[andrewclunn]

We used to fund distributed disruptive technologies to subvert Soviet censorship. Chinese censorship was seen as proof of our superior freedom 20 years ago. Now it is viewed with envy by those in power. What moral high ground do we hold now?

[incomingpain]

>We used to fund distributed disruptive technologies to subvert Soviet censorship. Chinese censorship was seen as proof of our superior freedom 20 years ago. Now it is viewed with envy by those in power. What moral high ground do we hold now?

The bigger point to discuss. If twitter is under control of the US government. I have no idea if it is or not, it just seems to be the case.

You dont get to make the comment 'twitter is private, free speech only applies to government' because twitter == government.

The other consideration I had. What if the us government doesnt explicitly own twitter. They simply dont realize the us government has hacked access to moderate and censor things in a clandestine way? Now it's an even more complicated subject but wouldn't justify the stock market situation that brings me to the point.

[bryanrasmussen]

>You dont get to make the comment 'twitter is private, free speech only applies to government' because twitter == government.

it's true, twitter == government but not twitter === government. Meaning that the conversion happens in the underlying JIT engine where government hacks twitter to do what it wants.

So the idea is that you could make a first amendment complaint against the government for hacking twitter if it infringed your free speech with that hack, but you could not say twitter cannot just turn off my account because while twitter == government it does not === government.

[andrewclunn]

> it's true, twitter == government but not twitter === government.

Let's not start coding political documents in JavaScript now. (Insert additional joke about the interpreter engine running on 9 robed meat processors).

[bryanrasmussen]

Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!

[incomingpain]

I get the complication of the position. Occams razor puts me back to the plain option that twitter is simply controlled by us gov.

[nemothekid]

I don’t understand how “Twitter is controlled by the government” is the simplest explanation. Do you actually use Twitter?

I feel like Twitter had an outsized representation along social media giants. It’s one of the smallest by MAU; and has a history of management problems. Isn’t occans razor here that is just a poorly run company?

[incomingpain]

>I don’t understand how “Twitter is controlled by the government” is the simplest explanation. Do you actually use Twitter?

I don't use twitter. Because of Elon I wanted to test and do have an account right now. I connected to my canadian political folks and chess people. I liked lots of things, but I never commented or retweeted. I then commented on a chess person with a positive tweet and I was quietly censored. Absolutely no way should have my account been treated this way.

>I feel like Twitter had an outsized representation along social media giants. It’s one of the smallest by MAU; and has a history of management problems. Isn’t occans razor here that is just a poorly run company?

If you're listed on the S&P500, you can't say that's poorly run. Poorly run would never have gotten there.

[nemothekid]

>I then commented on a chess person with a positive tweet and I was quietly censored.

This is no different than HN's shadowbans but I don't see people complain about free speech on HN to the same frequency on Twitter. Further still, the fact that you are only just now creating an account further reinforces to me that most people don't actually use Twitter and their entire perception of the platform comes from news headlines. Twitter has the least amount of moderation of all the social media giants. Try posting porn on Facebook and seeing how long that lasts.

When you say your tweet was censored, you mean it's no longer on your timeline? If your tweet was deleted Twitter would have sent you an email about it. If you are complaining that that you can't see it in the user's replies, well any large twitter user is going to have many replies, and a message from a new account will likely not make the top of the fold.

>If you're listed on the S&P500, you can't say that's poorly run. Poorly run would never have gotten there.

Enron??? The many dot coms?? Lehman Brothers?? There hasn't been a major stock market correction in nearly 15 years; there are plenty of companies out there that are swimming naked. Twitter management is no stranger to public executive issues with it's board + CEO.

[notacoward]

Occam's Razor has nothing to do with this, and its improper invocation is fallacious. Literally it means "do not multiply entities beyond necessity"; in practice it's also called the principle of parsimony, meaning that one should not assume a more complicated explanation when a simpler one will do. Positing a connection between Twitter and the US government, without supporting evidence but just because it "makes sense" - is anything but parsimonious. That remains true even if such a connection does eventually turn out to exist. "Do not attribute to malice that which is explained by incompetence" is likely to be the more applicable principle here.

[incomingpain]

>ccam's Razor has nothing to do with this, and its improper invocation is fallacious.

My mistake. Maybe I can't think of the one I'm trying to think of. I don't need a name or rule really.

Philosophically speaking, if you have a few competing ideas and no way to come to a conclusion. The simplest explanation is the best one to go with.

> Positing a connection between Twitter and the US government, without supporting evidence but just because it "makes sense" - is anything but parsimonious. That remains true even if such a connection does eventually turn out to exist. "Do not attribute to malice that which is explained by incompetence" is likely to be the more applicable principle here.

I did provide evidence in my original post. Perhaps you dont accept my evidences for some reason?

I believe I should consider a rebuttal to my evidences. Are the other S&P500 companies so tremendously undefended from takeover?

WBD recently joined S&P and they are pretty undefended, not as bad as twitter.

CPT is worse than WBD.

MOH is worse than CPT.

NDSN is about WBD.

CEG is worse than all of them.

Woah. I kind of disproved myself? I haven't considered this. Tesla is like the only defended stock I can find? I haven't checked them all.

https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-pe-ratio

Haven't checked on this in awhile. It's high but is trending down post covid recession.

The S&P500 is full of zombies? Is this seriously happening? wow. I haven't seen anyone talking about this. What the hell happened?

Just checked TSX60 for Canada. AEM, AQN, ATD, BCE, BMO, BNS, ABX, and they are all good. BHC is the first one that looks maybe questionable but nowhere near problematic.

Just checked a random selection of FTSE 100. BP, BATS, BLND. All healthy.

I feel like disproving myself wasn't a good thing though. I need to go spend some time on questrade.

[nemothekid]

>The S&P500 is full of zombies? Is this seriously happening? wow. I haven't seen anyone talking about this. What the hell happened?

People have been talking about it[1]; it's just that Elon hasn't so it doesn't end up in the media hype cycle. The S&P 500 is really just the 5 big megacap stocks.

That's what makes this Twitter so weird, as a company it's relatively unremarkable; it's not larger than Snapchat both in terms of marketcap and MAU, but in the media you would think it's the primary competitor to Meta.

Twitter gets a lot of flack about censorship and free speech; but it's by far the most libertarian platform - it still has a chronological timeline! If you had followed Donald Trump on Twitter, you would see all his tweets whenever he tweeted them. If you followed him on Facebook, Facebook would hide most of his posts on your feed! And yet Twitter is the boogeyman, the enemy of free speech.

Twitter the company, and Twitter the boogeyman are two seperate entities. If you read about Twitter from NYT headlines, maybe it makes sense they are government controlled. If you actually spend time on the platform you will find a platform that largely hasn't changed in the past 10 years, but still trying to wrangle it's political influence since the Arab spring days.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/10/investing/sp-500-tech-stocks/...

[JKCalhoun]

Controlled how?

I ask because I'm pretty sure real (non-US government) people post to Twitter and get real retweets. How is the US government controlling it?

I imagine this would have blown wide open a long time ago if true. (Also Occam's Razor?)

[dgb23]

Social control and power is never complete and absolute. Even very direct coercion can often be ignored, worked around or endured except for very extreme cases.

[adventured]

> What moral high ground do we hold now?

Vast amounts of ground, fortunately. How about the fact that we can have these conversations fully uncensored? That little thing known as freedom of speech, which is still overwhelmingly alive and well. I enjoy its use, aggressively, on a daily basis without persecution and have for decades uninterrupted.

[dangus]

The article is about the benefits that the US intelligence agencies get from the censorship power of a centralized monopoly of tech companies.

For example, if your main form of communication online is through companies owned by Meta, it’s very easy to effectively censor a point of view or group of people through deplatforming, but if there are dozens of platforms that becomes more difficult.

While more authoritarian countries rely on direct censorship, the US instead promotes the viewpoints they want people to subscribe to: positive reinforcement. You can see this with the government’s involvement with the entertainment industry, or with the military paying sports leagues to promote patriotic displays.

Tech companies being private entities means that they can censor or at least stop the viral effects of social media on ideas that don’t fit the mold.

There’s a lot you can do to shape public opinion without violating the first amendment.

It’s kind of similar to the way local news stations will run “stories” that amount to advertisements for various products or local businesses. Or you might see a funny meme on Reddit where the joke mostly has to do with a company.

Not to say that there aren’t valid reasons to do stuff like this…there’s plenty of harmful speech out there that makes the world a worse place. Hateful, violent, or misleading speech is a legitimate problem. For example, there’s a report that claims most anti-vaccination online content comes from just 12 sources. [1]

It seems a little bit alarming that such a small group can amplify speech in a way that has cost perhaps thousands of lives.

[1] [PDF] https://f4d9b9d3-3d32-4f3a-afa6-49f8bf05279a.usrfiles.com/ug...

[zozbot234]

Except that freedom of speech does not protect us from intolerance, as Karl Popper observed. For example, private entities are not required to uphold freedom of speech.

[refurb]

It's funny when Popper is brought up in this way because his conclusion was that the only reasonable censorship of intolerance was that which poses a threat of immediate physical harm. So basically how the US treats freedom of speech today.

He certainly wouldn't be supportive of censoring racist commentary that didn't incite immediate physical violence.

[mschuster91]

Funny enough, in Germany - which is definitely more restricted, and for good reason, on the US understanding of "free speech" - Facebook and Twitter are routinely seen as public discourse forums and have to unban users as long as what they post isn't against the law [1].

[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-urteil-faceboo...

[politician]

Good news- We aren’t required to tolerate institutions that don’t uphold freedom of speech.

[formerkrogemp]

We can have this conversation now, but vigilance is good.

[adventured]

Certainly. Nothing in my comment suggests otherwise in the least.

[formerkrogemp]

So much on this site and online more generally comes across as criticism. It wasn't meant as such. I just thought it should be minded.