Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
from the what's-the-good-word dept
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is weevie833 bringing some facts to the conversation about the perception of Conservative bias in Twitter content moderation:
Here is a research study (like, actual research) that provides nuance to the perception of Conservative bias in Twitter account deplatforming. Keep in mind that (as obvious as this is to say), Twitter is not a public square controlled by a socialist government – it is a private company in a capitalist economy for the purpose of making money through advertising. Twitter has ZERO interest in promoting the public good.
“Thus, among the politically active Twitter users in our study, Republicans and conservatives shared information from much lower quality sites than Democrats and liberals – even when quality was judged by a politically-balanced group of U.S. laypeople. This observation provides clear evidence for a political asymmetry in misinformation sharing in our dataset that cannot be attributed to liberal bias in what is considered misinformation or low quality news.”
“…we see a strong positive relationship between being more Republican / conservative and likelihood of being suspended (b = 0.45, z = 22.6, p < 0.001) when using political orientation as the sole independent variable in the probit regression. However, once low quality news sharing is added to the model, the association between suspension and political orientation is reduced by 56.2% (b = 0.20, z = 4.6, p < 0.001; see Figure 2b), and sharing low quality news is also strongly associated with suspension (b = 0.27, z = 6.6, p < 0.001).”
It may be true that Conservatives are deplatformed more than Liberals in pure number. But when controlling for misinformation / disinformation as a basis of suspension, that gap collapses. So, if Conservatives insist on feeding more crap into the system, you can expect a similar pattern of reaction from a privately held company concerned about its credibility as an advertising platform.
Of course, all this is moot since Elon took over, so who cares.
In second place, it’s an anonymous reponse to Musk’s statement that the Twitter algorithm is “overly complex and not fully understood internally”:
Err. Isn’t that because you asked the lion’s share of people who contributed key understanding to go find employment elsewhere?
It’s self inflicted wounds. Not quite all the way down, but He’s working on it.
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from Stephen T. Stone about the attacks on the Internet Archive:
I hope those publishers really wanted to encourage piracy—because that’s exactly what killing the Internet Archive is going to do.
Next, it’s T.L. with a reminder that there’s a reason congress is so bad at understanding technology:
Congressmembers would have better expertise on tech matters if the Office of Technology Assessment still existed. It was defunded in 1995 under Newt Gingrich’s “Contract to America” plan, because it was an unbiased organization that wouldn’t cow to political narratives. The Chew hearing is one of many instances that highlight both why Newt wanted to defund it, and why eliminating the agency was a detriment to politicians. (Ironically, Newt suggested shortly after the midterms that Republicans should come around to using TikTok to court young voters, despite the allegations of the app’s security risk.) Hopefully, someone in Congress will introduce legislation aimed at reviving the OTA somewhere down the line.
Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Pixelation with a comment about Twitter’s “shadowboosting” system:
I can’t believe Musk hasn’t shadow boosted Mike. After all of the publicity Mike/Techdirt has given him. How ungrateful!
In second place, it’s RyunosukeKusanagi with a comment about Ron DeSantis’s legal fight with Disney:
so… DeSantis is up Reedy Creek without a paddle?
For editor’s choice on the funny side, we’ve got one more comment on that subject, this time from Rico R. responding to the speculation about what Disney will do as Mickey Mouse heads towards the public domain:
Isn’t it obvious? Those higher-ups at Disney will then unthaw Walt Disney’s frozen head, install it to a robot body, and then revive Walt back from the dead. If he’s made alive again, we’ll have to wait until 70 years after his second death for Mickey Mouse to be public domain!!
Finally, it’s Kevin A. Carson with a comment about our post noting that Musk has “effectively admitted” that he burned down more than half of Twitter’s value:
On the plus side…
…at least there’s something he can do effectively
That’s all for this week, folks!
Comments on “Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt”
How do you make a small business?
You take a big business and give it to Elon Musk.
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Yeah but you have to watch carefully, and take it back fast enough. Otherwise you’ll end up with “no business”
Re: Welcome back, Bobvious! I missed you!
On another note, I’m glad that Rico R. won for funny this week because that gave me a silly Futurama-esque mental image.
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If you don’t mind the horripilations, you might consider that a Max Headroom situation (powered by Chat GPT!) is much more feasible today.
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Oh, and don’t forget to use the latest release of vocaloid so that it can say it all in his own voice.
As for the live action, still working on that hologram stuff but we’re getting there.
No need to animatronics.
Twitter, like all corporations, is run by people. To assert that a corporation has no interest in promoting the public good is to assert that the people running it have no such interest. We know that people exist who are interested in promoting the public good. Evidence should be provided that none of those people were running Twitter.
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Well, for starters, Elon Musk is running the company (into the ground).
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Well, to be fair, Twitter may have been run by some people with some interest in the public good. Now, it’s what’s good for Musk and his ego.
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“If there’s anything more important than my ego around here, I want it caught and shot now.”
– Zaphod Beeblebrox
…who incidentally presents himself as far smarter and more capable at his position than Musk.
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That’s just because Beeblebrox’ position had been designed to be a distraction from where the actual decisions are being made. The Twitter/Musk relation would better end up similarly. Or else.
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My reference to the “public good” was in about the institutions like the post office or the FDA operating in the public interest rather than for profit.
Twitter may have ethically sound staffers, but the business model is to make money by exploiting market opportunities. They (and all other social media companies) have never demonstrated an interest in promoting public well-being. Rather, quite the opposite.
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Unlike the post office or the FDA, Twitter makes its money from people who pay it voluntarily. Unlike the post office, it provides a valuable service for free to the public. So does Facebook. So does Google.
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For free? I suggest you look at their bottom line. They aren’t the mercenary equivalent of a perpetuum mobile.
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It’s not for free. Engaging with Twitter, or Facebook, or Google means engaging with advertising and their data mining. There’s a cost there – it’s not directly monetary to the consumer, but it’s still a cost.
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People only need to engage with advertising if they want to, at least on the written communications forums. (YouTube, which forces ads in between the things people want to watch, is different).
Data mining is only a “cost” to the privacy nuts. A person’s information is non-rivalrous; it can pay the mining “cost” infinitely often and infinitely widely and not be diminished by the payment. It’s like the fable about the baker who sued to get paid by the people who would gather around the bakery for the smell of the fresh bread, and was “rewarded” by the judge ordering those people to clink their coins so that the baker could hear the sound of the money.
Re: "Twitter, like all corporations, is run by people."
Those people answer to the executives, who are invariably driven by money for themselves and for shareholders. We’re certainly seeing Musk’s desperate scratching for profits these days. The decision to sell Twitter to Musk was also profit-driven, with little regard to the damage he would cause by green lighting Nazis, etc.
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That “invariably” is presented without evidence. Certainly responsible executives are interested in the good of their company, but that does not mean that the interests of the company are necessarily misaligned with the interests of at least some part of the public.
Not so fast, me bucko.
Merely by booting community-destroying assholes, they are indeed advancing the public good. Granted, they’re doing so more for profit than for grins, but nevertheless, the public does derive a benefit from their actions.
I presume, of course, that you and I are both referring to actual social media companies, and not to magnets for assholes. You know the ones I mean, I’m sure.
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That’s merely a useful side benefit.
A corporation only serves itself, no more. Usually, that is commonly attributed to their bottom line. Sometimes, their stakeholders, and once in a while, the shareholders. They answer only to Wall Street.
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That is an assertion with no basis in fact. If people can be altruistic as individuals, they can be altruistic in their jobs.
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sumgai – I think we (I think) agree about the same thing but are stuck on semantics. The only reason community-destroying assholes are removed from any commercial social media platform is because it jeopardizes their potential revenue stream. There are no laws being enforced in doing so and it is already evident that Facebook (at least) has been well aware that conflict and outrage is good for business.
Facebook’s ethical failures are not accidental; they are part of the business model https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8179701/
Where I agree with you is that the collateral effect of this practice is that it benefits the good of =the particular social media community= which I qualify as not being “the public.” If it were benefitting the public, it would benefit everyone – not just people with a social media account.
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Nothing can benefit everyone because people have conflicting desires.