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Comment by jeromegv | Hacker News Reader

Keep in mind your own biais. I am following liberals on twitter, and there has been a big outcry that some of those users had their account deactivated or tweets taken down while @jack is keeping famous neo-nazis on the platform (not talking of Trump supporters here, people that self-identify as nazis and white suprematist). So while it looks for you like Twitter has been becoming a liberal echochamber, to liberal it is becoming a place where neo-nazis are let free while critics are being harassed/taken down.

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Is someone who is a professed neo-nazi using your platform, but not otherwise engaging in abuse, worth banning?

Let's try it with this example. Is someone who genuinely and openly holds the opinion that all men are rapists, but not otherwise engaging in abuse, worth banning?

When we start going down this path of trying to get rid of "undesirables", we start engaging in censorship.

When you equate this imaginary feminist position with literally advocating for genocide, you're telling on yourself.

I've been involved in leftist/feminist spaces about a decade both IRL and online and I can assure you that while it certainly never gained mass adoption and may be out of favour now compared to the late 00s early 10s (thank god), calling it an "imaginary" position is disingenuous at best.

Sure, it was a second wave attitude. It's obviously not at all prevalent in the contemporary mainstream, certainly not among people young enough to be active on Twitter. In that sense it's imaginary: it's his imagined view of what feminists on Twitter are arguing for, not an accurate representation of what their views are.

> calling it an "imaginary" position is disingenuous at best

It was never worthy of engagement anyway, so perhaps stop creating strawpeople with it.

I didn't use the word feminist.

You don't think anyone can tell what you mean?

A better example would be TERFs, and they are often worth banning because they act like terrible people.

> Is someone who is a professed neo-nazi using your platform, but not otherwise engaging in abuse, worth banning?

You can't be a professed neo-nazi without engaging in abuse. Nazism is explicitly a genocidal ideology and calling for genocide is abuse.

> When we start going down this path of trying to get rid of "undesirables", we start engaging in censorship.

Yes. Lets get started.

Indeed. There's a reason leftist types have been escaping gradually escaping to Mastodon instances where they have much more useful content-blocking tools and aren't forced under pain of being banned to share a space with people who literally want them dead. On Twitter, a self-identifying neonazi can spout death threats, and the response to that will get the responder banned.

>Twitter, a self-identifying neonazi can spout death threats, and the response to that will get the responder banned.

Could you link an example?

Not without identifying myself, sorry. I sit in multiple irc channels where this sort of thing regularly happens to members though.

It’s the bizarre inconsistency of it that’s most grating - content can result in bans or not depending on... as far as anyone can tell, a roll of the dice. For any number of instances where a fascist says something awful and gets away with it, you can find much more banal things that get leftists banned.

It will be hard to satisfy your demand for proof, because there's no good way to search "tweets you've seen", but I have seen it happen.

Person A starts a thread.

Person B who A doesn't know says something dehumanizing to person A.

Person A says "fuck off and die".

Person A gets shadowbanned for a week.

There was even a time when, due to their bad automated processes, you could get shadowbanned for using the word "queer" in a positive sense.

(Hilariously, Twitter's position on shadowbanning is that they do no such thing, they just hide your tweets from everyone's timeline, which is exactly what everyone means when they say "shadowban".)

> Person A says "fuck off and die".

That's not a death threat. That's mean and callous and rude, but it's not a threat.

This seems intended as an argument against my post, but I agree entirely.

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