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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32248 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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There is - at least pre-Musk, twitter put a thumb on the scale of which hashtags were allowed to go viral or not. (This may or may not happen now, that's unclear.)

A very plausible alternative timeline is twitter jannie notices a contra-narrative story going viral, presses the de-amplify (or whatever euphamism they used for shadowbanning a trend) button on it and then it fizzles.

I don't find that plausible at all. This is simply too much like the Eric Garner case - no one is defending the customers who trashed the place, just like Bill O'Reilly said it was a clearly wrong thing for the cop to kill Garner. Even now, searches for "Waffle House Wendy" returns mostly positive tweets and pieces, with the focus on her impressive deflection of the chair over anything else.

It's not inconceivable that left-wing mainstream outlets decided, even prior to the girl going on Tucker Carlson's show, that it wasn't a good story because a black person was the aggressor and a white person in the right, but the newsworthiness of the story is inherently low. Makes for a good ice breaker at a party, not a headline on CNN.

There are better example to choose if you want to highlight the left-wing media's bias against anything perceived as anti-black, NBC cutting the Zimmerman police call to make him sound racist being a good example.

I'm pretty sure you're correct about Twitter putting their thumb on the scale before. I'm pretty sure incidents of groups of black people behaving in a shameful fashion went viral on twitter anyway. Why are you so confident that this one wouldn't have?

I am not sure about this specific one. I don't think that we disagree on much - we certainly seem to agree that we'll see more of these with twitter not putting their thumb on the scale.

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