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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

This is the Streisand effect in practice.

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

Here in Czechia we mostly concentrate on our outrageous Covid numbers of late, but this story about Twitter pulling down a NY Post article made it through into our local news.

If it stayed up, no one would have cared enough to write about it.

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Well, I think you underestimate the gravity of this. A thoroughly corrupt money laundering Biden family machine (which also involves children of other previously high profile politicians) -- may become the presidential family of US.

And the social networks in the country, have chosen to do what they have always done with anti-left news -- they censored them.

My view, make the execs accountable now.

They have to be ones explaining why they apply one set of rules to one side of political opinion, and then another set of rules to the other side. [2]

If they are biased, than they are not a neutral platform.

A person who establishes a Charity non-profit, to hide taxes, launder money -- will be held accountable in a just system.

So should be Twitter, Facebook, and others for hiding behind 'neutral platform and section 230'.

Bring them to justice is the only solution. And do it now, before they buy/lobby their way out...

[1] See my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24797602

[2] https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/if-unreliable-is-the-issue-why...

I don't see how it is big news that both sides of American politics are profoundly corrupt. If I were American (thankfully I am not) I would be thinking about the upcoming election as a choice between a corrupt arsehole whose rhetoric does not move your country towards a race war, or a corrupt arsehole whose rhetoric does move your country towards a race war.

Which is which ?

Are you basing those positions on an article by a tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch that was released 3 weeks before an election?

I don’t see how the information revealed by these hackers backs up any of the accusations you just made. This whole thing (along with your reaction to it) reminds me of 2016’s “but her emails!”

Exactly - blocking it just brought it to the front page.

You're assuming Twitter's intent is to bury the story. Their intent is to not be involved or liable.

But they are explicitly not liable, that's why their position makes no sense...in fact their curation/censorship for this news event could make them liable for -other- posts that are completely unrelated.

One of my takes is that Twitter leadership is completely incompetent. Facebook didn't censor the story completely, Twitter did. Twitter is arguably one of the most valuable (if not the most valuable) platforms for news in the entire world...yet they can barely make any money. This isn't the first time Twitter has massively botched something so simple. It really comes down to a detached CEO, and incompetent leadership.

They may not be legally liable but they are desperately trying to avoid alienating too many users by being party to questionable actions.

A client of mine recently asked to divest from Cloudflare because they have the Proud Boys as a customer. As much as Cloudflare has no legal obligation to police the content they host, customers can vote with their feet.

They alienated a solid 40-50% of their entire user base (within the US) because of their decision. I doubt Cloudflare would miss an investor given their current equity status.

Big citation needed on that. I highly doubt twitter's user base is 40% Republican-trump supporters. Only 20% of their use base in is in the US. And Republicans need to remember that because of the electoral college their electoral wins do not mean there is a silent majority of supporters out there.

I clearly meant within the United States, and even with popular vote the country is fairly 50/50, 40/60 at worst.

If I recall correctly, the last time Republicans won the popular vote was 2004. Last time before that was 1988. The Republican party is massively over-represented in American politics at nearly every level and has been for decades.

Not sure that has anything to do with what I said "a solid 40-50%" being Conservative/Republican leaning. Obama didn't even get close to 55% in his best year. I wouldn't call a ~.5-2% difference "massive" (especially when most Americans don't identify with either party) but anyhow your opinion of the electoral college and the Senate is completely off topic and not even related to what I just said.

This is a bit misleading since Republicans focus on winning the electoral college. If republicans needed to win the popular vote they would campaign harder in high population urban centers and the popular vote counts would be much closer.

50/50 of a voter turnout around 50%. If half the country doesn't bother voting I doubt this is alienating them.

While I do agree that a citation would be useful, just because this decision alienates people doesn't make the alienated group just Republican-Trump supporters or even just Republicans. As it is more a freedom of spreading information issue.

(I don't care what Biden's son does in his free time and it doesn't affect my opinion of Biden much at all).

>yet they can barely make any money

That's true of most of the other "valuable" news platforms too. Probably because people want entertainment not news ;)

A large part of the news/money problem is the practical, space-and-time-saving desire to reduce an almost hopelessly complex, point-in-time decision to a single, overarching, global statement, such as "It really comes down to a detached CEO, and incompetent leadership." And when you boil this desire down to Twitter's level of brevity, it gets completely untenable.

Someone else in this thread argues that Twitter may be the most-important news service going now, and I agree. The fact that the platform itself is specifically engineered to be so antithetical to honest fact and debate really demonstrates our societal values about money versus truth or social cohesion.

“The mission we serve as Twitter, Inc. is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers. Our business and revenue will always follow that mission in ways that improve – and do not detract from – a free and global conversation.”

Not really. I think most people take a glance "Biden, Hunter, Burisma" and tune out -- they decided long ago what they think of the matter.

The only news here is Twitter/FB's policies -- which is what people are actually discussing.

So, respectfully, I don't think this is the Streisand effect at all in this case.

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