6 ms·

What’s the theory?

by mikkergp 4y ago

What’s the theory?

gfdgfdgdfg 4y ago
Twitter suppressed information that portrayed Democrats negatively.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  So far Matt hasn’t said anything about this, where is the evidence to this theory? And who was doing this and how?
- DannyBee 4y ago
  Matt explicitly said they suppressed information from anyone who asked, basically, including both sides. Did you miss that?
  - refurb 4y ago
    Did you miss the part where it was driven by “connections” and 97%+ Twitter employee donations were to Democrats?
    - mikkergp 4y ago
      > 97%+ Twitter employee donations were to Democrats? So what’s the principle here? What’s the plan. Which companies should have to disclose the political contributions of their employees and what should they do if it’s unbalanced at more than say 60-40, randomly fire employees until it’s back in line?
    - ecommerceguy 4y ago
      - DannyBee 4y ago
        I see we are now down to ad hominem? The honest truth: I don't think twitter is useful enough to truly care, definitely not anywhere near as much as some people in this thread seem to. So i'll write a comment or two, but then i'll go back to woodworking or whatever and it will not reenter my mind till the next story pops up on the frontpage. As for my views: I believed twitter is a serious net negative for society before this story, and it hasn't changed that view. If it went away tomorrow, i would not shed a single tear. As for my politics - while it's really none of your business, since you seem to care a lot: Being in DC for a long time drove any desire to identify with any particular party well out of my mind. Georgia thankfully does not have registered party affiliation. There is some politically active Daniel Berlin in NY that donates a bunch, but it ain't me.
    - _kbh_ 4y ago
      > Did you miss the part where it was driven by “connections” and 97%+ Twitter employee donations were to Democrats? I find it hard to believe that 97% of people at twitter donated to _anyone_. I think your misinterpreting the data, the data says that 97% of donations were to democrats not that 97% of the employees donated to the democrats.
    - mikkergp 4y ago
      I saw that part and thought it was curious he glossed over it, I look forward to more detail in the future.
    - tbrownaw 4y ago
      The "driven by connections" and the culture that implies is the interesting part. It highlights how they're a center of power that needs similar anti-corruption traditions as any other center of power; there's at least the possibility of something generally useful coming out of this being known. Looking at the donation ratio as proof of the very obvious bias that everyone who cared to look already know about, is good for... what, playing "I told you so"?
    - DannyBee 4y ago
      This is hilariously naive. I lived and worked in DC for 10+ years. I watched this sort of thing happen live just sitting in coffee shops and restaurants near K street or the capitol, or just walking the halls in the office buildings. This is not driven by political donations at the 500-1000 level that employees are doing. No one gives a crap about those. Sorry. they just don't. Maybe you get invited to a dinner with 10000 other people and sit 1000 feet away from a candidate. The people who have "connections" to a place like twitter exist on both sides, aren't getting them from small donations to candidates, and believing otherwise is pretty far out there. If you want to use the donation number to paint this as "twitter has a liberal censorship bent because it's employees are democrats", the problem is that despite matt's anecdote, actual research doesn't back this up: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/Penn-research-Twitter-gives-conservative-news-greater-visibility-liberal-content https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/Penn-research-Twitter-gives... https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5 https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5 etc I'm also incredibly curious what you think should happen that would actually be better? Everything that involves humans is biased in some way by humans. You ban them from donating - well, if your problem is really they are democrats, this will fix nothing, of course. You force them to hire equal numbers of people from various political ideologies - There's a lot of them! You hold them criminally liable for something or other - good luck defining what "wrong" means. Or getting something other than robots to be good at it. Unless you are going to sequester people in a room, without access to anything outside, and somehow suppress all their lived experiences, you are going to end up with biased people moderating content. But here's the thing: If you want the platform to be useful in any meaningful way, you need to moderate content anyway, and live with the fact that it's always going to be biased. Free speech absolutism is not actually a highly useful thing for society in the end, despite the dangers of everything else. That's humans for you. All of our systems and all of the things we build are biased by the people who create and run them. That's true of justice systems, governments, your friend groups, everything. Trying to remove all the bias from decision making in something as large as twitter is like trying to kill all the ants in your backyard.
      - refurb 4y ago
        I'm not sure what you're arguing. You seem to have gone off on some wild tangent and started it with calling me "naive". Let me break it down: - Influence over Twitter policy is mostly through connections with politicians - At least using donations as a metric, 97%+ of Twitter employees support the Democrats - Hence, the Democrats overwhelmingly have more influence on Twitter policy - Thus, when the Biden team expressed concern over a new article, the Twitter team was fast to censor the store on their platform. Which is kind of the key point of the story? I mean the banning of Trump while President kind of makes sense. There was nobody (or maybe 3% of employees) who who leaned Republican who could actually argue their point.

What’s the theory?

gfdgfdgdfg 4y ago

Twitter suppressed information that portrayed Democrats negatively.

mikkergp 4y ago
So far Matt hasn’t said anything about this, where is the evidence to this theory? And who was doing this and how?
DannyBee 4y ago
Matt explicitly said they suppressed information from anyone who asked, basically, including both sides. Did you miss that?
- refurb 4y ago
  Did you miss the part where it was driven by “connections” and 97%+ Twitter employee donations were to Democrats?
  - mikkergp 4y ago
    > 97%+ Twitter employee donations were to Democrats? So what’s the principle here? What’s the plan. Which companies should have to disclose the political contributions of their employees and what should they do if it’s unbalanced at more than say 60-40, randomly fire employees until it’s back in line?
  - ecommerceguy 4y ago
    - DannyBee 4y ago
      I see we are now down to ad hominem? The honest truth: I don't think twitter is useful enough to truly care, definitely not anywhere near as much as some people in this thread seem to. So i'll write a comment or two, but then i'll go back to woodworking or whatever and it will not reenter my mind till the next story pops up on the frontpage. As for my views: I believed twitter is a serious net negative for society before this story, and it hasn't changed that view. If it went away tomorrow, i would not shed a single tear. As for my politics - while it's really none of your business, since you seem to care a lot: Being in DC for a long time drove any desire to identify with any particular party well out of my mind. Georgia thankfully does not have registered party affiliation. There is some politically active Daniel Berlin in NY that donates a bunch, but it ain't me.
  - _kbh_ 4y ago
    > Did you miss the part where it was driven by “connections” and 97%+ Twitter employee donations were to Democrats? I find it hard to believe that 97% of people at twitter donated to _anyone_. I think your misinterpreting the data, the data says that 97% of donations were to democrats not that 97% of the employees donated to the democrats.
  - mikkergp 4y ago
    I saw that part and thought it was curious he glossed over it, I look forward to more detail in the future.
  - tbrownaw 4y ago
    The "driven by connections" and the culture that implies is the interesting part. It highlights how they're a center of power that needs similar anti-corruption traditions as any other center of power; there's at least the possibility of something generally useful coming out of this being known. Looking at the donation ratio as proof of the very obvious bias that everyone who cared to look already know about, is good for... what, playing "I told you so"?
  - DannyBee 4y ago
    This is hilariously naive. I lived and worked in DC for 10+ years. I watched this sort of thing happen live just sitting in coffee shops and restaurants near K street or the capitol, or just walking the halls in the office buildings. This is not driven by political donations at the 500-1000 level that employees are doing. No one gives a crap about those. Sorry. they just don't. Maybe you get invited to a dinner with 10000 other people and sit 1000 feet away from a candidate. The people who have "connections" to a place like twitter exist on both sides, aren't getting them from small donations to candidates, and believing otherwise is pretty far out there. If you want to use the donation number to paint this as "twitter has a liberal censorship bent because it's employees are democrats", the problem is that despite matt's anecdote, actual research doesn't back this up: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/Penn-research-Twitter-gives-conservative-news-greater-visibility-liberal-content https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/Penn-research-Twitter-gives... https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5 https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5 etc I'm also incredibly curious what you think should happen that would actually be better? Everything that involves humans is biased in some way by humans. You ban them from donating - well, if your problem is really they are democrats, this will fix nothing, of course. You force them to hire equal numbers of people from various political ideologies - There's a lot of them! You hold them criminally liable for something or other - good luck defining what "wrong" means. Or getting something other than robots to be good at it. Unless you are going to sequester people in a room, without access to anything outside, and somehow suppress all their lived experiences, you are going to end up with biased people moderating content. But here's the thing: If you want the platform to be useful in any meaningful way, you need to moderate content anyway, and live with the fact that it's always going to be biased. Free speech absolutism is not actually a highly useful thing for society in the end, despite the dangers of everything else. That's humans for you. All of our systems and all of the things we build are biased by the people who create and run them. That's true of justice systems, governments, your friend groups, everything. Trying to remove all the bias from decision making in something as large as twitter is like trying to kill all the ants in your backyard.
    - refurb 4y ago
      I'm not sure what you're arguing. You seem to have gone off on some wild tangent and started it with calling me "naive". Let me break it down: - Influence over Twitter policy is mostly through connections with politicians - At least using donations as a metric, 97%+ of Twitter employees support the Democrats - Hence, the Democrats overwhelmingly have more influence on Twitter policy - Thus, when the Biden team expressed concern over a new article, the Twitter team was fast to censor the store on their platform. Which is kind of the key point of the story? I mean the banning of Trump while President kind of makes sense. There was nobody (or maybe 3% of employees) who who leaned Republican who could actually argue their point.