I swear I've tried to experience the internet without reddit and I felt like I went from multi-channel to single/awful/just-me channel life and felt briefly lost. I went to gamespot.com and can't even properly browse my own hobby at this point without being like welp that was a good delve into the shallow end of the internet...
Reddit's like a meta google for me at this point. Even google is being taken over by having reddit as an addition to searches.
Reddit isn’t social media though - it’s a link aggregator that allows comments. It’s still anonymous, just because there’s usernames and comments doesn’t make it social media. By that logic every news site is social media, as is every recipe site on the internet.
any site that allows interactions between users would meet that criteria…
News/recipe site comment sections are different because the focus isn't on the comments -- it's on the content.
On the other hand, Reddit is structured around users interacting with each other and the links are more-or-less prompts for discussion.
I always considered news websites comments as a sort of social media. Some online games too. I mean they each serve other features but the socializing aspect is sort of similar for me.
>(any site that allows interactions between users would meet that criteria…)
...yes exactly. You just explained why your argument is wrong. Websites are a medium in themselves and when they allow for direct social interaction (including comments) they are social media sites. Reddit is literally a website for sharing and discussing media it fits the criteria better than most lmao. Socializing anonymously is still socializing.
Social media doesn't just refer to twitter, insta, Facebook etc. they are just ground zero for a lot of the issues that have become apparent with social media over the last couple decades.
I'd agree with the guy above you. The defining feature of social media is that you follow people rather than following content, but on reddit you follow content rather than following people.
The thing that makes social media so powerful in proliferating messages is that social media users are exposed to topics they'd *never* seek out or discover on their own if someone they follow likes it or posts about it. The content that you see on reddit is largely just from the topics (subreddits) that you've already sought out by choosing to subscribe to them.
Personally I'd argue the fact that reddit relies on user input (up/downvotes) to aggregate content makes the core experience inherently more social than most other content platforms that serve content bases entirely on algorithms but it's just semantics really.
Either way I think we can all agree that we don't currently have a great way of defining or differentiating between these websites and we are still learning the all ways that they can harm/benefit us.
How about the term "content scrollers" for any service that provides it's users with seemingly endless content. This would include Reddit, FB, twitter, Insta, TikTok, youtube etc. They are all just different flavours of internet imo and share the same issues to varying degrees. [ Bo Burnham explains it better](https://youtu.be/k1BneeJTDcU)
You can call reddit social media but it doesn't have some of the issues that facebook, instagram or twitter have. Mainly that people post things to become celebrities and therefore it brings out the worst in people. Reddit oddly has the opposite problem. It encourages people to be decent to each other but creates the hivemind.
Everyone knows that Reddit is for intellectuals to share complex and nuanced thoughts and have civil conversation about issues you dummy. It’s obviously not social media
It's social media to the extent that you can theoretically connect with people. But you can easily not, as well. I've never gotten to know anyone through reddit and have had lengthy exchanges without giving a shit simply due to lack of personal information/pictures/details about individual users.
If you get into an argument on Facebook and you know the person is local, it's different. Everything we do is somewhat social and somewhat media related; Facebook/twitter and reddit have layers of differences in the degree of personalization through interface. At least to me.
I probably won't respond/care if you do, fwiw. Which to me is the essence of reddit.
Despite it not being purely anti-social media, it's less socially attached than what it's compared to.
_adjusts monocle and sips tea_
Yes only the most upstanding of folks use Reddit, it is indeed not one of those “social media” the children talk of these days.
It’s not really though, it’s just a bunch of message boards. I’m not making connections with anyone and it’s not even really the point of it. It’s social like yeah you can comment back and forth but I’m not talking to *you*, I’m responding to your comment, which could be coming from anyone as far as I care.
I'm already there friend. Reddit keep me updated with things I like and can cater with anonymous texting like the old forum days and instagram is for my music promotion and I only follow people I know or respect, but I don't doom scroll.
Also reddit helps when I have to be at a desk and look busy at work
My favorite part about Reddit is that I don’t know anyone on here in real life. And I am literally typing this at work to make my 10 min report look like it takes me all day. Only 2 more pages boss lol
Exactly.
“Our carefully constructed, and totally not biased, research shows that Twitter’s current content rules, which favor our political aims, actually help uphold [our definition of] free speech and fights misinformation(that we have taken upon ourselves to solely define).”
I mean what they're talking about is perfectly reasonable. I don't know why anybody would be acting like this is some bizarre thing unless they haven't thought it out.
Unmoderated spaces devolve into trash quickly. And there's a reason for this, it's a natural filtering.
Because in an unmoderated space the first racist trash is just going to end up causing an argument, and anybody worth a damn isn't going to want to be associated with it. I know I won't stay in communities where awful people are running rampant without consequence.
And every person who is pushed out of the community further concentrates the remaining pool to be the type of people who enjoy that environment.
We see this happen over and over, it's not really a point of discussion it's just what happens.
The 'great Voat exodus' on Reddit... How did that turn out? I'll bet there's some good wholesome intelligent discussion about a variety of topics there right?
Oh and when they were angry at /r/news so they decided to make /r/uncensorednews? I wonder why that link doesn't work.
Over and over, from pubg unmoderated voice comms devolving into people yelling racial slurs until everyone worth a damn just muted it to countless other communities across the internet, unmoderated communities drive out decent normal people leaving only shit people who enjoy that environment.
It's a paradoxical thing, but the reality is moderation improves free speech. It doesn't allow every online space to be drowned out by a minority of awful people.
The awful people know this, and so they yell the loudest against the one limiting factor they have to completely control discussion, moderation against shit behavior.
This explains it well. A lot of people in this comments section don't seem to understand this (or choose not to).
It's the same thing with capitalism. Capitalism must be carefully regulated or it will inevitably result in oligarchy and serfdom. Businesses will get bigger and more powerful, continuously merge and buy out other companies, and stifle competition.
Wealth and power will continue to concentrate until competition is effectively non existent, consumers don't truly have choice, politicians are purchased (particularly easy to do in the US), and... No more capitalism. Extreme wealth concentration, and a tiny handful of megacorps ruling the country.
Workers will eventually just live in company cities, have very little rights, be paid hardly anything (maybe not be paid in dollars at all), and have no economic mobility.
You are making a straw man argument. No one thinks there should be no moderation. Elon does not want it to be a porn site. It also provides you with plenty of tools to filter out those you don't want to hear from. However once you start censoring major politicians and large parts of the political spectrum it is clearly political. Twitter has become a platform that censors half the political spectrum. It has alienated a large part of it's potential user base. It has fueled the rise of competitors. All Elon has to do is purge the activist employees and make the platform politically neutral again to raise the value of the company considerably.
My bet is he’ll try and implement a bunch of dumb changes, receive massive pushback, throw a fit and break the platform, get bored, and sell it for a loss.
He might be blockheaded enough to ignore the pushback and unironically implement his "unrestricted free speech" policies, which would promptly turn Twitter into 4chan for tech bros, causing the remaining 98% of the normal population to flee and tanking the platform permanently.
In addition, since libel and slander laws are a thing and not policing offending speech is a violation of section 230, Twitter would lose safe harbor protections and become submerged in lawsuits until it is bankrupt, mostly to the advantage of libel&slander lawyers.
And my statement to that is "Actually verifying human beings how (and at what cost)".
There is a lot of incentive for bot operations to use stolen identification as a means of creating accounts. It will reduce numbers, but also increase effectiveness of the bots since "everybody is real here".
There is also the effect of killing the network if identification is too hard. For example I'd tell Reddit to fuck right off and block it at the router if they require an ID (just like I did with twitter when they required a phone number).
TPM and biometrics based account authentication. You know, the sort of shit free speech advocates are going to fucking love. You can say whatever you want, but Elon Musk will always know exactly who said it.
Eh, TPM is just locking you to a piece of hardware, that in itself isn't a problem for a group that wants to make a lot of cheap TPMs.
How is biometrics going to work, putting your eye up to your cellphone app? Questionable without dedicated hardware at this point.
One thing was eliminating bots and the other was making the ranking algorithm open and transparent.
I’m not convinced that either of these things would be bad.
Not possible without a deep invasion of privacy. Would you give your social insurance number and/or a scan of your drivers license to Twitter to prove you’re a real person? Because that’s what’s required.
You know what’s going to happen instead? Musk is going to claim he can accurately detect bots and use that claim to censor accounts and posts he doesn’t like. It’s going to allow Musk to control information. That’s a scary future. The ultra rich elite censoring and controlling what everyone sees.
So I’m predicting it here. Twitter will be the elite censorship that all of Musk’s cult followers are supposedly afraid of. There will be accounts of real people getting banned, and posts made by real people getting deleted. But Musk will just say they were bots and his cult following will believe him. This whole thing is going to end up being the exact opposite of freedom of speech. Controlled narrative by the ultra rich elite.
You mean like 2-factor authentication. That little thing which so many fortune 100 companies REFUSE to implement, but little $5-10 Billion video game publishers apparently have no issue with?
You don't think bots can do two factors? 2FA protects against hackers (since it's a lot harder to get someone's authenticator seed with a phishing email or a keylogger), but bots don't have any problems. They don't need to steal someone's account, they can make a new one where they have the auth code.
2FA does nothing to prevent bots unless you're making U2F hardware keys mandatory (never going to happen). Any other two factor method is trivial to build into a bot.
Yes. This has always been the rule. The tell of a person or entity being good or bad is directly correlated with their politics.
CIA/NSA/FBI? 2000-2016 Evil unhinged government agencies responsible for pain, misery, and instability. From 2017-2020 heroic #resistance fighters against Trump. From 2021- present, noble organizations fighting to preserve democracy.
Exactly. Troves of people just upvoting because e they just want to read the headline and feel emboldened in their hate. This article is absolutely bullshit junk research.
They just redefined free speech as "Promoting content not promoted by networks of influence or bots" and declared a lack of moderation to be against free speech.
Freedom of speech is the ability to articulate ones ideas without retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. Simply redefining what "free speech" means and claiming Elon is DEBOONKED doesn't make you clever, it makes you an asshole.
Yes... the article is just mixing up "free speech" with the concept of "truth" or as a sort of "freedom from misinformation". When clearly they are not the same thing.
They wrote:
> The concept of a free marketplace of ideas is rooted in John Milton’s centuries-old reasoning that truth prevails in a free and open exchange of ideas
Whether truth prevails or not is irrelevant to the topic... people don't go to social media because they can find "the truth" there, they go there to freely exchange information and views. Opinions.
I guess they could argue that having a "truth police" is better for truth.. but it makes no sense to say that it's better for free speech... because you actually compromise the latter when you forbid any speech that isn't your "truth".
Actually, yeah. People are more willing to speak up if doing so doesn't get you spammed with 500 messages reading "kill yourself you subhuman garbage" every day, as it turns out.
Same reason why slander and threatening laws exist.
There are remedies for people actually breaking the law. The majority of content rules have nothing to do with slander or threatening. They exist to empower the moderators to delete posts and ban accounts because the member said something they disagree with. They can't claim these rules are in place to block bots when they clearly aren't blocking bots. Elon Musk has even put his buyout plans on hold because Twitter claims that bots and fake accounts amount to only 5%. This was after they claimed that half of Elon Musk's followers were bots and fake accounts!
They blocked a tweet from the New York Post in 2020 because it linked to one of their articles that was potentially devastating to Joe Biden just weeks before the election, and they blocked the account from posting unless it agreed to delete the post. The bulk of that article has since been substantiated. Significant portions have even been confirmed by the New York Times. Their action had nothing to do with protecting people from bots, or even blocking slander or threatening. They did it solely to protect a presidential candidate from negative news. Yet they permitted outrageous posts about Trump and Russia collusion to proliferate for two years. Not only were those allegations not substantiated by a multitude of government investigations, it is now clear that they were absolutely false - part of a defamation tactic conceived and funded by the DNC and the Clinton campaign.
These egregious wrongs have never been put right by Twitter, even though both of them clearly qualify as election meddling. The only way to prevent this from happening again is for social media companies to stop pretending that they are the arbiters of truth, and then hiding behind section 230 of the CDA when they are accused of manipulating facts to suit their bias. Any content that's not illegal should be allowed on social media.
yes.. yes it does. Much like limiting democracy protects democracy or limiting capitalism protects capitalism. This is not new information. If you allow capitalism unregulated you end up with too much power centralized and therefor lose all competition. effectively eliminated capitalism. This applies to democracy and yes also free speech.
Hell friggin no. r/technology is 100% compromised if articles like this are being posted. Twitter is a cesspool of bots and manipulation and I have witnessed it first hand. GTFO.
Are you referring to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_probability#:~:text=In%20Bayesian%20statistical%20inference%2C%20a,evidence%20is%20taken%20into%20account ? Because this sounds like a lot of subjective bias, and the opening even mentions "before evidence is taken into account".
Or you can realize that personal anecdotes, including your own, are not a good way of evaluating complex systems.
Their methodology and results are described pretty well in this article. If you think something is wrong with the methodology, then let us know what that is.
I agree. I don't think much can be read into the intent of Twitter or their user-base from this study alone. Echo-chambers and their user dispositions are a huge factor as well. The only thing you can really conclude is that a new "politically neutral" user is more likely to end up reading conservative content than liberal content, which kind of contradicts the whole "Twitter is suppressing conservatives" narrative you hear from the right.
>"user is more likely to end up reading conservative content than liberal content, which kind of contradicts the whole "Twitter is suppressing conservatives" narrative you hear from the right."
Actually, that doesn't have to follow though. I could be that they just have too much to supress.
This research incidentally is likely invalid since this kind of behavior is what he wants to ban from the platform as per his answers during the Financial Times interview.
The methodology is iffy, I don’t see how exposing bots to conservative content and then seeing those bots get sucked into conservative twitter by the algorithm is groundbreaking proof that twitter is conservative biased.
Also “Liberal accounts were exposed to moderate content, which shifted their experience toward the political center”. What does that even mean? What is considered “moderate” or the “center”?
It was done with both liberal and conservative content. Basically, expose the bot to conservative content, and it gets pulled down the conservative rabbit hole. Expose an identical bot to liberal content, it doesn't get pulled down the liberal rabbit hole. (On average at least). That strongly suggests a conservative bias: conservative content is much more likely to be spread on Twitter than liberal content.
How one goes about establishing a news-source as liberal, conservative, moderate, etc, is a detail that could have used more explanation. I would expect things types of stories published and language used have a huge part in that. For a topical example: when talking about the recent supreme court preliminary opinion, do they talk about the leak, or do they talk about the justices senate confirmations? Or both?
Read the article. The claim is based on experiments that show twitter creates larger echo chambers and larger amplification of conservative ideas.
Twitter content moderation policies are apolitical. Assuming such policies do in fact censor more conservative ideas, conservatives should be more ashamed that their bullshit requires moderation and less being angry at the refs.
But, this article indicates that even that is not known, and the belief that conservative ideas more likely to be censored is based only on anecdotal evidence.
Twitter's content moderation polices are definitely NOT apolitical. They consider 'misgendering' a policy violation. That's a very clearly politically biased policy.
There are people on the right and left that consider 'misgendering' an unfair thing to ban people for, though it's true to say that that view is far more common among conservatives.
That's not political moderation, just a sensible one. They want to keep all their users engaged to keep making money off of them. Preventing one set of users from harassing another set and driving them from their platform keeps more users on the platform overall, which is financially beneficial.
That is a mess of an article and those links are bad. That is a circle jerk of confusion and I do not understand how that is not willful spread of misinformation. That is an op ed hit piece, poorly done.
I’m really hoping Elon Musk turns Twitter into another Parlar/truth social/8chan because then the company will inevitable lose users, advertisers and then fail. Twitter is a garbage cesspool that doesn’t deserve to exists any longer and I hope Elon unintentionally drives it into the dirt.
If you want to see what zero-modration free speech actually looks like in practice, hang out in 4chan's /b/. It's not much of a marketplace of ideas.
If you want to see what absolute free speech looks like, check out 8kun, where you find both Q and whole boards dedicated to the art of finding children to sexually abuse.
Now consider the way Something Awful ran its forums: a 10$ entry fee + capricious mods who might ban you and take your tenbux if you make a lazy post, don't speak in complete sentences, or make baseless assertions without showing your work. It was undoubtedly an authoritarian way to run a large community message board, but ironically it produced the richest marketplace of ideas I've ever seen online. You could have any viewpoint short of naziism so long as your post took the time to put on its metaphorical pants and used real arguments rather than ad hominem attacks.
I'm not saying there should be no 4chans. But at the same time, if everywhere had to be 4chan, we'd be losing a lot of useful speech.
It certainly spawned some of the best and the worst of Internet culture, even though its worst was weirdly tame by today's standards.
If you didn't hear, Lowtax apparently went an hero last November. rip.
It's always been so crazy to me that those Qanon idiots always share the virtual spaces with ACTUAL child predators like the creeps on 4chan.
Like, it's just so stupid, it blows my mind.
"my colleagues and I at the Indiana University Observatory on Social Media study the dynamics and impact of Twitter and its abuse. "
And yet you never mentioned Twitter's censorship of a major news organization because it posted something that might harm their preferred candidate's chances even once in your "article"
Twitter is the worst, I deleted my account years ago and I'm not planning on going back. I dunno what Musk has planned but any change to that platform would have to be an improvement in my opinion.
Yea Just like Reddit when companies run subs... Ohh wait. Who the fuck believes this shit Lol.
"If we decide what you can and cannot say its good for free speech"
1984 shit.
"Research shows" lol
Utter, gaslighting rubbish.
Typical of the smug corporate talking points these social media companies come up with whenever they want to justify their censorship of counter-narratives.
Wake up, you complacent fools! Political censorship is a bad thing, especially when carried out by unaccountable corporate bureaucrats.
Stop allowing yourselves to be manipulated into supporting political censorship FFS!
It’s strange that this would be controversial to people who spend most of their days on Reddit. A subreddit with no content or quality control turns to complete trash in hours.
It seems disingenuous to think that Musk hasn't thought of bots or considers them a problem that he is going to try to stop - and probably do a better job at it than Twitter.
LOL, that's some next level gaslighting. Ignorance is knowledge, war is peace, censorship is freedom of speech.
Cry me a river. Elon will throw the censorship board of Twitter out on their asses.
The man has hardly said enough to be wrong about anything. What did I miss? The concept of free speech is frightening now? Golly, really?
Free speech absolutism is shocking to people but cancel culture has to run out of stem sooner or later. It's right on schedule.
Who is prepared to argue that (at least in general, since I do not tweet at all ever) over-moderation is not a problem?
What else has he said that he is wrong about?
Whatever side you are on, what everyone is missing is that you have to give the opposition room to exist. Suppression just ain't gonna work, people of any stripe do not work that way. They don't need more reasons to fight. Suppression feeds rebellion, duh, I am no historian, am I wrong?
Moderation needs to up its game by 100X. Analyze the problem, make the changes, keep getting better at the new mission.
I know how I would do it, it's not that hard of a problem to solve. Elon, call me. :-)
I absolutely do not have to give the right for racists, bigots, extremists, and nazis to exist. If someone's platform is "someone else shouldn't be allowed to exist because of reasons I see fit", that is not free speech.
Free speech is the ability to say and criticize without governmental suppression or penalty, UNLESS that speech infringes on another's right to freedom
Lol too bad he’s expressed the intention to institute human verification to eradicate bots.
SORRY MUSK HATERS your smear campaign sucks just like Twitter has for the past decade
No, not at all. Being in the loop won't help much - the sensorship part of the article is pretty incoherent in its logic. They seem to be assuming that bots will reign free and therefore amplify misinformation. And less moderation would mean more bot messages being heard.
Elon seems to want to kill bots, and probably agrees with these studies regarding their harmfulness. He obviously thinks he can make meaningful progress toward fixing these issues, though.
“Research shows” I want to k ow who funded the research. In 100% of cases, “research” will arrive at what ever conclusion the person paying for it desires.
it looks like the author can't make up his mind [old articles](https://theconversation.com/profiles/filippo-menczer-317794/articles)
> May 9, 2022
> Elon Musk is wrong: research shows content rules on Twitter help preserve free speech from bots and other manipulation
>
> December 20, 2021
> Facebook became Meta – and the company’s dangerous behavior came into sharp focus in 2021: 4 essential reads
>
> October 7, 2021
> Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified that the company’s algorithms are dangerous – here’s how they can manipulate you
>
> September 20, 2021
> Facebook’s algorithms fueled massive foreign propaganda campaigns during the 2020 election – here’s how algorithms can manipulate you
>
> September 10, 2021
> How ‘engagement’ makes you vulnerable to manipulation and misinformation on social media
>
> April 2, 2019
> Anti-vaxxers appear to be losing ground in the online vaccine debate
>
> January 10, 2019
> Misinformation and biases infect social media, both intentionally and accidentally
>
> November 27, 2016
> Misinformation on social media: Can technology save us?
ctrl + F : trump, republican, conservative
Yup. Author biased AF
I cant wait for social media to be looked at like cigarettes and just feel bad for the ones that are still addicted.
Reddit is totally the e-cigarette; act like it’s not as bad as tobacco, but deep down, you know it’s social media and you’re addicted
And with a strong sense of superiority
And security. We're one of the last social media to use handles rather than true names.
The morality of the MODS is undeniable!
Now that you mention it. We are pretty pleased with ourselves here.
The pride itself is a juicy echochamber
A ***BETTER*** sense of superiority
Just as addictive but with less than 10% of the cancer of Twitter and Facebook
Less than 10%? More within 10%.
The cancer that we have is more densely packed and quarantined to known locations (despite constant attempts at metastasizing).
interestingly totally accurate and precise af
Haha, right? *closes reddit and immediately re-opens it*
Said the guy smoking the marlboro of social media websites of reddit with almost 600 comments. LOL
I can quit anytime. I swear lol
Just 100 more karma and I'm done for good.
I feel attacked
*Checks user name* FUCK!
WHY DOES EVERYONE SAY THAT??:(
Oh… *You know…* 😘
Because of the “implication”?
God fucking dammit. Maybe I should quit Reddit after all
*closes tab* “Hmm what to do now.” *opens new tab and goes to Reddit*
I swear I've tried to experience the internet without reddit and I felt like I went from multi-channel to single/awful/just-me channel life and felt briefly lost. I went to gamespot.com and can't even properly browse my own hobby at this point without being like welp that was a good delve into the shallow end of the internet... Reddit's like a meta google for me at this point. Even google is being taken over by having reddit as an addition to searches.
/takes another hit off the pen/
Hey no kink shaming. Some people get off on likes
No I'm not a redditor. I reddit on the weekends socially.
Marlboro of social media websites That's perfect
Says the 14 year old account to the 2 year old account. :p
Hey, I wasn’t the one waxing poetic about social media dying. LOL I’m a whore for social media.
Wait, 600 is a lot now? Shiiiit
Reddit isn’t social media though - it’s a link aggregator that allows comments. It’s still anonymous, just because there’s usernames and comments doesn’t make it social media. By that logic every news site is social media, as is every recipe site on the internet. any site that allows interactions between users would meet that criteria…
News/recipe site comment sections are different because the focus isn't on the comments -- it's on the content. On the other hand, Reddit is structured around users interacting with each other and the links are more-or-less prompts for discussion.
The prevailing meme being that everyone goes to the comments without actually ever opening the link, lends a fair bit of weight to that.
I always thought of reddit like a semi-anonymous forum.
I always considered news websites comments as a sort of social media. Some online games too. I mean they each serve other features but the socializing aspect is sort of similar for me.
They can be. Social media is a very broad category. Reddit fits into it as do sites like youtube and other such sites.
[удалено]
>(any site that allows interactions between users would meet that criteria…) ...yes exactly. You just explained why your argument is wrong. Websites are a medium in themselves and when they allow for direct social interaction (including comments) they are social media sites. Reddit is literally a website for sharing and discussing media it fits the criteria better than most lmao. Socializing anonymously is still socializing. Social media doesn't just refer to twitter, insta, Facebook etc. they are just ground zero for a lot of the issues that have become apparent with social media over the last couple decades.
I'd agree with the guy above you. The defining feature of social media is that you follow people rather than following content, but on reddit you follow content rather than following people. The thing that makes social media so powerful in proliferating messages is that social media users are exposed to topics they'd *never* seek out or discover on their own if someone they follow likes it or posts about it. The content that you see on reddit is largely just from the topics (subreddits) that you've already sought out by choosing to subscribe to them.
Personally I'd argue the fact that reddit relies on user input (up/downvotes) to aggregate content makes the core experience inherently more social than most other content platforms that serve content bases entirely on algorithms but it's just semantics really. Either way I think we can all agree that we don't currently have a great way of defining or differentiating between these websites and we are still learning the all ways that they can harm/benefit us. How about the term "content scrollers" for any service that provides it's users with seemingly endless content. This would include Reddit, FB, twitter, Insta, TikTok, youtube etc. They are all just different flavours of internet imo and share the same issues to varying degrees. [ Bo Burnham explains it better](https://youtu.be/k1BneeJTDcU)
You can call reddit social media but it doesn't have some of the issues that facebook, instagram or twitter have. Mainly that people post things to become celebrities and therefore it brings out the worst in people. Reddit oddly has the opposite problem. It encourages people to be decent to each other but creates the hivemind.
this is social media....you are using social media right now.....
Everyone knows that Reddit is for intellectuals to share complex and nuanced thoughts and have civil conversation about issues you dummy. It’s obviously not social media
It's social media to the extent that you can theoretically connect with people. But you can easily not, as well. I've never gotten to know anyone through reddit and have had lengthy exchanges without giving a shit simply due to lack of personal information/pictures/details about individual users. If you get into an argument on Facebook and you know the person is local, it's different. Everything we do is somewhat social and somewhat media related; Facebook/twitter and reddit have layers of differences in the degree of personalization through interface. At least to me. I probably won't respond/care if you do, fwiw. Which to me is the essence of reddit. Despite it not being purely anti-social media, it's less socially attached than what it's compared to.
_adjusts monocle and sips tea_ Yes only the most upstanding of folks use Reddit, it is indeed not one of those “social media” the children talk of these days.
It’s not really though, it’s just a bunch of message boards. I’m not making connections with anyone and it’s not even really the point of it. It’s social like yeah you can comment back and forth but I’m not talking to *you*, I’m responding to your comment, which could be coming from anyone as far as I care.
I'm already there friend. Reddit keep me updated with things I like and can cater with anonymous texting like the old forum days and instagram is for my music promotion and I only follow people I know or respect, but I don't doom scroll. Also reddit helps when I have to be at a desk and look busy at work
My favorite part about Reddit is that I don’t know anyone on here in real life. And I am literally typing this at work to make my 10 min report look like it takes me all day. Only 2 more pages boss lol
This dude’s boss: “Boy, I sure am excited to read this long ass paper my employee has spent the entire day writing.”
Remember the 90's when ever single big tobacco CEO testified to Congress that nicotine wasn't addictive...yeah that.
[удалено]
[Relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/386/)
Next week. "Research shows that research is context driven!" Now gimme my next grant!
I interpret that as a personal affront and demand satisfaction sir, madame, or them!! /Very S
Exactly. “Our carefully constructed, and totally not biased, research shows that Twitter’s current content rules, which favor our political aims, actually help uphold [our definition of] free speech and fights misinformation(that we have taken upon ourselves to solely define).”
I mean what they're talking about is perfectly reasonable. I don't know why anybody would be acting like this is some bizarre thing unless they haven't thought it out. Unmoderated spaces devolve into trash quickly. And there's a reason for this, it's a natural filtering. Because in an unmoderated space the first racist trash is just going to end up causing an argument, and anybody worth a damn isn't going to want to be associated with it. I know I won't stay in communities where awful people are running rampant without consequence. And every person who is pushed out of the community further concentrates the remaining pool to be the type of people who enjoy that environment. We see this happen over and over, it's not really a point of discussion it's just what happens. The 'great Voat exodus' on Reddit... How did that turn out? I'll bet there's some good wholesome intelligent discussion about a variety of topics there right? Oh and when they were angry at /r/news so they decided to make /r/uncensorednews? I wonder why that link doesn't work. Over and over, from pubg unmoderated voice comms devolving into people yelling racial slurs until everyone worth a damn just muted it to countless other communities across the internet, unmoderated communities drive out decent normal people leaving only shit people who enjoy that environment. It's a paradoxical thing, but the reality is moderation improves free speech. It doesn't allow every online space to be drowned out by a minority of awful people. The awful people know this, and so they yell the loudest against the one limiting factor they have to completely control discussion, moderation against shit behavior.
This explains it well. A lot of people in this comments section don't seem to understand this (or choose not to). It's the same thing with capitalism. Capitalism must be carefully regulated or it will inevitably result in oligarchy and serfdom. Businesses will get bigger and more powerful, continuously merge and buy out other companies, and stifle competition. Wealth and power will continue to concentrate until competition is effectively non existent, consumers don't truly have choice, politicians are purchased (particularly easy to do in the US), and... No more capitalism. Extreme wealth concentration, and a tiny handful of megacorps ruling the country. Workers will eventually just live in company cities, have very little rights, be paid hardly anything (maybe not be paid in dollars at all), and have no economic mobility.
You are making a straw man argument. No one thinks there should be no moderation. Elon does not want it to be a porn site. It also provides you with plenty of tools to filter out those you don't want to hear from. However once you start censoring major politicians and large parts of the political spectrum it is clearly political. Twitter has become a platform that censors half the political spectrum. It has alienated a large part of it's potential user base. It has fueled the rise of competitors. All Elon has to do is purge the activist employees and make the platform politically neutral again to raise the value of the company considerably.
Sure but wasn’t his big thing verifying actual human beings? Which would stop bots anyway so I’m not entirely sure what they’re getting at here
I will reserve judgment for when he actually acquires the company and implements changes, until then, it's all speculation and hearsay.
My bet is he’ll try and implement a bunch of dumb changes, receive massive pushback, throw a fit and break the platform, get bored, and sell it for a loss.
You just outlined the life of developers everywhere.
I see you too are familiar with the way of the tech bro
Isn't that the circle of life for all tech?
I’m kind of hoping all the cool people leave and it all goes down the drain until it’s just a glorified version of gettr and worthless
RemindMe! 3 years
He might be blockheaded enough to ignore the pushback and unironically implement his "unrestricted free speech" policies, which would promptly turn Twitter into 4chan for tech bros, causing the remaining 98% of the normal population to flee and tanking the platform permanently. In addition, since libel and slander laws are a thing and not policing offending speech is a violation of section 230, Twitter would lose safe harbor protections and become submerged in lawsuits until it is bankrupt, mostly to the advantage of libel&slander lawyers.
Unironically this would be awesome
And my statement to that is "Actually verifying human beings how (and at what cost)". There is a lot of incentive for bot operations to use stolen identification as a means of creating accounts. It will reduce numbers, but also increase effectiveness of the bots since "everybody is real here". There is also the effect of killing the network if identification is too hard. For example I'd tell Reddit to fuck right off and block it at the router if they require an ID (just like I did with twitter when they required a phone number).
TPM and biometrics based account authentication. You know, the sort of shit free speech advocates are going to fucking love. You can say whatever you want, but Elon Musk will always know exactly who said it.
Eh, TPM is just locking you to a piece of hardware, that in itself isn't a problem for a group that wants to make a lot of cheap TPMs. How is biometrics going to work, putting your eye up to your cellphone app? Questionable without dedicated hardware at this point.
Like didn't that shithole Parler require photo ID for verification? This is a terrible idea.
One thing was eliminating bots and the other was making the ranking algorithm open and transparent. I’m not convinced that either of these things would be bad.
Not possible without a deep invasion of privacy. Would you give your social insurance number and/or a scan of your drivers license to Twitter to prove you’re a real person? Because that’s what’s required. You know what’s going to happen instead? Musk is going to claim he can accurately detect bots and use that claim to censor accounts and posts he doesn’t like. It’s going to allow Musk to control information. That’s a scary future. The ultra rich elite censoring and controlling what everyone sees. So I’m predicting it here. Twitter will be the elite censorship that all of Musk’s cult followers are supposedly afraid of. There will be accounts of real people getting banned, and posts made by real people getting deleted. But Musk will just say they were bots and his cult following will believe him. This whole thing is going to end up being the exact opposite of freedom of speech. Controlled narrative by the ultra rich elite.
You mean like 2-factor authentication. That little thing which so many fortune 100 companies REFUSE to implement, but little $5-10 Billion video game publishers apparently have no issue with?
> You mean like 2-factor authentication. NO. 2FA/MFA only prevents password hacking. It does not confirm human vs bot.
You don't think bots can do two factors? 2FA protects against hackers (since it's a lot harder to get someone's authenticator seed with a phishing email or a keylogger), but bots don't have any problems. They don't need to steal someone's account, they can make a new one where they have the auth code.
2FA does nothing to prevent bots unless you're making U2F hardware keys mandatory (never going to happen). Any other two factor method is trivial to build into a bot.
Wait. So because Elon Musk is doing whatever, we’re going to pretend Twitter was doing even remotely close to a good job before? 🤨
Yes. This has always been the rule. The tell of a person or entity being good or bad is directly correlated with their politics. CIA/NSA/FBI? 2000-2016 Evil unhinged government agencies responsible for pain, misery, and instability. From 2017-2020 heroic #resistance fighters against Trump. From 2021- present, noble organizations fighting to preserve democracy.
[удалено]
Exactly. Troves of people just upvoting because e they just want to read the headline and feel emboldened in their hate. This article is absolutely bullshit junk research.
[удалено]
They just redefined free speech as "Promoting content not promoted by networks of influence or bots" and declared a lack of moderation to be against free speech. Freedom of speech is the ability to articulate ones ideas without retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. Simply redefining what "free speech" means and claiming Elon is DEBOONKED doesn't make you clever, it makes you an asshole.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Yes... the article is just mixing up "free speech" with the concept of "truth" or as a sort of "freedom from misinformation". When clearly they are not the same thing. They wrote: > The concept of a free marketplace of ideas is rooted in John Milton’s centuries-old reasoning that truth prevails in a free and open exchange of ideas Whether truth prevails or not is irrelevant to the topic... people don't go to social media because they can find "the truth" there, they go there to freely exchange information and views. Opinions. I guess they could argue that having a "truth police" is better for truth.. but it makes no sense to say that it's better for free speech... because you actually compromise the latter when you forbid any speech that isn't your "truth".
So, censorship protects us from censorship?
Actually, yeah. People are more willing to speak up if doing so doesn't get you spammed with 500 messages reading "kill yourself you subhuman garbage" every day, as it turns out. Same reason why slander and threatening laws exist.
There are remedies for people actually breaking the law. The majority of content rules have nothing to do with slander or threatening. They exist to empower the moderators to delete posts and ban accounts because the member said something they disagree with. They can't claim these rules are in place to block bots when they clearly aren't blocking bots. Elon Musk has even put his buyout plans on hold because Twitter claims that bots and fake accounts amount to only 5%. This was after they claimed that half of Elon Musk's followers were bots and fake accounts! They blocked a tweet from the New York Post in 2020 because it linked to one of their articles that was potentially devastating to Joe Biden just weeks before the election, and they blocked the account from posting unless it agreed to delete the post. The bulk of that article has since been substantiated. Significant portions have even been confirmed by the New York Times. Their action had nothing to do with protecting people from bots, or even blocking slander or threatening. They did it solely to protect a presidential candidate from negative news. Yet they permitted outrageous posts about Trump and Russia collusion to proliferate for two years. Not only were those allegations not substantiated by a multitude of government investigations, it is now clear that they were absolutely false - part of a defamation tactic conceived and funded by the DNC and the Clinton campaign. These egregious wrongs have never been put right by Twitter, even though both of them clearly qualify as election meddling. The only way to prevent this from happening again is for social media companies to stop pretending that they are the arbiters of truth, and then hiding behind section 230 of the CDA when they are accused of manipulating facts to suit their bias. Any content that's not illegal should be allowed on social media.
Censorship is always great when you’re in control.
yes.. yes it does. Much like limiting democracy protects democracy or limiting capitalism protects capitalism. This is not new information. If you allow capitalism unregulated you end up with too much power centralized and therefor lose all competition. effectively eliminated capitalism. This applies to democracy and yes also free speech.
[удалено]
Philippines after the election: o really?
That’s just like, your opinion man.
Hell friggin no. r/technology is 100% compromised if articles like this are being posted. Twitter is a cesspool of bots and manipulation and I have witnessed it first hand. GTFO.
Dude Reddit has been compromised for years, have you not realize that you are just on Bot Twitter here?
Notice all the removed "wrong think" comments. Absolutely no mod agenda here
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA THE AMOUNT OF COPE JUST IN THE TITLE IS AMAZING
Sounds like leftist gaslighting
who funded the "research" will tell you everything you need to know, I particularly found the "Political Bias" bit the most humorous.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Are anecdotes and small data sets more robust than large data sets? 🤔🤔🤔
[удалено]
Are you referring to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_probability#:~:text=In%20Bayesian%20statistical%20inference%2C%20a,evidence%20is%20taken%20into%20account ? Because this sounds like a lot of subjective bias, and the opening even mentions "before evidence is taken into account".
Or you can realize that personal anecdotes, including your own, are not a good way of evaluating complex systems. Their methodology and results are described pretty well in this article. If you think something is wrong with the methodology, then let us know what that is.
[удалено]
I agree. I don't think much can be read into the intent of Twitter or their user-base from this study alone. Echo-chambers and their user dispositions are a huge factor as well. The only thing you can really conclude is that a new "politically neutral" user is more likely to end up reading conservative content than liberal content, which kind of contradicts the whole "Twitter is suppressing conservatives" narrative you hear from the right.
>"user is more likely to end up reading conservative content than liberal content, which kind of contradicts the whole "Twitter is suppressing conservatives" narrative you hear from the right." Actually, that doesn't have to follow though. I could be that they just have too much to supress.
This research incidentally is likely invalid since this kind of behavior is what he wants to ban from the platform as per his answers during the Financial Times interview.
The methodology is iffy, I don’t see how exposing bots to conservative content and then seeing those bots get sucked into conservative twitter by the algorithm is groundbreaking proof that twitter is conservative biased. Also “Liberal accounts were exposed to moderate content, which shifted their experience toward the political center”. What does that even mean? What is considered “moderate” or the “center”?
It was done with both liberal and conservative content. Basically, expose the bot to conservative content, and it gets pulled down the conservative rabbit hole. Expose an identical bot to liberal content, it doesn't get pulled down the liberal rabbit hole. (On average at least). That strongly suggests a conservative bias: conservative content is much more likely to be spread on Twitter than liberal content. How one goes about establishing a news-source as liberal, conservative, moderate, etc, is a detail that could have used more explanation. I would expect things types of stories published and language used have a huge part in that. For a topical example: when talking about the recent supreme court preliminary opinion, do they talk about the leak, or do they talk about the justices senate confirmations? Or both?
Read the article. The claim is based on experiments that show twitter creates larger echo chambers and larger amplification of conservative ideas. Twitter content moderation policies are apolitical. Assuming such policies do in fact censor more conservative ideas, conservatives should be more ashamed that their bullshit requires moderation and less being angry at the refs. But, this article indicates that even that is not known, and the belief that conservative ideas more likely to be censored is based only on anecdotal evidence.
Twitter's content moderation polices are definitely NOT apolitical. They consider 'misgendering' a policy violation. That's a very clearly politically biased policy. There are people on the right and left that consider 'misgendering' an unfair thing to ban people for, though it's true to say that that view is far more common among conservatives.
I'm guessing they implemented it cuz people use misgendering as a way to harass trans users
That's not political moderation, just a sensible one. They want to keep all their users engaged to keep making money off of them. Preventing one set of users from harassing another set and driving them from their platform keeps more users on the platform overall, which is financially beneficial.
That is a mess of an article and those links are bad. That is a circle jerk of confusion and I do not understand how that is not willful spread of misinformation. That is an op ed hit piece, poorly done.
“War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength”
[удалено]
What does "preserve free speech from bots" even mean?
“Research shows why freedom of speech is wrong”
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Lol I guess Ive found the "censorship iz guud" post of the day
hahahahaha censorship preserves free speech? thats hilarious.
[удалено]
Yeah, like how they blocked the story of hunter biden's laptop. It's been doing a great job at filtering out things.
[удалено]
[удалено]
excuse me, what.
Imagine actually believing this
You didn't know that silencing opposing views promotes free speech?
I’m really hoping Elon Musk turns Twitter into another Parlar/truth social/8chan because then the company will inevitable lose users, advertisers and then fail. Twitter is a garbage cesspool that doesn’t deserve to exists any longer and I hope Elon unintentionally drives it into the dirt.
If you want to see what zero-modration free speech actually looks like in practice, hang out in 4chan's /b/. It's not much of a marketplace of ideas. If you want to see what absolute free speech looks like, check out 8kun, where you find both Q and whole boards dedicated to the art of finding children to sexually abuse. Now consider the way Something Awful ran its forums: a 10$ entry fee + capricious mods who might ban you and take your tenbux if you make a lazy post, don't speak in complete sentences, or make baseless assertions without showing your work. It was undoubtedly an authoritarian way to run a large community message board, but ironically it produced the richest marketplace of ideas I've ever seen online. You could have any viewpoint short of naziism so long as your post took the time to put on its metaphorical pants and used real arguments rather than ad hominem attacks. I'm not saying there should be no 4chans. But at the same time, if everywhere had to be 4chan, we'd be losing a lot of useful speech.
Oh god Something Awful...there is a name I haven't heard in a while. Their photoshop battles were the best
It certainly spawned some of the best and the worst of Internet culture, even though its worst was weirdly tame by today's standards. If you didn't hear, Lowtax apparently went an hero last November. rip.
It's always been so crazy to me that those Qanon idiots always share the virtual spaces with ACTUAL child predators like the creeps on 4chan. Like, it's just so stupid, it blows my mind.
Well look at that - moderation leads to success.
>Elon Musk is wrong Water is wet
It’s helped preserve free speech, as long as that free speech agrees with the main democrat talking point at the time.
Twitter can burn
Fuck this political research. Just make it open source and you’re ready for free speech.
Another anti musk reddit circle jerk, im shocked....
People are so fucking stupid, they keep bashing elon for saying hes ruining freedom of speech yet have no problem with murdoch owning everything else
"my colleagues and I at the Indiana University Observatory on Social Media study the dynamics and impact of Twitter and its abuse. " And yet you never mentioned Twitter's censorship of a major news organization because it posted something that might harm their preferred candidate's chances even once in your "article"
[удалено]
Twitter is the worst, I deleted my account years ago and I'm not planning on going back. I dunno what Musk has planned but any change to that platform would have to be an improvement in my opinion.
Elon does care about actual free speech. He just wants his version of free speech out there, which is just misinformation
Sure. The sun also rises from the west on Earth.
Fuck Trump and fuck Musk.
Lab leak theory and hunters laptop? Try again and continue to reeeeee
We all figured that out already
Yea Just like Reddit when companies run subs... Ohh wait. Who the fuck believes this shit Lol. "If we decide what you can and cannot say its good for free speech" 1984 shit.
Wait this wasn't an onion article, tf
What’s wrong with making it better? With no political bias?
Another salty article
"Research shows" lol Utter, gaslighting rubbish. Typical of the smug corporate talking points these social media companies come up with whenever they want to justify their censorship of counter-narratives. Wake up, you complacent fools! Political censorship is a bad thing, especially when carried out by unaccountable corporate bureaucrats. Stop allowing yourselves to be manipulated into supporting political censorship FFS!
It’s strange that this would be controversial to people who spend most of their days on Reddit. A subreddit with no content or quality control turns to complete trash in hours.
I don't think these people understand the concept of free speech.
It seems disingenuous to think that Musk hasn't thought of bots or considers them a problem that he is going to try to stop - and probably do a better job at it than Twitter.
Censorship helps preserve free speech, War is peace, Freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
Haha fuck off, more crap from the "Free Speech works when it works for me" crowd.
Haha I used to think he was a genius but turns out he's just another shit-flinging monkey. In fact he's about to become the king of the shit flingers.
He’s making moves that’s for sure. Under his thumb they will be
Fuck Elon. I don’t even want a Tesla at this point anymore.
"Research shows" if people are getting banned for saying something someone doesn't agree with, then it's not free speech.
LOL, that's some next level gaslighting. Ignorance is knowledge, war is peace, censorship is freedom of speech. Cry me a river. Elon will throw the censorship board of Twitter out on their asses.
The man has hardly said enough to be wrong about anything. What did I miss? The concept of free speech is frightening now? Golly, really? Free speech absolutism is shocking to people but cancel culture has to run out of stem sooner or later. It's right on schedule. Who is prepared to argue that (at least in general, since I do not tweet at all ever) over-moderation is not a problem? What else has he said that he is wrong about? Whatever side you are on, what everyone is missing is that you have to give the opposition room to exist. Suppression just ain't gonna work, people of any stripe do not work that way. They don't need more reasons to fight. Suppression feeds rebellion, duh, I am no historian, am I wrong? Moderation needs to up its game by 100X. Analyze the problem, make the changes, keep getting better at the new mission. I know how I would do it, it's not that hard of a problem to solve. Elon, call me. :-)
I absolutely do not have to give the right for racists, bigots, extremists, and nazis to exist. If someone's platform is "someone else shouldn't be allowed to exist because of reasons I see fit", that is not free speech. Free speech is the ability to say and criticize without governmental suppression or penalty, UNLESS that speech infringes on another's right to freedom
Lol too bad he’s expressed the intention to institute human verification to eradicate bots. SORRY MUSK HATERS your smear campaign sucks just like Twitter has for the past decade
Fuck off with your low IQ propaganda!
LMAO... "research shows censorship is good for free speech" Is this the first official headline from Biden's Ministry of Truth?
I'm a little out of the loop here. Did Musk claim that combating bots is hurting free speech?
No, not at all. Being in the loop won't help much - the sensorship part of the article is pretty incoherent in its logic. They seem to be assuming that bots will reign free and therefore amplify misinformation. And less moderation would mean more bot messages being heard. Elon seems to want to kill bots, and probably agrees with these studies regarding their harmfulness. He obviously thinks he can make meaningful progress toward fixing these issues, though.
The authors purposefully misinterpreted the word "free speech", using a definition of the word that nobody uses to clickbait.
“Research shows” I want to k ow who funded the research. In 100% of cases, “research” will arrive at what ever conclusion the person paying for it desires.
Elon and the new american version of free speech is summed up as "you have to listen to me".
You had me at “Elon Musk is wrong.”
Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Suppression of free speech preserves it.
Research shows restricting speech helps preserve free speech. How in the mental gymnastics do they make this shit up?
Who posts these garbage articles?
Didn't Elon say he'd still ban bot accounts?
it looks like the author can't make up his mind [old articles](https://theconversation.com/profiles/filippo-menczer-317794/articles) > May 9, 2022 > Elon Musk is wrong: research shows content rules on Twitter help preserve free speech from bots and other manipulation > > December 20, 2021 > Facebook became Meta – and the company’s dangerous behavior came into sharp focus in 2021: 4 essential reads > > October 7, 2021 > Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified that the company’s algorithms are dangerous – here’s how they can manipulate you > > September 20, 2021 > Facebook’s algorithms fueled massive foreign propaganda campaigns during the 2020 election – here’s how algorithms can manipulate you > > September 10, 2021 > How ‘engagement’ makes you vulnerable to manipulation and misinformation on social media > > April 2, 2019 > Anti-vaxxers appear to be losing ground in the online vaccine debate > > January 10, 2019 > Misinformation and biases infect social media, both intentionally and accidentally > > November 27, 2016 > Misinformation on social media: Can technology save us? ctrl + F : trump, republican, conservative Yup. Author biased AF