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Comment by _qulr | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure why Twitter thinks that quote tweets are better than retweets. Propaganda exists to be spread, and it's long been obvious that "This is wrong/bad [quote]" just serves to further spread the propaganda and raise the propaganda artist's profile. Also, you can disable retweets on accounts you follow but not quote tweets.

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> it's long been obvious that "This is wrong/bad [quote]" just serves to further spread the propaganda and raise the propaganda artist's profile.

This has never been obvious to me, and I continue to be confused by it as a position. It seems similar to "don't respond to anyone making blatantly false/harmful claims on discussion forums, because engaging with them just encourages them and spreads their message". In fact, in the Twitter case, it's even _more_ nonsensical to me - because the audience in a forum is general (and so, is likely to contain folks who are "on the fence" or who agree with the troll), but your Twitter followers are, by definition, those who hold similar opinions to you (and so, are likely to agree with your "takedown").

I'm not saying that you're wrong (I've seen enough apparently-smart people espousing this opinion to convince me that I'm the one missing something), I'm saying that I don't understand it. Can you help me understand what I'm missing?

What rdw said in a sibling reply. Also, it's all too easy to raise a troll's profile and turn them into an anti-hero or martyr by dunking on them. This is what happened with the POTUS. It's precisely the reaction he gets, the vehement criticism he gets, that makes him popular. His followers think, if he's pissing off a lot of people, he must be doing something right. The worst possible thing that could happen to him, from his perspective, is to be ignored. "All press is good press", as they say. In attempting to refute the message, you inadvertently make the messenger more prominent than they ought to be. You give them more public influence than they ought to have. This is how trolls rise to prominence, not only in politics, but in all areas. Look at the sports shows, where the loudest blowhards with the dumbest opinions — which they spout on purpose! — have the biggest audience. Dumb opinions make an inviting target to dunk on, and everyone takes the bait. The trolls want to be dunked on, time and time again. They want to be the go-to person for getting dunked on. If I make make a very bad Star Wars analogy, it's like when Obi Wan says "You can't win, Vader. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine." (Except Obi Wan is the bad guy in this analogy. Which he kind of is anyway, because he lied to Luke about his father.)

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf

> Results indicate that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the targeted ideological group. We also document several instances of a “backfire effect” in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question

In a nutshell, “There is no such thing as bad publicity”. Siblings explain in more detail.

> Propaganda exists to be spread

Indeed, that is the meaning of the word.

It's not that they're better per se, it's that there's more effort involved. Pushing people towards quote tweeting instead adds a little extra friction and slows down the spread

It makes it harder for bots to just retweet and amplify without having to write unique content. If they all just retweet with "I agree", that is easy to Twitter to detect and filter.

There are millions of real tweets like this though. "++ [tweet]" "Thread. [tweets]" [downward pointing finger emoji, tweet]

It's true, but unless your strategy to is to deplatform a viewpoint, adding context is very powerful. Just read the NYT or the Washington Post when they talk about foreign countries and how bad they are. Sometimes they present innocuous facts and you think they're the devil.

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