Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#91

Post by Karunamon » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 2:15 PM UTC

c4n4rd wrote: post #43

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...

Tweeter and all others you mentioned are private corporations. Their goal is to turn profit to their shareholders - NOTHING MORE. He who believes these companies exist as a way for the mass population to voice their opinion and as a way to exercise democracy should rethink what these companies are all about. Note: I do not necessarily agree with that they do, just pointing out what they are all about.

Fine - I'll accept that once Twitter stops pretending they were responsible for the Arab Spring. And Reddit stops talking about how they're a place for free expression. And so on.

By all means, curate your own back yard however you want. But misleading your users as to the nature of that curation should be actionable somehow. Enforced echo chambers are fine and dandy, so long as they are disclosed as such.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#92

Post by alphonsegaston » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 2:15 PM UTC

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...

This is why it's now, more than ever, necessary to build a social media platform owned and democratically controlled by its users. The reality of our contemporary social fabric is that meaningful discourse is occurring in privately controlled, authoritarian systems, where individual rights have little protection. This will not change outside creating a new network that guarantees these rights.

I know Mastadon is trying to do something like this, but IMO I think it has be premised on a centralized platform with direct democratic control if it's ever to gain steam.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#93

Post by fullshark » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 2:16 PM UTC

1337biz wrote: post #59

c4n4rd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tweeter and all others you mentioned are private corporations. Their goal is to turn profit to their shareholders - NOTHING MORE. He who believes these companies exist as a way for the mass population to voice their opinion and as a way to exercise democracy should rethink what these companies are all about. Note: I do not necessarily agree with that they do, just pointing out what they are all about.

That's why they need to feel the pain from consumer backslashs. Just look how ridiculous the Pepsi outrage did become.

And look at how quickly everyone forgot about it

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#94

Post by bshimmin » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 2:16 PM UTC

bshimmin wrote: post #32

* unpresidented

(I'm not actually bad at spelling, it was a reference to http://www.snopes.com/trump-sends-unpresidented-tweet/ - but I should probably know by now that cheap one-liners don't go down well on HackerNews...)

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#95

Post by taneq » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 2:17 PM UTC

bshimmin wrote: post #32

* unpresidented

That kind of joke is punished harshly around here.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#96

Post by Nutomic » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 2:18 PM UTC

root_axis wrote: post #69

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...

> 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.

So what alternative do you propose? 99% of users are on those platforms. Moving everyone to a different platform is almost impossible.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#97

Post by AlexandrB » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 2:18 PM UTC

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...

> 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.

This was inevitable. All the above-mentioned services are funded - in large part - by ads. When it came to choosing between serving the users vs. the advertisers the latter would always win in the long run because they were the paying customers.

What's needed is some sort of "public" space on the internet that's not controlled by corporate (and increasingly advertising) interests. Non-profits like Wikipedia and archive.org come close, but aren't meant for real time communication. Ironically, technologies like SMS are also somewhat neutral because they were conceived before advertising became the dominant business model on mobile and have no hooks for "curation" and "engagement".

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#98

Post by zeteo » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 2:19 PM UTC

c4n4rd wrote: post #43

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...

Tweeter and all others you mentioned are private corporations. Their goal is to turn profit to their shareholders - NOTHING MORE. He who believes these companies exist as a way for the mass population to voice their opinion and as a way to exercise democracy should rethink what these companies are all about. Note: I do not necessarily agree with that they do, just pointing out what they are all about.

> Tweeter and all others you mentioned are private corporations. Their goal is to turn profit to their shareholders - NOTHING MORE.

Not sure what that's supposed to mean. Would it be OK for a food company to use expired ingredients if it increased their profit, or for FedEx trucks to run over people if it helped their bottom line? Private corporations have various degrees of responsibility to the general public, depending on how much harm they can inflict. Twitter has become a major platform for public discourse and it's not like people can move their followers elsewhere. Using Twitter's power to suppress certain kinds of (otherwise acceptable) public statements should be a big no-no.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#99

Post by hashkb » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 2:19 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #91

c4n4rd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tweeter and all others you mentioned are private corporations. Their goal is to turn profit to their shareholders - NOTHING MORE. He who believes these companies exist as a way for the mass population to voice their opinion and as a way to exercise democracy should rethink what these companies are all about. Note: I do not necessarily agree with that they do, just pointing out what they are all about.

Fine - I'll accept that once Twitter stops pretending they were responsible for the Arab Spring. And Reddit stops talking about how they're a place for free expression. And so on. By all means, curate your own back yard however you want. But misleading your users as to the nature of that curation should be actionable somehow. Enforced echo chambers are fine and dandy, so long as they are disclosed as such.

Funny. The real world does not work that way. Misleading the public is what power is for.

Re: Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

#100

Post by chambo622 » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 2:21 PM UTC

Twitter had a moment filled with negative tweets about United at the top of its curated Moments tab for the entire day yesterday. Even now I see a trending hashtag and moments about the incident. If their goal was to suppress this story, they couldn't have done a worse job. These accusations sound like paranoia to me.