Twitter deletes over 10,000 accounts that sought to discourage U.S. voting | Hacker News Reader

Twitter deletes over 10,000 accounts that sought to discourage U.S. voting

reuters.com

10 pointstareqak18 comments

I'm wondering if flagging those accounts would be more effective. Make the problem obvious instead of sweeping 'em under the run. Might help average users to be more discerning.

Like the warning I get when my web browser visits a suspected malware site.

One can hope...

Using fox news as an example, it's clear that people cannot discern.

> The Tweets included ones that discouraged Democratic men from voting, saying that would drown out the voice of women

This is not a falsehood, such as telling people they need three forms of ID to vote. This is an idea that Twitter is censoring.

How do you "discourage someone from voting"? By telling him voting booths smell bad?

And why would something like that need to be censored?

(I am not American)

The article says that the deleted accounts were telling Democratic men not to vote because they would “drown out the voice of women.”

The idea is to cast a large net so that maybe, just maybe, a small number of Democratic males would abstain. Especially in swing states, every single vote is extremely valuable to both parties.

I can't imagine a male (a real male) not voting because of that. Sounds like those comments were in jest.

"Grab them by the ballots" facebook page with naked fat woman is not a jest. Would discourage me surely.

You would surprised by how easy people are "influenced"... Just heard some conspiracy theories from people I though were "sane" and I can tell you that people believe anything you tell them if that aligns somehow with their belief system.

That sounds ridiculous.

I also don't live in the US, but in my country we are encouraged to not vote or "vote blank" if we don't agree with any of the parties. It's a way of expressing your displeasure with all of the parties up for election.

In the USA, there are serious proposals for adding "none of the above" to each contest. Some even suggest if "none of the above" wins, there's a do-over with all new candidates.

Years ago, we had a local race for judge where both candidates were revealed to be despicable (during their campaign). A do-over would have been great.

Well, one example would be threatening people either directly or through violent public messaging. These are antisocial behaviors. Of the 10,000 words any human reads on any day, removing unnecessary negativity is an absolute virtue. This is the same reason we have spam filters. Would you consider Google to be censoring your email inbox? Wanting to force every human to see every other human's toxic dialogue is an invocation of Hanlon's Razor.

Not an American issue by the way, if your country happens to vote this is happening in your elections too.

If people were being threatened with violence, I'm sure that would be the focus of this article. And I'm also sure they would've taken it up with the authorities.

You asked how to discourage someone from voting, not what the focus of the article was. I guess you meant that rhetorically and had a different narrative in mind.

Just think about it for a few moments, it's easy to come up with some ideas that would work on some people some of the time:

    Democrats certain to win "we don't really need any more votes"

    Polling both lines expected to reach record '4 hour' lengths!

    "No hope" for democrats come polling day

    DEA planning "surprise" drug-test sting at polling booths

    ICE planning "polling-day round-up!"

    Georgia electoral system "hopelessly rigged" — why your vote won't even be counted

Now imagine that you were getting paid to work full-time at reducing turnout on social media and that it was something you believed-in — it wouldn't be hard to have some decent effect at the margins.

Can anyone clarify why this link is now flagged on HN? Thanks.

It's flagged because readers chose to flag it. We can't assume their intentions.

I flagged it because I don't want Reddit-style discussion (which inevitably happens on submissions like this) on Hacker News. There are many other outlets where content like this can be posted and discussed.

Original title: "Exclusive: Twitter deletes over 10,000 accounts that sought to discourage U.S. voting" (5 characters too long).

So the article isn’t exclusive? :(

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