.

In my opinion, this one is somehow even weaker than the first reveal. Most of this was already known through other sources, it just gives additional information to existing claims about bias.

Huh? Maybe in the "it's not happening, and if it is, it's a good thing" sense. Wikipedia is still calling Twiiter shaddow-banning a "conspiracy theory" (even as they admit it turned out to be true). Hard evidence comes out that it was in fact happening, and you go "pff, everyone knew that"?

Hard evidence comes out that it was in fact happening, and you go "pff, everyone knew that"?

But we already knew that? I mean just publicly, we knew that Twitter was taking a stance against "misinformation" and trying to add corrections to people's tweets. Mind you, I don't think the exact specifics were known to the public, but I also don't consider "news flash, Twitter has active infrastructure and action to combat what they don't want" to be something particularly revealing.

Wikipedia is still calling Twiiter shaddow-banning a "conspiracy theory" (even as they admit it turned out to be true).

It's Wikipedia on a topic that is now salient to politics, did you expect that the people editing it were more interested in substance over ideology?

Secondly, the shadow-banning thing is an annoying conversation by virtue of being over definition. My understanding of shadow-banning is that no one can see the content in question, though the user would never know this without logging out and checking for their content. This is how Reddit does it, from my understanding, and how a lot of people are thinking about this topic.

However, I don't agree with this and think we should amend the definition based on how Twitter operates. If a celebrity starts noticing their tweets get no engagement, they'd realize it immediately as something being off because there's a direct link between followers in a way that doesn't exist on Reddit. So if Twitter makes it so that only followers see that content, then we should say this person is shadow-banned. However, there's a caveat to this in that technically, the content wasn't hidden, just maximally deboosted, meaning even the amended definition wouldn't fit. I think that's a small and irrelevant point to quibble over, personally.

If I have any problem with how people are doing this debate more publicly, it would be that definitions aren't being tabooed.

But we already knew that? I mean just publicly, we knew that Twitter was taking a stance against "misinformation" and trying to add corrections to people's tweets. Mind you, I don't think the exact specifics were known to the public, but I also don't consider "news flash, Twitter has active infrastructure and action to combat what they don't want" to be something particularly revealing.

I think there was an implicit assumption there, they're filtering Twitter randos, not democratically elected politician during an election campaign. Like, I'm supposed to be outraged at Cambridge Analytica, or that the Russians spent their pocket money on a handful of Facebook ads, but shrug it off when Twitter is actively limiting the reach of politicians they don't like?

It's Wikipedia on a topic that is now salient to politics, did you expect that the people editing it were more interested in substance over ideology?

I didn't, but as they say, "we live in a society". I can't pretend there isn't a huge amount of people who think Wikipedia is neutral.

However, there's a caveat to this in that technically, the content wasn't hidden, just maximally deboosted, meaning even the amended definition wouldn't fit. I think that's a small and irrelevant point to quibble over, personally.

I mean, that's just how people were using the word "shadow banned" all the time. Check sodiummuffins link for an example.

If I have any problem with how people are doing this debate more publicly, it would be that definitions aren't being tabooed.

Tabooing definitions might be a good idea when there's a true misunderstanding between people who actually want to understand each other. It's not going to work in a fight between political rivals. They'll just find a way to abuse tabooing definitions to score political points.

I think there was an implicit assumption there, they're filtering Twitter randos, not democratically elected politician during an election campaign.

That would be a false assumption then because we knew since 2020 that Twitter was willing to publicly declare some politicians' tweets to be "misinformation".

Tabooing definitions might be a good idea when there's a true misunderstanding between people who actually want to understand each other. It's not going to work in a fight between political rivals.

This is true but trivial. I think there are many people who might be fundamentally missing the point by focusing on the trivial nature of what term is used to describe the action.

I disagree, the point is to make the post much less visible, not to remove it entirely. Many shadowban implementations, and I think even reddit, allows shadow banned content to be seen if directly linked to. They did the important thing regarding shadow banning, kill someone's/a meme's ability to go viral the way they/it naturally would have if not intervened on. Twitter isn't used as a private hosting platform, it's used a means to virally disseminate information. It is a totally useless tool if that ability is cut off.

Many shadowban implementations, and I think even reddit, allows shadow banned content to be seen if directly linked to.

But how would you even do that? You'd have to have separate accounts, at which point you're ban-evading, or you're just doing more work than necessary.

Among other things, a purpose for that particular implementation is so that past links -- written or noticed or indexed before the account was shadow-banned -- still work. Reddit also allowed mods to manually approve their messages, although it's not clear whether this was 'allowed' only in a technical sense rather than a norm one.

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