Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by whatthesmack | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

whatthesmack

Here's a couple that some folks consider to be leftist extremism on Twitter:

- Blue checkmarks claiming lockdowns are a net benefit to the world

- Twitter adding their corporate opinion on the recent US election to some tweets

The aforementioned left-wing extremism has caused many of us to move to Parler.

View on HN

That's... pretty mainstream actually.

What's extreme about any of that? Seems pretty tame.

There are a tonne of tankies on the site. Some who claim Holodomor was fake, Tianmen square was an exaggeration and the DPRK/China are heroes, Fidel Castro was a benevolent dictator and that everyone who escaped his regime was a slave owner.

Here is the secret: most leftists don't like tankies. Ban them as well I say! I people want to defend Stalin's murderous regime then I don't want them there either. Appealing to some hypocrisy here isn't super useful since the large bulk of people who don't want fascists on their webforums also don't want tankies.

It's also so vague, it's useless. There's "tonnes of <literally any type of person>" on Twitter. No presented evidence/claims that the number of them (relative to anyone else you don't like/don't agree with) is causing an issue, or that Twitter has a structural problem that raises the voices of tankies.

I don't doubt someone is repeating the CCP party line on Twitter, but are you actually saying anyone is taking those accounts seriously?

Come on now, I'm on lefty Twitter, and nobody is saying Chinese flavoured capitalism is the answer.

Yeah. People do. They get a lot of RTs (not in the millions) but I have seen tweets with several thousand likes and shares. There are more psychos like anarchists and some other buzzwords that are popular nowadays etc... one of them even wrote a book saying rioting is good because all businesses are inherently promoting white supremacy. I am not even joking. This article on The Atlantic covered the sheer lunacy of the person. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/there-no-d...

We can certainly agree that this is too much. You have inspired me to keep an eye out for such nonsense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com