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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Here's the thread:
All my left-wing woke friends are CONVINCED that the social media platforms uphold the white supremacist misogynistic patriarchy, and they have plenty of screenshots and evidence ...
... of times when the platform has made enforcement decisions unfairly against innocuous things they've said, and let far more egregious sexist/racist violations by the other side pass.
Woke friends: it's true, right? You have LOTS of examples.
All my alt/center-right/libertarian friends are CONVINCED the social media platforms uphold the woke BLM/Marxist/LGBTQ agenda and they ALSO have plenty of screenshots and evidence of times when...
... the platforms have made enforcement decisions unfair against them for innocuous things they've said merely questioning (in good faith) the woke orthodoxy, and let far more egregious violations by the other side stand.
Right-wingers and libertarians: it's true, right? You can remember PLENTY of examples.
Neither side is lying.
Mostly, it's really because enforcement is hard, and there are LOTS of errors.
The lab leak theory preclusion is something new. I was talking about Hunter Biden. There was no fear of imminent harm to anyone accruing from allowing a story about Hunter's sordid laptop. None. At all. It was just a salacious political story.
Moderation involves looking at each story discretely. The preclusion of the Biden story is indefensible. The preclusion of the lab leak story is defensible (I think very weakly, but still technically defensible).
You cannot defend the preclusion of the laptop story by lumping it in with the lab leak story. Very, very different things. And that thread's author, and your "umbrella" defense highlights a dishonesty in the censorship.
First, there's this defense that all or most moderation is precluding harm, a "Who will think of the children???" cudgel. This immunizes indefensible decisions like the Biden laptop preclusion by allowing the moderator to say, "We have to err on the side of safety." That's naked bullshit. The story on Biden's laptop involved zero public safety issues. It also allows the mod to say after the fact, as Dorsey has, "Oops. We goofed there."*
"Public safety" is a huge umbrella under which almost any content can be shoehorned (except things clearly outside it, like the Biden laptop). Mods can hide behind that all day long and abuse that privilege. One way to abuse it is to kowtow to the CCP by banning a lab leak story, while saying this was done to avoid having lunatics commit hate crimes against Chinese people.
I think the author of the thread was truthful and forthright about mistakes he sees in moderation. But I think he also highlights a system which, by his own admission, is riddled with ideologues (the woke) at lower levels, and is easily abused, with built in plausible deniability. |
Just stop. He doesn't "admit" anything about "ideologues (the woke) at lower levels." He says they make mistakes without an ideological valence, and then partisans of different stripes get bent out of shape, imaging that they're being discriminated against. See -- you're doing it. You're doing exactly what he says happens.
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See above. That's a dangerous construct.
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It's not a "construct." It's the way that every single commercially successful internet platform business operates. It's a fact of life that you choose only to notice when it fits your personal bugaboos about "the woke".
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When the Gen Xers retire, we're staring down the barrel of a minority of people in charge of platforms who think free speech is dangerous and something they should have the right to craft or curtail. There will be a woke CEO of a platform someday, and wrongthink will be banished.
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This is your own ideological horseshit, nothing more.
If you're going to pretend to care for free speech principles, shed a tear for Disney, which just had the State of Florida retaliate against it by changing its tax treatment for disagreeing with the Republican Governor.
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* What was truly loathsome in the Biden laptop debacle was our own intelligence community lying about how the story was Russian fiction. Clapper and Brennan made that argument everywhere they could, and it conveniently provided cover for Dorsey's awful decision. But I can't blame Brennan or Clapper. They are openly biased political actors. Dorsey, OTOH, had no basis to listen to those two men or their surrogates, as each of the two of them has been caught lying to serve their interests in the past (Clapper having done it before Congress in regard to NSA metadata collection).
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"Even a stopped clock is right twice a day."
"The clock says it's 5:30 and it's 5:30 -- see, that proves it's not broken."
