To be honest I’ve found this entire conversation frustrating.
The first thing I said about neutral journalism is that you don’t cover extremist positions, such as white supremacy.
The criticism to that was apparently it would have prevented the right for women to vote, which is completely spurious. The 9th Amendment gives people the ability to claim rights not covered otherwise. It’s not extremist to exercise what the constitution permits.
It just seems like we’re agreed that neutral journalism is possible if we both listen to NPR, but I’m being treated like some alt-right sympathizer over it while my attackers get high fives for my “takedown,” even though I’ve been a regular at this site for over 15 years (obviously not under this account the whole time).
I don’t care if people attack me, but just the nature of the friendly fire I’m taking is, at very least, disappointing.
I’m not saying YOU said that, I’m saying NPR DID that.
I’m not trying to attack you, I’m pointing out that NPR, which I listen to and enjoy, did the thing that most of would be critical of, giving an extremist a platform. I don’t think you’re an alt-right sympathizer at all. I’m pointing out that NPR has it’s flaws and we should be aware of that.
You’re not alt-Reich, just a centrist who has way too much faith in status quo and institutions that have repeatedly failed to provide justice and equality. This is the fundamental mistake of centrism.
Or as one wag put it: the problem with being open minded is that your brain falls out.
When I was a High School teacher, I was continually horrified by the number of students who seemed to have watched Mean Girls upside down (or something). They seemed to believe it was a sort of instruction manual…
Well this is one centrist who believes that if the scales between democracy and capitalism are tipped way out of balance, steps must be taken to correct it.
Centrism isn’t about sitting in the proverbial burning house thinking it’s fine.
I can’t sit idly by, nor should anyone else, as fascism and wealthy donors yank away all hope of freedom and equality. There is no major political party in the United States that represents the left, and that’s a big part of the problem.
I have commented before that Alf Garnett was the character who Archie Bunker was based on, and was a far more unpleasant person. It didn’t stop him being adopted as a hero by racists in the UK, to the anger of Warren Mitchell who played Alf (Warren was a Jewish social democrat) and writer Johnny Speight.
Over time, I only develop a greater appreciation for Stephen Colbert retiring his “Right wing Stephen Colbert persona” when he did.
I think he showed he was smart enough to know when it would start turning from well-understood-by-the-audience parody to something less artistically controllable and less healthy.
It also kind of reminds me how Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. started as nuanced political commentary on how the US isn’t perfect, and was almost immediately used for un-ironical flag-down-your-throat purposes.
It’s all like hearing the Sex Pistols God Save the Queen at a royal wedding.
NPR did interview Sebastian Gorka back when he was one of Trump’s advisers in 2017. It was the most hostile interview I’ve ever heard them give, and what Gorka had to say about his vision for the country was positively chilling.
He was in the administration running the country, and in that respect it was important to hear what his objectives were without Fox News sugar-coating or left wing histrionics. You knew exactly where he stood and how vile and dangerous his extreme position was.
Overall, I found it helpful because it made clear the threat to democracy his views represented, but I could understand how that may have upset many listeners.
They had him on several times. I eventually wrote my local station and told them that if I heard his voice on the radio again I would stop donating.
The problem with giving this kind of platform to a Gorka is not only the normalization of his message, but also that it adds lines to his CV for the next job he applies for. Then in the future, when he comes to a campus to give a talk, they can introduce him as someone who “has appeared on media as diverse as Breitbart and NPR” (which makes him seem like a moderate) rather then the more accurate “has a made-up PhD and is a lifelong supporter of Hungarian neo-fascist antisemitic organizations”.
From this thread, I understand that moderation is based on a system of flags: posts may be flagged and a large number of flags will automatically hide a given post and mark it so that moderation can decide to delete or keep it.
But, if there is a number of participants in the BBS that act as a close-knit group, there is a possibility that this group will compound their flags. They would not necessarily collude as a clique to flag a post, just reflag posts already flagged by other people they know, trusting the judgement of that person and not checking closely the value of the post. Conversely, the posts of members of that hypothetical group would not be flagged as often, since the other members are not organized.
In that case, the flagging system would steer moderation towards the particular tastes of that group and isolated members outside of that group would find that their views are often flagged and deleted.
This may or may not be considered a good thing, of course. I suppose it depends on the business model upon which the site is operating. Moderation by majority votes are used in the industry (either by down or by upvote as on digg for example).
Votes for Women genuinely was an extreme idea at the time and many people who fought for it, really did fight for it.
I think people are/were more arguing that the “attempt” at neutrality is possible but one shouldn’t make the mistake of patting oneself on the back that one has actually achieved it.
It’s really quite a nice system which of course relies on good moderators.
You will be pleased to learn that moderation has already thought about this possibility and is quite on top of who is whom on this forum. There is a hierarchy of trust. People colluding as you fantasize don’t get to the level of trust necessary to do what you’re saying.
Well, I don’t there’s anything in the system to prevent it other than vigilant action by a moderator.
Pretty much anyone can flag. TL1 and above.
I think the more relevant bit is that flagging itself does not do anything other than hide the post (as in add the minor step of clicking on it to read it) if enough people flag it (or one TL3 flag as ‘spam’ on a TL0 post or auto-silence for a TL0 user if enough TL3 users flag a post).
There is TL4 which allows immediate hiding of a post if flagged but I’m not sure BB implements level 4. @orenwolf?
If I understand @AndreStmaur’s scenario, the suggestion is that simply by things being flagged in a consistent fashion, it would eventually shape the moderator’s response.
I suppose that would be a risk but really as you say, one can only rely on moderators to take action to deal with inappropriate flagging if it occurs.
They explicitly said they weren’t suggesting collusion, merely that when someone who’s well ranked in the “hierarchy of trust” (which you yourself acknowledge the existence of) flags a post, there’s an increased likelihood of other people flagging it because that first flag came from a trustworthy person. And you’re asserting that people who flag posts which are flagged by other reputable users don’t become reputable users… somehow?
I don’t think there’s any systemic bias going on on BB, but I think it’s inarguable that there are some posters who are more visible than others, and I think that its not unreasonable to imagine that regular posters are more likely to be their partisans as a result of that notability.
Well I do want to apologize for derailing the Green New Deal thread with the nuclear power stuff. I should’ve just left well alone since it’s a sensitive subject. I’ll try to not make the job of moderators harder than they are already now in the future.
Not really. Flags do not carry equal weight. This isn’t just based on “Trust Level”, but also on how often a user’s flags are agreed with by moderators.
There are prolific flaggers who’s flags are not often agreed with, and there are users who rarely flag but their flags are always agreed with. The weights those flags carry have dramatically different affects on posts, and recent Discourse development has been informed in part on making sure prolific flaggers do not overwhelm moderators with work.
Tech specifics here:
In short, there is a LOT of information about users, how they flag, and how moderators respond to those flags, and that means that a user (or even group of users) flagging a post may mean less than you think.
That being said, there’s also a case to be made that a user who’s posts are consistently flagged by multiple other users over time may be an indication that the user is in fact a disruptive influence on the forum, and in extreme cases, we’ve removed such users for that reason in the past.
