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

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#121

Post by JackFr » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 2:32 PM UTC

zeteo wrote: post #98

c4n4rd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tweeter and all others you mentioned are private corporations. Their goal is to turn profit to their shareholders - NOTHING MORE. He who believes these companies exist as a way for the mass population to voice their opinion and as a way to exercise democracy should rethink what these companies are all about. Note: I do not necessarily agree with that they do, just pointing out what they are all about.

> Tweeter and all others you mentioned are private corporations. Their goal is to turn profit to their shareholders - NOTHING MORE. Not sure what that's supposed to mean. Would it be OK for a food company to use expired ingredients if it increased their profit, or for FedEx trucks to run over people if it helped their bottom line? Private corporations have various degrees of responsibility to the general public, depe…

I think your analogies are strained.

A better analogy might be to a broadcaster, who because of a monopoly on a scarce public resources, does have certain responsibilities.

But Twitter isn't a broadcaster (nor are they a public utility), and their value is in their network, which they literally have spent billions of dollars creating. It's theirs to do with as they see fit.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#122

Post by arca_vorago » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 2:32 PM UTC

sillyquiet wrote: post #78

c4n4rd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tweeter and all others you mentioned are private corporations. Their goal is to turn profit to their shareholders - NOTHING MORE. He who believes these companies exist as a way for the mass population to voice their opinion and as a way to exercise democracy should rethink what these companies are all about. Note: I do not necessarily agree with that they do, just pointing out what they are all about.

The scary thing is when you realize the so-called news organizations, for the most part, have exactly the same motivations. NYT, WSJ, et al are, after all, corporations too.

Oblig infographic: http://www.morriscreative.com/wp2011/assets/2012/06/info.jpg

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#123

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 2:34 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #115

AlexandrB wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wonderful, so Twitter is now a tool for corporate propaganda, Google is providing Censorship-as-a-Service API, Facebook is removing links classified as "Fake News(tm)", Reddit is deleting whatever mods don't agree with etc. This was inevitable. All the above-mentioned services are funded - in large part - by ads. When it came to choosing between serving the users vs. the advertisers the latter would always win in t…

"This was inevitable. All the above-mentioned services are funded - in large part - by ads." Unsustainable situations always seem to go on for longer than you expect, but I wonder if we're finally getting to be just a year or three out from Adpocalypse, when the ad-supported internet companies finally end up having to face head on that you can not serve two masters. I wonder if there's going to be a market developing…

> Adpocalypse

That's brilliant.

It can't come fast enough for me, but I highly doubt that's only 3 years away. It will also be remembered as the .com crash 2.0.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#124

Post by pg_is_a_butt » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 2:34 PM UTC

bitL wrote: post #22

Wonderful, so Twitter is now a tool for corporate propaganda, Google is providing Censorship-as-a-Service API, Facebook is removing links classified as "Fake News(tm)", Reddit is deleting whatever mods don't agree with etc. Seems like we are going full steam into a dystopian society. I think I should start reading Solzhenitsyn to prepare for what is coming...

so start your own website.

you're all idiots.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#125

Post by error-code » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 2:34 PM UTC

1) Twitter is a company that owes you, and the public, nothing. The same goes for Facebook and Google. There is no law I know of that prevents them from running their platform however they like. So what if they sensor or take sides? It is their right. If you don't like it, use or build a competing service (as long as Net Neutrality exists).

2) Negative tweets about United could be considered "Fake News" in my opinion. Not because I am some "shill" for United. But because the facts are it was Chicago airport police that escalated the situation to excessive force. The United employees were not involved in that part at all whatsoever. In fact they will probably hesitate to call the authorities for help ever again.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#126

Post by eutropia » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 2:34 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #51

diogenescynic wrote: post #19

I'll definitely not be flying United or Delta ever again after this incident. Over-selling spaces on a plane is a scummy practice and shokldn't be allowed. When someone needs to cancel they still pocket the change fee or keep tne entire fee if they miss the flight. Seems like borderline fraud.

Overbooking is an extremely common practice. In fact, I don't know of a single airline that doesn't overbook. On a plane with hundreds of seats you almost always get cancellations; the small amount of times you don't, you almost always get people volunteering to be pushed to the next flight in exchange for money (I've done it myself a few times as I don't mind working in airports). Cases like these are exceedingly ra…

starting with not simply not offering a better deal to the first other person who volunteered...

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#127

Post by jerf » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 2:34 PM UTC

nommm-nommm wrote: post #65

zeteo wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if the local water or electric monopoly could vary your service by how much they liked your views. It's time for some antitrust regulation of the big tech companies. If you control a platform then you have an obligation to be fair to the general public.

The web would degrade into unusable garbage if every single platform was required to display every single person's mouth diarrhea. Do you believe every website should be shut down if they don't have a comments section on every page? Should Google be forced to abandon PageRank because it censors shitty content?

When weblogs first started around 2000, one of the things I really liked about the community that briefly formed was that you had to reach out to make connections to people. I actually favored weblogs that didn't have comment sections at all for this. If some jerk decided to copy & paste your every post and troll as hard as possible in their own space, you could in fact go months without being aware of it, and even once you found out, all you had to do was... not visit it. No active action was required to avoid it.

Perhaps the core problem is that the "comment box" is a fundamentally unscalable tool. Instead of putting up a piece of content and letting everybody slap whatever they want on the end of it, maybe everybody needs to be given their own space, with no comment box. Maybe people should have to active seek out "comments" without having it pushed into their face. If "someone" built a system around that idea instead, perhaps we'd get a more stable structure.

(This, incidentally, harmonizes nicely with my other post that if you want to make money on this, you need to fundamentally rethink the whole situation and the entire incentive structure, not just create "X, but without ads!")

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#128

Post by JackFr » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 2:36 PM UTC

dilap wrote: post #101

root_axis wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seems like we are going full steam into a dystopian society Gonna have to roll my eyes pretty hard at this. These are privately owned servers, they can delete whatever content they want off of them, if you don't like it, you're totally free to host your own server and content.

Yeah, you can set up your own server and "content", but it ain't gunna be like Twitter, because that's where the people are. Network effects make it very hard to launch a competitor Twitter is an incredibly important communication medium; as an example, it almost certainly was instrumental in electing Trump to the presidency. Just because it's privately owned doesn't mean we should be content to have it run like a pe…

How about you spend billions of dollars growing a network, and I tell you what to do with it?

(That being said, IMHO, this is truly shortsighted means to collect a couple of bucks today, and a good way to diminish the value of the network over the long term.)

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#129

Post by meddlepal » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 2:36 PM UTC

zeteo wrote: post #80

nommm-nommm wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web would degrade into unusable garbage if every single platform was required to display every single person's mouth diarrhea. Do you believe every website should be shut down if they don't have a comments section on every page? Should Google be forced to abandon PageRank because it censors shitty content?

How about some form of transparency at least when deleting undesirable statements? It's not like you can go and tweet to your followers somewhere else.

Why do you believe Twitter us obligated to help you reach your followers?

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#130

Post by root_axis » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 2:36 PM UTC

chc wrote: post #102

root_axis wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seems like we are going full steam into a dystopian society Gonna have to roll my eyes pretty hard at this. These are privately owned servers, they can delete whatever content they want off of them, if you don't like it, you're totally free to host your own server and content.

A lot of dystopias have involved visions of the future where important parts of society have been largely subsumed by corporations. Those two ideas don't really conflict.

Twitter isn't "an important part of society largely subsumed by corporations", Twitter is a corporation and has been one from the start, but more importantly nobody is forced to use it. People use it because they like it, but frankly, in my opinion and in the opinion of pretty much everyone I know, twitter is mostly crap by a huge margin.