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Comment by asveikau | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if this is true, but I heard that recently, searching Twitter for "cats" led you to videos of cats being mutilated. The story continued that Elon had fired the entire team devoted to preventing such outcomes.

https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-removes-autocomplete...

Somehow hearing this story made me picture my daughter, 10, searching for cat videos.

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Yes, it’s accurate. I tested it at the time and was shown that video. It was later fixed for ‘cats’, but it took a while.

There have been other examples beyond that cat video too, that just got a lot of attention.

This shows how much I don’t use Twitter, but I was curious to verify this and learned I need to sign in (or in my case create an account) to search…is that true?

I believe it is now. Search used to work without being signed in, but I'm pretty sure that changed at some point in the post-Elon era.

Couldn’t verify?

https://twitter.com/search?q=%20Cats&src=typed_query

from the parent comment:

> It was later fixed for ‘cats’, but it took a while.

Argh thanks

Not your fault, I had an edit that I’d forgotten to submit but sent a few minutes later when I remembered. I didn’t see you’d replied to me already, my apologies.

Did you read the entirety of the comment you're responding to, or only the first third of it?

No, it was my fault. I edited it and forgot to submit it till a few minutes later. I didn’t see the responses before I did.

> Somehow hearing this story made me picture my daughter, 10, searching for cat videos

I don't think Twitter has ever been a place for children.

Or for cat mutilation. Until now.

I picture my mother using Twitter, searching for cat videos.

She's pretty close to teenage years. I wasn't much older than her when I started using IRC.

She can search YouTube for cats and not get that stuff.

But I frequently think of my kids even for situations they don't directly risk. Call it an empathy gauge.

You're parents had no idea what IRC was. You know what Twitter is.

Good point here. IRC was also nothing like Twitter or current day social media in general.

We also didn't have the massive amount of statistical evidence in mental health that came to light just recently about teenage social media use, especially in girls. Several times these studies have made it to the top of HN.

ahem US privacy law makes it basically illegal for anyone under 13 to have an account on most services. https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/rules/childrens-onl...

Not that it's any better presenting such videos to 13 year olds. Or adults, for that matter.

Unfortunately, team size doesn’t mean anything directly. Don’t forget what happened when one searched for “black girls“ on google in 2009:

https://time.com/5209144/google-search-engine-algorithm-bias...

And even though it’s improved. This is still an example of how Google has gone to shit over the years. Why can’t I just have “10 blue links” instead of pictures, videos, etc?

Anyone who knows mythical man month knows team size isn't everything. But the team for this task should probably not be 0-1 people.

A 10 year old should definitely not be on Twitter, even before Elon.

Overall this comment is weird to me. Does this show Elon was wrong and the org should continue being massively overstaffed and burning money like before?

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