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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28232 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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How have your predictions fared?

Decently. Graded:

  • ✅ 99%: Trumps Twitter ban has been lifted
  • ✅ 95%: At least one case of Twitter moderation has happened for which the NY Times or WaPO has written a story highlighting hypocrisy
  • ✅ 90%: Hate speech rules for protected classes remain, neither being retracted nor expanded to cover everyone
  • ✅ 70%: Misgendering and deadnaming no longer fall under this category, however.
  • ✅ 70%: Payment processors, cloud service providers, banks, and the US government have NOT taken measures to leverage or punish Twitter for content policies. (This one is tricky to adjudicate so I'll leave it to you.)
  • ❌ 70%: The EU HAS taken measures to leverage or punish Twitter for content policies. (Same.)
  • ✅ 60%: Twitter's medical misinformation rules have been modified.
  • ❌ 60%: Twitter's election misinformation rules have been modified.

Vibes-wise, I've been surprised by how full-throatedly dissident conservative Elon Musk has been in his tweets. And while "hate speech" is still against TOS, I've been subjectively impressed by how much far right accounts have been able to test the limits without being deleted, banned, or throttled from at least my feed.

❌ 70%: The EU HAS taken measures to leverage or punish Twitter for content policies. (Same.)

I thought EU has started enforcing the new Digital Services Act, and Twitter was named one of the big platforms that need to comply?.

Tbf, the changes don't seem that intense. And they target everything from Google Search, Google Maps (?!), to Apple's App store, to Wikipedia (!), to Tiktok, to Amazon's app store... and to Twitter.

Did you mean that it wasn't specifically towards Twitter?

The EU is threatening to enforce the DSA against Twitter, and smart EU-watchers are saying they look serious, but they haven't got to the point of actually doing anything yet. So if the prediction had an explicit one-year deadline, it adjudicates as "false".

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