Manufactured consensus on x.com

Yeah I mean, if the only reason you said that was to "piss off the libs" and hate on transgender men, you really shouldn't be shocked that a platform doesn't want that. Being unable to say hateful things without consequence on social media isn't the same as it being a propaganda machine.

I doubt you have any proof of that happening...

>It seems to me Twitter suppressed the post until they had time to spam it with hate posts.

Twitter can't spam hate posts in real time? They're literally an AI company.

>Bear in mind here also this suppression did not happen for other posts - only for the pro-Ukraine post - so Twitter at the least is specifically suppressing pro-Ukraine posts.

There's scant evidence of this, besides the vague assertion that "I have 5k more followers there and regularly have posts which are viewed over 100k times". If he normally posts informative and substantive content that gets good engagement, is it really surprising that a generic "I support Zelensky" post would get poor engagement?

Presumably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency

Many years ago I was really rooting for Tesla and Elon as they dragged the auto industry kicking and screaming towards electrification. How they focused on the underserved whole home battery market. He even kept his manufacturing domestic unlike most other big companies.

Some cracks started to form in this when he made a reckless wall street bet that he could make a million cars in a year or something and had his employees working double shifts in tents to get it done. In the end he won the bet and got an enormous payout. I remember calculating that if he divided the award in half and split that half evenly among every single Tesla employee that it would amount to about $40,000 per person, a life changing amount of money for most people. Instead he kept it all for himself and gave a press conference about how big of a genius he is.

But the turning point is when there was a kid trapped in a cave and he received some mild criticism over his ill conceived rescue solution and the result was to baselessly claim that the critic was a pedophile.

He's exactly the kind of guy who looks like a god when you only measure things in dollars. He takes big risks and they've paid off more often than not, but he's not someone anybody should really look up to.

Based on some of the videos of him it looks like its Ketamine.

There's no probably here, and it is healthy to avoid social media platforms run by people who perform nazi salutes in public and attempt to destroy democracy.

One problem I have with the Nazi Bar framing - or perhaps, how people read it - is that it assumes the behavior is accidental. That is, that the sites that have become Nazi bars did so purely out of a misguided sense of free speech absolutism that has been abused.

In practice, most Nazi bars are run by people actively choosing to kick people out: just the ones wearing the trans pride buttons instead of the ones wearing iron crosses. The kinds of online spaces run by free speech nutters or moderators asleep at the wheel tend to devolve into calling everything cringe, including the Nazis. Actually, Nazis are a particularly easy target for trolling and harassment, both because it is never unethical to laugh at Nazis and because critique makes them jump off the deep end.

During the Jack Dorsey era of Twitter, Twitter was a dive bar. Problematic users rarely got removed off platform, neither left nor right[0]. If people did get banned, it was for egregious offenses even Twitter management couldn't excuse. When Musk bought it, he changed it into a Nazi bar, making sure him and his favored far-right commentators got all the algorithmic boosts while left-wingers got shadowbanned.

Same with all the right-wing communities that forked out of Reddit. /r/The_Donald, Voat, etc. I bet you $10 they all had active policies to ban or bury left-wing content while actively screaming their heads off about "freedom of speech".

And there's a parallel with the actual rise of Hitler as well. I think a lot of Americans have this incorrect picture of a stupendously angry and racist German public, all voting in a landslide for the state-sponsored murder of six million Jews. The reality is that the people who owned the bar - both in Germany and abroad - were rallying behind Hitler since day one, in ways that persisted even beyond the fall of the Nazi state. They're the bits of the deep state[1] that ensured Hitler's insurrection against the Weimar Republic was given a light sentence and that Americans were kept in the dark about the nature of the Holocaust until it was undeniable. Nobody ever actually voted Hitler into office. He took advantage of a technicality and a frightened owner class to seize power for himself.

Yes, it is true that Nazis are malware[2]. Yes, Nazis can independently worm their way into a system and ruin it. However, more often than not, the people who own the Nazi bar don't merely tolerate Nazis, they accept and embrace them.

[0] Before you mention Donald Trump's ban in 2021, keep in mind Twitter had made a policy specifically to justify keeping Donald Trump on platform even when he was breaking rules.

[1] Informal ruling hierarchy parallel to the formalized one we vote for. This term usually also alleges that the informal hierarchy has subverted the formal one; but I'd argue that's almost never necessary for a deep state to exist. All states start deep, formal hierarchy is a transparency mechanism to make it shallow.

See also https://xkcd.com/898/

[2] Fun fact: if you fine-tune an AI to write malicious code unprompted, it becomes a Nazi. See https://www.emergent-misalignment.com/

>This didn’t start with the API change drama

The proximate cause IMO is that the protests (ie. moderators shutting down their subreddits) resulted in some moderators being deposed, causing new subreddits and moderators to come in power, which were easier to astroturf or whatever.

I agree, the API change was the last nail in the coffin, honestly. Reddit was always bad for several reasons, but it always had some availability of smart people that placed it alongside StackExchange and Hacker News. But 2022 and 2023 really saw a mass exodus of expertise from Reddit (and Twitter, etc.)

Lots of smart people left to Mastodons, at least.

Missing the Kucinich connection here, what's the lore?

It got much worse a few years ago. I am a daily Reddit user and it was a big difference.

I feel so old that I remember the post-2016 election when Reddit started down this path. It's been particularly bad in the last few years but agree. Ever since the_donald and the admin's reactions to it, it's been bad.

>The API shutdown allows a flooding of bots, crippled 3rd party apps and the moderator tools that kept things clean.

I thought they backed down on the API changes for moderators?

Gatekeeping the definition of art probably doesn't help your cause. Even if you convince everyone to say, I don't know, "algorithmically generated images" instead, have you really improved the situation from the artists perspective?

While I agree, they still notify everyone who liked it of the community note, so there is some feedback after the fact.

They also don't seem to last. I don't know quite how it happens but you see a lot of these community notes disappear 24 hours after they appeared. They act on the tail end of the posts exposure and then are removed for the long term for when the news comes along and uses it as a reference. But all the people who spotted the misinformation see the post and the community note and so everyone walks away "happy".

This. It's technically a solution but not a solution at all. It's like giving a calorie count AFTER someone's eaten a meal (or in this case after the tweet has been viewed by the majority of people that are going to view it).

And Mark pushed it through for FB and IG, at the same time he wound down the Fact Check system (which only hit like 0.0001% of contentious posts). Liberals reacted very negatively to this change.

Probably not, but as someone who didn't vote for either major party, nor am I a conservative, it was glaringly obvious that ramming through without lube someone who totally dive-bombed the prior primary might have avoided a sanity check to filter primary issues.

'Disappeared' of course means that they were banned.

Ive noticed very clearly a material change even on this site, where a comment with a conservative viewpoint would get downvoted into oblivion, and now I seem to see far more diversified opinions. Which is great, I want that.

No I don't think people are saying Biden was the better option. At first, as I recall, people were fairly outraged that they were left with two bad options.

The general tone very quickly shifted to Kamala's brat summer, Kamala is bae type shit.

Even after the fact nobody was questioning Kamala's qualifications. Why, at the 11th hour, were we left with demented grandpa and someone that couldn't win a primary the first time? Whose fault was this? What consequence did they suffer?

The dialogue was mostly around trying to figure out who to blame for people not voting for Kamala. Men? Black dudes? Mexicans? Misogynists? Anyone but whoever was actually responsible for the situation? Idk what it's like now though, I haven't used Reddit in months.

In the past I would spot check them and there were plenty of submissions that were neither bot submitted nor obviously rule breaking that were deleted. My best guess was that mods of sufficiently large subreddits just like to shape the content that's shown. In most places, there seems to neither be the power user nepotism of late-era Digg nor the Eastern Germany level narrative censorship of subs like worldnews. Rather it just seems like a ton of cooks in the kitchen (huge modlists) with some of the mods seeming to just take action for action's sake. Either way the point is that users aren't really dictating the content.

Don't even get me started about local city subreddit busybody moderators with their online fiefdoms and their "Daily Discussion" post graveyards.

>alongside some rough semantic analysis to understand which topics are being silenced

You'd have to find somewhere on reddit that wasn't 100% deleted haha

The worst part is that in a lot of niche communities knowing the "best" brand for a given activity then becomes a shibboleth, so it really only takes a few strategic instances of planting these seed crystals for the group opinion to be completely captured, and reinforced with minimal intervention.

How is that not treated as fraud? As you pointed out, with a little bit of detective work (which is well beyond the means and motivation of a casual internet user, but well within reach of a consumer protection agency) it's fairly easy to expose these manipulative tactics. Commercial communication ought to be clearly labelled as such.

It’s clear they know outright removal of it would kill off a portion of the user base, so they’ll just kill it piecemeal - starting with the old messages system and forcing people into the newer chat system.

> Outside of PBS, do you have evidence for this claim: "News is/was paid vast sums by the government to tell a certain story"?

Yeah, they wouldn't have to rely so much on Madison Avenue if they were just paying the news agencies to report whatever they want.

Incidentally, I'm not sure I'd characterize even PBS' government funding as "vast sums", either absolutely or relatively (to the rest of their funding).

I get and agree that 'super accounts' like Musk or Taylor Swift or Barack Obama can have an outsized impact that is too powerful.

Strongly argue that TODAY has far more diversity of thought being communicated on various media than 2024. Disagree on being "in 1984 situation," the whole "Biden is sharp as a tack" -> replaced without primary "Campaign of Joy" is as 1984 is you can get. Very clear evidence of syndication occurring across various news outlets, and those syndicated stories don't happen for free. The hard evidence you request is thoroughly concealed and hard to follow as it gets washed through non profits and NGOs. USASpending shows $2mm direct in 2024 to NYT as an example, but it's no stretch to assert indirect sources as well.

Reddit mgmt itself has significant concerns, according to anonymous sources. You heard it here first.

> Outside of PBS

How much influence do you imagine PBS wields and how much money do you suppose is in these vast sums they are paid?

PBS is mostly known for Sesame Street and nature documentaries. Their government funding has been whittled down to almost nothing over years of relentless attack from the Republicans.

Here's some discussion from PBS itself on the topic:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-look-at-the-history-of-p...

A pull quote:

"The U.S. is almost literally off the chart for how little we allocate towards our public media. At the federal level, it comes out to a little over $1.50 per person per year. Compare that to the Brits, who spend roughly $100 per person per year for the BBC. Northern European countries spend well over $100 per person per year."

It's to radicalize people into becoming racists.

Ah yes the "look at what brown people are doing to our cities" accounts... One of the main reasons I am not on there anymore.

The far-left denies the Holocaust? On what grounds?

And even on tweets that don't seem to be outwardly ragebait the top replies will always be from blue checked right wing accounts, of course.

There's also left-wing rage bait if you scroll down.

It's sad that these social media companies supplanted proper journalism, only to then rot into this.

What do we have now?

> This story is based on interviews with people familiar with the events involved and supported by documents obtained by Platformer.

I think you might want to check the article again. The interviews were not just based on fired engineers. EM did fire one engineer after he told Musk that interest in Musk was declining.

I can't quite tell if this is sarcasm :). I'll assume it is.

It was a little right wing biased. Now the bias moved a lot to the right.

No way of telling one way or another, no? Unless you actually work at X and know exactly how it works.

Note - My original comment was not about whether now is worse than before or vice versa. It is just that narratives shifted in a different way, that had nothing to do with scale. Algorithms are just as likely as uncensored (or censored - how does one know?)