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I am not an Elon or X fan, and I don’t think this is Good, but Twitter’s policy pre-X to comply with national content laws was to geo-block content when a gover

I am not an Elon or X fan, and I don’t think this is Good, but Twitter’s policy pre-X to comply with national content laws was to geo-block content when a government demanded it be blocked. I don’t recall if the algorithmic shadow-ban was in that toolkit pre-X as well, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Again, I don’t think this is a good outcome, but it’s not substantially at odds with what Twitter pre-Elon would’ve done (I also seem to recall Twitter was very sensitive to employees visiting or living in Turkey - the relationship with the Turkish government had been fraught for years). Now, if the critique here is that Mr. Free Speech is rolling over and showing his belly to the first autocrat who shows up at his door, yeah, I get that, but it’s a little bit more of a “dog bites man” than a “man bites dog” story at this point.

NewJazz 1y ago
Can you source this claim because Twitter turned a lot of heads when it didn't comply with content restrictions elsewhere in the Mediterranean and faced website blocks (that they retained Moxie to help circumvent)... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Arab_Spring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Ara...
- ayhanfuat 1y ago
  It was indeed more selective before Elon https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/twitter-has-complied-with-almost-every-government-request-for-censorship-since-musk-took-over-report-finds/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...
- dmix 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Twitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Twitter
  - bmelton 1y ago
    Am I reading it correctly that there are no instances on that wikipedia after Elon's purchase (other than the Substack incident?)
dmix 1y ago
This is definitely not the first time post-Elon that Twitter has continued the practice of following foreign requests. AFAIK they only pushed back on Brazil when what the government requested was particularly aggressive, not unlike when Facebook pushed back against Brazil back in the day and similarly got a daily fine for not following through.
energy123 1y ago
Elon fights UK, Brazil, Australia, Germany, and other democracies but turns a blind eye to every autocracy on the planet engaging in far more insidious censorship. Worse he will genuflect towards those autocrats. Interesting.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  >Elon fights UK, Brazil, Australia, Germany, and other democracies Care to share the sources that Elon fought those countries? Because the Wikipedia list of Twitter censorship shows that X complied with the majority requests from those countries.
  - Quarrelsome 1y ago
    Elon Musk stirred the pot in the UK during the summer riots of 2024 posting on twitter: > civil war is inevitable as the owner of a key media platform in the world that sort of statement is indefensible. He's also picked a side in Germany by weighing in with as much support as possible for AfD. Don't pick this as a hill to die on, that man isn't worth it.
    - graemep 1y ago
      I do not know about Germany, but I would characterise Elon's attempts to gain political influence in the UK as failed. He tried to bribe one party to accept an extremist as a member in return for a huge bribe, and he failed. He does not seem to have much influence on public opinion. I do not think its accurate to say he was fighting countries either. He was trying to buy influence. Its not the same thing.
      - Quarrelsome 1y ago
        The man owns twitter ffs. The only way his attempts to gain political influence will ever fail is if the UK government block access to twitter or British people decide to stop using it. Until then he has significant capacity to sway political opinion. As an example: there is significant power in cultivating the default UK experience of twitter for new accounts, which he's already had significant impact on by culling Twitter's internal moderation team. I've experienced it myself and its a an absolute disaster zone of disinformation and bot accounts trying to stoke internal divisions.
panarky 1y ago
I happened to be in Istanbul during the Gezi Park uprising in 2013. I didn't participate in the protests, but I did manage to wander into the wrong place at the wrong time and got teargassed pretty good and hard. I sheltered from the gas and the water cannons and the soldiers with a group of protestors overnight and got to learn from them firsthand. They were using Twitter extensively to coordinate and to find out what what was going on because state media was completely bogus. They told me the government was blocking or throttling network traffic from Twitter at the DNS and ISP level to suppress the uprising. Twitter routinely refused or challenged Turkish government demands to take down material or to turn over logs. I remember that in 2014 the government demanded Twitter take down links to evidence of official corruption and Twitter refused. Pre-Musk Twitter quite vigorously fought Turkish demands for censorship. Not every time, but many times. After Musk took over, Twitter/X has been far more compliant with Turkish takedown demands. Before Turkish elections in 2023, Twitter restricted access to some accounts in Turkey to avoid threats of a wider shutdown. Musk publicly defended his decision as the "lesser of two evils". X’s own figures (as cited by Human Rights Watch) show 86% compliance with government requests from Turkey in 2024 (https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/05/08/joint-open-letter-social-media-companies-censorship-turkiye https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/05/08/joint-open-letter-social...). Compare that to pre-Musk times, where Twitter complied with Turkish court orders ~25% of the time (https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/313615_TURKEY-2021-HUMAN-RIGHTS-REPORT.pdf https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/313615_TURK...). Free-speech Twitter no longer exists.
- postexitus 1y ago
  All material facts are correct - but let's also remember that the world in 2013 doesn't exist anymore. In 2013, the authoritarianism was not on the rise. Arab Spring gave people hope. Gezi people were not only protesting, but also enjoying their uprising, singing, dreaming. Today - all of that is gone. Most western democracies succumbed to levels of authoritarianism. Let alone the number of active wars and conflicts developed countries are perpetrators...
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    > the world in 2013 doesn't exist anymore True. For better, but mostly for worse. >In 2013, the authoritarianism was not on the rise Just because you didn't see it, doesn't mean authoritarian wasn't on the rise. By the time you see it it's already too late. >Most western democracies succumbed to levels of authoritarianism. Because they discovered how powerful and important social media is, so they're seeking to control it more than they did in 2013 because leaders in 2013 didn't fully understand the internet. And because most western democracies aren't true democracies where people have a voice in all matters that affect them, but function on the basis of controlled opposition, where there's two maximum three major parties pretending to oppose each other but all of which are coopted by the big-money establishment, making your vote irrelevant as no matter who you vote for, housing will still keep being more expensive, etc. even though you voted for the opposite thing to happen. And if you vote for a fringe party or candidate that's not part of the establishment, and that candidate ends up getting enough traction to alter the elections, then that candidate will be eliminated from elections using selective enforcement of the law: see France, Romania, Germany, etc. Democrats tried to to the same to Trump to get him out of the 2024 presidential race with his mugshot everywhere, but failed. Not that Trump is not part of the establishment though.
arp242 1y ago
I guess the thing is that Musk does actually fight this sort of thing, but seemingly only on certain topics that align with his pretty far-out views. It's rather hard to take that in good faith. This is "For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law." kind of stuff. Old Twitter wasn't perfect, but at least tried to be somewhat neutral and even-handed.
- shadowgovt 1y ago
  I got off the bandwagon of old Twitter when they decided to respond to the US electing a Twitter troll President not by enforcing their own policy, but by modifying that policy to create a narrow carve-out of "newsworthiness" for a specific account that could then, more or less, disregard their policies wholesale. New Twitter is worse, but the Twitter of the past had no real spine either.
like_any_other 1y ago
> it’s a little bit more of a “dog bites man” than a “man bites dog” story at this point. Not just at this point, and not just Twitter - slanting algorithms and bans for political ends is common practice, it's just usually a little more subtle: Twitter Aided the Pentagon in Its Covert Online Propaganda Campaign - https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/twitter-dod-us-military-accounts/ https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/twitter-dod-us-military-... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/technology/twitter-military-influence-campaign.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/technology/twitter-milita... On Facebook, Comments About ‘Whites,’ ‘Men,’ And ‘Americans’ Will Face Less Moderation - https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/12/03/on-facebook-comments-about-whites-men-and-americans-will-face-less-moderation/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/12/03/on-face... Facebook, Twitter stocked with ex-FBI, CIA officials in key posts - https://nypost.com/2022/12/22/facebook-twitter-stocked-with-ex-fbi-cia-officials/ https://nypost.com/2022/12/22/facebook-twitter-stocked-with-... Emi Palmor, the former General Director of the Israeli Ministry of Justice is on Facebook's oversight board - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emi_Palmor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emi_Palmor 1993-1997 US secretary of Labor Robert Reich: Trump is suing Facebook, Twitter, and Google for violating his 1st Amendment rights by keeping him off their platforms. Someone should remind him that they're private companies to which the 1st Amendment doesn't apply. - https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1412826396490039296 https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1412826396490039296 Meet the Ex-CIA Agents Deciding Facebook’s Content Policy - https://www.mintpressnews.com/meet-ex-cia-agents-deciding-facebook-content-policy/281307/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/meet-ex-cia-agents-deciding-fa... Far-right Polish groups protest Facebook profile blockages - https://apnews.com/article/7ea31c13b8bf45db88430e763e594025 https://apnews.com/article/7ea31c13b8bf45db88430e763e594025 Polish PM calls Facebook ban on far-right party undemocratic - https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-technology-health-europe-poland-ffc07f410963475fc0adaff2261ce6c9 https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-technology-h... YouTube: Keeping Americans in the Dark on Islam - https://www.raymondibrahim.com/01/26/2018/youtube-keeping-americans-dark-islam https://www.raymondibrahim.com/01/26/2018/youtube-keeping-am... PPC candidate banned from Facebook and public debates - https://xcancel.com/MarcScottEmery/status/1433845069480665106 https://xcancel.com/MarcScottEmery/status/143384506948066510... Website critical of Joe Biden banned by reddit, and even banned from private messages on Facebook - https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/hr30p3/reddit_facebook_ban_website_of_joe_biden_touching/ https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/hr30p3/reddit_f... Facebook Prevents Sharing New York Post Story on Black Lives Matter Founder Patrisse Cullors' Real Estate - https://www.newsweek.com/facebook-prevents-sharing-new-york-post-story-black-lives-matter-founder-patrisse-cullors-real-1584050 https://www.newsweek.com/facebook-prevents-sharing-new-york-... Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments - https://theintercept.com/2017/12/30/facebook-says-it-is-deleting-accounts-at-the-direction-of-the-u-s-and-israeli-governments/ https://theintercept.com/2017/12/30/facebook-says-it-is-dele... Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News - https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006 https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-sup... Reporter: Facebook using ex-CIA to decide misinformation policy is ‘very, very worrying’ - https://thehill.com/hilltv/3566225-reporter-facebook-using-ex-cia-to-decide-misinformation-policy-is-very-very-worrying/ https://thehill.com/hilltv/3566225-reporter-facebook-using-e... Meta: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content - https://text.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorship-palestine-content https://text.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorshi... How Facebook restricted news in Palestinian territories - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c786wlxz4jgo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c786wlxz4jgo
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
numpad0 1y ago
imo the bigger talking point is that Twitter post-acquisition has been working pathetically to curb organic buzzes in favor of manufactured trends, even harder than its previous left-leaning management. Effect of that being observed in Turkish politics is a downstream issue to that. Twitter's strict "fun wins" algorithm of past seem like it had been a major driver in e.g. Arab Spring.
- TRiG_Ireland 1y ago
  The idea that a large company has ever "leaned left" in any real sense is a bit ridiculous.
  - numpad0 1y ago
    I would argue that Twitter pre-acquisiton had elements of inferiority-complex-driven-correct-isms and tryhard leftism. Not necessarily that I disagree with that biasing especially with what happened to it since. Their intents back then were 120% innocent, just occasionally un-ideal as nothing ever is perfect.
  - mensetmanusman 1y ago
    What is left? Your definition might be very different than the majority.
    - BlueTemplar 1y ago
      You should be wary in going there, unless you want to be beholden to the opinions of China + India.
pessimizer 1y ago
Old Twitter was selective in what countries it would take orders from because it would consult with the administration on a weekly basis and be told what to do. Social media explicitly changed their policies to allow for the advocacy of violence against Russians (only), which is insane. I have no idea how people could delude themselves into thinking that was a better situation, especially during a Trump presidency that has been deporting and excluding people for speech, but it's impossible to understand the movement Democrat's value system at any particular moment. It's of course sad that we have to rely on Mr. Free Speech Oligarch in order to debate subjects from positions that consistently poll majorities of the electorate, but I'd rely on China, Russia and Iran to talk about my problems with the US government, too. They openly hate free speech, they just support the freedom of that sort of speech (until the US likes them again.) It's the US that is desperate to abandon what is almost literally its Prime Directive and main differentiator from the rest of the world. We are popularly sovereign. We are not ruled by God through His current anointed representative bloodline, with a Parliament as a customary intermediary (which is actually a frozen conflict.) How many years are we away from a POTUS directly passing rule to their child or spouse? We've gotten awfully close multiple times in the past couple decades. Will Democrats finally be happy that dumb people don't get to vote anymore? Do we pass from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire again, propelled by the righteous complaints of slaves and farmers about a decadent, narcissistic, do-nothing elite?
bananalychee 1y ago
Twitter regularly banned political figures globally following government pressure. X is more consistent in applying bans regionally rather than banning accounts from the platform entirely. Post-acquisition they've expressed that they choose to do that because they deem it to be preferable to having the entire network banned in certain countries. It probably has more to do with the financial incentives than with a value judgement, but either way there's no reasonable alternative, so I find it disingenuous to frame it as evidence of Musk's dishonesty, regardless of the fact that there are other instances where moderation policies were changed arbitrarily that actually do constitute evidence of that. I understand that some people flag any comment that isn't sufficiently critical of Musk and his companies regardless of their validity, which makes it tempting to parenthesize any "softball" comment to express loyalty to the tribe, but with regards to their compliance with government censorship it's unwarranted.

NewJazz 1y ago

Can you source this claim because Twitter turned a lot of heads when it didn't comply with content restrictions elsewhere in the Mediterranean and faced website blocks (that they retained Moxie to help circumvent)... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Arab_Spring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Ara...

ayhanfuat 1y ago
It was indeed more selective before Elon https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/twitter-has-complied-with-almost-every-government-request-for-censorship-since-musk-took-over-report-finds/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...
dmix 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Twitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Twitter
- bmelton 1y ago
  Am I reading it correctly that there are no instances on that wikipedia after Elon's purchase (other than the Substack incident?)

dmix 1y ago

This is definitely not the first time post-Elon that Twitter has continued the practice of following foreign requests. AFAIK they only pushed back on Brazil when what the government requested was particularly aggressive, not unlike when Facebook pushed back against Brazil back in the day and similarly got a daily fine for not following through.

energy123 1y ago

Elon fights UK, Brazil, Australia, Germany, and other democracies but turns a blind eye to every autocracy on the planet engaging in far more insidious censorship. Worse he will genuflect towards those autocrats. Interesting.

FirmwareBurner 1y ago
>Elon fights UK, Brazil, Australia, Germany, and other democracies Care to share the sources that Elon fought those countries? Because the Wikipedia list of Twitter censorship shows that X complied with the majority requests from those countries.
- Quarrelsome 1y ago
  Elon Musk stirred the pot in the UK during the summer riots of 2024 posting on twitter: > civil war is inevitable as the owner of a key media platform in the world that sort of statement is indefensible. He's also picked a side in Germany by weighing in with as much support as possible for AfD. Don't pick this as a hill to die on, that man isn't worth it.
  - graemep 1y ago
    I do not know about Germany, but I would characterise Elon's attempts to gain political influence in the UK as failed. He tried to bribe one party to accept an extremist as a member in return for a huge bribe, and he failed. He does not seem to have much influence on public opinion. I do not think its accurate to say he was fighting countries either. He was trying to buy influence. Its not the same thing.
    - Quarrelsome 1y ago
      The man owns twitter ffs. The only way his attempts to gain political influence will ever fail is if the UK government block access to twitter or British people decide to stop using it. Until then he has significant capacity to sway political opinion. As an example: there is significant power in cultivating the default UK experience of twitter for new accounts, which he's already had significant impact on by culling Twitter's internal moderation team. I've experienced it myself and its a an absolute disaster zone of disinformation and bot accounts trying to stoke internal divisions.

panarky 1y ago

I happened to be in Istanbul during the Gezi Park uprising in 2013. I didn't participate in the protests, but I did manage to wander into the wrong place at the wrong time and got teargassed pretty good and hard. I sheltered from the gas and the water cannons and the soldiers with a group of protestors overnight and got to learn from them firsthand. They were using Twitter extensively to coordinate and to find out what what was going on because state media was completely bogus. They told me the government was blocking or throttling network traffic from Twitter at the DNS and ISP level to suppress the uprising. Twitter routinely refused or challenged Turkish government demands to take down material or to turn over logs. I remember that in 2014 the government demanded Twitter take down links to evidence of official corruption and Twitter refused. Pre-Musk Twitter quite vigorously fought Turkish demands for censorship. Not every time, but many times. After Musk took over, Twitter/X has been far more compliant with Turkish takedown demands. Before Turkish elections in 2023, Twitter restricted access to some accounts in Turkey to avoid threats of a wider shutdown. Musk publicly defended his decision as the "lesser of two evils". X’s own figures (as cited by Human Rights Watch) show 86% compliance with government requests from Turkey in 2024 (https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/05/08/joint-open-letter-social-media-companies-censorship-turkiye https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/05/08/joint-open-letter-social...). Compare that to pre-Musk times, where Twitter complied with Turkish court orders ~25% of the time (https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/313615_TURKEY-2021-HUMAN-RIGHTS-REPORT.pdf https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/313615_TURK...). Free-speech Twitter no longer exists.

postexitus 1y ago
All material facts are correct - but let's also remember that the world in 2013 doesn't exist anymore. In 2013, the authoritarianism was not on the rise. Arab Spring gave people hope. Gezi people were not only protesting, but also enjoying their uprising, singing, dreaming. Today - all of that is gone. Most western democracies succumbed to levels of authoritarianism. Let alone the number of active wars and conflicts developed countries are perpetrators...
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  > the world in 2013 doesn't exist anymore True. For better, but mostly for worse. >In 2013, the authoritarianism was not on the rise Just because you didn't see it, doesn't mean authoritarian wasn't on the rise. By the time you see it it's already too late. >Most western democracies succumbed to levels of authoritarianism. Because they discovered how powerful and important social media is, so they're seeking to control it more than they did in 2013 because leaders in 2013 didn't fully understand the internet. And because most western democracies aren't true democracies where people have a voice in all matters that affect them, but function on the basis of controlled opposition, where there's two maximum three major parties pretending to oppose each other but all of which are coopted by the big-money establishment, making your vote irrelevant as no matter who you vote for, housing will still keep being more expensive, etc. even though you voted for the opposite thing to happen. And if you vote for a fringe party or candidate that's not part of the establishment, and that candidate ends up getting enough traction to alter the elections, then that candidate will be eliminated from elections using selective enforcement of the law: see France, Romania, Germany, etc. Democrats tried to to the same to Trump to get him out of the 2024 presidential race with his mugshot everywhere, but failed. Not that Trump is not part of the establishment though.

arp242 1y ago

I guess the thing is that Musk does actually fight this sort of thing, but seemingly only on certain topics that align with his pretty far-out views. It's rather hard to take that in good faith. This is "For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law." kind of stuff. Old Twitter wasn't perfect, but at least tried to be somewhat neutral and even-handed.

shadowgovt 1y ago
I got off the bandwagon of old Twitter when they decided to respond to the US electing a Twitter troll President not by enforcing their own policy, but by modifying that policy to create a narrow carve-out of "newsworthiness" for a specific account that could then, more or less, disregard their policies wholesale. New Twitter is worse, but the Twitter of the past had no real spine either.

like_any_other 1y ago

> it’s a little bit more of a “dog bites man” than a “man bites dog” story at this point. Not just at this point, and not just Twitter - slanting algorithms and bans for political ends is common practice, it's just usually a little more subtle: Twitter Aided the Pentagon in Its Covert Online Propaganda Campaign - https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/twitter-dod-us-military-accounts/ https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/twitter-dod-us-military-... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/technology/twitter-military-influence-campaign.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/technology/twitter-milita... On Facebook, Comments About ‘Whites,’ ‘Men,’ And ‘Americans’ Will Face Less Moderation - https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/12/03/on-facebook-comments-about-whites-men-and-americans-will-face-less-moderation/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/12/03/on-face... Facebook, Twitter stocked with ex-FBI, CIA officials in key posts - https://nypost.com/2022/12/22/facebook-twitter-stocked-with-ex-fbi-cia-officials/ https://nypost.com/2022/12/22/facebook-twitter-stocked-with-... Emi Palmor, the former General Director of the Israeli Ministry of Justice is on Facebook's oversight board - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emi_Palmor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emi_Palmor 1993-1997 US secretary of Labor Robert Reich: Trump is suing Facebook, Twitter, and Google for violating his 1st Amendment rights by keeping him off their platforms. Someone should remind him that they're private companies to which the 1st Amendment doesn't apply. - https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1412826396490039296 https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1412826396490039296 Meet the Ex-CIA Agents Deciding Facebook’s Content Policy - https://www.mintpressnews.com/meet-ex-cia-agents-deciding-facebook-content-policy/281307/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/meet-ex-cia-agents-deciding-fa... Far-right Polish groups protest Facebook profile blockages - https://apnews.com/article/7ea31c13b8bf45db88430e763e594025 https://apnews.com/article/7ea31c13b8bf45db88430e763e594025 Polish PM calls Facebook ban on far-right party undemocratic - https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-technology-health-europe-poland-ffc07f410963475fc0adaff2261ce6c9 https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-technology-h... YouTube: Keeping Americans in the Dark on Islam - https://www.raymondibrahim.com/01/26/2018/youtube-keeping-americans-dark-islam https://www.raymondibrahim.com/01/26/2018/youtube-keeping-am... PPC candidate banned from Facebook and public debates - https://xcancel.com/MarcScottEmery/status/1433845069480665106 https://xcancel.com/MarcScottEmery/status/143384506948066510... Website critical of Joe Biden banned by reddit, and even banned from private messages on Facebook - https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/hr30p3/reddit_facebook_ban_website_of_joe_biden_touching/ https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/hr30p3/reddit_f... Facebook Prevents Sharing New York Post Story on Black Lives Matter Founder Patrisse Cullors' Real Estate - https://www.newsweek.com/facebook-prevents-sharing-new-york-post-story-black-lives-matter-founder-patrisse-cullors-real-1584050 https://www.newsweek.com/facebook-prevents-sharing-new-york-... Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments - https://theintercept.com/2017/12/30/facebook-says-it-is-deleting-accounts-at-the-direction-of-the-u-s-and-israeli-governments/ https://theintercept.com/2017/12/30/facebook-says-it-is-dele... Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News - https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006 https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-sup... Reporter: Facebook using ex-CIA to decide misinformation policy is ‘very, very worrying’ - https://thehill.com/hilltv/3566225-reporter-facebook-using-ex-cia-to-decide-misinformation-policy-is-very-very-worrying/ https://thehill.com/hilltv/3566225-reporter-facebook-using-e... Meta: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content - https://text.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorship-palestine-content https://text.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorshi... How Facebook restricted news in Palestinian territories - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c786wlxz4jgo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c786wlxz4jgo

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

numpad0 1y ago

imo the bigger talking point is that Twitter post-acquisition has been working pathetically to curb organic buzzes in favor of manufactured trends, even harder than its previous left-leaning management. Effect of that being observed in Turkish politics is a downstream issue to that. Twitter's strict "fun wins" algorithm of past seem like it had been a major driver in e.g. Arab Spring.

TRiG_Ireland 1y ago
The idea that a large company has ever "leaned left" in any real sense is a bit ridiculous.
- numpad0 1y ago
  I would argue that Twitter pre-acquisiton had elements of inferiority-complex-driven-correct-isms and tryhard leftism. Not necessarily that I disagree with that biasing especially with what happened to it since. Their intents back then were 120% innocent, just occasionally un-ideal as nothing ever is perfect.
- mensetmanusman 1y ago
  What is left? Your definition might be very different than the majority.
  - BlueTemplar 1y ago
    You should be wary in going there, unless you want to be beholden to the opinions of China + India.

pessimizer 1y ago

Old Twitter was selective in what countries it would take orders from because it would consult with the administration on a weekly basis and be told what to do. Social media explicitly changed their policies to allow for the advocacy of violence against Russians (only), which is insane. I have no idea how people could delude themselves into thinking that was a better situation, especially during a Trump presidency that has been deporting and excluding people for speech, but it's impossible to understand the movement Democrat's value system at any particular moment. It's of course sad that we have to rely on Mr. Free Speech Oligarch in order to debate subjects from positions that consistently poll majorities of the electorate, but I'd rely on China, Russia and Iran to talk about my problems with the US government, too. They openly hate free speech, they just support the freedom of that sort of speech (until the US likes them again.) It's the US that is desperate to abandon what is almost literally its Prime Directive and main differentiator from the rest of the world. We are popularly sovereign. We are not ruled by God through His current anointed representative bloodline, with a Parliament as a customary intermediary (which is actually a frozen conflict.) How many years are we away from a POTUS directly passing rule to their child or spouse? We've gotten awfully close multiple times in the past couple decades. Will Democrats finally be happy that dumb people don't get to vote anymore? Do we pass from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire again, propelled by the righteous complaints of slaves and farmers about a decadent, narcissistic, do-nothing elite?

bananalychee 1y ago

Twitter regularly banned political figures globally following government pressure. X is more consistent in applying bans regionally rather than banning accounts from the platform entirely. Post-acquisition they've expressed that they choose to do that because they deem it to be preferable to having the entire network banned in certain countries. It probably has more to do with the financial incentives than with a value judgement, but either way there's no reasonable alternative, so I find it disingenuous to frame it as evidence of Musk's dishonesty, regardless of the fact that there are other instances where moderation policies were changed arbitrarily that actually do constitute evidence of that. I understand that some people flag any comment that isn't sufficiently critical of Musk and his companies regardless of their validity, which makes it tempting to parenthesize any "softball" comment to express loyalty to the tribe, but with regards to their compliance with government censorship it's unwarranted.