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Comment by Macha | Hacker News Reader

> First, none of our policies have changed. Our approach to policy enforcement will rely more heavily on de-amplification of violative content: freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.

"Nothing has changed, except..."

> Our Trust & Safety team continues its diligent work to keep the platform safe from hateful conduct, abusive behavior, and any violation of Twitter's rules. The team remains strong and well-resourced, and automated detection plays an increasingly important role in eliminating abuse.

It's undeniably less well-resourced than it was a few weeks ago, and people's experience indicate it's clearly less effective as a result.

What a non-statement. I doubt advertisers will react the way Elon hopes they will.

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Yeah... Also, the unbanning of users previously considered hateful also directly conflicts with "to keep the platform safe from hateful conduct"

Yea.. how does he expect this to be interpreted? Their stance hasn't changed.. cool, except before Twitter said some people posted hateful content, and banned them. Now they unbanned them, so what is the non-change?

Does twitter agree that the comments were hateful, did that not change? If didn't change, then twitter agrees they were hateful comments and twitter is now happy to have them on the platform.

Musk can't keep his foot out of his mouth here it seems.. it's very confusing.

Maybe their stance is that people shouldn't be banned forever?

I personally, don't believe in eternal bans. I always hate the horror stories where someone has made a mistake and thus Google bans them from all non-related activities for life, then bans the account of anyone who gave that person privileges too.

With respect to Twitter, I'd say sure Trump is an insurrectionist and a shameful individual, but it's been 2 years... while we can't all rightly forgive him, we can at least him speak his thoughts in 280 characters or less.

> Maybe their stance is that people shouldn't be banned forever?

They are entitled to that stance, and advertisers uncomfortable with either the actual or anticipated results of that stance are entitled to not advertise on Twitter.

Anybody would agree with you given the following two assumptions-

That these previously banned users were banned for conduct that they would consider hateful

That banning users is the only way to keep the platform safe from hateful conduct

If twitter disagrees with either of these statements, you can see why they would disagree with your point

Problem in the long run is that it doesn't matter whether or not Twitter believes they are hateful. Heck, it doesn't even matter if the person you're responding to thinks they are hateful.

For Musk to not lose gobs and gobs of money, it only matters whether advertisers, in their sole estimation, consider those people hateful. The guys with the nine figure ad budgets will almost certainly fall on the "cautious" side of that line.

The only thing that will help here is finding small, less PR minded brands or businesses to replace the players in the nine figure club. This won't be easy, but I think it is the only reasonable way forward to create the kind of Twitter that Musk seems to want to create. Having worked at "DDB Need'em" long ago, I'd set his chances of pulling that off relatively low, but I don't think it's impossible.

> The only thing that will help here is finding small, less PR minded brands or businesses to replace the players in the nine figure club.

My partner runs a small business that spends a few million on ads each year.

Why would she take the risk (and it is a huge risk) of advertising on Twitter when Facebook, Google etc. give her the confidence and results her business depends on. Smaller businesses are far less likely to take risks.

> My partner runs a small business that spends a few million on ads each year.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think a company with an ad budget of a few million is a "small business" anymore.

> For Musk to not lose gobs and gobs of money, it only matters whether advertisers, in their sole estimation, consider those people hateful.

Or, more accurately, “content they don’t want their advertising seen near”.

No, because the thing that has changed explicitly is Twitter is no longer going to ban users based on hateful conduct, but deboost their tweets.

Except they actually keep suspending accounts for violations of the hateful content policy, specifically for Tweets with fairly mild criticism of Musk and nothing that even superficially relates to what is prohibited by the hateful content policy.

The idea that the suspensions are restricted to only hateful content is simply false. It's a popular lie by political propagandists who know the truth and want to push the myth of systematic distortion, and I guess your argument is a natural way for someone who has internalized that propaganda, doesn’t know the methodology, but has seen the definition to try to rationalize what they have internalized, but its just not true.

Only if you trust the judgement of the previous team.

Simple, just define their beliefs as hateful/hate speech, then you can ban them for hate. reddit is also great at this.

Remember way back before the era of social media mob justice, when there was this concept of 'forgiveness'?

At least some of the banned deserve a second chance. Those who were total monsters will probably be quickly re-banned. Others have found their own echo chambers elsewhere and won't even bother coming back.

Banning is usually only for repeat offenders. Usually you get multiple suspensions before the ban.

Which is basically what you described and therefore is already how it works.

Forgiveness usually requires some level of admitting fault and contrition. I have not seen that from the hateful accounts Elon unbanned.

Elon is pretty clearly unbanning violent right-wing extremists while banning rule-following accounts on the left, sometimes transparently at the direction of the right wingers. Why do you insist on pretending anything else?

Which rule following accounts on the left have been banned since musk bought the company? I only know of a couple accounts that were banned for very clearly violating terms of service, i.e. impersonating other people. I personally don't agree with even those bans, but I am curious to know which rule followers were banned.

https://www.newsweek.com/activists-accuse-elon-musk-banning-... mentions a few, although there are far more.

You need to be more specific - he wasn't banning George Takei or Occupy Democrats. He banned ANTIFA accounts that were being used to plan "direct action", ie: riots. Something that was previously against Twitter's TOS, but it wasn't being enforced specifically against ANTIFA accounts because Twitter employees were sympathetic to the cause.

> He banned ANTIFA accounts that were being used to plan "direct action", ie: riots

Please provide evidence that accounts like Chad Loder were posting about imminent, direct actions to riot. I followed that account pretty closely for the last month and saw none of that.

I would think about your comment because this is pretty defamatory.

Loder was suspended for ban evasion. He ran the masksfordoctors Twitter account, which was suspended last year for violating the covid misinformation policy.

That said, Loder is not a particularly nice person. He loves to both encourage violence and do violence to anyone who doesn't share his politics.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]

1. https://archive.ph/Xznhv

2. https://archive.ph/GrQIm

3. https://archive.ph/bHmmT

4. https://archive.ph/Bip8W

5. https://archive.ph/2z4Dd (The photo is of Aaron Danielson, who was murdered by Michael Reinoehl, a member of antifa.)

6. https://archive.ph/P1ljs

7. https://archive.ph/94vA9

Answered above, reproducing for you here:

"As the Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin noted on Twitter, the suspended users include Chad Loder, an antifascist researcher whose open-source investigation of the U.S. Capitol riot led to the identification and arrest of a masked Proud Boy who attacked police officers. The account of video journalist Vishal Pratap Singh, who reports on far-right protests in Southern California, has also been suspended."

"All four accounts had been singled out for criticism by Andy Ngo, a far-right writer whose conspiratorial, error-riddled reporting on left-wing protests and social movements fuels the mass delusion that a handful of small antifascist groups are part of an imaginary shadow army called “antifa.” In a public exchange on Twitter on Friday, Musk invited Ngo to report “Antifa accounts” that should be suspended directly to him."

https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...

Whatever you need to tell yourself to make your little delusion work. Obviously the banned accounts were not calling for any form of violence, otherwise the bans wouldn't have been news

Other people seeing and understanding what is going on does not require your participation.

https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...

reading the article it seems Loder continued to tweet about some right wing extremist even after being court ordered to stop. I think this qualifies as "breaking the rules" even if I disagree with him being banned (based on the article, I don't care to research Loder in depth).

It seems to me a reasonable course of action to ban people violating restraining orders on your website. I do suspect the restraining order is being misapplied here, but that maybe isn't twitters responsibility to determine? Not sure how I feel about that since twitter is aiming to be pro free-speech and this case specifically seems to be a free-speech issue. I could go either way, but I don't know enough about this Loder person, maybe he isn't high profile enough to warrant in-depth thought about his ban and otherwise would be unbanned in the name of free speech? I certainly would be more likely to think he would be unbanned if he was a right-wing activist, though, but I don't know that I've seen substantial evidence here that shows a banning bias as this particular ban could be entirely justified.

> antifascist researcher

doesn't that just mean someone who doxes people they don't agree with? Great, i'm glad he helped arrest a criminal but the ends don't always justify the means.

I mean, you can just make up stuff about people to justify whatever happens to them if you want.

> doesn't that just mean someone who doxes people they don't agree with

... no?

Speaking of "pretending", that is false on both counts.

Twitter 2.0 is banning accounts as soon as Andy Ngo, the galaxy's biggest liar, demands they be banned.

https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...

I don't see how you reached that conclusion. If you look at the referenced thread, he was reporting accounts that were inciting violence.

The article describes Ngo's claims as "misleading, factually incorrect". Which would be in keeping with literally everything Ngo has ever written.

The article is misleading. You can go look at the thread to see for yourself.

excellent argument, you sure changed my mind

Can't you see the irony in this when you didn't offer any evidence?

He unbanned a right wing extremist who attempted to use Twitter to overthrow the government.

Same game as always, but now the other team now has the ball.

With a propaganda weapon as powerful as Twitter, it's probably better for everybody if it's destroyed, rather than continues to be used/abused to escalate political divisions by either side of the great divide. And that seems to be the way things are going.

It should never have been taken so seriously to begin with.

> it's probably better for everybody if it's destroyed

At first I hoped Musk would see the nightmare, give up, just pull the plug, and go home. I think that's out though, now I hope it collapses under its own weight. Hope dies last.

By what metric was Twitter previously controlled by the "other team", by which you presumably the far left? Before Elon owned them, they were bending over backwards to allow right wing accounts ([0] for example), and they frequently banned left wing accounts that at all went afoul of the rules

[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-algorithm-crackdown-...

From the same first quote - none of our policies have changed, just policy enforcement has changed.

Isn't policy enforcement a part of a separate policy? The policy for policy enforcement? They really wanted to be able to say "the policy hasn't changed." This is a bigger stretch than a taffy pull.

policy vs Procedure.

you have a procedure for the policy, thus procedures can change but the policy is the same.

policy's are goals, procedures are how those goals are met, and given the wide and subjective nature of all Big Tech policies, changing in procedures are more import and impactful than changes in policy, and the procedures are never open to public review

Yeah, I'm betting that a lot of advertisers will have concerns being on a platform that does not try to delete things like hate speech, but merely "demonetize it, and negatively boost it.

If I were an advertiser Twitter would be on my "never advertise here again" list, and I might re-evaluate in a decade or so. Besides look at the slimy ads have been common on twitter in the last 2 weeks. I would not want my ads showing up alongside those.

> Our Trust & Safety team continues its diligent work

IIRC, between direct firings and resignations they got rid of the entire team shortly after the takeover, including at least the first head installed after the takeover and firing of the former head, so the impression of continuity this seeks to invoke is at best misleading.

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