What Counts as Plagiarism? Harvard President's Resignation Sparks Debate 119
Harvard University President Claudine Gay resigned earlier this month over plagiarism claims, sparking an online debate over academic copying. While many say original writing remains essential, some researchers argue for more flexibility, as long as sources are clear. The affair has prompted vows of plagiarism reviews targeting faculty, including from billionaire Bill Ackman, whose wife faced similar allegations at MIT. Nature: Few would argue with the US government's definition, which calls plagiarism "the appropriation of another person's ideas, processes, results or words without giving appropriate credit." But that seems to be where the agreement ends. Some plagiarism scholars say that Gay clearly copied text without proper attribution. She agreed to issue several corrections to her dissertation and other papers before resigning last week. For some, this was necessary to preserve public trust in science. "We all make the occasional mistake, but once it was shown that there were more than a few problems with her research, I think it was essential that president Gay stepped down," says Naomi Oreskes, a science historian at Harvard.
Others argue that the alleged violations are at most minor omissions. They say that Gay, a political scientist, merely summarized the scientific literature in line with the norms of her field, with no bearing on her own scholarship. "The day the plagiarism allegations broke, the response in the hallway was kind of like, 'Well, I guess we're all plagiarists,'" says Alvin Tillery, a political scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who knew Gay during their time as graduate researchers. These disputes highlight a singular challenge in evaluating plagiarism allegations: the official definition does not differentiate between what some consider the innocuous borrowing of phrases and wholesale theft of ideas and prose. Some academics are now calling for rules to provide clarity.
[...] What happened to Gay has prompted some scientists to question the value of requiring scholars to freshly summarize known facts in the introduction and methods sections of each new paper. In one approach, dubbed 'modular writing,' researchers could sample more liberally from the work of their peers to describe the broader scientific literature, provided that they cite the source. This could particularly benefit those whose first language is not English, theoretical physicist and author Sabine Hossenfelder wrote on the social-media platform X after Gay resigned. "It is entirely unnecessary that we ask more or less everyone to summarize the state of the art of their research area in their own words, over and over again, if minor updates on someone else's text would do," Hossenfelder wrote.
Others argue that the alleged violations are at most minor omissions. They say that Gay, a political scientist, merely summarized the scientific literature in line with the norms of her field, with no bearing on her own scholarship. "The day the plagiarism allegations broke, the response in the hallway was kind of like, 'Well, I guess we're all plagiarists,'" says Alvin Tillery, a political scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who knew Gay during their time as graduate researchers. These disputes highlight a singular challenge in evaluating plagiarism allegations: the official definition does not differentiate between what some consider the innocuous borrowing of phrases and wholesale theft of ideas and prose. Some academics are now calling for rules to provide clarity.
[...] What happened to Gay has prompted some scientists to question the value of requiring scholars to freshly summarize known facts in the introduction and methods sections of each new paper. In one approach, dubbed 'modular writing,' researchers could sample more liberally from the work of their peers to describe the broader scientific literature, provided that they cite the source. This could particularly benefit those whose first language is not English, theoretical physicist and author Sabine Hossenfelder wrote on the social-media platform X after Gay resigned. "It is entirely unnecessary that we ask more or less everyone to summarize the state of the art of their research area in their own words, over and over again, if minor updates on someone else's text would do," Hossenfelder wrote.
Famous Quotes (Score:1)
"You miss all of the shots you don't take."
-Wayne Gretsky
-Michael Scott
-Claudine Gay
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-Simo Hayha?
Re:Famous Quotes (Score:4, Funny)
- Lee Harvey Oswald?
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Inevitability (Score:2)
There are only so many words with so many meanings. Will it not eventually happen by simple chance that two people choose to describe the same topic with the same words, without ever knowing what the other said?
Re:Inevitability (Score:4, Informative)
No. For more than a trivial amount of words, there is no chance of this happening.
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Calculus is a great example of what you questioned us on. We know the two men had similar conclusion with similar math proofs. But even then it is clear that the ideas were derived(pun intended) separately, because while the result was the same, how they got there was not exactly the same.
Such advances are RARE.
The chances two people create the exact same paragraph, EXACTLY is VERY unlikely.
That being said, my daughter, when she was in 7th grade was accused of plagiarism by one of her teachers because her
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So, I take a careful look before accusing one of illicit copying. Gay is not ignorant and therefore it is unreasonable that it was repeatedly made mistake. If it was reasonable excuse, she is incompetent. Those two choices are the real problem here. She did it on purpose or she is incompetent. Either way is a big problem. I don't care which was it falls, as I have not claimed that she plagiarized, only that is a reasonable version. The alternative is not a better choice, but still is viable.
What would you c
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Gay is not ignorant and therefore it is unreasonable that it was repeatedly made mistake. If it was reasonable excuse, she is incompetent.
I don't care if it was deliberate or not. The result should be the same however.
We ought to stop allowing incompetence as an excuse, when the results are the same.
Either outcome results are similar or the same, she isn't the excellence that school deserves.
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So, I take a careful look before accusing one of illicit copying. Gay is not ignorant and therefore it is unreasonable that it was repeatedly made mistake. If it was reasonable excuse, she is incompetent. Those two choices are the real problem here. She did it on purpose or she is incompetent. Either way is a big problem. I don't care which was it falls, as I have not claimed that she plagiarized, only that is a reasonable version. The alternative is not a better choice, but still is viable.
What would you call it when entire paragraphs are lifted [businessinsider.com] from one source and used in your own without attribution?
Just a quick note that the article we're discussing is about Claudine Gay, but the link you give is about accusations against Neri Oxman.
The link does mention Gay, but the "plagiarism" charge there was for failing to use quotation marks, not for failing to cite the authors ("Gay was found to have lifted passages from other academics' work without using quotation marks while citing the authors.")
Re:Inevitability (Score:5, Informative)
("Gay was found to have lifted passages from other academics' work without using quotation marks while citing the authors.")
That's the tell that it was a political hitjob or revenge for offending his wife and not about good faith academic rigor or anything.
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Re: Inevitability (Score:1)
Interesting. I looked it over myself and it looks like she gave proper attribution as is required, but didn't surround the excerpts with quotation marks as is required. But more importantly, how specifically does this atone for Claudine Gay's missteps? Or is this just whataboutism?
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Considering Bill Ackman's role in this whole fiasco to me it's just funny. Honestly, I am looking forward to the cultural shitshow this is gonna turn up, it's the Spiderman pointing at himself meme, everybody's been plagiarizing everyone else the entire time. .
I personally don't care if Gay got sacked, she probably deserved it for her testimony alone (there's a way you can make the argument she's making but she did a more than piss poor job at expressing it though and that's a big stage to flub on).
Gay des
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Re: Inevitability (Score:2)
Harvard isn't anything special beyond name recognition. Been that way for a very long time. Employers have gotten wise to that over the last decade.
https://www.inc.com/larry-kim/... [inc.com]
Shit, I myself make a LOT more than the typical Harvard grad with not much more than community college education.
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Thanks for confirming this whole thing is totally about integrity and definitely certainly not about some sort of academic vengeance fantasy.
This post has confirmed my original point, it's funny. It's funnier that people are this worked up on both sides of it.
Won't somebody pleeeeeease think of the billionaires and Harvard grads
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Stackoverflow
I'd call it stack overflow.
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Given MIT policy on wiki use for definitions, or rather lack thereof in 2009, not plagiarism. As for the actual stuff that was cited without quotation marks but had attribution in line, it was entirely in line with MIT citation formatting circa 2009. Had the complete retards at BI taken two seconds to do their own research on the matter, they would have known this.
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Wow you're almost, but not quite, as retarded as the people at BI. The comment I was responding to was regarding the poorly researched Business Insider hatchet job on Oxman, Ackman's wife who most definitely went to MIT.
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It's happened a few times in physics too.
The original quantum theory was first written down by Hiesenburg, and very shortly after and independently by Schrondinger. They both solve the same problem and give the same results, but they each go about it very differently (matrix mechanics vs. wave mechanics).
The nobel prize for quantum electrodynamics was split three ways because three people pretty much came up with it independently. They all expressed their ideas differently, but they we're all basically equi
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She had something like 8-10 academic papers and zero books, with at least 5 plagiarized passages.
That's not an accident. The DEI based excuse making is amazing and shameful.
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Rules about how much you can copy with credit... (Score:2)
aren't rules about plagiarism.
Absolutely copying chunks that aren't your actual research and just describe the current state should be copyable with attribution.
And I don't know what English as a first language has to do with this -- you don't need to speak English well to know you can't copy without attribution.
And obviously you should be allowed to have a ghost grammar corrector for your papers - this isn't about the scientist's writing style, it's about communication of science.
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No. Just attribute them. It's not that hard. We have quotation marks and various other means of identifying copied text for exactly that reason.
I don't know what standards are like in polical science, but I was taught starting in elementary school and consistently right through grad school that if you're going to use someone else's words verbatim you quote it, otherwise it's plagiarism.
Re: Rules about how much you can copy with credit. (Score:1)
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Not including quotation marks is trying to pass someone else's work off as your own. You take someone's words that you like and you include them, verbatim, in your work. Yeah maybe you stick in a reference but the reader understands a non-quoted passage with a reference as being *your words* supported by someone else. You then get quoted, with the quote attributed to you, etc.
Some of the examples of what the ex-Harvard president is accused of are sloppy paraphrasing. That is less of a problem, although stil
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Where matters too. The Literature Review is by definition what other people think. The important thing is attribution.
Sneaking in other people's thoughts as your own in the methods and conclusions is much more serious.
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The correct term for what you're trying to say is copy editor [wikipedia.org] One of a copy editor's jobs is to correct awkward or imprecise usages such as that.
Legal vs. Ethics (Score:4, Insightful)
Plagiarism is publishing someone else's work as if it were your own.
It is a well understood principle writers and academics have lived by for centuries. It does not need to be redefined or re-examined.
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Plagiarism is publishing someone else's work as if it were your own.
It is a well understood principle writers and academics have lived by for centuries. It does not need to be redefined or re-examined.
It certainly does need to be redefined, or at least more clearly defined if the current definition is as you say it is. "Plagiarism is publishing someone else's work as if it were your own." What does "work" mean in that sentence? Does it mean exact words? The results of research studies? Ideas? And what exactly constitutes an "idea"? What is the exact test to determine if two ideas are the same or not? If two people independently come up with the same idea (and this happens all the time) is this pl
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Any academic paper will be filled with citations, it's basically a big shout-out to your colleagues and any linking to any previous seminal works gives legitimacy that you're researching the existing literature and building on decades of knowledge and not simply making stuff up.
Professors love that shit.
The insinuation here is that Ms Gay didn't follow the conventions of attribution or worse... If that were the case then her supervisor or the university staff did a 'peer review' ought to have been severely
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Indeed it is a matter of legal vs. ethics. Leave legalese to lawyers ... and let ethical people stay far away from it.
When someone is accused of plagiarism in public without clarification, it will be assumed to be plagiarism with intent and not just sloppy academics. It should be an academic principle to always mention intent or lack of it when making an accusation of plagiarism.
makeing an tagging error on attribution should NOT (Score:2)
makeing an tagging error on attribution should NOT count
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Sure, unless it's on purpose. That's not what she did.
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How many errors before it should count?
Ya Don't Say? (Score:3)
They say that Gay, a political scientist , merely summarized the scientific literature in line with the norms of her field, with no bearing on her own scholarship. "The day the plagiarism allegations broke, the response in the hallway was kind of like, 'Well, I guess we're all plagiarists,'" says Alvin Tillery, a political scientist ...
(emphasis mine)
Colour me shocked.
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They say that Gay, a political scientist, merely summarized the scientific literature in line with the norms of her field, with no bearing on her own scholarship. "The day the plagiarism allegations broke, the response in the hallway was kind of like, 'Well, I guess we're all plagiarists,'" says Alvin Tillery, a political scientist ...
(emphasis mine)
Colour me shocked.
He just literally told you not to be, Dr. Awareness.
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He just literally told you not to be, Dr. Awareness.
And apparently sarcasm is lost on you, Dr. Oblivious.
Plagiarism taken very seriously in academia (Score:2)
If that was a concern, lifting entire paragraph in *
accused of self plagiarism? so you are not allowed (Score:2)
accused of self plagiarism? so you are not allowed to use your own work?
why is school so ass backwards at times?
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accused of self plagiarism? so you are not allowed to use your own work?
You are allowed to use your own previously published work in exactly the same way you can use others' published works: with proper citations and quotation marks.
for codeing useing the same base is common and ver (Score:2)
for coding useing the same base is common and very times are you going to start from nothing.
Re: accused of self plagiarism? so you are not all (Score:2)
No. It is recommended for boosting your references, but it is fucking retarded and frowned upon in good circles
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It isn't this hard (Score:2)
You def know it when you see it (Score:5, Interesting)
Like the examples from Claudine Gay's work that are unattributed carbon copies from other's work.
Image examples here: https://freebeacon.com/campus/... [freebeacon.com]
This case does not merit major academic institutional soul-searching* or legal hairsplitting. A student getting caught doing these things would at least get an F, probably get sent to the Honor Court, and who knows, maybe even expelled.
*Well, maybe soul-searching could be merited if it takes forms like "how did we ever put a person like this in charge?", "are many of our disciplines complete jokes lacking any form of rigor or integrity?", etc?
Self plagirism (Score:1)
Plagiarism isn't the issue (Score:4, Interesting)
She was fired because she embarrassed the institution by getting caught protecting people calling for genocide against Jews.
The accusation of plagiarism is just one of the things thrown at her to force her to leave quietly, and an excuse she can use to avoid mention of the antisemitism. She had enemies waiting to oust her and no friends to protect her.
It's all internal political bullshit.
In the end, the racist got the boot. It may or may not lead to policy changes, or she may be used as a convenient scapegoat with no actual changes made. If you think it was actually about plagiarism, I have a bridge to sell you.
Re:Plagiarism isn't the issue (Score:5, Interesting)
She had enemies waiting to oust her and no friends to protect her.
The board of Harvard unanimously voted support for her after the initial allegations.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/12... [cnn.com]
She's still a tenured professor, and she's going to make millions writing a book and giving talks about she was ousted from her position because of racism. She's a celebrity to the academic elite.
In the end, the racist got the boot.
One did. All of the Harvard board of directors that supported her statements are just fine.
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Yes, but they weren't willing to go the distance.
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"She was fired because she embarrassed the institution by getting caught protecting people calling for genocide against Jews."
In order for this to be true, there would need to have been actual cases of American college students calling for "death to Jews", which there never was. "From the river to the sea" and the word "intifada" do not mean genocide. Zionists have to manufacture crises to distract from their favorite ethnostate's murder spree of over 10,000 children in the last three months.
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> "From the river to the sea" and the word "intifada" do not mean genocide.
Intifada means 'uprising' if I recall correctly, though it is usually used in support of terrorist acts rather than political action or protest.
But "from the river to the sea" is absolutely code for "make sure every Jew in the area is dead". It is explicitly a call for conquering Israel and killing all the Jews within its borders.
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It has been a common protest phrase for decades without that meaning, and its detractors typically frame all criticism of Israel as antisemitic. But let's pretend it actually did actually mean genocide: what is more impactful, the studenrs chanting it, or the defense ministers and PM of Israel who have consistently stated the intent (now being carried out) to exterminate all Palestinians, even comparing them to Amalek? Or the American MIC who will enable them indefinitely?
The primary claims of harassment pu
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The problem is not what the students might or might not have been saying. The problem is that under questioning on whether calling for genocide of the Jews would break a code of conduct for the students her reply was it would depend on the context. That flabbergasted people, because I can't think of any context that calling for genocide, could be OK.
I am quite sure if she had been asked if calling for the genocide of Blacks, or Trans or was acceptable she would have immediately replied no. However, she is
Re: Plagiarism isn't the issue (Score:2)
She was fired because she embarrassed the institution by getting caught protecting people calling for genocide against Jews.
For flexible definitions of calling for genocide against Jews. Using the same bar, this is what Trump did with Charlottesville's Unite the Right rally. A sitting U.S. President.
Protecting actual neo-Nazis, not students upset with Israel. People on the right seem to have a loose definition of antisemitism all of a sudden, funny huh?
Frankly I'm a little tired of right wingers arguing one side of the tolerance paradox with neonazis chanting Jews will not replace us, for example, and another end when Harvard st
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just how weak their argument against her
Here you go:
At issue was a line of questioning that asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate the universities’ code of conduct. At the hearing, Gay said it depended on the context
It's pretty simple. She failed to denounce genocide against Jews. I wouldn't call that weak, but okay.
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"Have you stopped beating your wife, please answer yes or no"
The issue isn't plagiarism (Score:3, Insightful)
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This entire story was only incidentally about plagiarism. The argument is over whether DEI is logically consistent and has value. The testimony showed that it's not logically consistent because they wouldn't say that someone on campus calling for genocide of Jewish people violated the rules of the university, but it was pointed out that a student can get pulled in to have a chat with the DEI office if a black student complained about a microaggression.
The genocide thing was more an issue of framing. Genocide isn't just mass killing, it's forced deportation, kidnapping children, forced cultural assimilation. Imagine a couple of students talking about the conflict and one of them saying "well why not just deport all the Israeli's to some empty Islands in the South Pacific?" It's a dumb idea, but the kind of dumb idea that can lead to an exchange when they learn something. It's not really something you want someone disciplined over and it's one reason you'
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Changed meanings (Score:3)
First, what counts as plagiarism is whatever the institution decides and the employee agreed to.
But I think Harvard's rule is so strict, when it comes to non-fiction, that I think it slows down science. A fact should be allowed to be repeated verbatim, because attempts to paraphrase said fact inevitably change its meaning.
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Why even ask this? Use Harvard's standards. (Score:2)
There is only one reason this question is being asked. The guilty party and their ilk are going to try and "redefine" what plagiarism is to make themselves not guilty.
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There is only one reason this question is being asked. The guilty party and their ilk are going to try and "redefine" what plagiarism is to make themselves not guilty.
They did try. They failed. That's why she resigned. That they even tried shows there is a lot more firings that need to happen before Harvard can be considered to be an elite university again.
Cool cover story, bro (Score:2)
It's really obvious they got rid of her because of her political views not because of her plagiarism. The plagiarism was just a convenient excuse. I think it's pretty clear borrowing some phrases isn't really plagiarism.
I don't think it matters (Score:2)
It's like that old line about give me six lines from anyone and I can hang them. It's always funny to watch when the Free speech warriors use that tactic.
I mean be honest did you even know who this woman was or give a rats ass about anything she'd ever written until you were told to care about it? It's like how 11 peo
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So good if white, bad if black (Score:1)
Claiming Work vs Not Citing Sources (Score:2)
There's a big difference between presenting something as if it were a new original idea that you came up with and presenting something as background material without citing who did come up with it. The former is academic fraud. The latter is at worst sloppy work.
Would people in the target audience believe you were saying you came up with it? That being other academics in the same field reading the journal or attending the conference? If so, you're in big trouble if it turns out it wasn't original, but o
Plagiarism (Score:1)
She copied some verbiage for describing graphs and things like that. Going by the examples I saw online, she didn’t copy any ideas or the main body of work. It’s a nothing burger. If you set the bar for plagiarism at that, a large percent of dissertations would be guilty of it. Notice when they examined the dissertation of her biggest critic, Bill Ackman, here too had similar issues. When you keep reading scientific articles your own way of writing changes too btw.
Note: I agree with her being fi
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Take a cue from copyright law (Score:2)
Has nothing to do with it, just the excuse. (Score:2, Informative)
What counts as plagiarism? (Score:2)
Plagiarism has been more than well defined and und (Score:2)
Plagiarism has been more than well defined and understood For decades if not centuries. Let us not pretend ANYONE would care if Claudine was not who she is in this strange political landscape of today.
Not a single soul would defend her if she was someone else.
10 papers, 50+ plagiarized sections, ZERO books (Score:2)
Just 10 papers, 50+ plagiarized excerpts, and ZERO books. That's 5 plagiarized sections on average, per paper. Can we stop making excuses for this bullshit? She's an anti-Semitic diversity hire with no academic qualifications being paid nearly a million dollars a year to
And from what I've heard from other professors (even black ones), her doctoral dissertation is 'pedestrian' at best, no academic value, certainly nothing that would get any white person a professorship anywhere, much less at Harvard.
But s
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Examples? Be specific.
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She hates whites & Jews.
Go woke Go broke.
That certainly explains what's happening to Twitter.
Re: Wokist woman made Harvard an international jok (Score:2)
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You accidentally slipped an abs() into your calculation of growth
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You mean the social media site that respects free speech and is growing faster than ever?
Yeah, it respects free speech [imgur.com] so long as it doesn't make fun of that pedo guy or investigate [yahoo.com] the rampant anti-semitism on the site.
As for "growing", it's lost 50% of its ad revenue as companies flee the site, and it's lost at least 1 million users [manofmany.com] since the takeover. This doesn't take into account the "value" of the company has plunged 71% [marketwatch.com] and the banks told they wouldn't lose money have already lost at least $2 billion [businessinsider.com].
But keep dreaming. It's almost a certainty the company will either go under in a year
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Good. It's basically a website - why does it need those things?
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I don't think Harvard is going broke over this...
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The democratic process being subverted by the Washington political class to take down a former reality television star ö