Live data from Hacker News

The Twitter Files

twitter.com

821–830 of 1001 posts

Re: The Twitter Files

#821
post #610

Why is this propaganda bullshit on the front page. I gotta ask about moderation on HN here. This is literally moderation, "the twitter files" my ass. They pretext political contributions and falsley connect legitimate moderation to that. Of course they should have blocked that story and still should. Oh, but get this, it's their platform they get to do what they want. They are not an impartial government agency. In t…

>Oh, but get this, it's their platform they get to do what they want. now it's Musk's platform and he gets to do whatever he wants you're cool with that, right?

Sure, but i am free to avoid twitter as well. Long as he does't break the law or cause social harm.

Re: The Twitter Files

#822
"4. Twitter in its conception was a brilliant tool for enabling instant mass communication, making a true real-time global conversation possible for the first time."

How can you trust anything else in the thread if the author really believes this? IRC was more than 20 years old when Twitter was founded!

Re: The Twitter Files

#823
post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These policies were always a pretext. The two major social networks blocking the same story at the same time citing different policies that are obviously inconsistently applied (did Twitter block the story about Trump's leaked tax returns? Did facebook block Biden when he claimed that covid would be gone once everyone was vaccinated?). These emails show twitter executives puzzled by the application of those policies.…

the life of a politically inconvenient story: 1. it's conspiracy theory 2. it was obvious to everyone 3. forgotten

So true but I don't think the gaslighting aspect will be forgotten so easily. First, we were gaslit about our understanding of the facts, then we were gaslit about having being gaslit. Many public figures have lost all credibility.

Re: The Twitter Files

#824

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…

i thought the lack of support channels was that they try to work like google. Instead it's just a way of handling the scarcity of a resource - a scarce resource is a means of selling it high!

Algorithms, Shmalgorithms - in the end it's just some guy in the backroom who is takimg phone calls from the political commissars, just like in the old Soviet Union and nowadays China...

Re: The Twitter Files

#825
post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but only for some White House admins. The previous White House admin saw their press secretary’s account suspended because the campaign didn’t like the fact that she tweeted about this story. The current White House likely wouldn’t see that same fate.

You need to think of Twitter as MSNBC or Fox News. Bias in editorial decisions is perfectly legal.

Bias might be legal but when we say “the White House” pressured them to take it down, we are being less than clear on what actually happened.

The “White House” was trump at the time.

Re: The Twitter Files

#826

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…

There's nothing really new in your post either, since it misses the whole point. All your post does is restate the obvious. It was obvious the story was true and that Twitter covered it up.

The news worthiness of this is that, just before a very close election, Twitter was used to hide information for political purposes. Not only that, the White House press secretary had her account suspended for calling Twitter on it. And not just the press secretary, but many others were labeled as consipiracy theorists and misinformation spreaders, and had their accounts suspended.

In other words, Twitter was used for hateful purposes by the people who ran it. Isn't banning people, censoring them, and labeling them as nutjobs the worst kind of hate speech?

The only way forward for things like Twitter is transparency. If someone lodges a complaint about someone else, that should be completely known and published. If some politician wants to tell Twitter to take something down, everyone should be able to know who did the asking.

Re: The Twitter Files

#827
post #665

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…

These policies were always a pretext. The two major social networks blocking the same story at the same time citing different policies that are obviously inconsistently applied (did Twitter block the story about Trump's leaked tax returns? Did facebook block Biden when he claimed that covid would be gone once everyone was vaccinated?). These emails show twitter executives puzzled by the application of those policies.…

Isn’t the revelatory part that both parties had bat phones to the moderation teams, and that the team working with the Trump admin was intentionally sandbagging violations by “The Left”?

Re: The Twitter Files

#828
post #16

I'm a moderate, not a Democrat and not a Republican. I think people on the left have a blind spot here, that the more suppression they use, the more division they create, and the more moderates and people on the right grow to resent them. I would have identified as a Democrat on pretty much every issue, but this authoritarian suppression of speech and ideas has just pushed me away from that side completely. At this p…

This is such a ridiculous political narrative. The Democrats are not for policing speech, Twitter can police whatever it wants. Imagine being a conservative and thinking government regulation of corporations is wrong and simultaneously thinking you have a right to post stuff on twitter.

Re: The Twitter Files

#829
So interesting to see if this will affect politics since midterms have passed. At least at the moment I don’t think free speech (esp via Twitter) is a priority over guns, crime, economy and reproductive rights for the average voter, or that any candidates want to seriously hold that mantle. I wonder if and how that will change going into the next election cycle.

Re: The Twitter Files

#830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

throughout the replies here people are making this argument but it still seems insane to me. like if you got photographed with prostitutes and someone tweeted that out would you expect the DNC to lobby directly w Twitter to get those down or would you just report the tweets in the app

You’d use the best connections you have available which, if you’re a major corporate or political entity, are way better than the Report button. Obviously.
Post reply on HN