Union boss ignored university’s request to change polarising speech
abff08f4813c @ abff08f4813c @j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us Posts 5Comments 1,044Joined 11 mo. ago
abff08f4813c @ abff08f4813c @j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us
Posts
5
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1,044
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11 mo. ago
I think it’s obvious I’ve thought a lot about this, if you have any context outside of these couple of comments here.
In fact, I could easily be missing additional context. I've always said I'm open to new evidence and changing my mind and opinion on that basis.
Which if you’ve been noticing this user at all, you would have a lot more context…
That's probably it. I haven't really put in the time and effort to follow this user around, see what he was posting in his own communities, etc.
Mods addressed it here, for example.
That I saw and responded to. For the record, I stated that
I agree with this.
That being the case, let's dig in to see where between the two of us, where we actually disagree.
In any case, the mods/admins finally decided that they agree with the extremely popular opinion you’re taking issue with.
Their stated reason is a little confusing, because they mention dms specifically.
I hope you can see the contradiction between your two statements. User was banned because of harassing DMs as per the modlog you referenced, https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=9454261
I’ve been on the receiving end of that several times actually. Just a couple nights ago they were dming me
In fact this is an example of context that I can't see. For whatever reason that user didn't bother with me so I was unaware of this until folks starting mentioning it happening in the post reporting the first ban. I definitely agree that this is inappropriate and permaban worthy.
the extremely popular opinion you’re taking issue with.
Again, for the record, the opinion that I took issue with was that evidence showed this was a bot account or a shared account. I can't rule out that this is in fact the case, but I still don't see the evidence for it. Instead, it looks to me that this was a guy who got a permaban because he was too much of a jerk and couldn't be civil, leading him to eventually cross the line and break the TOS.
So I suspect after the influx of complaints they got, they almost had trouble even picking a specific explanation.
To me it seems the two bans were done by different folks (mods of a magazine vs admins of the instance) and had different reasons and evidence (temp ban in a magazine for duplicate post rule violation - for which your script, in identifying duplicates, would have been extremely helpful - vs permaban on the instance for violations in DMs - for which only the instance admins could confirm and verify).
I'll point out again, the explanation did not reference https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#bot-usage-and-guidelines suggesting that the admins did not think the user was a bot account.
Also worth repeating: I don't disagree with either ban (though with the DMs I don't have the knowledge or context, but I'm good with trusting the instance admins of lemmy.world in this case). I just believe the reasoning is different.
The dude was 100% trying to piss people off and succeeded many, many, thousands of times.
That again dives into the context that I didn't have, like the DMs.
From what little I did see, I agreed with https://lemm.ee/post/45466523/15630878
Looking at some of their threads, the trolling type behavior seemed directed at users who were already fairly antagonistic to them to begin with, then it turned in to trolling back and forth all the way down.
Which doesn't justify it, but also explains why I've interacted a lot with that user and only once felt trolled. The user tried to be a mirror and reflect back what was given. Which is not appropriate social behaviour, but if we're banning a user for that reason, we should be open about it.
Also I agreed with https://lemm.ee/post/45466523/15631367
The only other “trolling” they did just seemed to be being anti-Democratic when a lot of people don’t like that
If this was /c/democrats, that could definitely be considered trolling, but /c/politics isn’t organized as a fan club.
Now, I don't mind if /m/politics becomes /c/democrats - I'm a lifelong democrat myself. But I also feel we should be open about these things. I shouldn't be banned from /m/conservatives because of a hidden rule that I wasn't not liberal enough in loving a universal basic income, for example.
Ugh. Actually, this would explain so much - I have heard from MAGA folks before that they feel it's the end of democracy and their way of life if (insert Hiliary/Biden/Harris) wins.
This makes me feel much better about https://lemmy.world/post/21153248 - undoubtably what must be happening is that even despite his best efforts, Nate Silver's polling data is being contaminated by this made up stuff, and so the new trend he's reporting isn't actually real.
...Right?
Isn't that a violation of rule 4?
Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
Truman was a true Democrat.
As for the current GOP candidate, well, he was a registered Democrat in the 00's when he was running The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice.
And, as President:
He said he'd join with Democrats if the Republican legistators would not get in line with his plans,
It wouldn't be the only time he went with the Dems either, https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/06/politics/trump-meeting-with-democrats-deal/index.html
And of course, this from former GOP Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/356346-ryan-mocks-wh-for-being-full-of-ny-liberals-and-wall-street-ceos/
In truth the GOP guy isn't a Democrat in Republican clothing or a Republican in Democrat clothing. Both are suits he's willing to try on to hide the ugly truth of what he really is.
So where does this leave those of us who want things to move back to the left? Where do we go from here?
The raw numbers aren't directly on that post, we just have this - which mentions the model's avg crafted from statewide polls is 1.9 vs 1.3 from the national polls.
Last update: 11:45 a.m., Thursday, October 24. We’ve been starting to see more national polls showing Kamala Harris behind — certainly not a good sign for her given her likely Electoral College disadvantage. Her lead in our national polling average is down to just 1.3 points. The good news for Harris is that our model doesn’t care that much about national polls; instead, our forecast of the popular vote, which is mainly based on extrapolations from state polls, has her up 1.9.
Well, the question here is - if they know the canvassers numbers are bunk, would they still try to use them? It'd be a way of creating more respectable fake polls, I suppose.
Although it’s likely this shit will be used to claim trump had “more voters than votes” but they’ll claim Dems cheated no matter what
This is the worrying bit. It will get debunked but they'll still make the claim and their faithful will believe it, and that will be a justification for messing up with the vote counting and the certification processes post election.
Exactly. He's getting out what he put in. This is what he deserves and he has no one to blame but himself.
Also aren’t you the dude defending UM to me yesterday? What’s your deal?
"Defending" is a bit strong.
I think these two comments explain it better than I did for myself last time around,
The response here is not about whether their behavior was socially acceptable, but whether it was an indication of a fake account being run by multiple people or a script or something.
https://lemmy.world/comment/13011607
I get that, but hear me out… it’s just as likely that they’re an obsessive ... who can’t stand letting someone have the last word.
https://lemmy.world/comment/13010767
Basically I was saying your stats, while useful, could be read in a way that did not quite support the "fake account being run by multiple people or a script or something" line of thinking, and that folks should use more critical thinking before making accusations like that.
I realize now that I may have come off snarky asking if /m/politics is leftist. The whole fediverse is, but what I was specifically asking was how we go about dealing with people whose opinions we disagree with.
Conservatives now are a minority in US politics (even though the Electoral College and overall makeup of the states distorts and amplifies their powers in getting to the White House and in the Senate, and gerrymandering doing the same for the House of Res) - but they are still a significant minority.
I kinda viewed it as a test, at least for myself. If I can't even get along with a self proclaimed socialist who merely can't give up the love of voting third party, what hope do I have with making peace with an actual conservative? And what happens if we can't make peace as a country?
That's why I was asking if /m/politics was open to engagement with conservative views (which no one answered).
So that number three spot is suspect to me too. I would’ve assumed a lot of users over time would have broken -4000.
There are two explanations that come to my mind.
I've only been running my own instance for a couple of months at this point, and so I only have the history from then on. Anything older and my instance wouldn't know about it since it didn't exist to receive that info.
The second one - we're seeing changes now with the downvoting process. I personally use pyfedi ( flagship instance is at piefed.social ) - and pyfedi is, erm, opinionated. For example, by design, it automatically hides posts and comments in it's UI if the downvotes are too negative (by default a score of -20 or greater, though this is configurable by the admin). Pyfedi also implemented anonymous downvoting, but users whose reputation are too low (based on how many downvotes they are getting) won't be able to use this feature.
In short, being downvoted all the time is starting to bite. So my guess is that folks who do this might be changing accounts in order to avoid too negative a score in an attempt to avoid some of these consequences.
This is a bit new to me, as I actually have never tried a DM since I started self-hosting an instance (and as far as I know, no one has tried to DM me).
But from https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/117834 it seems that DMs on Lemmy are indeed federated - albeit to the minimum required (your instance and the instance of the person you are DMing - so for example, with me being on a single user instance, I would never see these get federated over unless someone was trying to DM me). So they don't get federated outward if DMs are going on between users on the same instance.
Fortunately that also points to a workaround - using Element.io and Matrix to send secure messages between users (when you don't want even the instance admins or Element.io or Matrix admins to see the message contents).
My only experience sending DMs on the fediverse was with a kbin.social account, but from what I recall that was for local users only (so I could DM someone else who had a kbin.social account but not someone who had a mastodon.social account, for example).
That's very true. But also kinda sad.
The university did greenlight this (as they had enough advanced notice of the content to request he make a change, and refused to censor him when he refused). However, the spokesman also said,
We regret that the speech was not more befitting of a graduation ceremony
Which I optimistically take to mean that they didn't find it particularly relevant either.
Hey, I might be able to help you out here. I'm pretty sure this can be figured out if one has access to the underlying raw vote data. Which all instance admins do (more or less).
So running this SQL query on my pyfedi instance,
select username, sum(effect) from postreplyvote v inner join "user" u on u.id = v.authorid group by username order by sum(effect) asc;
The first two rows,
UniversalMonk | -23315
MediaBiasFactChecker | -19231
So this account is indeed the most downvoted (or at least the most downvoted that my instance knows about). Interestingly enough the MediaBiasFactChecker bot is the 2nd most downvoted instance.
Number 3 is a human afaik and shows up as -4147 so the margin between this account and the next most downvoted human is indeed a very large one.
McD's might be unique in this regard, but they actually own the land the building is on for most franchises. So they'd have the authority to deny if they wanted to (at least in the standard agreement in the US).
This was well explained in the biopic, The Founder https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4276820/
Sadly, it makes sense that corporate would not deny it in this case - the store was going to be closed so there was no impact on business (as compared to the store being closed for a more typical reason), and they'd probably fear the public relations backlash after seeing "McD refuses to allow store to be borrowed by GOP/MAGA campaign"
Forgot the /s at the end
Brilliant! I agree.
I think the first step is Harris getting elected and Dems retaking the Senate in 2026. Then go with the 127 DC states plan - https://www.vox.com/2020/1/14/21063591/modest-proposal-to-save-american-democracy-pack-the-union-harvard-law-review - this gives the required two thirds majority to pass any required constitutional amendments to implement the above.
And they saw it was evidence of a bot account or a shared account specifically? The numbers did show the guy submitting duplicate posts and such - which lead jordanlund to apply a temporary ban under rule 3 of that magazine as per https://lemm.ee/post/45466523
And I also apologize if I somehow implied that the script was not useful or worth it. While cautioning how the data should be interpreted, I generally support such efforts. I have no issue with your script.
Why would I look into my database and provide you with additional numbers or provide you info on how you could accomplish this on your own, if I was against this effort, against your script, or opposing you?
I think it's more that additional context got revealed - as jordanlund pointed out, abusing DMs is a fast track to getting banned by the admins.
Agreed. Good data is important, and Lemmy in specific has a lack of good mod tools, so anything that can be done to address the gap is not only vitally important, but very necessary.
Absolutely.
On that note, I'd like to finish by explaining my own personal failings and why I might be a bit overly sensitive to someone getting banned without significant justification.
I first joined the fediverse after the API limits got announced on spez's site. But at the same time, my main account was permanently banned. Do you know why?
I sure don't. It came without warning and no one would response beyond the generic "look at our TOS to understand our rules"
I had alts that were unbanned so I could have continued, but I felt really unhappy with the lack of response. Ultimately I decided to delete all my alts and leave spez's site for good.
Later, their legal team did contact me, but even after that, no reason for the ban was ever given.
If a user is banned, they should be told why. And the rules should be made clear upfront before they join. I agree with the reasons why Monk was both temp and perma banned. These rules were clearly visible up front. But there was never an explicit rule that folks who post on /m/politics should only post Dem posts. That should be added to the rulebar of that magazine if that's going to be a rule going forward (and it's a rule I'd have no trouble complying with, just to be clear).
I just want what's fair.