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Comment by mastazi | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been wondering for a while whether I should delete my Twitter account and this piece of news suggests to me that perhaps I should.

The sentence “Fomenting political discord” sounds a lot like 1984.

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Not the first time I've heard someone argue that state-sponsored agitprop is free speech, while suppressing it on a private platform is somehow dystopian.

Ignorance is strength?

I think part of the problem is that Twitter is rooted in American assumptions about propaganda that don't apply globally.

America isn't propaganda-free, of course, but there's enough competing/conflicting propaganda that things kind-of balance out. (Or at least historically they did; increased silo-ing is reducing exposure to conflicting opinions even here).

Opening the platform to countries like Saudi Arabia and China brings fully-functional propaganda operations into the global mix, for which there is no existing competition. Nobody really knows what to do about it.

Do these 'state-sponsored' accounts have a footer '- sponsored by X' in their posts? How are you determining what is state-sponsored?

> state-sponsored agitprop

as defined by the board of Twitter, Inc.? I stand by my "ignorance" then.

State-sponsored agitprop bad, private, corporate-sponsored agitprop good.

Am I understanding the implications of your post correctly?

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

I think is pretty directly relevant to your "question"?

So unless we deal with the problem of Coca Cola being on twitter we can't deal with state sponsored bots?

Your question seems insincere and merely aimed at morally confusing the issue to no useful purpose.

How on Earth is pointing out the hypocrisy of censoring paid propaganda by a state actor, but not by a corporate actor whataboutism? This is an incredibly relevant issue.

And we're not even trying to 'deal with the problem of Coca Cola being on Twitter'. The whole raison d'etre for Twitter's existence is dissemination of paid propaganda by corporate actors. It's what keeps the lights on at Twitter! Ads, promoted tweets, and other forms of paid speech.

If the difference between a State and a Corporation is that muddled in your mind it's your issue not the rest of ours.

It's a critical part of being a discerning person to be able to BOTH say how things are similar and how they differ.

You seem to have no test for discerning how Coca Cola and the Russian government differ.

For someone who doesn't live in Russia, the difference is academic, and they are far more similar, than they are different.

Actually, now that I think about it - one key difference is that shitty sugary drinks have killed more Americans then the Russian government did.

Another is that corporations buying candidates, by virtue of sponsoring their political campaigns have done more to undermine, subvert, and corrupt democracy than the Kremlin could ever dream of. You say the Russians have improperly 'influenced' elections? China astroturfs their global image? Please contrast that to to both the effort expended by, and the rewards gained by the fossil fuel industry, in 'influencing' elections, and astroturfing its global image.

Everyone's getting their knickers in a twist because some Trump staffer had some meetings with the Russian government - yet half the politicans in Washington are regurgitating talking points straight from a corporate press release.

But I suppose propaganda from the former is kosher, because they have a clear profit motive for it, eh?

> Actually, now that I think about it - one key difference is that shitty sugary drinks have killed more Americans then the Russian government did.

The difference is agency. The people that chose to drink those drinks were able to make that decision, not helpless to some corporation.

You don't get to choose not to be assassinated by a Russian agent.

That's a load of crock. By that same argument, since you have the agency to think for yourself and vote however you want, foreign propaganda should have zero impact on our elections.

I also don't have any choice in whether or not I personally get to deal with the negative social impacts of overconsumption of sugary drinks, overextraction of fossil fuels, or politicians bought by the healthcare cartels. I have to live with all of it.

Partially, yeah. I do think that. Responsibility stops with the voter. The way we combat misinformation is with more information (like fact checks and advertiser transparency) and never censorship.

Prove that it's state sponsored. The point is, we can't. Not without Twitter sharing their data and methodologies. I've heard too many horror stories about being axed from the internet by a faceless corporation to accept their judgement blindly.

In the article, the accounts were "actively spreading misinformation and encouraging unrest in politically sensitive climates."

Sounds fine to me. Overreaction much?

Sounds fine to me too. When NSDAP executed "Night of the Long Knives" they also provided a reason that sounded fine. In fact it wasn't even called Night of the Long Knives, it was called "Hummingbird" ... Nobody is going to provide a reason that doesn't "sound fine" ... or did you verify those accounts?

Besides "encouraging unrest in politically sensitive climates" is BS statement in itself. They kicked out 200k Chinese accounts, 5k from UAE, 4k from Russia ... so these are "politically sensitive climates" according tho whose political narrative and objectives? I'm sure Chinese definition of "sensitive climates" fits different countries.

Bottom line is, Twitter is a private business and now they play geopolitics (or aid their player of choice, choose whichever you like)

Without any context, if you said "a spokesman justified the censorship by claiming those involved were 'actively spreading misinformation and encouraging unrest in politically sensitive climates'" and asked me to guess who the spokesman was representing, I would say the Chinese government not Twitter. You might object that that statement is true when made by Twitter but would be a lie coming from China, but I don't think that's right. The protestors in Hong Kong are certainly "encouraging unrest" and probably some of them have made untrue claims at some point.

This kind of surface-level similarity doesn't necessarily mean much, but I still think it's a bit disturbing. Twitter have a lot of power to censor, and I'm not sure why anyone would trust them to reliably use it wisely.

"misinformation" - as defined by whom?

"encouraging unrest in politically sensitive climates" - La Résistance in Vichy France would fall under this. In some countries asking for fair and democratic elections would fall under this.

Inconvenient truths often get mislabeled as misinformation.

What truths are being labeled as misinformation here?

If I knew and told you that for this very site I'd get banned. If the truths weren't inconvenient, no one would bother mislabeling them.

Do you trust their judgment on this? Will you always? Like other similar happenings, the side you agree with may not always be the side making the choices. No one can objectively make that call in 100% of circumstances, and the risk of deplatforming a valid counter voice should not be dismissed.

> Do you trust their judgment on this?

More or less.

> Will you always?

Hard to say. I can at least see the possibility that the answer is no.

> Like other similar happenings, the side you agree with may not always be the side making the choices.

The side that's in favor of keeping foreign agitprop off of the site is a side that I'm likely to continue to agree with. It's not like the actors being blocked are good-faith "valid counter voices". They are illegitimate because of their methodology, not because of their viewpoint. (An organized campaign of people lying about who they're working for, trying to advocate positions that they don't actually believe, in order to mess with the minds of voters of another country... yeah, let's block that, no matter which viewpoint they've chosen to "advocate".)

Could Twitter move on to viewpoint blocking? Yes, they could. Would I have a problem with it if they did? Absolutely.

Disclaimer: I don't actually use Twitter, and I may not know what I'm talking about.

Isn't that exactly how China justifies all its online crackdowns?

> "actively spreading misinformation and encouraging unrest"

Isn't this the way many dictators describe democracy movements? How do we know if it's one or the other? Twitter is not a government, you can't submit a freedom of information request, we don't know what methodology they've used.

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