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Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

> Twitter is a conservative cesspool

I disagree. If anything now it's more balanced, every "right of Portland-liberal" is no longer hidden and shadow-banned or worse. I like it a lot more!

Now you can actually read and learn about stuff you care about.

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Yeah, maybe we just have different politics and I'm too dismissive of alternative worldviews.

Still though, I get like Matt Gaetz' tweets recommended to me. Does anyone like that dude? How is this happening? Why on earth would I want that? I feel like all this conservative stuff is surfaced by the application to me.

[Proof](https://ibb.co/ypHS8fN)

I got notifications, on my dang phone, for the dumbest fucking takes. I don't get them for liberal people. Possible I am just in the demographic of people they think would swing conservative so they target me.

This is funny to read since this is basically what conservatives experienced for the last ten years on Twitter pre-Elon.

It’s not just you. I echo your sentiments.

I use Twitter for tech, but my feed is now conservative politics, gore video, & tech tweets intermingled.

Navalny’s wife was just banned and then shadow banned. There are countless examples of leftist accounts getting banned just for being critical about Musk.

It’s absolutely conservative cesspool. Nazis can are literally posting 14 words propaganda all day long and there are no consequences.

To think that Navalny or his wife are in any way leftists is insane. They were leaning more towards nationalism (just for Russia instead of the US).

In the face of current events though, that can be overlooked as it is not a narrative that serves western interest.

But to give an anecdote about an alternative, I rarely see any bigotry on Mastodon. Instances which allow that or don't moderate it correctly get block listed by instances I like. These instances may defederate into their own bubble in which they can still exist but cause no harm to the general timeline. Yet everyone still remains the freedom to express themselves. I like this because it's just a natural way of how to solve this problem for the end user.

There are other reasons than being vocally left-wing [1] or being a journalist [2][3] that get you suspended or banned on Twitter these days.

Musk is grandstanding about "free speech", but what Twitter actually does now is fold and cave to demands for censorship from any authoritarian government that asks [4][5].

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-leaked-internal-mess...

[2] https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/elon-musk-twitter-banned...

[3] https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musk-suspends-insiders-li...

[4] https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...

[5] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/15/once-again-free-speech-a...

They’re left of Putin so I dunno what you’re talking about.

Putin is a fascist dictator and Navalny wanted democratic rule.

How do you get shadow banned after getting banned ?!?

They publicly claimed to unban her so they could convince people it was a mistake, and then they shadow banned her.

I agree. I now see both extremes(horseshoe) and in-between as much. While before it was heavily leaned towards the left.

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