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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

> Twitter denied that they did for years

You yourself literally posted a link from 4 years ago that demonstrates the opposite of this claim. How is this comment so high? I feel like I'm at a UFO convention and people just want to believe.

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> people just want to believe

Accurate. There’s a strong contingent of folks here that believe “the leftists” are oppressing them and “Twitter silences our voices” is a big part of the conspiracy theory.

Musk is throwing fuel on the fire, because he also just wants to believe.

The hilarious part too is that the same contingent also ignores the screenshots showing that the "Libs of Tiktok" account had special rules around moderating it. So much for "silencing conservative thought" (if you can call that Twitter account "thought").

@libsoftiktok is not a left-wing account. The name is derogatory

That's the point. The special rules were "don't moderate this account at all without getting high level approval".

We've had two releases of documentation that prove what you are mockingly-dismissing here, and you pretend that it's still all in people's heads. What am I missing?

They don't prove that. This reasoning is like saying the law oppresses men because they are disproportionately convicted of violent crimes.

Don't read anything into this, but can you see the next step here if you replace "men" with "black men"? Is this actually the point you want to make?

I don't see how that changes anything except to make the analogy politically fraught and easier to derail. The logic remains the same. Certainly, conservatives have no problem with the logic if you modify the analogy as you have suggested.

My only point that as with anything (and especially with crime statistics), "it's just not that simple" and nuance matters, in the sense that (in the modified analogy), to say at least some systemic racism doesn't exist in the way the prison stats play out seems naive at best, it seems similarly naive to assume there's no bias in this case as well.

> My only point that as with anything (and especially with crime statistics), "it's just not that simple" and nuance matters,

If this is actually your point then you are supporting root's argument, not rebutting it. Root was pointing out poor causal relationships determined from lack of recognition of confounding variables. You just listed another (substantially more famous) example of such a relationship.

Obviously nothing is "just that simple", if that's your only point so be it, but that isn't telling us much since this is true of literally everything.

That was such a bad faith argument/read that I don't even know where to begin.

I would like to see some actual numbers. I am sure they have enough data that could either prove this claim or not.

And I think everyone here is hung up on the literal definition of shadow banning, and not the CONCEPT of monkeying with people's posts without their knowledge or awareness. It's the same thing, and I feel like everyone wants to give them a pass because of pedantry.

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