322
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
322 points (93.0% liked)
News
23265 readers
3010 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Truth is an absolute defense in cases like these. They admitted to the facts of the case. The testing methodology is absolutely standard. There is no way Musk can prevail.
I just wonder if this will also fall under anti-SLAPP laws, since Musk is clearly doing it to shut down public disclosure and discussion.
It would, so they chose a jurisdiction that's unrelated to any involved party but doesn't have those laws.
Texas does have anti-SLAPP laws:
Whether a judge in the northern district of Texas agrees to implement these remedies is less clear
Texas state law has it but this was filed in Federal court. There's no Federal anti-SLAPP.
Ok got it, and since this was always going to be filed in Federal Court, the jurisdiction didn't particularly matter as far as anti-SLAPP laws are concerned
Exactly. This case likely will never make it past discovery given how much there is to lose.
Yeah, he filed this to say he filed this, to cause a chilling effect on other orgs who report on the nazis he supports on his platform.
He will fold the very instant before discovery starts, because once email/texts/chats hit the lawyers, Twitter will be burning to the ground.
The thing is that it looks like Musk is going to mount a technical defense. There's likely to be an admission that there's all kinds of Nazi crap on Twitter and that they allow it to roam free, within it's own little echo chamber. The whole "it's not what the average user experiences" tells me is that what they're going to do is cover the keywords that unlock the Nazi echo chamber and how that sequence of required words aren't in some top 5,000 search terms on the site.
I'm pretty sure the entire point will be to sow some distrust on Media Matter's manner by which they got those screenshots. Basically an argument of "Well, yeah, if you search Nazi 100,000 times and then Apple 100,000 times, we're going to absolutely show you Nazi + Apple stuff. But the number of users who have that as their search history, we here at Twitter, can count on one hand."
The idea is to not deny that it is possible to get Nazi + Apple, but to indicate that the chances of getting it are so rare that Media Matters had to know that their research was contrived. I don't think they're going to deny one ounce of what Media Matters presents to the court, I think what they're going to try and do is shift what the underlying question is on the matter. Basically, shifting it to "this happens to rarely that you just have to go out of your way to get it to happen."
Media Matters will need to keep focus on their broader topic. "X admits that such a combination can happen, they indicate that it is super rare, but there is no way that X could have calculated every permutation. Because of that, the arguments of Media Matter stand firm in that such CAN absolutely happen and X has no idea the frequency of it."
And the fact that X has filed in a very friendly to them courtroom, it's likely that the court is going to entertain the more technical merits of the case rather than the broad questions. It'll absolutely put Media Matters in a very hard position.
First rule of any kind of litigation. Don't ever say never. Law is black and white but the people who enforce it and judge it are still fleshy emotion pods.
Oh yeah, he's absolutely doing that.
Yeah, they signaled that’s what they’re going to argue but I don’t think it matters. That’s the standard way of doing that kind of research.
Lining up with any given ad is going to be a function of the number of buys for that ad and the number of locations on a page it could be shown on. That, times the number of users will give you the ability to estimate how many times that happens.
Not having the source code or the business rules for ad picking, the only way to simulate the experiences of millions of daily users is to load the pages over and over again and see what it produces.
IBM and Apple know pretty well how Internet advertising works. They were concerned enough to pull their spends because they were guaranteed this wouldn’t happen, and then it did. It’s really as easy as putting a flag like
racist=trueon the ad, then having the advertisers contract allow them to opt out of racist ads.In fact, it’s so simple and such a solved problem that the only reason it wouldn’t be working is if Elon fired the staff that oversees trust and safety and signals that it’s not a concern of twitter’s.
Which he did.
Even if he managed to hand pick his judge, he will lose on appeal. This is a SLAPP with a chilling effect, and I’ve done research on network effects using internet searches as part of the data set, and I can tell you that they followed accepted academic practice.
Musk’s sole argument will be that they didn’t say how often it happened out of how many attempts, but the breadth and variety of the documented instances shows it’s not uncommon when you’re talking about millions of daily users.
Either he knows he’s going to lose and is just doing this to get his narrative into headlines, or he’s got full blown narcissistic rage.
You're talking about a guy who swatted the family of a Tesla whistleblower. Elon Musk is vile
And I don't disagree with you one bit there. But Texas' anti-SLAPP law is the Texas Citizens Participation Act and it used to be one of the strongest in the country. In 2019, it was modified by the Texas Assembly to introduce a lot of gray area and weaken it considerably.
So I don't disagree with the assertion that this is absolutely frivolous. But Texas' current laws on the book are likely to give Musk enough room to avoid challenges on that aspect.
Oh no doubt, that's the point. To sow doubt on that whole process.
Oh yeah, the notion that they're indicating that Apple pulled their revenue because of "THIS REPORT" is just them grasping. But Musk is absolutely banking that IBM and Apple won't file brief with the Judge to provide more motivation to stick to the broad questions put forward by Media Matters. Business wise, this case isn't bringing dollars back to the platform, it is just being vindictive. Musk had his feels hurt and now he wants to hurt something else.
I'm going to guess that one. Just the way Musk's been talking about this case, it feels like this one got deep under his skin.
I'd never heard of anti slapp laws before. That's cool. We have them where I'm at too!