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Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

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Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#421

Post by hexane360 »

tomschlick wrote: post #355
pat2man wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tabloid essentially make up stores, so I would say they fall into the "fiction" category. This story is essentially Russian propaganda designed to destabilize the US election. It's a whole different category of content.

The Director of National Intelligence (director for all US Intel Agencies) has said it is not Russian disinformation. https://twitter.com/i/events/1318222118421590016

And has caught flak from the intelligence community for making that determination prematurely: https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2020/10/intelligence-expe...

He is also hamfistedly talking up Iranian election interference solely to downplay Russian election interference: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-security/u-s...

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#422

Post by einpoklum »

vvillena wrote: post #69
bmarquez wrote: post #15

Twitter's lack of transparency is depressing. If they're going to lock the NY Post account, they should put a notification on the page (and perhaps a reason why). Right now if you go to the NY Post Twitter it just looks like they voluntarily decided to stop tweeting, which is misinformation.

As a counterpoint, Twitter as a company isn't forced to do any such thing, so if they think it can hurt its userbase and its revenue, it won't be done. Social media tries to establish a unique public forum, that gets policed by a single company. It's an unsustainable, doomed model. There's a reason the Internet as a whole is serviced by miriads of companies that are more or less forced to cooperate.

I don't buy the moral legitimacy of groups of people doing wrong merely because they are recognized as a "private company" and not being legally bound to act a certain way. So,

> a unique public forum, that gets policed by a single company ... is an unsustainable, doomed model

is exactly right. It's just so damn hard to pull people out of it!

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#423

Post by ganoushoreilly »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #158
thebeefytaco wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the laptop became property of the repair shop, how would that be illicitly obtained?

Protip: the laptop never existed

Except theres clear evidence of the FBI's acquisition of the laptop / data.

We can question the framing of data selected from the laptop, but the laptop itself has never been in dispute.

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#424

Post by roenxi »

droffel wrote: post #107
olivermarks wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes - I've found Zerohedge to be scarily accurate over time! Depends on your political allegiances I suppose but my mother taught me when i was kid to always read the financial press - 'follow the money to find out what the b@stards are thinking' was her old line. (she used to work for the UK tory party in the '50's, despised them). ZH is what many city of London and wall street minions read live on their bloomberg…

> scarily accurate As the saying goes, Zerohedge has predicted 28 of the last 4 recessions. They have a consistently bearish bias (which rarely seems to play out), and ties to the Russian state, which brings into question the motivations behind their criticisms of the US (not that I'm the biggest fan myself). All of that said, ZH introduced me to a lot of economic literature and concepts I likely wouldn't have been e…

> As the saying goes, Zerohedge has predicted 28 of the last 4 recessions.

No question ZeroHedge is excessively pessimistic, but that saying is silly. The US has been having recessions almost like clockwork once every 10 years since 1950 [0].

Saying "a recession is incoming!" is pretty much trivially true. It is always very likely there will be a recession in the next 10 years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#425

Post by einpoklum »

function_seven wrote: post #31
blhack wrote: post #19

To the people constantly saying that twitter is a private company and should be allowed to do whatever they want: Would you support the same idea around electrical power? If the power company providing the power to the office at the NyPost decided that they had a political disagreement with them, would it be okay to just cut off their power? NyPost could just make their own power, of course, by purchasing a generator…

Twitter is not a utility. It is not common infrastructure. The Internet is, and I would not be okay with Internet access being terminated over political disagreements. But individual services? Sure, why not? For those who argue that Twitter is a de facto common platform, well these decisions are moving them away from that role. The more they exercise their own prerogatives in removing content, the more they're no lon…

> Twitter is not a utility

It's effectively a utility.

I'd say one could fashion a reasonable criterion based on extent of use by anybody + extent of use by organizations + extent of use by news media. Beyond some level, a platform is a utility (albeit not necessarily defined by law to be one).

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#426

Post by awerawerawrjhui »

quacked wrote: post #408
calvinmorrison wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is it fake or is it russian disinformation? I can't keep up with you types.

Who deleted your response to ZeteticElench? You, or the mods? Usually when they delete something, they include a comment that says "this comment was deleted because it violates our community standards" or whatever.

I don't think it's possible to delete your own comment on HN.

It's possible for the mods to "shadow delete" your comments: it still appears to you when you're logged in, but no-one else can see it. (To see if any your comments have been shadow-deleted, check out the difference between news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=yourusername when you're logged in and logged out.)

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#427

Post by philipkglass »

koolba wrote: post #346
mantap wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that fake news websites (websites that intentionally post falsehoods to drive traffic) should be allowed to post on social media with impunity? How is that workable? Many people cannot distinguish fake news from legitimate sources of information. Increasing noise (disinformation) is just as damaging to free speech as decreasing the signal (censorship).

> Do you think that fake news websites (websites that intentionally post falsehoods to drive traffic) should be allowed to post on social media with impunity? Unless it's directly inciting violence, yes. > How is that workable? Many people cannot distinguish fake news from legitimate sources of information. The track record of restricting information from people because you feel like you're smarter than they are is n…

Unless it's directly inciting violence, yes.

By this standard, Facebook must allow everything that you can find on Pornhub and Liveleak. Plus much of the material published in Al Qaeda's magazine Inspire. Telling people "crusaders should die" and "here's how to make a bomb from over the counter materials" aren't direct incitements to violence. Reddit could never have banned r/WatchPeopleDie or r/jailbait. (Although it could be hard to spot any actual jailbait in r/jailbait once torrents of MLM schemes and cryptocurrency scams flood every subreddit.)

The First Amendment protects a lot. That's why back in 2014/2015 American legislators who were unhappy with Islamist terrorist propaganda circulating on social media called on social media companies to do something instead of passing a law. A law that says "it's illegal to publish photos of dead Americans or their allies with gloating commentary" wouldn't survive the First Amendment. But social platforms could and did deplatform groups cheering for ISIS, to bipartisan approval.

You may sincerely believe that only direct incitements to violence should be suppressed on social media. I don't think that there is legislative support for that state of affairs, though. Not even among the conservative legislators who are currently the most critical of social media moderation decisions. If legislators managed to pass a law that said "social media platforms cannot suppress anything that is legal to publish under the First Amendment," I think that they would regret that choice a month after seeing the consequences.

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#428

Post by devthrowawy »

wow_yes wrote: post #225
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or on the side that Twitter thinks is the good side.

We are on the right side of history - progress always is. People like me are much more trustworthy because we're not motivated by greed, but for the desire for a better world.

Is that a quote from Hitler? I honestly can't tell.

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#429

Post by ilikehurdles »

khawkins wrote: post #176
jimbokun wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very small handful of companies have a stranglehold over the lion's share of all global communications: Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter. So maybe Twitter isn't quite a monopoly on its own, but the consolidation of control over information and data distribution into the hands of a very small number of organizations has worrying implications for how we think about censorship and freedom of speech.

It's interesting to see how quickly Silicon Valley culture has changed over the past 10 years from one of free speech absolutism to "benevolent censorship". The people so vociferously clamoring about the nightmare-hellscape of a world without Net-Neutrality are now telling us that a handful of major corporations actively and blatantly censoring speech is no cause for concern.

I, as the hypothetical Twitter CEO, choosing to silence or remove an account isn't a "big F" Free Speech issue.

The government telling me, the hypothetical Twitter CEO, that I am legally mandated to publish your tweet, be it actually misinformed or just plain unpopular, or face asset seizure and jail time as a consequnce -- that is an _actual_, real infringement on free speech.

It just turns out that a lot of those SV libertarian free speech absolutists were actually partisan authoritarian hacks that are now abusing the notion of free speech in the current online discourse, so that the government will step in and mandate publishing their particular flavor speech. The people arguing against Twitter having the ability to silence and ban accounts (for any reason) are arguing for a Propaganda-class of speech that must be repeated by all who have any influence.

Re: Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

#430

Post by anthonypasq »

varispeed wrote: post #404
rhizome wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That should be illegal with few exceptions. And thus the right wing comes around to centralized government control of companies.

Not sure what it has to do with right/left wing. Free speech should exist regardless of your economic or social views and should be protected with the force of law.

how is forcing a company to platform your views free speech?
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