Russia is not "the good guy". Neither are we. Any action that promotes war between the two is an action that also promotes widespread death and destruction across the entire planet.
Maybe down-ranking Ukraine tweets have hushed the war drums to a degree, maybe not. But there is a justification that does not include supporting Russia.
Ukraine was invaded by its neighbour. Russia started a war.
Would you deem tweets that encourage donations toward Ukraine's military defence to be "promoting war"?
How about tweets that boost morale of their defence forces (well-produced propaganda videos, etc)?
The war isn't something that Ukraine wanted, but it was forced on them.
To then demote any tweet about Ukraine is throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and (in the examples I've given above) making their digital 'life' harder when trying to deal with a problem they didn't want.
> The war isn't something that Ukraine wanted, but it was forced on them.
I rate both of these claims to be indisputably true.
> Would you deem tweets that encourage donations toward Ukraine's military defence to be "promoting war"?
> How about tweets that boost morale of their defence forces (well-produced propaganda videos, etc), [are they promoting war]?
The answer to both of these questions is indisputably yes.
War propaganda from the side which I support is still war propaganda. It doesn't stop being war propaganda just because it's also in the right. Remember "loose lips sink ship"? It was a WW2 American propaganda slogan designed to address German u-boat aggression. America was plainly on the right side of that conflict, yet those posters are still cited today in American classrooms as an example of war propaganda, because that's indisputably what it was.
Morally in the right and war propaganda have never been mutually exclusive.
Actually this is promoting war. Because if you are donating to someone who is at war, you are participating in this war.
Some people just think that Russians will never come and ask them why did these people give money to kill their brothers.
Also it works like a promo. First you are supporting someone with tweets. Then you are sending money. Then you are sending weapons. Then they send you to the battlefield, because You know, it's very important to support Ukraine.
How about well-produced propaganda that targets people outside Ukraine and Russia? Why should a foreign military be allowed to influence public opinion in America or India?
This is the jingoistic phrasing we hear a lot, which implies that Russia did something unique. As Americans, certainly we invade many countries, but we have the integrity to invade countries who are not our neighbors.
Say it with me:
Russia invaded Ukrainian territory.
Ukraine does not seek war against Russia, they seek to reclaim the territory that Russia stole.
If Russia were to leave tomorrow, the war would be over.
There is no way to "promote war between the two" by supporting Ukraine, because the war was caused (and continues to be caused) by the unilateral actions of one party: Russia.
What country do you think should stop us?
Wouldn't it be better if the people demanded an end to war instead of being convinced we can bomb our way out of conflict?
The Russian political elite are enjoying their luxurious lives in Moscow. Many of their children and grandchildren live in the West. They are not going to destroy the planet just because they will a smaller slice of Ukraine than they had hoped for.
It is interesting that "Russia will nuke the whole world" fear mongering is only coming from the people who want Russia to win.
The worry as I have heard it that Russia may not be willing to accept defeat in the Ukraine and will use nukes in the Ukraine, not USA or Western Europe - which is of course bad enough in itself - and that this might escalate into a global nuclear exchange.
Your final point is interesting - I suspect it is a logical artifact. The people who are worried about nuclear war are generally people who want to minimise death; and people who want to minimise death generally prioritise peace; and people who prioritise peace are generally labled as wanting Russia to win, as they would give Russia concessions if it means fewer hundreds-of-thousands of deaths - and anything other than a total victory for Ukraine is said to be a victory for Russia.
Actually if Putin thinks that it's an existential threat, he WILL use nukes, no matter what other people think on this matter
Imagine for yourself what "victory" against Russia, China, and Brazil would look like. How many millions would be dead?
Putin has shown restraint over past two decades, so he probably won't use nukes. Those who may replace him, real hardliners, may be less restrained.
The standard both sides are the same argument with black and white thinking. No mention of shades of grey or nuance.
One notable vignette: Elon Musk called the Crimean handover “Kruschev’s mistake”. That’s a very specific statement steeped in Russian revanchism.
* One has to know Crimea used to be part of Russia
* One has to know Kruschev handed it over to Ukraine in the 1950s for an anniversary
* One has to believe this was wrong
* One has to ignore voting at Ukraine’s independence suggesting the inhabitants at the time wished to be part of Ukraine and not Russia
It suggests the comment was inspired through talking to a Russian revanchist. One would not get this interpretation from, say, Wikipedia.
I don’t think he is a vatnik as some here have said, but one of the memes going around the bubble is „think for yourself, question everything”. This makes him think that Russian aggression has some justification simply because „things are never what they seem” or „things are never black and white”.
It isn't impossible or contradictory to hold both concepts in one's mind. If Russia wants Crimea, it was a mistake for the USSR to hand it over. From that point an individual could also believe that every region has the right to secede. The two views are not contradictory.
It takes a specific kind of bias to read intent into the statement.
Let us try again with an issue divorced from the inflammatory topic.
"The getaway driver made a mistake by turning off the engine."
The above statement doesn't assume support for getaway drivers or bank robbery. It is an observation of folly, nothing more.
Yeah, no. The Independence referendum asked "Do you support the Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine?". To which 37% of the electorate of Crimea and 36% of Sevestopol said yes. They were never asked if they wanted to join Russia.
Results in Crimea:
54.19% yes
45.81% no
It would not have been sensible to ask “would you like to join russia” as Ukraine was already part of the USSR at the time the question was asked.
Now, those are obviously not strong results, but it also doesn’t immediately suggest the handover was a mistake. The split is even.
My point was, to come to the framing that this was “Kruschev’s mistake” one needs some preconceived ideas about how things ought to be.
People can just read history and interpret them... This trend of interpreting every politically adjacent thought as originating from one propaganda source or another is insane and absolutely destructive to having any sort of reasonable discourse.
"He picked up the children's history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you--something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it.
Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?"
Interestingly enough the original title for that work was intended to be "The Last Man in Europe." It was only commercial interests that drove it to "1984."
This is Europe. Everything was part of something else if you go back long enough. And in most cases not even that long.
* One has to know Khruschev had been the head of the Ukrainian communist party before he became the head of the USSR
"Russian revanchist"
So the position that the Ukraine has to take Crimea back is 'Ukrainian revanchism'?
* "With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Ukrainian independence the majority ethnic Russian Crimean peninsula was reorganized as the Republic of Crimea, after a 1991 referendum with the Crimean authorities pushing for more independence from Ukraine and closer links with Russia. In 1995 the Republic was forcibly abolished by Ukraine with the Autonomous Republic of Crimea established firmly under Ukrainian authority. ..."
---
There's an unfortunately (or fortunately for history buffs) large amount of history there. Here are some of the key events. One big one is a Crimean referendum in January 1991, that Wiki is indirectly referencing above. The other one is from December 1991, that the poster above is referencing:
* [2] January 1991: The USSR was still alive, but collapsing. Crimea, under Ukraine, under the USSR voted on reestablishing the Crimean Autonomous Soviet socialist Republic and participating in the New Union Treaty. The New Union Treaty was a failed USSR effort to reconstitute the USSR. In other words Crimea was voting to rejoin the USSR. It passed with 82% turnout and 94% approval.
* [3] March 1991: The first USSR referendum on the New Union Treaty was run. In Ukraine the wording was changed to also include joining the New Union Treaty being contingent upon a Ukrainian declaration of independence. This was more a cynical polling (in Ukraine) since independence and being part of the New Union would have been largely mutually exclusive. But it's important because it sets the stage for...
* [4] December 1st, 1991: The USSR still technically exists, but is in its death throes. Ukraine runs their independence referendum. All of Ukraine, including Crimea, votes yes. But not in the same way. Crimean voters were in a weird position. Thanks to the March referendum, Ukraine has left Crimea in a "heads I win, tails you lose" type scenario. You're supposed to vote yes to rejoin the USSR, but that's increasingly obviously not happening. Voting no makes it legally impossible to rejoin the USSR. 41% of Crimeans do not vote, 37% vote yes, 22% vote no. So "yes" wins. This was most certainly not a vote about joining Ukraine instead of Russia.
* December 8th, 1991: Russian, Belarussian, and Ukrainian leaders secretly meet in Western Belarus. They sign the Belavezha accords, declaring an official death of the Soviet Union.
And that's far from the end, but it's far enough for this little segment of history.
---
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimea_in_the_post-Soviet_era_...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Crimean_sovereignty_refer...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_Union_referendum
[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Ukrainian_independence_re...
If Twitter doesn't want people to draw the wrong conclusions, maybe they can release the whole actual algorithm? Not just some weird category preprocessing whatever thing?
As it stands, they throw this out there, their PR email responds with poop, Elon is in some space spreading misinformation/having no clue what he actually released.
"Where is the war footage?!" is one of the main talking points among far-right disinfo accounts to dowplay the severity of Russia's invasion.
Selectively down-ranking war footage from Ukraine is suspicious when they don't do the same for war footage from other parts of the world.
I actually think it's a good thing that twitter doesn't censor or down-rank war footage from the Middle East showing the results of American and Israeli bombings.
However that just makes it more suspicious that they are down-ranking footage that show the results of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Also all other filters on the list have very unambiguous names.
It is UkraineCrisisTopic and not UkraineCrisisMisinfo.
PS: All filter names: DoNotAmplify, CoordinatedHarmfulActivityHighRecall, UntrustedUrl, MisleadingHighRecall, NsfwHighPrecision, NsfwHighRecall, CivicIntegrityMisinfo, MedicalMisinfo, GenericMisinfo, DmcaWithheld, HatefulHighRecall, ViolenceHighRecall, HighToxicityModelScore, UkraineCrisisTopic, DoNotPublicPublish
Btw this class seems to be for spaces not tweets and a quick search for Ukraine in TweetSafetyLabels in the same package turns up no results, really shoddy writing.
Starlink has been disabled on the frontline for now a few months. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/spacex-cu...
Basically, Starlink is now useful just for the residents living in areas where the infrastructure has been destroyed, but it's not helping anymore the Ukrainians to win the war.
"Russian propaganda accounts are now openly praising Elon Musk for blocking Ukrainians from Twitter" - https://twitter.com/Biz_Ukraine_Mag/status/16030704554847150...
“When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.
- Maya Angelou
From the article:
> "Actually, I find their news quite entertaining," Musk continued, according to the filing. In a follow-up text, the world's richest man described Russian media as having a "lot of bullshit, but some good points too."
> "Free speech matters most when it's someone you hate spouting what you think is bullshit," Musk commented after Gracias agreed with his stance on free speech.
Spinning this as praise is borderline disinformation. But then again, spewing clickbaity BS is completely on brand for BI.
Would it be OK if Twitter allowed misinformation about the miltary operations in the Ukraine to run rampant? Would it be OK if Twitter censored pro-Ukranians (because they share a lot of misinformation)?
russia lost multiple multi million dollar AA systems and a helicopter full of marines, all on crystal clear HD video. Other than 'gesture of goodwill' statement from one of the sides what part of it was disinformation?
> Social media posts, online articles and Ukraine's president hailed 13 of the country's border guards as heroes, saying they were killed on a small Black Sea island after rejecting a Russian warship's surrender demand. But Kyiv's navy later admitted the troops were captive rather than dead, and Moscow said dozens had surrendered.
https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...
UPD: here is link to main branch without specific commit. Line is still there, it's not some fake or something:
https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/main/visibilit...
Never seen this before. Why would a commit to a fork show up on the original repo?
https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/main/visibilit...
The problem is, the branch 'main' and its contents will change over time, so GP linked to a 'permalink' of the exact commit hash instead.
I understand the Ukraine crisis is listed along misinformation but that's not enough to know what this map is made for. I'd like to see where this map is used before taking someone's word on it that all those topics are down-ranked.
Considering that the Ukraine conflict has been going on since 2014 it would be nice to get more info before bringing out the pitchforks.
Ukraine tweets are negative about Ukraine as much as they are positive, and I for one am tired of seeing the absolute clusterfuck that is armchair war mongers going at it 24/7.
While I agree with that completely, the "free speech absolutist" narrative that was pushed in support of Musk is that far-right talking points were getting downranked, that platforms should be neutral to "political opinions." In Texas, this notion has been enshrined into law.
Considering the massive propaganda operations from both Russia/Ukraine, it's actually not a bad flag.
Sure Ukraine is the good guy, but if you think that Ukraine doesn't run propaganda, you are completely naive.
Twitter repo + relevant visibility tweaking code at: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/tree/main/visibilit...
Still reading through it myself, but if I'm properly distilling the gist out of this, it seems they've implemented an "iptables for tweet visibility" through which the server sends instructions to the client to then run a rules engine against to drop tweets or specifically throttle engagement.
So... if I'm right, and this is the real kick in the teeth from my perspective; they aren't even doing the hard work on their side to sift through the datastream and drop things on their side. They're instead programming your hardware to do their gaslighting/censorship/filtering for them.
Dumb pipe for them, but you're left burning cycles on your phone/client/whatever to hide their material for them. Corollary being that with a sufficiently misbehaving client, one ought to be able to reconstitute an unfiltered stream to get a more accurate representation of the awfulness of those around you instead of only seeing what Twitter wants you to see.
It also means that server-side, there may actually be nothing preventing using a sufficiently misbehaving client from repurposing the Twitter backend as a Command & Control layer. In fact, one may even be able to compose several account provisioning/deprovisioning/visibility primitives to ensure no normal client would see anything, while the message nevertheless gets through. It's technically auditable, but if I put on my blacker hat; I miiiiight see a few ways to get up to some difficult to follow mischief if the system as posted is truly representative of what is there. May do dome net traffic analysis to see if I can figure out where the request is that would return the hypothetical ruleset to be consumed by the client. Not entirely convinced the engine is entirely client side, as that would have tipped their hand much longer ago I'd think. Not sure til I actually audit the full codebasr.
Yet another reason I've never quite been brave enough to pull the trigger on hosting a system like this for anyone but those I personally know and trust. After a certain point, probability goes to 1 that somepne is going to find a way to repurpose something nice no matter the level of good intention into something horrible. I like to think of it as a more abstract form of Rule34. If you build an information transfer system, someone will use it for something illegal somewhere.
Of course, even if I'm totally wrong, odds are that if I'm seeing the potential here, there is a smarter, less ethical version of me with a goatee that's already picked it apart and os likely actively exploiting it.
