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Comment by sn0w_crash | Hacker News Reader

I am fully prepared for folks on the left to pretend this is a non-issue / not important. The probability that they consider this an abuse of power is zero.

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It’s not important because it’s not important

Abuse of power by whom? Twitter or the Government?

The head of legal at of a publicly traded corporation acting without knowledge of the CEO to suppress a story about a presidential candidates son, while other internal executives argue in writing if they even have the legal/policy grounds to do so - Ive spent decades in corporations and I can think of few more obvious abuses of power.

If you can see the scam, great.

If you cannot then I cannot help you.

I mean, this is an event that lasted a day, they admitted their own mistakes, and they clearly deliberated over it. Like I agree with you in principal and could agree if they tried to keep it going, but they even said they should probably stop suppressing it because it was against their policies. They in fact seemed to not want to use their power.

So I guess, yeah, what do you propose gets done about it? What is the core principal here that should get applied equally across the political spectrum. If you misapply your moderation policies you should be hanged?

The NYPOST was banned for 16 days over this story. It was suppressed for 16 days, not one day.

It is literally the job of the head of legal to act, often without knowledge of the CEO (especially on time sensitive matters). The CEO is usually informed at some point, of course. But this is why they are the head of legal.

It's often actually written into their policies. There are certainly corporations that say the opposite, or require the board to be notified, or whatever, but it would not be that uncommon for the head of legal to respond to something and then inform the CEO after doing it.

As for suppressing stories - it seems they suppressed stories from pretty much anyone who asked - Matt says explicitly they did it for "both sides".

That does not seem like an abuse of power. It may be a crappy policy, but despite all the hand-wringing, Twitter is just a platform, not anything special. So maybe it's a platform with a crappy policy.

Believing that 7.8 billion people talking at each other directly (where if 99% of people agree, you are still arguing with 78 million people) is somehow advancing anything useful is, honestly, crazy or highly ignorant of why we moved towards representative systems of (government, et al) in the first place.

It wasn't because we couldn't get all the people in the room.

Seeing it as a place to shoot the shit, awesome.

Seeing it as a foundational block of democracy - uh, no. Or at least, if it ever became that, democracy is doomed. Thankfully, it isn't, really.

> As for suppressing stories - it seems they suppressed stories from pretty much anyone who asked

So then the problems were even worse than people thought!

You have just described how the issue of story suppression is an even bigger problem!

It's only a problem in that the policy seems crappy, and that seems like it will drive away their users/create distrust in their platform.

It's not some larger problem for society or whatever nonsense is being pushed today.

This is not an abuse of power. It's literally what the job entails.

This is why companies have leadership, with diversified duties. So the CEO doesn't have to have knowledge.

You can absolutely, and fairly, argue that is the wrong call, that the team acted too swiftly, but it's weird to look at what has been reported so far and say it was "abuse of power".

I would say I consider it both an abuse of power and not important. Musk is also abusing his power as dear leader of Twitter and I also consider that not important. All the drama about Twitter is a just a gossipy sideshow.

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