Hacker News Reader

Comment by clowd | Hacker News Reader

Slight correction: alleging Donald Trump's government was doing unconstitutional acts.

Which we know they did, in spades, in other contexts; but I've seen no evidence in the "Twitter files" to indicate anything illegal was going on in this context. The government briefed Twitter that they expected disinformation campaigns and to be on the lookout for them. The government also flagged a bunch of tweets as "hey, these are sus and might violate your rules, you ought to take a look" like anyone else can do.

Whatever Musk and Taibbi are trying to cook up, they seem to have forgotten who was running the federal government at the time. It wasn't Joe Biden or tHe LiBeRaLs. The whole thing is stupid.

View on HN

Thanks for the correction, it’s an interesting point. In terms of CIA and FBI involvement, why didn’t he put a stop to it if he could? How would the censorship have benefitted him?

One thing I can’t get my head around is Twitter censoring joke accounts. Do you think it was because they were under so much time pressure that they erred on the side of trusting the Government suggestions?

>One thing I can’t get my head around is Twitter censoring joke accounts. Do you think it was because they were under so much time pressure that they erred on the side of trusting the Government suggestions?

If a joke account specifies it's a joke account in it's profile information, great. But that content doesn't get displayed when someone shares a tweet made by that account.

Now, think about how many times you may have come across something on the internet that was a joke, but also easy to misread as a serious comment. Such is the nature of a lot of online dialogue.

You've now got a tweet that can easily be (mis)read as truthful, being shared by people on their accounts who could insist to their own followers (who might not do their own due diligence and look at the joke account's profile to see that it's fake) that it's real, and voila, suddenly you've got a joke being used to spread misinformation.

I'm not defending Twitter or taking a side here, nor am I saying that's what happened. But it's a possibility that that's one perspective taken.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com