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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

From the tweet storm, emphasis mine:

> While working to fix it, we‘ve been accused of apathy, censorship, political bias, and optimizing for our business and share price instead of the concerns of society. This is not who we are, or who we ever want to be.

I don't understand why people don't admit that that their own political biases exist. Hell I know I have them. It's part of what makes us human.

Apparently we're not alone either: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608986/forget-killer-robo...

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Ask any politician - there is power in appearing to be above the frailty of bias, apathy, etc. Hypothetically, if twitter wanted to purge it's platform of one side of the political spectrum, it would be far easier to do it for the sake of "collective health, openness, and civility", than for the real reason of "we don't like you".

> Ask any politician

They will tell you they favour fairness and freedom from bias. It's the other side that are biased.

Bad guys have biases, good guys have convictions.

Ask any politician - there is power in appearing to be above the frailty of bias, apathy, etc

Ironic, considering the current President seems to have gotten his position by doing the exact opposite.

Because the moment you admit it, self-appointed "rational" people will use it to deletigimitize you.

Better to be dishonest and retain the appearance of legitimacy.

The thing is though, as a society, we're dishonest for the appearance of legitimacy on nearly every subject. I mean, that's basically the same reason we don't admit our severe racial biases.

Biases are a part of life. Not admitting them is a part of life. Where Twitter goes off the rails, is not in failing to recognize and admit to their own bias, but rather in failing to recognize and admit to the conflicting biases of everyone using their platform.

Twitter recognizing their own bias does little at all to solve the core issue they are speaking to in the missive. They need to change the behavior of their users, and I'm not at all sanguine about their ability to do that.

Since we are supposedly talking about level of bias everyone has by function of being human, the "dishonest apearance of legitimacy" framing does not change much nor adds anything meaningful.

His own statement rests on an assumption "political bias" and "concerns for society" can be disentangled.

I'm not surprised people are accusing them of being dishonest, because the alternative is that they seriously believe that the two aren't the same thing.

People have learned that bias is wrong. Never mind that being biased toward doing the right thing is not wrong, it will be called a bias, and it will be called wrong.

That's why people don't do it. The word "bias" strongly invites equivocation.

I think by "we" he doesn't mean himself and his colleagues, but Twitter itself.

While a human has a political bias, an Internet service, especially one claiming to be an open communication platform, probably shouldn't.

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