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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

#301
post #228

If overbooking ever happens, here is what they should do: Ask a representative of each atomic passenger group to write down a number of dollars on a napkin, and the number of tickets they represent. An individual flying alone might write down $1000-1. A mother of 2 kids might write down $2500-3. Collect the bids, and sort them. Then if you need to swap 4 seats, select the four lowest bids, and give them cash. Overboo…

This system they have in place is the reason you can find flights for extremely low fares that were once unheard of. Obviously this could have been handled better, but I think people should bear in mind that these inconveniences are the very reason they're saving so much money. This is a rough instance of it, but if you buy a first class ticket you can bet this won't be happening to you. All that said, everyone has t…

I think there's a few tragedies here that people seem to be missing.

1. A man not clearly identified as a man of authority was empowered to physically remove a passenger from an airplane. I've seen 3 videos so far and while it's not obvious that the passenger questioned his authority, he should have. Given how things unfolded, I wouldn't be surprised to hear next that the man who removed the passenger was actually a nearby manager who was not trained or experienced in removing passengers from airplanes.

2. I think people are actually repulsed by the revocation of permission to fly. Compliance of a passenger denied boarding simply implies that the passenger continues to be in his present location. Here compliance required the passenger to perform work on behalf of the airline. While it's a pretty minor amount of work, I think people are more accustomed to restrictions of their actions. They are understandably more sensitive to giving control to others over what actions they must perform, particularly since it was unexpected in this scenario and the man in question had no frame of reference for determining if his actions were reasonable or not.

3. The execution by the "office" in question was abysmal at best. He showed no patience or sensitivity and the doctor showed no sign of aggression. The force used to remove the man was unquestionably extreme. Someone like that probably would have responded very well to a uniformed police officer. The other two men had uniforms but they didn't look that official and they weren't the ones removing the man. Simply bringing out your handcuffs is likely enough to get compliance. The "officer" should be fired here for performing poorly.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#302
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wanting a place where every thread isn't derailed by low-effort jokes doesn't mean you're humorless. I mean, I like chocolate, but I don't want to only eat chocolate, and I'd be upset to find my computer screen smeared with chocolate.

Fair enough. It just seems that here people too often advocate for _never_ eating chocolate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#303

Given twitters track record upholding user privacy in the face of lawsuits and the like [0] I'm somewhat skeptical that they'd play ball with United in this way. I'd suspect it's more likely that United and their twitter drone army are "reporting the tweet(s)" as "abusive or harmful" and if enough twitter users do that it would make sense that twitter would auto-remove / moderate said tweet. Of course, it's strange t…

I'm not sure I'd take Twitter's refusal to unmask an anti-Trump account as purely upholding privacy. I'd consider Twitter to be pretty anti-Trump, so politics likely play a part there.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#304
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That could just be a matter of attempts at a crackdown failing spectacularly. Reddit mods have been pretty aggressive in trying to prune United stories, without actually blocking or removing them. It can be enough, in other words, just to increase the friction in the system, not to eliminate bad press, but reduce its volume and persistence.

What steps is Reddit taking to "prune" these stories? Do you mean preventing them from hitting the front page?

Aggressively enforcing rules of various subreddits, no actual skullduggery that I've seen at least. So, while normally a subreddit might allow a repost, or a topic to be covered by more than one article, they crack down hard on that. In a sub like WorldNews they were being extremely quick and harsh with "US Internal Politics" for another example, which effectively kills the post.

In essence, it's just how police operate; if you were subjected to every reasonable measure police could bring to bear on you, all of the time, your life would be a misery; A legally sanctioned, totally acceptable misery, but the power of "discretion" keeps that from being the reality for "acceptable" groups.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#305
post #142

Surprised that people here are taking this at face value. Why would Twitter remove these tweets from random users while leaving the vast majority of negative tweets in place? No proof has been given. Indeed, this Jay Beecher's allegedly deleted tweet is visible as far as I can tell: https://mobile.twitter.com/dancow/status/851808188567388161 edit: To be fair, Beecher says that my tweet refers to tweets he sent out af…

I don't think this should be assumed to be true, but I also don't think it should be rejected out of hand. The correct answer is often the middle-ground: ask twitter for a clarification about what happened to the tweets in question, the trending tag, and what its larger policy is.

Given how widespread the incident has become, it doesn't seem sensible for Twitter to start deleting a few "random" tweets.

I suppose it is possible that some faction inside Twitter is doing this, but it isn't official policy, and as such they aren't able to delete everything critical of United.

I, however, find it more likely that this is just a technical issue. As when an "eventually consistent" distributed database takes longer than expected to be consistent, if it does at all. Most of the distributed database products out there have lots of edge cases where they are not consistent, reliable or durable. And Twitter is at a scale (size of DB, update volume, number of datacenters) that few others approach.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#306
post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea that, in any situation that goes badly, exactly one actor must be at fault and all others blameless is distressingly common, but clearly wrong. So remind me again why we are exclusively lynching United and not potentially other bad actors (passenger, security personnel)?

I don't see anyone getting anything remotely analogous to a lynching, and I see plenty of posts suggesting error on the part of the passenger and/or security services as well as United, so I entirely reject the premise of your question.

> I don't see anyone getting anything remotely analogous to a lynching,

When I say "lynching" I don't mean it literally. I just mean groupthink mindless bashing. Just look at /r/videos over at reddit. It's just a poop-slinging contest at United. If you even mention that the security guards or passenger share part of the blame, you'll get downvoted to oblivion. Same thing happened before with Michael Brown and Ahmed Mohammed. If you went against the hate, you got burned. Right now it's "cool" to bash United so everyone is jumping on the bandwagon.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#307
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what they did. Someone up the chain made a mistake. Other airlines board must-ride passengers (i.e. crew deadheading to the next destination) before passengers, but this did not happen. Due to FAA regulations, the movement and sleep requirements of crew is enforced big time. In this case, they had a higher priority than a full-fare passenger (Must Ride), and even though it's morally wrong, it is well w…

"airline's right to remove any passenger at any time for any reason" 1. Absurd. Flight attendant: Sir, you farted, we're going to remove you. Passenger: Umm, we're at 42,000 feet?! Flight attendant: Too bad, we can remove you at any time for any reason. 2. Citation for this "right"? In the airline's contract of carriage I see explicit reasons for being removed from an aircraft, and none of them apply to this case.

If I understand correctly, odor is in fact one explicitly-stated valid reason for being removed from an aircraft. (Not at 42,000 feet, of course.)

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#308
post #279
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The r/videos subreddit has a rule against videos of fights/assault. Specifically against videos of police brutality / misconduct... which coincidentally came into effect around the time a police officer joined as moderator.

There's a rule that isn't about police at all. > 9. No Videos of Assault/Battery > No videos of real-life, malicious person-on-person assault/battery or physical abuse of animals. This includes raw videos of fights and malicious violence.

Yet they rarely remove videos for physical abuse of animals.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#309
post #25
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.

Yes, though it seemed to start during the 2016 primaries.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#310
post #262
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/

The r/videos subreddit has a rule against videos of fights/assault so whoever posted the video you linked to wasn't following directions. Every subreddit has its own rules. The front page of that subreddit is currently dominated by anti-United sentiment that doesn't violate the rules so I don't know what you're trying to imply. Do people even make a cursory effort to verify these accusations before repeating them?

The man is not shown to be resisting (not a fight), and it doesn't seem like police misconduct (or assault). Or am I mistaken?

No need to be smug, especially when you're probably wrong.

This all aside from the fact that I merely pointed out they were deleted, without judgment why. You should also be aware that there is almost always a "rule" in place to point to and serve as cover for tyrannical actions...Doesn't mean much in those cases. (Private company, blah blah, yeah we know. The point is many rules simply serve as cover for authorities to do whatever they want)

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