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Comment by herval | Hacker News Reader

Pretty sure they could get rid of all the bots if

a) it was a non profit and

b) people didn’t cry “censorship!” every time they do anything to curb abuse and

c) it would be ok to deactivate a % of real users by accident (these researchers can’t tell who’s a bot vs who’s an actual user _for sure_)

It’s not an easy problem.

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The people complaining about censorship aren’t concerned about the removal of bots. They’re concerned about a pattern of behavior from twitter whereby they shadowban, remove, and editorialize viewpoints that don’t agree with the Valley’s ideology.

Good point and I agree, but perhaps the accusation that it’s a corporate mandate is unfair, when it’s just a lot of rogue actors.

Alternatively, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the censorship complaints came from bots or people deploying bots that aren't happy they're being caught.

"The Valley's ideology" is to drag your feet, do as little as humanly possible, and to make vapid appeals to freedom of speech rather than do anything about rampant, massive-scale abuse of their services causing real and actual harm to people and society in general.

I know this isn't what you intended to say but it what your statement implies is that everyone who disagrees is uncaring, idiotic, or evil. It might do you well to spend some time finding people to respect on the other side and listen to why they advocate for things you find so distasteful.

I am trying to follow this supposed implication but I don't see the jump from "the valley" to "everyone who disagrees" and also from "dragging feet" and "making vapid appeals" to "idiotic and evil".

I will agree it's a bit of a stretch and I pattern matched to other arguments I have seen but "massive-scale abuse" and "real and actual harm" is language that presupposes a negative moral judgement about what is happening.

You think it is worth debating whether massive troll farms spreading misinformation and stoking hatred and division on a nation-state scale is good or bad?

None of these claims is real. “shadowbanning” doesnt exist, and that has been proven many times over. They also don’t remove any content that doesn’t infringe the TOS. This “valley ideology” nonsense is pure propaganda.

> None of these claims is real.

Dude, you can’t even form a grammatically correct sentence.

You should go back to Blind or 4chan. Better places for that kind of discourse than hackernews.

Your original comment added nothing of value. Everyone on hn is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points.

I wonder if there's a disincentive for social networks to purge accounts like that due to MAU being a core metric in their financial reporting.

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