The statehouses can do a lot of damage all on their own. Gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts are their efforts, not the federal reps’. The “laboratories of democracy” have been increasingly taken over by conservative Dr. Frankensteins over the past 30 years.
9 Likes
With language like that, he’ll fit right in with the current trends in the GOP on a national stage! /bitter, bitter sarcasm
12 Likes
Saddly, that not sarcasm. It is just a flat out statement of fact.
1 Like
The US post office literally just stopped bombs from reaching their intended destinations last week. I don’t really get how the two are similar…
15 Likes
This goes way beyond that, since if it were a matter of people breaking laws by posting something, you could just go to the police or the criminal justice system to deal with it. The problem they are dealing with is whether and how they should moderate speech that these legislatures and elections and constitutions have already determined is legal.
The speech is legal but they do not legally have to give it a platform.
7 Likes
I’m not suggesting that they do. Just that explaining that the comment I was replying to’s assertion that they are arrogating to themselves the powers of the government is incorrect.
1 Like
How is it dissimilar? Just like Twitter doesn’t catch all offensive tweets/trends, the postal service didn’t catch all of them before they were delivered.
On Twitter’s Big Board, they could even show the incoming Russian bots.
2 Likes
wow, that is intergalactic-level missing the point. are you feeling well? running a fever?
5 Likes
I get what you’re saying, but there is no such thing as a computer that has a conscious understanding of what those words mean in that order. It’s obvious to us, but almost no computer can answer natural language questions like, “What would I call my sister’s, uncle’s, daughter?”.
It’s just a dumb machine that counts how many times a hashtag is used. They are up against bot nets specifically tuned to grow certain trends. If they filter out a hashtag like #redIsBetterThanBlue, people will use an endless combination of alternatives #r3dIsBetterThanBlue.
Because computers are not yet omnipotent, and hiring editors to check every trending hashtag and tweet isn’t feasible, the best they can do is react. And they do.
Saying that Twitter is “posting” local trends like “kill all jews” is a bit misleading. It’s a mostly automated system that doesn’t understand the meaning of all natural language. I’m not a big fan of Twitter, or social media in general, but this anger is misplaced.
1 Like
If the problem is too hard, and they’re too big to succeed, then they’re too big to exist.
If it wasn’t Twitter, then who or what was it?
11 Likes
What seems to be missed in the article and discussion is that the topic was trending not because of the anti semitism on Twitter but because of the recent story of a man who vandalized a Brooklyn synagogue (the other similarly popular trending term in the screenshot) with the phrase. Example tweet: “Former Obama campaign volunteer writes ‘Kill all Jews’ on door of Brooklyn synagogue”.
The fact that this hasn’t happened with this phrase before is more an indicator that the anti semitism on Twitter is either diffuse or coded such that they never got around to blacklisting the phrase.
This isn’t a case of Twitter “failing to acknowledge the source of the problem” since the source is people talking about a recent news story. It may be the case that anti semitism is common on Twitter. It may be the case that Twitter doesn’t acknowledge it. But this story is about the algorithm picking up legitimate conversation and not realizing the meaning of the trending quote.
2 Likes
10 Likes
I love your taste in gifs Mindy, fantastic
1 Like
Twitter. Where I call the users twits- for a reason.
I live in Pittsburgh, and go to Squirrel Hill all the time.
A f*cking dumb mistake guys.
Yaweh what assholes.
Rob, you’re hitting on something important and true here, but I would slightly correct.
First of all, the trend reporting “algorithm” is not capable of “saying” anything beyond a neutral statement of fact regarding the existence of a trend. It is disingenuous for you to use that as scaremongering regarding anti-semitic intent. We are all capable of understanding that “trend” means, a phrase that is common, and not, a command from Twitter headquarters.
Unless I’m missing something, even those who hate this acknowledge Twitter’s choices are:
- monitor and censor the trend-reporting algorithm so it no longer accurately reports trends (but in which languages/markets? only the ones that matter? who draws the lines? what’s the budget?)
- let the algorithm run freely, but monitor for outrage, and if some threshold is crossed, then issue an apology and scrub the trend reporting after the fact
It seems they’re going with option 2, and a lot of people don’t like it. That’s the “mistake” you refer to; and there you are right they won’t be doing anything at all about it, because that attempted neutral trend-reporting, with occasional offensiveness-correction, IS the soul of the machine. I don’t tweet, and I don’t run tech companies, and I don’t hate Jews, but I sure can’t see any way that option 1 looks feasible or doesnt lead to lots of mistakes worse than this one.
1 Like
Ah, that would be why there has never been any litigation involving newspapers or legislation that applies to them. I see…
That’s a perfectly valid point (although a lot of the content on these sites is quite clearly illegal in the relevant jurisdictions). My comments were in response to a post stating that tech companies don’t want to moderate content because it would mean they’d have to create a legal system from scratch in-house.
My issue with that is that they do in fact want to do just that but they want to have the sole decision about how they set that up and what rules it applies; ignoring the already existing rules and regulations where they are inconvenient to them.
2 Likes
I’m not sure what you’re saying here.
Are you suggesting that the anti-semitic Twitter developers knew that there wouldn’t be enough genuine anti-semites using the phrase for it to trend and used that knowledge to justify leaving that phrase out of the blacklist with the plan that one day a newspaper headline would include the phrase in a factual manner and enough non-anti-semites would tweet about the story allowing them to have the pleasure of seeing it trend but be able to throw up their hands and claim it was the algorithm?
there is at least a 3rd choice: abolish the trend-reporting. I may use twitter differently than others, but i never needed that at all.
3 Likes
