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Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

Does the old Twitter just meekly comply with the court order and not make a fuss?

“gratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact or detail”

Gratuitous ... does not sound correct. Indications are that this attack was not randomly targeted or without a purpose.

Offensive ... makes it more worthy of attention, not less. Should genocide also be hidden because it is so offensive?

High degree of impact ... because it contains important information about the social climate that can help people protect themselves and each other. How is that a reason to suppress?

Or detail ... that is important for judging authenticity, to be harder to fool.

Australia's rationale amounts to "we need to control your reality so that you don't get out of control". Wherever this leads, thanks for pushing back, X.

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The "old Twitter" pretty much did whatever various governments told them to do.

The FBI literally had a jira board for suspending accounts with stories worked by Twitter. You can see how this started with the noble purpose of shutting down state sponsored trolls, but it eventually morphed into "that RFK jr guy is a loon and is threatening people's lives by spreading anti-vax sentiment, delete that tweet".

The old Twitter had a vigorous legal team that fought a number of government requests, particularly the ones that involved secret court orders. Most of those people were wiped out in the first round of layoffs. The new Twitter selectively fights requests on high-profile issues that align with the owner’s politics.

So the new twitter using less resources available to it is fighting less requests that are still blatant attempts by governments to exercise control over media narrative. Got it.

There is no mental gymnastics or wordplay you can perform to justify quasi-fascist bureaucrats from hiding the truth.

The old twitter had a vigorous compliance team that slavishly obeyed government requests, particularly the ones that involved secret court orders. Most of those people were wiped out in the first round of layoffs. The new Twitter has no such team nor impulse and ignores censorship requests, fighting them only when the courts get involved.

Yeah, which is why they're complying with India's request for censorship and not fighting back... It's almost as if they're okay with working with authoritarian governments but don't give a shit if the nation in question is left leaning or not run by a fascist demagogue.

Receipts:

> Elon Musk, the owner of social media network Twitter, said the platform has no choice but to follow local laws in every country.

https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/twitt...

This isn’t fair at all.

Previous Twitter had just as much (if not more) political bias in their censorship decisions as Elon.

> Australia's rationale amounts to "we need to control your reality so that you don't get out of control".

Why have you concluded that this is their rationale?

Australian authorities claim the church stabbing video may incite reprisal attacks. Censoring is their attempt at behaviour modification of the few, at the expense of the right to raw information for the many.

They want a blindfold mechanism on a per-content basis for the entire internet, at the request of eKaren - the American ex-Twitter staffer whose highly paid job is to threaten Big Tech with takedown orders.

The footage belongs to the church, it's not "extremist content". It's similar to security footage of any crime. Mainstream news in Australia routinely shows home invasion footage, road-rage, all kinds of incidents in prime time news.

The priest who was stabbed made a clear statement forgiving his attacker and wants peace, no reprisals. It worked. That is what a healthy Australian community does. De-escalation with honest expression, not censoring or strong-arm threats to social media with pretentious power-play politics and "keeping people safe" rhetoric.

Australian authorities assert, with receipts mind you, that the church stabbing video and the unchecked troll accounts on X-Twatter did incite a sustained reprisal riot.

> The priest who was stabbed made a clear statement forgiving his attacker and wants peace, no reprisals. It worked.

By the time the statement from the priest had made it was many hours after actual reprisal attacks that were stoked by false account on social media.

The power of the lord did not apply retrochronologically in this instance.

If you're going to comment then at least do so within the realm of actual events that took place in the real world.

There were no reprisal attacks on places of worship connected to the attacker's faith. This is what the priest and everyone meant by reprisal.

We're talking about the video, nothing more. Your argument is poor if you're bundling trolls and disinformation issues in order to strengthen your argument for censorship of a video.

The video is factual. It happened. Regardless if the video existed or not, the hypothetical message: "our priest was stabbed by a terrorist, come to the church now"... would have had same outcome.

You don't have receipts. All you have is authorities asserting that a 5 sec clip of crime in the community should be scrubbed from the internet because they say so. Because their idea of a "safe community" is a docile, uninformed and unaware community. The police literally said, "we are the source of truth" in their press conference.

> "If you're going to comment..."

Should I reach out to you before I comment in future with a summary of what I intend to post?

> in order to strengthen your argument for censorship of a video.

I made no such argument.

> You don't have receipts.

There is extensive coverage of the mob riled up by social media surrounding the church and ripping up material to hurl in anger. You're correct that I personally don't have that footage. So what?

> Should I reach out to you before I comment in future

It'd be sufficient if you pause before posting before making claims that no attacks in reprise followed that at the church ...

> "...riled up by social media"

By social media? Mobs have riled up for centuries, long before social media. We wouldn't blame the phone company for increased vulgar language, would we?

Messages about the church incident would have spread regardless of any video. Videos are watched, copied, screen-grabbed, shared in seconds cross-platform. Why walk against the flowing river? Whack-a-mole content takedowns across the whole internet is a waste of time.

The Sydney riots footage exposed the worst offenders attacking cops and cars. That was a few idiots out of many. Same for other unrest you alluded to, it would be a few dickheads. And since the Bishop said "don't retaliate", it did have effect, it hasn't blown up. His words were not a useless gesture.

Cops made arrests and wider community is in agreement about the criminality of those riots. Social media helped find the offenders. Censorship played no part.

A positive option is improving platform features like contextual notes & content warnings, controls for users to fine-tune their social media equalizer sliders. Crowd-sourced community responsibility, trusting the process of shared community information, is a value I will not give up because bratty politicians don't like mean things said about them on X.

Or maybe Twitter would have also pushed back, but it wouldn’t have been news because Elon wouldn’t have been involved.

I don’t think that’s the case at all.

Previous Twitter was receiving a direct flow of censorship requests from Government officials asking them to shadowban or remove users. This was pure political speech censorship.

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