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Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

thenextweb.com

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Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#81

Post by jasonlfunk »

I'm also a little skeptical of this. It seems too random. If it were an algorithm, it's hard to know what the parameters were that it was looking for. And if it as a person, it's hard to know why it was so sporadic and limited.

I wonder if it can just be explained by user error? Do we /know/ these tweets were actually ever on twitter? Perhaps the tweet about united failed to post. (It's happened to me). And if that happens to a few people who posted about United, you then get a conspiracy. But if the same thing happens to the cat picture you tweeted, it's chalked up to a bug and forgotten.

Though given Twitter's recent track record with "ghost-deleting" and "shadow-banning", this sort of thing - if true - wouldn't be surprising.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#83

Post by spectistcles »

oska wrote: post #76
spectistcles wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism at its latest

Corporatism, not capitalism.

Corporatism in this sense is really just monopolization of capitalism, which in itself is a symptom of unchecked capitalism.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#84

Post by ythn »

nkkollaw wrote: post #36
ythn wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's "bad publicity", and then there's lynch mob Streisand Effect bandwagoning.

Still deserved, also for the comments they made afterwards. At least pretend, and say something like "this will not happen again".

> Still deserved, also for the comments they made afterwards.

Maybe, maybe not. We don't have all the facts yet. We still don't even know the identity of the victim - only hearsay from other passengers.

This type of viral emotional response makes me weary. I see it happen so often - Michael Brown, Ahmed Mohammed, TSA Cancer Girl, etc. The lynch mob gets bloodlust and calls for complete destruction of the alleged perpetrators (St. Louis Police, School Administration, TSA, etc). Later more facts come out and we empathize with the perpetrators a bit more, but it's too late - careers and such have already been ruined.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#85

Post by goatforce5 »

zeteo wrote: post #49
bitL wrote: post #22

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...

Imagine if the local water or electric monopoly could vary your service by how much they liked your views. It's time for some antitrust regulation of the big tech companies. If you control a platform then you have an obligation to be fair to the general public.

It's like a privately owned shopping mall telling the anti-abortion protestors to move on.

The mall owners probably like free speech as a concept and may even be anti-abortion themselves, but people yelling and waving objectionable banners around upset the other customers and are interfering with the business the mall owners are trying to operate.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#86

Post by upofadown »

bitL wrote: post #22

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...

Yeah, you don't just pay for free services with your privacy, you also pay with your free expression.

That is why things like privately run blogs, forums and email lists are ultimately very important...

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#87

Post by exelius »

ihsw2 wrote: post #47
Mao_Zedang wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customers will only tolerate it for so long, think of it as an opportunity.

Customers have been clamoring for more control over Twitter's moderation functionality since the 2016 US Presidential elections and they got it. To be more clear, Twitter's customers are corporations and special interest's groups, not regular non-paying end-users.

Twitter has always been a marketing platform for large brands.

The number of meaningful tweets I see these days is just drowned out by people discussing global brands or whatever manufactured controversy is running around this week (that stupid Pepsi commercial for example).

Also, the news media is lazy and doesn't research stories anymore; they just look at trending topics on Twitter (which is honestly a really, really bad barometer for any sort of public sentiment given how much of Twitter is controlled by bots).

But yeah, I agree with you. Unless you're paying to get tweets removed, you're the product.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#88

Post by dev_head_up »

cheath wrote: post #73
dev_head_up wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

In short, because they think you'd engage less with Scott Adams' content. Filter bubbles are an algorithmic attempt to give you the content that you want the most. For example, Twitter might have identified at some level that you like and retweet sports related content more often than political content. Or even further, that you like left-leaning content more than right. So, they'll do everything they can to serve yo…

I've seen that and I'm sorry, but I really don't accept your explanation. I've never retweeted/liked/replied or tweeted, ever. I'm a passive consumer. I don't follow political accounts, or search out political views there. If anything, I reckon I was clicking a lot on his blog links via tweets, so (presumably) he should have been showing up more... rather than not at all.

I don't mean to sound like I'm holding you accountable for this! It's just, well this kinda thing is well dodgy and I want to assure people I'm not just cribbing about this without a basis.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#89

Post by mmjaa »

Tools such as Akasha[1] and IPFS[2] and ZeroNet[3] can't arrive on the scene soon enough, imho.

I think we're on the cusp of seeing these corporate-tools lose their grip on the populace, once Akasha becomes usable by the common man.

[1] https://akasha.world [2] http://ipfs.io/ [3] http://zeronet.io/en

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#90

Post by root_axis »

williamle8300 wrote: post #75
root_axis wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seems like we are going full steam into a dystopian society Gonna have to roll my eyes pretty hard at this. These are privately owned servers, they can delete whatever content they want off of them, if you don't like it, you're totally free to host your own server and content.

Sure... It's like a restaurant spitting in your food.

That's an absurd comparison. Besides being illegal, spitting in someone's food creates a health risk for the victim, in addition to being a violation of a customer agreement (wherein you pay money to have food prepared for you with reasonable expectations of cleanliness).

Having your posts deleted from a private forum is about as benign as it gets.

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