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Comment by EMM_386 | Hacker News Reader

> If we are using the town/time square example, what Elon is describing is the digital version of putting a noise-cancelling box around the people saying “bad” things so that nobody can hear them.

I'd equate it more to people in Nebraska can't hear the guy yelling in Times Square, nor should they.

If people like this guy and want to hear him, they can go to Nebraska and listen to him (follow on Twitter).

If he does something outlandish and makes the national news, people will know about it (a lot of retweets).

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That’s how Twitter works already — that’s how the “filter bubble” concept is able to exist, you’re only exposed to things in your self-selected bubble.

What Elon is describing (as I understand it based on the limited information provided) is restricting reach within your network, i.e: you tweet something bad, the tweet won’t show up on your followers feed.

Basically shadow banning, which a lot of the “anti-woke” brigade have been complaining about for years and thought Musk would stop. Unsurprisingly, it turns out it’s more complicated to run a social media site than some people might think.

This, exactly. Although I'm still convinced that at least 90% of cases where people complain about shadowbanning are nothing more than them being unable to handle the idea that others just aren't all that interested in what they have to say.

The problem is there’s fundamentally no difference for the user posting such things. They both result in low engagement, and the tools deliberately and necessarily don’t differentiate, after all you kind of can’t tell the banned individual. So they just can’t tell and it exacerbates their view it’s stacked against them.

Not really. They've been complaining about shadow banning at the account level. Musk explicitly said it would be at the Tweet level.

> you tweet something bad, the tweet won’t show up on your followers feed

As far as I can tell, this is already how Twitter works.

I have plenty of people I follow who I almost never see tweets from anymore in my timeline, but if I go to their accounts directly I can see they are saying a lot of things.

People call it being shadowbanned.

Are you using the chronological timeline? If you're using the algorithmic timeline, this can happen even if a user isn't shadowbanned. Facebook does this too.

>people will know about it (a lot of retweets)

Yeah, unless those get suppressed too which is what currently happens on social media sites like Facebook, Reddit and (pre-Musk) Twitter.

There is no way authorities can gently steer public debates in the "right" direction. Any meddling is overstepping a line and problematic.

Are you able to provide a citation for Twitter suppressing retweets?

It's been referred to by them as "de-emphasizing" of content. It's fancy newspeak for this type of suppression of speech:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/a35nbj/twitter-content-moder...

Any meddling? Like when people of one ethnic group use social media to organize a massacre of another group (as has happened in a number of countries)? Social media have correctly tried to suppress that, and I worry about what happens when people who speak the language get fired because they aren't coders.

Wow. I suppose the downvoters have never heard of what happened to the Rohingya people in Myanmar.

Your own example is the best argument against such censorship. Myanmar is a heavily censored military dictatorship, the violence is against the Rohingya is state sanctioned. Journalists have been arrested for as much as reporting on it:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-journalists/reute...

If they're max deboosted, you won't see their posts even if you follow them; you'll only be able to see their posts by going to their page.

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