Biden's corruption
- Thread starter innonimatu
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Berzerker
Deity
I dont blame presidents for wars they inherit. Some of those weapons Obama sent to Syria came from Libya after we toppled the government and the civil war there 'ended' last summer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Libyan_Civil_War
Show us where in that article you found reason to blame Trump? Erik Prince is a gun runner, I wouldn't be surprised if he was doing stuff like that under Bush and Obama. Trump praised Haftar for attacking ISIL, thats about the only thing Trump has done in Libya - occasional airstrikes on their camps. Sooo, whatabout Trump?
FriendlyFire
Codex WMDicanious
Heres the thing
There should be no problem connecting the dots between Trump and Erick Princes Libya weapon selling but you choose not to in this case.
Especially after screaming about Obama arming terrorists in Syria. If you want to claim that third parties were arming Libyans including the US and allies then extend the same benefit to Obama.
Trump knowingly provided most of Haftar's advanced weapons via the UAE.
innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
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Trump bogus sock puppet, you claimed? Those incriminating documents about the Bidens just had to be "an invention" right? "bogus".
Well, it wasn't. What was reported by the New York Post before the election was entirely true. The evidence existed, it was abandoned in that laptop by the drugatic younger Biden, and included details about the elder's take in the corrupt deals.
But it was censored by most mainstream media. Worse, they invented and disseminated lies. They lied about it "not being true", "hacked", whatever. And you chose to believe the lies. You believed a lie because it suited your world-view, your wishes.
And now, years later and after letting that corrupt family get through another election, Twitter's internal discussions on making up excuses to censor the true news are getting published. As usual, the lies are admitted to only years later and after the damage is done. But they are still very relevant because this kind of censorship is still being done with current news. This is a valuable case study. For anyone capable of taking off the blinders.
What has happened, as Taibbi correctly points out, is that mass media has changed over the past 20 years. It now operates targeting certain "demographics". The same corporate media group can own several brands, each of which says only what the targeted groups want to hear. And people in those target groups thus get deeper and deeper into their group echo chambers, ignoring reality around them, because everyone in their in-group also believes the same deceptions.
Broken_Erika
Play with me.
The problem with media is that the US got rid of the Fairness Doctorine during the Reagan administration. So now you don't have to present both sides in an argument like you used to have to do when reporting news.
innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
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It may have been so initially, but I think it goes beyond something that now such an attempt at regulation could fix. The whole market structure of the internet media businesses is based on cultivating separate groups of people by keeping them in manged bubbles.
The problem is that this business model works and seems to give the highest returns currently. So this develops organically inside companies - like Twitter, it wasn't created as some Democratic Party conspiracy, its management just found it convenient to target primarily the professional-managerial classes, and moderation was allowed to develop (and staff itself) to cater to those, which in the last election were almost all anti-Trump fanatics.
This needs to be fixed starting by looking at how internet media businesses finance themselves and changing incentives there. Or throwing away the entire market but I'm that's not a political option at all in the US. I think the best bet there is to actually enforce anti-monopoly laws on those that control most advertisement revenue now. This does not appear to fix the "bubble" problem, instead it would multiply platforms and create "many bubbles". But then people could not "live" entirely on a single bubble. Diversity of opinions would creep in because people would be frequenting many platforms, not consume everything from one or a few. And the effort to control and influence demographics to form a "bubble" within any single smaller platform would founder - they'd be too small, too narrow. That is my hope, I'm not sure it would work, I just think it would improve things. Other countries may try different fixes but in the US this is the only possible one I'm seeing.
Gori the Grey
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We already have what you say you want. There are no shortage of right-wing bubbles. And despite that diversity, people do live in whatever bubble they favor. As you point out, a right-leaning paper did publish the known details about the laptop. That information was available to anyone who wanted it and trusted that source. But you're wrong when you say places like Twitter want to cultivate a bubble. They're best served, financially, by creating an environment where the largest number of people possible are comfortable. Musk now seems intent on turning Twitter into a right-wing bubble. He's entitled to do so, since owns the company and any losses he suffers are his own to deal with. I wonder if Hunter Biden has grounds for a lawsuit based on Twitter publishing pictures of his genitalia.
I don't know if 'largest number people feel comfortable' isn't 'a series of bubbles'. Obviously, they all want monopolies, but if the algorithm curates your feed to only things you'll interact with, it will become bubbles even if everyone is there.
There's a real need to nationalize these companies or break them up.
There's a real need to nationalize these companies or break them up.
Gori the Grey
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That's fine. If one site can manage to create an environment that is a series of bubbles (i.e. you can interact with the people you want and not with the people you don't), that's the site that will win out.
You can't break it up. There can only be one. The only thing that makes each major kind of site what it is is that its the place where everyone is. Advertisers want to be able to say "like us on Facebook," not "like us on X, or Y if you're on Y, or Z if you're on Z." The very thing that Twitter sells is that it's the brief-message site to which everybody goes for brief messages. Success in this industry is somehow getting yourself to be the place that everybody comes. The second you did break them up, someone would devise a Social Media Aggregator, so that you could be in touch with people whatever site they were on.
And they can't be nationalized because then moderation does become a First Amendment issue.
@Kyriakos, yeah, but most of those posts are people saying "What a nothing burger," The presentation that Musk had Taibbi give did not demonstrate Twitter acting on "orders from the government"--in fact tweet 22 explicitly says the opposite. (And if it had, it would be Trump's government! Maybe we don't remember but Trump was President when the Hunter Biden laptop story broke). It just showed there were moderator teams devoted to posts about Hunter's Laptop.
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Not if the moderation is left to the client.
Gori the Grey
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Then in what sense is it nationalized?
Well, if it was up to me the state would write the software. They would own the copyright, but release it under an open source licence. That would be national ownership?
Gori the Grey
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But the key isn't the software. The key is ongoing moderation. As soon as you put that in the hands of government agents, you risk violation of the First Amendment.
The moderation should be client side. In the usenet days we had various tools that did some sort of a job. In this day and age, with state support, they should be loads better. It is mostly automatic in the centralised model anyway, that could be run by users and customised to their preferences.
I think that Gori's concern is that any "state support", however tangential (even provided as technical features to the platform) can be argued as flying in the face of the First Amendment.
It's difficult to divorce one from the other (we fundamentally don't have the same legal issue here).
In youtube, the channel's owner can be as explicit as outright auto-ban specific terms in the comments. Using implicit functions, this can quickly become a hidden auto-bahn of limitations ^^
It's a little bonkers that megacorps need to run social media in order to get sufficient moderation. Like, it's a rough sentence to write. There really has to be a doable workaround.
