Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Surprised that people here are taking this at face value. Why would Twitter remove these tweets from random users while leaving the vast majority of negative tweets in place? No proof has been given. Indeed, this Jay Beecher's allegedly deleted tweet is visible as far as I can tell: https://mobile.twitter.com/dancow/status/851808188567388161

edit: To be fair, Beecher says that my tweet refers to tweets he sent out after the original tweet was deleted. Indeed, his screenshot shows a different timestamp for the original tweet. Not knowing him at all, I have no reason to accuse him of deliberately making this up. But burden of evidence is still on him, and hard to accept claims of random Tweet deleting when, as I write, #NewUnitedAirlinesMottos is a top trend (as it has been all morning), and we have much more definitive evidence that Twitter manually shuts down controversial trending hashtags.

On a sidenote, how is it possible for a user to have a screenshot of an old tweet unless they took it before it was deleted? Other than a caching issue, I thought all Twitter clients (especially the official one) removed tweets marked for deletion? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5955021/detect-tweet-dele...

My tweet from last night is gone. It's not "alleged".

Yes, it is still an allegation. Nothing has been proven beyond your assertion.

You could settle this by experiment easily if we're trying to prove this to you: go ahead and try posting one, in similar vein to the others. There'd be a false-negative rate if you do it too late so I would try it now.

Their machine learning should be smart enough to not discriminate on a statistically significant scale.

I've been posting negative-sentiment tweets about United since yesterday. If we do accept the premise that Twitter would do something like this, we should also assume that they'd be selective in which tweets they've deleted, such as tweets that aren't likely to be noticed when gone.

There are too many independent variables and unknowns for there to be an easy experiment. In any case, I'd be happy for other kinds of evidence. If Twitter is silencing tweets about United, is it part of a corporate ad package, in which case, other folks would've heard about this kind of deal for other companies?

Of all tweets to delete, why would they choose ones that aren't likely to be seen anyway?

The premise is so unlikely (given what we know of Twitter's past behavior) that if we accept it, we have to accept motives that are beyond our understanding. That said, it's hard to conceptualize even just the metric that they might be optimizing for.

I mean, randomly pruning negative sentiment tweets for a given topic might allow Twitter to tell United, "Hey, we removed 12,000 negative tweets about your brand" (leaving out the fact that there are 12,000,000 negative United tweets total). Or maybe by removing these random tweets, Twitter reduces the overall spread and diversity of this negative sentiment, as many people are content to just retweet what the most popular Twitter users have said about United. But...what would that fix? Twitter already has algorithms in place that make it hard for you to see things either outside of your own filter bubble or otherwise not popular content.

For example, it's well known that many bots are triggered to auto-reply to Trump tweets, as the space devoted to tweet replies are seen as prime advertising space [0]. But I never see those merch-selling bots. The top replies I see to Trump tweets are either from my network, or are replies from popular (usually political) accounts. I have to dig very far to find those random bot replies.

For me, a major argument against Twitter deleting tweets is that it has many other effective ways to suppress content that would be virtually undetectable without wide-scale analysis of their data.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/12/weird...

> The premise is so unlikely (given what we know of Twitter's past behavior) that if we accept it, we have to accept motives that are beyond our understanding.

What you and I both know of Twitter's behavior is unlikely to be shared knowledge between us, unless it's been your job to follow the company for awhile in which case I would have to defer to you. But I still expect you to tell me what it is we should both know.

The Twitter I know is happy to shill for political reasons, that puts the possibility of money being given for damage control at corporate as being plausible to me, since there is more money in corporate than politics and Twitter itself is profit-driven with a shit business model. The Twitter you know is not? We could both be wrong. Without clarifying what you mean by "what we know" I wouldn't be so trigger happy with the rhetoric just yet.

We know these things about Twitter relating to censorship:

They have shut down Twitter accounts for abusing the TOS, and this process is on a case-by-case basis, and can affect well-known users such as Milo Yiannopoullous and Martin Shkreli:

http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/07/19/breaking-milo-suspe...

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/01/08/pharma-legend-marti...

Twitter also deletes content in response to valid legal requests and copyright claims, according to their own transparency report:

https://transparency.twitter.com/en.html

We also know that Twitter has applied crowdsourcing/human editing to search query analysis:

http://blog.echen.me/2013/01/08/improving-twitter-search-wit...

I suspect that Trending Topics also has some curation, or at least a manual blacklist, but couldn't find official mention of that.

We also know that Twitter has been sensitive to the tension between being an unfiltered source of information and a platform that amplifies abuse. In January, the company admitted that it "didn't move fast enough" in dealing with abuse complaints:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/twitt...

In March, they announced new measures for reporting abusive tweets/accounts. Under a heading "Leveraging our technology to reduce abusive content", they describe new ways in which an abusive account can be limited, including suppressing the visibility of tweets: https://blog.twitter.com/2017/our-latest-update-on-safety

So we've seen that Twitter will shut down accounts and tweets based on an interpretation of TOS (i.e. what constitutes "abuse") in ways that not everyone agrees with. At the same time, Twitter knows that its special sauce is unfettered speech, so much so that it was slow to even act on shutting down accounts openly associated with ISIS: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/02/tw...

If they are selectively deleting a small number of tweets, they are probably running an algorithm to determine the most effective tweets (at damaging the brand) while also optimizing for low-visibility deleting.

The real question would be why are they deleting them at all?

>If we do accept the premise that Twitter would do something like this, we should also assume that they'd be selective in which tweets they've deleted

Maybe twitter has a team of lawyers sending them lists of Ids to remove, citing DMCA or whatever.

Of course the hypothetical team of lawyers couldn't keep up, and the whole idea is ludicrous, but twitter might comply.

Who knows?

and mine is still there, so.

they also deleted my tweet from this morning, which simply made fun of united airlines ("we seat you, then we beat you! Board as a doctor, leave as a patient! #NewUnitedAirlinesMottos")

UAL may be paying twitter and reddit to stifle the fun

That could just be a matter of attempts at a crackdown failing spectacularly. Reddit mods have been pretty aggressive in trying to prune United stories, without actually blocking or removing them. It can be enough, in other words, just to increase the friction in the system, not to eliminate bad press, but reduce its volume and persistence.

What steps is Reddit taking to "prune" these stories? Do you mean preventing them from hitting the front page?

Aggressively enforcing rules of various subreddits, no actual skullduggery that I've seen at least. So, while normally a subreddit might allow a repost, or a topic to be covered by more than one article, they crack down hard on that. In a sub like WorldNews they were being extremely quick and harsh with "US Internal Politics" for another example, which effectively kills the post.

In essence, it's just how police operate; if you were subjected to every reasonable measure police could bring to bear on you, all of the time, your life would be a misery; A legally sanctioned, totally acceptable misery, but the power of "discretion" keeps that from being the reality for "acceptable" groups.

I think twitter needs to be a bit more transparent about how this stuff goes. I've also heard a lot about political shadow banning, which, who knows? At a certain point though, where theres smoke theres likely fire

Surprised that people here are taking this at face value ... No proof has been given.

What could any ordinary Twitter user possibly provide that you would accept as proof?

I don't think this should be assumed to be true, but I also don't think it should be rejected out of hand. The correct answer is often the middle-ground: ask twitter for a clarification about what happened to the tweets in question, the trending tag, and what its larger policy is.

Given how widespread the incident has become, it doesn't seem sensible for Twitter to start deleting a few "random" tweets.

I suppose it is possible that some faction inside Twitter is doing this, but it isn't official policy, and as such they aren't able to delete everything critical of United.

I, however, find it more likely that this is just a technical issue. As when an "eventually consistent" distributed database takes longer than expected to be consistent, if it does at all. Most of the distributed database products out there have lots of edge cases where they are not consistent, reliable or durable. And Twitter is at a scale (size of DB, update volume, number of datacenters) that few others approach.

Why speculate when you can ask?

Twitter throttles conservative messages and users so we know that Twitter is at least willing to engage in censorship. We'll see if this story develops legs as well.

From TNW. Seems relevant:

Update 2, April 11, 11:15ET: Some readers have suggested that the allegedly deleted tweets might have initially appeared as replies to now-deleted tweets, which would explain why they are missing. However, numerous users contacted by TNW rejected this premise, claiming the missing posts were standard tweets.

TBF it's harder to tell when your tweet is being posted as a reply than it used to be, because of the changes in the Twitter mobile app UI for replies. Since the change I have accidentally posted tweets as replies a couple times.

Surprised that people here are taking this at face value.

Really?

Yes. Many people here have had IT experiences where laypersons swear their computer spontaneously did something ridiculous as if the computer was out to commit personal malice. And HN users generally are skeptical of the Internet media's ability to understand and write about technical concepts, especially when click bait is on the line. And there are more than a few users who understand how Twitter's massive data output would make such an alleged Tweet culling to be hilariously insignificant, given the investment of engineering time to execute such a pathetic conspiracy.

Sure, there's a lot of hate for Twitter and for large companies in general. But this kind of claim, without actual evidence (nevermind motive), is a pretty Wilde one, even for HN. Guess it can't be flagged off the front page now without confirming fears of a massive coverup.

Oh I just think that there is a big chunk of users ready to be credulous about any given topic. Not the same users for every topic, just that the userbase is large enough for some people to take lots of things and run with them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com