Twitter algorithm to be open sourced 'next week,' says Musk If Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk is to be believed, the social media platform's algorithm is finally going open source, and it's happening "next week." "Prepare to be disappointed at first," Musk tweeted, "but it will improve rapidly!" The notion of making Twitter's algorithm open source isn't new – Musk had been pushing …
You trust the government to impose "appropriate" restrictions? If you're a Democrat, imagine what restrictions a Trump government would find appropriate. If you're a Republican, imagine what a Clinton government would do. (Non-US residents feel free to substitute your own nation's equivalents.)
How do you stamp out hate?
Re-education camps maybe? Brainwashing and chemical conditioning? Hypnosis?
I am not sure that ideas can be "Stamped out"
They can be unpopular, pushed underground, hidden but not so much eradicated unless the drivers for the idea are made a moot point and to be honest with the diversity in the human race you will never get 100% agreement on all things.
Sometimes you just have to agree to disagree.
Disagreement is not hatred.
I can disagree with you, it doesn't mean I hate you.
It does, however, imply that I respect your person and position, and bring proper arguments concerning my own opinion on the matter.
I have no problem with disagreement in a civilized society. Disagreement can foster new ideas that are a benefit for all. What I have a big problem with is blind stupidity and the refusal of considering that one's own opinion just might not be the Lord's Gospel.
In this context, "hate" is shorthand for "hate speech", which in turn is shorthand for speech which is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, etc., abusive and systematically belittling. The sort of speech that was used against Jewish people and used to stoke up the hatred that led to Kristallnacht and the atrocities that followed (and the same sort of speech that was incidentally common throughout Europe for centuries beforehand, and should not have been tolerated then, either).
I think it's quite proper to stamp out that sort of speech, rather than allowing it to go unchallenged. It's Popper's "Paradox of Tolerance" - the argument is that if you're tolerant then you should tolerate all speech, but by doing so, you are promoting hate speech and intolerance, so you should therefore not tolerate intolerance.
Personally, I'm all for the alternative, which is punch a Nazi.
>you should tolerate all speech, but by doing so, you are promoting hate speech
This is a completely false dichotomy and its present in the thought process of extremists on both the left and right. In no way, shape or form is tolerance the same as promoting, its not even in the same ball park. You are being very dishonest here. Either intentionally or because you dont have the self awareness to see your own contradictions
This is why censorship is so dangerous, especially around "hate speech" which has no clear definition. Ask 10 different people what qualifies as "hate speech" and you get 10 different answers. Thats why we created our cultures around free speech with a very specific exception of incitement to violence. Anytime you go further than that its for censoring opinions that differ from your own, regardless of the lies you tell yourself to justify it
so... Karl Popper was an "extremist" was he?
I'm inclined to place more weight on what he had to say than some random on the internet.
What I am saying is quite clear: if you allow all speech, including hate speech, without removing things which spread violent and discriminatory attitudes, then you are essentially endorsing it. To paraphrase, possibly badly, "The only thing evil needs to succeed is for good men to stand by".
Yes, what constitutes "hate speech" may have any number of definitions, just as many things do. It's a false argument to say that doesn't mean we can say what things should not be tolerated.
For example, I'll start the list here. We should not tolerate speech which promotes:
Any of those you disagree with? Hopefully not.
In essence, if you are "othering" a group of people, and then discriminating against them based on that "othering", you are doing something that should not be tolerated. We need to regulate it, because, unfortunately, it is part of human nature to do so due to our evolutionary origins.
*Note - there is a clear line between religious belief, and actions taken using religion as a justification. People should be free to believe anything they want, but it is no exemption for doing things that would otherwise be illegal, such as, to take an extreme example, human sacrifice.
This is just avoidance and deflection. Your response has nothing to do with the point that I made and is further self delusion to justify censoring opinions that differ to your own
Deal with the point I actually made:
>you should tolerate all speech, but by doing so, you are promoting hate speech
This is a completely false dichotomy and its present in the thought process of extremists on both the left and right. In no way, shape or form is tolerance the same as promoting, its not even in the same ball park. You are being very dishonest here. Either intentionally or because you dont have the self awareness to see your own contradictions
My point is quite clear. You should not tolerate hate speech. Offering "tolerance" to it is tantamount to accepting it, and thus endorsing it.
At risk of invoking Godwin, it's like saying, "we should let that nice Mr Hitler have his say about the Jews, it's down to them to refute it". We all know how that ended up. The correct response is to say, "Fuck off Nazis, I'm not giving you the air-time, go and peddle your hate elsewhere".
There is no grey area, no deflection, and it isn't "censoring opinions that differ from my own". Refusing to publish something isn't censorship, any more than hate speech is "just opinions". By casting such things in this sort of light you are arguing for hatred to be given an equal footing with other speech. Hatred doesn't deserve equivocation. It should not be on an equal footing with speech that is not hateful, and it's not just a "theoretical discussion", in the same way as punching someone in the face is not on an equal footing with not punching them in the face.
Hate speech demonstrably causes harm, in some cases extreme harm, and even death. It should not be tolerated. Especially not on the grounds of "you're censoring me if you don't allow me to spew hatred". If you can't see why, you should fuck right off.
@Elongated Muskrat
Problem is that peoples opinion vary on whether something meets that criteria
e.g. A women objects to a trans woman (TW in this example man self IDing as women, who has not had male genitalia removed) sharing female swimming pool changing rooms as she will be in a state of total nudity at times & does not feel comfortable with possibility of being seen by the TW or seeing the TW "girl penis" *, in same way she would not be happy with seeing any other biological male in what she regards as what should be a female only space as involves full public nudity within that space & in this case the woman has been previously raped making presence of a biological male even more triggering.
In that example some people (e.g. me) will say that's a totally legitimate expression of a woman's right to privacy and to feel safe.
,, Other people will say that is rampant transphobia.
* always find that phrase odd & don't understand why so many TW use it, almost as if the vast majority are AGP and just a tiny minority genuinely have gender dysphoria.
> Problem is that peoples opinion vary on whether something meets that criteria
Which does not invalidate any of the arguments for working against the propagation of hate speech.
There is and always will be arguments over precisely where to draw the line - which is one of the reasons why we have courts and the whole jury of your peers setup[1].
[1] if you believe your setup is dysfunctional then this whole discussion about controlling hate speech is moot to you anyway
I would hate to see twitter propped-up in any way by any government as a "public utility".
Not only because I don't particularly trust government not to bungle it and make things worse, but also because at this point I'd rather see twitter fail (or succeed?) on its own "merits".
if( Tweet.UserId == GIANT_ANGRY_BABY_ELMO )
{
..... // TODO Make these a config file option, he demands changes
..... // to these every night at midnight after smoking too much weed
..... Tweet.Views *= 1234; // obfuscate the 000s
..... Tweet.Likes * = 11.5; // ditto
..... Tweet.Retweets *= 5.2;
}
( . added just to keep the indents )
> "Prepare to be disappointed at first," Musk tweeted, "but it will improve rapidly!"
> as Musk implied, help fight algorithmic bias by inviting others to examine the code and run it through algorithm interrogation software.
So it is "disappointing" now but by making it OSS we can shift the work needed to find its flaws onto "the wider developer community".
Presumably, if no-one finds any biasses in it (because, ooh, it is too badly documented to be reliably run and tested?) that will be taken as PROOF that it is actually the bestest algorithm really, so it isn't Twitter's fault, stop complaining.
Try: not expecting anyone[1] to spend any time on it, but that still gives him the same result: "it was released to the community, but nobody found anything wrong in it".
[1] although it wouldn't be a total surprise if it was picked up as (part of) someone's genuine research project, but that'd take ages - years - to publish properly done results, until which he still gets his "nothing bad found".
These "AI" things are all about the training data.
It's certain that there are significant biases in the training data - there's no reason to believe Twitter did much better than everyone else.
It's unlikely anyone would find bias in the algorithm - but quite possible that people will find copyright infringements.
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