Hacker News Reader

Comment by and0 | Hacker News Reader

That simply isn't true. I'd love an example of how yourself or other you follow are censored. I'm deeply familiar with the platform and have not witnessed censorship outside of threats and direct hate speech, as well as extreme disinformation campaigns (ie Trump).

(Of course you'll be able to find a bunch of death threats from random accounts all over, I could find a handful in a few minutes, but that's largely outside of anyone's control.)

The only recent example I can think of is the Babylon Bee and, yeah, this was 100% warranted https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2022/03/21/the-babyl...

View on HN

> (Of course you'll be able to find a bunch of death threats from random accounts all over, I could find a handful in a few minutes, but that's largely outside of anyone's control.)

I think this is what I don’t understand about the general sentiment that Twitter is some kind of uber-censored platform. Sure, high profile accounts and tweets can sometimes be removed, but have you ever tried reporting tweets?

9 out of 10 times that I report tweets threatening violence or harm against someone, I get a notification a few hours later that the “moderation team” has reviewed that tweet and found it not to be in breach of any policies. Twitter’s reporting system is ineffective at best, and I almost wish I had seen the kind of heavy handed moderation that people prescribe to Twitter here.

I mean recent Twitter leaks have shown internal tools that let them categorize users into blacklists and the ability censor their tweets so they dont get much reach or engagement by not showing up in Trending lists and etc. The screenshots of the tools came out during the big hack a year ago that was pushing crypto scams.

And why is that a bad thing? Trending blacklists are a standard moderation tool, basically every social media platform uses them nowadays. Without them, bad actors can game the algorithm to get their spam promoted through the trends system.

The fact that moderation tools exist does not imply that they are being used for political censorship. None of the screenshots of "search blacklisted" accounts from the leak showed any evidence of it being used on actual people, they are all random alphanumeric usernames with more reports than tweets.

In fact, the opposite is true. In 2018, when the feature was first rolled out, it was found to be catching several notable conservative commentators because their tweeting behavior is hard to distinguish from trolls and spambots (wonder why...), so those people were explicitly whitelisted so that they would appear in searches and trends despite their bad behavior.

We quickly went from "Twitter isn't a heavily censored platform" to "they have secret blacklists, but it's totally normal and not political and a good thing anyway". This game of moving goalposts is tiresome and clearly disingenuous.

Twitter is a moderated platform. Tooling for moderating content existing does not inherently imply it is being used for political purposes, but you’re more than welcome to contradict that with sources.

There’s no goalpost moving here - a social media site having the ability to prevent large volumes of spam making its way to the trending page in front of thousands of eyeballs shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. The number of crypto scams in replies to tweets by Elon himself suggests that this tooling is definitely not as draconian in ability as you seem to believe.

Your email provider also has “secret” blacklists, and if incoming email originates from a sender on those lists then it gets put in your junk (or even bounced). Does that concern you?

For a vast amount of people (on both sides of the political spectrum, oddly enough), referring to Levine as a man is an objective statement of reality.

The tweet is still up, even. Babylon Bee are being asked to delete it as a form of bending the knee to an opposing ideology. It's wrongthink, not hate speech or incitement, that you and Twitter are concerned with.

I don't have a horse in the trans debate, but I have my fair share of opinions that are verboten in progressive circles. It would be stupid of me to deny what is happening there.

The fact that your comment is being downvoted is why we need more free speech. The above comment is simply a biological fact. Many people are stuck in echo chambers that make them think their fringe opinions are from the majority, Twitter enables this enormously

Astroturfing 101.

For a long time referring to ____ race (or women, etc) as having a naturally lower intelligence was "an objective statement of reality" to the vast majority of people, so I don't that a compelling argument for defining hate speech.

Especially in this case where it was targeted at an individual, and not just a conservative blog post on transgenderism being linked to etc. Notice that Ben Shapiro et al have not been banned.

> I don't that a compelling argument for defining hate speech.

I'm not trying to define hate speech, I'm saying that there's no hate there to begin with and so all we're left with is an argument over reality (or the terms we use to describe it): is a woman an adult human female, or is there something else we have to consider?

In your counterexamples, black people/women are being declared strictly inferior. That's not the case here - Levine isn't lessened by being an adult human male.

If you want something censored, the onus should be on you to prove that it is hateful, not on someone else to prove that it is not. For that, you need to define hate speech and explain how the Babylon Bee's post fits that definition alongside the examples you just gave.

> For a long time referring to ____ race (or women, etc) as having a naturally lower intelligence was "an objective statement of reality"

It still is, if we're talking about averages. Extremely well studied too.

If you think banning the Babylon Bee was 100% warranted, then you share the same views as the moderation team.

Banning the Bee is warranted only in the eyes of transgender ideologues.

The whole point of free speech is that no faction should be allowed to suppress the speech of others, lest such factions prevent consideration of ideas that might eventually prove convincing and true.

Are you arguing that Elon Musk should make efforts to allow for CSAM on Twitter?

>The conservative-leaning parody site, The Babylon Bee, was suspended by Twitter for 12 hours, after it had mockingly awarded transgender government official Rachel Levine the title "Man of the Year."

In what way was this "100% warranted"? You mean it's "100% warranted" to ban accounts which make fun of people and things you don't like? What about making fun of Trump? Is that fine? Seems to be, and seems to be based entirely on the mod's political persuasions.

Let's talk about Hunter Biden's laptop. This was banned almost immediately under the premise of "hacked material." Okay, seems fair. Except they allowed (and continue to allow) hacked material to circulate about the Canadian Freedom Convoy donors.

Let's talk about covid. Twitter banned any and all mentions (and accounts) which discussed the possibility that covid came from a lab in Wuhan. This is now a leading theory of its origin. Project Veritas, whether you like them or not, have been instrumental in exposing the relationship between Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance. The fact that Fauci oversaw re-defining the term "gain of function research," that he explicitly gave funding to EcoHealth Alliance, knowing they would be funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct gain of function research, and uncovered incorrectly redacted emails between Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance.

Twitter even suspended Chinese virologist Li-Meng Yan who fled the country to talk about the high likelihood of a lab leak.

I feel quite certain you're busy telling yourself "but these are all totally justified!" This means your views align really well with the moderation on Twitter. Where it's fine to ban things like this, but not the hacked private information about Canadian Freedom Convoy donors, or Trump and family hacks, or the doxing of Libs of Ticktok founder Chaya Raichik.

What a shock you are getting downvoted - not sure why, other than you are challenging people’s cherished dogma. Which is exactly why if Elon can forced moderation to at least be transparent and consistent, and not purely through the lens of political ideology we will all be better for it. And if it makes people uncomfortable - good! If you are fat, dumb and happy then you really aren’t doing anything. Life without friction is pretty meaningless - probably why so many people are pretty miserable even if they don’t actively realize it. Reading some of the comments in here - the lack of self awareness by many is pretty amazing.

"Transparent and consistent" moderation has nothing to do with freeing it from "political ideology".

Twitter's moderation is fairly transparent, and mostly consistentish (as it can be, moderating on the scale that twitter does, which i guess is not very consistent at all...). Just because you don't agree with their moderation doesn't make it untransparent, or inconsistent.

Trump should start identifying as a woman so that it becomes hate speech to mock him.

> Let's talk about covid. Twitter banned any and all mentions (and accounts) which discussed the possibility that covid came from a lab in Wuhan.

This is the one example everyone who is getting their knickers in a twist about Twitter censorship loves to bring up, but it doesn't seem to be a great example. There's only weak circumstantial evidence in favour of the theory and banning discussion of it was something Twitter realised was a mistake and rolled back on.

I don't think it's unreasonable for mistakes to happen as long as they're corrected. I think there are plenty of things you can criticise Twitter for, but this seems like an odd one to highlight.

> Twitter even suspended Chinese virologist Li-Meng Yan who fled the country to talk about the high likelihood of a lab leak.

"Even"? This is a misrepresentation. Yan is a political hack. She refuses to have her work peer-reviewed. See e.g. [0]. She's a useful pawn for Steve Bannon.

[0] https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/pubs_archiv...

Libs of TikTok was temporarily suspended twice for targeted harassment. On April 13, 2022, Libs of TikTok was suspended for 12 hours from Twitter for "hateful conduct." Hours after being reinstated, the account was suspended a second time for another 12 hours.

The only thing Libs of TikTok posts is videos made by liberals on TikTok. Yet it was deemed hateful? Reposting liberal content is hateful now.

That is not all it does, it's posts videos that are longer than any of their 'true believer' readers will actually watch. Many of which are at best 'cringe'. Then labels the videos as evidence of pedophelia/child grooming. Which they are clearly not.

> it's posts videos that are longer than any of their 'true believer' readers will actually watch.

What? How do you know how long they are watched? How do you how long it's watched on Twitter?

> Then labels the videos as evidence of pedophelia/child grooming

Strange way to summarize the captions, the annotations and summaries I've seen were pretty accurate and more specific than your hyperbole.

So what if they label videos? Not sure how that matters. Mute or block if you are offended. Sticks and stone y’know?

How many posts have there been on Twitter calling republicans Nazis? Or claiming the 2016 election was stolen? Or calling Clarence Thomas a house —-r or an Uncle Tom.

Libs of Tik Tok is tame by comparison.

This is a remarkably uninformed comment. Go actually look at what they post (some of the thousands they've deleted). They lie, slander, misrepresent, and dox repeatedly https://github.com/salcoast/deleted-tweets-archive/blob/main...

Looks like just annotating videos. The deleted ones may have been forced.

I spent 2 seconds reading through: "This polyamorous genderfluid witch is a preschool teacher in Florida. She’s so proud of herself that she discusses her gender and sexuality with 4 year olds"

"This is a mental illness"

"This teacher has been identified and is employed by @FergFlorSchools"

"3rd grade teacher at @GracemorNKC teaches 8 year olds about gender identity and then “wonders if anyone [students] will change their minds” presumably about their gender. These groomer teachers need to be fired. "

You say "just annotating videos", those political blinders you're wearing must be pretty strong...

You'll have to link the videos that accompany those texts so we can decide.

>I'm deeply familiar with the platform and have not witnessed censorship outside of threats and direct hate speech

Maybe you're brainwashed to the point where everything Twitter bans falls into categories of "hate speech" or "extreme disinformation". That doesn't mean the majority of people out there share your views. Of course, you don't have to deal with those people, because you probably hang out only on websites that reinforce your biases via censorship.

>I'd love an example of how yourself or other you follow are censored.

Unity 2020 campaign account got permanently banned and links to its website were restricted even in private messages. They broke no rules, posted nothing edgy and no one ever coherently explained why this happened.

New York Post got suspended after Tweeting Hunter Biden laptop article link. The suspension was based on clearly fabricated rationale.

These are just two egregious cases that I'm well familiar with. I can post about a dozen more. There are thousands less notable, but no less clear-cut examples out there. There are even more examples that are debatable, but which in totality indicate a pattern or political manipulation.

Funny thing is, I don't even use Twitter. The question is, why does a person like me is more aware of its censorship that someone who claims to be well familiar with the platform?

i'm just going to repeat what you said back to you, because it also applies to you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com