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Comment by SilverElfin | Hacker News Reader

Yep I find it hard to believe that real users can tolerate X. It’s FILLED with racists and supremacist content and it is very hard to hide from it. Look at what happened to Vivek Ramaswamy - he had to shut down his account because replies were nearly 100% slurs. If you aren’t aligned with the far right, it’s unusable. The ones saying otherwise are the ones who aren’t targeted by all this because of their demographics, and often, they’re wealthy too. Think VCs and billionaires.

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I've used Twitter since the first year it came out (almost 20yrs now) and it's always been filled with crazy politics. It's also always been a platform where you have to invest time to very carefully curate your feed otherwise you get garbage. You can 100% filter out politics and get high quality stuff that suits your interests. It's not like Tiktok where they'll do that job for you with an algorithm and push you into a comfortable bubble immediately. Twitters recommendation algorithms have never been good.

That's absolutely not the case with my "For you" feed.

It's mostly photography and tech.

Compare that to Reddit where my "Home" page is actually FILLED with left extremist political propaganda and an endless onslaught of posts about Trump across frontpage subreddits.

Can you provide some examples of what you think left extremism is?

I click /r/pics, and I see a photo of Black Panther protesters holding assault rifles, a pic of Musk and Trump at dinner with the title yapping about the Epstein files, multiple pics protesting ICE and literally labelling them both fascists and Nazis, a photo of Trump's Hollywood star being smeared with "pedophile", some high ranking border patrol officer labelled a "Nazi officer" for wearing a uniform coat, and so on.

I think left extremism is a fair description here; it's at least far left.

You’re telling on yourself here my brother

What I'm actually telling is that I disagree with far left propaganda.

Many of you seem to jump to the conclusion that I'm some sort of hardcore MAGA supporter or far right Trump fan.

In reality, I'm European and arguably only conservative leaning, and I don't like Trump and his erratic trade and geopolitical policy.

Apparently disagreeing with far left politics already often makes me a pariah on the internet. This discussion alone has already cost me like 10 karma, for pushing back on X supposedly being the worst for political content.

Logically, there are only two possibilities here: everyone else is wrong about what qualifies as “far left propaganda” or you are.

It is not "everyone else", but a specific audience here.

Out of those some disagree strongly enough about what is and is not far left propaganda to downvote my controversial opinions.

I can also see that others upvote.

This seems like a “left has a reality bias” thing? These are current, factual events. Maybe they’re not being shared in right wing spaces, but these things are really happening.

These are left extremist takes on current events.

On social media, when I click "Pics", I'd expect photography.

What we see there is political content that distinctly reminds of a publication from a local socialist youth chapter.

Reddit subs sometimes don't match the content you'd expect from their name (some are very hard to decode for outsiders, e.g. femcelgrippysockjail, gangstalking etc). Perhaps pics was once just pretty landscape photography, but what happens with Reddit is that a sub will start to focus on one type of content that the hivemind wants and then the sub will fracture. You have to go find r/lovelylandscapes if that is what you want. It'll be there somewhere. You landed in the wrong sub.

That's not really the issue here. This strong political orientation is widespread across default subreddits including /r/news or /r/europe and affects the Home / front page.

There is /r/photographs and /r/photography for that.

Maybe you want your personal preferences served up to you without having to work for it?

The first has 300k users, while /r/pics sports 33M. The second is for discussion rather than posting photos.

Good that you ask, because that's exactly what I get on X: after liking some photos, I see mostly photography in my feed.

This brings us back to the original topic here: this appears to work well on X, while it is Reddit that pushes politics into my feed via default subreddits.

Those all seem pretty reasonable given the current environment? Are Epstein and his associates not pedophiles? Are minorities not allowed to exercise the second amendment rights the right champions for themselves? Is it unfair to call someone cosplaying for a social media account that regularly posts repurposed Nazi slogans a Nazi?

No, it is not reasonable to constantly spread propaganda labelling Musk and Trump pedophiles and then act like the site wasn't filled with far left propaganda while talking about how bad X is.

The left-wing reality bias strikes again.

Sometimes, when there is conflict, it helps to ask questions to better understand people. In furtherance of that shared understanding, here are some questions you were asked:

> Are Epstein and his associates pedophiles? [0]

> Are minorities allowed to exercise the second amendment rights the right champions for themselves? [1]

> Is it unfair to call someone cosplaying for a social media account that regularly posts repurposed Nazi slogans a Nazi? [2]

0: Only 6% of americans are satisfied with the administration's handling of the epstein affair - https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/18/politics/epstein-files-cnn-po...

1: Only 20% of americans believe there should or should not be a law that would ban the possession of handguns, except by the police and other authorized persons - https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx

2: Only 23% of americans believe Hitler was a "good person or an equally good and bad person" or "a bad person who did some good things" - https://www.newsweek.com/hitler-had-some-good-ideas-american...

Sometimes, it is crucial to differentiate a wall of loaded premises from an actual question before you move on to quoting a survey about whether Americans like Hitler.

It seems you might seek a back-and-forth argument where you simply talk past your interlocutor. In my experience, that doesn't lead to understanding. Are you sure you don't want to seek understanding?

We're in a polarized environment, and understanding is the best way to get past that, whereas dismissing* people with which you disagree tends to increase it.

* – from you in this thread so far: dismissing questions as "loaded"; dismissing 3 questions across 3 lines as "a wall"; dismissing differing opinions as "propaganda"; dismissing differing opinions as "extremist"; dismissing differing opinions as "far left"; dismissing differing opinions as "yapping"; dismissing differing opinions as "unreasonable"; etc.

facts and pictures/videos of ICE brutalizing people in Minnesota.

For me, the "For you" feed is basically the best-case scenario.

I don't follow anyone and rarely use Twitter, so it doesn't have much signal on me, but a short scroll of my "For you" feed is pretty innocuous.

If I venture into any comment section, it's absolute drek. Going to the feed for a few of my local news channels and clicking through a few of their posts from today, I'm treated to half the comments being stuff along the lines of the following:

"Gee…an immigrant…no surprise"

"Another 3rd world import"

"Can’t predict the weather two days in advance but sure, global boiling for the summer. Got it."

"Queue in the carbon tax. FmL wake up people, it is a scare tactics. Like acid rain, hole in the ozone, polar ice caps flooding the coasts, you NEED CO2 for vegetation to live, and for the vegetation to gove YOU oxygen. Enjoy the few weeks of heat we get."

"She is a communist cow who supports terrorists"

Look - I don’t disagree that Reddit has a strong leftward bias. But at the same time, despite my disagreement with many of those left positions, I have to acknowledge that Trump and the current MAGA movement are what truly extremist looks like, not typical Reddit content.

To contrast X and Reddit, I’ve not seen content on Reddit that advocated for invading allies, passing illegal tariffs that as Americans, justifying accepting jumbo jets from other nations, shooting citizens in the streets, denaturalizing citizens of different ethnicities, or numerous other examples.

Bias side, also consider that discussions about Trump on Reddit are just current events and not something unexpected, since that’s just today’s news.

On the other hand, apart from extremist content, on X I also see extremist users. The replies on many topics and profiles are absolutely vile, and that’s what makes me think there must be a large number of bots. It’s an echo chamber because normal people can’t tolerate that type of toxicity, but it’s an echo chamber with massive reach apparently.

If we're going to the worst examples, let me say that on Reddit I have seen content openly glorifying terrorist groups, particularly in some Arabic subreddits.

This sort of content is illegal in some EU jurisdictions and after I reported it, it took Reddit days to take it down, with no action on the subreddit's moderation who participated in it.

If we're going to the worst examples, let me say that on twitter I have seen content openly glorifying terrorist groups, particularly in some right-wing threads. Indeed, some terrorists have active accounts there.

Some of that content has been posted in the comments here on this HN submission.

This sort of content is illegal in some EU jurisdictions, and post-elmu era, after I reported it, twitter never took it down at all.

Note that on Reddit I also had to fill some separate "EU illegal content" form, it was not removed via the regular reporting system.

Note that on twitter it is never removed. Indeed, it is embraced.

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