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Comment by ajb | Hacker News Reader

Every news outlet, and perhaps journalist associations such as the NUJ, should set up their own mastodon instance now and advertise that that's how to avoid Musk's blocks. There's no need for them to take this lying down.

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Hilarious you see the NUJ as competent enough for that. In my view the NUJ, NCTJ etc are (sadly) not the answer for the challenges of media in 2022 and beyond - it could be argued they are not fit for purpose.

And they’ll just be reporting news to each other leaving a massive vacuum on Twitter for others to quickly fill.

Most people don’t really care about this story. They’re just users looking for news, opinions, trending topics, etc. if you don’t follow these types of accounts then you haven’t noticed much change on Twitter.

Honestly if anything I’ve noticed Twitter is probably a bit more fun and interesting now.

People are on Twitter because of accounts like that, across the spectrum. It was the one place where you could find everyone, including politicians, organisations, journalists, experts, and random people with cool interests, and interact on a more or less equal basis.

When enough of those leave it'll just become Truth Social or Parler. You might personally find that more fun and interesting, depending on your political background, but it'll never sustain the same user base.

Musk could have kept twitter that universal platform and keeping an eye on political interference from within, knowing that right wing people would just trust him doing the right thing.

But no, he wanted to make a big public outcry out of it, and he's now reaping the consequences.

Exactly. He couldn't stop his ego from taking over.

It is the if e universal platform. He’s just getting rid of the toxic people that thought they were immune to the types of canceling they’ve asked for more of previously.

Live by the cancel, die by the cancel, I guess.

I'm not leaving Twitter because they canceled somebody or because they don't have canceled somebody else.

I'm leaving Twitter because it no longer provides me an interesting timeline with content that I care about.

Enough people in my network left (for whatever reason) and that's enough to create a network effect.

I tried blocking musk and other accounts that created what I perceived as just noise I don't care about (I'm not a us resident, I've had enough of your culture war. It was educational and all but I'm also interested in other things!). But that wasn't enough, the Twitter recommendation engine keeps notifying threads about people I don't follow that talk about things I don't care about. Often just because Musk replied (and since I blocked him I don't really notice that until I click to see to details of a hidden post).

It's a shame. I'm not a social media person. I found Twitter to have been a nice low friction way to subscribe to interesting topics and people.

This whole drama has just turned it into a permanent worst version of itself

The audience for far left propagandists is much smaller than they’ve been telling you. They’ve been amplifying each other for years but as that infrastructure is taken away from them, they’ll head back to the margins where they belong. Like the far right trolls they aren’t too different from.

If you think the journalists suspended were all 'far left propagandists' there's not much more that can be said in this discussion. You're too far gone down your own rabbit hole.

I wish you luck finding your way back sometime.

Not all of them. But most of them (possibly unwittingly) do their bidding in amplifying their fringe message.

Far-left? On twitter?

A site that famously stated that if they applied their rules equally, they'd have to ban almost all republicans, so they currently don't apply the rules to those?

Twitter is a site where a statement as simple as ACAB, which is legally protected speech [See https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemit...] would get you a ban.

Twitter is as center-right as it gets. If you think twitter is far-left, you're living in an extreme filter bubble.

Twitter is both. The records hop from 'left wing bias' to 'right wing bias' over and over. Plus, the internet skews left-progressive, which makes even centrist views seem right-conservative.

For every case of ACAB you can find a case of white hate or man hate with loads of retweets left alone or soft-endorsed, with the opposite being flagged for ToS violation. Both those statements are far more dominant among far-left.

I guess this depends on whether you think "transwomen aren't women" is a right-wing or centrist statement. By world standards twitter was far left, by USA standards it was left, by California standards or non-USA anglosphere standards it was centrist.

> By world standards twitter was far left

Whose world standards? The US left is the European right.

And no one buys into the transwomem are women over here. On social issues euros are more conservative, more ethnocentral and more racist. If you're an immigrant you can become an American but you will never become a German, just doesn't work like that.

Where in Europe do you live? I was born and raised (and still live) in the Netherlands, and our experiences are clearly very different.

Of course, there exist racists in any country; I don't deny that. However, racism certainly isn't generally accepted here.

This is supported by the fact that the alt-right occupies less than 20% of seats in Parliament (10% in Germany).

A lot of the interactions what immigrants like me in western europe have to go through are considered racist in america, that was my point. Ask anyone who has been an immigrant in EU and US. America is far more welcoming.

Also in Spain where I live is welcoming to lgbt in general, the feminists are all what Americans would consider terf and it's mainstream, actually in power right now - women are women, no prostitution, no to surrogacy, no to porn production.

I am a child of immigrants. I'm sorry that our experiences differ on this point. It may be possible that the south is more conservative than the west, but be careful about falsely generalizing this to 'world standards'.

By the way, Spain is generally considered part of Southern Europe, not Western Europe. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Europe#Modern_division...

> the feminists are all what Americans would consider terf and it's mainstream, actually in power right now - women are women, no prostitution, no to surrogacy, no to porn production

This is excellent news for women - are they enacting / have they enacted laws to fulfil this?

The majority of Germans support self-id laws for trans people (Selbstbestimmungsgesetz). Both in parliament and society overall, a broad majority supports this.

So, you're wrong on this topic, too.

Places like Colombia, India, China, South Africa.

There the average person doesn't agree that transwomen are women.

South Africa has full legal protections for trans people, including permitting gender reassignment surgery without government interference and allowing them to apply to change the gender markers in their identity documents and the national population registry.

Discrimination against trans people for their gender identity is illegal, and the hate speech laws consider gender identity to be a protected category. [0]

It's true that a proportion of the population is conservative and does not agree with this or with LGBTQ rights in general, but that's true of any population.

[0] https://www.southernafricalitigationcentre.org/wp-content/up...

> Twitter is as center-right as it gets. If you think twitter is far-left, you're living in an extreme filter bubble.

I think this is what they call “gaslighting”.

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