Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

melovedata.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 763 posts

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#91

Post by legitster »

What a hot mess.

I am imagining those years of looking at terrible National Enquirer headlines at store checkouts. This kind of terrible reporting as always existed, but for some reason (luckily I guess) they never crossed over into national discourse the way that stories do online.

I never begrudged the store for carrying them and selling them. If Wal-Mart suddenly felt the need to arbitrate on the accuracy of every periodical they sold, I'm not sure if I would feel better or worse.

I also don't know how to handle the people who are saying the story is fake or terribly reported, but we have a right to be misinformed if we want to be.

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#92

Post by r00fus »

core-questions wrote: post #45
recursive wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"centre leaning" Could you draw a diagram of this?

Sure, it's called the Overton Window, and it moves over time. Generally speaking in America it has moved leftward continually since the American Revolution, which was a left-wing act of protest against a monarchical government (which, on a flatness hierarchy view of the left/right axis, is among the furthest right political systems possible). Each successive major shift in American politics has been a shift towards t…

Mostly correct - however, the period after the Civil War moved the country distinctly back towards the right. Chinese Exclusion Act, among others, would not have been considered mainstream in the early 1800s. This continued well into the 1900s - which is when all the confederate hero statues were built (mostly by private funding). Many are being removed now.

In this case it's possible the Overton Window may finally be shifting back leftward on race and history regarding the Civil War.

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#93

Post by jkingsbery »

quacked wrote: post #6

The Post publishes a lot of disreputable trash that's outright false or unproven, but more and more often, it seems that they release primary sources of information (especially videos) much earlier than other news outlets will, if the other news outlets do so at all. There have been multiple times when I've seen an insane video of something happening spreading around Twitter or WorldStar or some other "raw video" agg…

As someone who reads the NYPost regularly, I find that it's an interesting outlet. It publishes a lot of "tabloid" stuff that's worth skipping - celebrity sitings, silly videos that went virals about cats or people trying to escape the police by doing cartwheels, and outlandish headlines. But if you read certain sections (Sports, Business, Metro), the articles are written as they would be in any other outlet (with the exception that maybe the Opinion & Editorial section is more conservative leaning than other NY newspapers).

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#94

Post by think814 »

function_seven wrote: post #31
blhack wrote: post #19

To the people constantly saying that twitter is a private company and should be allowed to do whatever they want: Would you support the same idea around electrical power? If the power company providing the power to the office at the NyPost decided that they had a political disagreement with them, would it be okay to just cut off their power? NyPost could just make their own power, of course, by purchasing a generator…

Twitter is not a utility. It is not common infrastructure. The Internet is, and I would not be okay with Internet access being terminated over political disagreements. But individual services? Sure, why not? For those who argue that Twitter is a de facto common platform, well these decisions are moving them away from that role. The more they exercise their own prerogatives in removing content, the more they're no lon…

There are network and anti-trust concerns that make this problematic.

In the old days, if you thought newspapers were biased you could publish your own and it would sit on the newstand next to the other ones. That's how we got NY Post and the Daily News in NYC, etc.

But imagine if one newspaper had 100x the readership of the second one. And if it'd be impossible to start a new one because of network effects. The editor of that newspaper would have outsized power to affect elections and it would be considered threat to democracy. That's the case with Twitter.

Either Twitter stays 100% neutral, or we'll need to anti-trust the heck out of it to make sure there are a few Twitters to compete with each other (and represent different views).

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#95

Post by manigandham »

orf wrote: post #82
blhack wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is an infrastructure on top of which thousands of services are run. It's a notification service, it's a messaging server, it's an authentication/identify verification service, it's a news dissemination and discussion service, etc. But that actually doesn't even damage the argument: would it be okay if Google decided that they didn't like NyPost's politics, so they disabled the functionality of all of their ne…

> Twitter is an infrastructure on top of which thousands of services are run. It's a notification service, it's a messaging server, it's an authentication/identify verification service, it's a news dissemination and discussion service, etc. It's all of these, except private. It's a privately run notification/messaging/authentication/identity/verification service. Just one that is widely used. That doesn't make it "pu…

Your ISP and phone provider are private/non-state-owned entities too.

The corporation providing the service doesn't matter, it's the how the service itself is used by the public. And social media is now at the same level as phones and internet.

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#96

Post by andrewem »

tbenst wrote: post #73
dimgl wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Post publishes a lot of disreputable trash that's outright false or unproven Implying that every other major MSM organization doesn't do the same exact garbage and aren't deserving of the same treatment. Edit: the point is that rules should not favor one MSM corporation over the other. It should be neutral.

This equivocation of news sources is how misinformation spreads. Look at how WSJ handled same story vs NYP. WSJ is indeed more reputable as is NYTimes

Here's the New York Times article about how the Wall Street Journal's handling of this compared with the New York Post's.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-bid...

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#97

Post by tbenst »

I’m reminded by the stories in 2016 on how the Pope has endorsed Donald Trump. Was it true? Not in the slightest. And yet these stories got millions of impressions. Enabling the spread of harmful, false, foreign-planted propaganda to spread like a cancer in our democracy is worth taking a moral stand over. Actors that propagate such falsehoods have earned their punishment.

Equivocation in this thread to NYTimes publishing on Trump tax returns boggles the mind, and shows the sorry state of 2020. It’s reminiscent of how Trump redefined “fake news”—a phenomena associated almost exclusively with right-wing falsehoods masquerading as news—to mean “facts that are so damning of me that I construct a reality-distortion field to blind my followers”. I am dismayed by how many commenters here seemingly abandon objective Truth and descend into the anarchy of textual equivocation.

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#98

Post by xadhominemx »

numpad0 wrote: post #75

That’s their normal courses of action for account freezes. They programmatically freeze your account with the message “Twitter freezes accounts that violate Twitter Rules.” which criteria is just a /dev/urandom that apparently any average script kiddies can trigger at will. They don’t bother dealing with your complaints, but don’t bother with ban evasions either, so people either keep sending complaints until it reac…

The NYPost’s account was not frozen programmatically.

And if they want to unfreeze their account they can do so by deleting the tweet that was manually flagged. They have not done so because they want to draw attention to themselves as an alleged victim of bias against conservative media outlets.

Edit: is there a reason my factually sound comment is being downvoted?

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#99

Post by jimbokun »

cortesoft wrote: post #40
blhack wrote: post #19

To the people constantly saying that twitter is a private company and should be allowed to do whatever they want: Would you support the same idea around electrical power? If the power company providing the power to the office at the NyPost decided that they had a political disagreement with them, would it be okay to just cut off their power? NyPost could just make their own power, of course, by purchasing a generator…

Power companies are regulated monopolies. There are no competitors. Twitter is in no way even close to the only way to publish something. It is no where near as difficult to publish on a different platform than it is to generate your own power. If an ISP was cutting off the NyPost, I would have issues with that. If they had their domain name seized, I would have an issue with that. If other ISPs blocked network route…

A very small handful of companies have a stranglehold over the lion's share of all global communications: Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter.

So maybe Twitter isn't quite a monopoly on its own, but the consolidation of control over information and data distribution into the hands of a very small number of organizations has worrying implications for how we think about censorship and freedom of speech.

Post reply on HN