84 Nate Silver’s Indigo Blob Fallacy
With Mark Zuckerberg’s latest capitulation to Trump-a hostage video where he vows to end fact checking on Facebook-like clockwork Nate Silver wrote a post. Honestly I didn’t even need to read it to know what it would say-unpredictable Nate is not.
He tried to wind the reader up a little with his framing: “I don’t really trust Zuck/Meta. But..”
But I knew where was going even before reading the “But…”-that he would support it.
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Indeed, we’ve seen a lot of “anti anti Trump” people on both the Far Right and Far Left the last few years and in this same vein I didn’t need to read this article to know that Silver is “anti anti misinformation.” That he for some reason sees the very idea as cracking down on free speech. I guess Xitter parlance misinformation-or disinformation-is good, actually
I mean “do journalism” where? On Facebook? Is that actually journalism? Recently Elon Musk has been declaring that his Xitter is where journalism happens. One change Musk made pretty early when he took over Twitter-turning it into Xitter-was to phase out hyperlinks-he actively doesn’t wantn people to click on links. Part of that may be he doesn’t want people to leave Xitter-sure. But I strongly suspect it’s also part of his larger ideological agenda-he wants people on Xitter to take what they read at face value without trying to, uh, fact check it?
But Silver is one of those Elon loving pundits-another notable example was Noah Smith-probably Yglesias?-who celebrated when Musk took over Twitter as being salutary for “free speech.”
He wrote a long post welcoming Musk’s purchase as a way to break up the wascally “Indigo Blob.”
(1) Twitter, Elon and the Indigo Blob – by Nate Silver
Mark Zuckerberg calls for the “repopulation” of the “cultural elite class” in Joe Rogan interview