Comment by troad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by troad | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

There is no site more perfectly suited to turning people off the fundamental democratic value of free speech than Elon Musk's Twitter, circa 2024.

The front page is just brazen anti-Semitism and racism at this point. And no, I am not referring to some reasoned debate of the Gaza War or social issues, I mean literal memes with hook-nosed men, their captions explicitly referring to the Protocols of the Elder of Zion. I mean photos of black children with captions about low IQs. It's truly abhorrent. Open a no-follows, no-cookies Twitter account right now, and see how long it takes you to get something like this on the front page of Twitter. It won't be more than 30 seconds.

I have truly never seen anything like it. Perhaps it's old hat for some of you 4Chan types, but it's profoundly shocking to the average person. If Gen Z or their successors kill the First Amendment, it will be because Elon groomed them to think that this deluge of darkness is what free speech is all about. It is not.

Twitter is an echo chamber that offers direct financial incentives for being the most vociferous hater, the most demented racist, the most extremist politician. That's a thumb on the scales, which kills off any notion that what emerges out of Twitter is the product of open and free discourse.

>If Gen Z or their successors kill the First Amendment, it will be because Elon groomed them to think that this deluge of darkness is what free speech is all about. It is not.

Cut the melodrama. This isn’t the first time there has been racism on the Internet. MySpace and then Facebook were both loaded with it and 4chan has been there all along. The Internet in the late 2000s was far less filtered than X today.

You’re just dealing with coming down from a massive swing to extreme censorship in the 2010s so it seems scary.

Bull. You can't lie to me about ordinary Internet in the 2000s, because I was there.

For context, this is a sampling of literal front page content from Twitter, on an new account with no cookies or follows, via a VPN, from a day in late August when I ran this little experiment:

- A meme of a dark-skinned man saying 'You never wuz been judged by yo skeen cola' and a white man replying 'How are you in college?'

- 'The Mirror Test: White Babies Recognize Themselves at 15 Months, Black Children Not Until 6 Years (Science Video)', with the caption: 'I'm guessing this is what a 30 point higher IQ average does'

- A still from a Hilter speech, Nazi flag visisble in the background, caption 'the world owes this man an apology'

- An image of "Fr. Leonard Feeny" with the quote 'Having a television in your home is like having a Jew in your living room'.

- A meme of Sully from Monsters Inc. smiling, with the caption 'Mfs entering heaven when they see Adolf'

Again, I want to stress this, this is the Twitter front page. To suggest that Facebook and MySpace were suggesting content anywhere near this revolting to average accounts on Facebook or MySpace is just a lie. They were not. Did racist content exist somewhere in the dark recesses of those websites? Probably. Was it being suggested to the average person within thirty seconds of opening the equivalent to the front page? Absolutely not.

Convincing the average American that ordinary moderation of content like the above is 'extreme censorship' is how you get Americans who decide they're actually OK with that.

Before Twitter the nazis would go to the town square of Jew filled towns and march. Americans have been dealing with this for ages and found it legally tolerable.

You're conflating two different things.

You have the right to say all kinds of horrible things without fear of arrest and imprisonment. This is good. The First Amendment rocks. Skokie is good precedent.

There is no logical follow-on from that that would require me to listen to, or publicise, or give equal airtime to, or care about the stupid things you say. None of that has anything to do with free speech.

Most people don't go to Twitter for racism, and yet they're getting their faces rubbed in racism every time they go, and being told that's just free speech, get used to it. The natural consequence of this is the turning of people against free speech, with deeply deleterious effects for the republic.

What am I conflating? No one is required to go to Twitter. They are occasionally required to go near the town square, and they tolerate Nazis in their face even there.

I don't see something particularly novel here.

>Bull. You can't lie to me about ordinary Internet in the 2000s, because I was there.

So was I, sites were filled with racist shit it took a lot of work to filter out. You’re just getting hung up on the idea of a Twitter front page. If Facebook had a front page of virally shared stuff, it would have been filled with racism, conspiracies, and whatnot.

Companies usually curated their front page to avoid that kind of stuff, but nobody looks at the front page so it doesn’t really matter. The content you were exposed to as a user was filled with racism.

I take it you didn’t play video games because online gaming was also absolutely packed with people yelling and typing racist and homophobic shit. It wasn’t until many years into Xbox live that they figured out to put the people with each other based on shit talking. It wasn’t until Rocket League brought in the other platforms that they enforced people personally attacking each other.

>Convincing the average American that ordinary moderation of content like the above is 'extreme censorship' is how you get Americans who decide they're actually OK with that.

You’re trying to rewrite history. What you’re calling “ordinary” is very new. Setting aside what the “right amount” is for moderation, it’s indisputable that moderation at scale is a very recent invention. The job of “internet moderator” in 2005 didn’t exist. Now Facebook employs thousands of them and uses AI and crowdsourcing to do it at immense scale.

Only Americans could see social media a decade ago and think that is extreme censorship

> The front page is just brazen anti-Semitism and racism at this point

We have plenty of that here. A year ago I would have mailed dang, he used to block „Elders of Zion“ posters quickly.

Today it‘s clear that antisemitism that doesn‘t literally post Elders stuff is welcome on HN, and there‘s no reason to report it anymore.

If most people want the internet to be a network TV sitcom level of content, so be it, but it will be a loss.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com