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I believe it is Haidt himself who said bringing phones is analogous to a kid in the 90s bringing in a portable TV and putting on a show during class, and no one thinking that it is out of place. Of course it is! As a society we've made the determination that personal TVs and music players are unacceptable in the classroom, but phones, the single most addictive device ever made, is OK?!

My oldest is only 7 right now but I'm also seriously considering middle and high school options for him that severely restrict phone use. We play Minecraft on the weekends, he does MakeCode Arcade coding tutorials, and occasionally gets (heavily supervised) YouTube time. I don't think he's missing out on opportunities to become skilled with computers.


I'm not sure what world you're living in but we've been shooting missiles at Chinese military objects and restricting their access to semiconductors. I have little doubt that if the CIA or FBI had information it was actually a Chinese plot they would have released it by now.


Naw. Nobody wins from increased instability. Seems to me the playbook is obvious. You see in politics all the time. Everyone knows the truth but pretends otherwise until the proper time when things have settled down and the truth can be allowed to be free.

We are coming to the time when people are forgetting what lockdown were like and just want to move on with live. The near future is when the lab leak hypothesis can become the de facto default of scientists and intel agencies.

Same applies for the vaccines. 4 months of study for top level review of vaccines as a metastudy. 6 months of journal review for meta analysis of existing papers. 6 months of journal review, 4 months to parse the data.

Already, before the narrative can change, 20 months need to pass since the end of the dataset. If you want relevent data on covid and vaccine outcomes, then it's Jan 2021-Dec 2022.

First two years of preliminary data won't be finalized and combined and analyzed to a sufficient degree to potentially flip the narrative until about September 2024.

Want real data on covid and the vaccine? 5 years worth? You can have it in September 2027.

Why bother having the CIA release shit when you can just have the scientists do your dirty for you and time slide relevent information into 2024+?

Its all coming out. Just a matter of timing.


> I'm not sure what world you're living in but we've been shooting missiles at Chinese military objects

Only after several days of failing to resolve the balloon matter diplomatically. Shooting it down was not their first resort, and that's probably because diplomatic considerations with China were being weighed against the domestic political situation. When the diplomatic situation can be kept relatively smooth and normal by keeping the public in the dark, that's the 'rational' choice.


How would that improve anything for the US, though? Shooting down balloons helps us because it gets rid of spy equipment in our skies (and lets us get our hands on it). Restricting access to semiconductors keeps us on better technological footing than China.

If they release evidence of a lab leak, China will deny it and relations will deteriorate. How do either of those things help the US? It's not going to make China a pariah in the world (and even if it did, that may or may not be a good thing) - the world is already very clear on their profound human rights abuses of Uyghurs, but nothing happens because they're too economically important.

We'd maybe gain some theoretical moral high ground, but that doesn't make the world safer or better.


Not unless you were using it for leverage ?


> American media

Huh? The previous President of the US frequently called it the "China Virus".

> GOP conspiracy to bring down Biden

Biden wasn't President for the first year of the pandemic, not sure how that works out.

> Are American progressives so fragile in their identity that they avoid agreeing with conservatives for fear of guilt by association?

I personally don't care whether the virus was man-made or natural. It bares next to zero importance on my life. At the end of the day what are we really arguing about? Lab practices in China? The Chinese should be better about lab safety and wet markets. But there was a pandemic which has killed millions of people. It seems like the people most invested in this question are also the ones most invested in downplaying the pandemic, which is just evil.


>I personally don't care whether the virus was man-made or natural

That's really surprising to me, because in my opinion the answer truly does matter, and sticking my head in the sand feels defeatist. I suppose that's a difference of opinions, though.


I guess it's a natural human reaction when something reflects badly on you. I never cared about it anyway, it doesn't really matter, etc.


How does it really matter though? What are in the Western world going to do in retaliation? Are we going to start a war with China over their bio-lab programs?


> How does it really matter though?

I’m seriously baffled how people say this.

It’s it obvious that if true then BSL4 virology and gain of function work needs international supervision and agreement for humanity.


It's better to have a terrible 5-6 years dealing with diapers and strollers in your 30s than spend 30 years in your 50s to 80s alone.


There is no guarantee your children will visit or take care of you in old age, and if you're having children due to the above reason, that is a very poor reason indeed to have children, as it seems to be more of an argument for the parent's well being, rather than the child's. If you don't want to be alone, cultivate lifelong friends.


These are all novel cultural values not common in any traditional society with normal birth rates. In fact, this attitude is one reason why birth rates are so low.

It is totally normal to expect children to care for you in your old age. The guarantee is that other people can and should ostracize people for not caring for their parents. When an acquaintance tells me they don't visit/call/care for their parents with pride, I make a mental note to not be friends with that person. If you can't keep the most basic relationships straight... that's not a great sign, realistically.


That is certainly...one opinion. You don't know what those people have been through, they could have had abusive parents for example and don't talk to them anymore. If the parents don't take care of the child well when raising them, I consider it more than fair to not take care of them in old age (or even simply once the child leaves the nest, so to speak). Taking care of one's parents is not an immutable law of nature (indeed, many if not most organisms simply breed and leave their children), nor should it be. That you implicitly "make a mental note to not be friends with that person" is quite telling indeed.


If you're still pushing your kid around in a stroller at age 6, something is very wrong.


As a parent myself I can tell you that they are very likely referring to having two to three children close together rather than a single child ... ie. having both a six year old (eldest) and a child in diapers | stroller (youngest) at the same time.

After that period things are great!

. . . until you've faced with a household full of teenagers rebelling against anything and everything in overly dramatic ways.


I literally only hear that Google search is bad from HN. No one else in my daily life - my family, friends, people out at my gym or grocery store - ever complain that Google search is bad. In fact, Google is still the default for looking up information anywhere. It's sentiments like this that make you realize how much of a bubble HN exists in.

OTOH, people have trouble using GMail, google home, or ban YouTube in their house for their kids. Next to no one uses Android, etc.


Haven't you noticed how search results quality has changed let us say from 2007-2013 and comparing recent time period? I used to get the best information, websites, media material that I was looking from the rarest sources on the web, even probably rare to find given my geo location. Today I usually get information not by the quality, but from "the biggest brands" on the web. I was surprised that I didn't find one specific forum in over 20 search pages, but then I had checked my bookmarks and the site was still running and functional and contained what I was exactly looking by the keywords and other possible search factors. These days I just feel I get the information sources that are the most advertised or well branded, but do not reflect the accuracy of what I'm looking for.


it's starting to get really hard to believe that, as people repeat 'wow, search used to be better and now it's trash', remembering only the good parts, rewriting their memories of it, and just having it literally be 'well somebody said it, so it must be true'. 'i remember how it used to be a decade ago', well, sure you do. and yeah, somebody could dig out their search history takeouts and do some kind of opinionated pondering about it, but this ain't it.

and if one wants to experience real search results difference, just switch back to, say, duckduckgo for a bit, and see how many times you just end up giving up and googling stuff instead.


Google results are markedly worse than they used to be. SEO spam routinely pushes the site/content I'm searching for down/off the page. These sites are often just straight up copies of StackOverflow.

My perception is that search queries need to be much more specific in order to avoid SEO trash as well. It used to be fairly common to find special interest forums when looking for product reviews. Now the first page is almost exclusively auto-generated spam sites referral linking to Amazon product pages. Adding "Reddit" sometimes provides helpful advice but there's often a lack of in depth insight that was present before.


DDG just uses Bing though, it’s bad but Bing was never particularly good.


DDG uses bing only for images AFAIK. Has that changed?


DDG is a reskin of Bing web search.


I pondered on this for a while, unsure if my memory was false. Then I switched to Kagi and it felt like Google 15 years ago. I was served the content I was looking for, not the content Google wants me to look at. It's not perfect, but 9/10 cases (and I do 50+ searches a day) it's great, and validates my perception of the quality of Google going down (or less cynically, the likelihood that Google is optimising for the general public, and I'm an outlier).


because the rarest sources of the web were relatively speaking much more popular back then when the internet had about 20 pages in total. The entire scale of the web has been growing x-fold every year.

So what was relatively relevant back then is now irrelevant to a general audience and as a result has been pushed back. You could argue Google should bias search much more towards individual history but that has its own pitfalls, both in terms of results and privacy wise.

Basically blame your fellow searchers for clicking and wanting big brand stuff, Google just gives you what the internet considers relevant.


I blame Google and the third party ad model for profiting from and encouraging the creation of the lowest quality cash grabs. Search for any kind of product review and you're faced with a sea of auto-generated shit, the only purpose of which is to serve you an ad and hope you click an amazon affiliate link. It's a prime example that the "value" delivered isn't value to society or the individuals using the service.


Can't be the whole explanation for why you cannot find them with Google anymore: search.marginalia.nu manages to find the


To be fair Marginalia Search is very much not a general-purpose search engine.

If I was trying to cater to a broader set of use cases and users, I'd probably have more of Google's problems as a result.


Send me your queries to debug if you remember them.


I stopped using google a while ago, but try searching for something unusual, add doublequotes around it and notice how your search engine blatantly ignores double quotes (and even your verbatim operator) in order to inflate results.

This cost many minutes most times and is seriously annoying because the search engine ignores me and lies to me.

Machines shouldn't do that.


>Next to no one uses Android

Wait, what?

Who's in the bubble now?


I thought it was clear the poster was talking about their daily life, and not commenting on world statistics.


The fact that somebody writing on HN doesnt know this shows you how low information the world really is.

We generally assume too much about the shared knowledge basis. There would be much less friction if we could improve on that


American bubble. US people don’t realise the world runs on Android.


> American bubble. US people don’t realise the world runs on Android.

It's not even an American bubble. Some sources show that the iPhine market share in the US is only slightly above 50%.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/north-amer...


This could be a regional experience. Some states have 70% apple market share, with Rhode Island having 80%[0]. The difference could be even greater for smaller regions within a state.

[0]: https://deviceatlas.com/blog/mobile-os-popularity-by-us-stat...


If Android users are roughly 50% in the US, then the likelihood of knowing zero people that use Android is quite small. We can think of this as roughly each of your friends tossing a coin and all of them landing heads. If they do, that's a pretty biased bubble (because it isn't a pure random process, but you also don't have a representative and random sample)


The statistics of a population are not unifrom across it's subpopulations.


especially because of this whole imessage/rcs thing, your friends are extremely more likely to be using the same OS as you.


> If Android users are roughly 50% in the US, then the likelihood of knowing zero people that use Android is quite small.

If you mostly associate with people who are on pre-paid cell phone plans they got at Walmart or a gas station, you'll see a high concentration of Android. Among people who are in technology or often purchase luxury goods, most your friends with have iPhones.


Is this downvoted by salty Android users, or actually disagreed upon?

Obviously it's a bell curve - not all Android users are cheap and not all iPhone users are luxary goods providers, but my experience (Australia) reflects this generalisation broadly.


This is the answer here. I believe iOS wins the US but world wide Android has a 72% market share.


Even in the US it's like 45% Android, so "no one uses android" is absurd in any context.


"I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him." - famous quote from 1972


Maybe OP is saying nobody important uses android


You need to multiply the market share by the wealth of the participants.

What fraction of the world’s wealth (easier to measure than influence) runs on Android? Elon using iOS has more influence than how many impoverished billions?

This is why German and Japanese are often localized before other languages with more speakers.

Not saying it’s right, but just pointing out the reality. The world runs based on the decision makers, who use iOS.


> Elon using iOS has more influence than how many impoverished billions?

Does he buy that many phones? /S

I agree with your point, but catering to luxury users certainly has an advantage. Android, globally, is doing ok.


Lol. If you want to talk wealth, then it doesn’t matter again because people with enough money have multiple phones, iOS and Android.


I've heard this over and over on HN in recent years and I simply don't understand it. Almost any Google search I run has just what I am looking for as the first or second choice. Google frequently knows what I am looking for after I type in the first few words of the search! Are HN people not logged in when they search?


For me it is not a problem with ordinary searches: directions, recipes etc, no problem.

But try to find a specific error message from an npm package!

First you get useless results because Google found something it rather wanted to show you.

Then you add doublequotes and realize the Google results are full of utterly irrelevant pages lacking half my keywords.


> Next to no one uses Android, etc.

Seems like a self-selection bias, possibly based on socio-economic factors that determine who you surround yourself with.

In my personal circles, I only know 1 person who uses iPhone, everyone else uses android.


In some sense, it could seem better to a lot of people just because for whatever query you can imagine there is probably a top N listicle that search will happily present to you, even if it is auto generated nonsense.

> Next to no one uses Android, etc.

That is sarcasm right? I can't quite tell.


US is mostly apple world


"Mostly" being a minor majority, only recently established (September, 2022)?

> For the first time ever, there are more iPhones in use in the US than any other type of smartphone. Citing data from analytics firm Counterpoint Research, the Financial Times reports the iPhone overtook the entire Android ecosystem in June to claim 50 percent of US market share

[...]

> By 2010, two years after its debut, Android overtook iOS to claim the larger install base. Ever since then, Google’s mobile operating system has been the dominant force in the global smartphone market, claiming more than 70 percent market share as of 2022, according to Statcounter.

https://www.engadget.com/iphone-overtakes-android-us-market-...


Android has a 48.2% mobile OS market share in the US as of November 2022: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...

Claiming "next to no one uses Android" is just plain wrong even in the US.


In my daily life, all my tech coworkers and zoomer (and older) friends in VRC say it's horrible, myself included. The only people who don't have a problem are it are my very casual-use family members.

TikTok search is apparently better. My version of that is "site:reddit.com", but even that's gotten worse as the culture there becomes more censorious, echo-chambery, and more insane.


To expand on this how often do you have a conversation with someone where you evaluate or recommend search engines? I'm going to assume never because that would be both weird and boring.


I work in an environment where this might come up once a month or something on slack or in meetings etc.


Most people I know use Android. I have noticed Android and IPhone users have their own bubbles.


Maybe because other people search in different places. Events/Businesses: Google Maps, Instagram Trend/Tutorials: Tiktok, IG Reels News: Twitter/Social Media/News Outlet of choice

Google is for searching new sources of information and either it’s instant (google info box) or takes too long which makes a lasting memory about it being painful.


My mother (quite the opposite of a techie) complains about how hard it is to find stuff on Google - especially unbiased stuff that isn't being promoted by a company or individual with a promotional / commercial agenda.

I don't think the issue for this is with changes Google has made, but rather with the increasing extent to which it's targeted by SEO spam.


Because non-tech people don't think about which search engine they're using. Doesn't mean it's not bad.


People care when things are bad. They don't care when things are fine. Not good or great, but fine. It gets normal folks the information they were looking for the vast majority of the time. Whether the results "got worse" is irrelevant when the results are still what people were looking for.


Many continued to use Altavista or something until a friendly sysadmin or another early user showed them Google.

Same with IE, if no one showed them Firefox they just stuck with IE.


I was wondering and started asking around me, and while they probably don't express it the same we people here do, a significant proportion of the people I asked (~50%) noticed that they spend more time avoiding bad quality connect



Your second paragraph points that you are living in a bubble as well.


I hear it often in my circles that search has degraded.


It’s not a bubble. If you want to hear basic opinions from the everyday person then sure, go talk to your gym bros and grocery store Facebook moms about Google. That’s if you’re not met with blank stares. They don’t know what they don’t know.

HN is a much more distinguished community possessing vast technical knowledge. We can approach products from beyond the level of the everyday person and can give deeper appraisal of their worth. Some here may have even built those products, or at least could build a distilled version of them in a weekend for fun.


Maybe because we were early power users and knew how well it used to work?


You blame journalists of all people? How about him, does he have agency? How about the GOP (I suppose not, putting up con artists seems par for the course)? How about the NY Democratic party for doing zero opposition research?

Not to mention there were quite prominent journalists like Josh Marshall raising red flags about this guy all last year. https://twitter.com/joshtpm


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#United_S... It sounds like this is starting to catch up with us ...


We should all expect candidates to be dishonest. And that's by far the most appropriate posture for journalists. I agree that the state party is crap, which is precisely how they lost so many House seats.

https://www.democracynow.org/2022/11/10/congress_midterm_ele...


Why is that gross? It's their speech to decide what they want to promote or not promote. Why are you anti-free speech?


Not when the platform (a) benefits from network effects that make it immune from private sector free market competition (b) actively colludes with government officials


It's not trustworthy when a system actions a user's content without telling them. Free speech principles are also a thing.

The question is not what is getting demoted, it's how. In this case, it's being done secretly, and Twitter isn't the only one doing it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33916414


This outrage is hilarious coz HN shadowbans people too. Which increases site quality which is why all the complainers are on here.


Transparently removing content is the normal way to moderate a forum. This research [1] suggests it reduces mod workload because users learn the rules. Discourse doesn't secretly remove content and is popular.

It isn't accurate to say secrecy increases site quality. No such qualitative study has been done.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/duwdco/should_mode...


That's talking about article submissions, not comments. Couldn't read the PDF because the link is broken.

More than 95% of the time I see a flagged account on HN, they post complete garbage that leads to more flaming replies if not removed promptly. HN has a very limited set of moderators, like one or two, who cannot police every comment 24/7.

>Discourse doesn't secretly remove content and is popular.

Popular where? In corporate and niche business use cases? What are some public Discourses that allow everyone to post?


> That's talking about article submissions, not comments

Shadow moderation was implemented without doing any research. I agree it's about time more studies are done on all types of content and all platforms in order to assess whether or not this functionality furthers the platforms' goals.

> Couldn't read the PDF because the link is broken

Good call. Blog post summarizing [1] and pdf [2]

> Popular where? In corporate and niche business use cases? What are some public Discourses that allow everyone to post?

All of them that don't use the ShadowBan add-on, I guess.

Indeed shadow moderation appears to have made platforms more popular. I won't disagree there. But I also think it's clear it has contributed to echo chambers and increased isolation and tribality.

I think we're reaching a point where the public wants to know what's going on in social media. Its harmful nature is not just driven by preference-driven news feeds, which we already know can be toxic, it's also driven by shadow moderation. That's the other shoe that may be dropping here.

[1] https://medium.com/acm-cscw/does-transparency-in-moderation-...

[2] https://shagunjhaver.com/research/articles/jhaver-2019-trans...


https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3359252

You could have just use the menu to find it, it only took a few seconds. There's a preprint available there if you need it. https://shagunjhaver.com/research/


HN has an option to be able to see the removed content.


No. I don't assume I have any rights other than vis-a-vis the government. I've dealt with a lot of corporate bullshit from tech companies, it's an annoyance but I just handle it and don't make a career out of whining about it as some do.

I've been arrested and kept in jail overnight on false charges for being a political activist, people complaining about being in Twitter or facebook jail don't impress me much (especially when almost all of them have a backup account).


Presumably you eat at restaurants whose food you like and buy hardware whose quality you like. It's the same with social media. You can give attention to systems you support and share information about them. The alternative you propose sounds like cowering to company overlords.

And where are you that it is illegal to be a political activist?


I live in the good old USA, where I have the privilege to be a member of the underclass.


"New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.

Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.

You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet."

How is this any different than Elon's stated goals from 3 weeks ago?


A shadowban has the property that it's hidden from the user. Elon seems to want to make these kinds of actions transparent, like, for instance, deboosted tweets being visible as deboosted by their creator/other users, which is a pretty big difference. This difference is already visible in initial intent: Twitter hid what they were doing https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/1022658436704731136, while Elon is explicitly saying what he will do.


That tweet is referencing this[0] blog post.

> We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile). And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.

It specifically mentions factoring in user behavior:

>What actions you take on Twitter (e.g. who you follow, who you retweet, etc)

> How other accounts interact with you (e.g. who mutes you, who follows you, who retweets you, who blocks you, etc)

How was Twitter hiding this?

[0]: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/...


Twitter's visibility filtering wasn't based on "Your" User Behavior. It was based on what their moderation team decided to filter or not filter.


Sure, there was human involvement. Seems irrelevant to the comment I was responding to - Twitter did not hide that they were deranking some Tweets and there doesn't seem to be any difference between their current policy 'revealed' in the Twitter Files and what Elon proposed.


Problem is that there is a reason shadow bans exist.

It prevents nefarious actors from easily probing the limits of their content moderation processes.

It really is funny how Musk is just taking Twitter back to the start.


He'll end with the exact same practices, but with a different set of enemies.


He's going to speedrun learning moderation from "first principles". And we get to watch him learn (just like when he started banning people who changed their handle to mock him).


It's already easy to check to see if you or your post is shadowbanned.


I think the issue is not that this feature exists, but that it was abused to silence criticisms primarily from the right, while at the same time twitter denied this.


If it was done in secret how could you know it was abused to silence criticisms primarily from the right?


Because people can see that their message that used to get x retweets and likes, is now only getting y which is far less. It is very common to see people complain about being shadow banned on twitter, and not knowing for what, or why.


> people can see that their message that used to get x retweets and likes, is now only getting y which is far less.

If we go up to the top comment in this chain we see

> Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.

- Elon Musk

So... you're in agreement?

(btw, this isn't shadowbanning. Shadow banning would be 0 likes and 0 retweets and 0 views)

> t is very common to see people complain about being shadow banned on twitter, and not knowing for what, or why.

Actually this is my entire complaint with these Twitter Files. They show examples of people getting delisted but do not show the tweets that led to these decisions. That is a CRITICAL element of the story. We can't determine if Twitter was acting in good faith or not without this knowledge. We also have no idea if these examples are selection biased or not. Probably since there's only right leaning stuff and thefp.com is a right wing organization. Maybe Twitter does have a left bias (it probably does) but we sure aren't getting a fair shake.


Okay, so that gets us to “it seems that my account has been shadowbanned.”

Has someone compiled a dataset of users that appear to be shadowbanned, that tweet political content at least some of the time, as well as the political lean they have?


The main issue here is not that shadowban exist but fact that twtter officials explicitly denied its existence.


> but fact that twtter officials explicitly denied its existence

I haven't seen anything here that indicates that it ever did exist.

Limiting reach is different from people not seeing your content at all.


Shadowban is not a total hiding content from everyone, it also implies selective hide[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning


> Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1601042125130371072


The OP twitter thread doesn’t seem to be describing shadow banning.


> How is this any different than Elon's stated goals from 3 weeks ago?

It is different because Elon's goals are at the level of tweets, and the screenshots here depict action at the level of users.


Like Kanye West?


You're right it's not. I gather if you want to get two sides to talk who aren't talking, i.e. those who support that message vs. those who don't, you need to appeal to both.


I think there might be a reason two sides aren't talking.

Conservatives: Rope, tree, journalist: some assembly required

Fuck Joe Biden

Fuck your feelings

These are all t-shirt slogans you can buy at conservative political events, and they're quite widespread rather than exceptional.

Also conservatives: Why am I being shadow banned, this is viewpoint discrimination!

To be clear, there are obnoxious people and outright assholes all over the political spectrum. But conservatives have made outrage and offensiveness their brand, in recent years. I remember being astonished and disgusted by the gleeful antagonism of Rush Limbaugh back int eh 1990s when conservative talk radio first became A Thing following the Reagan administration's abolition of the 'Fairness doctrine.'


> I think there might be a reason two sides aren't talking.

Both sides can certainly find a reason not to speak to each other. The left claims the right is hateful, the right claims the left is obscene. It's always been like that, with one having the power to censor the other.

Here's an example [1]. One side, a well known entrepeneur/investor, is arguing for no censorship, and the other side, a well known disinformation researcher [2], argues for limits of the reach of certain content. One has blocked the other, so they no longer communicate directly.

Five years ago, someone at Twitter might have observed this interaction and decided, "I'm going to secretly action content. That will satisfy both the disinfo labeler and the anti-censorship crowd." Yet in doing so, as we can see, nobody is satisfied. They're still not talking to each other, and they don't understand why. The reason is due to the secrecy built into all of these platforms where an unknown third party is actioning content without anyone involved in the conversation knowing about it.

See also Free speech for me--but not for thee : how the American left and right relentlessly censor each other [3] (Nat Hentoff, 1992)

[1] https://twitter.com/noUpside/status/1599532506252214272

[2] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-is-not-the-same-as-f...

[3] https://archive.org/details/freespeechformeb0000hent/page/n9...


Interesting though these points are (and I'm familiar, as I am personally acquainted with DiResta), I think you are looking at this issue in too abstract a manner.

Ther's no obligation to have dialog with others who are actively threatening to kill you. Don't owe them a conversation or even a hearing.

I don't disagree with your characterization that 'the left claims the right is hateful, the right claims the left is obscene.' But there is a clear qualitative difference between the two sides in terms of the willingness to insinuate, actually issue, and finally carry out death threats, and it's not a wholly new phenomenon. I put it to you that the people who are amused by and choose to promote messages like 'rope, tree, journalist: some assembly required' do not actually give a shit about free speech but are opportunistically employing the grievance for political leverage.

Get back to me on this when the right stops openly calling to murder people on such a frequent basis and I'll be happy to consider it in more abstract terms. I see why you're concerned about this, but having extensive first hand experience of political violence I think shadow bans are a relatively minor issue by comparison.


> Ther's no obligation to have dialog with others who are actively threatening to kill you.

I never said there was. Even free speech law has limits and may punish such speech.

What I advocate is for authors of secretly removed content to be able to discover the removal, because even if the comment is vitriolic, the offending author may perceive the lack of a response as tacit approval of their words.

> But there is a clear qualitative difference between the two sides in terms of the willingness to insinuate, actually issue, and finally carry out death threats

Left wing extremists are currently saying that words are violence [1]. This is wrong, short of something that "in context, directly causes specific imminent serious harm", a definition from Nadine Strossen [2].

[1] https://archive.ph/1NeiV

[2] https://books.google.com/books?&hl=en&id=whBQDwAAQBAJ&q=in+c...


> Left wing extremists are currently saying that words are violence [1].

It’s the Republican, Trump-appointed, FBI director’s assessment that extremist right-wing political violence (read homegrown right-wing terrorism) is far and away a bigger problem than left-wing violence.

Jan 6 I hoped would have demonstrated that clearly once and for all. After that day, it has become impossible to “both sides” political violence in the US — it really is asymmetrically coming from the right.


It's not my intent to pick sides. I highlighted the left there only because parent focused on the right.

Regarding shadow moderation, I can promise you that every side of every issue in every geography and on every major platform uses it. See the talk linked in my profile for examples.


It's getting very boring hearing Americans going on about "Jan 6th". Some protesters entered a building. It's not that big a deal, no "political violence" happened.

It's been 20 years and Americans have finally recently stopped harping on about "9/11", after decades of them murdering orders of magnitudes more innocents. It's incredible to see them committing some of worst attrocities in the world and still loudly yell about their own tiny issues.


Leader of Oath Keepers was found guilty of seditious conspiracy, so you’re wrong about that.


I'm aware of what you're advocating because you repeat it so often. I have no objection to your points about discoverability (indeed I mentioned else where that sufficiently obnoxious tweets could be highlighted as ban-worthy, rather than simply being removed - although this wouldn't mitigate the harm done by posting slurs etc.

It's a little odd to me that you contemplate hypotheticals like 'perceiving the lack of response as tacit approval.' It's not that this is incorrect, but that you're overlooking evidence of the alternative: when platforms like Twitter or FB leave posts up (to gather both argument and support) but attach some sort of note saying 'this post might be disinformation' or words to that effect.

That is what you are asking for, no? A clear signal that the social media post is disfavored by the platform operator in some way, such that the author is notified and given some context, and so is everyone else. I would appreciate if you would clarify whether or not this meets your desired standard of transparency.

The reason I bring this up is that when this approach is applied, authors of the controversial posts tend to hate it and still scream that they're being censored by being publicly shamed, or having words inserted into their social media post by the platform operator (notwithstanding the extremely obvious distinction.. Twitter has gone farther again by allowing users to add meta-commentary in the form of notes (previously birdwatch), but on controversial topics said notes are often railed against by the original author or the subject of meta-controversy by people trying to spam the note system with negative characterizations of the notes themselves.

If you're going to make transparency of moderation into your political cause (and you very much seem to approach it this way), then I think you should go all the way and address the questions of why people are not happy even when they get what you are advocating for, and just pivot to a slightly different variation of the same argument about how they're being censored and it's a terrible injustice etc.

Incidentally the definition in your 2nd link is not from Nadine Strossen; it's just a restatement of the prevailing legal standard for incitement (from Brandenburg v. Ohio) and indeed seems to be offered as such in the text. Like the 'true threat' doctrine, this definition is being interpreted in increasingly elastic fashion in our era of instantaneous mass communication.

I'm familiar with Strossen's book but also consider it to be written from a comfortable suite in an ivory tower. Like many well-intentioned idealists, she acknowledges the possibility of violence but argues that it must be met by reasoned debate and nonviolent resistance. I reject this posture, because it basically says people who are the target of violence should accept their role as punching bugs (or targets of gunfire) in exchange for the possibility of moving the conscience of elites who review circumstances, form policy, render decisions, and recognize peers (eg accepting or rejecting the validity of other states). In this mode of argument, willingness to passively sacrifice oneself is the threshold of acceptability - becoming famous for your advocacy and then dying for it like Christ, King, or Gandhi is the way to go. And conveniently, once people are dead they can be cited as moral exemplars without the troubling possibility of them reappearing and critiquing subsequent outcomes.

Oddly, I don't see Strossen or her peers throwing themselves in front of violent mobs in an attempt to bring them to moral clarity. Having at various times been arrested, attacked, beaten by a mob, and beaten by cops while engaged in wholly non-violent political activity, I do not give much weight to pure idealism that isn't grounded in cold hard reality.

This brings me back to your first link, which complains about transgender extremism and was ironically published on the first of April this year. Just in the last three weeks, we've seen a mass shooting at an LGBT club leaving 5 dead and a further 18 injured (Colorado Springs); multiple militant groups, openly armed, demonstrating against a drag queen story hour event while police looked the other way (Columbus, Ohio); well-organized attacks on electrical substations that left a whole county without power for days and happened to coincide with a drag show in the county seat (Moore County, North Carolina).

Now, my strategic assessment is that opposition to drag shows is often a convenient excuse for militant organizing and action, and if all LGBT people magically teleported away to Planet Fabulous tomorrow, the militant organizing and action would quickly pivot to some other scapegoat.

But please, don't waste my time with links about 'transgender extremism' and free speech issues unless you are willing to address the fact that those who oppose the acceptance and freedoms of LGBT folk are themselves engaged in the suppression of free speech and indeed life. I have yet to see any of the conservative/libertarian champions of free speech address the abundant right-wing attacks upon it, probably because they're scared of their own side.

And by address, I don't mean dismissing it with a truism like 'violence is illegal of course.' Rather, try providing evidence of how your preferred approach would mitigate actual and ongoing harms, and why havens of largely unrestricted speech (eg parts of 4chan) are not utopias of thoughtful discussion but rather cesspools of bigotry that celebrate and incite violence as a means to drown out discussion. It's hard for me to take you seriously when the issue you complain about at such length involves so little hardship.


> It's hard for me to take you seriously when the issue you complain about at such length involves so little hardship.

It seems you feel that secretive online censorship is not a big deal. I don't see the point in trying to convince you. Plenty of other people, such as those I quoted here [1], do care.

If you'd like me to respond further, please narrow it down to a question or two.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33916519


Where does it say he suppressed information? Elon only says he had a “possible role in suppression”. They do say he vetted the information before it was public. For Twitter's sake I hope a lawyer did vet it!


I too love remembering to file a 8949 for all my coffee purchases


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