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Comment by rococode | Hacker News Reader

Twitter just posted this statement: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/informati...

And a new policy banning all state-controlled media from advertising: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/advertisi...

I think this is an interesting example of recent discussions about the disproportionate influence of social media companies on information. Obviously, it doesn't seem right for a government to manipulate public conversation. But it's also worrisome that a single company has the power to shut down an entire government trying to spread its ideas. In this instance it's well justified, but it feels a little scary that the flow of information is policed by a couple private individuals with very little oversight. I don't have any particular opinions here on what might need to change, if anything - just thinking out loud.

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> But it's also worrisome that a single company has the power to shut down an entire government trying to spread its ideas.

Twitter doesn't have the power to shut down an entire government trying to spread its ideas. Not by a long shot—the very idea is laughable. Twitter has the power to shut down an entire government trying to spread its ideas via twitter. And that is in no way worrisome; that is a very good thing! If it were impossible for Twitter to do so, that would be worrisome.

Not to undermine your concerns, for you raise fair questions, but this is justifiable behavior on Twitter’s part for a simple reason: Twitter is blocked in PRC.

It seems fair to block the activities of even entire governments to operate on a platform that is itself blocked from operating normally in that country. Governments are not above reproach or criticism anymore than corporations are. If PRC will not subject itself to fair scrutiny or allow their subjects to participate on Twitter’s platform, then why should Twitter have to play or even allow PRC’s game on their platform, especially when they are blatantly breaking Twitter’s rules and intentionally trying to deceive Twitter’s users.

I think the ethics on this is quite clear. PRC is not trying to share their ideas in a fair manner. Rather, they are trying to shape and manipulate beliefs by distorting the amount of support there is for their preferred take. It's next level propaganda.

If not for the fact that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bots are being coordinated to create an illusion of weight for some consensus, things would indeed be murkier. As it is, the PRC is currently acting disingenuously.

How is this any different than the New York Times or the Nightly News? They control to a large extent the news people see.

For one, social media companies are a different kind of entity in legal terms and have different legal responsibilities.

These are journalistic organizations. Not tech companies selling ads. Sure, newspapers sell a ton of ads, but they tend to balance the news and the commercial sides way better and more delicate than your average SV tech corps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

Because you know that what you see in NYT and NN voices mainly the opinion of their editor/journalists, while Twitter can give you the illusion that the opinions you see reaching consensus there, come from your peers.

it's also worrisome that a single company has the power to shut down an entire government trying to spread its ideas

To be clear, that's not what Twitter is doing. They specifically state:

"Affected media entities are free to continue to use their Twitter account(s) to organically participate in public conversation"

What they're doing is blocking paid ads by governments and deceptive practices by everyone. But they're fine with governments spreading their ideas on Twitter the old-fashioned way, by tweeting things under their own name and getting lots of likes/retweets.

And, obviously, Twitter has no power whatsoever to shut down governments spreading their ideas the old-fashioned way off of Twitter.

By the old-fashioned way on twitter, don't you mean "running ginormous bot-farms tweeting propaganda?" Because I doubt the PRC will be restrained to simply posting tweets under the bluecheck PRC account.

Huh? I'm sure PRC will try to do that, but Twitter won't be fine with it. Twitter will try to stop them, as described in the original article.

The other weird thing is that Twitter is seen as a global information platform but the value system imposed on it is very US-centric. Likewise for Facebook.

The whole "interference" in US elections on Facebook, for example, was quite possibly blown way out of proportion compared to all the other "interference" happening around the world on Facebook.

For example, why was Facebook called to testify in front of US Congress, but not testify in front of Beijing for spreading misinformation about China?

Beijing would have FB testify if it were possible to compel them and if it suited their purposes.

Maybe what you are after (I think...) is some form of code ethics like the code of Bordeaux for journalists [0] but then also applicable to tech corporations in Silicon Valley.

Many journalists and more important journalistic organizations take this seriously. Doesn’t mean there aren’t bad apples or mistakes. It just means there is a moral guideline to fall back on.

[0] https://www.ifj.org/who/rules-and-policy/global-charter-of-e...

More like a government has the power to shutdown all except their own ideas from the internet.

I hope they also put a stop to Russian and American propaganda... :-)

Why would it be ok for the Chinese government to influence public opinion on Hong Kong, but Russia can't influence public opinion on presidential elections? Feels like it should be both or none.

There's lots of differences at a high enough resolution of analysis.

Both are wrong. I don’t think anyone is arguing anything different.

Neither is ok, but Jack likes the guys who chants “Russia is our friend”:

https://boingboing.net/2018/09/03/twitter-was-going-to-ban-c...

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/10/10/when-white-na...

Twitter permanently banned Alex Jones a couple of days after the above article was published.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/06/twitter-permanently-bans-ale...

Spencer (the neo-nazi), not Jones (the conspiracy theorist slash propagandist), is the one who loves Russia and who Jack is friendly with.

Spencer is still active on Twitter where he still posts white supremacy stuff.

I’m going long $TWTR with this news, the quarterly report is going to be great

Interesting - but many pro-HK bot accounts are still up and running. Indeed, there's a discord channel where many LIHKG (a 4chan-like HK site) users congregate to brigade Twitter and Reddit, and they've explicitly shared scripts and bots to manipulate or mass retweet messages in the channel.

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