According to the New York Times, Twitter is going to “mark” abusive political messages. This is a very good news, as ISPs can be finally immune to the OTT and Platform “we’re just neutral” lie.
After about 20 years, like the proverbial Chinaman on the river’s bank, I’ve finally witnessed the end of an unsustainable claim that affected for very longtime ISPs: the OTTs and Platforms’ position about their “neutrality” in relationship to the behaviour of their users.
This has always be – at very least – grossly misleading a statement that let lawmakers into regulating ISPs as if they where OTT, while they are not. Facebook decided to actively close fake politically oriented account, and now with Twitter self-acknowledgement of its power/duty to actively interfere with users’ activity, the difference between ISPs and OTT should be finally clear.
Unfortunately, I fear that the very same notion of “OTT” has lost its meaning, therefore the regulatory game should start again from the very beginning. Hopefully, now, without waiting another 20 years or so…
?I use to transcribe the lessons of my courses by having Google Docs listen at the recordings and transcribe it right into a text file.
While transcribing a lesson on the Italian terrorism, I made a reference to ? (Toni Negri), the academic who has been accused of providing ideological support to the left wing revolutionary groups.
Well, to my surprise, when I checked the transcript, I noticed that the word “Negri” has been written “N***”.
At a first glance I thought that it was just a software error, but then I understood: “Negri” is the Italian for “Nigger”, a word that in the English language is never neither written nor pronounced, being referred to as “the “n” word”.
As Google failed to understand that “Negri” was a family name, it just fell back on the political correctness and edited in real time the “n word”.
This experience shows that Google voice recognition service is not neutral.
Forewarned, is forearmed…