
White House launches tool to report censorship on social media - mooseburger
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/15/18626785/white-house-trump-censorsip-tool-twitter-instagram-facebook-conservative-bias-social-media
======
throwayEngineer
We are going to have the government deal with shitty Mods?

Back when I was a kid, if the Mods sucked, you'd stop going to that website.

Serious question, why do unhappy customers keep buying what bad companies
sell?

I stopped using Facebook and many subreddits. I have this self control.

Is there anyone here that cannot stop visiting bad websites?

~~~
mfatica
Where do I go for a Twitter sized audience if they ban me from their platform?
The only real competitor is gab and there's barely anyone using it. The
problem right now is these platforms are basically monopolies and are
aggressively censoring people on the right side of politics

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
Isn't it a bit conceited to think you'll have access to that audience? I don't
believe my twitter account is reaching that many people. If the message is
strong enough and will get to that many people somehow, might as well start a
blog.

~~~
luckylion
> I don't believe my twitter account is reaching that many people.

That's up to your message though. If people share your tweet, it might. If
you're banned from the platform, that's not an option, no matter how many
people find your opinion valuable, they'll never see it.

~~~
cannonedhamster
The amount of people who see even the most popular tweets is a small
subsection of Twitter. If you're banned from the platform, sucks to be you.
You shouldn't have violated their TOS. If you didn't understand the TOS then
you shouldn't have joined. Pewdiepie is one of the biggest people on Youtube,
how many people have heard of him? Outside of that slice of society not many.
How many people could tell you off the top of their head who Marshall Mathers
is? Noam Chomsky? Outside of tech how many people know who Linus is? The point
is there are very, very few people who have their voices heard. Even famous
people aren't guaranteed to have their tweets read. If you want a platform
where people will listen you have to control your own platform, like Oprah or
the pope. You have to have as many people following you as Oprah to have a
guaranteed voice.

~~~
luckylion
> You shouldn't have violated their TOS.

Since their TOS are vague, and they enforce it very discriminatory,
deplatforming is obviously not about "violating TOS".

> The point is there are very, very few people who have their voices heard.

I agree wholeheartedly. My point isn't that everybody on Twitter automatically
reaches everybody else on Twitter. It's that he has the chance. If you tweet
something that everybody loves, you can go viral. If you're banned, you can't.

Everybody can run for office, but not everybody can win. If you block people
from running in the first place, you better have some damn good reasons, and
they better not be "I don't like their political opinions".

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isk517
I find it kind of amusing that the same political party that believes internet
service providers do not have obligation to neutrality believe internet
content providers do.

Edit: spelling mistake fixed

~~~
luckylion
True, that's a weird thing. One side wants ISPs to be neutral, the other wants
platforms to be neutral, but neither really want both to be neutral.

------
giarc
>A later question asks the user what year the Declaration of Independence was
signed “just to confirm you aren’t a robot.” This is an unorthodox anti-
scripting technique, and a generally ineffective one, given the relative
simplicity of automatically entering a number.

A twitter user reported that any 4 digit number will be verified.

~~~
scohesc
Well yeah, it's literally a survey and it can be any answer you want. It's not
to verify anything other than the guise of "if you don't know when it was
signed then you're not an informed american and your opinion doesn't matter"

------
sehugg
_In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter
hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because
the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be
Republican politicians._

[https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/04/25/twitter-cant-ban-
ra...](https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/04/25/twitter-cant-ban-racism-
because-theyd-have-to-ban-republicans-too/)

~~~
kprjo
That's what happens when "our country and people first" gets classified as
white supremacism.

~~~
caseyohara
Phrases like "our country and people first" get classified as white supremacy
because they are used as dog whistles by white supremacists.

~~~
kprjo
But that's as silly as classifying the "ok hand" emoji as white supremacist
too.

~~~
thrower123
The Streisand Effect when people try to pile on these things as being some
kind of secret masonic handshake is insane.

I don't think actual white supremacists could ever come up with propaganda
anywhere near as effective.

------
KirinDave
It's an extremely dangerous conflation of terms to suggest that private speech
and private moderation are the same as censorship.

But forcing a "fairness" doctrine onto the tech world is exactly what the
current political parties, who feel like reporting for them has had
insufficient deference and whatabout-ism, want to do. Uniformly across the
center of the political spectrum most of the US government represents.

Speech Rules enacted democratically by small communities are fine. Speech
Rules imposed top down by the owners of infrastructure for communication are
not great, but at least customers can make choices about them and it's not so
unimaginable to find alternatives. Speech Rules enacted top-down by the
executive are impossible to argue with and ultimately one of the most
dangerous kinds of authoritarianism. The infosec community can tell you
they've been fighting a slow, losing battle against going to jail for saying
something that is not illegal to say out loud for some time now.

~~~
malvosenior
> _It 's an extremely dangerous conflation of terms to suggest that private
> speech and private moderation are the same as censorship._

It's extremely dangerous to continue to erode the spirit and meaning of free
speech by narrowly defining it as a government only concept. We're
collectively losing our ability to tolerate different views and have a level
playing field of discussion. We need to get back to "I may not agree with what
you say but I'll fight to the death for your right to say it". Both in spirit
and in law. Tech companies and political parties have been attacking the
spirit of free speech.

~~~
IOT_Apprentice
No we don't. The meaning of free speech is clearly defined in the United
States by the First Amendment. QED.

~~~
malvosenior
I explicitly stated I'm talking about the spirit of free speech.

~~~
cannonedhamster
The spirit of free speech is this. You have a right to say whatever the hell
you want in public. That doesn't mean I have to let you do it in my home, my
business, my private internet website. I am not required to give a platform to
speech I disagree with. It also doesn't shield you from responsibility or the
inevitable reaction from choosing free speech.

~~~
malvosenior
I disagree. The spirit of free speech is that _everyone_ should want to at
least have access to all thoughts and speech. You don't have to like them, you
don't have to read them but you should have access to them. Otherwise you're
letting someone else filter what _you_ can and cannot see.

~~~
cannonedhamster
You can disagree all you want. It doesn't make you less wrong. You literally
are limited by the nature of the universe and your physical body so reality is
a filter. Time limits how much you can consume should you be able to bypass
the physical limitations of your body. Your belief is fundamentally
incongruous with the intent of free speech.

If I am forced to host your platform/speech/lewd gestures/etc. you're taking
away my rights of free speech to not host your platform. No one is taking away
access. What they are doing is kicking the drunk ass jerk out of the bar for
harassing other people because they were warned to stop being such a dick and
they continued on anyways. They can say whatever they want from someplace them
own and no one is preventing access to them. They want a bar full of jerks,
they can go right ahead and have no rules of decorum.

You're confusing unlimited speech with free speech. There has never been a
right to access to all speech. Private conversations happen all the time and
no one has a right to listen to those. So again, just because someone owns a
billboard doesn't mean they are required to post your message. The courts have
been pretty solid on this and it's why the baker won his case against the
couple. You cannot force me to advocate for you if I don't believe in it.

~~~
malvosenior
Once again I'll repeat that I'm talking about the spirit of free speech not
the law. I'm encouraging everyone to take up the attitude that having
information filtered by someone else is inherently bad. Users should be
_demanding_ unfiltered access to all of the content on the platform. Just like
on Reddit how some subs add a mod log so you can see what they're filtering.

This is the mentality of intellectual inquisitive people and needs to be
promoted as it's currently under attack.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Let me try to bridge the gap between you two.

If I'm running a platform, I have the choice to make it a moderated platform
or an unmoderated one. If I make it unmoderated, you can have your "free
access to everything". [Edit: At the price of it becoming a cesspool that most
people don't want to wallow in.] But if I make it moderated, you don't have
the right to make me carry anything on it that I don't want to carry. You
don't like it? Go run your own platform, and carry what you like.

And between all these different platforms - some unmoderated, and the
moderated ones having a bunch of different standards of what they will and
will not allow - people get to freely choose which ones they want to spend
time on and contribute content to.

All that can work without the government forcing anybody to do anything.

------
panarky
What's worse?

Private companies making decisions about what appears on their privately
funded platforms?

Or bureaucrats, ideologues and partisans using government power to influence
what appears on private sites?

~~~
dx87
Considering there's plenty of ideologues and partisans working at those
private companies, I think it's pretty bad either way.

------
thex10
It's only for social media censorship against USians. The form kicks you out
once you tell it you're not a U.S. citizen or permanent resident.
[https://twitter.com/typeform/status/1128993614250553344](https://twitter.com/typeform/status/1128993614250553344)

------
olliej
I can’t help but feel the GOP wouldn’t be running into this if they didn’t
keep posting attacks on minorities.

If you are saying some set of people don’t deserve the same basic rights as
other people, simply because they exist, and are different, it’s hate speech.
And if your platform is deliberately based on intolerance then there is not
requirement for others to tolerate you. This isn’t a paradox - bigots love
trying to say it is, but it’s not.

------
andygates
That's not creepy and McCarthyite at all. No sir.

------
MarkMc
I suspect that the primary purpose here is not to uncover bias or censorship
on social media platforms - it's to get people to identify more strongly as
Trump supporters.

This is the classic psychological 'consistency' principle at work. When
someone takes the small step of "sharing their story with President Trump" it
strengthens their self-image as a Trump supporter. This is then reinforced by
receiving frequent emails "from President Trump" thanking them for their
support to eliminate censorship. This makes the person more likely to get off
the couch and vote for Trump in November 2020.

~~~
redleggedfrog
This shows lighter in my browser, like it's voted down, but it's by far the
most insightful comment.

Also, if you're a company and you have a platform like facebook and Twitter,
and you're a private company, not the government, you can kick whomever you
damned well please off your service, or delete their posts, or edit them to
make them look stupid. It's not censorship if you're not the government. If
facebook gets all progressive and the conservatives don't like it, let them
make their own conservative platform. Too bad techies lean left, going to make
that difficult.

Freaking 'merica's biggest political activity is now whining.

~~~
toasterlovin
FWIW, there is a precedent for treating monopolies differently than other
companies. Utility companies, which are natural monopolies, are highly
restricted in their ability to refuse service to customers, for instance.
Social media companies seem to be natural monopolies.

~~~
int_19h
Social media companies aren't _natural_ monopolies. There are no intrinsic
high fixed costs, for example. The only significant barrier to entry is lock-
in of existing users via their social graph, but that barrier is entirely
artificial - Facebook could be a part of a larger federated network, for
example, it just chooses not to (but could be forced to).

~~~
jfengel
Wikipedia defines a "natural monopoly" as "a monopoly in an industry in which
high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of
the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier
in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors."

That's the case for Facebook. The barrier to entry isn't the cost of the
machines or software, but the Network Effect: if your friends aren't on the
new network there's little reason for you to go there. Once large network is
more effective than many small ones. Facebook could give up that natural
monopoly, if they chose to, but they won't unless forced.

------
JaimeThompson
I am totally confident that they will handle reports of censorship by media
that supports them completely and totally the same way as reports against
media that doesn't.........

------
SpikeDad
I wonder if you can use this to report censorship that the Trump
administration is actively doing to scientific reports and scientists
themselves who's results disagree with their business and extremist religious
agenda?

------
katabasis
So Net Neutrality constitutes unwelcome government interference in the
internet, but it's okay to force private companies to tolerate extreme right-
wing views? This is ridiculous.

~~~
1f60c
It's outrageous. People think this is a good idea?

------
smpetrey
Not a good look for Typeform.

------
DeusExMachina
> A Twitter spokesperson responded to the new tool saying, “We enforce the
> Twitter Rules impartially for all users, regardless of their background or
> political affiliation. We are constantly working to improve our systems and
> will continue to be transparent in our efforts.”

In the discussion with Jack Dorsey on the Joe Rogan podcast, Tim Pool had a
good point: some of the rules are intrinsically biased on one side of the
political spectrum.

An good example is the rule against misgendering. Twitter forbids referring to
a person using a different gender than the one that person choses. E.g., you
have to refer to a male-to-female transgender as a "she".

But to conservatives, referring to someone using a gender other than their
biological one is the definition of misgendering.

This is a purely ideological take, and Twitter chose the definition of one
side over the other. Then they can apply it "impartially to all users", but
its the rule itself that is not impartial.

~~~
makomk
There's an even stronger argument that Twitter's misgendering rule is
ideological, I reckon. See, it used to be that all the right-thinking,
connected feminist and feminist-adjacent folks thought that referring to
people using anything other than their biological gender at birth was not just
misgendering, but misogynistic and patriarchal - and even once this shifted
somewhat, folks were expected to defend the people who still held those views
until around 2016 or so. For instance, when Wordpress banned someone using
wordpress.com to outright dox and harass every prominent trans woman out
there, there was a successful campaign to unban her and no counter-campaign,
because all the left-leaning groups fighting to make Internet sites
ideologically correct supported this back then.

Twitter choosing to act against misgendering now isn't simply the result of
some abstract belief about respecting people. It's a direct reflection of the
changing views of activists in one particular slice of political spectrum.

------
SlowRobotAhead
I'm interested in the dichotomy of comments here between when Trump Admin
releases a tool to report censorship and when Elizabeth Warren talks about how
we need to break up Big Tech.

Also, it's fascinating how many of the negative reaction comments want to
pretend like there are actual alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube,
Amazon Marketplace. If the argument comes down to "it's a private business, do
whatever you want"... Well, let's be at least partially honest this is a new
problem and these are effective-monopolies.

~~~
bediger4000
Why? Censorship is quite a different issue from anti-trust. Censorship in the
USA applies to the government, not to individuals (real humans or
corporations), basically because the idea is that nobody wants to pay for
someone else's sub-moronic "free speach".

Anti-trust, in the USA, is related to harmful effects to consumers. Monopolies
can charge monopoly rents, or slow innovations or change in the monopolized
market.

Absolutely two different issues.

Also, lots of folks pretended there were actual alternatives to Microsoft in
2000. It's not a new problem.

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
>Why? Censorship is quite a different issue from anti-trust.

Is it in this case? The censorship here is only effective because of the
failures in anti-trust to adapt to the modern internet tech giants. If you are
pretending that these companies aren't monopolies in search, video delivery,
messaging, and social media... Well, I disagree.

So I get what you're saying, but let's not pretend Microsoft in 2000 was
larger than Google or Facebook is now.

The issue is that these companies are clearly pretending to be PLATFORM when
it suits them, and PUBLISHER when it suits them.

~~~
bediger4000
> So I get what you're saying, but let's not pretend Microsoft in 2000 was
> larger than Google or Facebook is now.

Larger in terms of what? Cash flow? Probably not. Monopoly power? Microsoft
had something like 95% of a market that didn't even have 3 major players. The
4-firm concentration ratio was ridiculous, as was the Herfindahl-Hirschman
Index. Microsoft owned so much of the market for PC operating systems that
they loaned Apple money to avoid anti-trust issues.

Google is at about 92% of the global share of searches, but Bing, Yahoo,
Baidu, Yandex exist. DuckDuckGo actually entered the market not too long ago.
Google now has nowhere near Microsoft's monopoly power.

------
hedora
I wonder if this is running afoul of campaign finance laws.

The Trump administration has been doing that a lot recently, and while this
can easily be misconstrued as a “report to the government” tool, it is not
hosted on a .gov site.

Will the executive branch be acting on the information posted here? That also
seems legally dubious. [edit: because there are security issues involving
using non-government computers for government business. I think Hillary had
some problems with that; maybe Trump didn’t hear about it?]

