171–180 of 1001 posts
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Huh?
The argument lefties like to make about free speech is that companies are free to choose who can use and what can be said on their platforms. Free speech only applies to government. Well, looks like government has been a part of it.
It's still kind of odd to think that you can be an in-favor executive at a company, then somebody else can buy your company, fire you, and go back and read all your work emails (many of which would be extremely sensitive) and share it with journalists who then screenshot it and share it with the world on the same platform that employed you! This was always a possibility (and a probability- my friend was a lawyer who…
> there is no clear evidence that they explicitly favored one party, and to be honest- I don't really care if they do
Ah yes the old, "It didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, they deserved it."
If you truly believe that there's no clear evidence, then I don't know what to tell you. Taibbi shows emails where Twitter and the US government collude to censor true information that people wanted to read. That is a big deal.
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It’s blowing my mind to see people on Twitter reading the story and thinking this is an issue of whether or not Hunter Biden is a problem. This is clearly the much more pernicious issue that 1. social media companies are massively influencing the dissemination of information on an ad hoc basis informed by personal political whims and 2. even the leaders of these organizations are unable to rein in these influences.
Honest Question: If the white house contacts Twitter and asks for a tweet to be removed, is that a first amendment violation?
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From a country with five viable parties: this picking sides thing, or even being a “moderate” is just weird and kind of horrifying how normal the populace thinks it is. It’s not normal. People should be FREAKING OUT that their governmental system is in such bad shape. They’re too busy cheering for whichever tribe they’re in. All of politics being one dimensional is one of the biggest lies ever.
The difference between the multiparty countries and the USA is that in the USA the compromises needed to form a government are made before you do the final vote. In some ways I think that's better because the parties have to have a fuller and more realistic platform than in Europe where you can get a bunch of parties in power only caring about a few issues each and the tradeoffs aren't presented upfront
During a majority government where a single party has enough votes, I generally agree with you.
HN is a weird place. Feels like the loudest political voices are alt-right-adjacent nowadays. Just yesterday I had to wade through Q-level talk about Balenciaga being the true villain in society (one user literally said the Latin translation of Balenciaga had occult meanings). It's just so surprising to see Tucker Carlson's outrage machine consistently make rounds in HM comments. I guess he recovered from that Jon St…
I think you're confusing Hacker News for 4chan.
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It doesn't matter which side, because isn't the problem that the government is doing an end run around the 1st Amendment? If you don't think so now, you might in 2024. So it's time to care now.
> Isn't the problem that the government is doing an end run around the 1st Amendment? "The Biden team" was not the government in October 2020. (For that matter there is a "Biden team" right now that has no governmental capacity, that is, his re-election team, which is probably engaged in these same kind of activities with many platforms.) I have to wonder if these communications aren't just pretty normal? It might be…
"Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored."
It's kind of interesting in the sense that reading internal emails is always kind of interesting...but otherwise, nothing here seems particularly shocking or groundbreaking. The only real revelation here seems to be that there existed some internal debate whether or not blocking the story was a good idea, which seems...kind of obvious? I'd be more surprised if there wasn't internal debate.
It seems like something like this will never hit the HN frontpage. I ponder if its really just due to the upvote/downvote + flag ratio. Edit: It seems to have been unflagged manually.
This comment illustrates why it's a good idea to prune these kinds of stories from the homepage. No one learns anything new or surprising from discussing this stuff here, at this point we could have the same political nerdfight in our sleep.
It was surprising to me to see that the various political parties are in direct contact with people at Twitter to remove stuff, and I consider myself fairly well informed.
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It’s blowing my mind to see people on Twitter reading the story and thinking this is an issue of whether or not Hunter Biden is a problem. This is clearly the much more pernicious issue that 1. social media companies are massively influencing the dissemination of information on an ad hoc basis informed by personal political whims and 2. even the leaders of these organizations are unable to rein in these influences.
Honest Question: If the white house contacts Twitter and asks for a tweet to be removed, is that a first amendment violation?
Of course those requests can and will be made in a biased manner, and it's naive to assume that the nature of the request isn't going to influence how Twitter responds to it, but it's definitely a murky grey area at that point.
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https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064 Biden team asking Twitter to "handle" tweets they don't like. This rubs me the wrong way, nobody in government should be telling Twitter to remove speech.
1- Biden wasn't in government, he was running for office. Private citizen at the time. 2- They weren't telling, they were asking, and if Twitter feels like they were told, they can sue the government for violating their First Amendment rights.