Elon Musk's tweets unleashed a wave of hate | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk's tweets unleashed a wave of hate

bbc.co.uk

48 pointsfinne48 comments

This is one of the rare times where I come to a comment section out of having read the article before.

Sure the platform moderation problem always will stir a censorship / FoS discussion.

But the article lists forms of abuse (e.g. detailed death threats) that are or definitely should not be legal in my view.

This might be a subjective observation, but all in all Twitter has become an even more hateful and extremely unpleasant place on the internet since Musk took over. Dangerous I'd say even.

Even after reading one interesting thread (without a login), I quickly get suggested plain hate speech or far-right content. This extends to Musk himself, as the article already explains.

Another thing are conspiracy memes designed to stir up hate, which Musk also happily shares.

I don't even need any more screenshots or examples for this, every brief Twitter experience that I have from time to time seems to confirm to me how it's rapidly gotten even worse than before.

I'm reminded of the Chris Rock joke about Lululemon and their $100 no-hate yoga pants. But given that price they actually hate poor people.

But they hate them without racism.

Is this sarcasm? I thought a reason of choosing the name “lululemon” was that it can be difficult to pronounce for some

https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-lululemon-2015-9?...

Edit: the linked article suggests it wasn’t “a reason” but rather “the reason” for the name, I was being too forgiving

That’s interesting about the name, I didn’t know that. However, I don’t think it’s racist. A Japanese marketing firm designing a brand for Japan chose the name with 3 Ls because that letter doesn’t exist in Japanese, so would seem more like a non-Japanese, American brand.

That seems very different from someone choosing it to laugh at how some people can’t say it.

Funny how the BBC keeps complaining about Musk's Twitter take over but refuses to cover the Twitter Files he's been releasing. Guess those government millions are put to good use.

You mean like this one?

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63963779

The thing is that "the Twitter Files" just... broadly aren't interesting.

It's just a bunch of stuff that was already known or internal conversations that don't shift the needle one way or the other. "Social media company has discussion about how to apply moderation practices" isn't news unless you're looking to make a quick buck of pretending that it is. (Especially if you can frame it in such a way that whatever camp you belong to is being silenced and censored.) Neither are things like algorithmic deprioritization or shadowbanning. These are bog-standard moderation tools. It's well... not news. There's nothing to report there unless you want the report to be "social media company does what every other social media company does, more at 11".

Twitter has always been transparent about government requests, they literally have a site dedicated to listing that[0]. It used to be updated every year but ironically 2022 data isn't available because I guess Musk fired everyone involved with it/didn't think it is a priority to keep updated (ironic given the supposed claims of the Twitter Files.)

The closest thing I ever saw to something being interesting is that certain accounts have immunity against Twitters regular flagging system, instead being marked with "only let the higher-ups make decisions".

I think there's an interesting discussion to be had about how fame apparently gives you the option to break most rules on a social media site unless blowback becomes so significant that the upper management decided you're not worth the trouble, but that's not the discussion that's being held. (This is, if I had to guess, entirely because of the significant overlap between "famous person who thinks Twitter Files matter" and "famous person with immunity against the rules", but I admit that that is just a guess.)

[0]: https://transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/information-requ...

> "Legal demands" include a combination of court orders and other formal demands to remove content, from both governmental entities and lawyers representing individuals.

I am very very much in doubt that it was publicly _known_ (not theorised) that the government was asking Twitter to delete _legal_ but _undesirable_ tweets!

When the government is suggesting Twitter to censor specific users/subjects/tweets, is that not close to (if not outright) violating the first amendment?

No? They just used the same reporting functionality everyone else had available from what I can tell. Twitter has, at least according to the transparency report also more often than not just straight up rejected the requests from the government (the last known report data shows that they only complied 40% of the time[0]). Twitter basically received a report, practically no different from if you or someone else clicked on the report button in their interface and then decided whether or not to act on it. There would be no consequences to saying "no", which again, according to their transparency report, they did more often than not.

So no, I don't consider that to be a free speech violation; nobody went to jail, nobody was threatened into being silenced by the government. By all metrics, that is not a free speech violation. Section 230 allows internet service providers (that's not just your ISP; anyone with an internet site that allows for user-generated content is an ISP for this law) to make their own decisions[1]. Twitter made their own decisions based on the information given.

If we're talking first amendment though, Twitter also had a rather notable history of butting in on lawsuits that actually would affect the government crossing a free speech boundary to give its own input on those cases, specifically to prevent the US right to free speech from being neutered[2]. (And with another great irony, Musk fired the person who was chiefly responsible for that because she also was the person that signed off on Trump getting suspended.)

EDIT: Also as for it being known - yeah it was. No social media site really hides this. Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, they all have openly discussed the fact that at some point, the government will just ask you to take stuff down. Each of those sites has their own limitations on what they allow. Reddit is for example rather compliant with those requests (since Reddits entire success is due to staying just below the surface of the attention of the news) while Facebook has been infamously flip-floppy with say, the Christchurch shooter video where they weren't sure on whether or not to comply with the request from the NZ government.

[0]: https://transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/countries/us.htm...

[1]: This is without delving into the broader section 230 conversation, which also has come under fire. No comment on that.

[2]: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/10/28/elon-musks-first-move-is...

- No, the government and politicians don't use the same reporting functionality as us plebes, they e-mail Twitter Safety directly, as revealed by the Twitter Files.

- When the government (with their regulatory powers, monopoly on legitimate violence, etc) asks a private company to do something, the coercion is implicit. Just like if a heavily armed thug looms over you and asks, in a threatening tone of voice, for your wallet—the "or else" doesn't need to be aired out loud.

> They just used the same reporting functionality everyone else had available from what I can tell.

I think a major part of the Twitter files is exactly the fact that all of these social networks have close working relationships with tons of government and government funded agencies, where these groups can just send along lists of people and topics that they want removed on dubious grounds (this is not the same as things like getting a warrant or court order which I'm assuming the transparency report is about).

The recent release includes things like "true facts about covid vaccines that might cause hesitancy". You can have whatever opinion you want about what they should and shouldn't be platforming, but I for one agree that these organizations shouldn't be able to casually tap twitter/fb/etc on the shoulder and nix random legal speech.

Alot of people found the Twitter files very interesting indeed, just not the left-wing media.

Wasn’t they so uninteresting that US congress tried to silence them last week so that they wouldn’t die of boredom?

That was something else; Twitter has a consent agreement with the FTC surrounding the privacy of its users (after they got hacked some time ago). Musk has been very negligent on actually making sure the paperwork is correct[0].

Congress requested for information on whether or not Twitter was properly following the consent decree when Musk gave Tabibi and the others access to the files. Twitter is legally required to assess the possible privacy impact of anything surrounding user data. That's all that was requested. They did not request Twitter to stop providing the journalists access, just that they had done the necessary precautions to avoid accidentally leaking out sensitive user information.

Tabibi of course screamed that he was being censored by the government. I leave you to your own conclusions there.

[0]: After the entire legal team resigned en-masse when they had to put their signatures down for something, presumably the new Twitter Blue. Musks current policy is that engineers are independently liable for FTC violations, which I'm pretty sure is not how it's supposed to work.

All I saw Tabibi's journalistic integrity questioned with options of yes/no and congressmen shouting "SILENCE - you don't waste my time".

No one from twitter was there.

Maybe you were in the loop about this. But I didn't know that US government officials, politicians, and law enforcement were pressuring Twitter to censor 1A-protected speech, in violation of the Constitution. I didn't know that Twitter was regularly complying with these blatantly illegal censorship requests. I didn't know that organizations like Hamilton 68 and the Global Engagement Center (goverent agency) were blatantly lying about random private citizens being foreign agitators, and that the media was breathlessly repeating these lies.

So maybe I'm just not in the loop, I don't know how to keep up with the latest techniques of our enlightened overlords. Which media sources should I be following, to correct this apparent deficiency?

Musk did not give the BBC access to those files, so what is there for them to report? They've been reported by the journalists who were given exclusive access.

I've tried to follow every Twitter Files dump and honestly there really isn't anything there to cover. It's like ppointing at people doing their jobs and claiming "there's some seriously scurrious stuff going on over there!"

Just doing their jobs, censoring the legal speech of private citizens at the request of government, after government without a shred of evidence accuses the private citizens of being foreign agents

For decades, AT&T gave the government unlimited access to all its technology. The head of AT&T and Bell Labs would personally go to DC on a secret schedule and share technical documentation that let the NSA spy (illegally) on Americans (see Idea Factory for footnotes, etc). From what I read, Twitter pushed back against the government in a thoughtful way. If you have problems with what the government is doing, use these files to file a lawsuit. If you think the US government is going to change being heavy handed I think you'll be depressed at the outcome.

The first nationwide social graph was built at AT&T Labs, made of call detail records harvested (on mag tape and possibly even punched cards at the time) from storage all over the country. It was possibly the largest database at the time. Pre-RDBMSs.

> Funny how the BBC keeps complaining about Musk's Twitter take over but refuses to cover the Twitter Files he's been releasing. Guess those government millions are put to good use.

How would that work? How did Twitter spend millions on the UK Government and how would that result in the BBC not reporting on a Twitter related issue?

"Antisemitism on Twitter has more than doubled since Elon Musk took over" https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/antisemitism-on-...

She doesn't name names.

What would be the point of naming names?

1) A lot of Twitter users are anonymous or have fake names.

2) The story is about the volume of hate, so why would individual names be relevant?

3) Twitter trolls are often seeking attention (Musk himself being a case in point), so naming them just rewards their behavior.

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