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Comment by young_unixer | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you, but Twitter is rife with leftists being almost as horrible as Gab's extremists and not getting banned because Twitter execs lean left. So let's not act like Gab users are the only ones being awful.

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Good luck with that position. Too many people fail to recognise the Ying and Yang that is Twitter and Gab. Both of them are dominated by extreme ideologies, but only one has all celebrities, politicians, governments and business leaders.

Complete nonsense false equivalence. Gab is _dominated_ by far-right racist content and conspiracy theories. My mum uses Twitter and doesn't see a single far-left opinion, 99% of the content on Twitter is that way.

You're comparing an entire polluted pool that is unfit to swim in with a single floating turd in the ocean.

Really? It literally isn't possible to look at the "trending" panel in Twitter without seeing far-left talking points.

For example, today's trending topics include the "cancellation" of Dr Seuss (with many tweets giving examples of why he should be cancelled in the author's opinion) and the use of the words "latinx" and "womxn" to avoid offending people by using gendered language.

> It literally isn't possible to look at the "trending" panel in Twitter without seeing far-left talking points.

You've gone from complaining that twitter is consumed by the left to complaining that the left is allowed on twitter at all.

> For example, today's trending topics include the "cancellation" of Dr Seuss (with many tweets giving examples of why he should be cancelled in the author's opinion) and the use of the words "latinx" and "womxn" to avoid offending people by using gendered language.

Right-wingers post about that stuff 10:1 compared to anyone on the left. You're posting about it now.

> You've gone from complaining that twitter is consumed by the left to complaining that the left is allowed on twitter at all.

I'm not complaining about anything though - are you confusing posts from different HN users? I really don't care who uses Twitter or for what purpose. I'm pointing out that it's unlikely someone could use Twitter and be unaware of left-wing posts on the platform given that Twitter themselves amplify such content daily.

Stuff trends on Twitter without it appearing in my timeline all the time though, so it is quite true you can use Twitter and never deal with left wing politics even if the rest of Twitter is ranting about bean dad or whatever that was.

Hell kpop shows up on the trending as often as leftist stuff but I don’t claim kpop controls Twitter.

I just looked and nothing about seizing the means of production from our capitalist overlords, or that money is a construct that needs to be abolished is trending on Twitter today.

You are attempting humour of course, but leftists in the West have long since abandoned those goals - I wouldn't expect anything of that sort to trend on Twitter.

The far left is still advocating these things. That's what makes them the far left. If you just lop off the extreme wing of the spectrum so you can call the mainstream left "far left", where does that leave the people advocating for democratic control over the means of production?

Ah yes, false equivalences. However, the current state of affairs is more like

   far left                         far right
   <---------------------------------------->
                             [Overton Window]
                         perceived      perceived
                         far left       far right

Why is "both sides" or "they started it" or "what about" the only other retort that always comes up?

I'd say it's more like this:

    far left          center            far right
    <-------------------|-------------------->
               [Western O.W.]
                      [US Overton W.]
                             [  Gab users*   ]
     [        Twitter users*       ]

*: 90% of users, because there will always be outliers.

Nah, Twitter just seems full of leftists to you because you use the "both sides" or "what about" argument, a common conservative talking point. You think arguments like hey, let's use a word like "latinx" to be a far left talking point. It's silly, but the position is nowhere nearly as radical as "let's get rid of all governments, by force if necessary". The extreme left views to you seem to be to get rid of Dr Seuss. You can't even think of even more extreme left views as viable discourse, such as getting rid of all world rulers.

There aren't nearly enough leftist talking points on Twitter as it appears to your rightist brain, and there's plenty of homophobia, "feminism has gone too far", "it's okay to be white", worldwide anti-immigration sentiments, and (still!) Trump supporters. Maybe they're bots or whatever, but the talking points are there.

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