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Comment by throwaway042122 | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. It's bizarre to see him argue that Twitter censors news simply because it wants to avoid mobs, when the company has stood by and done nothing to stop actual Twitter mobs that have gotten innocent people fired for doing nothing (for a couple examples look at David Shor[1] or this random Chipotle manager[2]). And there are certain issues where Twitter has stated that you simply aren't allowed to take an opposing view or you'll be kicked off their platform. You might argue that their decision to take sides is a good thing, but I don't know how anyone can argue that it's nonexistent.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/chipotle-rehires-manage...

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There are literal mob calls to get people killed, like that Pakistani woman who was accused of "blasphemy" against Islam a few weeks back. I think twitter would have done something about all those users tweeting she should be hanged if she were American and had the right sort of identity but like this they don't even care.

It's not that bizarre. It's called lying.

David Shor wasn't fired by a Twitter mob - wouldn't his manager have to be on Twitter for that? He was fired via backchannel complaints or a very emotionally sensitive email list.

I think you're confusing two different things. Here's a New York Magazine article that goes over what happened[1]. After Shor tweeted this:

> Post-MLK-assasination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-violent protests increase Dem vote, mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage.

A twitter mob went after Shor, including people tagging the CEO of his company (who _is_ on Twitter, not sure what the confusion is there) and asking them to "Come get your boy." A few days later, he was fired. Four days after that[2], he was kicked off the Progressphiles list for being "racist."

If you don't like New York Magazine, here's a Vox article that goes over what happened[3].

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/case-for-liberalism-... [2] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/white-fragility-raci... [3] https://www.vox.com/2020/7/29/21340308/david-shor-omar-wasow...

Huh, I thought the email list stuff happened before he was fired. Guess not.

The culture didn't last long - people usually fight back at the mobs now, who have died off some. Now it only exists in minor extremist form where leftists (anti-Epstein conspiracists) and rightists (many other kinds of conspiracists) go around calling random people pedophiles. Twitter still doesn't ban them if you report them though.

Also, that research he quoted is from a Black researcher (Omar Wasow) who is still around tweeting himself and seems well respected.

Yes, people do fight back against the mob. But Twitter has been on the side of the mob throughout.

Do you think Wasow would have picked that moment to promote his research?

That’s exactly when the research needed to be promoted, for the good of everyone, including advocates of policing reform. Failure to heed that advice allowed republicans to paint democrats—by doing nothing more than reposting articles from NPR and the like—as feckless enablers of their radical wing who would cower in the sidelines for months while rioters tore down city blocks.

And in the end nobody suffered as much as the folks living in these high crime neighborhoods. Not only is there evidence the riots increased homicides, https://www.city-journal.org/new-evidence-connects-police-pr..., but also it created a backlash against police reform even in the most progressive cities in the country, like NYC and SF. Police budgets are now bigger than ever: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/cities-vowed-2020-cut-po...

Bi-partisan momentum on police reform evaporated as Trump baited progressives into picking a self-destructive fight over the acceptability of rioting and the need for policing.

With no other attention? Don't know.

In our timeline he did, since I remember reading some followups he wrote about it.

It's not the real most annoying research you could post; that'd be the NBER paper finding protests reduced covid cases by getting uninvolved people to stay home.

The paradox of tolerance is that if you let people promote an "opposing view" to some people's right to exist as equal citizens, you drive the people they are attacking off your platform, no one wants to advertise on you & you become 4chan.

"And there are certain issues where Twitter has stated that you simply aren't allowed to take an opposing view or you'll be kicked off their platform." such as?

There was a time when you weren't allowed to say that the SARS-COV-2 might've leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan. That's the most prominent, indefensible example of moderation gone awry and proof that the censorship model can be successfully abused by bad actors to suppress potentially valid opposing views. Imagine how many other issues have been suppressed but haven't reached the level of visibility that issue did.

You were absolutely allowed to say that, you just weren’t allowed to assert that it was definitely leaked from the lab. You’ve fallen for the false grievances pushed by blatant con men like Alex Berenson.

I don't know who Alex Berenson is or what he's said about this topic but another example you could use is "limiting the dissemination" of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which also has now returned to the news as a viable story despite being buried during the election cycle.

I don't really care about the details of these stories, it doesn't affect me if the virus came from a lab or how deep the corruption runs in the Biden family. But any rational person without a political agenda has to agree that the censorship system as it exists is ripe for abuse by bad actors. These two examples in particular completely changed my viewpoint on moderation and I no longer see Facebook or Twitter fighting "misinformation" as a good thing given how easily they can be manipulated into denying valid information. They simply cannot be trusted to identify what is or isn't misinformation.

If you are trying to come off as center and non-political why do you assert there's corruption in the Biden family and the only question is how much?

I think it's pretty widely accepted at this point that Hunter Biden repeatedly attempted to peddle the influence of his father for personal profit. Whether he was ever successful at influencing his father or whether his father participated is less clear, but the emails from his laptop don't paint an encouraging picture.

> You were absolutely allowed to say that...

... That may be true for Twitter, but it's certainly not the case for IG and FB. Discussion of any sort was off-limits, based pretty much entirely on Daszak's letter (we agree that's batshit insane, right?). Millions of posts were deleted, and tens of millions got a little warning bar that dropped interaction by "at least" 80%.

Meanwhile back at Twitter, people who tweeted wrong-think of very mild varieties, such as anything but the current and official (and ever-shifting) stance on vaccine effectiveness were getting banned. While that's not super cool, you're right to point out that Twitter weren't quite as authoritarian as claimed.

they were deleted because the point was to create a new reality regardless of the truth and they were politicized causing people to do the wrong things - become anti vaccination, protest masks and cause more harm and death - all on something that didn’t really matter because the facts don’t change on the reality of an unconfirmed source in which case it’s evident this is exactly your MO too.

> the point was to create a new reality regardless of the truth...

Some people did that, sure. Others were genuine. For example, this tweet in cautious favor of a new vaccine development got a Professor of haemostasis and thrombosis at the University of Sheffield banned, and even on appeal they made him delete the tweet: https://twitter.com/ProfMakris/status/1474068222550884367/ph...

Many, many other cases of this sort exist, and there's no justification for it. Speaking of unwarranted - your assumptions about people's motives, to justify attacking and censoring them, are disturbing. Do you feel like that's a normal thing to do?

Baseless racist accusations that led to multiple real-world violent attacks aren't "opposing views": they are blood libel.

You just put the problem into focus. Trump pushing the lab leak hypothesis and using the term "China virus" is indisputably a xenophobic dog whistle to a racist subset of his base. But that doesn't mean the lab leak hypothesis and any discussion of it is racist, and based on what's been uncovered since, it's certainly not a baseless accusation.

Trump has used this tactic effectively many times in the past: he says something that makes sense ("we need border security") in such a racist and distasteful way that causes the opposition to kneejerk react against whatever policy he's proposing, forcing them to take a position that's at odds with common sense ("border walls are racist!"). It's possible he may have had some classified information about the lab leak being a feasible story, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it was just one of the thousands of things he blabbers uncontrollably about and this particular one luckily happened to have some truth to it.