Twitter Is a Far-Right Social Network (The Atlantic) | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Is a Far-Right Social Network (The Atlantic)

theatlantic.com

28 pointshn201717 comments

Anyone is using Twitter for anything serious and beyond some joke or personal activity fun, is an idiot.

Exactly, we need to be more careful with what billionaires do with our idiots. Who controls the idiots controls the planet.

The Atlantic is trying too hard. Yes, the CEO is leaning hard right and has a bunch of weird opinions. But Twitter remains its users as of yet, and there aren't 450 million "hard right" users on Twitter for sure. If you compare it, say, with TruthSocial...

Twitter is however dying, and that's... another debate I guess.

But it's that CEO that defines the direction of the company. He personally asks for users to be banned, and for other users to be promoted. Sure, he doesn't directly influence what users write, but he does directly influence what they see.

He defines the direction yes, but inertia also matters. Twitter may be small by Facebook standards but it's still one of the largest social medias in the world. If you grab the wheel of a giant ship moving full speed forward in a given direction, you may want to set direction, but it'll take you time to steer it in that direction.

In 5 years Twitter will be absolutely nothing like what it was a year ago. But we're still in a transitionary period that's merely starting.

I don't think inertia matters. Even if the users don't change a bit compared to before the take-over, the network still moves to the right if people are constantly being shown right-wing tweets and pushed into right-wing topics. That doesn't take 5 years, it takes one day. And that day has passed a couple of month ago.

And since then Musk has been banning people on the left and un-banning people on the right, so the users definitely have changed already.

Everyone is trying too hard nowadays. It's one of the downsides of the internet. If you say "Rock and roll sin't as popular as it used to be" nobody will read your article. If you say "Rock is dead!" you'll get hits. I don't think it's fair to criticize the Atlantic for this. They're just playing by the rules of a game that many people here inadvertently designed.

I've been lurking a bit on Twitter recently, and I agree it has a larger right wing group on there that appears to be experiencing a bit of a renaissance. I can only see that as a good thing. It's mostly just people with different political views than the establishment, that are in general far less extreme than the lot of the left wing stuff you see. It's brought some natural balance back, which should be a good thing no matter your political view. Twitter's still an echo chamber, and has a lot of pointless outrage, but at least there are more perspectives now.

I don't buy in to the idea that twitter is censorship free, or neutral, there seems to be lots of exceptions. But at least it lets a different group of people talk. For a while it seemed like anything that wasn't ultra left coastal liberal views were socially unacceptable (which this article tries go insinuate) but in reality there are lots of perfectly normal perspectives people have.

I need more information to understand your comment.

> It's mostly just people with different political views than the establishment

Who is "the establishment" in this context?

> that are in general far less extreme than the lot of the left wing stuff you see.

Can you help me with some examples of "less extreme" and "left wing stuff" so I can understand your baseline?

> but in reality there are lots of perfectly normal perspectives

What are the "perfectly normal perspectives" here that we're contrasting against "ultra left coast"?

I find that "expand on what you're saying so I can poke some holes in it" style a really tiring way to participate in an online discussion. If you have a different view why don't you just say it?

> If you have a different view why don't you just say it?

How can I claim to have a different view from you if I don't know what your view is? If you don't have any interest in talking about your ideas, that's good to know, but then why initiate the process of talking about them with your top level comment?

> I find that "expand on what you're saying so I can poke some holes in it" style a really tiring way to participate in an online discussion

How do you feel about people who say vague things and then refuse to explain what they mean?

The parent made a few direct statements that seemed pretty clear so I’m not sure what you’re looking for.

It wasn’t me so I _could_ be wrong but I read this: 1. Twitter has more right wing content than it did before Musk. 2. It’s generally not extreme. 3. It’s good to have different views.

Yes, those are generalizations but I would think they’re clear and concrete enough to agree or disagree with. They’re generalizations so specific examples really wouldn’t contribute to the conversation either. I don’t get what sort of clarification you’re looking for. Maybe some sort of formal statistical analysis?

Of course, if you’re just not interested in generalizing about Twitter that’s fine but this whole article isn’t for you then.

> I’m not sure what you’re looking for.

I specifically indicated with quotation marks the exact phrases I had questions about.

I find the “make vague, sweeping statements about things and when asked to clarify cower away from answering because the thin veneer you used to try to cover your ideology will be stripped away” posting style to be really tiring myself.

The Atlantic has no what far right even is. Most folks on the far right aren't even on twitter, they're on gab. From what I see on twitter, most of the right wing stuff is pretty middle of the road.

> Now the site itself has unquestionably transformed under his leadership into an alternative social-media platform—one that offers a haven to far-right influencers and advances the interests, prejudices, and conspiracy theories of the right wing of American politics.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230523210556/https://www.theat...

Here comes the very upset news outlets still crying over the bird app again, with the normal users still not caring and continuing to use Twitter with over 220M+ daily active users.

We have given 6 months for Twitter to completely collapse and the hard truth is, it did not collapse as expected. The doomsters will never admit it and the Atlantic still won't leave Twitter either. In fact, they are still paying for Twitter. [0]

Articles like this, reads like complete cope since Twitter has always been the source of media outrage and attention and they keep resorting to using the platform regardless.

[0] https://twitter.com/TheAtlantic

Reply on news.ycombinator.com