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Comment by BryantD | Hacker News Reader

I can’t help but notice that Twitter and TikTok didn’t get called for that session. In November 2023, Twitter went from a zero tolerance policy for violent speech to “we may remove or reduce the visibility of violent speech.” Seems really relevant for the topic of the hearings! And yet.

I’m thus unwilling to take Rep. Comey’s decision to call Reddit to testify as evidence of anything. Feels more like political theater to me. This doesn’t either condemn or absolve Reddit, it’s just not strong evidence.

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While Twitter has many problems it does seem to do a reasonable job of not promoting hate and violence towards a large audience. There's many messages critical of immigrants on my timeline but none calling for violence against them (or any other group that Twitter users dislike).

Meanwhile posts about violence against Trump, Musk or celebrating the dead of Kirk did get massive upvotes and visibility on some of the biggest and most popular subs on Reddit.

You're either desensitized or simply don't follow accounts that attract any political issues at all if you say that. Twitter is absolutely, depressingly overridden with genocide apologia and putrid racism.

> You're either desensitized or simply don't follow accounts that attract any political issues at all if you say that.

There are some other options too. For instance, there are people who honestly believe that Twitter is now a much better place and feel right at home because they are the ones pushing the genocide apologia and putrid racism themselves.

While I understand your frustration projecting American political biased on this does seem a bit extreme.

I'm not an American, nor do I care very much about US politics (outside my sphere of influence). It's hard to discuss exactly what genocide apologia and putrid racism are without a closer definition but I do not see anything on Twitter that's not discussed in the left liberal Dutch newspaper that I read (Volkskrant) or the German conservative center newspaper that I read (NZZ).

No worries, I know your background.

But if that's your twitter experience then you have a very well curated feed and on top of that are somehow able to side-step the stuff that Musk pushes really hard.

No worries.

While Twitter has many issues, I still find value in it and I figured that a counter point to the common narrative would add value to the discussion.

I would love a LLM curated social network where I can drive the content that I see by adjusting the prompt to ensure that only high quality, fact based content is presented to me.

While no doubt not perfect and accounting for LLM biases (at scale) is not trivial this seems doable on a small (personal or small community) scale. Given the low cost of LLMs these days (queries on Flash 2.5 Lite or QWEN usually cost me a fraction of a cent), this might actually be a pretty cool weekend project!

In general I'm not very interested or concerned with American politics since this is outside of my scope of influence. I cannot say how much that influences my experience but I can confidently say that I have not seen any genocide apologia and putrid racism.

The closest that I've seen is conversations about violence rates and nationality (in the context of immigration) but these topics have also been discussed in the liberal left Dutch newspaper (Volkskrant) and conservative center newspaper (Neu Zuricher Zeitung) that I read.

My main point would be that Twitter does a better job at not amplifying calls for violence than Reddit. I, obviously, do not have access to internal Twitter data so my assessment is purely anecdotal but nonetheless seems relevant to the conversation.

Twitter is absolutely full of calls for violence, i genuinely don't know how you can use the platform and not see any of it

Last time I logged into Twitter to delete my account, many months post Musk, I was presented immediately with disturbing videos of both people and animals beating beat up in the "For you" tab.

And let's not ignore the owner of the site posting inflammatory/hateful/violent rhetoric.

I have a different opinion of Twitter than you do, but that’s not actually the case I was making. I was pointing out that Twitter’s terms of service were modified to be less aggressive about calls for violence. If you’re correct and Twitter succeeds at not promoting hate and violence… why wouldn’t James Comer want to understand why?

My explicit hypothesis is that he’s not holding these hearings out of a desire to investigate, he’s holding them for other reasons.

Also you’re slipping down a slope here. Originally the question was about promoting violence yet you keep referring to hatred or even being glad someone’s dead. Promoting violence is not the same as being glad someone has passed away.

I created a new account about two months ago to see what’s true about the tales that it’s absolutely crazy what’s there as a new account. And it’s pure racism. At least half of tweets either about some blacks who did something bad, or how whites are suppressed, and we are right. And the whole experiment started by blocking Musk and co, so the intent wasn’t even there. It had a honeymoon phase for a few days, where it seemed the hearsay to be not true, so I didn’t visit for a while. Then I went back after a month, and it’s a racist “paradise” completely since then.

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