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Comment by bedhead | Hacker News Reader

Good news citizens of San Francisco and Chicago, your looting/shoplifting epidemic is about to vanish completely! Antifa riots? What are those? I mean, if you can't post pics and videos on Twitter, did it even really happen?

The next step is Twitter will have a formal list of approved media outlets (gee I wonder which ones it might be) where if they publish it first, Twitter will allow it. Selective reporting seems to be one of the primary tools for media bias/activism, and this is Twitter figuring out their own way to selectively ban content they don't like instead of the current user generated openness.

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A former NYT tech reporter is calling it the `Andy Ngo law`.

https://twitter.com/NellieBowles/status/1465724183044841473

It does seem crafted to gatekeep citizen journalists who are a major thorn in the corporate media's official narrative.

Specifically, Ngo posted a lot of videos of BLM riots, and mugshots of people arrested for said rioting, to show they weren't black and in fact were often teachers, government employees etc. Well the establishment didn't like that at all.

Ngo: "Oregon lawmakers introduced a bill to stop public record access to arrest photographs after I documented who was arrested at the riots last year."

And now Twitter introduces this new policy the day after Jack resigns. Presumably stopping people like Ngo tweeting about arrested people had been a long term desire of the internal faction whose ascent is now complete with the new CEO, so bye bye videos of peaceful protests!

Funny, the moment I first read this I also called it Andy Ngo Law and quipped to a friend that Twitter finally figured out how to shut him down.

It doesn't entirely work until they manage step 3: make Twitter (and Google, Facebook and Amazon) the entirety of the internet. We saw some movements in that direction when Amazon and Apple colluded to remove the Parler Twitter competitor app. They don't (yet) control enough of the internet routing infrastructure to complete their vision, but it's definitely coming.

Is parler supposed to just be a “Twitter competitor” now? Is that really an intellectually honest way to describe it and why it was removed?

As a San Franciscan, Twitter is the only place I see anyone worried about a looting epidemic. And my peer group is literally "Union Square retail worker," so we're kind of the people everyone keeps telling me are the most freaked out.

Don't get your information from Twitter. I don't. :)

Best source I've found. What do you use?

The Atlantic, New Yorker, NPR, NYT, Reuters, here.

IMO those all provide a very particular, somewhat narrow perspective. I feel I can get a wider sense of what's going on from Twitter. As just one example, mainstream sources were quite blase about the COVID pandemic until very late, while other (it turns out more accurate) perspectives were available on Twitter.

(Edit: Well, w/ the partial exception of HN, of course!)

Twitter is an odd duck. What does it mean to "use" Twitter? If I follow the posts of an actual NYT reporter who is tweeting an event they are at am I using NYT or am I using Twitter? This is different than following what's trending and getting into the muck with other faceless users which is I what I typically ascribe "using" Twitter to mean.

As an aside- a benefit of just not using social media for news is that I miss out on a lot of things that almost always turn out to not be important. There is a higher threshold. I'm not succumbed by some hot issue or crisis for a day that is ultimately meaningless. Coworkers would often ask me my thoughts on an issue and I'd have no clue what they're talking about. It's liberating. Sometimes less is more.

For me, using Twitter means following a bunch of strangers that seem knowledgable about various domains. Obviously, there are a gazillion possible ways to use it. :-) I feel I've learned useful things that I wouldn't know without it, and it's the second-best way I've found, after personal experience, to ascertain the "truth" about the world. (Blogs and substack and forums like HN are similar, but they don't have the same breadth and density.)

Is it a good use of time? Who knows, hard to say. It's interesting, sometimes even addictive.

I do agree that on an emotional level we should be most occupied with living the tangible, real lives in front of us, and not worry too much about history roiling by all around us.

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