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Comment by philjohn | Hacker News Reader

1. Twitter has a terms of service, and advertisers don't want their adverts next to hate speech. 2. there are SO MANY right wing people on twitter, tweeting away merrily. They adhere to the Terms of Service. 3. Once again, I mostly see that coming from accounts with a certain political bent 4. Fair

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The way most of these platforms work your ad is actually never “next to” anything anymore. Most people don’t associate online ads the same way as say a TV show. It is expected that you would get unrelated ads to your content when the content you consume is diverse, unlike TV ads which are very specifically on one topic. Then depending on if you view on mobile, ads again aren’t even part of the broader message. They take up the whole screen and aren’t associated with content again. Sponsorship, meaning your ad specifically supports the product, and online ads are different.

>Twitter has a terms of service, and advertisers don't want their adverts next to hate speech

Why? Does an ad get contaminated by association?

Or it's a minority who gets to call what's "hate speech" and what's not, and pushes advertisers to not want to risk this (who wouldn't give a fuck otherwise)?

> Does an ad get contaminated by association?

People buying ads certainly think so. Or more specifically they think their brand or product denoted in the ad will be associated with the context in which it appears.

And they are the customers.

And 3 is almost always conspiracy bs. They are "shadowbanned" but their tweets somehow get high engagement. It bs political complaints.

Shadowbanning is very real on many platforms. It is a method designed to ban a user without pushback from the user and minimize the ability of them to work around the ban. Explicitly lying to users like this, even the bad ones, should be something that is banned the by government. If you paid money for a service and they tricked you into not receiving the service without telling you this wouldn’t be allowed, but for some reason it’s okay to trample on the expectations of users when giving out free service.

> 2. there are SO MANY right wing people on twitter, tweeting away merrily.

As there are left wing people tweeting away (AOC). what’s the point here? We going back to trying to stifle right wing speech?

No, it's that there is a healthy balance on the site, and the people who get banned have typically posted some REALLY unsavoury stuff - and plenty of left wing people have also been banned for posting unsavoury stuff.

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