It’s kind of like they are forced into that position by their philosophy. You believe that people acting on their own interests will lead to utopian conditions, you believe that people do act on their own interests. If you accept that the government that you are railing against was itself naturally produced by human action then your whole thesis falls apart. So you have to imagine an outside force manipulating things. It’s just like white supremacists who think themselves to be superior but also think they are being oppressed by PC culture and affirmative action. It’s pretty much necessary to imagine some group doing the oppressing intentionally.
Of course why the answer to, “And who is doing this?” is always “The Jews!” is something I don’t think I’ll ever understand. It’s baked deep into our culture for thousands of years.
Filtering for unwanted content (aka spam) has been around for a long time. Yes, bag of words techniques (naive Bayes etc.) work. The problem isn’t technical, it’s design. Filters trained on hate speech were not used when selling ads.
You’re right about producing false positives, but that’s not a huge problem when you’re talking about demographic segmentations for ad sales.
George Soros is only targeted because of people like the Koch brothers. He would be a nobody in the public consciousness except that the right wing needs someone to deflect to when talk of rich people buying elections comes up.
I wouldn’t say that about small-l libertarians in general, but the strain of thought you describe has existed on in the “rugged American individualist” and sovereign citizen/militia corners of the movement for a long time. Recently it’s bled into the alt-right movement, where Libertarians meet up with white supremacists. Their common code for this anti-Semitism is the idea that America is being corrupted by “alien values” via Hollywood and Wall Street (both controlled by Da Jooos, dontchaknow).
I agree, but FB really can’t be blamed for that, alas.
The underlying problem with democracy is the electorate.
As an example, larger corporations receive (justifiable) criticism for attempting to (and sometimes succeeding in) buying an election, but just what is “buying an election?”
It’s giving a candidate a bunch of money to buy advertising.
If people didn’t respond to advertising like a Pavlovian dog – i.e, if we really were rational, thinking beings – this wouldn’t be an issue.
The most die-hard libertarians I know personally are a pair of elderly Jewish Trump voters and a Native American, but believe me there’s no lack of cognitive dissonance in those houses either. I think @anon50609448’s observation about the inherent need for outside manipulators fits the data, though - if it’s not the Jews, it’s gonna be George Soros, or the Bilderbergers, you know? Or whatever.
Well, I usually lay responsibility for that at the feet of the Christian Church, and the Catholics did finally stop shouting the doctrine of Jewish Deicide from their bully pulpit in the mid 1960s. So only about a thousand years, give or take a couple decades?
Not any reply. I’ve had several very civil conversations on the topic here. But this is a privately owned and operated site, and the proprietors don’t usually tolerate pro-Xian incivility.
Or to put it another way, phrasing matters. Refute my statement cleverly and/or politely, or offer another point of view (that isn’t espousing Jewish Decide or some similar hate meme) and you’re unlikely to get censored.
Yeah, well, you didn’t actually say that Xians are inherently evil or anything like that. But, I am not religious.
I think there is no scientific basis for the notions of races/ethnicitys/“peoples”. These have been concocted by human beings for various (IMO usually evil) purposes. But you can’t say that here. I struggle to think of a civil, polite way to phrase it. Are we supposed to cleverly “beat around the bush”?
Just don’t be so clever that you get labeled a crypto-Nazi dog whistler… In my experience, you can be quite nasty here if you’re snarkily amusing and/or if you agree wholeheartedly with the site owners, but otherwise you must hew very straitly to the site terms.
I haven’t any problem with free site owners running their sites as they see fit, personally,. Facebook is not a free site, they charge organizations for preferential treatment, and a for-profit site that does any traffic filtering at all is rightly liable for the consequences of the way they filter.
For me the takeaway isn’t that Zuck is purposefully targeting Jews, or that his coders are culturally biased. It’s that they’re greedy and careless, which are surely good enough reasons not to use FB.
I’m pretty sure I’ve said exactly this on several occasions. I don’t think I’ve ever been censured, let alone censored - on that subject. The only reprimands I have received has been on the use of language.
