Live data from Hacker News

The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists

twitter.com

401–410 of 580 posts

Re: The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists

#401
Let me quote Elon:

"New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.

Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.

You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet."

Re: The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does big tech, including HN all have the same auth-left wing bias? I think intelligent people are abnormally capable of self-deception.

Everyone is heir to the same inherent flaws that plague humanity but smart people are less likely to practice self deception. If you find yourself on average on the opposite side of the vast majority of smart people the first thing that is in order is self refection. While being smart doesn't make them correct the last thing that would be useful would be to dismiss the majority of smart folks.

> but smart people are less likely to practice self deception

Smart people are better at contriving complex justifications that seem right but are in fact wrong.

People don’t usually set out with the intention of deceiving themselves.

Re: The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not the fact that these systems exist, it’s that Twitter denied that they did for years, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

> Twitter denied that they did for years You yourself literally posted a link from 4 years ago that demonstrates the opposite of this claim. How is this comment so high? I feel like I'm at a UFO convention and people just want to believe.

> people just want to believe

Accurate. There’s a strong contingent of folks here that believe “the leftists” are oppressing them and “Twitter silences our voices” is a big part of the conspiracy theory.

Musk is throwing fuel on the fire, because he also just wants to believe.

Re: The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

So I see the term fascist being thrown around against conservatives frequently on sites like Reddit and I just chalk it up to people on sites like that not really knowing what the term means. HN to me is different. I fully expect people to understand and mean what they say here. So I'd like to know from a fellow HNer what exactly do you mean by calling "these" people fascists and who exactly are these fascists? Do yo…

There are literal fascists within the alt-right, and the conservatives as a whole have failed to distance themselves sufficiently from them.

“If there's a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis.”

Nick Fuentes is a fascist. He has complimented Hitler and Putin - even saying the media comparing Putin to Hitler “as if that wasn't a good thing.” He holds a variety of other repugnant views which are tightly associated with fascism and Nazis.

When Ye and Nick Fuentes (an actual fascist) have dinner with a leader of a party, and that party didn’t immediately abandon that leader, they all qualify under the 11 Nazi’s category. See also: no abandonment or even major pushback against the leader saying “very fine people” were chanting “blood and soil” at Charlottesville etc.

[edit] also in the context of social media moderation, most people moderated hold extreme views, so when talking about conservatives who have been moderated, they are more likely to be fascist. Same as how of moderated left users, they are more likely to be Stalinist’s or other extreme groups when compared to the left population as a whole.

The difference is, sometimes when conservatives have complained about moderation, the examples given were of prominent alt-right fascist adjacent figures being banned. Christian Nationalists and White Nationalists are fundamentally fascists, but some of them are defended in cultural wars by a good chunk of conservative voices. E.g. Alex Jones received conservative op-Ed’s in his support when he lost a lawsuit.

Re: The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists

#405
post #370
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that colloquially it's definition can be looser depending on context, but it's in bad faith that Weiss[0] quotes Twitter's then Head of Policy and Trust as saying Twitter doesn't shadow ban people when in the very blog post[1] she's quoting they clearly define shadow banning as, "deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poste…

> "deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster." This happened to my tweet here [1]. It doesn't show up under the parent tweet [2]. It appears to be some sort of domain-based shadow filtering. It's probably because of the cheap .win domain I bought for $2. Why would Twitter censor that link? One could speculate it was because pat…

They explicitly say they don't shadowban people. Pattern matching for moderation is a completely different thing.

Re: The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why do you want to distract readers with BS like access controls imposed on the journalists? the head of twitter security testified to Congress how twitter had poor security controls and audibility across the company. If that button does allow ability to read DM, Twitter employees have surely abused that for ages without repercussions. Let’s stay focused on the important details rather than worrying about established…

> If that button does allow ability to read DM, Twitter employees have surely abused that for ages without repercussions. How many employees have access to the tool? Do all users see that button? Seems pretty likely they’d have tiered access levels, no? What if access to user DMs was a hugely restricted piece of functionality and Musk just said “screw it” and gave it to two non-employees on a whim? You’re writing off…

Twitter employees were seen bragging about this long ago, as exposed by Project Veritas - https://twitter.com/Project_Veritas/status/16010371927882915...

you are pushing fake news to distract from the core abuses, all to protect liberal interests

Re: The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not the fact that these systems exist, it’s that Twitter denied that they did for years, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

> Twitter denied that they did for years You yourself literally posted a link from 4 years ago that demonstrates the opposite of this claim. How is this comment so high? I feel like I'm at a UFO convention and people just want to believe.

And I think everyone here is hung up on the literal definition of shadow banning, and not the CONCEPT of monkeying with people's posts without their knowledge or awareness. It's the same thing, and I feel like everyone wants to give them a pass because of pedantry.

Re: The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists

#408
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If there is now wide understanding that this happens everywhere, maybe we have a chance to build a platform whose express goal is to not withhold censorship actions from the author of the content. I want to know what rock people have been living under all this time, that this sort of thing is news to them.

Shadowbanning only works because it is news to people. That's the whole point. People aware of shadowbanning can easily check their posts from a private browser window or similar to see if they exist. If it wasn't news to people, then no companies would use it, because it would be ineffective!

The existence of shadowbanning, much less fine-grained moderator manipulation,'secret blacklists' or opaque moderator actions shouldn't be news to people, certainly not here. Much of the outrage around this, like much of the outrage in the 2000+ comment dumpster fire that is the previous and still ongoing "Twitter Files" thread, is manufactured for political purposes.

Like yes, social media platforms can moderate content and decide how it appears, or doesn't appear, under whatever arbitrary criteria they want, and they don't need your approval first. That isn't news at eleven, I guarantee it was spelled out in the terms of service no one ever bothered to read.

Re: The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists

#409
post #35

Wow this post is #208 on HN: https://i.imgur.com/e4lQko4.png It's only an hour old. The post must've been flagged, which I know has a pretty heavy influence on the ranking here. For those flagging, this conversation is worth having. Whether platforms secretly demote people's content is important to them.

...which is why I avoid HN homepage and read it through Serializer.io (set only HN content) which also allows syncing through unique URL across devices.

HN homepage is incredibly brigaded, but since it's in line with admins opinions they don't do anything about it.

Re: The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists

#410

These “Twitter Files” have been so disappointing. I was really expecting to see some crazy stuff, but all I’m seeing is a company that was moderating their content. Even the incident that Weiss points out of someone being doxxed and Twitter doing nothing about it happened under Elon’s rule, and was probably not moderated because of the chaos that Elon created. Even the people that were “shadow banned” makes sense, I’…

In other words, Twitter was moderating user content according to a systemic far-left political bias at the company. But since your bias matches, you don't think it's a big deal.

If Twitter had a far left moderating bias, explain how Donald Trump remained on the platform for years while repeatedly and unapologetically violating the TOS. It took him using the platform to launch a failed coup to get him banned.

Very hard to buy that the platform was a political tool of Democrats when it was being used effectively as a political tool by the leader of the Republican party.

Post reply on HN