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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31957 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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But we already knew that? I mean just publicly, we knew that Twitter was taking a stance against "misinformation" and trying to add corrections to people's tweets. Mind you, I don't think the exact specifics were known to the public, but I also don't consider "news flash, Twitter has active infrastructure and action to combat what they don't want" to be something particularly revealing.

I think there was an implicit assumption there, they're filtering Twitter randos, not democratically elected politician during an election campaign. Like, I'm supposed to be outraged at Cambridge Analytica, or that the Russians spent their pocket money on a handful of Facebook ads, but shrug it off when Twitter is actively limiting the reach of politicians they don't like?

It's Wikipedia on a topic that is now salient to politics, did you expect that the people editing it were more interested in substance over ideology?

I didn't, but as they say, "we live in a society". I can't pretend there isn't a huge amount of people who think Wikipedia is neutral.

However, there's a caveat to this in that technically, the content wasn't hidden, just maximally deboosted, meaning even the amended definition wouldn't fit. I think that's a small and irrelevant point to quibble over, personally.

I mean, that's just how people were using the word "shadow banned" all the time. Check sodiummuffins link for an example.

If I have any problem with how people are doing this debate more publicly, it would be that definitions aren't being tabooed.

Tabooing definitions might be a good idea when there's a true misunderstanding between people who actually want to understand each other. It's not going to work in a fight between political rivals. They'll just find a way to abuse tabooing definitions to score political points.

I think there was an implicit assumption there, they're filtering Twitter randos, not democratically elected politician during an election campaign.

That would be a false assumption then because we knew since 2020 that Twitter was willing to publicly declare some politicians' tweets to be "misinformation".

Tabooing definitions might be a good idea when there's a true misunderstanding between people who actually want to understand each other. It's not going to work in a fight between political rivals.

This is true but trivial. I think there are many people who might be fundamentally missing the point by focusing on the trivial nature of what term is used to describe the action.

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