These are the opinions of the left, as I've surmised them. Not all of the left believes all of them, but I have heard or deduced each of these arguments from them.
1. The social media moderators try to reduce racist, hateful, and misinformation on their platforms.
2. The social media moderators, while mostly left-leaning, apply their standards blindly and without regard to politics.
3a. The right is more likely to generate content that fits into #1, and so gets suppressed more.
3b. There is no disparity between moderation of the left and right.
4. There is no moderation of the right. (Because right-leaning users have high engagement)
5. The word "suppress" is too polemical.
#3 is split into two, because both can't be true, but I've heard both arguments. #4 is a remarkably terrible argument. There are many reasons why the right can have high engagement despite an effort to reduce it. Making this argument is like saying masks have no effect on Covid spread because countries with mask mandates are seeing Covid spread. There is no way to infer the effect of a deterrent by observing the final amount of anactivity. The only thing that high engagement tells you is that any moderation isn't 100%, which no one is arguing.
This is what the right believes, as I understand it:
1. The social media moderators try to suppress racist, hateful, and misinformation, and that's ok.
2. The social media moderators, mostly left-leaning, apply their standards inconsistently and overzealously because of their own views.
Recent events are substantial evidence that #2 is true.
The NY Post story. First, Twitter banned the links altogether because the story was based on hacked e-mails or it contained private information, so they said. First, there was no evidence that the e-mails were hacked. Recovered under dubious circumstances, to be sure, but no indication they were obtained illegally. On the other hand, the NYTimes story about Trump's taxes was very likely based on tax returns obtained illegally. There's clearly a double-standard. Twitter has also never acted to suppress a political story that contained private information. Again the NYT story about Trump's taxes would seem to fit into this definition.
On the overzealous application of their "standards," the recent post from U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan is illustrative. Twitter suspended him for a post about the border wall. The text of the post: "[Customs Border Protection and US Army Corp of Engineers Headquarters] continue to build new wall every day. Every mile helps us stop gang members, murderers, sexual predators, and drugs from entering our country. It's a fact, walls work."
The explanation from Twitter: "You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease."
If we first remove everything that Twitter can't possibly be referring to: "You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin....". Since there's no threat here, there's no promotion of violence, so it must be that Twitter believes this harasses other people. But still this doesn't seem to relate in anyway to the offending post.
In truth, Twitter blocked this because a moderator, representative of the left, inferred that Morgan is saying 100% of the people (who are overwhelmingly Latino) are "gang members, murderers, sexual predators, and drug [transporters]." Firstly, this is not what Morgan said, this is what Twitter inferred. Second, even if he had said exactly this, it still wouldn't fit the reason they cited, since it's not harassment. It would be an extremely egregious and racist form of stereotyping, but Twitter should have a policy for that explicitly.
The problem for the right with this episode, is Twitter is acting, call it suppressing or moderating or censoring, based on how they are interpreting a statement, not based on the literal words being used and that there's no clear policy. Taken as it is, I don't think it's disputable that there are some gang members, murderers, sexual predators, and drugs that cross the border, and if a wall is effective it'll stop them.
The left has a real problem separating text as written from their own inferences. Because their inferences are highly correlated with their political biases, it leads them to over-moderate the right. Morgan should not have been suspended for making a factual statement that didn't obviously violate Twitter's policy. Instead, Twitter should have, at most, slapped on a "Potentially racist implication" tag, and allowed Morgan to modify his language if he wanted it removed.
No comments:
Post a Comment