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Comment by alpaca128 | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that there's no middleground. Either you don't play the "ministry of information" role and have to live with the fact that eventually your platform will turn into a more chaotic 4chan, or you start removing particularly excessive content at which point you crossed the only line that can be clearly defined.

This is one of the reasons I think old-school forums are superior in terms of "web hygiene". You have a group of moderators, each responsible for a clearly defined section and a userbase small enough so rules are still enforceable. And the people running it are not an untouchable megacorporation.

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Since this tweet comes from the chinese embassy of the USA, it seems to me that this is diplomatic matters and should be handled by the government. For example the USA government could apply diplomatic sanctions to the embassy if they do not delete the tweet. I find it very strange that the twitter moderation team is acting in stead of the foreign affairs department.

If we're going to treat Twitter like a public utility, let's just nationalize it and get rid of the oligopoly. Although I'd rather have it broken apart into a bunch of federated websites with a hard requirement to never break federation (GTalk/XMPP style) with the rest of the open web.

Twitter is not an arm of the US government. It's like saying I don't have the right to choose what is published in my newsletter [0].

[0] I don't actually have a newsletter.

If China sent it as a statement to every newspaper and television channel in the US, do you think they should be required to run it as a story?

Terrible analogy, newspapers and stations have limited space for what they cover and it's an editorial decision to choose to run something over something else.

Twitter could just let the tweet exist for people who personally choose to follow the Chinese US embassy at no cost to other tweets. I mean, it's from a national government's embassy, their angle is not hidden at all.

Now they open themselves up to all sorts of questions, are they softer on the Saudis? On Israel?

Why is US company Twitter obligated to perform postal services for a foreign government?

It's more effort to ban a post than to just leave it up.

Getting into picking and choosing which foreign governments are allowed to post, and which messages they'll countenance, at additional expenses for their mod team? Twitter has a foreign policy?

> it seems to me that this is diplomatic matters and should be handled by the government

You'd obviously see similar arguments about keeping Trump's account. What if the leader of a country calls for violence? Keep it because diplomacy?

As someone else mentioned and I now agree with, Twitter isn't an arm of the government. It's a U.S. company that has rules. Government officials can use any platform they want to get their message out. Companies can mostly do whatever they want with their own platforms.

This seems backward. The government has no business censoring the Chinese embassy. However, the embassy has no particular right to force platforms to disseminate its propaganda.

Honestly, this sort of action just seems like a return to the status quo; you can say what you want, and people who read a lot of embassy press releases might see it, but good luck finding a newspaper who’ll cooperate if it’s abhorrent stuff like this.

If it's diplomatic matters they should have used the usual diplomatic channels. They instead posted it on a privately owned platform they themselves banned in their own country.

Twitter has to obey the law, other than that they don't owe that embassy anything.

Foreign embassies have no right to abrogate the private property rights of US citizens or businesses.

Twitter has the right (and, really, an ethical obligation) to deter the spread of misinformation by malicious actors. This tweet implicitly makes the false claim that mass sterilization in Xinjiang is voluntary, and its deletion will mitigate the impact of the misinformation and fake news.

>your platform will turn into a more chaotic 4chan

You might be surprised to know most 4chan boards are very tightly moderated.

I didn't write it very clearly, I guess "unmoderated" would have been a more fitting term. Especially as my main point was about the need of moderators so the community doesn't turn into a toxic pit.

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