10 ms·
It's amazing that the reactions to this are both "should have banned him years ago for violating their rules" and "this is blatant dangerous censorship." Whiche
by 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
It's amazing that the reactions to this are both "should have banned him years ago for violating their rules" and "this is blatant dangerous censorship." Whichever side you're on, this is a lose-lose situation for twitter.
- solveit 6y agoBoth sides are correct.
- Tokkemon 6y agoNo, they are not.
- DenisM 6y agoWith power comes responsibility.
- chillacy 6y agoThere is no popular position with moderation, everyone hates the umpire. On the flip side, if everyone hates you equally you're probably on the right track.
- polka_haunts_us 6y agoI dunno, I was friends in college with someone who moderated a subreddit whose head mod was univesally hated to the point where a rival subreddit formed and eventually outpaced the original. I have to say from everything I heard about the guy, and my own rare interactions with him, the hatred of him was 100% justified. Some people are just very shitty and lack any sympathizers.
- edbob 6y ago> On the flip side, if everyone hates you equally you're probably on the right track. This gives pedophiles the moral high ground.
- chillacy 6y ago* when moderating But touché, I could have been more clear as to the scope of my statement.
- optimalsolver 6y agoYou were the chosen one!
- edbob 6y agoWhat do you mean?
- chasd00 6y agobest to be a moderator who is loved. next is a moderator who is feared. worst is a moderator who is hated.
- bra-ket 6y agoOnly in this case the President is using Twitter to talk directly to supporters and try to calm down people. Twitter is definitely the baddy here, looks like they're giving in to the left wing mob. Edit: they also suspended Lin Wood https://twitter.com/LLinWood https://twitter.com/LLinWood
- abootstrapper 6y agoThe hell he’s been tweeting them to calm down.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- morelisp 6y agoFour people are dead and their blood is on your hands.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dang 6y agoPlease don't do this here.
- na85 6y ago>Only in this case the President is using Twitter to talk directly to supporters and try to calm down people. He's pretty explicitly doing the opposite of trying to calm people down.
- tjpnz 6y ago>Only in this case the President is using Twitter to talk directly to supporters and try to calm down people. The very same people he was winding up a few hours earlier.
- skrebbel 6y ago> everyone hates the umpire. I'd say @dang is pretty liked around here! Ups to the great umpire, keep it up. This shit is hard.
- FriendlyNormie 6y agoYou just randomly brought him up and then immediately shoved his dick into your mouth. What’s wrong with you? No one likes a sycophant.
- nindalf 6y agoHe is, but maybe there’s some survivorship bias there. We can’t really ask the shadowbanned people what they think of the moderation because they’re shadowbanned.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- shard972 6y agodang has an ego problem at times, but yep im shadowbanned so i guess bias
- szatkus 6y agoYou can turn on dead comments in your preferences and see all the nice things they have to say.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoMost of the things they have to say are reasonable most of the time. Like mundane comments about programming languages and whatnot. I think they would be pretty pissed off to know that they've been banned for months or more because they said something that rubbed the mods the wrong way at one point.
- stefantalpalaru 6y ago
- inglor_cz 6y agoThere is a problem when the umpire is an empire. If HN decided to ban Trump, no one but local hacker population would notice. In case of services with billions of registered users, quantity has its own quality. Facebook, Twitter et al. built enormous platforms for speech and thus got caught up in the middle of all cultural and political conflicts on this planet. Not just American election(s), but elections in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Germany, UK, Brazil, plus religious conflicts such as Islamists vs. people who draw Muhammad. They cannot possibly stay neutral in all those wars at once and when they start taking sides, they will be hated first and then, later, either dismembered or regulated to be a de-facto arm of the government.
- midasuni 6y ago> On the flip side, if everyone hates you equally you're probably on the right track. This is the false equivalence argument. Some argue that 5g spreads covid. Some argue it doesn’t. You advocate both views and everyone hates you. Doesn’t make you right.
- qmarchi 6y agoSo you're saying that 5G towers don't broadcast both COVID-19 _and_ 5G signaling? Why are there split bands then! /s
- spuz 6y agoWhat if you weight dislike by the number of people? There are surely more people who believe 5G doesn't cause COVID than those who do.
- hef19898 6y agoPropably wouldn't work, as the minority is much more liuder and active than the majority.
- pornel 6y agoSome myths and conspiracy theories are dangerously close to being believed by the majority of people: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/30/951095644/even-if-its-bonkers-poll-finds-many-believe-qanon-and-other-conspiracy-theories https://www.npr.org/2020/12/30/951095644/even-if-its-bonkers... so in the end you have to anchor this to some expertise and grounded-in-reality judgement. For example, the majority in the aforementioned poll believed that COVID-19 was created in a lab in China. And to be honest, an average person really has no way of truly knowing this. They're not virologists or spies. They can only judge based on a gut feeling whether China is/isn't evil, and that is likely based on other things they've heard, which may include rumors, propaganda and Bond movies.
- atleta 6y agoI haven't heard of the false equivalence before, but it doesn't sound like this. There is that popular fallacy though, but I'm not aware if it has a name, where people think that the truth is always in the middle (the golden middle). And you could say that this is it, but given the strong polarization and extremism around topics that involve politics it might be a good measure in this case. (Of course, depending on what exactly 'everybody' means.) By definition extremists of either side will see independent actors as hostile. But, of course, this is just a measure, not a proof.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- watwut 6y ago> There is no popular position with moderation, everyone hates the umpire. Afaik, one big issue is that this account was operating under different rules then everybody else. As in, twitter was more permissive with Trump then with other people.
- odessacubbage 6y agoonce you stop being content-neutral infrastructure, you can only lose.
- vkou 6y agoYou can also lose by being content-neutral infrastructure that is used for organized violence.
- watwut 6y agoThey were not content neutral. They by themselves said that they wont apply the same rules on Trump then on other political players on twitter. They did not wanted to ban or limit him, because he was president and thus special. That is not being content neutral. Had it been content neutral, his account would be policed the same way as other peoples years ago.
- KozmoNau7 6y agoThey should have treated his personal Twitter account like any other, no white glove treatment. If he wants to tweet in the official capacity of the President of the United States of America, there is an official Twitter account for that.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoAnd they will, once he's out, but they have made a formal statement effectively stating Trump's account gets preferential treatment for being such a powerful person. Of course, the cynical reason is that Trump's tweets are responsible for a significant percentage of Twitter's "engagement" metrics; I'm sure that internally they have figures that indicate how much revenue they generate from Trump alone.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoIt’s not just the engagement. It’s the publicity and brand awareness too. Every time the news wants to report on what trump said, they talk about and link to twitter.
- hef19898 6y agoI sa an interview with Nicole Wallace today, the Nicole Wallace from MSNBC that used to be on W. Bush's WH team. Never thought I would agree someone from the W. admin, but she was right in saying, that she hersefl and the media at large were way to soft on trump, already before the election. I gues the same can be said about social media. i do get the diffficult choice Twitter faced, Trump was / is the president. So everything he says is part of the official record. So I guess banning his personal account would ba quite difficult. Twitter, Facebook, YoutTube and so on could have added disclaimers already much earlier, so.
- simonswords82 6y agoI wonder how much banning DT from Twitter will hit their bottom line and whether this factors in to their decision making process?
- optimalsolver 6y agoI predict a cost of absolutely zero.
- hef19898 6y agoHe can still use Telegram, like all the other conspiracy wakos.
- Dziurkacz 6y agoI believe that the blame is hard to pin here. Instinctively I have blamed media for not reporting the truth, which led people to believing in so many mutually exclussive news. However, because the news media have to compete with social media they are bound to put out cheaper and more clickbaity content or go extinct.
- sleepysysadmin 6y ago>It's amazing that the reactions to this are both "should have banned him years ago for violating their rules" and "this is blatant dangerous censorship." Whichever side you're on, this is a lose-lose situation for twitter. A month from now Trump will not be on Twitter. Nobody will actually see what he allegedly says but he'll be gone.
- chasd00 6y agomy gut says the moment trump is not in office he starts a news channel or some sort of media company, I bet he even still have rallies. he'll leverage his supporters to influence elections and politics. i think he's addicted to the attention and the chearing throngs.
- sleepysysadmin 6y ago>my gut says the moment trump is not in office he starts a news channel or some sort of media company, I bet he even still have rallies. he'll leverage his supporters to influence elections and politics. You're right, no doubt. Though technically all the previous presidents do that. even Michelle Obama is on book tours and such. George W Bush does stuff with Michelle Obama as well. >i think he's addicted to the attention and the chearing throngs. True even before potus. Here's the reality though. The political divide in the USA is at like 30+ year high. It used to be just democrats who divided. Republicans hadnt really changed much over the last several decades. With platforms like twitter pushing republicans off their platform. It means the echo chamber will be becoming much worse. The political divide just begun for the republicans. The divide will become much larger than it is today because there's even less intermingling.
- chasd00 6y agoi think Trump will go beyond book tours, i think you're going to see "TrumpTV" and serious competition for other traditionally conservative leaning outlets like fox news etc.
- amanaplanacanal 6y ago
- wolco3 6y agoBoth can be true. Banning him years ago would be censorship but with clear rules equally applied to all. Now we are unequal censorship. Twitter is trending down and will probably not recover but they were going to take a nosedive after Trump left. This gives them political points with the left.
- syndacks 6y agoF* Twitter. Trump clearly violates their ToS yet they keep him on... I wonder why that i$?
- LudwigNagasena 6y agoWell, my position is that no institution, private or public, should possess such powers in the first place.
- snarf21 6y agoNo, it is a win-win for Twitter and FB and YT. They have made billions on the faux tribalism fight. Look at Parler: it is a ghost town because people want to argue and pwn the other side. Just talking to other people that agree with you is boring and not sticky. Twitter and FB and YT and FN and CNN and the rest have the sole goal of outrage to get more views and more ad revenue. This is the root of the problem.
- vonmoltke 6y ago> the sole goal of outrage to get more views and more ad revenue How does outrage lead to more ad revenue? Who wants their brand advertised next to outrage? How many outraged people click on ads?
- amanaplanacanal 6y agoPeople who are outraged stay on the platform longer and view more ads. The platform gets paid.
- giarc 6y agoI find it odd to say taking him off twitter is censorship. Twitter is used by 22% of adult Americans (according to Pew). Trump and any president, on a whim can speak live to all Americans through all cable news channels. He could have called NBC, Fox, CBS, ABC etc to the Oval Office and in 5 minutes be live on basically every channel (including being streamed live on twitter). Instead he choose Twitter.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoApparently somewhere between 30 and 40% of adult Americans get news from TV, depending on whose surveys you look at. And cable news is only 16-19% of adults, having fallen enormously since 2016 and 2017 surveys. It was more than twice the proportion just a few years ago! But yeah, he can always address the press and let the press disseminate his statements, which has its own pros and cons.