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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

#3
Assuming this is true (which I don't believe it is), why would they do this? I doubt UAL is paying them enough in advertising dollars to justify something like this.

This isn't like silencing/promoting selective political speech where the personal ideals of the heads of the company are being pushed forward. Unless Dorsey really likes flying United.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#5
post #3

Assuming this is true (which I don't believe it is), why would they do this? I doubt UAL is paying them enough in advertising dollars to justify something like this. This isn't like silencing/promoting selective political speech where the personal ideals of the heads of the company are being pushed forward. Unless Dorsey really likes flying United.

Even if it's not intentional, they may have some algorithms that "throw the baby out with the bathwater" as the saying goes.

We're already seeing Google's recent "extremism curation" hit a lot of youtubers that shouldn't be anywhere close to being impacted by it, and yet they still are. If Google's DeepMind/Brain AI can't properly curate this sort of stuff, I can't imagine Twitter is any better at it.

After governments keep pushing them to "deal with extremism" I wouldn't be surprised if they took overly aggressive actions to be on the "safe side." I also think they're wrong to do that, but in Google's case they are obviously concerned about more advertisers dumping them.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#9

I'm pretty skeptical this is true. I don't think this has to do with Twitter censoring left or right wing accounts.

I did not think this was about politics. I am not sure this is true either but I thought twitter was trying to curb abusive tweets lately. Perhaps the tweets towards United were trollish/abusive etc?

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#10
post #2

Would not at all surprise me. Twitter regularly censors popular right-of-center Twitter accounts.

Was sceptical of this myself until I experienced it. Scott Adams completely disappeared from my feed for, well I'd like to say months but can't pinpoint when it started. I assumed he had just given up his account/been banned. Until one day I searched for him, and there he was still posting. He had actively tweeted while I was logged on yet it was no-where on my timeline! I scrolled back a bit collarating tweets that appeared for me on the homepage versus times that he had posted, he was no-where to be seen and presumably under some sort of shadow block by Twitter itself. Before someone comes in and says it was due to preferences etc, I don't follow a huge bunch of accounts, I don't like/retweet or even tweet.
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