“This Tweet Is Unavailable” – Musk Escalates Shadowbanning | Hacker News Reader

“This Tweet Is Unavailable” – Musk Escalates Shadowbanning

husseini.substack.com

25 pointspaulnpace27 comments

It's also likely Twitter is just broken. They did fire a lot of staff. Also, in any broad move you are going to keep people you should have fired and fired people you should have kept (even if the overall numbers are justified)

I don't think this is shadowbanning. It's just that the feature of viewing individual tweets via a direct link has been very flaky for a month, and getting worse over time. Tweets will just randomly show up as "unavailable". (And I think it's unreliability in their systems rather than a policy, since I have also seen it happen e.g. for tweets by Musk.)

It’s been bad for years, especially in in-app web browsers like discord. The success rate for me was in the 10-20% success range unless I opened the link in a logged-in, non-in-app browser.

I deleted my twitter account at the first rumour of Musk, so I don’t know if it’s getting worse, but I find that hard to believe based on how bad it was before.

I’ve actually seen the same thing “This tweet is unavailable” when attempting to view musk’s tweets in general (admittedly I do not have a Twitter account and don’t know how the guest view may differ from an active login). Refreshing many times usually resolves it.

Based on that I wonder if what you’re seeing is intermittent infrastructure failure and not shadowbanning, or maybe even both at different times.

This shadowbanning must be targeted—I am able to see all of the tweets listed by the author.

Occam’s Razor: this is just a bug, not shadow banning.

The emperor has no clothes.

Musk made clear they would still shadowban, but the difference is that people would be able to contact Twitter, they would know why, the views to the tweets may simply be limited, etc.

The ongoing campaign in the far leftists media lately against the new, more neutral twitter is quite obvious.

When I search for his "@..." nothing comes up; however, I can just use manually typed in URI to get to his account. I guess that's the very definition of shadow banning.

As far as I'm concerned twitter has always been unusable, but honestly, I'm not sure I'd want to use it anyway when it's this tense.

I have noticed that those who lean extremely right respond feverishly to personalities like Trump and Elon. Does anyone have a theory as why this is the case?

Idiots are fan of people that claim to have simple answers to complex problems. Mind you: I'm talking about far-right (and perhaps far-left as well).

The smarter you are, the more aware you are that people saying they have all the answers are hucksters. Extremist politics, nationalism and blind faith thrive on ignorance.

Well you don't come off as self-involved at all.

How can you seriously claim Elon is a huckster with all the achievements under his belt? Besides trying to attribute that success to other people and luck.

I'm not a native speaker, so I had to look up the definition of "huckster". They all have a quite negative connotation, but "somebody who sells things in an aggressive or showy manner" does seem to fit Elon quite well.

Authority creates order, freedom creates chaos. But order can be tyrannical or benevolent, and because it can be tyrannical, some people trust freedom more. Essentially if you are on the winning end of authority's benevolence, you want a greater concentration of power; the losing end and you want more freedom.

This hypothesis is founded on my intuition (which is some accumulation of life experience). This includes all my biases and things I'm wrong about, so be skeptical of it:

Humans (the meaty prison part) are wired to be driven by curiosity or fear. Curiosity drives some attitudes: embrace change, be excited by new things, challenge priors, be curious of the unknown, have an open mind, be willing to try things, be skeptical of your own ideologies.

Fear drives other attitudes: there's a threat, stay safe, unknown things can be bad, the status quo works so resist change for safety, they want to hurt me, they want my success, what makes me feel safe and whole is always being threatened.

Maybe this is a silly distinction, but for a moment, rid any concept of "politics" or "right vs. left wings" from your mental model and perceive it as, "for one reason or another, in each person, one of those two voices is louder. Sometimes slightly, sometimes significantly. And those people gather together for security and validation."

Authoritarians make the fear group feel validated.

I have an inkling that the "fear voice" was imperative to our survival as a species. It's a "safe" and simple algorithm for preservation. But I think it has been becoming less important over time.

Something I draw a blank on: what exactly is up with the leaders that the "curiosity" group picks? There's the Obama-style "Hope" message, which totally fits, but quite often, in my opinion, it's rather clearly just lip service. Perhaps there is a tinge of truth in the "fear" group's, "you need us on that wall" mentality about not letting wolves into the hen house (but personally I think they just don't want competition for that role).

I hope people pick this apart and criticize it in detail. I do not hold this hypothesis strongly.

I think it's a messiah infatuation, they need someone, anyone who loves them and they can love back as long as they feel they're being heard and belief systems (nationalism? qanon) are somewhat shared.

The left just picks different deities. Fauci / Thunberg / AOC etc...

The belief in a great leader is something all political tendencies can fall victim to. But I think only the left took to heart the failures of the authoritarian “leftist” leaders of the 20th century. Now anytime a leftist leader reaches prominence they are subject to endless purity tests from the left. Not so on the right, which is odd because they’ve had their share of genocidal dictators.

I’m reminded of an anecdote I heard from an Italian commentator on the recent election of a neofascist leader: “Many Italians still seen fascism itself as a stigma, but convinced themselves that she [Meloni] was not a fascist or racist because she is representing the new tendency, which rejects the letter of the old fascist policies while arguing for the spirit.”

The left tends to deify or damn particular classes and groups of people instead. Sort of makes sense given they are more of a collectivist mindset as opposed to a individualist one. Teachers are paragon of virtue, "all cops are bastards". Backwards Christians, brave Muslims. White privilege. So on and so forth.

...Well, you have lots of reading to do.

When the left damns "groups" as you say, it is not aimed at the individuals made up of this group, but rather the whole social construct. Why ACAB ? Because the police institution, as it is, is a corrupt monopoly of violence, where abuse gets neither reported nor punished. You can be the best of samaritans, but in an institution such as the police, you will behave in a way dictated by this social construct. White privilege, in the same way, is recognizing that people of european descent naturally have less roadblocks in life, _due to those social constructs_. (Although the whole "privilege" term comes from US leftists which have always been dogshit at naming things. It is rather a disadvantage imposed on every other person on the basis of skin color, which is directly linked to the US's racial history).

As for "brave muslims", it's a particular group of idiots that will bend over backwards to self flagellate for being white. Leftists have no love for any religion (opium of the people, yadda yadda) in general.

Excuse me! I think you mean "visibility filtering".

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