Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Twitter Files

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 1001 posts

Re: The Twitter Files

#381

Post by newZWhoDis »

romellem wrote: post #296
Dig1t wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you read your own source? The Biden team never asked Twitter staff to “handle” anything. They forwarded tweets that [violated twitter’s ToS][1], a Twitter staff member forwarded them for review, and at that point the reviewer said they “handled these.” That’s what content moderation is supposed to do! [1]: https://twitter.com/parkebench/status/1598841731763810304

No post body was provided.

Re: The Twitter Files

#382

Post by rvz »

mrcwinn wrote: post #271

It's pretty odd that the Verge and Platformer have had wall to wall coverage of every moment of Twitter the past few weeks, including live-tweeting content sourced from (perhaps appropriately) disgruntled ex-employees. And yet here, silence so far. It goes to show what we already knew. Every media outlet (or blogger, or influencer) has an audience, caters to that audience, grows that audience, monetizes that audience…

No post body was provided.

Re: The Twitter Files

#383

Post by tmaly »

noah_buddy wrote: post #146
Dem_Boys wrote: post #127

Most concerning thing here is that this proves political parties (including the white house[0]) have a direct line to Twitter[1] to get stuff they dislike removed. One would have to assume that there was also a direct line to other social medial platforms. It's so wild to have the slimy-ness of our American political system be revealed in yet another way. So in America you cannot say negative things about political l…

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.

It seems this could have had a big impact on the election.

Now that we know the laptop is real, what do you think will come of it?

Re: The Twitter Files

#384

Post by dehrmann »

tbrownaw wrote: post #334
cwkoss wrote: post #32

Some people are probably going to call for legislation to address this twitter thread. What kinds of laws or regulations do you think could solve this?

Well, the one party wants to require more censorship, which would be bad (and unconstitutional here in the US), and the other party wants to ban censorship, which would also be bad (and unconstitutional here in the US). Maybe something about transparency would be workable? Even if the policy that whichever site is being transparent about is "all decisions are arbitrary", at least people would know that that's the pol…

No, each party wants things they disagree with censored.

Re: The Twitter Files

#385

Post by jacooper »

nikitaga wrote: post #264
jacooper wrote: post #46

I don't follow or give attention to American politics, I don't live in America, and probably never will. But the Left bias in Social media is extremely concerning, its so apparent from the type of people who work in tech, especially in Silicon valley, that they have a Leftist bias, whether the Left or the Right are correct doesn’t matter. The issue is Social media in our time is it’s where a lot of people form opinio…

If you think it's the Twitter's moderation team who's responsible for "to control and influence the conversation itself" on Twitter, I got bad news for you. Political conversation on twitter is driven by: 1) loud extremists on all sides of the political spectrum 2) domestic and foreign agents working to destabilize society for their gain 3) bots amplifying all of the above Regular people, the majority of them with bl…

> 1) loud extremists on all sides of the political spectrum

One side controls and puts rules for the entire conversation, that's the issue.

> Regular people, the majority of them with bland moderate opinions, are largely absent from all of that

Yet they consume that content, that's why it shouldn't be controlled by a biased party.

Re: The Twitter Files

#386

Post by nathanaldensr »

newZWhoDis wrote: post #367
Dem_Boys wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest Question: If the white house contacts Twitter and asks for a tweet to be removed, is that a first amendment violation?

Yes. And a properly-endowed Justice Department would begin prosecution for Twitter employees that colluded with the government to defraud US citizens of their fundamental rights. Twitter officers conspired with rogue elements of the US government to defraud US citizens of their constitutionally protected rights. This is not a game. The people involved should be facing 30 year prison sentences.

And yet it's treated as just the latest Twitter drama. Reactions like the ones I'm seeing--"Republicans are just obsessed with Hunter's ****!"--are the reason why the "I Support the Current Thing" NPC meme exists.

Re: The Twitter Files

#387

Post by i0null »

Am very much surprised to see the backlash against this story, especially given some of the thoughtful comments in an earlier thread "distinction between free speech as a legal right and cultural value" [0].

The government has as much right to report ToS violations as any other user.

Having VIP lanes isn't a great look but it isn't surprising.

The government are in a position were they can force legal changes if it feels corporations are abusing their power. Moderation is important but of course that has to be balanced against the risks of censorship. Of course neither are desirable but we are essentially talking about the reporting of individual tweets, not requests for systemic changes to the platform.

If this story pointed to something more serious like requests to access to the moderation platform or keyword manipulation, of course this would be breaching an entirely different red line.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33823725

Re: The Twitter Files

#388

Post by sroussey »

newZWhoDis wrote: post #377
andreyk wrote: post #108

It does not seem like this really exposed any new information - Twitter publicly justified its actions as being about its hacked data policy back when this all happened ( https://www.nationalreview.com/news/twitter-cites-hacked-mat... ). All this shows is some internal disagreement as to whether that was the right call. By the way, Facebook also suppressed the news story citing its misinformation policy ( https://www…

Quoted post unavailable.

No one has a constitutional right to post on Twitter

Re: The Twitter Files

#389

Post by newZWhoDis »

lapcat wrote: post #189

The worst part of this censorship was the pure stupidity of trying to censor links to a website that was always available independently of Twitter and Facebook. If someone wanted to read the story, they could always go to the original source, the NY Post. It's just impossible to keep it a secret, and that's why the censorship attempt was an utter failure, predictably so. Failure was inevitable in this case. Twitter c…

> It's just impossible to keep it a secret, and that's why the censorship attempt was an utter failure

Context matters. They didn’t fail to hide the story, that wasn’t the goal.

They succeeded in their goal of preventing the story from harming their candidate a few days before the election.

This is everything the left says they care about, a mega corp colluding with powerful connected political interests to determine the outcome of an election

Re: The Twitter Files

#390

Post by AmericanOP »

What a coup for Matt Taibbi.. not so much the content, but the branding! The Twitter Files- I’m in immediately. Can’t wait for the movie. And the sequel, The Taibbi Files, where we see how Elon bought a company to send cherry-picked internal emails to throw muck at prior leadership.
Post reply on HN