Biden's corruption
- Thread starter innonimatu
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Gori the Grey
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Social media sites are fundamentally unlike newspapers, though, in that you get to "publish" until your comments are taken down. In newspapers, it's the reverse: nothing gets published without the editors' approval; your comments don't get published in the first place until they are judged to meet societal and editorial standards.
They're a new kettle of fish. None of our old models for public discourse are like them. Not town square. Not newspaper. We've been learning as we go how to manage this new beast, and it's fundamentally a matter of content moderation. But that content moderation is tricky. We're seeing that as Musk crashes Twitter. I'm firmly convinced that his approach to content management will drive people off Twitter. And once everyone isn't on Twitter, no one will have any incentive to go on Twitter.
These sites are monopolies. They have their value, even to users, only as monopolies. That too massively confounds our tools for dealing with such matters.
They're a new kettle of fish. None of our old models for public discourse are like them. Not town square. Not newspaper. We've been learning as we go how to manage this new beast, and it's fundamentally a matter of content moderation. But that content moderation is tricky. We're seeing that as Musk crashes Twitter. I'm firmly convinced that his approach to content management will drive people off Twitter. And once everyone isn't on Twitter, no one will have any incentive to go on Twitter.
These sites are monopolies. They have their value, even to users, only as monopolies. That too massively confounds our tools for dealing with such matters.
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As long as using such moderation tools is voluntary I do not see the issue.
It seems fair that if you are hosting something you get to control the content there.
It can easily become too hypocritical; an infamous example on youtube was when, during an episode in the feud between two popular youtubers, one made a video supposedly to show he wasn't annoyed by the other person's flaming (it was about his "glass chin") and auto-banned any mention of the term "chin"...
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Farm Boy
I hope you dance
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Everyone isn't on Twitter. Everyone isn't on Facebook.
I think the marketing is really really good.
Moderation can never be optional, unless you accept the bottom line in every instance where none exists. EDIT - though that's actually tangential. Dissent r.e. First Amendment will probably work on the grounds that it's possible, not that it's voluntary.
I mean, that's not what I was saying (or understanding it to be). The problem is uniquely American (or US-ian, even), in how it interprets the Constitution.
There's also a lot of separate legal wrangling for international problems. Do you think Twitter's legal department was as superfluous as Musk treated it as?
We can pretend these things aren't problems at scale, but it doesn't stop them being so.
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Gori the Grey
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Everyone who wants to be on that kind of site, is all I mean. I just mean that there is and always will be exactly one site for everyone who wants to be on that kind of site, and what the site will sell is everyone being on that site. It's a kind of enterprise where only a monopoly makes sense.
I myself am not on any social media but CFCOT. And in fact this discussion is reaching the limits of my second-hand knowledge of such matters. I don't, for instance, know how users can set their own accounts' settings to only get the sorts of posts that they want to get. All I know is that people report using all of those mechanisms that are in the individual user's command, and they still end up seeing material that they don't want to see.
So I'll bow out.
It's more that the algorithms try to predict what we will interact with. It's not so much echochambers. Like, YouTube shows me a lot of things that makes me angry. Facebook only shows me stuff my friends seem to care about. After that, I need to work to see the stuff I think I should be seeing
I mean, that's ad culture in a nutshell. Capitalism hard at work. Feature, not a bug, etc.
Take any old goon (in this case, as a thread callback, Taibbi), have him put stuff next to each other and effectively say "makes you think", and the algorithms do the rest. It's why it becomes "newsworthy". It's why it even turns up in this thread. Someone was shown it (though possibly they could've also gone looking, but my suggestion is the less embarrassing one
).
Take any old goon (in this case, as a thread callback, Taibbi), have him put stuff next to each other and effectively say "makes you think", and the algorithms do the rest. It's why it becomes "newsworthy". It's why it even turns up in this thread. Someone was shown it (though possibly they could've also gone looking, but my suggestion is the less embarrassing one
).
Gori the Grey
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Biden's corruption
Seeing as the threads on the election are old news, the election is done I'm thinking that now it is allowed to talk about this? Most media is pretending nothing happened of course. But it's getting reported anyway. In the US there's a justice for the powerful, connected one and one for the...
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João III
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All politicians are corrupt
stinkubus
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There are plenty of other industries which can only function when a monopoly is granted. Utilities are the textbook example. Regulation or nationalization is the cure.
Gori the Grey
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Except that that's not a solution in the case of this one.
innonimatu
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Are you aware that asking thus just shows how effectively the story about Hunter Biden's laptop contents was suppressed by the editors of the media channels you consume? You really did not hear what the Bidens were accused of in the news pieces about the laptop's contents?
The accusation was that Biden (joe) was the "big man" refereed to in one of the messages from a Biden's (son) associate regarding the distribution of received bribes from a ukranian oligarch.
Hunter Biden was "hired" by that oligarch at the time when Joe Biden was vice-president and specifically handling foreign policy towards Ukraine in the US. As hunter Biden's only known competences are as a possible evaluator of hookers and drugs, and ukranian oligarchs certainly do not need aid in those departments, his "hiring" was transparently a bribe. Said associate of Hunter Biden later confirmed in an interview that the message refereed to the father.
It would have been an open-and-shut case of corruption were it not for the fact that no one prosecutes top politicians. As you have verified from your own dashed hopes of seeing Trump actually prosecuted in court. The Bidens too are "untouchable". But what is really bad is that they are even uncriticizable, in that reporting on the dirt known about them is being actively suppressed. And with such a close election, if you acknowledged that the report about the laptop was damning then you'd have to consider whether its suppression managed the election outcome.
All is fair in love and war? Then you get to live with widespread and entrenched political corruption. Bcause so long as the party can "manage the narrative" for the faithful, everything goes.
Senethro
Overlord
So who should the conscientious anti-corruption voter have voted for between Trump and Biden?
EnglishEdward
Deity
That usually boils down to the question of which is the lesser evil, a dilemma on which people have different valid perspectives.
It's not going to change inno's opinion, but to me it's incredibly funny considering Taibbi actually found similar stuff that came from Trump's White House during the same time period, but decided to drag up the Hunter Biden stuff because <reasons>
Kupe Navigator
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this mentality is EXACTLY what brought Trump to power since he wasn't a "politician"
