Oh noes, his anti-mask tweets cannot trend with “hot girl friday”. By not allowing his speech to be algorithmically amplified, Twitter practically denying his the right to free speech, or something.
2 Likes
I have a God-given right to yell SHOOTER! in a crowded movie theater, but a professor of medicine at one of the most prestigious universities on this planet can’t even post important public health information on the internet. What has this world come to?!?
1 Like
I assume his was one of those accounts where the blacklisting came straight from the top.
Yeah, I’m purposefully ignoring all this until Taibbi writes a long form article on this. Not reading a bunch of long twitter threads.
From what I hear, not if it’s a flag of a pineapple.
1 Like
She did more than merely retweet, hence the bans.
If you think some dipshit twitter content moderator is equipped to make sound judgements about what a guy like Bhattacharya should be allowed to say about public health, I don’t know what to tell you.
The problem is that amplifying his information, or any of the anti-vax do your own research crowd, was going to lead to Sklansky deaths. So amplifying the information was problematic because it was going to kill people, having dipshit twitter moderator make a judgment about it was problematic because they were unqualified, having the government aligned scientists make a judgment is problematic for 1st amendment reasons. Just going to be the best of problematic solutions.
2 Likes
Again it’s the lack of context, when did he get put on the list? What does being on the list mean? How long was he on the list? It could have been when he was hocking a paper that had be refuted and Twitter didn’t want the refutations to boost the paper’s exposure. Maybe the shouldn’t have done it in that instance based on some free speech premise, but on the other hand having misinformation being propagated out and being responsible for its spread is also not good. Maybe that’s what happened, or maybe someone at Twitter was like ‘time to silence the truth tellers’ and smashed a big red ‘Break in Case of Conservatives Winning the Culture War’ button and shadow banned him. We don’t know.
This is amazing.
Taibbi apologized on the program and later on Facebook. “The behavior [Ames] describes is reprehensible. It is also, like a lot of things in the eXile, fictional and not true.” He said he regretted putting his name on a book “that used cruel and misogynistic language to describe many people and women in particular.” In a second Facebook apology, he wrote: “The eXile did have a satirical idea, at least in the beginning. It was supposed to be an obscene send-up of the Americans who stood behind the crooked Yeltsin government.” Ames recently told reporters that the eXile was obviously satire and complained that he is being smeared for that satire.
But so many of their sins were real. Taibbi once wrote in the eXile that women had no business wearing “painter’s pants and sneakers” when they ought to be more like Russian women, with “their tight skirts, blowjob-ready lips, and swinging, meaty chests.” Ames described going to the senior prom of an international high school with a 17-year-old date he called his “Jew-broad”; he was 34. Back home she would be “jailbait,” he wrote in the eXile , but Russia “permits sex with a fourteen-year-old, so long as you had reason to believe she was sixteen, the legal statutory age.” A photo shows Ames in the front row with his date.
Before I became a favorite target, Taibbi and Ames took regular aim at Carol Williams, the Los Angeles Times Moscow bureau chief in the late 1990s. After she wrote about terrible Moscow roads in 1997, they proclaimed her the “ultimate press villain.” They said she was “translator dependent,” even though, she told me, she was the “only one in the four-person bureau to travel without a translator. They were trying to provoke me. They were making up stuff and accusing me of complicity with bad actors in the Russian government. It was completely false. They were pigs.”
“I’m really sorry about this thing. Also, this thing is of course satire and completely not true.”
Guy is a rapey scumbag.
why is the content moderator automatically a “dipshit” and the professor not?
also yes. the private company should be able to decide what you say on their private platform…
1 Like
A content moderator can’t be an expert in all things but he’s empowered to limit the expression of an expert like the professor. Perhaps “dipshit” is unduly harsh, apologies to all the brave frontline soldiers in the content moderation trenches.
Sure, private platforms can blah blah blah. Unless it’s at the behest of the government, which is why I’m most interested in any and all communication between the feds and the twitter.
But this aspect is also a newsworthy story as twitter executives seem to have publicly lied about what they were doing content moderation-wise and how they were going about it.
The Barrington manifesto or whatever it’s called presented an alternative public health strategy than what was being pushed by the public health agencies. I think that alternate public health strategies should be debated and engaged, not shouted down and algorithmically suppressed. The dominant public health idea at any given time is certainly not always the correct one, and critiques and challenges to orthodoxy should be allowed. This is true of all public policy and scientific orthodoxies.
“Seem” is doing a LOT of work for you. As HueHue pointed out, we still really don’t know anything about the content moderation. Bari Weiss’s tweets don’t shed much light on things, they rely way too much on inference and she’s not a reliable narrator from what I understand.
Regardless, jumping in in defense of these supposed revelations doesn’t advance the cause of free speech (I assume that’s why you care about this?) because Musk has proven in his short tenure that he doesn’t give a shit about free speech or transparent moderation or whatever. Or maybe you don’t think you’re defending them, just attacking the previous executives? In which case, again, in this context that’s not at all helpful to the cause of free speech or “fair” moderation or whatever.
JFC
“People are afraid of what our paper will write about them, so they give us free shit,” Mr. Taibbi said.
They say they also take advantage of what they like to call the “white god factor” and make trips to the provinces. “Tens of millions of people live in dire circumstances, stranded in the center of the world’s largest continent, with little hope of going anywhere,” said Mr. Ames. “Which means–sexual opportunity for me.”
Mr. Ames said he didn’t like the trend toward lesbianism among American women. “Nothing coils my dick up faster,” he said. “When I was in school in Berkeley, there were dykes all over the place who hated my guts for being a tall male. They don’t like tall men, really.”
He spoke about his sex life in Moscow. “Russian women, especially on the first date, expect you to rape them,” said Mr. Ames. “They’ll go back home with you and say, ‘No, no, no,’ and if you’re an American, you’ve been trained to respect the ‘No,’ because you’re afraid of sexual harassment or date rape, and so you fail over and over. But it took me a while to learn you really have to force Russian girls, and that’s what they want, it’s like a mock rape. And then you come back here and you’re really freaked out–because you don’t know if that actually exists deep in all women’s psyches, that that’s what they all want. All relations between guys and girls is basically violent, I think. It’s all war.”
How are these guys employed anywhere by anyone?
2 Likes
Sure if they did lie about what they were doing and that thing was widespread it’s a newsworthy story. If they didn’t then it’s not. Like I said I’ll wait for Taibbi to publish a long piece on this before I make up my mind.
1 Like
I personally dont think private companies such as twitter are under any obligation to treat all views as equal or amplify radical right wing idiocy. I think it gets more complicated/dangerous when the company starts working with the government in power to suppress views.
I agree that twitter lying about what they are doing is a newsworthy story, just not really a free speech issue.
All just my opinion but, personally, I think social media has been absolutely toxic for society and want to see Section 230 repealed and most social media sites basically die even though thats probably the anti free speech position.
5 Likes
Are public companies allowed to discriminate and then lie about it? My assumption is no, but maybe I am wrong.
As someone else mentioned it would be wild if the formers management of Twitter owned Musk a second time (the first time being when they forced him to give them billions of dollars for a worthless company) if he is now financially liable for their transgressions as owner of the company.