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Comment by MauranKilom | Hacker News Reader

I can get behind the sentiment of your post, but could you detail how the Sci-Hub twitter account has breached Twitter TOS?

Contrast that with Trump who has been very clearly violating twitter TOS on a daily basis.

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> Trump who has been very clearly violating twitter TOS on a daily basis

How has Trump violated Twitter's TOS on a daily basis? It feels like every policy that has been put up is typically put up specifically for Trump.

I don't see how people can post photos of Kathy Griffin showing a decapitated Trump head as being kosher, or CNN's Como saying violent protest is constitutionally protected, and claim Trump is violating TOS. It's hypocrisy.

hypocrisy is the new honesty

Posting election misinformation violates Twitter ToS, and since the election he has posted something violating that policy (in their judgment) if not every day, very close to it. These policies have been around since before the election [1].

These examples don't appear to be hypocritical to me on the surface, but I am certainly open to more information. Many people are not happy with Kathy Griffin doing that, on both sides. And I am honestly not sure how Cuomo saying that violates anything, could you explain? Or point me in the direction of it? I had not heard about it. If it does violate their ToS, then he should have received a suspension or at least warning too.

[1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/civic-int... https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/2020-elec...

My only problem with this is who determines what is election misinformation?

If Russian authorities call another dubious election in favor of Putin, do we just accept that now and ban any dissenting opinions?

I mean after all their authorities have set the official narrative, isn't anything else misinformation now?

While I think the comparison is a bit unfair, it does raise an interesting dilemma. I really don't know what you do in that situation. I don't think their government would be considered the trusted authorities on the matter, but who would be? At the same time Twitter is not a Russian company and does not have a large Russian presence that I know of. Are they under any moral obligation to help maintain free and fair elections there? Where they may feel like they are for the US.

Yeah I just used a more extreme example to make the point.

Twitter is US based but they purposefully operate in a multi-national manner serving users across the world, so it's easy to argue that there is some responsibility.

If Twitter wants to play arbitrator and set that expectation to the international community, what happens when they don't remove "misinformation" in other countries?

Sci-hub by its own admission is a service that breaks the law by providing unauthorised access to copyright materials.

I don't know whether Sci-hub has violated Twitter ToS (on the platform) but it doesn't surprise me that Twitter would want to distance itself from an organization that is committed to breaking the law. A more dramatic/extreme example would be whether we would think it is ok for other illegal organisations/services (e.g terrorists) to be on Twitter if they weren't breaking ToS on the platform, I suspect many would say no.

On Trump, it wouldn't surprise me if he broke Twitter ToS on the platform but you would have to admit that his ban would involve greyer interpretation of his tweets than a black-white ban of a service that aims to break the law.

And I say this as a big support of sci-hub too.

Generally speaking delete Facebook/Twitter/etc, I did and it has been a big improvement to my life.

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