X caught blocking links to NPR, claiming the news site may be 'unsafe' | Hacker News Reader

X caught blocking links to NPR, claiming the news site may be 'unsafe'

techcrunch.com

61 pointscoloneltcb30 comments

Summary of article: A single NPR link got automatically flagged by X to display a warning after NPR changed the URL for an unknown reason. It was reported to X who said it was a false positive and corrected it.

Seems like there are so many hit pieces out there anymore because they don't like someone or something.

What happen to fact based reporting.... :(

The details in the summary given by the previous poster were from the article. I don't know what distinction you think exists between a "hit piece" and "fact based reporting", but this article falls into the fact based reporting category.

It's a non-story. Who needs to know X erroneously blocked 1 link to NPR? And what's with the title?

>X caught blocking links to NPR, claiming the news site may be ‘unsafe’

Is it one link or many?

> Who needs to know X erroneously blocked 1 link to NPR?

The appearance of a conflict of interest is a story. This appears to be a conflict of interest because a site is making it more difficult to read a negative story about a candidate endorsed by the company’s owner.

> Is it one link or many?

This is a rather pedantic complaint but multiple instances of the same link qualify as “links”. This is easier to see if you imagine them physically, multiple copies of the same book would be referred to as “books”.

I called it a hit piece because instead of saying users recently found a bug affecting 1 link to NPR. They say X "Caught" blocking links like it was something intentional and not an erroneous error. Any other site not connected to Elon with the same issue and it wouldn't of been writen I suspect.

> instead of saying users recently found a bug affecting 1 link to NPR

This is a good example of bias. It is not a fact that this was a bug. The fact is Twitter displayed the warning. Twitter has told NPR it was a false positive, but a journalist shouldn’t take an uncorroborated secondhand statement from the party being accused of potential wrongdoing as proof of anything.

Imagine for a second that this was done maliciously. Do you think Twitter would immediately admit that? Of course not, their statement would likely be identical to the one we got. Therefore the “fact based reporting” thing to do is present the facts, present Twitter’s response, and let the reader come to their own conclusions.

It's a fact that a pattern of behavior was accused, but a pattern of behavior was not shown.

Tells us more about bias.

(I'm no Twitter fan. I never had a Twitter account and no way in hell would I now.)

>It's a fact that a pattern of behavior was accused, but a pattern of behavior was not shown.

Yes, that is exactly what both the article and I said. The warning was applied to the link. Some people accused Twitter of doing that nefariously. Twitter denied it and claimed it was a mistake. Those are the facts of the situation.

The motivation for applying the warning or whether it was a mistake are not facts that can be confirmed by an independent journalist. They are speculation regardless of which side of the issue you come down on.

"this article falls into the fact based reporting category" is unsupported.

The article makes a general claim of behavior that is not supported by any single incident, yet only presents a single incident.

What are you talking about specifically? Can you point to a quote from the article that you think crosses a line journalistically? Because it seems like you’re equating reporting on the existence of accusations with actively making accusations and that type of thinking comes from either bias or a lack of media literacy.

And you know why this crap will continue?

Because you guys will go on twitter to discuss this.

Back in 2023:

>t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37130060

Concerning.

Looking into it. Might take me a few seconds.

I miss the old, funky Twitter. Back before the platform itself was actively trying to push people away from it.

My Mastodon feed keeps improving. Maybe someday it'll get there.

I've just accepted this wonderful part of the internet is gone now. I tried getting into threads. It's just too heavy on Instagram's recommendation engine for my taste and wasn't doing a good job of helping me discover other throughtful people

I like NPR but I wonder why their slugs have that weird bit of code after the date/time

"nx-s1-5092087" looks like a random string that might trigger some automated firewalls or checks

probably a post id. the rest of the slug is for seo. For example this link works fine without slug.

https://www.npr.org/2024/08/29/nx-s1-5092087

The problem is this specific url on twitter (probably due to mass reporting of the link by bots, or a manual ban).

Can someone explain to an outsider how "state funded" NPR is, if at all? Is it like BBC, DW, .. or more like CNN/FoxNews? And does its political stance change between governments?

I deleted my Twitter account overa year ago. I was not liking the changes. Stories like this only confirm my decison to be right.

The title is misleading. X isn’t blocking NPR, but was displaying a warning about a potentially unsafe link on one article from NPR. I don’t see any evidence that there is something malicious here; it could just be some automation acting incorrectly. NPR did change the URL and title of the article, by the way, and I wonder if that triggered something.

All that said, I am against any type of link blocking or warning functionality in the first place. This type of message is at best patronizing and at worst, censorship. Reddit does this, blocking links to various domains entirely or shadow banning submissions or comments with those links. I have seen their automation do this even in more nuanced ways, for example blocking certain Wikipedia links to articles that they’ve deemed unacceptable, instead of the whole domain. Other social media - including Twitter pre-acquisition, Meta, etc - all variously show such warnings from time to time or block certain domains entirely, both in submissions/posts and comments.

In my experience, the blocking on those platforms (not warnings but outright blocks) has had a political bias towards the left and against moderate or right wing views across these platforms. I find it hypocritical that people who have supported over the top censorship for years are now so offended and upset when it happens on Twitter/X, even if it is accidental and not malicious. Regardless, I think Twitter/X does owe an explanation in such situations and should act quickly to correct it.

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