Kansas Crimson

randylahey wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2023 10:50 pm Here, mark Zuckerberg confirms the fbi was influencing censorship of information on big tech platforms. Same story as what happened on twitter

KUTradition wrote: ↑Thu Jul 06, 2023 7:11 am hey everyone, look at randy!!

he’s craving the attention

MICHHAWK wrote: ↑Thu Jul 06, 2023 8:02 am most of you weaklings are very easily manipulated. russia and china and big tech are all having a field day. i think the correct term is "easy pickings."

randylahey wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2023 10:50 pm Here, mark Zuckerberg confirms the fbi was influencing censorship of information on big tech platforms. Same story as what happened on twitter

What did we find?

* Tweets about political content from elected officials, regardless of party or whether the party is in power, do see algorithmic amplification when compared to political content on the reverse chronological timeline.

* Group effects did not translate to individual effects. In other words, since party affiliation or ideology is not a factor our systems consider when recommending content, two individuals in the same political party would not necessarily see the same amplification.

* In six out of seven countries — all but Germany — Tweets posted by accounts from the political right receive more algorithmic amplification than the political left when studied as a group.

* Right-leaning news outlets, as defined by the independent organizations listed above, see greater algorithmic amplification on Twitter compared to left-leaning news outlets. However, as highlighted in the paper, these third-party ratings make their own, independent classifications and as such the results of analysis may vary depending on which source is used.

Paul M. Barrett, deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University’s Stern School of Business, who has studied the companies’ content moderation policies, said there was “no systematic evidence any place of a broad methodical plot” between the government and the platforms to censor.

On the contrary, social media platforms often appear reluctant to block political content, especially from Republicans, even when it appears to violate their own policies of abusiveness.

His articulation of the ways the White House engaged in this sort of behavior includes a list of 22 occasions on which staffers pressured the companies. Most of the examples appear to be complaints from former White House staffer Rob Flaherty about the speed at which the removal of false information was taking place. But there’s also the 22nd example, one of the few in which there is an actual purported threat issued by the White House.

Doughty points to “White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield’s announcement that ‘the White House is assessing whether social-media platforms are legally liable for misinformation spread on their platforms, and examining how misinformation fits into the liability protection process by Section 230 of The Communication Decency Act.’” This is mentioned earlier in the ruling, referencing a “July 20, 2021 … White House Press Conference” in which Bedingfield “stated that the White House would be announcing whether social-media platforms are legally liable for misinformation spread on their platforms.”

There does not appear to have been any such news conference. There are reports of Bedingfield’s saying that social media companies “should be held accountable” if they share misinformation — but that was during an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Bedingfield was asked whether there might be a review of the companies’ protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and she said the White House was “reviewing that.”

This is an important distinction! Doughty’s presentation suggests that the White House was proactively considering retribution for social media activity — one of the only such instances in his ruling. The quote included in the list of 22 times the White House applied pressure seems to be invented out of whole cloth.

In the abstract, this is a shocking mistake. In the context of the ruling overall, though, it makes sense.

After all, this is a document that takes seriously the complaints of defendant Jim Hoft of the conspiracy website Gateway Pundit. Like all Americans, Hoft has the right to say what he wants. But he and his website offer numerous examples of careless, dishonest claims that might be good for engagement but hardly reflect well on platforms that carry them.

The lawsuit notes that Hoft’s Twitter account was permanently banned in February 2021 after it posted “video footage from security cameras in Detroit, Michigan from election night 2020, which showed two delivery vans driving to a building at 3:30 a.m. with boxes, which were alleged to contain election ballots.”

The issue wasn’t that Hoft shared the video. It’s that his site claimed, without evidence and inaccurately, that this was evidence of fraud. It was not.

[The] district court made no effort to identify circumstances where the government came even close to coercing social media companies into doing something they didn’t want to do. Take the allegations concerning hydroxychloroquine. On pages 52-53 of the opinion, the district court recites the very serious allegation that the Department of Health and Human Services “suppressed speech on hydroxychloroquine” by having Dr. Anthony Fauci make “statements on Good Morning America and on Andrea Mitchell Reports that hydroxychloroquine is not effective.” The next sentence then reports that, after this apparently very coercive Good Morning America appearance, “social-media platforms censored” videos and material that were pro-hydroxychloroquine. That must have been quite the Good Morning America appearance. But joking aside: A government official appearing on a television show and stating that certain speech is disinformation does not come even remotely close to the government coercing social medial companies into removing that speech.

KUTradition wrote: ↑Thu Jul 06, 2023 11:42 am is there a twitter meme that lays it out in plain English, for dummies?

Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press

Sparko wrote: ↑Thu Jul 06, 2023 12:29 pm Horse de-wormers would have saved America. If not for those meddling kids and their Constitution.