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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

> white supremacists increasingly dominate everyone's feeds

Either I'm the one person who isn't seeing this, or this person has a very deranged definition of "white supremacist." I get AI grifter guys in my feed but I can't recall seeing unironic white supremacists.

I'm not a fan of Elon but these people that made their entire personality trying to demonstrate how Twitter is dead are the same ones who were saying it would happen as soon as Musk was confirmed to take over, and if anything are disappointed it's not going as badly as they predicated so they need to make things seem worse than they are.

The biggest problems I've had with Twitter since Elon took over is having to see his unfunny jokes like tweets saying which planet they're sent from or making the logo a doge head for a few days.

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Agreed, I hate how people just throw this out like it's fact and everyone applauds. My twitter feed before was a ton of artists I follow, my twitter feed now? A bunch of artists I follow.

I bet most of the community here defaults to Following (non-curated timeline). Mine's gotten a lot quieter, without as many interesting threads cutting across fields, but talking to friends hasn't changed. However I've seen the occasional literal, ideological N*zi pop up in New Twitter's For You (curated timeline), which I suspect is down to using metrics susceptible to rage-farming.

Not sure about white supremacists, but as an ex-user of Twitter, now a casual lurker, I find that toxic commenters are almost everywhere.

I don't know if part of Twitter's algorithm was to filter these out for me, but browsing Twitter without an account is a wild ride, and has led me to believe that the far right has indeed infested the platform thoroughly.

It's like dating apps. Letting people buy reach, rather than relying on "merit," can make people's feeds worse. And yet you have to make money. It's a balancing act. You want to turn the ads spigot on just enough that people are still happy with the service.

At least for me the twitter comments have always been a cess pool of toxicity and really have only gotten worse over the years. Far worse than any other platform I've used. I haven't noticed a significant change in the rate the toxicity grows since he elon took over but to be fair I do feel as though the toxicity has been near saturation for years already.

A lot of it did, and still does get removed/hidden that at least gives the impression that the platform is less toxic than it really is but I don't really buy the argument that forceful removal/banning is helpful anymore because it really hasn't worked anywhere online that ive seen, it just escalates things and makes them madder/more vengeful. Then they just make new posts/accounts/do damage elsewhere.

I'd much rather just read a few more empty death and terrorism theats and move on with my day than have twitter esculate them until they actually are mad enough to try and follow through with them.

It's exaggeration for sure, but even I get some white supremacist content in my "For You" feed and I only follow sports/band/venue/restaurant accounts. It's puzzling how it found its way there. My "Following" feed is fine though.

Like what, exactly?

It's puzzling how very broad topics such as "sports" might have overlap with white supremacy communities?

It's puzzling how human intervention isn't used to prevent such a simple but unrealistic correlation.

People are creating an alternate reality in their own head.

A couple things here:

1. Their definition of "white supremacist" is far, far wider than yours.

2. I don't see white supremacists at all. In fact, aside from Elon's mercurial and adolescent drama and knee jerk policy changes, Twitter is far, far better.

It seems like all the people who whined about other people on Twitter fled to Mastodon or something. And in fact, I stopped using Mastodon because it became a clutter of people complaining about people on Twitter, because those people held different opinions.

It could be from Robin DeAngelo who wrote the very popular book "White Fragility" and other books about problematic white people. She says:

"Remember: When I use the term “white supremacy”, I do not use it to refer to extreme hate groups. I use the term to capture the pervasiveness, magnitude, and normalcy of white dominance and assumed superiority."

So it looks like a further redefinition of a word to control language and discourse. In essence, "white culture" (I don't really know if that's a thing?) or what is commonly referred to as "whiteness" today is “white supremacy”. So unless you want to be a "“white supremacist" you will actively fight against it. At the least, you certainly won't disagree with the critical social justice ideology if you want to be an "ally". And if you think you're being a "good white" by not being racist you are actually problematic and need to "do the work".

This is from her extremely popular, celebrated, and mainstream texts and not my opinions.

I don’t see any either, mainly b/c I curate who I follow and click the link at the top “Following” to only show tweets of people I follow (instead a of the default “For You” which mixes in Twitter’s mostly inane recommendations).

> Either I'm the one person who isn't seeing this, or this person has a very deranged definition of "white supremacist."

I honestly have noticed no changes whatsoever in my feed. A lot of people I follow are griping about how bad it is, but I'm not seeing it. Perhaps they are sunsetting this site because it's not all doom and gloom, as much as they may have wanted it to be?

I have no opinion on the entire matter other than it's the same for me, outside of Elon Musk making more frequent odd replies (as you mention). He seems to respond with "we really need to look into this" or "this needs further investigation" on things that border on conspiracies or are easily proven/disproven.

Am I just an outlier for some strange reason?

Yeah, I don't have this either. I suspect it's the new sense of "white supremacist" (something like "people who are at all critical of left-wing identity politics") rather than anyone who discernibly professes a belief in the superiority of the "white race".

> I'm not a fan of Elon but these people that made their entire personality trying to demonstrate how Twitter is dead

Yeah, when he laid off a bunch of engineering, lots of people (including Grady Booch, one of the guys behind UML) were insisting that Twitter was going to fall apart, pointing to every single bug as proof of their prophesy (despite that Twitter has always been plagued with bugs--fail whale, anyone?--and many other successful social media platforms thrive as businesses despite far more frequent, egregious bugs). Of course, this isn't an endorsement of Musk in any way, but it will be read as such because we're not allowed to have nuanced opinions on the Internet.

> nuanced opinions

Ah yes, I remember when people had those. I think they phased them out because they didn't fit into the headlines anymore.

Also, it costs less to paint the world with simple black and white.

There's no such thing as an ironic white supremacist.

I have seen on my feed a picture of Hitler with a sympathetic quote from an account called "Racial Consciousness" with a blue check mark. I could not even imagine seeing that before Elon took over. So for me, yes, there are definitely white supremacists increasingly dominating my feed.

Are you sure that wasn't satire? Poe's law and all that?

Satire requires a clarity of purpose and target lest it be mistaken for and contribute to that which it intends to criticize.

I agree, but (1) not all satire is good satire and (2) not everyone is adept at picking up on good satire and (3) even those who are adept at picking up good satire might miss something once in a while.

"It was just a joke" is a common distraction technique used by neonazis and other social conservatives. When seen it is safe to presume bad faith until proven otherwise.

It’s also used far more frequently by ordinary people who tell jokes.

“You know who else drank water? Hitler!”

Am I joking, or am I pointing out the silliness of taking something as mundane as “humor” and portraying it as something uniquely fascist?

I don't know any "ordinary" people that go around telling racist nazi-type "jokes."

This isn't some kind of nuanced topic, the facts of the matter are evident, there's just nazis and nazi-enablers playing interference and trying to fabricate uncertainty many of which are in this very thread.

As we learned long ago there are very effective tools that defeat social conservatives such as nazis, entertaining their ideas is not one of those tools.

I think you're confusing "jokes about Nazis" for "Nazi-type jokes". A Nazi isn't very likely to joke about the semblances between fascism and some far-left identity ideology for the same reasons far-left identitarians don't make those jokes. And my "You know who else drank water? Hitler!" example is a common example of a satirical joke about Nazis, so clearly ordinary people do tell jokes about Nazis (to varying degrees of subtlety).

Can you explain what this would be satirizing?

It would be satirizing "race consciousness" by highlighting parallels between it and traditional right-wing racism as embodied by Hitler in this case. I'm not necessarily endorsing that interpretation, but it is a common point made by critics of left-wing identity politics.

So Nazis were conscious of race because they wanted to commit genocide. Left wingers are conscious of race because they want to eradicate social inequities. Yeah, personally I wouldn't waste my time trying to downplay this sort of discourse as a joke.

I'm not "trying to downplay"; this really only makes sense as satire (actual Nazis probably wouldn't borrow leftist phrases like "race consciousness" because they see themselves as opposed to leftists as leftists see themselves as opposed to Nazis). It seems like it is almost certainly quipping about the ironic similarities between two ideologies that purport to be polar opposites (fixation with race, tendency toward mass violence in the extremes, etc). I'm sure that a leftist and a right-winger see the Holocaust and Holodomor as completely different (the Holomor was merely Stalin's persuit of "eradicating social inequities"!), but to a moderate these feel a lot more similar to each other than either of them feel similar to any reasonably desirable moral or political order. So in my mind, this only really works as moderate satire.

> actual Nazis probably wouldn't borrow leftist phrases like "race consciousness"

The most definitively actual of actual Nazis borrowed leftist phrases like “Socialism” right into the name of the party from which “Nazi” is abbreviated, as well as a lot of other leftist language (while radically recontextualizing the meaning.)

Borrowing language from existing left, right, center, religious, and secular groups, and then rearranging and defining them to create the appearance that the natural endpoint of whatever your existing ideology is is Nazism is what actual Nazis do.

Yeah I don't understand what the original commenter is thinking if he's going to insist that this is actually some sort of centrist joke. I really don't want to assume the worst here.

This isn't moderate in my mind. Only a Nazi or a complete fool would try to equivocate genocidal ideologies with current leftist rhetoric.

Allowing people to express themselves is fascism.

Maybe your feed is curated more, but it's definitely true that visiting a tweet url as an anonymous user, almost no matter what the tweet is about or who tweeted it, when you scroll down it starts just showing suggested tweets/topics, and not kidding they are almost all paid blue checkmark right wing provocateurs. And part of this was unintentional in promoting "paid" checkmark people but the vast majority of those are a certain type of person who want to shout loudly.

Seems the previously amplified "notable" voices have self-selected themselves out of the blue checks because they refuse to buy them. I see a lot of "I'll never pay a single cent to elon" sentiment from the former anointed ones.

It's the usual thing of broad strokes defining a whole group of people. Dehumanizing to make it easier to hate them.

All democrats are commie socialists that want to take away your individuality.

All republicans are white supremacist nazis that want to impose their will.

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