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Comment by shortstuffsushi | Hacker News Reader

This seems tone-deaf to me. While the world is screaming about either censorship or misinformation issues with Twitter, they're launching a service to make ephemeral tweets ala Snapchat or Instagram stories. I guess they've got to keep developing something, but it feels like a weird time to launch this.

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> While the world is screaming about either censorship or misinformation issues with Twitter

The world isn't screaming either of those things, just some individuals living in a political bubble. Most of Twitters millions of users think Twitter is mostly fine.

The President and Congress are just "some individuals living in a political bubble"?

Absolutely, they are completely out of touch with the masses who are generally fine with how twitter works, they don't even think about it. There is a small bubble that obsesses over celebrity politics on twitter and cares about who got banned and who should have been, but that is a relatively tiny niche. Twitter is an entertainment website for most people, just check the top 100 on twitter - 98% of it is music, tv, sports, etc

To be fair, kinda yes actually

More than most people on the planet.

After a couple reads, I'm not sure if this is supposed to be ironic or not.

And that is specifically why it's "tone deaf". The misinformation issues around social networks are neither limited to USA nor to people who follow politics, they are far more widespread.

Imagine there's a Fire Department in your city and most people are happy with it as they put out the fires, but it turns out a small subset of the houses are kept getting broken into by firefighters on duty. Wouldn’t people be concerned why the hell is Fire Department not getting act together and looking into the matter? Soon they might be the next ones that get broken into.

This is not a fire. Twitter is an entertainment product and ad delivery network. People who are into politics on twitter take it way too seriously.

I would agree, but the feature itself does seem interesting, I am actually looking forward to trying it - to be honest I do feel kind of a weird social pressure on Twitter given that the tweets are somewhat of a public record; it's why I still prefer IRC for instance.

I wouldn't have made the connection between misinformation problems and ephemeral tweets were it not for your comment.

Just remember that for all intents and purposes, fleets will be just as public.

I.e. I predict politicians, activists, celebrities will stumble over them just the same.

As a thought experiment: do you think if Corbyn had fleeted his comment about that graffito, would it have really protected him? I find that unlikely.

Edit: and after typing this out, I'm pretty sure I actually think that last bit is a good thing, independent of my stance on the substance of the matter. But don't mistake "I can't see it anymore" for "nobody else will remember."

Fleets aren't to protect the Leader of the Opposition -- they're to protect the random insurance adjuster who doesn't Tweet anything except sports because he's afraid of getting fired for it. Fleets might let him open up a bit.

Sorry, in my mind even that is closing your eyes and expect nobody to be able to see you.

I'm pretty sure insurance companies, three letter agencies, and anyone else with a vested interest will make sure to have a copy of as many of these as they can get their hands on. And you won't be able to rely on yours not being in any of these stashes.

Public stays public.

Nobody will have any guarantees, but controlling the probabilities lowers the number of people affected. I know that there were multiple women in my college being serially abused by a guy who had unconsensually shared consensually recorded videos of them having sex with him, and the police were not helpful because the laws were not in place at that time. He would keep uploading to a single website with their real names. The takedown of that one website dropped to 0 their constant harassment, even if there likely are some copies of those videos still out there somewhere.

For what it's worth, I don't mean to make a link between fleets and misinformation. Kind of the opposite - it is so totally unrelated that it feels tone deaf

This barely solves anything. All public people get screenshoted and once this rolls out, I imagine someone will find a way to screenshot all tweets.

HN is a huge community and I imagine full of ex-employees of Twitter, what exactly does the organization believe the businesses core focus/value is? Like what is the framework they are growing towards?

I've never worked for Twitter, my guess is their business idea is "Well, Snapchat has it, Instagram/WhatsApp/Facebook have copied it, we should also offer it.".

I returned to browsing Twitter more after the election, and IMO it hasn't changed, it's just a place to get your dopamine hit when you see a tweet you agree with get traction, or for some adrenaline when you read something supremely idiotic. I thought about replying to 1 or 2 tweets, but geez, will anyone read it, will it change anyone's mind?

Would a screenshot of a deleted tweet hold up as evidence, either for an investigative journalist or in court? Given how easy it is to produce fake tweet screenshots, it seems it would be difficult-to-impossible to 100% verify authenticity, unless you had Twitter’s cooperation.

There's already independent recording of deleted tweets by politicians:

https://www.politwoops.com/countries

They could easily record fleets as well.

I agree. The memes with the Twitter fact checks are hilarious, but they're also tragic. I have no hope of any meaningful Section 230 reform anytime the way things are going and applauding big media companies for their censorship.

I feel like all the big media platforms need to be required by law to not editorialize on anyone else's content:

https://battlepenguin.com/politics/is-meaningful-section-230...

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