Twitter Algorithms Amplify Right-leaning Political Content More Than Left-leaning, Company Says Citing Own Research (protocol.com) 137
Twitter is publicly sharing research findings today that show that the platform's algorithms amplify tweets from right-wing politicians and content from right-leaning news outlets more than people and content from the political left. From a report: The research did not identify whether or not the algorithms that run Twitter's Home feed are actually biased toward conservative political content, because the conclusions only show bias in amplification, not what caused it. Rumman Chowdhury, the head of Twitter's machine learning, ethics, transparency and accountability team, called it "the what, not the why" in an interview with Protocol. "We can see that it is happening. We are not entirely sure why it is happening. To be clear, some of it could be user-driven, people's actions on the platform, we are not sure what it is. It's just important that we share this information," Chowdhury said. The META team plans to conduct what she called a "root-cause analysis" to try to discover the "why," and that analysis will likely include creating testable hypotheses about how people use the platform that could help show whether it's the way users interact with Twitter or the algorithm itself that is causing this uneven amplification. Twitter didn't define for itself what news outlets and politicians are "right-leaning" or belong to right-wing political parties, instead using definitions from other researchers outside the company. The study looked at millions of tweets from politicians across seven countries and hundreds of millions of tweets of links from news outlets, not tweets from the outlets themselves.
not really news (Score:2, Insightful)
This has been known by intelligent persons for ages now.
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Re:not really news (Score:5, Insightful)
Bingo.
Right-wing nutters complain about censorship, when in fact the platforms have been giving them all the attention. Once they get actually censored/blocked/muted, they complain because their audience evaporates and moves onto the next nutter.
Left-wing nutters also complain about censorship, but they complain about being shadow-banned (eg the algorithm buries them), which to be fair, left-wing conspiracy trash and right-wing conspiracy trash are completely different kinds of warmongering.
Left-wings villains are "Chaotic Good" while Right-wing villains are "Lawful Evil". Essentially everything that involves saving the environment requires sacrifices of quality-of-life, and that's largely why they don't gain much traction unless the less-nutty left-wing (Lawful Good) actually make it policy. Right-wing "Lawful Evil" nutters, are only selfish. So that's why the algorithm elevates and amplifies it, because "greed is good" in their minds, and any policy that puts money back into their pockets (eg canceling social safety nets) to let the private companies operate (deregulation), is good to them. Sometimes even left-wing people get caught up in this amplification by sub-tweeting "how evil this person/company is"
But let's point out one thing that is obvious to everyone. Outrage and Hate drive algorithms. Microsoft learned this the hard way with "Tay", that machine learning will learn the "worst" of us and show us the black mirror.
Re:not really news (Score:4, Informative)
It's worse than that. Twitter, like Facebook, bends the fuck over backwards NOT to enforce the rules against right-wing bigotry (white supremacists, neo-nazis, and the like).
In fact, they openly admitted they COULD ban the nazis... but it would mean banning most right-wing politicians [businessinsider.com] because the two categories have a venn diagram of a single circle.
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Nice article. Did you read it? Even the headline says that such an algorithm to ban nazis COULD also affect "some GOP politicians". Not that the Venn diagram is a single circle.
Going into the article, a developer familiar with the AI work at Twitter indicated that such a change "could result in some innocent accounts being flagged by accident, which may not be an acceptable trade-off." [ quote from the article, not from the developer ]
So basically, Twitter might be worried that such a feature would be 10
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I regularly see right wing memes posted on Facebook that say something like "Please share this before Facebook bans it!" For example, "Please share this before it's banned: I Love Jesus" I mean seriously? People are spreading the idea of rampant banning, because they want to portray themselves as a persecuted people. Like a minority except in the majority. Liberals are suppressing good law abiding and Jesus loving people! White males are the most persecuted people on the planet! Yada yada yada.
Additionnal reasons (Score:3)
I am from the wrong side of the pond to have a deep understanding of the nutters at both extreme of your policital spectrum (to us Europeans, it looks like being somewhere between hard right, and batshit inside ultra far right conspiracy theorists), but still:
Twitter also seems to be a little bit less censoring than most other platform (they are one of the last "generalist" platform that tolerate sex-workers chatting there).
So chances are the extremist are a little bit slower to getting kicked out, as you p
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1. Promote a right leaning posts.
2. Ban/censor anyone that supports it in the comments.
3. Turn the comment section it a hate filled echo chamber.
4. Pull their suspenders and with an Steve Urkel voice ask... "Did I do that?"
5. Go to step 1 and repeat.
They'll keep coming back everyday.
If algorithms reflect reality (Score:1, Insightful)
what this says is that either Twitter users find rightwing content more interesting or noteworthy (either in the good or in the bad way) or that righwing content creators are better at being interesting/noteworthy than their counterparts on the other side.
Or it's all russian troll farms.
Or Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde are secret Republicans.
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Re:If algorithms reflect reality (Score:5, Insightful)
This. Conservatives have mastered outrage. In fact, I don't think Conservatism, in the classic sense of the word, actually exists any more. It has become an ecosystem dominated by rage, self pity, persecution complex and a seemingly bottomless well of vitriol and histrionics. Essentially modern conservatism is one big endless moral panic.
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Honestly, I think the right wing has moved further to the right in the U.S. Nixon started OSHA and the EPA and opened trade with China, for example. Perhaps it was a majority democratic house & senate that pushed him to it, but at least he was able to negotiate.
I view the modern Democrats as well-aligned with large interests like you do and think they're more centrist from a global perspective. The affordable care act, for example, didn't give everyone goverment health insurance, but rather set up ma
Re:If algorithms reflect reality (Score:4, Informative)
Or you could read the research paper. https://cdn.cms-twdigitalasset... [cms-twdigitalassets.com]
Re:If algorithms reflect reality (Score:5, Funny)
Or you could read the research paper. https://cdn.cms-twdigitalasset... [cms-twdigitalassets.com]
Where the hell do you think you're posting? I didn't even RTFS!
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I only got two words into the headline before deciding to write an angry reply.
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You must be new, welcome to Slashdot! You must have gotten that low ID on ebay...
Re: If algorithms reflect reality (Score:2)
it's users and likely the reaction users make to self-confirming input relative to their politically leanings.
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Rightwing users find rightwing content more interesting or noteworthy because they are more inclined to support who they see as authorities then leftwing users.
Cite: The Authoritarians [theauthoritarians.org]
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Right wing users must be more likely to click on advertisements thus making money for the platforms.
That's the only thing that counts, not eyeballs but clicks.
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Or the people who creating content that infuriates the most people get the most retweets? I mean, in the day the Trump tweets were retweeted far and wide, not because of their brilliance but because of the "omg you won't believe the shit he said this time!" factor...
Twitter is not really a popularity contest.
We trust their research why? (Score:1)
This is like Big Tabacco saying saying that cigarettes don't cause lung cancer, Shaggy saying it wasn't him, or Amber Heard saying that she didn't shit the bed.
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This is like Big Tabacco saying saying that cigarettes don't cause lung cancer, ...
Technically... cigarettes don't cause lung cancer, smoking them does.
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Also technically Shaggy didn't say it wasn't him, he was advising Rikrok to say that.
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This is like Big Tabacco saying saying that cigarettes don't cause lung cancer,
Yeah, but "Big Tabacco" had plenty of research which told them that cigarettes actually do cause cancer. This is that equivalent research which Facebook ("Big Surveillance") also has and is hiding.
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Yes, but they didn't release that research publicly. Instead they released the research that showed cigarettes are healthy or at least cause no ill effect.
Easily explainable (Score:3)
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Anyone remember the early 00s where up and coming Internet services, which were all running at a loss, tilted towards defending the vulnerable
No, I don't remember that at all.
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You just need to move into the reality that poster exists in, instead of this icky one that doesn't give the results he wants.
Koch and Russians (Score:1)
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Left is boring. (Score:5, Interesting)
it's not that left wing ideas are boring (Score:2)
The left tells you the world is a fucked up place and that we forever have to strive to keep it running. We're also *never* satisfied (that's the "progress" in "progressive") so we're kind of kill joys. When blacks g
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Uh, dude: nuclear power? On nuclear power the American left was played like a musical instrument by the fossil fuel industry, and that's evidently something too painful to face.
Granted, on most issues, the left has been doing way better in recent decades, and the right has gone totally batshit crazy (just when I think they can't do any worse they prove me wrong...).
(And it's perhaps not strictly relevant, but back when I was a teenager in the 70s there was *a lot* of crazines
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Uh, dude: nuclear power? On nuclear power the American left was played like a musical instrument by the fossil fuel industry, and that's evidently something too painful to face.
On nuclear power the right has been played by the nuclear power industry, which convinced them that it was a good idea even though the market has spoken and soundly rejected it.
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But the big thing is that when one of us starts acting crazy and grifting (ala Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop) instead of running with it and forming a happy little community around the grift we tear into it for being psuedo scientific and harmful. e.g. we debunk B.S. quickly, and that means the ability of it to spread, in particular on social media, is limited. That in turn limits the all important "engagement".
Still waiting for BLM to be denounced by the left for their grifting. The presumed beneficiaries have already started complaining about being forgotten and when the officers build a real estate empire during their tenure, something is fishy.
Glad I don't have to figure this out... (Score:5, Interesting)
All of these social media sites have so many inter-locking algorithms, which interact in extremely complex and hard-to-predict ways, so this could be a very very complex problem. Some of them are amenable to being fixed by algorithmic tweaks. Others are not.
Examples:
Twitter has a character limit. If Angry Anglo-Saxon English takes less characters than Intersectional Analysis, then you would expect Anglo-Saxon-Anger to do very well on twitter. Moreover, Conservatism mostly wants things to stay the same. "NO" fits into 280 characters with 278 to spare. Making the case that a) the current healthcare system sucks, b) it must be changed, and c) my specific version of change is superior to the others? That's not 280 characters.
Progressive messages come from many different groups, with many points of view, who are capable of ignoring each-other. If a small group of conservatives amplifies every message that leans right, and the Income Inequality People aren't amplifying the Global Warming people; one would expect the right to do better in terms of engagement even tho the small group of conservatives is small.
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I think we were collectively assuming friction-free communication would increase information flow and knowledge; turns out it amplifies memes at least as well. I suppose an analysis of the content of email chain letters 20 years ago would have found the same.
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I think we were collectively assuming friction-free communication would increase information flow and knowledge
Not all of us. E. M. Forster painted a pretty bleak picture of friction free communication/social media in 1909. 100 years proved him to be a very good judge of human nature.
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There's one past to long for (and even that gets badly distorted), but many possible futures. Liberals suffer from market fragmentation.
The right wing is staffed by professionals (Score:5, Insightful)
Finally, and this comes from one of the big fake news sites a while back, if you try spreading a left wing conspiracy it gets debunked before it goes viral and you don't make any money from adverts. On the right wing side of things... well just go look at your uncle's Twitter feed.
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the left [is staffed] by hobbyists.
That is the the biggest example of motivated reasoning I've ever seen.
Name some professional leftists (Score:2)
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Name some professional leftists who are actual politicians
Unless you think Bernie Sanders is not a leftist?
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You're right, but look, there's a bare handful of them when you can only come up with one useful example off the top of your head. Most of those who claim to be leftists are centrists, whether we're talking about politicians or voters.
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How did you get the +1 auto moderation (Score:2)
Also, a religion requires a belief in the supernatural as well as custom, dogma, etc. None of which the left has. Our lack of dogma is a bit of a weakness, as we're quick to falling into disagreement where as the right wing, because it's run from the top/down in a strict hierarchy (with billionaires at the top) can do things like enforce Reagan's 11th commandment. This doesn't make the Right Wing correct, just stron
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the left by hobbyists. So the right is going to be more successful in amplifying their voices. Right wing politics also tends to trade in fear while left wing leans on hope and futurism. That means the right wing is gonna play better with doom scrollers.
What a load of shit. For four years under Trump, we heard nothing *BUT* fear from the left every single day. "Trump is going to start WWIII. Trump is going to attack North Korea. Trump is going to declare martial law." Now that he is out of office, 50% of 2021 CNN coverage is "the boogeyman is coming back any day now, just you wait and see." Even General CRT Milley was willing to commit treason with the Chinese military out of the fear he swallowed from the left. With such a weak kneed, scared Joint
Engagement results in exposure (Score:2)
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AOC could have probably made more of a big deal about playing Among Us. Side benefit, Sykkuno would have been revealed for the asshole he is a year sooner than actually happened.
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Very easy to explain (Score:3, Insightful)
The left-wing has an outsized presence on said media, so all the attention is divided across hundreds of blue checkmarks making it harder to amplify a particular message. Not only that, but since the Twitter is base is primarily left-wing (you can find stats that say it's something like 60/40 for the users and 80/20 for the 'influencers' in favor of Democrats), the only engagement the left wingers see is a relatively low-yield positive.
The right-wing doesn't have nearly as much presence, between the direct and indirect suppression and the simple fact most don't care about talking in the wind to an overwhelmingly left-wing user base so whatever they do present has a following of both fans and anti-fans that amplify everything they say.
As has been demonstrated by people on YouTube, it doesn't matter whether you click like or dislike, the algorithm sees any interaction as an engagement and the more divergent the engagement (up and down simultaneously) it is designed to generate more traffic because, as with headlines, it's "spicy" that drives the eyeballs.
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The right-wing doesn't have nearly as much presence, between the direct and indirect suppression
Nope. Studies have shown time and again that social media sites in general (including the biggies, Twitter and Facebook) suppress more liberal content than the right-wing stuff [bbc.com]. They've also shown that republicans have a persecution complex [pewresearch.org], which is probably because they do more of the persecuting so they know how easy it would be for it to happen to them.
The whole republican fantasy that their ideas don't take over the world because of persecution is simply a way to avoid the simple truth that their ideas
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As I said, there is more liberal content to suppress.
You said it, but if it's true then it proves exactly what you are claiming isn't true, because there is more engagement on social media with conservative content [politico.com] than with liberal content. So if there is in fact more liberal content on social media, then it is being suppressed much, much more strenuously than conservative content. In fact it proves what liberals have been saying all along, that cancel culture is a conservative invention.
On Facebook 8/10 top engaged content is liberal (MSNBC, CNN).
MSNBC [msnbc.com] and CNN [cnn.com] literally say the exact opposite of what you claim they
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Oh yeah, and I should have also included some other informative links in my post, like conservatives share the most fake news and also conservatives are more likely to be cucks [washingtonpost.com] but also are more likely to call people cucks [gq.com]. The fascist playbook includes accusing others of what you are doing as a distraction from those acts, it's frankly a staple.
Confused (Score:2)
If your Twitter feed is based on who you follow, then how is this significant? If I'm not following (I actually actively block) any right-wing political figures, then how does this work?
vocal minority (Score:3)
It's called "vocal minority", not specific to right wing, it applies to everything.
Yes, of course (Score:2)
A product controlled and developed by Jack Dorsey must OBVIOUSLY be promoting right wing ideals.
Does anyone really even parse what they're saying anymore?
Twitter amplify right-leaning political content? (Score:1)
You have got to be shitting me. Just take a look at who gets banned as compared to who gets left up. The Taliban is acceptable, but not the orange one
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Well, the Taliban were able to read and comprehend the ToS.
Industrial grade bullshit (Score:1)
Re:Industrial grade bullshit (Score:4)
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Your side spent the last 2 years flushing every hard-won freedom down the toilet
Name one.
you destroyed feminism by pretending that womanhood doesn't exist
I have my own views on womanhood which might surprise you, as they are probably a lot closer to your own than you would think, but liberal ideas of womanhood have not destroyed feminism. Feminism has always been a fractured idea with significant and dramatic differences in how it is pictured and practiced by different groups and individuals.
All in the name of hurt feelings.
Feelings are a much better basis for argument than privilege, which is what conservatism is about conserving.
Boring Conversation Anyway (Score:1, Troll)
The mods are out abusing the system to label "disagree as "Troll" etc.
Go look up Tim Pool interviewing Jack Dorsey on Rogan, especially the segment on deadnaming.
It reveals both sides' biases.
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Wah my opinions are unpopular wah
Is this the explanation for the 95% of humanity? (Score:2)
Outside the USA, there is little to zero evidence of any "left leaning" individuals or activity in your country. Even your use of the word "liberal" to mean leftie is a part of it. The word liberal means moderate and unbiased. It identifies people who are neither Conservative or Socialist. If someone sees someone like that as being far to their left, as so much of your media does, they are saying that the middle ground is far to their left - or that they are far to the right of moderate!
The question is,
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Right-wing ideas are more defensible than left-wing ideas. It's the same reason why there are more right-wing talk shows than left-wing talk shows.
If right-wing ideas were more defensible, there would be fewer right-wing talk shows.
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Right-wing ideas are more defensible than left-wing ideas. It's the same reason why there are more right-wing talk shows than left-wing talk shows.
If right-wing ideas were more defensible, there would be fewer right-wing talk shows.
That doesn't follow at all. There is just plenty to talk about and conservatives are generally willing to explore conversations outside of the talking points as approved by their preferred political party. Furthermore, they generally aren't afraid to engage with opposing ideas.
Listen to a few hours of Michael Medved, for example. He gives preference to callers with opposing viewpoints. Neal Boortz used to do the same, before he retired. Both of them had quite different ideas on a number of topics (Boor
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Right-wing ideas are more defensible than left-wing ideas. It's the same reason why there are more right-wing talk shows than left-wing talk shows.
If right-wing ideas were more defensible, there would be fewer right-wing talk shows.
That doesn't follow at all.
Sure it does. If they're more defensible, one shouldn't need to spend more time defending them. Conservatives have to constantly push their ideas because they're usually bad and/or unpopular ideas.
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That's like saying there is no reason for all the news outlets - nothing is different from day to day. Talk shows discuss the news of the day and how decisions are being made that affect people. Those decisions are worthy of comment and it is illuminating to discuss how conservative and liberal approaches to current problems differ.
Of course, you can just default to "Derp, derp - those stupid conservatives and their talk radio are just repeating the exact same things over and over." I'm sure that explai
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On what basis are they more defensible? Take a look at the core rationale for Brexit; immigration. Conservative rags like the Daily Mail and the Telegraph had endless streams of stories about dangerous Eastern Europeans and Islamists running rampant in the streets (ignoring the fact that your average group of drunken English football fans will cause more havoc in an evening than all the Romanian truck drivers and Polish carpenters combined). And yet, now suddenly the British Government has to call out the f
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For every conservative idea that you think is outrageous, there at least as many liberal ideas that I would cite. So, instead, I will point to the lack of willingness among liberals to debate these ideas on campuses as extremely strong evidence of the simple lack of faith in the validity of their positions.
There's really no value in debating certain subjects; you can learn what misguided views the opposition to things like factual education (see: critical race theory) or equality espouses without engaging them in debate. But there's no valid argument against it, and wasting time is what it says on the package: a waste of time. There's no value in an argument with a Nazi. We already had a whole war over what to do with Nazis. It worked pretty well, and maybe we should have another one.
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Leftists freely use censorship as a weapon of first resort. Their own positions are so weak that if people are allowed to point out the many problems, they would collapse.
You don't know the arguments, do you? You call yourself educated? The Enlightenment legacy can be seen all around us: individualism, international commerce and trade, moral cosmopolitanism, freedom of the press and a culture of publicity, technological modernity, the valorization of expertise, and on and on. All of these are bogeymen to
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Re: Simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Cupcake, the only left-wing idea there is goes something like, "See that successful person/place/thing over there? He/they/it is doing so well because they stole from you. Let's punish them!"
If you spend your days immersed in right-wing media, I can understand how you may think this is true.
There are subtle, nuanced positions for the both the right and the left. There are also simple-minded caricatures of these positions, which are what is constantly attacked in what passes for political discussions.
Pro tip - spend a lot of time listening to pundits that you disagree with. Notice how they distort and simplify your viewpoint until it is ridiculous. Now, go back to listening to the ones you like. If you're careful, you see the same BS flying in from different directions.
Re: Simple (Score:1)
I stopped listening to pundits about 15 years ago, around the time TV news turned from news to 5 retards sitting around a table yelling at eachother.
Believe me I am quite acquainted with the sloppy thinking that gets passed off as punditry on my side and the other side. You'll notice I tend not to cite some TV moron's rant when I post, but for some reason people arguing at me seem to think I've got a direct line to Tucker Carlson, so they can yell at the TV by yelling at me.
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Believe me I am quite acquainted with the sloppy thinking that gets passed off as punditry on my side and the other side.
Curious. You claim to be familiar with sloppy thinking, yet you are only able to describe liberal thought in the rudest, most simple-minded caricature.
Hmm....
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Wasn't there a study done several years ago where researchers found that political pundits were no more accurate in their assessments and predictions than picking random people off the street? To be a successful pundit, you don't actually have to know a goddamned thing, you just have to say whatever gibberish is in the script with charisma and gusto.
Re: Simple (Score:2)
No...if I memory serves it wasn't tv pundits, it was professional consultants like stratfor and McKinsey that were doing worse than a group of randos off the street.
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Which is why for decades now I keep seeing Republicans campaigning by calling their opponent "the most liberal member of Congress". I mean, how can so many incumbents always be "the most liberal"? Shouldn't there be only one? Is the math that hard?
Of course, it goes the other way, so many flagrant racists on the right. Not everyone there is a David Duke idiot. A few years back there was even a high level discussion amongst key Republican leaders about how to become more inclusive, appeal to the black a
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There are subtle, nuanced positions for the both the right and the left.
Nuanced, sure. Subtle? Left yes, right not so much. The arguments of the right literally always boil down to I've got mine, so fuck you. That is in fact their entire platform. That this platform has so much traction in America speaks volumes about the state of American education.
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The arguments of the right literally always boil down to I've got mine, so fuck you.
Only in their most caricatured form.
It is mistake to think that people who disagree with you are inherently selfish, stupid, or bad.
Here's another right-wing principle that we should all be able to agree upon - a strongly centralized government is prone to corruption and abuses of power, hence an emphasis on local control gives people more access to power structures close to them and more say into details. Or another: when people work hard, they are entitled to the fruits of their labor.
The flip
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It is mistake to think that people who disagree with you are inherently selfish, stupid, or bad.
It's not about the fact that we disagree. It's about what we disagree about, which is issues of basic human rights. We also see time and again that conservatives are more hypocritical than liberals, starting with the name (it's really not about conserving anything, it's about opposing progress — they should be called oppositionists if anything) and progressing through the name-calling (they love to call people cuck for example, but actual scientific studies show that they are more likely to be cucks)
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I think you missed the mark on the right-wing ideology. It isn't "let's emulate their behaviour" it is "I've already got mine who the hell cares if you get yours".
It is most definitely not "Let's leave everyone the fuck alone." otherwise they wouldn't be so hell bent on overturning Roe vs Way. It wasn't that long ago that it was the right-wing individuals that were demanding television and movies be cancelled or boycotted if they didn't agree with the message presented. If the right is so hands off and want
Re: Simple (Score:1, Flamebait)
Yeah in the 80s it was the right that harbored the most ardent proponents of the banhammer. Today it's the left. Maybe tomorrow it'll be the right again. I don't care. It's all stupid and I choose not to play.
And just as a pro tip, the reason we on the right "don't accept" whatever acronym stew you people call yourselves is because you don't get to vandalize the dictionary with your preferred monikers today and call everyone who doesn't get the memo a racist sexists whateverist for not being personally inve
Re: Simple (Score:2)
Hehe. Censored songs.
I took a trip to China about 7 years ago. I'm walking through a mall or a store or something, and where in the US the music playing would be something bland and inoffensive and royalty-free like smooth jazz or whatever, in that Chinese mall, they were plastic Pink's uncensored version of "Perfect" and every once in a while she'd be dropping the f bomb on an unsuspecting crowd of families with children doing their shopping.
The language barrier took the edge off, to be sure...but you kind
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Can you honestly say you want fuck this and titties that blasted over the speakers at walmart?
I wasn't talking about what's played on the PA, but about what's sold in the CD section. Wal-Mart only sells the censored versions of albums, and won't carry anything with explicit lyrics if they can avoid it (which was generally pretty easy thanks to assistance from the industry even before the explicit lyrics warnings.)
But with that said, yes, I would rather hear fuck and titties and whatever if the alternative is to hear censored versions of songs. There is however another alternative, which is to simply
Re: Simple (Score:2)
Rap music will be difficult to justify for wokety woke types. White men profiting off the sales of nword this and bword that...
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If I were to be in a Wal-Mart (I try to avoid it, but it happens occasionally) and I were to hear an uncensored rap song overhead, I might well die laughing, and someone might sue on my behalf.
nice abuse of moderation there (Score:2)
Only comment reply (at all) making the above statements (in thread) modded redundant. Concrete and factual examples of conservative hypocrisy thus buried below threshold for most readers. This is what the reich wing resorts to because it knows its arguments are nonsensical.
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I don't think they've even found the root cause.
One observation (not mine, I can't recall where I saw it) is that Twitter, by nature, leaves no room for discussion. Statements on twitter are often characterized by unfounded certainty.
So when you have tendencies to want to think about and consider alternatives, those are not facilitated by Twitter, which is focused on making short statements of "fact" with no room for refutation or discussion.
Media like Twitter are just fundamentally set up to support discu