Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is weevie833 bringing some facts to the conversation about the perception of Conservative bias in Twitter content moderation:
Here is a research study (like, actual research) that provides nuance to the perception of Conservative bias in Twitter account deplatforming. Keep in mind that (as obvious as this is to say), Twitter is not a public square controlled by a socialist government - it is a private company in a capitalist economy for the purpose of making money through advertising. Twitter has ZERO interest in promoting the public good.
Thus, among the politically active Twitter users in our study, Republicans and conservatives shared information from much lower quality sites than Democrats and liberals - even when quality was judged by a politically-balanced group of U.S. laypeople. This observation provides clear evidence for a political asymmetry in misinformation sharing in our dataset that cannot be attributed to liberal bias in what is considered misinformation or low quality news."
...we see a strong positive relationship between being more Republican / conservative and likelihood of being suspended (b = 0.45, z = 22.6, p < 0.001) when using political orientation as the sole independent variable in the probit regression. However, once low quality news sharing is added to the model, the association between suspension and political orientation is reduced by 56.2% (b = 0.20, z = 4.6, p < 0.001; see Figure 2b), and sharing low quality news is also strongly associated with suspension (b = 0.27, z = 6.6, p < 0.001)."
It may be true that Conservatives are deplatformed more than Liberals in pure number. But when controlling for misinformation / disinformation as a basis of suspension, that gap collapses. So, if Conservatives insist on feeding more crap into the system, you can expect a similar pattern of reaction from a privately held company concerned about its credibility as an advertising platform.
Of course, all this is moot since Elon took over, so who cares.
In second place, it's an anonymous reponse to Musk's statement that the Twitter algorithm is overly complex and not fully understood internally":
Err. Isn't that because you asked the lion's share of people who contributed key understanding to go find employment elsewhere?
It's self inflicted wounds. Not quite all the way down, but He's working on it.
For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from Stephen T. Stone about the attacks on the Internet Archive:
I hope those publishers really wanted to encourage piracy-because that's exactly what killing the Internet Archive is going to do.
Next, it's T.L. with a reminder that there's a reason congress is so bad at understanding technology:
Congressmembers would have better expertise on tech matters if the Office of Technology Assessment still existed. It was defunded in 1995 under Newt Gingrich's Contract to America" plan, because it was an unbiased organization that wouldn't cow to political narratives. The Chew hearing is one of many instances that highlight both why Newt wanted to defund it, and why eliminating the agency was a detriment to politicians. (Ironically, Newt suggested shortly after the midterms that Republicans should come around to using TikTok to court young voters, despite the allegations of the app's security risk.) Hopefully, someone in Congress will introduce legislation aimed at reviving the OTA somewhere down the line.
Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Pixelation with a comment about Twitter's shadowboosting" system:
I can't believe Musk hasn't shadow boosted Mike. After all of the publicity Mike/Techdirt has given him. How ungrateful!
In second place, it's RyunosukeKusanagi with a comment about Ron DeSantis's legal fight with Disney:
so... DeSantis is up Reedy Creek without a paddle?
For editor's choice on the funny side, we've got one more comment on that subject, this time from Rico R. responding to the speculation about what Disney will do as Mickey Mouse heads towards the public domain:
Isn't it obvious? Those higher-ups at Disney will then unthaw Walt Disney's frozen head, install it to a robot body, and then revive Walt back from the dead. If he's made alive again, we'll have to wait until 70 years after his second death for Mickey Mouse to be public domain!!
Finally, it's Kevin A. Carson with a comment about our post noting that Musk has effectively admitted" that he burned down more than half of Twitter's value:
On the plus side...
...at least there's something he can do effectively
That's all for this week, folks!