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Comment by awacs | Hacker News Reader

Ok, let's say they did, it's a private company, 1st Amendment doesn't apply in the manner you seem to think. In fact it's the opposite, they as an entity / company have 1st Amendment rights to do as they please with content on their platform.

That being said, yes they suppressed propaganda and disinformation that could lead to bodily harm (as on J6). People like Fox News hosts pushing disinformation that could lead to people dying over COVID is easily crossover into legal territory. Why would they want that shit on their platform? Is it their fault all the disinformation comes from right wing kooks?

This argument is ridiculous. It's like Nazis complaining their propaganda was being removed from the radio and their voice was being silenced.

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> It's a private company

Twitter benefits from network effects, which makes them immune to an extent from the normal rules of private-sector competition. Telephone carriers have to carry certain speech, your power company can't shut off your power because they don't like your speech, etc… Arguably the major social media platforms are in a similar position.

Twitter also colludes with government officials, as revealed in the previous "Twitter files" installment.

> they suppressed propaganda

I just checked the Twitter Rules [1], the Rules don't forbid "propaganda".

And I just checked the definition of "propaganda" [2], seems like it includes many things that nobody alleges is against the Rules (for example, any political ad, no matter what it advocates, is "propaganda").

[1] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules

[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/propaganda

What the congressmen did was illegal on their part. What Twitter did was at best unethical, but ironically, severely tampering with our election which the fake left seemed to be so upset about. The tweets weren’t propaganda, some of them were about Joe Biden being involved in illegal deals with eg China. The source information for this, his sons laptop, has been verified as authentic by for example the Washington Post.

There is no way to bend far enough to excuse what happened here.

> What Twitter did was at best unethical, but ironically, severely tampering with our election…

Huh? Twitter does not administer US elections last I checked. I am sure people could read this hugely consequential information you're claiming on Reddit, 4chan, OANN, AM radio, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, or various other outlets that right-leaning voters typically seem to use. In fact, I seem to recall all of those running several stories about it at the time.

Or are you claiming that Twitter is the sole source of media that the entire United States consumes?

If the story circulating on all the major social media platforms didn't make a difference they wouldn't have suppressed it.

I'm not sure where to even start with this clearly agitated post. If you genuinely think all disinformation comes from "right wing kooks" you might be in an information bubble.

I would have thought at least the Hunter Biden laptop story pierced that bubble for most people recently by demonstrating these "right wing kooks' were the only ones NOT spreading misinformation.

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