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As a Twitter lover, it's been a real letdown to see them sacrifice objectivity and fairness at the altar of political correctness. The platform is so seriously
by microcolonel 9y ago
As a Twitter lover, it's been a real letdown to see them sacrifice objectivity and fairness at the altar of political correctness. The platform is so seriously broken by their attempts to censor things they deem unpleasant. I have tried my best to turn off all of their content filtering features, but they still sometimes censor replies to my own replies. You can sometimes see the actual number of replies to a tweet next to the reply button, but can not actually see them at all.
At the same time, they have not done anything to reduce certain types of spam, such as the repeated reply chains under the President's tweets, which can so easily be identified as spam by the fact that they are unrelated to the parent, and appear in the same order under a number of parent tweets.
It's a total mess.
Added: I went back to find an example of the spam chains to reply to Srslyjosh, but I'm pleasantly surprised that they seem to have finally eliminated them. I withdraw that specific criticism I guess.
- SrslyJosh 9y agoSounds like somebody's butthurt about all the mean tweets directed at Orange Shitler.
- microcolonel 9y agoNo, the pro-Trump ones are just as annoying. Regardless of the opinion the chains take, it is annoying that they have nothing to do with the specific tweet.
- sctb 9y agoYikes, would you please not comment like this on Hacker News? We're shooting for a very different kind of discourse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- fhood 9y agoThey did not suppress those tags because of "political correctness" but rather used those as an example of tags associated with unusually high levels of spam.
- megaman22 9y agoIt does raise an interesting idea... If you want to suppress and discredit something, just spin up a pile of bots to heavily promote that which you want to censor. Bonus points if you route it through VPNs in Russia or China or North Korea.
- creaghpatr 9y agoIt was alleged that bot nets would try and dilute politically motivated trends by blasting out a hashtag that was one letter off- for example #podasta instead of #podesta. Then 'real' users who started typing would autofill with the false one and the topic would lose steam quicker. Of course, without knowing Twitters proprietary algorithms, this is all just anecdotal.
- ch4s3 9y agoI'm not sure that invalidates the reasoning behind nuking hashtags driven by bot farms, which is clearly a practice that negatively impacts the practice. What you're describing sounds like a case for better discerning between bots and real users.
- bookmarkacc 9y agoDepends if the spam was used to initially seed the hashtag or if it comes in after genuine discussion between real people. To me it seems like two different cases that are easy to distinguish.
- thenayr 9y agoBanning nazis from your platform isn't about political correctness, unless you are a nazi sympathizer.
- microcolonel 9y agoIf you think it stops there, or even achieves that goal, you haven't been using Twitter much I guess.
- Sangermaine 9y agoNo one believes that banning Nazis from Twitter is going to magically make them go away, but it does remove a platform for them, or at least hinder their ability to use it.
- Helloworldboy 9y ago"if you don't censor people, you're a nazi!!!!!"
- Frondo 9y agoIt is amazing to me how Nazis have become "just another point of view" in the tech world. "Let them hash it out in the marketplace of ideas," as if we haven't tried that before. Genocide? Aryan supremacy? Well, both sides make valid points. Absolutely amazing that we got here. You even see this with people attacking the latest Wolfenstein game for being anti-Nazi! How did we get here???
- custos 9y agoI don't know, but I remember when hating Nazi's was as American as apple pie or baseball. Call of Duty, Wolfenstein, Battlefield 1942 if I recall correctly; were all anti-Nazi and it was basically it's own genre of first person shooters. Then everything moved towards terrorism related themes (Counterstrike starting that I'm guessing)... then political correctness just referred to it as "Opposing Force (OpFor)". Weird times we live in.
- sctb 9y ago
- ivraatiems 9y agoThis isn't about the right-wing dogwhistle of "political correctness" at all. It's about not letting networks of fake users (bots and/or individuals claiming to be someone they aren't) spread false information with no input from real people. There are plenty of real, unrestricted "politically incorrect" people on Twitter right now. The difference - as it pertains to this discussion - is that they are real people, not robot armies paid for by foreign adversaries. Yes, some of them have been banned, and sometimes the reasons for those bans are dubious because Twitter does not consistently enforce their policies. But that is a separate issue from what's under discussion here.
- creaghpatr 9y agoenforcement consistency is the point of the discussion, otherwise Twitter can proactively or retroactively label anything 'spam' without describing how they [or their algorithm] arrived at that conclusion.
- adrxyz 9y agoNever have I heard the expression "dog whistle" more than in the last two years, always regarding politics, and always from liberals chastising conservatives. It's like their "in group" slang.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ivraatiems 9y agoSure, I'm a liberal and I agree. What's your point?