Trotter: Alright, alright. Now, Miss Vito, being an expert on general automotive knowledge, can you tell me what would be the correct ignition timing be on a 1955 Bellaire Chevrolet with a 327 cubic engine and a 4-barrel carburetor.
Ms. Vito: It’s a bullshit question.
Trotter: Does that mean that you can’t answer it?
Ms. Vito: It’s a bullshit question. It’s impossible to answer.
Trotter: It’s impossible because you don’t know the answer!
Ms. Vito: Nobody could answer that question!
Trotter: Your Honor, I move to disqualify Miss Vito as a expert witness.
Judge Haller: Can you answer the question?
Ms. Vito: No. It is a trick question.
Judge Haller: Why is it a trick question?
Vincent Gambini:[to his clients] Watch this.
Ms. Vito: 'Cause Chevy didn’t make a 327 in '55. The 327 didn’t come out til '62. And it wasn’t offered in the Bellaire with the 4-barrel carburetor til '64. However, in 1964 the correct ignition timing would be 4 degrees before top dead center.
“Does your mother knows that you’re a pedophile? Just a yes or no answer.”
“Have you stopped being a racist? Just a yes or no answer.”
Don’t get me wrong, the tech companies that these guys lead are parasites growing fat on the discord they foment in our nation, but only an idiot allows a questioner to dictate their response.
By “largest smoking gun”, I was referring to Trump’s account. If he hadn’t constantly claimed the election was stolen on Twitter nor the call to action to attend the January 6th rally, the insurrection wouldn’t have happened.
Completely agree that both FB and YT via their algorithms helped share and propagate the quack theories and pundits who were backing up Trumps claims. But if Trumps hadn’t made those initial claims and so sternly insisted they were true, the whole idea would not have gotten as big as it did.
Depends on what the question is. The question of do they bear SOME responsibility, then the answer is clearly yes. Dorsey has a “yes, but” answer, but has to admit there is SOME there.
As stated above, you are making an intellectually dishonest analogy.
“Does your platform bear some responsibility for disseminating this false information” is a straight yes-or-no question that does not rest on an assumption of guilt as the questions you just posed do.
I’m not saying the questions are analogous, I’m pointing out the dangers of enforced yes/no answers.
It’s a classic bit of sophistry. Force a yes/no answer, then have a line of attack for either option.
If you’re walking into a conversation that is likely to be adversarial (such as questioning by congress, which is filled with political grandstanding and attempts to score points at the expense of the questioned) then you should never answer that way.
I detest all of those guys and think they all beat some responsibility, both for the insurrection and for the increasing polarization of America. But I don’t fault them for not giving a yes/no answer.
well, i may think so, and you may think so, but apparently Jack feels that world leaders deserve a different set of standards, or at least need extra considerations. feh.
Enforced yes/no answers are fine as long as you’re asking an actual yes/no question that is not built on a presumption of guilt.
If you asked the electric company if they bore some responsibility for an amateur electrician burning their house down they’d probably say “no, because we cannot take responsibility for our customers’ irresponsible personal behavior.”
If you asked the electric company if they bore some responsibility for their high-voltage wires sparking a forest fire they might say “yes, and we are trying to make that right.” (Assuming they were being honest).
If they think being asked a straightforward question about whether they’re responsible for things they control access to is too oppressive, they should have thought about that when they refused to hold themselves to their own standards.
It is a hard question that doesn’t give them a right answer because:
THEY INTENTIONALLY DID THE WRONG THING
Nothing here is unfair. Actions and inaction have consequences. They don’t get to dodge them just because examining their actions make them look bad. That’s their own fault. It’s not unfair.
If you see someone with blood all over them, standing over a corpse, and ask them “did you do this?” that’s NOT A GODDAMN LOADED OR UNFAIR QUESTION.
I am so fucking sick of people defending known bad actors as if questioning what they very explicitly and provably did is unfair.
If you don’t want consequences for your actions go be an evangelical prosperity gospel christian. God forgives anyone of anything as long as you ask.
For the life of me I’ll never understand why so many people instinctively rush to the defense of Billionaire tech executives when people start asking them uncomfortable questions about how their business models are impacting our society.
Zuck and Sundar and Jack are all sitting on more wealth and power than a mortal mind can begin to comprehend and a couple of tough questions aren’t about to change that. They don’t need anyone to step up and represent them pro-bono.
It’s more like either response entails implications that require elaboration.
If I use a telephone to contact an assassin, does the telephone company bear responsibility? If I use a newspaper classified ad to post a coded advertisement for an assassin, does the newpaper bear responsibility?
Are strict yes/no answers with no elaboration of any use? All they do is inspire outrage, either way.
It’s not even about guilt - it’s about the premise of the question. Asking if one has stopped being something that they never were is an unanswerable question because the premise is faulty - neither “yes” nor “no” as an answer is accurate in that situation. But the premise of the question here is sound. One can’t really argue with the premise that the “disseminat[ion of] disinformation related to the election and the Stop the Steal movement that led to the attack on the Capitol.” Nor is one really going to argue about whether it happened over social media. So then the question, if their particular platform was a part of that dissemination - and therefore bears some responsibility - is perfectly reasonable. Hell, it’s more than reasonable, as it’s simply asking them to admit to something we all saw happen.
Yeah. And I think it’s not unfair to rake the richest most powerful least accountable people over the coals.
I don’t feel any sympathy at all.
And it’s not out of line to demand straight yes or no answers to yes or no questions. Even if you like to call it grandstanding.
I also don’t think they’re pointless and I think if you as a CEO of a massive powerful company put yourself into unwinnable situations where you can’t make yourself look good without dissembling, then you deserve to look bad.
I absolutely don’t care even slightly that “whether they say yes or no they look bad”. That’s nobody’s fault but their own.
They could have made hard deciscions about a year ago, all the way up till now to avoid looking so bad. But they didn’t.
There was still “Stop the steal” content circulating in plain view on facebook days after the storming of the capitol building. Facebook was one of the central hubs of the “stop the steal” fad
Facebook’s culpability was greater than zero in this context.
Hmmm. I’m not an expert on US law, but it seems like Mike Doyle is a funny one to be asking them whether or not they hold any responsibility.
He was one of the vast majority of congresscritters who voted “Aye” on the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which states that legally, they do not hold responsibility for what their users post.
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
And that’s what Facebook, Twitter, have been hiding behind all this time. An honest answer - with zero PR value - to Doyle’s yes/no question might be “No. You helped make sure we wouldn’t”.
I remember a friend’s outrage about section 230 at the time, and I thought it was an over-reaction. Section 230 was very much in tune with the “free Internet” zeitgeist of the 90s. Being against it seemed like being against free speech. Now, I’m pretty sure I was wrong.
[edited to add] - I believe that social media was an essential part of the mayhem on Jan 6. I’ll go further: I think social media has made the world a lot worse. I think there is an enormous moral responsibility these companies bear. I feel like they’ve helped make a huge problem, and there isn’t a way to get rid of the problem that can still fit their business model. My feeling watching Doyle ask this question is like watching two criminals when a bank heist goes wrong, arguing about who got them into this mess.
These are poor analogies, for two reasons. First, the answer is “yes.” Both the newspaper and the telephone company have a legal responsibility not to allow their services to be used to promote or perpetrate a crime. The fact you framed the newspaper ad as a coded message means you recognize this. The telephone company, too, insofar as they are able to monitor your call (which is legally null unless ordered to do so by the court), would be required to report your calls to the police if so ordered.
The second reason is because the scenario ignores how FB, Twitter, Google, the telephone company, and newspapers work. If you read a newspaper article about how to strengthen your marriage, the newspaper doesn’t suggest an article on untraceable ways to poison your spouse. If you text your friend about how your spouse irritated you at Target, Verizon doesn’t send an unsolicited text to you suggesting “a guy who can make him ‘disappear.” On the other hand, FB’s algorithms are built to enhance engagement, and so it is entirely conceivable that a post along the lines of “my spouse did X, I could kill him” will result in more posts and groups about spousal murder being suggested to you. (Which is what we see with the “Stop the Steal” crowd.)
FB, Twitter, Google, etc. have an absolute responsibility for how their algorithms promote “engagement” on their platforms. They’ve demonstrated they have the ability to fight disinformation (they’ve done a decent job policing against child pornography), they can apply a similar strategy against the seditionists, anti-vaxxers, virulent racists, etc. It might not be cheap or easy, but it can be done. Instead, they choose not to, because it creates “engagement” which allows them to sell more advertisement to put in front of those “engaged” eyeballs.
Did they create societies’ ills? Of course not. Did they exacerbate them for power and profit? Most certainly, and they have a responsibility and obligation to be held accountable and to be an active part of fixing the damage they helped to cause.
The yes/no question is disingenuous. It implies that the platforms are wholly responsible and they can’t really answer yes to that. If he had asked if they bear some responsibility then their answers would have been squirrelly.
Personally, using my understanding of responsibility, it’s impossible to not answer yes to the question. But the “Yes” doesn’t mean anything as it depends on the speaker’s meaning of that word; which one cannot know without further explanation. Unfortunately, because “responsibility” has such a personal meaning the listener can’t understand the intent but can imply whatever they want. The point of the question is to frame the speaker, but it does nothing to expand on the truth or fix the problem.
So I think I’m wrong in calling in a false dichotomy, it’s not a fair question but I’m not sure what I’d call it.
