Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence” • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”

#801

Post by dmoy » Fri, May 29, 2020, 7:17 PM UTC

meheleventyone wrote: post #736

082349872349872 wrote: post #110

One can also check easily-discoverable recent US military policy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23347453 to discover that those who think these things through don't condone "looting ⊃ shooting". Bonaparte was a fan of the "whiff of grape" https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_royaliste_du_13_v... but we all know how that ended.

Isn't it a long standing thing that the US Military use of force rules in warzones are generally more restrictive than the policies for use on their fellow citizens by police back home?

Yes

One obvious example of this is simply ammo. Military bullets don't expand as much as bullets available to cops or civilians. A military bullet is explicitly not allowed to be an expanding hollow point which really messes you up.

There are all sorts of international agreements on not using certain types of things in war - types of bullets are no exception.

Re: Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”

#802

Post by BurritoAlPastor » Fri, May 29, 2020, 7:18 PM UTC

MarkLowenstein wrote: post #790

I'd like to see a system like this: if your tweet is blocked for a reason, all you have to do is find a tweet that's worse than it is for that same reason, that is not already blocked. If the moderators agree then yours is unblocked and the other's is. Maybe disputes with the moderators' decision can be public, so people can see which way the wind blows with the particular social media platform. Lots of people here w…

Leaving aside the logistical and gamification reasons why this would be a bad idea – you’d also be creating an incentive structure for people espousing marginally offensive content to actively seek out and engage with more extreme positions? It would result in radicalization, not moderation, even if it worked as intended.

Re: Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”

#803

Post by gurkendoktor » Fri, May 29, 2020, 7:21 PM UTC

youeseh wrote: post #337

partiallypro wrote: post #333

Twitter is well within the rights to do this, but I have seen tweets from blue check marks essentially calling for violence and Twitter didn't remove them. So, does that mean Twitter actually -supports- those view points now? If Twitter is going to police people, it needs to be across the board. Otherwise it's just a weird censorship that is targeting one person and can easily be seen as political. Everyone is applau…

Instead of being the police, Twitter should do what Rotten Tomatoes does. There are plenty of people - journalists and researchers analyzing the facts behind what celebrities say. They should analyze what the analysts say and display a score.

The problem then becomes, who decides which tweets to fact-check? If most politicians at the higher levels are liars, singling out a few of them is unfair even if Trump is notorious for it.

Twitter can clearly not fact-check every single tweet on its platform. But what if they did it for every tweet (maybe from a verified account) that X people report for being untruthful? Trump would look bad even if Twitter held everyone to the same standard, and the blue checkmark would come with some responsibility not to lie, so why not?

Re: Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”

#804

Post by dependenttypes » Fri, May 29, 2020, 7:22 PM UTC

oarsinsync wrote: post #797

dependenttypes wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The leader of the United States encouraging law enforcement and the military to shoot American citizens for looting, that's the line. Is this supposed to be bad? I actually wish that our own PM had done the same. I am sure that the citizens of a lot of countries that live under the rule of criminal syndicates, looters, and highwaymen would agree. It seems that the US citizens are fine with state mandated violence a…

> It seems that the US citizens are fine with state mandated violence as long as it does not include them. Nothing happened regarding https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21018041 for example. I don't think it's fair to paint this as unique to US citizens. I'd go as far as saying this is generally true across the world, with few people protesting state sanctioned violence abroad, and significantly more people protest…

I think that you forgot to mention that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21018041 was an act done by the US military, and it was not the only one of its kind. I would understand if most USA citizens did not give a shit if it was done by a 3rd party, but it was done by their own military which they fund via their own taxes.

Re: Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”

#805

Post by zapita » Fri, May 29, 2020, 7:24 PM UTC

ardy42 wrote: post #699

Animats wrote: post #79

Twitter policy: "We start from a position of assuming that people do not intend to violate our Rules. Unless a violation is so egregious that we must immediately suspend an account, we first try to educate people about our Rules and give them a chance to correct their behavior. We show the violator the offending Tweet(s), explain which Rule was broken, and require them to remove the content before they can Tweet agai…

> Somewhere a counter was just incremented. It's going to be amusing if Twitter management simply lets the automated system do its thing. At some point, after warnings, the standard 48-hour suspension will trigger. Twitter management can simply simply say "it is our policy not to comment on enforcement actions". I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter has exempted Trump's accounts from all automated moderation. However, I…

> However, I'm half expecting them to ban him about twelve seconds after he leaves office.

At the top management level, they are probably weighing the possibility that he never leaves office (a plausible scenario at this point), and how that scenario affects their bottom line.

They probably don’t want US institutions to dissolve into full-blown autocracy... But on the other hand, if that were to happen, then it would be better for the stock price if they hadn’t burned all bridges with the new leader for life.

You can bet that Zuckerberg is making the same calculus - except that he seems to have chosen a side. Facebook is no longer pretending to care about preventing autocracy. They are betting on the GOP coup succeeding, and are building bridges accordingly.

Note: no amount of downvoting by the alt-right fringe lurking here will make the facts go away. Downvote away since you don’t have the courage to write down and justify your true beliefs. You are an embarrassment to the technology community. You are the spineless, petty, cowardly foundation upon which all autocracies are built.

Re: Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”

#806

Post by advisedwang » Fri, May 29, 2020, 7:26 PM UTC

bgorman wrote: post #794

Objectively - how is this advocating for violence? I have not been following this deeply but it seems like there is already serious violence occurring where dozens of people have been charged with probable felonies and buildings have been set on fire? Isn't it the responsibility of the local government to protect private property? It certainly seems like the situation is out of hand when a police station is burned to…

The phrase Trump uses is a direct quote from a police chief who was explicitly giving the OK to his police officers to kill protesters.

Much as I hate the over-use of the term "dog whistle" this is the exact thing it means. It has plausible deniability, but to the intended audience it sends a clear message.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/05/29/when-the-l...

Re: Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”

#807

Post by generj » Fri, May 29, 2020, 7:27 PM UTC

seesawtron wrote: post #327

In 2017 a rogue twitter employee suspended Donal Trump's account on last day at the job. Did the world politics change in that downtime?

The account was only suspended for like 17 minutes, and it’s not clear the POTUS even noticed. So no, no impact to world politics.

Re: Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”

#808

Post by UncleMeat » Fri, May 29, 2020, 7:29 PM UTC

chance_state wrote: post #748

UncleMeat wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fair amount of this is caused by the state and police. Why do you think that the rioters were in koreatown during the rodney king riots? Police defended the rich neighborhoods and pushed the riot into places where society tolerates more damage.

Did the police burn down and destroy $1B of property?

No, of course not. But the reason why minority communities tend to be the victims of property damage during riots is the same as the reason for the riots in the first place.

Re: Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”

#809

Post by pjc50 » Fri, May 29, 2020, 7:30 PM UTC

throwawaysea wrote: post #542

tomp wrote: post #171

This is amazing news, and I hope Twitter adopts this policy for all rules violations. Much better than deleting tweet or banning accounts, this lets people decide what they want to see. (Except for obvious spammers etc. which should probably be banned.) Even better would be if there were user-configurable "lists", whereby you could decide upfront what you want / don't want to see (like many sites do right now with NS…

We can hope Twitter adopts and enforces policies equally across the board, but they won't and I don't think they can either. As an example of how they won't do so, consider that there are people literally organizing violent riots and destruction of property on Twitter right now, and they have not been banned or had their tweets/accounts hidden. Ilhan Omar's daughter was caught doing so herself, amplifying rioting sup…

Twitter don't ban for mere misgendering; anti trans Twitter has been left alone to harass for years, although I believe Glinner finally got banned.

Re: Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”

#810

Post by fennecfoxen » Fri, May 29, 2020, 7:30 PM UTC

Reedx wrote: post #709

tomp wrote: post #171

This is amazing news, and I hope Twitter adopts this policy for all rules violations. Much better than deleting tweet or banning accounts, this lets people decide what they want to see. (Except for obvious spammers etc. which should probably be banned.) Even better would be if there were user-configurable "lists", whereby you could decide upfront what you want / don't want to see (like many sites do right now with NS…

If we're being honest, Twitter is basically a machine that glorifies violence. It rewards it at the platform and algorithmic level. An endless volume of tweets under every charged trending topic violates these rules, which are being surfaced and promoted by the platform. And it enables mob mentality like nothing we've seen before. Moderation is mostly just theater, especially as long as the platform itself is quite l…

Twitter's design is fundamentally broken beyond repair.

Your Twitter feed is yours. It's like your home territory. People feel like they're entitled to defend this territory. Twitter assists inflammatory media as it attempts to invade this territory, originally with retweets, but more recently with algorithmically selected tweets coming from people who you didn't follow, selected for "engagement". But it does more than that. When you defend your territory, your defense ends up on someone else's feed as a provocation.

The original model worked, with tweets from your followers only, and no retweet support except copy and paste and the letters RT. The current model is cursed.