10 ms·

Twitter disallows liking, commenting, or retweeting “Misleading” tweets

124 points by simonsarris 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
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deleted 5y ago
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xvector 5y ago
How long until this feature lives long enough to see itself become the villain?
- DevKoala 5y ago
  Release date?
- TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  Now? I can't believe they thought this would go over well. At all.
poszlem 5y ago
Okay, so this is going to be super controversial to some people, but I firmly believe that we are basically trying to bypass the law (at the very least in spirit) when we agree for the big companies to limit free speech in that way. We should either make it illegal to post that kind of information (or rather - try and fail) or enforce fair treatment of people from the big tech companies. They cannot be both a "mere conduit" and a "censor/publisher" at the same time.
- edandersen 5y ago
  I think at this point its clear that there is a legal risk to the platforms themselves if content contrary to the official narrative is left up. Like "sued and held accountable for all Covid damage" levels of legal risk. A family who lost a loved one who didn't take the vaccine because they read something on Twitter would have a very good case today to take them to the cleaners. And given the political climate they would probably win.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    IANAL, but I think the legal danger runs the other way. If they don't police content, they're covered by Section 230. But if they do police content, and they miss some, then... are they liable for the part that they miss? Does Section 230 still cover them if they're picking and choosing what they're going to carry?
    - edandersen 5y ago
      They are still technically carrying it.
    - jakelazaroff 5y ago
      They're covered by Section 230 no matter what. The entire point of the law is to indemnify them for third-party content, even if they moderate. There's a (mildly sarcastic) article on TechDirt that's pretty comprehensive: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
    - donw 5y ago
      Depends on Twitter’s campaign contributions.
    - ThrustVectoring 5y ago
      Yes. Moderation actions are actually explicitly called out for greater protection under section 230. The "publisher" exception is a lot narrower than people think - it's for when the purported "third party" making the statements isn't actually a third party.
    - xoa 5y ago
      >Does Section 230 still cover them if they're picking and choosing what they're going to carry? Holy shit. 230 is LITERALLY ABOUT PROTECTING PICKING AND CHOOSING. That's the entire point!! Carrying everything in common is called a "common carrier". Putting out your own personal speech is publishing. Moderation exists in between and can never be perfect. Section 230 was created so that forums could moderate, imperfectly, however they wish without being liable for stuff that other people wrote. It is what makes the internet as we know it possible, including Hacker News itself. Seriously, how do these memes get started and gain so much traction!? Why has nobody apparently actually read 230? It's TWENTY-SIX WORDS. That's it. Here: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." Does anyone see the word "neutral" or anything like that in there? Any qualifications on "both sides"? No. Because it doesn't exist. Stop.
- judge2020 5y ago
  We're trying to bypass the law because nobody can determine exactly what is misleading/incorrect information without taking in every bit of nuance and context concerning a tweet/social post, much less some law. If you solve that by having some oversight/review board make the rules and review violations you just get to the problem of government workers determining the rules and what general information is false, which nobody in the US public would trust after $x decades. If you're paying for the servers that run the conduit, the least you should be able to do is decide who can add to it and what you allow through it.
  - donw 5y ago
    Then you should be held liable for what you allow through.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      Liable for what? They already are liable if they enable things like CP if they don't proactively scan and remove it, and other crimes like distribution or sale of illegal substances is something they have to work closely with police on if they don't want to be held for aiding & abetting such crimes. They just aren't going to be the defendant if someone wants to bring a libel suit that originates from a false statement in a tweet, because Twitter isn't omnipotent and can't verify everything someone states to be true.
- smt88 5y ago
  Enforcing "fair treatment" (meaning forcing companies to publish anything that's sent to them) is flagrantly unconstitutional and not even consistent with the First Amendment. Free speech is the US is freedom from censorship by the govt only, and it isn't unlimited. It only applies to ideological speech. No consumer wants an unrestricted platform anyway. There are no platforms with zero moderation.
  - dvdkon 5y ago
    People probably don't want an unmoderated community, but a community is usually smaller than a social media behemoth/"platform". Twitter is actually the one site that doesn't try to divide its userbase into groups/communities, but pretty much all other platforms I know either have a very prominent "friend" or "group" mechanism. Even on Twitter there are many subcultures, not just homogenous "Twitter users", they're just not organised as such. One-size-fits-all moderation of whole platforms is the problem, in my opinion. Imagine if all PhpBB forums were moderated by a central team and you might see why some are against Facebook/Reddit/Twitter regulating their corner of the platform.
    - smt88 5y ago
      I agree that private communities are better. You see only who you choose to see. But I disagree that Twitter is an outlier in that regard. Facebook, YouTube, and reddit (mostly) are spaces that technically have groups, but you're still flooded with algorithmically-chosen content made by strangers.
- convery 5y ago
  Remember during the 2016 election when Dems wrote a public letter to Google (while anti-trust was on the table) strongly advising them to remove what they considered 'misinformation' (e.g. Wikileaks)? Ye.. totally not in favour of censorship though as it was only an innocent 'suggestion'..
  - lp0_on_fire 5y ago
    Remember when the sitting Press Secretary admitted they were "flagging problematic posts" for facebook?
- chmsky00 5y ago
  Yeah they can because social laws are not beholden to the kind of logic used in science. Laws are thought ending semantic games invented by aristocrats to manipulate the masses. Read James Madison; government exists to protect the opulent minority from the poor majority. Laws as our society knows them are aristocratic obligations put in people. Our social meme obliges us to kowtow to the owners, just as religion obliged us to kowtow to the masters of the sacred texts.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    I'd like to subscribe to James Madison's newsletter... can you recommend a starting point?
    - mikepurvis 5y ago
      This is the common starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Federalist_Papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Federalist_Papers
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    That sounds rather unlike Madison. Where, specifically, did he say that?
    - chmsky00 5y ago
      My bad; he wrote the Senate not “government”, should protect the opulent minority. Aristocratic protectionism is built into the American political system. https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/8793/what-did-james-madison-try-to-say-when-talking-about-agrarian-reform https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/8793/what-did-j...
    - throwawaysea 5y ago
      The actual quote referenced is: > Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body. This quote comes from a statement Madison made at the Federal Convention of 1787 (https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0044 https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-004...), and is basically pointing out that a Democracy is susceptible to a Tyranny of the Majority (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority), and needs a balancing force (the Senate). The comment you are replying to is from a user named "chmsky00" which gives a hint about how some, in particular Noam Chomsky, have interpreted this quote by Noam Chomsky (https://chomsky.info/commongood02/ https://chomsky.info/commongood02/).
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  Would you also agree that a coffee shop that pulls down objectionable flyers from their wall/window is circumventing free speech? Maybe you can say more about why a business can't be both a publisher and a distributor? A newspaper publishes original content and classifieds, and they certainly have discretion over which classifieds to distribute in their paper, what makes social media any different?
  - alexanderchr 5y ago
    The scale?
    - davidw 5y ago
      Where do you draw the line? Honest question. I think this is an interesting topic, as so much is online these days. These are companies, not the government, so they should have some more leeway... but given their size, it's also kind of scary. What if someone with a lot of money buys, say, Twitter and clamps down on all right of center, or left of center or whatever content? It's also incredibly easy to spread pure garbage with social media. Debunking it takes real work. I am going to a funeral in a few hours for an unvaccinated friend who died of COVID.
      - meltedcapacitor 5y ago
        Someone buying Twitter and banning a whole (normalish) category would be wonderful: it would make space for alternative platforms. As it is everybody is too lazy to fight the network effect. Maybe regulators should force dominant platforms to kick out a section of their user base every so often to keep the ecosystem diversified.
  - kansface 5y ago
    > Would you also agree that a coffee shop that pulls down objectionable flyers from their wall/window is circumventing free speech? No coffee shop has 1/4 of the human population visit each day.
  - l33tbro 5y ago
- oehtXRwMkIs 5y ago
  What law?
- ramesh31 5y ago
  >Okay, so this is going to be super controversial to some people, but I firmly believe that we are basically trying to bypass the law (at the very least in spirit) when we agree for the big companies to limit free speech in that way. Use IRC. Use free forum software. Write a blog. Go stand on a soapbox in Times Square and shout it at the top of your lungs. Do whatever you want. But free speech has precisely nothing to do with having free reign to violate a company's terms of service. You have the constitutional right to say whatever you want. You do not have the constitutional right to have your nonsense amplified by billions of dollars worth of privately owned technical infrastructure.
  - throwawaysea 5y ago
    What happens when the public mostly occupies spaces/services that are owned or outsourced to private corporations? Do you agree that the spirit of the law would be violated by their imposition of censorship? Or that shouting on a soapbox is roughly the same as doing nothing at all when almost all the important parts of our democratic process that precede voting are taking place on platforms owned by large tech companies?
    - anoonmoose 5y ago
      If you're asking what happens when public spaces are mostly owned by private corporations, I'd suggest you need to be a bit more clear on what you consider a public space.
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  Which law do we feel is being bypassed? I believe in marketplace of ideas ; I believe we should let stupid and wrong opinions be voiced rather than simmer in darkness; I dislike censorship in virtually every way and situation; but I'm not aware of what law is being broken. You might persuade me to vote for a new one but I don't know which law prohibits private company on their own private infra to do as they please. (Please don't say "section 230" without reading it first, that gets tiring, not "controversial". See #1 etc etc ad infinitum ad nauseum) [1]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
- tw04 5y ago
  How are we violating the spirt of the law? Freedom of speech means freedom from government intervention. The founding fathers never said or intended that: newspapers must publish anything a private citizen wants to put in the paper. You are saying the equivalent of: if this were 150 years ago, and your crazy uncle thought that the moon was made of cheese, the New York Times would legally be required to put that on the front page of the paper. That's insane.
  - jdavis703 5y ago
    This is the problem with invoking “spirt of the law.” US lawyers can barely agree on what basic constitutional laws mean. We should only invoke the spirit of a law when it’s a decision of last resort. But we’ve been talking about public vs. private speech for decades now. If Congress had a different spirit in mind, the constitution would’ve been amended or the Supreme Court would’ve issued a definitive decision.
  - tehjoker 5y ago
    NYT has hiring process and editorial standards, FB/Twitter is a town message board. I think people pick on the government/private distinction too much. When the government is leaning on private monopolies to implement public policy that would be illegal to do directly, I don't think this traditional analysis holds up. Tech CEOs are getting hauled before congress constantly these days, there's a revolving door of government officials. The public/private separation is very superficial. Under conditions of monopoly, the private companies act much like a government, but unaccountable and undemocratic. It violates the spirit of 1776 to be subjected to the will of an unelected minority and be silenced. That said, I find the opinions being suppressed despicable, but that doesn't mean I'm going to line up behind government censorship and private monopoly.
    - poszlem 5y ago
      That is essentially my point and you expressed it much better that I could (sorry, English as a second language). Facebook is not a newspaper. Twitter is not a newspaper. In this example Facebok/Twitter ARE PAPER. They are part of the infrastructure of the internet.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
edandersen 5y ago
View the Quote Tweets for a sense of public opinion on this.
- jakelazaroff 5y ago
  It's not "public opinion" — you would expect most quote tweeters to be people who follow this person (or follow other quote tweeters), i.e. people who generally agree with him already. This is a great example of selection bias.
  - j-bos 5y ago
    Are most quote tweets not dunks on the original tweeter?
    - jakelazaroff 5y ago
      I don't know about "most". But either way, the operating mechanism is that some person has amplified the quoted tweet to an audience that already agrees with them. The dunk tweet scenario is also an example of selection bias.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      If it gets popular enough outside of twitter, maybe. But with the spread limited to the quote tweets themselves, only followers will see it initially and those followers are much less likely to have a large follower-base of their own to spread it.
throwawaysea 5y ago
Is this a recent change? This is really an alarming step up in the narrative shaping (AKA propaganda) practiced by powerful Silicon Valley tech companies. For the tweet here, I feel it is totally valid to push back on vaccine mandates, because they violate the right to bodily autonomy and health privacy, because the IFR for COVID-19 is so low (especially for those who are healthy or under the age of 50), and because we don’t know what the long term effects of new vaccines might be. I say that as a pro-vaccine person who has all the common vaccinations available and still believes that getting an mRNA vaccine is the wiser choice. By censoring critique of policies and laws, Twitter is interfering with our democratic process and making in-kind political contributions to those backing those laws and policies. We need new anti trust regulations to be enforced ASAP, and new regulations to treat large platforms with network effects as public utilities and public spaces. They shouldn’t be given the free reign they have when we already regulate other telecom services and utilities.
- decremental 5y ago
  Good luck with that. These companies are doing the bidding of the people in power and this is cheered on by the bug men who have come out of the woodwork to celebrate having every aspect of our lives controlled from on high. This is only going to get worse. It's pathetic watching it unfold.
- lp0_on_fire 5y ago
  5 minute old comment and it's already been downoted into oblivion. I believe it's been determined you're guilty of wrongthink.
- EricE 5y ago
  Not sure why you are getting downvoted. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. If the content really is bogus, the discussion around it will take care of itself. A free society can't function with unchecked on sided propaganda, but that's what big tech is promulgating.
badkitty99 5y ago
Say hello to the new police
fighterpilot 5y ago
What's so misleading about this Tweet? Is it the first bit about non-covid vaccines?
- judge2020 5y ago
  mRNA vaccines "don't stop transmission" isn't false, but it is misleading in that it sounds like they do nothing for transmission at all.
  - fighterpilot 5y ago
    .
    - EricE 5y ago
      Doesn't fit the narrative demanded by their tribe. Thus threatened they act on emotion and not logic.
- TideAd 5y ago
  Probably the claim of 0.2% IFR. I don't know what the latest IFR estimates are, but it can't be that low: for example, more than 0.2% of Americans have died from Covid, and many Americans have never been infected.
  - nradov 5y ago
    The CDC estimated an overall 0.6% IFR for the US. The vast majority of those deaths are in the older age groups with serious co-morbid conditions such as obesity and diabetes. So the IFR for younger age groups is significantly lower than 0.2%. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
- breezeTrowel 5y ago
  Nearly everything. COVID-19 IFR seems to be more like 1% (compared to an IFR of 0.05% for polio, for example) but more infected will suffer from damage to respiratory tissues and other complications. MMR vaccines are mandatory for school children so, if you've attended school in the US, odds are you've been vaccinated against mumps, measles, and rubella. Polio has been wiped out by a massive vaccination campaign. It's no longer a threat precisely because of vaccinations. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 vaccines greatly reduce the chance and period of transmissibility, reduce disease severity in breakthrough infections, and only require boosters for those populations whose immunity wanes. The latter also applies to those infected with COVID-19. Reinfection can and does happen. Vaccines can help counteract that. The biggest benefit to vaccines is not just personal protection but also how much they work to limit spread. This is crucial in stopping the pandemic because the longer and easier COVID-19 is allowed to spread, the more likely it can mutate into a strain that's more virulent and harder to fight. We saw this with Delta.
jimbob45 5y ago
Anyone got a steelman for this? It seems like everyone here agrees that this is generally bad but I'd love to hear the best-case opposing view.
- president 5y ago
  They couldn't prove misinformation so they re-interpret terminology like "misleading" and make new phrases like "vaccine-hesitancy" to defend this censorship. And the only reason it works is because the gang of inflential companies that do this have captured the entire nation.
- smt88 5y ago
  We can all agree it's bad, but that doesn't make it illegal. The problem is the concentration of publishing power. We should never be in a situation where a single person (Dorsey, Zuckerberg, etc.) has so much control over publishing. If we can't break up social media, we should at least enforce interoperability so that there can be free market pressure on these companies.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  If your platform is essentially a giant loudspeaker, and you see the public believing too many lies, and the lies causing damage, then it's reasonable to at least think about not giving your loudspeaker to people spreading lies. (I also think it's generally bad, but that's my attempt at a steelman.)
  - josephorjoe 5y ago
    I think it is basically this. Amplifying dangerous messages has a liability. Screaming "FIRE! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!" in a crowded theater when there is no fire or evidence of fire is not protected speech under any sane "freedom of speech" doctrine. Giving the person screaming that a megaphone makes you complicit in the crime. Giving people the "freedom" to trick other people into causing harm to each other is not giving people freedom. It is supporting abuse. There are lines, of course... fine or otherwise, and it is a messy process to draw them. And mistakes are often made and should be called out. But it is not a weak argument to claim that supporting the spread of disinformation about public health measures during a pandemic is supporting abuse. And the problem with social media is that instead of there being 200-500 people who can hear the megaphone there are hundreds of million. Scale matters. What can be tolerated in the local pub a half hour before closing may not be tolerable on a billboard in Times Square.
president 5y ago
Part of the new trifecta between social media companies / media / influencers, government, and large multinational conglomerates (pfizer, etc).
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  This is what is so frustrating here. Big tech knows they face scrutiny and regulation with people like Lina Khan coming after them. During the Trump years, these companies broadly began practicing censorship/deplatforming along progressive political lines. As that administration came to an end, they seemed to step it up even further, as if to say “hey we are ready to collaborate and do what you want, please spare us anti trust and labor scrutiny”. Glenn Greenwald has written some great articles about how sitting members of Congress have been abusing their position and leverage to pressure tech companies to censor their political opposition, in what may be a major violation (or loophole?) of the first amendment: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-escalates-pressure-on-tech https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-escalates-pressure... https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-show-of-monopolistic https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-sho...
djrogers 5y ago
This is the first tweet I've seen with this feature enabled, and frankly I'm floored. In what way is this tweet misleading? Are there any facts in it that are false? Twitter links this tweet to a page saying "COVID-19 vaccines are extremely effective at preventing serious illness and death, trials show" however the parent tweet doesn't dispute or contradict that statement at all. We're through the looking glass here...
- deathanatos 5y ago
  I would say its the implication that the virus is ineffective at preventing transmission: > this one mRNA shot […] that doesn’t stop transmission This phrasing implies can be easily misconstrued to that it's completely ineffective in preventing transmission… and it's not. The tweet is … off … here, > I can go unvaccinated against polio AIUI, one can go unvaccinated against polio because the vaccine against polio was so effective it is one step shy of being eradicated. The cognitive dissonance of refusing a COVID-19 vaccine on that argument is astounding to me… > I can go unvaccinated against […] tetanus, hepatitis, measles and mumps Presumably it depends on jurisdiction, but I was required to get those vaccines in order to attend school. Now, while I (personally) think the tweet is bad, Twitter's moderation is not the greatest here, and I would agree that banning comments is too heavy handed. If nobody can correct the poster, with nuanced debate that addresses their points specifically, how would they ever change their view? Simultaneously, I think people running discussion sites need the ability to moderate, and that moderation will be at times wrong. But users, simultaneously, need reasonable choice when it comes to services like this, so that if they disagree with the company/org's choices, they have a meaningful way to choose a different provider.
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    and when it comes to transmission: No, Vaccinated People Are Not ‘Just as Likely’ to Spread the Coronavirus as Unvaccinated People https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/the-vaccinated-arent-just-as-likely-to-spread-covid/620161/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/the-vaccin... The impact of SARS-CoV-2 vaccination on Alpha & Delta variant transmission https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264260v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264260v...
BurningFrog 5y ago
But you can quote tweet it: https://twitter.com/MichaelPSenger/status/1443238759944785922/retweets/with_comments https://twitter.com/MichaelPSenger/status/144323875994478592...
thallavajhula 5y ago
You can quote tweet it though
jdavis703 5y ago
Most viral political tweets (on both sides) are super misleading. I’ve actually twice tweeted incorrect stuff by accident , and those tweets were on the verge of going viral before folks pointed out the error and I deleted/amended the tweet. (FWIW one tweet was because a budget document itself had a misleading denominator, and the other because of a recent change to a law.)
- davidw 5y ago
  This is always relevant to these conversations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  > on both sides Something tells me that only one side is going to find their likes disabled, though.
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    Probably. Because it is one side and one side only that mostly spreads lies. "Both sides" is bullshit.
    - decremental 5y ago
      My side told me the other side spreads lies.
      - user-the-name 5y ago
        No, no "my side" about it. This is simple, objective fact. The American right spreads lies, constantly, every day. Tons of them. Lie after lie. They are not shy about it. There is no "both sides". There is no equivalence. There just isn't.
        MathCodeLove 5y ago
mikevm 5y ago
The ministry of truth has deemed your tweet "misleading", you will now be escorted to isolation to reflect on your deeds.
debacle 5y ago
Are we at the precipice of technofascsism, or are we already there?
sva_ 5y ago
It's hilarious that I can see this 'misleading Tweet', but when I click on getting more info about why it is misleading, Twitter prompts me with the signup/login prompt, stopping me from seeing why. ...Twitter confirmed perpetuating Covid19-misinformation
judge2020 5y ago
Hello, Please move to Mastodon. It's pretty cool over here, and there's no ads.
- throwdecro 5y ago
  But "toots" has connotations of flatulence.
  - ruined 5y ago
    perfect, and appropriate. everyone with qualms about that will self-select out of the userbase and mastodon shall become sleek and nimble, the most refined shitposting machine on all the internet
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    In some random part of the US. Not in the rest of the world.
  - throwdecro 5y ago
    Oh did they recently change "toots" to "posts"? Maybe that barrier to wider adoption is out of the way now. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/16080 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/16080
- 5560675260 5y ago
  There is a downside of having to spin and maintain your own instance, or maybe having to suffer from same issues.
  - mtlynch 5y ago
    I use masto.host for managed hosting of my personal instance.[0] I've had a good experience so far, but I get the impression that I'm missing out on a lot of the user discoverability features of being on a bigger instance. My only gripe is that the website doesn't support exporting your data so that you're okay if masto.host disappears, but I request a backup via email once a month and they put it in my Megadrop within a day. [0] https://m.mtlynch.io https://m.mtlynch.io
thepasswordis 5y ago
Who cares? Nobody will stop using twitter over this. Yeah, twitter sucks. We can get mad at each other and argue about it and talk about how bad it is and blah blah. Nobody cares. It will change nothing.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  > Nobody will stop using twitter In part because hosting providers like AWS collude to push viable competition offline.
  - thepasswordis 5y ago
    No. Go throw up a twitter clone on an AWS instance or a digitalocean droplet, or host it on an old PC in your closet. Probably half of the people here on HN have coded some clone like that and it's just sitting unused. It's not AWS preventing a twitter alternative from popping up. Also: things like gab, gettr, .win etc. all exist. They're just cesspools.
    - istinetz 5y ago
      >It's not AWS preventing a twitter alternative from popping up. Really? Cause I seem to recall that every company in their tech stack decided to drop Parler, including Amazon, and including removals from both app stores. I'd like to see "half the people of HN" create a twitter clone - but don't forget ALL the infrastructure, no service providers, no app stores, no hosting, etc.
      - pixxel 5y ago
        You recall correctly. It was an orchestrated deplatforming.
      - thepasswordis 5y ago
        The person who created gab is a HN alum (although he was "kicked out")
  - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mypalmike 5y ago
Good. Amplification isn't anyone's right.
908B64B197 5y ago
Something I wonder is... A year ago, you could get banned, without appeal, from social media, for sharing the lab leak hypothesis. Now, a year later and suddenly the same hypothesis, laughed and mocked as a racist conspiracy, is deemed serious enough that it's worth an investigation. Nothing, other than a certain administration, changed in the meantime. Interesting.
aasasd 5y ago
I'm happy to see this. Specifically to see Twitter dig themselves a grave. Today they come for anti-vaxers, tomorrow they'll come for you. Then you'll finally anger up and move to Telegram or another identical shit. And the cycle will repeat until people get tired of this. Or until they get old and the new generation does things right from the start, wondering what the old idiots were thinking.

124 points by simonsarris 5y ago

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xvector 5y ago

How long until this feature lives long enough to see itself become the villain?

DevKoala 5y ago
Release date?
TigeriusKirk 5y ago
Now? I can't believe they thought this would go over well. At all.

poszlem 5y ago

Okay, so this is going to be super controversial to some people, but I firmly believe that we are basically trying to bypass the law (at the very least in spirit) when we agree for the big companies to limit free speech in that way. We should either make it illegal to post that kind of information (or rather - try and fail) or enforce fair treatment of people from the big tech companies. They cannot be both a "mere conduit" and a "censor/publisher" at the same time.

edandersen 5y ago
I think at this point its clear that there is a legal risk to the platforms themselves if content contrary to the official narrative is left up. Like "sued and held accountable for all Covid damage" levels of legal risk. A family who lost a loved one who didn't take the vaccine because they read something on Twitter would have a very good case today to take them to the cleaners. And given the political climate they would probably win.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  IANAL, but I think the legal danger runs the other way. If they don't police content, they're covered by Section 230. But if they do police content, and they miss some, then... are they liable for the part that they miss? Does Section 230 still cover them if they're picking and choosing what they're going to carry?
  - edandersen 5y ago
    They are still technically carrying it.
  - jakelazaroff 5y ago
    They're covered by Section 230 no matter what. The entire point of the law is to indemnify them for third-party content, even if they moderate. There's a (mildly sarcastic) article on TechDirt that's pretty comprehensive: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
  - donw 5y ago
    Depends on Twitter’s campaign contributions.
  - ThrustVectoring 5y ago
    Yes. Moderation actions are actually explicitly called out for greater protection under section 230. The "publisher" exception is a lot narrower than people think - it's for when the purported "third party" making the statements isn't actually a third party.
  - xoa 5y ago
    >Does Section 230 still cover them if they're picking and choosing what they're going to carry? Holy shit. 230 is LITERALLY ABOUT PROTECTING PICKING AND CHOOSING. That's the entire point!! Carrying everything in common is called a "common carrier". Putting out your own personal speech is publishing. Moderation exists in between and can never be perfect. Section 230 was created so that forums could moderate, imperfectly, however they wish without being liable for stuff that other people wrote. It is what makes the internet as we know it possible, including Hacker News itself. Seriously, how do these memes get started and gain so much traction!? Why has nobody apparently actually read 230? It's TWENTY-SIX WORDS. That's it. Here: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." Does anyone see the word "neutral" or anything like that in there? Any qualifications on "both sides"? No. Because it doesn't exist. Stop.
judge2020 5y ago
We're trying to bypass the law because nobody can determine exactly what is misleading/incorrect information without taking in every bit of nuance and context concerning a tweet/social post, much less some law. If you solve that by having some oversight/review board make the rules and review violations you just get to the problem of government workers determining the rules and what general information is false, which nobody in the US public would trust after $x decades. If you're paying for the servers that run the conduit, the least you should be able to do is decide who can add to it and what you allow through it.
- donw 5y ago
  Then you should be held liable for what you allow through.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    Liable for what? They already are liable if they enable things like CP if they don't proactively scan and remove it, and other crimes like distribution or sale of illegal substances is something they have to work closely with police on if they don't want to be held for aiding & abetting such crimes. They just aren't going to be the defendant if someone wants to bring a libel suit that originates from a false statement in a tweet, because Twitter isn't omnipotent and can't verify everything someone states to be true.
smt88 5y ago
Enforcing "fair treatment" (meaning forcing companies to publish anything that's sent to them) is flagrantly unconstitutional and not even consistent with the First Amendment. Free speech is the US is freedom from censorship by the govt only, and it isn't unlimited. It only applies to ideological speech. No consumer wants an unrestricted platform anyway. There are no platforms with zero moderation.
- dvdkon 5y ago
  People probably don't want an unmoderated community, but a community is usually smaller than a social media behemoth/"platform". Twitter is actually the one site that doesn't try to divide its userbase into groups/communities, but pretty much all other platforms I know either have a very prominent "friend" or "group" mechanism. Even on Twitter there are many subcultures, not just homogenous "Twitter users", they're just not organised as such. One-size-fits-all moderation of whole platforms is the problem, in my opinion. Imagine if all PhpBB forums were moderated by a central team and you might see why some are against Facebook/Reddit/Twitter regulating their corner of the platform.
  - smt88 5y ago
    I agree that private communities are better. You see only who you choose to see. But I disagree that Twitter is an outlier in that regard. Facebook, YouTube, and reddit (mostly) are spaces that technically have groups, but you're still flooded with algorithmically-chosen content made by strangers.
convery 5y ago
Remember during the 2016 election when Dems wrote a public letter to Google (while anti-trust was on the table) strongly advising them to remove what they considered 'misinformation' (e.g. Wikileaks)? Ye.. totally not in favour of censorship though as it was only an innocent 'suggestion'..
- lp0_on_fire 5y ago
  Remember when the sitting Press Secretary admitted they were "flagging problematic posts" for facebook?
chmsky00 5y ago
Yeah they can because social laws are not beholden to the kind of logic used in science. Laws are thought ending semantic games invented by aristocrats to manipulate the masses. Read James Madison; government exists to protect the opulent minority from the poor majority. Laws as our society knows them are aristocratic obligations put in people. Our social meme obliges us to kowtow to the owners, just as religion obliged us to kowtow to the masters of the sacred texts.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  I'd like to subscribe to James Madison's newsletter... can you recommend a starting point?
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    This is the common starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Federalist_Papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Federalist_Papers
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  That sounds rather unlike Madison. Where, specifically, did he say that?
  - chmsky00 5y ago
    My bad; he wrote the Senate not “government”, should protect the opulent minority. Aristocratic protectionism is built into the American political system. https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/8793/what-did-james-madison-try-to-say-when-talking-about-agrarian-reform https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/8793/what-did-j...
  - throwawaysea 5y ago
    The actual quote referenced is: > Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body. This quote comes from a statement Madison made at the Federal Convention of 1787 (https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0044 https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-004...), and is basically pointing out that a Democracy is susceptible to a Tyranny of the Majority (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority), and needs a balancing force (the Senate). The comment you are replying to is from a user named "chmsky00" which gives a hint about how some, in particular Noam Chomsky, have interpreted this quote by Noam Chomsky (https://chomsky.info/commongood02/ https://chomsky.info/commongood02/).
jazzyjackson 5y ago
Would you also agree that a coffee shop that pulls down objectionable flyers from their wall/window is circumventing free speech? Maybe you can say more about why a business can't be both a publisher and a distributor? A newspaper publishes original content and classifieds, and they certainly have discretion over which classifieds to distribute in their paper, what makes social media any different?
- alexanderchr 5y ago
  The scale?
  - davidw 5y ago
    Where do you draw the line? Honest question. I think this is an interesting topic, as so much is online these days. These are companies, not the government, so they should have some more leeway... but given their size, it's also kind of scary. What if someone with a lot of money buys, say, Twitter and clamps down on all right of center, or left of center or whatever content? It's also incredibly easy to spread pure garbage with social media. Debunking it takes real work. I am going to a funeral in a few hours for an unvaccinated friend who died of COVID.
    - meltedcapacitor 5y ago
      Someone buying Twitter and banning a whole (normalish) category would be wonderful: it would make space for alternative platforms. As it is everybody is too lazy to fight the network effect. Maybe regulators should force dominant platforms to kick out a section of their user base every so often to keep the ecosystem diversified.
- kansface 5y ago
  > Would you also agree that a coffee shop that pulls down objectionable flyers from their wall/window is circumventing free speech? No coffee shop has 1/4 of the human population visit each day.
- l33tbro 5y ago
oehtXRwMkIs 5y ago
What law?
ramesh31 5y ago
>Okay, so this is going to be super controversial to some people, but I firmly believe that we are basically trying to bypass the law (at the very least in spirit) when we agree for the big companies to limit free speech in that way. Use IRC. Use free forum software. Write a blog. Go stand on a soapbox in Times Square and shout it at the top of your lungs. Do whatever you want. But free speech has precisely nothing to do with having free reign to violate a company's terms of service. You have the constitutional right to say whatever you want. You do not have the constitutional right to have your nonsense amplified by billions of dollars worth of privately owned technical infrastructure.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  What happens when the public mostly occupies spaces/services that are owned or outsourced to private corporations? Do you agree that the spirit of the law would be violated by their imposition of censorship? Or that shouting on a soapbox is roughly the same as doing nothing at all when almost all the important parts of our democratic process that precede voting are taking place on platforms owned by large tech companies?
  - anoonmoose 5y ago
    If you're asking what happens when public spaces are mostly owned by private corporations, I'd suggest you need to be a bit more clear on what you consider a public space.
NikolaNovak 5y ago
Which law do we feel is being bypassed? I believe in marketplace of ideas ; I believe we should let stupid and wrong opinions be voiced rather than simmer in darkness; I dislike censorship in virtually every way and situation; but I'm not aware of what law is being broken. You might persuade me to vote for a new one but I don't know which law prohibits private company on their own private infra to do as they please. (Please don't say "section 230" without reading it first, that gets tiring, not "controversial". See #1 etc etc ad infinitum ad nauseum) [1]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
tw04 5y ago
How are we violating the spirt of the law? Freedom of speech means freedom from government intervention. The founding fathers never said or intended that: newspapers must publish anything a private citizen wants to put in the paper. You are saying the equivalent of: if this were 150 years ago, and your crazy uncle thought that the moon was made of cheese, the New York Times would legally be required to put that on the front page of the paper. That's insane.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  This is the problem with invoking “spirt of the law.” US lawyers can barely agree on what basic constitutional laws mean. We should only invoke the spirit of a law when it’s a decision of last resort. But we’ve been talking about public vs. private speech for decades now. If Congress had a different spirit in mind, the constitution would’ve been amended or the Supreme Court would’ve issued a definitive decision.
- tehjoker 5y ago
  NYT has hiring process and editorial standards, FB/Twitter is a town message board. I think people pick on the government/private distinction too much. When the government is leaning on private monopolies to implement public policy that would be illegal to do directly, I don't think this traditional analysis holds up. Tech CEOs are getting hauled before congress constantly these days, there's a revolving door of government officials. The public/private separation is very superficial. Under conditions of monopoly, the private companies act much like a government, but unaccountable and undemocratic. It violates the spirit of 1776 to be subjected to the will of an unelected minority and be silenced. That said, I find the opinions being suppressed despicable, but that doesn't mean I'm going to line up behind government censorship and private monopoly.
  - poszlem 5y ago
    That is essentially my point and you expressed it much better that I could (sorry, English as a second language). Facebook is not a newspaper. Twitter is not a newspaper. In this example Facebok/Twitter ARE PAPER. They are part of the infrastructure of the internet.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

edandersen 5y ago

View the Quote Tweets for a sense of public opinion on this.

jakelazaroff 5y ago
It's not "public opinion" — you would expect most quote tweeters to be people who follow this person (or follow other quote tweeters), i.e. people who generally agree with him already. This is a great example of selection bias.
- j-bos 5y ago
  Are most quote tweets not dunks on the original tweeter?
  - jakelazaroff 5y ago
    I don't know about "most". But either way, the operating mechanism is that some person has amplified the quoted tweet to an audience that already agrees with them. The dunk tweet scenario is also an example of selection bias.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    If it gets popular enough outside of twitter, maybe. But with the spread limited to the quote tweets themselves, only followers will see it initially and those followers are much less likely to have a large follower-base of their own to spread it.

throwawaysea 5y ago

Is this a recent change? This is really an alarming step up in the narrative shaping (AKA propaganda) practiced by powerful Silicon Valley tech companies. For the tweet here, I feel it is totally valid to push back on vaccine mandates, because they violate the right to bodily autonomy and health privacy, because the IFR for COVID-19 is so low (especially for those who are healthy or under the age of 50), and because we don’t know what the long term effects of new vaccines might be. I say that as a pro-vaccine person who has all the common vaccinations available and still believes that getting an mRNA vaccine is the wiser choice. By censoring critique of policies and laws, Twitter is interfering with our democratic process and making in-kind political contributions to those backing those laws and policies. We need new anti trust regulations to be enforced ASAP, and new regulations to treat large platforms with network effects as public utilities and public spaces. They shouldn’t be given the free reign they have when we already regulate other telecom services and utilities.

decremental 5y ago
Good luck with that. These companies are doing the bidding of the people in power and this is cheered on by the bug men who have come out of the woodwork to celebrate having every aspect of our lives controlled from on high. This is only going to get worse. It's pathetic watching it unfold.
lp0_on_fire 5y ago
5 minute old comment and it's already been downoted into oblivion. I believe it's been determined you're guilty of wrongthink.
EricE 5y ago
Not sure why you are getting downvoted. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. If the content really is bogus, the discussion around it will take care of itself. A free society can't function with unchecked on sided propaganda, but that's what big tech is promulgating.

badkitty99 5y ago

Say hello to the new police

fighterpilot 5y ago

What's so misleading about this Tweet? Is it the first bit about non-covid vaccines?

judge2020 5y ago
mRNA vaccines "don't stop transmission" isn't false, but it is misleading in that it sounds like they do nothing for transmission at all.
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  .
  - EricE 5y ago
    Doesn't fit the narrative demanded by their tribe. Thus threatened they act on emotion and not logic.
TideAd 5y ago
Probably the claim of 0.2% IFR. I don't know what the latest IFR estimates are, but it can't be that low: for example, more than 0.2% of Americans have died from Covid, and many Americans have never been infected.
- nradov 5y ago
  The CDC estimated an overall 0.6% IFR for the US. The vast majority of those deaths are in the older age groups with serious co-morbid conditions such as obesity and diabetes. So the IFR for younger age groups is significantly lower than 0.2%. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
breezeTrowel 5y ago
Nearly everything. COVID-19 IFR seems to be more like 1% (compared to an IFR of 0.05% for polio, for example) but more infected will suffer from damage to respiratory tissues and other complications. MMR vaccines are mandatory for school children so, if you've attended school in the US, odds are you've been vaccinated against mumps, measles, and rubella. Polio has been wiped out by a massive vaccination campaign. It's no longer a threat precisely because of vaccinations. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 vaccines greatly reduce the chance and period of transmissibility, reduce disease severity in breakthrough infections, and only require boosters for those populations whose immunity wanes. The latter also applies to those infected with COVID-19. Reinfection can and does happen. Vaccines can help counteract that. The biggest benefit to vaccines is not just personal protection but also how much they work to limit spread. This is crucial in stopping the pandemic because the longer and easier COVID-19 is allowed to spread, the more likely it can mutate into a strain that's more virulent and harder to fight. We saw this with Delta.

jimbob45 5y ago

Anyone got a steelman for this? It seems like everyone here agrees that this is generally bad but I'd love to hear the best-case opposing view.

president 5y ago
They couldn't prove misinformation so they re-interpret terminology like "misleading" and make new phrases like "vaccine-hesitancy" to defend this censorship. And the only reason it works is because the gang of inflential companies that do this have captured the entire nation.
smt88 5y ago
We can all agree it's bad, but that doesn't make it illegal. The problem is the concentration of publishing power. We should never be in a situation where a single person (Dorsey, Zuckerberg, etc.) has so much control over publishing. If we can't break up social media, we should at least enforce interoperability so that there can be free market pressure on these companies.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
If your platform is essentially a giant loudspeaker, and you see the public believing too many lies, and the lies causing damage, then it's reasonable to at least think about not giving your loudspeaker to people spreading lies. (I also think it's generally bad, but that's my attempt at a steelman.)
- josephorjoe 5y ago
  I think it is basically this. Amplifying dangerous messages has a liability. Screaming "FIRE! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!" in a crowded theater when there is no fire or evidence of fire is not protected speech under any sane "freedom of speech" doctrine. Giving the person screaming that a megaphone makes you complicit in the crime. Giving people the "freedom" to trick other people into causing harm to each other is not giving people freedom. It is supporting abuse. There are lines, of course... fine or otherwise, and it is a messy process to draw them. And mistakes are often made and should be called out. But it is not a weak argument to claim that supporting the spread of disinformation about public health measures during a pandemic is supporting abuse. And the problem with social media is that instead of there being 200-500 people who can hear the megaphone there are hundreds of million. Scale matters. What can be tolerated in the local pub a half hour before closing may not be tolerable on a billboard in Times Square.

president 5y ago

Part of the new trifecta between social media companies / media / influencers, government, and large multinational conglomerates (pfizer, etc).

throwawaysea 5y ago
This is what is so frustrating here. Big tech knows they face scrutiny and regulation with people like Lina Khan coming after them. During the Trump years, these companies broadly began practicing censorship/deplatforming along progressive political lines. As that administration came to an end, they seemed to step it up even further, as if to say “hey we are ready to collaborate and do what you want, please spare us anti trust and labor scrutiny”. Glenn Greenwald has written some great articles about how sitting members of Congress have been abusing their position and leverage to pressure tech companies to censor their political opposition, in what may be a major violation (or loophole?) of the first amendment: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-escalates-pressure-on-tech https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-escalates-pressure... https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-show-of-monopolistic https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-sho...

djrogers 5y ago

This is the first tweet I've seen with this feature enabled, and frankly I'm floored. In what way is this tweet misleading? Are there any facts in it that are false? Twitter links this tweet to a page saying "COVID-19 vaccines are extremely effective at preventing serious illness and death, trials show" however the parent tweet doesn't dispute or contradict that statement at all. We're through the looking glass here...

deathanatos 5y ago
I would say its the implication that the virus is ineffective at preventing transmission: > this one mRNA shot […] that doesn’t stop transmission This phrasing implies can be easily misconstrued to that it's completely ineffective in preventing transmission… and it's not. The tweet is … off … here, > I can go unvaccinated against polio AIUI, one can go unvaccinated against polio because the vaccine against polio was so effective it is one step shy of being eradicated. The cognitive dissonance of refusing a COVID-19 vaccine on that argument is astounding to me… > I can go unvaccinated against […] tetanus, hepatitis, measles and mumps Presumably it depends on jurisdiction, but I was required to get those vaccines in order to attend school. Now, while I (personally) think the tweet is bad, Twitter's moderation is not the greatest here, and I would agree that banning comments is too heavy handed. If nobody can correct the poster, with nuanced debate that addresses their points specifically, how would they ever change their view? Simultaneously, I think people running discussion sites need the ability to moderate, and that moderation will be at times wrong. But users, simultaneously, need reasonable choice when it comes to services like this, so that if they disagree with the company/org's choices, they have a meaningful way to choose a different provider.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  and when it comes to transmission: No, Vaccinated People Are Not ‘Just as Likely’ to Spread the Coronavirus as Unvaccinated People https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/the-vaccinated-arent-just-as-likely-to-spread-covid/620161/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/the-vaccin... The impact of SARS-CoV-2 vaccination on Alpha & Delta variant transmission https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264260v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264260v...

BurningFrog 5y ago

But you can quote tweet it: https://twitter.com/MichaelPSenger/status/1443238759944785922/retweets/with_comments https://twitter.com/MichaelPSenger/status/144323875994478592...

thallavajhula 5y ago

You can quote tweet it though

jdavis703 5y ago

Most viral political tweets (on both sides) are super misleading. I’ve actually twice tweeted incorrect stuff by accident , and those tweets were on the verge of going viral before folks pointed out the error and I deleted/amended the tweet. (FWIW one tweet was because a budget document itself had a misleading denominator, and the other because of a recent change to a law.)

davidw 5y ago
This is always relevant to these conversations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
commandlinefan 5y ago
> on both sides Something tells me that only one side is going to find their likes disabled, though.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  Probably. Because it is one side and one side only that mostly spreads lies. "Both sides" is bullshit.
  - decremental 5y ago
    My side told me the other side spreads lies.
    - user-the-name 5y ago
      No, no "my side" about it. This is simple, objective fact. The American right spreads lies, constantly, every day. Tons of them. Lie after lie. They are not shy about it. There is no "both sides". There is no equivalence. There just isn't.
      - MathCodeLove 5y ago

mikevm 5y ago

The ministry of truth has deemed your tweet "misleading", you will now be escorted to isolation to reflect on your deeds.

debacle 5y ago

Are we at the precipice of technofascsism, or are we already there?

sva_ 5y ago

It's hilarious that I can see this 'misleading Tweet', but when I click on getting more info about why it is misleading, Twitter prompts me with the signup/login prompt, stopping me from seeing why. ...Twitter confirmed perpetuating Covid19-misinformation

judge2020 5y ago

Hello, Please move to Mastodon. It's pretty cool over here, and there's no ads.

throwdecro 5y ago
But "toots" has connotations of flatulence.
- ruined 5y ago
  perfect, and appropriate. everyone with qualms about that will self-select out of the userbase and mastodon shall become sleek and nimble, the most refined shitposting machine on all the internet
- user-the-name 5y ago
  In some random part of the US. Not in the rest of the world.
- throwdecro 5y ago
  Oh did they recently change "toots" to "posts"? Maybe that barrier to wider adoption is out of the way now. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/16080 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/16080
5560675260 5y ago
There is a downside of having to spin and maintain your own instance, or maybe having to suffer from same issues.
- mtlynch 5y ago
  I use masto.host for managed hosting of my personal instance.[0] I've had a good experience so far, but I get the impression that I'm missing out on a lot of the user discoverability features of being on a bigger instance. My only gripe is that the website doesn't support exporting your data so that you're okay if masto.host disappears, but I request a backup via email once a month and they put it in my Megadrop within a day. [0] https://m.mtlynch.io https://m.mtlynch.io

thepasswordis 5y ago

Who cares? Nobody will stop using twitter over this. Yeah, twitter sucks. We can get mad at each other and argue about it and talk about how bad it is and blah blah. Nobody cares. It will change nothing.

commandlinefan 5y ago
> Nobody will stop using twitter In part because hosting providers like AWS collude to push viable competition offline.
- thepasswordis 5y ago
  No. Go throw up a twitter clone on an AWS instance or a digitalocean droplet, or host it on an old PC in your closet. Probably half of the people here on HN have coded some clone like that and it's just sitting unused. It's not AWS preventing a twitter alternative from popping up. Also: things like gab, gettr, .win etc. all exist. They're just cesspools.
  - istinetz 5y ago
    >It's not AWS preventing a twitter alternative from popping up. Really? Cause I seem to recall that every company in their tech stack decided to drop Parler, including Amazon, and including removals from both app stores. I'd like to see "half the people of HN" create a twitter clone - but don't forget ALL the infrastructure, no service providers, no app stores, no hosting, etc.
    - pixxel 5y ago
      You recall correctly. It was an orchestrated deplatforming.
    - thepasswordis 5y ago
      The person who created gab is a HN alum (although he was "kicked out")
- 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mypalmike 5y ago

Good. Amplification isn't anyone's right.

908B64B197 5y ago

Something I wonder is... A year ago, you could get banned, without appeal, from social media, for sharing the lab leak hypothesis. Now, a year later and suddenly the same hypothesis, laughed and mocked as a racist conspiracy, is deemed serious enough that it's worth an investigation. Nothing, other than a certain administration, changed in the meantime. Interesting.

aasasd 5y ago

I'm happy to see this. Specifically to see Twitter dig themselves a grave. Today they come for anti-vaxers, tomorrow they'll come for you. Then you'll finally anger up and move to Telegram or another identical shit. And the cycle will repeat until people get tired of this. Or until they get old and the new generation does things right from the start, wondering what the old idiots were thinking.