On the day Yelp introduced a new “racist behavior” wokeness rating, antifa and Black Lives Matter activists in Portland were seen on Twitter soliciting names of “non-friendly” businesses that support police, singling them out as targets. By Sunday’s pre-planned “Day of Rage,” rioters had trashed one of the explicit targets, a black-owned downtown Portland cafe.
Read the whole story. My point here is that I am pretty sure that people on the left never see stories like this. Perhaps it is true that people on the right never see some stories of outrages committed by the right, although I am skeptical about that.
I could be wrong, and I hope I am, but I think that in this sense the news bubbles are asymmetric.
I wonder what Yelp’s legal liability would be if it were to falsely label a business as racist or if a business that it so labeled were to be subsequently destroyed. The thing it has going in its favor is that the term “racist” is conveniently vague. Moreover, the Left is working to make it synonymous with “white.” In the case of a black-owned business that is falsely labeled or destroyed, Yelp could claim the owner had a false consciousness. That is unlikely to carry much weight in a courtroom today. But, tomorrow?
A common complaint of employees looking for new jobs and asked to provide references is that many of their former employers have “no talk” policies in which the most they will do is confirm that an individual worked at the business for a certain length of time. That because of the laws of defamation and of “tortious interference with contractual relations” which sometimes also includes *prospective* advantageous economic interactions.
That is, our tradition of law recognized the obvious which is that certain speech had the power to seriously harm other people by destroying their reputations and livelihoods and thus made those speakers liable for those harms, especially if they weren’t being completely honest and careful in making their claims, and most especially if it was clear they were being malicious and dishonest and *trying* to cause the harm.
What has happened is that while those laws are still quite strong when applied to the real world of employment relationships – arguably too strong, which is why employers just can’t afford to deal with potential liability and so keep their mouths shut even when the former employee would prefer otherwise – the laws have been effectively nullified in the online world, which is what encourages people to engage in all sorts of terrible and antisocial conduct and lets influential platforms like Yelp completely off the hook for enabling such conduct even when they have reason to know of abuse.
The platforms are acting like they are confident section 230 will never be repealed, and judging by their share prices, the market agrees with that prediction. That’s a reasonably good proxy for the conclusion that the GOP is worthless and doomed. The moment it appears otherwise a few hundred billion dollars disappears overnight and good riddance.
This is not the tradition of our law at all. Until some point in the 80’s, it was the norm to give out personal recommendations quite freely.
This is a trend towards extreme marginal thinking and modern risk management principles. Beyond extending courtesy, there is nothing whatsoever to gain by giving out recommendations.
Larger companies know that risk of a recommendation in a single instance is very small but costs will inevitably accrue across thousands of employees, and they just decided to eliminate those risks.
Likewise, people have always lost their jobs when their views conflicted with their top management. Corporations are rigid hierarchies, and those that rise to the top are typically not shy about using their power over others to achieve their goals. You appear to remember a world that has never existed.
What is different now is that everyone now has that outlet to play hardball, not just a small group of powerful men.
The other major change is that, despite the increase in formal education (or perhaps because of it), fewer people have skills with much actual economic value. This means that employers can afford to be choosier. It’s easy to fire a writer or a manager for disagreeing with the boss, but a brain surgeon or even a good plumber is has the security that comes from being valuable.
Richard – great point, that there may be legal liability for Yelp. Thanks.
I go out of my way to see news from “both sides.” And there is no question this “bubble” exists.
I googled “Yelp racist”.
The first page of articles cited in order on this topic were:
New York Times
BBC
NPR
Restaurant Business Online
CNN
Washington Post (2)
SF Chronicle
NBC News
There was a discussion recently where the moderator asked 6 friends to Google a certain topic and report what Google returned with a screenshot. They wall got variations and no two were alike. It seems the algorithm returns what you “want” or have interest in seeing. Draw your conclusions.
Google may return what I “want” or have interest in seeing, but I hope you aren’t implying they created what I have interest in seeing.
The core premise of this post is wrong. Major news outlets all reported on this. Does anyone here “want” or have interest in seeing that?
But did they see the part about antifa targeting businesses for destruction, including a black-owned business? That is what Arnold was referring to.
It is difficult to accept a story this small and specific as evidence of asymmetric news bubbles or ignoring Antifa.
You googled “Yelp racist” and you still didn’t turn up the story Professor Kling cited raising concerns about Yelp’s new feature?
My google turned up roughly the same hit list yours did, and on reviewing each of them, I didn’t see anything raising the concerns posted on the link Professor Kling provided.
Seems like you may have just proved his core premise?
I was not able to easily get to the report of the mob of activists going to confront the owner of the business in Portland.
Using google,
not with
Yelp racist
and just barely, with
Yelp racist portland
which brought me to something by Andy Ngo.
I would certainly say that some of my acquaintances believe that the violence during protests is a serious issue, while others consider the entire issue to be overblown. If you are busy with life and just listen to NPR (for example), you may think that the protests are “mostly peaceful.”
An excitable friend in Chicagoland is the only reason I know much about the situation there.
No I am saying the algorithm learns what you prefer and gives you more of that. Hence the bubble being created for you depending on what the algorithms determine you prefer.
Sounds like you missed the point. Yes, they provided coverage of Yelp’s decision to label businesses as racist, but they didn’t cover Antifa/BLM rioters violently attacking businesses that were declared racist.
Or maybe you didn’t miss the point and are just being deliberately deceptive?
I don’t think the coverage is that bad. I mean, it could be better, but the acceptable outlet coverage asks a few reasonable questions.
But try some other searches on hot topic and you will get nothing but a “Vox Explainer” wall of rationalization and fabrication.
There are certainly lots of people who get their news solely from talk radio and Fox News, and maybe sometimes the local tv news.
I know they see it because I’ve got lefty friends in a slack Channel, friends going back to high school in the 90s, and it tends to go something like this: “I see your Peripheral Conservative Media Bubble story about a small business and raise you a far right attempt to kidnap a governor!”
Sounds like a bigger deal right?
Which is in itself a pretty funny phenomenon, insofar as the arrested conspirators seem to have an ideology, or vague gestures towards one, that largely agrees with Theodore Kaczynski. Ted has a pretty different set of ideas than anti-racist demonstrators, but doesn’t map well to the political right in any country.
It would sound like a bigger deal, but unfortunately, it seems to be yet another instance in a long line of made-for-media, quasi-entrapment terrorism cases (of whatever variety, right, left, jihadist, communist, even cattle-grazers) in which for PR and existence-justification reasons, the FBI arranges to have informants and agents bootstrap the legal minimum requirements for a conspiracy among a group of harmlessly incompetent, suggestible idiot blowhards. Top men on the case keeping us safe, it is not.
The reality is that (1) these threats are extremely rare, and (2) law enforcement is utterly terrible at detecting and preventing them beforehand without a man on the inside, and even then, without that man repeatedly suggesting the criminal activity and setting up the mock transactions to get fake illegal weapons.
A legal rule in which confidential informants and agents are not allowed to suggest anything or offer to make any deals happen and are only there for passive surveillance (wearing a wire, planting a bug, identifying participants) would make nearly 100% of these inside-joke preventative success stories disappear.
fwiw
Pew surveys support the asymmetric bubble hypothesis:
“While Americans across the political spectrum have been getting information about key election-related storylines, their knowledge and opinions about these issues – as well as the candidates themselves – differ strikingly based on their party affiliation and key news sources, according to the new survey, conducted Aug. 31-Sept. 7, 2020, as part of the Center’s American News Pathways project.”
https://www.journalism.org/2020/09/16/political-divides-conspiracy-theories-and-divergent-news-sources-heading-into-2020-election/
Other related supportive Pew Research include: “A new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. adults’ Twitter behaviors finds that Democrats and Republicans have notable differences in how they use the site – from how often they tweet to the accounts they follow or mention in their own posts.”
YouTube news might be an exception with Pew finding:
“An examination of the most popular YouTube news channels shows that the vast majority do not clearly state a political ideology on their channel page – regardless of whether the contents of their videos take an ideological slant. Only 12% of popular YouTube news channels explicitly include language about their ideology in the channel description, with slightly more identifying as right-leaning (8%) than left-leaning (4%). Independent news channels, however, are somewhat more likely than news organization channels to describe themselves in partisan terms and are more likely to say they lean right.”
If you are on the right you can not but hear the left’s talking points and positions. If you are center-left you not only do not see the right’s concerns but actively reject anything the right says. “That is just a Fox talking point” or “I did not see that in the NYT” to quote my 90 year old mother who never voted for a non Democrat in her life. She complains when her non leftist friends mention anything not in the NYT.
Even mainstream media with a conservative bent is getting censored now. The NY Post article about Hunter Biden is censored on Twitter and Facebook.
You think that’s bad, Twitter suspended a Bret Weinstein account with his totally harmless and unobjectionable “Unity 2020” effort.
#Repeal230Now
We need two separate countries.
I’m at political odds with virtually my entire family and friends.
I’d be willing to vouch for them if that want to visit me on short-term visas.
If only there was a clear geographical seperation on which we could separate.
I considered moving to Carroll County, MD before we bought our house. As trump and GOP as you could get. As white as you could get. They have closed public schools because of “the pandemic”. The same people are in charge everywhere, no matter how anti-woke you locality is. The people in the admin are woke.
https://twitter.com/charlesmurray/status/1316333881411461121
Charles wrote a book about this and begged some billionaires for money to fight it, but no luck with results.
I work at NASA in Maryland. They’ve gone woke. Can’t get onsite to build an instrument but we can have endless opportunities to discuss anti-racism. Already got in a little trouble expressing some non-woke views. Told I can’t challenge the customer. I’m a contractor.
The speed at which things have gone south is extraordinary. I love my family and like my friends but they are political morons. They also don’t like being told that particularly by a Trump supporter. I see Trump as the only person with the power and the understanding to hold things back. If he loses, I don’t know what the retreat will be like. If he wins, no prisoners. Water cannons as the minimum.
The way the media is actively suppressing the recent “Hunter Biden forgotten laptop in a repair shop” story is amazing.
I am only saddened by Hunter Biden’s personal life, and it is none of my business anyway.
But the contents of the laptop indicate a clear and obvious conflict of interest, engaged in by his Hunter’s father and denied until this point.
This is a legitimate, and should be a prominent, news story.