Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlecSchueler | Hacker News Reader

Had to delete mine a few weeks ago when I suddenly got a pro-book burning reel, showing Nazis burning books with the caption "They tell you they burned books, bit never which books."

It had 30,000 likes and the top comments were all along the lines of "The victors write history, they will never say the bad guys won WW2" and "Hitler was just fighting the Jewish transgender conspiracy in Germany. Trump will defeat it in America" etc.

I used Instagram to follow traditional musicians and people tailoring their own historical clothing. But I can't stay on a platform that is so happy to give a place to that kind of outright hate speech.

View on HN

We are all choosing sides, each and every day, between compassionate concern for our fellow human beings, and callous disregard for others' happiness.

Choose well, everyone. The karma you reap is always exactly what you deserve, for good or ill.

And the pleasure of having power over others is not a good replacement for peace of mind, joy, and happiness.

I haven’t been served that type of content but I feel the same way as you lately. It feels like it’s shock content with a race to the bottom to get users attention instead of showing interesting content I would actually like

Instagram is ad matching machine. Meta is not in the business to care about people.

It seems short sighted. I know a lot of trans people who use the app, and I used to follow many content creators of colour etc. If we start normalising violently silencing them, paving the way to sending them to camps to work and die, then Meta loses a big part of their customer base.

If I had to delete an app every time I see something I politically disagree with I would have no need for a smartphone.

That's a really unfair representation of what happened. I frequently see things I "disagree with" on most platforms and I am happy to ignore it or go into discussion about it. Facism is not something I just "disagree with." Calling for people to be silenced by violent mobs is not something I just "disagree with." Holocaust denial is not something that is up for debate.

I felt terrified by what I saw, quite literally sickened by it. I closed my phone completely and struggled to sleep afterwards. It took me three days and some conversations with my family before I could open the app again just to delete my account.

I'm not just taking some moral stand against Instagram by leaving it for publishing views that differ to mine, I'm simply too disgusted to ever open it again, the thought of having an app like that on my phone makes me queasy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com