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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15598 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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Steve Sailer has been suspended from Twitter for allegedly violating their rules against hateful conduct.

His tweet said

Blacks suffer and perpetrate the majority of homicides/murders in the U.S., so anytime there's a sizable change in the national trend, it's usually driven by changes in black behavior. During the BLM Eras, black homicides [and] black traffic fatalities have trended together.

He appealed and the decision was upheld.

This is yet another way in which Elon Musk is going back on what he said in April.

By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law.

I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.

If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect.

Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.

It's starting to look like his attitude towards free speech isn't that different from his predecessors'.

It's starting to look like his attitude towards free speech isn't that different from his predecessors'.

Or he's far more constrained than he assumed he would be for various reasons (e.g. institutional forces really are that powerful, he has people part the Twitter deal he has to consider, profitability is a very real concern especially given the overpaying for Twitter + Tesla stock drop, etc. )

I would prefer that he's just a hypocrite tbh. The world's richest man outright buying Twitter, firing the old guard and still not being able to stop Cthulu swimming left is...disheartening.

I would prefer that he's just a hypocrite tbh. The world's richest man outright buying Twitter, firing the old guard and still not being able to stop Cthulu swimming left is...disheartening.

The elonjet fiasco was disappointing, but I still think he is more committed to free speech than his predecessors. The common reason for this is advertisers, although having certain accounts not display ads would be the simple solution, which for some reason social media companies cannot implement easily. Just banning an inconvenient account is easier than having to overhaul the ad platform. tech companies love to avoid easy solutions to common problems but waste billions of dollars on useless features or upgrades no one wants (such as Metaverse, youtube shorts ,etc.).

I think you have things slightly wrong. @greyenlightenment doesn't seem to be proposing that naughty users don't get ads served to them, but rather that naughty accounts don't get ads inserted alongside their tweets when others view them. So posting a bunch of racial slurs wouldn't have any benefit to the user doing so, as they'd still continue to see ads.

That being the case (at least if I'm right), point #2 is also mitigated. Because this wouldn't be about ads not being served to terrible people, it would actually be directly addressing the desire companies have for ads to not be served next to terrible people. Point #3 still may or may not stand, I guess it really depends. Twitter may be able to charge more for ads if they say "hey we can guarantee that your ads won't ever show up alongside some guy dropping the N-bomb", and they might be able to make more money this way. On the other hand, the lower ad volume (since this would certainly mean some number of fewer ads get shown) may mean they lose money on this. It really depends.

On the other hand, the lower ad volume (since this would certainly mean some number of fewer ads get shown) may mean they lose money on this. It really depends.

The widely cited numbers about an increase in hate speech come from here.

They suggest the word "nigger" was said 26k times/week, "tranny" 34k, "faggot" 22k, "kike" 2.5k and "w*g" (what is this?) 1.2k in the post Musk era. This is an increase of 30-50% over the pre-Musk average, meaning before Musk there were 17k "nigger" tweets on average.

Twitter has about 500M tweets daily.

Admittedly, the tweets which appear in feeds are not a uniform sampling of all tweets. Most tweets come from 23 follower account, whereas most tweet impressions come from accounts with lots of followers such as Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Cristiano Ronaldo and Justin Bieber.

That means the impact of 26k tweets with "nigger" / 3.5B tweets total is even lower.

tl;dr; the ad volume lost due to avoiding "nigger" and "#gasthejews" is negligible.

and "w*g" (what is this?)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cN7L_cte7PA&t=89s

Sir, if you don't recognize "wog", I'm going to have to ask you to change your name to "gaygroyper85pct." 92% at most.

While I admit I am a wog by birth, I consider myself to be a trans white man who aligns with 100% WN.

Given their archaic phrasing, I'm surprised they didn't also track the use of "h**t" and "w*h" to suggest that internet sexism also increased post Musk.

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