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

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#21

Post by 542458 » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 1:29 PM UTC

nkkollaw wrote: post #18

hammock wrote: post #14

The main threads on Reddit were deleted also: https://www.reddit.com/r/undelete/comments/64jbfq/1458098779... Many more: https://www.reddit.com/r/undelete/

Jesus Christ, what's going on? How can we counteract this? They absolutely deserve the bad publicity they're (or would be) getting!

Let's not act like this is some massive conspiracy. It's one /r/videos thread was deleted because it broke the sub's rules. There were literally dozens of other /r/videos posts on the subject upvoted to /r/all. It's not like the sub's mods were hiding the incident.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#22

Post by bitL » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 1:30 PM UTC

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...

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#23

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 1:30 PM UTC

nkkollaw wrote: post #18

hammock wrote: post #14

The main threads on Reddit were deleted also: https://www.reddit.com/r/undelete/comments/64jbfq/1458098779... Many more: https://www.reddit.com/r/undelete/

Jesus Christ, what's going on? How can we counteract this? They absolutely deserve the bad publicity they're (or would be) getting!

[deleted]

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#24

Post by fennecfoxen » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 1:31 PM UTC

dev_head_up wrote: post #10

67726e wrote: 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…

Scott Adams has blogged that he thinks it's about his politics and trollishly pro-Trump tweeting/blogging, and I've never been certain whether or not to believe it was true at all (he needn't even be lying for it to be false: it's possible to get quite confused going through these things with many followers, doubly so with any reason to be suspicious or paranoid).

But in light of an incident like this it seems far more plausible to me that they have a more general-purpose algorithm at work that, in a few cases like United and @ScottAdamsSays, misbehaves radically. At a guess, some anti-spam thing gone terribly wrong. (A missing tweet identified in this incident is basically "United training video as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade blimp scene". Do viral-joke tweets like this have similar enough dynamics to Scott Adams tweets and spam that they'd trigger similar filters?)

(But hey, maybe I'm not paranoid enough :b)

postscript: hey, why the downvotes? am i being too speculative? too paranoid? not paranoid enough? it's okay to downvote but do help me out here.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#25

Post by odiroot » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 1:31 PM UTC

hammock wrote: post #14

The main threads on Reddit were deleted also: https://www.reddit.com/r/undelete/comments/64jbfq/1458098779... Many more: https://www.reddit.com/r/undelete/

It's actually interesting how much content gets deleted from Twitter and Reddit since the the last election. I think it's really unprecedented.

Media is indeed the fourth power.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#26

Post by kristiandupont » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 1:32 PM UTC

andoon wrote: post #13

cheath wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beware the filter bubble

The entire point of Twitter was that there was no such filter, it would just show the tweets of everybody you followed in a chronological order. That's why we are all pissed.

I don't know if that was the "entire point" of Twitter. I am certainly glad that there is a bit of filtering. I recall the old days where most of my feed consisted of noise, today I actually get some value out of it.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#27

Post by nkkollaw » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 1:33 PM UTC

542458 wrote: post #21

nkkollaw wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jesus Christ, what's going on? How can we counteract this? They absolutely deserve the bad publicity they're (or would be) getting!

Let's not act like this is some massive conspiracy. It's one /r/videos thread was deleted because it broke the sub's rules. There were literally dozens of other /r/videos posts on the subject upvoted to /r/all. It's not like the sub's mods were hiding the incident.

I see.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#28

Post by radnam » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 1:33 PM UTC

Do not ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity or in this case probably engineering oversight. No affiliation or affection to twitter.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#29

Post by dev_head_up » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 1:33 PM UTC

cheath wrote: post #11

dev_head_up wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Beware the filter bubble

Hmm. I'd say Scott is the only vaguely political account I follow. Next up would be one BBC News and a local newspaper account. Apart from that I follow mainly sports teams (my main use for it is scores and fantasy football) and some selected ones for tv shows. Less than 40 accounts in total.

If anyone can explain how Twitter uses that information to decide to hide Scott Adams from my timeline, I'd love to know. It seems to me that there's one obvious explanation.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#30

Post by brightball » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 1:36 PM UTC

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.

Wait wait wait....what's wrong with Delta?