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Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

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Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#231

Post by chc »

dopamean wrote: post #200
bshimmin wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm not actually bad at spelling, it was a reference to http://www.snopes.com/trump-sends-unpresidented-tweet/ - but I should probably know by now that cheap one-liners don't go down well on HackerNews...)

People here can be rather humorless.

Wanting a place where every thread isn't derailed by low-effort jokes doesn't mean you're humorless. I mean, I like chocolate, but I don't want to only eat chocolate, and I'd be upset to find my computer screen smeared with chocolate.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#232

Post by JackFr »

zeteo wrote: post #49
bitL wrote: post #22

Wonderful, so Twitter is now a tool for corporate propaganda, Google is providing Censorship-as-a-Service API, Facebook is removing links classified as "Fake News(tm)", Reddit is deleting whatever mods don't agree with etc. Seems like we are going full steam into a dystopian society. I think I should start reading Solzhenitsyn to prepare for what is coming...

Imagine if the local water or electric monopoly could vary your service by how much they liked your views. It's time for some antitrust regulation of the big tech companies. If you control a platform then you have an obligation to be fair to the general public.

The water and electric companies are regulated as public utilities largely because they are considered natural monopolies -- that is there is typically only one water or electricity distribution infrastructure for a given community.

Twitter is not a natural monopoly, not a monopoly, and it's not even clear that it will remain the incumbent leading platform.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#233

Post by danso »

bordercases wrote: post #224
danso wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is still an allegation. Nothing has been proven beyond your assertion.

You could settle this by experiment easily if we're trying to prove this to you: go ahead and try posting one, in similar vein to the others. There'd be a false-negative rate if you do it too late so I would try it now.

I've been posting negative-sentiment tweets about United since yesterday. If we do accept the premise that Twitter would do something like this, we should also assume that they'd be selective in which tweets they've deleted, such as tweets that aren't likely to be noticed when gone.

There are too many independent variables and unknowns for there to be an easy experiment. In any case, I'd be happy for other kinds of evidence. If Twitter is silencing tweets about United, is it part of a corporate ad package, in which case, other folks would've heard about this kind of deal for other companies?

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#234

Post by d23 »

danso wrote: post #233
bordercases wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could settle this by experiment easily if we're trying to prove this to you: go ahead and try posting one, in similar vein to the others. There'd be a false-negative rate if you do it too late so I would try it now.

I've been posting negative-sentiment tweets about United since yesterday. If we do accept the premise that Twitter would do something like this, we should also assume that they'd be selective in which tweets they've deleted, such as tweets that aren't likely to be noticed when gone. There are too many independent variables and unknowns for there to be an easy experiment. In any case, I'd be happy for other kinds of e…

Of all tweets to delete, why would they choose ones that aren't likely to be seen anyway?

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#235

Post by JackFr »

Lambdanaut wrote: post #194
root_axis wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seems like we are going full steam into a dystopian society Gonna have to roll my eyes pretty hard at this. These are privately owned servers, they can delete whatever content they want off of them, if you don't like it, you're totally free to host your own server and content.

> if you don't like it, you're totally free to host your own server and content. You're obviously still seeing the world through this fanciful lens of Mom And Pop corporate libertarianism. But there's more to that story. The more power you pour into Mom and Pop, the less they resemble their usual run-of-the-mill town grocer, and the more they become The Town itself in their own right. Corporations are graduating from…

> Corporations are graduating from companies and becoming as powerful or more powerful than many nations.

Charge first leveled against the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the 17th century. Of course when push came to shove, they were nationalized by the government. But the trope has far outlasted any of the companies its been pointed at.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#237

Post by phil21 »

jacquesm wrote: post #173
maxerickson wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure I agree it is just a claim. But they overbook most flights, so it isn't really hard to believe. They could have paid some other passengers already to not board, prior to deciding that they wanted to fly the crew and needing to pull more passengers. That leaves the overbooking claim as misdirection, which isn't any better than a lie that they were overbooked, but it's a different situation. (sorry about the edit…

Overbooking does not include non-paying passengers that were not confirmed before the flight. Those passengers had confirmed seats and boarding passes and were in fact already on the plane (as was their luggage). In my experience - which is limited, but I've flown quite a bit over the years - overbooking always involved other paying passengers, never crew.

There are many mechanisms for crew (and just airline employees in general - think mechanics on an emergency call-out to a remote airfield) to pre-empt paying passengers.

This case was exceptional in that those crew (presumably) showed up to the gate after boarding, but I've watched a set of mechanics walk up to a gate just as it was boarding with "must fly" company tickets and some of the last folks who had yet to board got denied.

I don't think there is a significant difference in calling this flight overbooked due to the 4 extra seats needed were on company tickets - it just typically happens behind the scenes 99% of the time and is invisible unless you're specifically watching for it.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#238

Post by Dylan16807 »

root_axis wrote: post #193
dilap wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, none of those networks were anywhere near as influential as Twitter is now. Many reporters basically live on Twitter; it's at the center our media world. I don't believe in the idea of "entitled to" or not "entitled to" as absolute moral truths. We come up with a set of rules as a society and entitlements come from those rules. It's perfectly reasonable to imagine various combinations of rules and try to guess w…

> Nah, none of those networks were anywhere near as influential as Twitter is now. There are also many more people online now than ever before, but nothing fundamental has changed. > Many reporters basically live on Twitter; it's at the center our media world. You mean they "use" twitter? So what? Real journalists are outside chasing down stories in the real world, not retweeting crap on twitter as literally anyone i…

> Real journalists are outside chasing down stories in the real world

You're never seen a breaking news story come out through twitter in a way that's not possible without instant social media?

> I am not arguing anything even remotely close to this. I don't think private companies should be able to break the law, for example.

Missing the point. This is a discussion about theoretically changing those laws.

> nobody needs or is forced to use twitter

I mean, nobody needs newspapers either. A lot of unnecessary things are very important.

> I'm sorry but this is totally absurd. Twitter does not have the power to levy taxes or a standing army or literally any influence or authority over your life at all beyond what you give it.

Look at walmart. They have half a trillion dollars of money flowing through them. In terms of GDP they would be the ~25th largest country in the world. You think that money doesn't have ridiculous amounts of power just because they don't have a standing army?

> At most you should be entitled to your money back

Imagine for a second that twitter grew to become as important as an ISP. Let's say 90% of the alexa top 10000 required a twitter login to use. Or getting cell phone coverage from a national company required a twitter login. Would you still say they're entitled to discriminate? Is there any threshold of impact on people's lives where you change your mind?

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#239

Post by danso »

d23 wrote: post #234
danso wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been posting negative-sentiment tweets about United since yesterday. If we do accept the premise that Twitter would do something like this, we should also assume that they'd be selective in which tweets they've deleted, such as tweets that aren't likely to be noticed when gone. There are too many independent variables and unknowns for there to be an easy experiment. In any case, I'd be happy for other kinds of e…

Of all tweets to delete, why would they choose ones that aren't likely to be seen anyway?

The premise is so unlikely (given what we know of Twitter's past behavior) that if we accept it, we have to accept motives that are beyond our understanding. That said, it's hard to conceptualize even just the metric that they might be optimizing for.

I mean, randomly pruning negative sentiment tweets for a given topic might allow Twitter to tell United, "Hey, we removed 12,000 negative tweets about your brand" (leaving out the fact that there are 12,000,000 negative United tweets total). Or maybe by removing these random tweets, Twitter reduces the overall spread and diversity of this negative sentiment, as many people are content to just retweet what the most popular Twitter users have said about United. But...what would that fix? Twitter already has algorithms in place that make it hard for you to see things either outside of your own filter bubble or otherwise not popular content.

For example, it's well known that many bots are triggered to auto-reply to Trump tweets, as the space devoted to tweet replies are seen as prime advertising space [0]. But I never see those merch-selling bots. The top replies I see to Trump tweets are either from my network, or are replies from popular (usually political) accounts. I have to dig very far to find those random bot replies.

For me, a major argument against Twitter deleting tweets is that it has many other effective ways to suppress content that would be virtually undetectable without wide-scale analysis of their data.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/12/weird...

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#240

Post by yongjik »

thescriptkiddie wrote: post #227
542458 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not act like this is some massive conspiracy. It's one /r/videos thread was deleted because it broke the sub's rules. There were literally dozens of other /r/videos posts on the subject upvoted to /r/all. It's not like the sub's mods were hiding the incident.

The /r/videos rule that was broken is "No Police Brutality/Harassment". They specifically allow videos of police who "have not over-stepped the limits of the law". Let's not pretend that isn't a politically-motivated rule. https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_4_-_no_...

I love[1] how police brutality is so common nowadays that a random subreddit must create rules basically saying "Yeah we've all seen these shit; I know it's bad but please take it elsewhere because otherwise we'll be swamped."

[1] By which I mean I hate it.

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