The internet age has brought us a medium with a bias towards even more gutteral, visceral messaging. Social media encourage short, punchy messages, and by punchy, I mean people are trying to punch each other with words. The medium has a bias towards stridency and absolutism, because you really can’t include too much nuance and caveat in 140 characters.
It also has a strong bias towards anger, because, as far as short missives go, “Go fuck yourself” has the virtue of being brief, direct, and very easy to write.
Much easier to write a bunch of fuck yous to strangers than compose an article explaining your beliefs or the defects of the claims of those you disagree with.
And a lazy medium thereby encourages lazy thinking.
I kind of think anything important one has to say should be said in person. If you’re going to break up with someone, it should be in person.
If you’re going to tell someone you’ll never speak to him again because he supports a candidate you don’t like, you should probably man up to deliver that message in person, too.
If you have the guts. But that’s hard. Much easier just to rip someone in a 140 character Sick Burn.
Ace, “Divisive Political Season Causing Mass Unfriending on FaceBook”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2016-08-15.
April 10, 2018
March 22, 2018
February 18, 2018
December 8, 2017
But what about “whataboutism”?
Megan McArdle on the folks who automatically resort to “what about x”:
Last week, as you may have noticed, Republicans passed a tax bill. As you may also have noticed, Democrats were aghast. Passing a bill like that on straight party lines! Using a parliamentary maneuver to push through something that could never have survived a filibuster! How could Republicans be so brazen, so immoral, so fiscally irresponsible?
Those of us who remembered saying many of the same things during the passage of Obamacare had to beg them to stop. I mean, we could have been seriously hurt, laughing that hard.
But when I pointed this out, the good citizens of Twitter informed me over and over that this was mere “whataboutism.”
Whataboutism is defending some indefensible action by pointing to some equally indefensible action that was supported, or at least not condemned, by your opponents. (Whataboutism is usually defined as a version of the tu quoque fallacy, attacking the questioner rather than answering the question. It’s also a red herring.) After lobbing a few “What about you?” grenades, you use the resulting chaos to duck uncomfortable questions.
It is a favorite tactic of our president, whose campaign platform was “What about her emails?” Every time someone brings up the FBI investigation that is creeping closer to the highest echelons of his staff, he is fond of asking, apropos of nothing, why Hillary Clinton’s not in jail.
December 1, 2017
Censorship on the web
At City Journal, Aaron Renn explains why some of the concerns about censorship on the Internet are not so much wrong as misdirected:
The basic idea of net neutrality makes sense. When I get a phone, the phone company can’t decide whom I can call, or how good the call quality should be depending on who is on the other end of the line. Similarly, when I pay for my cable modem, I should be able to use the bandwidth I paid for to surf any website, not get a better or worse connection depending on whether my cable company cut some side deal to make Netflix perform better than Hulu.
The problem for net neutrality advocates is that the ISPs aren’t actually doing any of this; they really are providing an open Internet, as promised. The same is not true of the companies pushing net neutrality, however. As Pai suggests, the real threat to an open Internet doesn’t come from your cable company but from Google/YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and others. All these firms have aggressively censored.
For example, Google recently kicked would-be Twitter competitor Gab out of its app store, not for anything Gab did but for what it refused to do — censor content. Twitter is famous for censoring, as Pai observes. “I love Twitter, and I use it all the time,” he said. “But let’s not kid ourselves; when it comes to an open Internet, Twitter is part of the problem. The company has a viewpoint and uses that viewpoint to discriminate.” (Twitter’s censors have not gotten around to removing the abuse, some of it racist, being hurled at Pai, including messages like “Die faggot die” and “Hey go fuck yourself you Taliban-looking fuck.”)
Google’s YouTube unit also censors, setting the channel for Prager University to restricted mode, which limits access; Prager U. is suing Google and YouTube. YouTube has also “demonetized” videos from independent content creators, making these videos ineligible for advertising, their main source of revenue. Much of the complaining about censorship has come from political conservatives, but they’re not the only victims. The problem is broad-based.
Yet sometimes Silicon Valley giants have adopted a see-no-evil approach to certain kinds of content. Facebook, for instance, has banned legitimate content but failed to stop Russian bots from going wild during last year’s presidential election, planting voluminous fake news stories. Advertisers recently started fleeing YouTube when reports surfaced that large numbers of child-exploitation videos were showing up on supposedly kid-friendly channels. One account, ToyFreaks, had 8 million subscribers — making it the 68th most-viewed YouTube channel — before the company shut it down. It’s not credible that YouTube didn’t know what was happening on a channel with millions of viewers. Other channels and videos featured content from pedophiles. More problems turned up within the last week. A search for “How do I …” on YouTube returned numerous auto-complete suggestions involving sex with children. Others have found a whole genre of “guess her age” videos, with preview images, printed in giant fonts, saying things like, “She’s only 9!” The videos may or may not have involved minors — I didn’t watch them—but at minimum, they trade on pedophilic language to generate views.
August 26, 2017
Hot takes are easy, if you’re Andy Benoit
At the Daily Norseman, taking shots at “pro” sports personalities comes as second nature. Ted Glover and Eric Thompson have developed a particular joy in sharing the … gems … from Andy Benoit’s Twitter feed, and have taken it one step further:
August 19, 2017
How bad can a business graphic get? This bad
Found on Colby Cosh’s Twitter feed:
CUT TO DESIGN MEETING
“We need something like a pie chart, but worse.”
“Sure thing, boss.”#PieChartsKillKittens pic.twitter.com/lXJ6SKYxNc
— Thomas LaRock (@SQLRockstar) August 16, 2017
"Bet you can't violate every principle in 'The Visual Display of Quantitative Information' with one chart."
"Hold my beer."— W. Dow Rieder (@Riderius) August 17, 2017
July 23, 2017
Requiem for an SJW heavyweight
James Delingpole on the Twitter phenomenon Godfrey Elfwick:
Linda Sarsour/Sally Kohn/Graham Linehan/Caroline Criado Perez/Gary Lineker/Diane Abbot/someone from the Guardian/a guy from CNN/ISIS has said something really hateful, stupid, and wrong on Twitter. Again.
Back in the day, this would have been a cause for celebration, not dismay. Why? Because within milliseconds of their fatuous utterance tainting the ether with its embittered, warped, politically correct insanity it would have been endorsed – and simultaneously destroyed – by the mighty Godfrey Elfwick.
Godfrey Elfwick was the funniest and best thing on Twitter.
To have your tweet singled out for praise by Godfrey was the kiss of death. It meant that you were a humorless, self-righteous, deluded, smug, sanctimonious, insufferable Social Justice Warrior. Just like Godfrey purported to be.
Which is why, of course, Twitter had to silence him. Sure, the official reason given for Godfrey’s permanent ban was because he had broken Twitter’s terms of service – apparently having upset a millionaire potato chip salesman called Gary Lineker.
July 9, 2017
July 1, 2017
May 29, 2017
May 20, 2017
“Trump has always said the kinds of things that most of us learn to think the better of around our freshman year of high school”
Megan McArdle on the calls to impeach or otherwise depose Il Donalduce (soft coup, anyone?):
Trump has always said the kinds of things that most of us learn to think the better of around our freshman year of high school — not just the tragic wailing about how hard everyone is on him, but also the needy self-flattery: When he isn’t claiming that he knows more about Islamic State than our nation’s generals do, he is putting similarly laudatory words in the mouths of the brilliant and impressive people who apparently constantly ring him up so they can gush like tween fangirls at a Justin Bieber concert. Does he expect people to believe these utterances? I have no idea. But the reason most people don’t say such things is that whether you expect them to or not, no one ever does.
As for the rest … the twitter rants? Check. The lack of respect for longstanding political and institutional norms? Check. The outrageous, uncalled-for attacks on anyone who gets in his way? Check-plus. All quite evident before the American public went to the polls in November. And that is the rub.
It’s one thing to remove a president who is clearly no longer the man (or woman) we elected to the office. But this is what Americans, in aggregate, pulled the lever for. Do his staffers and Congress have the right to step in and essentially undo that choice?
Even as a thought experiment, that’s a tough question. It becomes much tougher still when we are not in a tidy textbook, but in a messy real world where his followers, having voted for this behavior, do not recognize it as a sign of impairment. If Trump is removed now, they will see the removal not as a safeguard, but as a soft coup. And they won’t be entirely unjustified. The damage to our political culture, and its institutions, would be immeasurably grave.
I think there’s a case for removing Trump on the grounds that he is clearly not competent to execute the office — not that he has committed “high crimes and misdemeanors,” but that he simply lacks the emotional and mental capacity to do the job. But preserving the very norms he’s destroying requires that removal not be undertaken until things have reached such a state that most of his followers recognize his problems. So those of us who believe that the competence of the executive matters — that there are things worse in a president than “more of the same,” and that what we are now seeing is one of them — will simply have to hope like heck that his supporters come to the same conclusion we have before he damages much more than his own reputation, and the hopes of the people who elected him.
February 18, 2017
Twitter turns on the free speech filters
At Forbes, Kalev Leetaru reports on Friday’s introduction of “hate speech” filtering on Twitter:
Earlier this morning social media and the tech press lit up with reports of users across Twitter receiving half day suspensions en masse as the platform abruptly rolled out its decade-overdue hate speech filter to its platform. The company has refused to provide details on specifically how the new system works, but using a combination of behavioral and keyword indicators, the filter flags posts it deems to be violations of Twitter’s acceptable speech policy and issues users suspensions of half a day during which they cannot post new tweets and their existing tweets are visible only to followers. From the platform that once called itself “the free speech wing of the free speech party” these new tools mark an incredible turn of events for the company that just two years ago famously wrote Congress to say it would do everything in its power to uphold the right of terrorists to post freely to its platform. What does Twitter’s new interest in hate speech tell us about the future of free speech online?
It was just a year ago that I wrote on these very pages about Twitter’s evolution from bastion of free speech to global censor as it stepped back from its utopian dreams as they collided with the realities of running a commercial company. Yet, even after changing its official written policy on acceptable speech and touting that it would do more to fight abuse, little has changed over the past year. Indeed, from its inception a decade ago, Twitter has done little to address the problem of hateful and abusive speech on its platform.
[…] the concern here is that Twitter has thus far refused to provide further detail into at least the broad contours of the indicators it is using, especially when it comes to the particular linguistic cues it is concerned with. While offering too much detail might give the upper hand to those who would try to work around the new system, it is important for the broader community to have at least some understanding of the kinds of language flagged by Twitter’s new tool so that they can offer more informed feedback to help it shape that tool given that both algorithms and people are far from infallible. Simply rolling out a new tool that begins suspending users without warning or recourse and without any visibility into how those decisions are being made is a textbook example of how not to roll such a feature out to a user community in that the tool instantly becomes confrontational rather than educational.
Moreover, it is unclear why Twitter chose not to permit users to contest what they believe to be a wrongful suspension. The company did not respond to a request for comment on why suspended users are not provided a button to appeal a suspension they believe is due to algorithmic or human error or lack of contextual understanding. Given that the feature is brand new and bound to encounter plenty of unforeseen contexts where it could yield a wrong result, it is surprising that Twitter chose not to provide a recovery mechanism where it could catch these before they become news.
H/T to Peter Grant for the link.
