Hacker News Reader

Comment by bioemerl | Hacker News Reader

I had hopes. Twitter was terribly run and there was all sorts of examples of them being a typical social media platform trying to push various ideas using their control.

Elon could have come in, aligned the website to be a lot more neutral, slimmed down the employee count and pushed for more features and more payments for features to get away from dependence on advertisers.

I saw some headline a few weeks ago about Japanese trending on Twitter went from a whole bunch of political stuff to more neutral cultural stuff. Stuff like that is what I wanted to see.

Instead we're getting this hilarious situation where Elon is using his authority to ban everything he doesn't like. It's worse than it was.

View on HN

The one good thing that's come out of Musk's ownership of Twitter is that we now have extensive public evidence that Twitter staff bent over backwards to maintain objective moderation standards even in the face of unprecedented challenges. The "leftist cabal" theories are thoroughly disproven now. And we see now the kind of actions that an actual ideological cabal would take if they controlled Twitter.

Matt Taibbi literally said the exact opposite of this.

The evidence he (and Bari Weiss) presented and his analysis of that evidence were not consistent with each other. Given the choice, I'm going to rely on the primary sources, not the guy who was handpicked to promote a particular agenda.

Sources?

You do know they covered different topics, right?

What are you asking me for?

This seems like gaslighting? My interpretation of the recent files reports were the opposite.

this is hallucinatory, twitter had a dozen former fbi officials on staff and was literally sent lists of tweets to delete by the DNC

Taibbi said both campaigns sent in reports of content on Twitter that they claimed violated TOS. The tweets reported by the Biden campaign were clearly in violation of the TOS (they included leaked nude pictures). I don't know what the FBI has to do with any of this, but if Twitter has a lot of ex-FBI people on staff that would seem to be evidence _against_ the "leftist cabal" theory.

it has been clear for some time that the US intelligence machine has chosen its side: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/19/hunter-biden-story-...

Wait what? Not my take on this at all.

> The "leftist cabal" theories are thoroughly disproven now.

Just the other day there was a post in here of the FBI getting actively involved in censoring Twitter content, if it had been only the "leftist cabal" involved (btw, there's nothing genuinely "leftist" about those people, but that's another story) things would have been way better.

The FBI passed along reports they received of possible violations of Twitter TOS (something we already knew they did), and the evidence is clear that they did not limit these reports to conservative accounts (something that has been claimed, but which never made sense, considering the FBI's historical Republican lean).

> The FBI passed along reports they received of possible violations of Twitter TOS (something we already knew they did),

I.e. censorship. Why the heck does the FBI get involved in the TOS enforcement of some website on the Internet? (if not for controlling the discourse, that is).

It's only censorship if Twitter was being coerced into taking action on the accounts. Conveniently, Taibbi included evidence showing that Twitter made its own independent moderation decisions -- some accounts reported had already been suspended, and others were not acted on after a review.

> It's only censorship if Twitter was being coerced into taking action on the accounts.

Self-censorship is how censorship best works. When a 3-letter agency sends you something you get the cue on the spot.

But glad that the FBI agents didn't have to physically threaten the former Twitter guys to censor stuff, we're not in the Soviet 1950s anymore.

the fact that you thought the site wasn’t already neutral but just overwhelmed with content reports and that it is simply impossible to fairly moderate is a good indication you’re being duped in other areas, fyi

I still don't think the site was neutral, I just also think the current person is also not neutral and is worse.

> there was all sorts of examples of them being a typical social media platform trying to push various ideas using their control.

Can you share some of these?

"Elon could have come in, aligned the website to be a lot more neutral"

How?

"slimmed down the employee count"

Why would you care about this? How could he know which half of the company should be fired? How does this improve Twitter?

" and pushed for more features and more payments for features to get away from dependence on advertisers."

Besides paying to be verified, a system which changed rapidly over weeks being enabled and disabled, what else did he do?

"I saw some headline a few weeks ago about Japanese trending on Twitter went from a whole bunch of political stuff to more neutral cultural stuff"

What does this mean? That the Japanese Twitter population all shifted to discussing culture over politics? Why would they do that? What does it have to do with Elon Musk taking over?

"Stuff like that is what I wanted to see."

Culture is shaped by politics, at least to some degree. Also "culture wars"

How?

Look to that example about Japan. The idea is that the Japanese Twitter population did not shift over to discussing culture over politics. Instead, the tags were being pushed towards politics, and once they stopped being pushed they returned back to something neutral.

The people who were pushing the tags in that direction were removed. I want to see a website like Twitter have absolutely no people are ever interested in doing something like that.

For the employee account, it's not something I care about personally, but from the perspective of Twitter as a business, being able to have a smaller number of better employees is ultimately a win because the company is able to do more with less money, and be more successful as a result.

> what else did he do?

Not much, which is part of why I'm disappointed.

Nepotism? Was that even an accusation against the previous Twitter?

I use that word roughly to mean that they had their own internal clique, standards that they wanted to apply to the rest of the world, and that small group of people was trying to govern a very large group of people.

I changed my phrasing to remove that term, because that's not quite what it means.

I miss the Elon Musk of a decade ago.

He was totally better at masking a decade ago, I'll agree with that.

There is also the fact that some people change over time. Not saying Musk wasn't always like this, but it's possible that he wasn't before, and turned into it over time.

Like my mother always used to say: "You're a liberal now, but when you get older you'll be more conservative!". Not that she was right about me, but in general I think she was right that sometimes people change.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com