Twitter has suspended YC Hacker News account | Hacker News Reader

Twitter has suspended YC Hacker News account

twitter.com

16 pointssyrusakbary16 comments

To be fair, this doesn't appear to be an official account (i.e. one that is affiliated with YC). Seems like a project by an unaffiliated developer that happened to grab a relevant Twitter username.

If anything, I believe that https://twitter.com/hackernews is HN's official, YC-affiliated Twitter account.

Here's the latest "working" snapshot from the Internet Archive on May 28th (they had around 242k followers) https://web.archive.org/web/20220528044528/https://twitter.c...

It seems they suspended the account on June 4th, based on the most recent snapshot from Internet Archive. https://web.archive.org/web/20220604050840/https://twitter.c...

I think I'd bet a small sum that Twitter believes this bot posted links to HN stories, and also occasionally popped in a link that was actually an advert they were paid to post, but without telling anyone.

Like most of the other HN bots do...

How is it possible to appeal against the suspension if they do not say which of the Twitter Rules is violated? "Platform manipulation and spam" seems the most likely, but how to be sure?

The goal is that it is not. After all you don't want the bad actors to circumvent the bans. Or trying to work at edge of them. Standard practise.

This is a good way to drive off good actors who get caught in the crossfire too.

It is not standard practice in criminal law.

What does any of this have to do with criminal law?

It's hard to avoid breaking the law when it is not clearly defined. Same can be said here.

Maybe that's why they write down the law, in books. On the whole I would say criminal law is fairly clearly defined, the parts that are more muddy are more muddy because lawyers are good at splitting hairs, not because the law was muddy in intent.

You're not going to be sure. Everything done is done arbitrarily.

Twitter has suspended a fake YC Hacker News account.

Does it make more sense now?

There was nothing fake about it. It posted legit links to the top HN stories. It's how I've kept up with HN for the past... 6 years? maybe 8?

The Hackernews bot on Mastodon is still up, lots of people like it.

Small update from the creator of the twitter handle [1]:

  Working on getting @newsycombinator
  unsuspended(!) – got hit with a trademark infringement

[1]: https://twitter.com/riklomas/status/1533811106015223821

dang, how ironic

Reply on news.ycombinator.com