Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#251

Post by pcthrowaway » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 5:34 PM UTC

dev_head_up wrote: post #88

cheath wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In short, because they think you'd engage less with Scott Adams' content. Filter bubbles are an algorithmic attempt to give you the content that you want the most. For example, Twitter might have identified at some level that you like and retweet sports related content more often than political content. Or even further, that you like left-leaning content more than right. So, they'll do everything they can to serve yo…

I've seen that and I'm sorry, but I really don't accept your explanation. I've never retweeted/liked/replied or tweeted, ever. I'm a passive consumer. I don't follow political accounts, or search out political views there. If anything, I reckon I was clicking a lot on his blog links via tweets, so (presumably) he should have been showing up more... rather than not at all. I don't mean to sound like I'm holding you ac…

Just a thought, but even of clicking his blog links means you're engaging more, perhaps twitter is guiding their users to engagement in the form of scrolling through their feeds, since that's what twitter makes their money from. Thinking about it that way, maybe it makes sense to filter out tweets that are more likely to take you away from the site

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#252

Post by iamnothere » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 5:34 PM UTC

corey_moncure wrote: post #191

matt4077 wrote: post #71

This may serve as an example of a lot of the things wrong in society. First, as a show of how good faith has broken down. Then, to demonstrate the logical contortions performed by people who are otherwise perfectly capable of critical thinking, but really want to see their mistrust in every institution, or human, be true. This alleged conspiracy would involve (a) some rather rapid negotiations for a sum that wouldn't…

I was in the same camp until I personally witnessed administrative-level collusion to block certain topics on Reddit. I observed the entire event, from the initial breaking story, to its meteoric amplification, and finally to the censorship and aftermath. I didn't believe it was possible, or that such things were happening, until I saw it happen for myself. Since then, I have seen it happen many times on various plat…

I don't see why this comment was killed. The comment does seem to be relevant to the broader discussion, and it isn't aggressive or hostile in tone. I don't fully agree with all parts of it, but it should be allowed to stand in the conversation.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#253

Post by bordercases » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 5:39 PM UTC

danso wrote: post #239

d23 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" (leav…

> 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.

What you and I both know of Twitter's behavior is unlikely to be shared knowledge between us, unless it's been your job to follow the company for awhile in which case I would have to defer to you. But I still expect you to tell me what it is we should both know.

The Twitter I know is happy to shill for political reasons, that puts the possibility of money being given for damage control at corporate as being plausible to me, since there is more money in corporate than politics and Twitter itself is profit-driven with a shit business model. The Twitter you know is not? We could both be wrong. Without clarifying what you mean by "what we know" I wouldn't be so trigger happy with the rhetoric just yet.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#254

Post by ythn » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 5:41 PM UTC

drakonandor wrote: post #108

ythn wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Still deserved, also for the comments they made afterwards. Maybe, maybe not. We don't have all the facts yet. We still don't even know the identity of the victim - only hearsay from other passengers. This type of viral emotional response makes me weary. I see it happen so often - Michael Brown, Ahmed Mohammed, TSA Cancer Girl, etc. The lynch mob gets bloodlust and calls for complete destruction of the alleged perp…

Except we have tons of video, witness statements, responses from UA PR, and the CEO doing the old public "very sorry!, trying to contact the victim now and make ammends"/private "this guy is immature and beligerant!" positions.

So if it's United's fault, remind me again why the security guard likely lost his career over this?

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#255

Post by jerf » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 5:42 PM UTC

z4chj wrote: post #136

zeteo wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we should expect more, the same way we'd expect food producers to not poison us and truck operators to not run us over. Twitter has become a major platform for public discourse (including elections) and needs to at least have some transparency into their deletion and shadowbanning decisions.

That comes from government regulation. The FDA keeps your food from poisoning you. As of now, there is no structure in place forcing twitter to keep the spread of information alive and well.

I'd also point out that structurally, food companies are strongly disincentivized to quickly kill their customers, as they'd like to sell you something tomorrow, too. (Slowly killing their customers is a potential strategy, though anyone who wishes to dance on capitalism's grave with that has a lot of very pointy questions to answer about the government's involvement with the way the food industry may be slowly killing us.)

Twitter is mostly incentivized to keep eyeballs on their site no matter what. If that means using highly sophisticated machine learning algorithms to lock people in a soft, warm filter bubble in which they are eternally flattered for their opinions and never encounter a reason to leave, so be it.

In fact arguably Silicon Valley's biggest social-media challenge they are facing right now is that the world is trying to force them to recognize that not everybody wants to be locked in the same bubble that a Silicon Valley liberal does, a lesson that they are still trying to resist. It would probably be worth billions for Facebook and Twitter to give up on that dream and instead help people into their own custom soft warm filter bubble. If they don't do it, somebody else will.

I'm not celebrating this, simply observing that every month the money gradient Facebook, Twitter, and so on are facing to head down this road is going to get steeper.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#256

Post by artursapek » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 5:43 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #223

artursapek wrote: post #149

> Do you think rich people on their own jets get TSA patdowns the same way? No. What we are creating is a state of freedom for the rich, and compliant abuse for the majority of the citizens. Rich people aren't going to hijack their own jet and kill themselves in the name of Allah.

I've told you before that if you returned to religious flamewar on HN we would ban you. I'm going to call this one borderline and not ban you for it, but you need to up your game if you want to keep commenting on HN. That means not only dropping the religious slurs, but also making your comments more civil and substantive in general. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14088238 and ma…

Can you define "flamewar", so I can avoid treading this line? I like HN a lot but you seem to be very sensitive so I'd like to not get banned. He brought up 9/11 and asked what the difference is, and I told him. You seem to be miserably insistent on deleting even the most slightly negative mention of Islam (again, I wasn't even the one who brought up 9/11).

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#257

Post by tunap » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 5:43 PM UTC

chc wrote: post #114

chambo622 wrote: post #100

Twitter had a moment filled with negative tweets about United at the top of its curated Moments tab for the entire day yesterday. Even now I see a trending hashtag and moments about the incident. If their goal was to suppress this story, they couldn't have done a worse job. These accusations sound like paranoia to me.

Yeah, looking over my timeline for yesterday, there are still tons of angry tweets about the incident. This article kind of appears to be jumping to conclusions.

Perhaps they are targeting astroturfing campaign(s).

r/TodayILearned has at least 6 TIL United horror stories ATM.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#258

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 5:44 PM UTC

phil21 wrote: post #237

jacquesm wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bo…

In the age of social media 'must fly' company tickets are likely to become a thing of the past. As is offering minimum compensation and if not accepted forcibly 'volunteering' a couple of passengers. Spectacles like this are the last thing any public facing company can get away with and if they got away with it in the past it was only because there weren't any easy avenues for people to hold them accountable.

United seems to be on a roll lately.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#259

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 5:44 PM UTC

ythn wrote: post #254

drakonandor wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we have tons of video, witness statements, responses from UA PR, and the CEO doing the old public "very sorry!, trying to contact the victim now and make ammends"/private "this guy is immature and beligerant!" positions.

So if it's United's fault, remind me again why the security guard likely lost his career over this?

Fault isn't exclusive; United could have acted wrongly in calling security (making it United's fault on one level) and security personnel could have acted wrongly once called (making it their fault, as well.) Heck, both of those could be true even with the passenger's actions at some stage also being wrong.

The idea that, in any situation that goes badly, exactly one actor must be at fault and all others blameless is distressingly common, but clearly wrong.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#260

Post by tylerjd » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 5:45 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #165

maxerickson wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure it wasn't also overbooked? They pulled passengers to fly crew, but that doesn't mean it wasn't overbooked.

They claimed it was overbooked but that has not been substantiated with any evidence other than the company making that claim and using it to pre-empt those passengers in favor of their dead-headers. The proof that they are bullshitting is that the passengers were already on board when suddenly the plane was declared overbooked. Which to me sounds like UA using an excuse to bump passengers off a flight they are alrea…

That's exactly what they did. Someone up the chain made a mistake. Other airlines board must-ride passengers (i.e. crew deadheading to the next destination) before passengers, but this did not happen.

Due to FAA regulations, the movement and sleep requirements of crew is enforced big time. In this case, they had a higher priority than a full-fare passenger (Must Ride), and even though it's morally wrong, it is well within the airline's right to remove any passenger at any time for any reason.