So "X" - nothing to see here. Elon's in control - Part XXX **Threadbans in OP**

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119075902#Comment_119075902

Expert consensus is a key example.

If you've worked in any academic field you will know that "expert consensus" suffers from the very same problem. Getting research funding and published in journals is largely based on your willingness to make your research and opinions line up with those of your funders.

There is a reason that a 'replication crisis' exists in academia - people will adjust their scientific conclusions and findings to align with their own biases or those of their funders.

Cordell

Yes because before social media there was no murder. Fuckin hell indeed.

Tony EH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076051#Comment_119076051

Bloody hell 🙄

Give your head a wobble there. It badly needs it.

Cordell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076132#Comment_119076132

Do you remember how before social media they blamed videogames? And how before videogames they blamed heavy metal? And yet do you still trust them?

Dohnjoe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076021#Comment_119076021

I addressed this. There is normal, healthy debate and disagreement in any field. That's the basis of academia. Out of that academic debate we have come to understand universally accepted facts and consensus. The world is round, vaccines are safe, etc.

Cranks and charlatans and contrarians need to attack those facts to project their false or extreme narratives. One of the first steps is to cast doubt on the academics themselves, another step is to exaggerate or distort normal academic debate. As mentioned there are many techniques to cast doubt on facts/consensus in order to project a disingenuous narrative. Hell, sometimes people don't even care about an alternative narrative, they are just happy to attack science/history/whatever. Sometimes just out of pure spite.

I highlighted the word "exaggerate". It's important for grifters to project that there is debate where in reality there is little or none. For example, with vaccine safety. The grifters produce a high volume of disinfo, and even if that is all countered by a high volume of debunking and fact-checking - it doesn't matter. The grifters have successfully made it seem there is a significant debate where there is none.

This is why many private platforms opted to de-platform the grifters rather than have to rely on users to tackle all the disinfo, which, as I've mentioned usually comes out at a far faster rate than it can be tackled.

RobbieTheRobber

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076151#Comment_119076151

Who are "they"?

Cordell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076221#Comment_119076221

The ones that think they have the right to decide what is the truth.

RobbieTheRobber

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076270#Comment_119076270

Oooooooo very conspiratorial.

Cordell

Ooooooooooo no it's quite in the open, look, even here there are people calling for it. But yeah, my mistake, I should have said "you". I don't trust you people to decide what is the truth. Better?

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076281#Comment_119076281

Hardly. Back in the day when the church were the supreme authority, sure didnt they decide that there were no kiddy fiddlers, and that you would be deplatformed for disinformation then too. People in power will always use censorship for their benefit.

Those Hunter Biden laptop files were banned from Twitter as disinformation - despite multiple news outlets later verifying their authenticity.

Closer to home, the likes of redacted and his business dealings were not permitted to be discussed on any of the media outlets he had a stake in, for years journalists were shut down around the discussion of certain sensitive topics, whereas other outlets would run with them freely*

Throughout history centralisation of information has always been a bad thing - its a symbol of authoritarian regimes, Russia, Nazi Germany, Communist China. Bringing in strict "disinformation" controls for social media in the west will inevitable lead to abuse by those the so called experts must answer to.

*Subject to Irelands awful libel laws

Dyr

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076170#Comment_119076170

Healthy debate and disagreement doesnt exist in most of these fields anymore, which is why people lose faith in them. We were supposed to believe that there was no possibility that Covid 19 came out of a lab and that anyone who said otherwise was so wildly and dangerously wrong that they needed to be banned from social media.

Dohnjoe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076361#Comment_119076361

I remember certain politicians and so on claiming that e.g. video games were to blame for violence, do you support their right to claim this?

Cordell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076526#Comment_119076526

Of course I do. Having an open and healthy conversation about this have lead to the current age rating system and parent awareness that there are games out there that are not suitable to young kids.

Of course I don't believe it to be true and it was proven false by the very fact violence existed before videogames but still discussing the subject is better than burring it by censorship.

Dohnjoe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076599#Comment_119076599

Indeed. Having an open and healthy conversation about anything is usually a positive.

So why do you think discussion about e.g. the "great replacement" theory or Qanon on unfettered social media sites seems to turn into an open sewer and instead acts as a breeding ground for extremists?

Cordell

I don't know but let's have them discuss all their crazy theories in the open and hopefully everyone will see them for what they are. Because banning them helps nobody.

Dohnjoe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076475#Comment_119076475

There's nothing wrong with scientific method. Lay-people have just discovered they can baselessly trash scientists and experts via social media, and sadly an increasing number of people are falling for that.

Cordell

TIL that the Darth Putin account (yes, that one) is much older than I thought and it was actually banned by Twitter around 2016.

Please explain me again why this was a good thing.

Dyr

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076895#Comment_119076895

Why are you quoting my post when your response has nothing to do with it?

Dohnjoe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076898#Comment_119076898

Didn't know so just looked it up, they just to suspend the account due to a rule they had regarding parody accounts. Basically if you ran a parody account pretending to be some figure you had to have some blurb that it was a parody account. Possibly for legal/slander reasons. They reinstated the account later.

Dohnjoe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076938#Comment_119076938

Maybe I misunderstood, I thought you were claiming that healthy debate/disagreement in most academia didn't exist anymore, when by definition they do. Academia is a method, that's unchanged, e.g. peer review by science. What has changed is the sharp rise (or reappearance) of woo, quackery and pseudo-science that attempts to undermine it. Often spread by social media.

"We were supposed to believe that there was no possibility that Covid 19 came out of a lab and that anyone who said otherwise was so wildly and dangerously wrong that they needed to be banned from social media."

I don't know where you got this notion from, many scientists and experts said accidental lab leak couldn't be ruled out. What was widely dismissed was the notion that it was deliberately leaked (or man-made), for which there was little or no credible evidence.

Quin_Dub

I used to think that "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" as it were in terms of allowing public debate and opinion and that people would logically see through the fallacies and incorrect information and ultimately make decisions based on fact and reason.

My views have changed however in recent years.

The "let them speak and the truth will rise to the top" used to mostly work when the platforms were TV Channels and the Print media and the conversation was between friends in the pub or families around the dinner table.

It's an entirely different world now and that "dinner table conversation" is now a global one involving millions and it's almost impossible to tell who is speaking from a position of knowledge/authority on a subject and who is just a loon.

As such , moderation and control of who and what can be posted has to exist.

There should be greater clarity as to why information or people are being blocked etc. but the ability to filter out the nonsense is critical for actual facts and information to get out there.

There is a far greater risk in allowing unfiltered dangerous rhetoric to flow unimpeded than there is for "bad actors" to suppress information.

Of course there will be mistakes made and again visibility and clarity of the decisions will help to fix those mistakes , but that is absolutely worth the risk in my view.

Tony EH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119077213#Comment_119077213

Noam Chomsky once said, "You are either for free speech, or you're against it", which at its heart is an admirable enough expression. However, that's based on a situation where people are discussion a subject using facts and arguing from a position of relative honesty. And it's from a time when trivial, but potentially dangerous, social media platforms didn't exist.

These days, it's very clear that there are people willing to use all sorts of malicious and mendacious conspiratorial gibberish to merely push something and the internet is their conduit. Case in point being Trump's conspiratorial lie about a stolen election. A lie which led to people's deaths and a lie which he still continues to use in spite of what it led to on Jan 6th last year.

When you reach that point it's clear that, at least, some sort of checks and balances need to be in place to tackle the most egregious examples of liars and their lies. Because they have a very real life and death effect, as the people who want to believe these lies have no interest in what the facts actually are. They have their beliefs and that's all that matters. But when you have bad actors come along a feed those beliefs (often ones they don't have themselves) it can create a very serious situation. A situation where people can be killed...and it doesn't get more serious than that.

Potatoeman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119077347#Comment_119077347

Who watches the watchmen?

Tony EH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119077427#Comment_119077427

...and other assorted cliches.

Snake Plisken

Oh Biden not going to be happy about this

https://youtu.be/T_yxkcK8zJk

Cordell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119077282#Comment_119077282

And it doesn't say that I'd rather see people murdered, this was something out of your imagination and I'm not interested in discussing it any further.

Ten of Swords

Mod - Thread is starting to go off on some very abstract tangents, can we get back to the core topic please?

Tony EH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119078422#Comment_119078422

In response to...

"Just the other day some idiot shot up a load of people because he believed the "great replacement" conspiracy lie.

There's people's lives at stake here. That supersedes a silly desire to read baseless nonsense in the name of "free speech".

"Such is life" indeed."

you, literally, said...

"I would rather have the danger of that than having some twit deciding what is true and what is not true based on his personal opinions thank you very much."

Enough of this nonsense. We're done here.

..

As for the Twitter deal itself, Musk saying the offer was based on SEC filings and he's putting Twitter on the spot now to release information on bots. If this turns out to be some calculated attack on Twitter, it's pretty genius. Apparently it's the worst thing in the world now so everyone should be happy.