There is a Substack associated with the suspended twitter account [0].
They have made a recent post about the suspension of said account and all of the users other twitter accounts [1]. It states that twitter told the user "the account was “artificially” amplifying information".
That's not even a relevant question - the excuse given by Twitter was "the account was “artificially” amplifying information" not "bots were 'artificially' amplifying the account"
How can you trust someone who says "There was not outside amplification"? How would the controller of the twitter account differentiate between simple virality and outside amplification? Of course, it's lame that Amy can buy a bunch of bots to get Bob's account canceled.
And then there's the challenge of "Hmm, if I'm a PR firm hired by Maxwell, what can I do? I know, we'll hire a bunch of sock puppets. And then we'll report the account!"
If so, I want BrooklynDad_Defiant, the Palmer Report, Duty to Warn, the Gravel Institute, and ReallyAmerican1 removed immediately. There is no way these folks always manage to be at the top of every trend organically.
100% agree. It sure is funny how these accounts are always surfaced as the first reply. Especially with that BrooklynDad account. It was always the first hot take reply to any Trump tweet.
Of course BitwiseFool and I have no proof beyond our observations so please don't ask for proof of Twitters internal workings. Note we have no proof of why this Maxwell trial account was suspended other than twitters word. They provided us with no data or proof. This is very common now. Folks take the word of tech companies as hard fact and any other speculation is not allowed.
Any twitter employee want to use a throwaway account to set the record straight? Doubt it.
Or for being a part of a network that was doing so. I suspect that it is more likely that they were just part of a system that was promoting tweets and reposting material
Substack handles paid subscriptions, which is distinctly non-trivial to "host your own". They've also publicly advertised a strong anti-censorship position, and a lot of their userbase will abandon them if they change stances.
While it's certainly a possible concern, not all platforms descend in to censorship. I think it's reasonable to wait until there's at least warning signs before criticizing a specific site.
> We reserve the right to remove any content from Substack at any time, for any reason (including, but not limited to, if someone alleges you contributed that content in violation of these Terms), in our sole discretion, and without notice.
A lot of platforms unfortunately have these blanket disclaimers. Fortunately Substack hasn't gone down that road yet, while Twitter, Facebook and Google are already over the horizon.
There are plenty of reputable journalists closely following the trial including Julie K Brown, the Miami based reporter whose story broke the whole thing open a few years ago leading to these arrests:
Doesn't it seem a pretty strong indicator that the claim they got censored for reporting on Maxwell is untrue because more popular, more credible people aren't being suspended. If the goal is to supress news about Maxwell it seems pretty clear that suspending some small anonymous account would not acheive that.
yes, but this one was the most popular. If they're looking at suppressing news or attention, they'd want to ban the most popular, not the most credible necessarily.
That doesn't seem right to me - they're saying this account had something like 500k followers (which, again, let's assume that's true) you're going to see reporting from WSJ, NYT, WashPo etc. all of whom have millions of follows. Even some basic reporters have way larger followings - for example I don't know who this guy is: https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec but he's got 1.5m followers and seems to be very active reporting Maxwell/Epstein details.
500k sounds extremely unlikely to be the largest reporter covering this, and even if it is, it's not that much more than the reputable reports who have 200k+
In case you aren't already aware, you can use Nitter [0] as an alternate Twitter frontend (you can install an extension to automatically redirect you there, if you prefer). At various times nitter.net may be rate limited, in which case you can look to a list of instances and pick a different one [1].
If you're interested in the factual details of the case rather than some meta argument about Twitter's bot policy (of which there's not really a point, because we don't know why the account was actually banned aside from artificial manipulation) - I thought it'd be helpful to have a few other sources that are unlikely to be removed.
It's possible you're reading too much into that comment. The GP may simply have been providing a PSA about where they have found useful information given that one potential source has been removed.
From HN community guidelines on reading into a comment:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Why? They're saying they have people they believe are reputable. Again, reading into that to assume the commenter intended to say the banned account was sending out bad information violates the community guidelines of "plausible interpretation." Is it plausible that the commenter merely meant "Hey, here's some reputable sources"? Seems possible to me.
If one store goes out of business and I say "Here are two store that I consider reputable for buying the same things", that really doesn't mean I think the original store was not reputable.
The comment does not at all read to me as justification for the ban one way or another. It is a simple statement that there are sources the commenter trusts on the topic, with a referral to them.
Twitter didn't suspend the account for not being reputable. They suspended the account for being part of a network that was artificially promoting tweets and content. You're arguing a point that Twitter never made
>"being part of a network that was artificially promoting tweets and content."
This is part of the reason why I detest Twitter's leadership. It's the tyranny of selectively enforcing the rules and hiding behind it. If someone tells me the same dozen or so twitter handles that always manage to chime in at the top of just about every trending social topic are authentic, I simply won't believe them. Why aren't these banned?
> It's the tyranny of selectively enforcing the rules and hiding behind it.
Well I can't disagree with that. It is endemic of Google, YouTube, Amazon, Facebook, Apple etc.
When these companies deal with the sheer volume of users they have they hide behind rules that are judged via algorithm and are not able to be evaluated or appealed unless you get enough attention on social media.
It is yet another argument for the elimination of them. If they can't manage themselves then they shouldn't be running.
Bruh I'm just happy someone linked someone else at all. These are current events, moving targets... Squabbling in the comments like that is more of a destructive distraction than anything
Is it not demonstrative of my point that this person immediately hand waves away twitter banning this account then immediately suggests that you use two blue checkmarks instead?
Well rather than reading anonymous accounts who aggregate what real journalists are reporting from the courtroom while interspersing random conspiracy theories, it seemed useful to just link to the real journalists directly.
An extra benefit is that since the journalists are reputable, their accounts are unlikely to be deleted or suspended.
Fair but it’s an appeal to authority and skirts true Scotsman but… never the less on occasion reputable journalists are leveraged to plant narratives on behalf of interested parties because they are reputable, so there is that. It’s not as though very wealthy people were not ensnared by mr Epstein and would love to keep their involvement low key.
I mean, Julie K. Brown wrote like 30? articles about it, talked to 60+ victims, her reporting lead to Epstein's arrest, Acosta's resignation, Maxwell's trial -- I don't think she's "on the take".
Is it an appeal to authority to trust a primary source who is literally in the courtroom every day, instead of a random anonymous Twitter account just cribbing from primary sources?
I grant you she’s doing a good job, but that does not grant her a monopoly on fact. If only accredited journalists are allowed to report then we have no Wikileaks, no citizen journalism etc. Twitter is in the wrong to suppress an account on account of “artificially” inflating engagement. First, they don’t have to present evidence and second What news organ doesn’t create artificial engagement? It’s a preposterous excuse.
Real journalists as in they're literally in the courtroom reporting from the trial, and one of them wrote the series of articles that broke the Epstein thing wide open... vs. randos on Twitter just cribbing their reporting while writing "THREAD" at the top.
How is it remotely controversial to prefer primary sources.. As much as it annoys the very online, reporting isn't just writing twitter threads with your opinions, it actually takes fact finding effort.
> It was some doofus not at the trials trying to shill his paid sub stack and then tweeting absolute bullshit. As you can imagine, a lot of the 500,000 followers were bots, which is probably why it got suspended. Also we are covering this for Barstool Sports.
(Quote tweeting a Barstool Sports account, so that part’s a joke).
> It had 200k followers the day after it was launched it doesn’t take a damn genius to figure it out!!!
very convenient that a lot of bot accounts suddenly follows an account for people trying to amplify the accessibility of information of a trial that is suspiciously low profile considering the people involved.
if you listen to trueanon they had to open multiple overflow rooms becuase press agents from all over the world are lining up hours early to get it, it's not low profile.
I just opened the front pages of CNN, Fox News, BBC News and NBC News and found the Maxwell case either completely uncovered on the front pages, opinion-only coverage, coverage of only this particular Twitter story, tabloid nonsense or coverage buried so far down the page in a sidebar it may as well not be there.
That seems pretty poor to me for such a high profile case.
You can pay money for followers. You don't need the means of a nation state or shadowy cabal. I'm right there with you on the Maxwell/Epstein story being far more significant though.
But an analogy is, if you have a legitimate criticism of the security state/"deep state" (a phrase I use and have no aversion to), it's not useful to buy into Qanon nonsense just because they criticize some of the same people. I know nothing directly about "patriot one" so I'm not saying it's Qanon level nonsense, but I'll defer to TrueAnon that it was probably counter-productive as a source. And making that judgment doesn't put anyone in league with the devil.
Just follow better informed and more scrupulous sources. TrueAnon are flippant and mischievous in ways that diminish them slightly, but on the whole, they're excellent. And they're at the trial every day.
I care deeply about the hacker news community, but engaging a conspiracy theorist on a standard discussion is destructive and dangerous to the overall community because such a conversation is a grounds to express more "facts" and reach a broader market. My response quickly points out the connection to existing dangerous communities and reinforces our reality as people casually browsing an internet forum and preempts further discussion and replies of ("I'm just saying")
Since you care deeply about the HN community, you should refrain from posting low-quality comments and breaking the site guidelines. As they point out, the way to deal with egregious comments is to not reply, to downvote/flag, and possibly email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can take a look. Otherwise we just end up in a tedious, offtopic spiral.
The discussion here focused on a single spam account being banned from Twitter, flagging comments and suspecting accounts promoting conspiracy theories validates that disgusting worldview (that big tech has a nefarious connection to underaged trafficking). But as the other comment said I do appreciate your civility. I would like to point out this tedious off topic spiral has the benefit of refusing the engage the dangerous ideas we were originally responding too, and instead pivoting the topic.
Ok, but the cost of tedious downward spirals greatly exceeds the benefit. Much better is not to feed them. We all need to just accept wrongness on the internet as a cost of doing internet on the internet. Fighting it amplifies it.
I think that's the fundamental disagreement. I think fighting it through dressing down is most effective. Conspiracy theories thrive on politeness, and masking harmful leaps of faith as innocent conversation. Mockery quickly points out the inherent bad faith of the premise. I don't think open platforms have to cater to such extremism.
HN is one kind of site (the kind where that's not ok) and not the other. I get that not everyone agrees with the guidelines or would design a community to be this way, and that's fine—there's room for many different kinds of community, including many that haven't been created yet. We're going to enforce the rules of this one, though.
That's a valid perspective and I find this community to be a place of interesting content and discussion the majority of the time. Obviously my comment was flagged, and looking at the original parent I replies reveals a vast array of discussion circling around dangerous speculation and paranoia, so whatever goals I aimed to accomplish failed.
Oh well, it's ultimately just the internet, I have to believe people are good enough not to become radicalized. Worrying about these issues is more likely to get me banned then to generate anything productive.
it is in fact very easy to not fully believe conspiracy theories, those who do go all in with those are not the primary demographic that enjoys thinking about conspiracy theories. It is primarily an activity practiced by people who are capable of entertaining wild ideas without believing them as truth, aka skeptics. I never understood the massive public stigma around being able to have a wild imagination but stay grounded regardless.
Nobody prominent is involved. This case is so larded with misplaced expectations. We as of yet have no real proof any prominent people besides Prince Andrew may be tangentially implicated and no reason to think Maxwell has any compromising information if they were. And even if both those assumptions are true there's no reason they'd be pertinent to her trial. Her trial which is happening likely because the prosecutor couldn't force a plea.
I don't know how you operate, but when I hear that the royal family is implicated, I immediately start to wonder who else is involved and not dismiss the case all together.
Again. Zero proof. Think about all the dots to connect for it to be a murder and how few for it to be a suicide. He had absolutely every reason to be suicidal and the evidence says it's very likely. For it to be murder we have to assumed a giant chain of events for which we have proof of none.
* Very powerful people procured his services for something illegal <- Maybe, no proof
* Epstein had incriminating evidence on those powerful people proving their illegal activities <- Maybe, no proof, requires above unproven point to be true
* Powerful people knew what evidence he had, believed he would leverage it to reduce his punishment <- Maybe, no proof, requires all above unproven points to be true
* Powerful people hired ninjas to invade the detention center, evade all the cameras (all but one camera was working and recorded the approaches to his cell), murder Epstein to make it look exactly like a suicide, leave no traces, no witnesses <- Maybe, getting pretty ludicrous by now
You just added another several levels of speculation. Could the CIA pull off an Op like this? Maybe. Have they ever assassinated an American citizen on American soil? Not that we know of. Would they take orders from a president looking to cover up his involvement in sex trafficking and obey without question and leak no details? No. That's pure fantasy.
Not in the US. The US audience doesn't really care about the UK royal family.
And in the UK, the media is constrained by stronger libel laws such that they'll sit on their haunches in terms of reporting on things in the case until they are considered factual enough to withstand a UK libel suit. Allegations thrown about in a foreign court of law don't meet that bar.
We don't know if there are prominent people involved in every case in every courtroom in the world. Maybe Bill Clinton has been stalking Bushwick stealing bikes for the last 5 years. Probably not though. Meanwhile the most recent ex-president is directly implicated in trying to upend democracy and lying about deliberately spreading covid at the White House.
Okay, then there is no reason to ban this twitter user at all, because there are plenty of ways to follow this trial and have the public decide for themselves what they think.
They also suspended Nancy Tracker [0], a twitter account tracking Nancy Pelosi's stock trades.
Something else I noticed that I think has changed is the follower counts on suspended accounts, which is only available on the app. It may have always been hidden on the web.
I get it, they're a private platform. But if they're acting on behalf of powerful state actors, how can we say that's not suppression on speech? The white house has admitted that they're in direct contact with social media platforms even going so far as tagging posts for "misinformation" [1]. In theory the state can't restrict the speech on social media. But in practice they don't even need to.
If so - whatever got them suspended (bot farm upvotes usually?) got both accounts suspended. These then aren't separate suspensions but one person's suspension across multiple accounts.
You quite possibly hit the nail on the head. Sometimes, far too often, random people doing nothing underhanded become a false positive statistic for some sort of automated malicious activity detection and have their accounts suspended for no good reason.
But other times, those automated malicious activity detectors are doing their job correctly, and people really ARE doing something underhanded, and the giant corporation in question chooses not to air their reasoning in public, which is probably the right call (from the corporation's perspective) most of the time. It's hard to know from the outside which one of those two things happened.
The new "private information" policy has been widely abused in the last week or so. A lot of accounts of this nature are going up and down as people war over false reports.
I just got banned from Twitter a couple days ago for the same reason: "platform manipulation and spam". I only occasionally tweet about college football and don't do anything illicit at all. All I can figure is I was banned simply because of the accounts I follow, which included @TrackerTrial among other "controversial" conservative-type political accounts.
It's not merely "conservative" accounts who have been banned. Plenty of anti-war activists, supporters of government transparency and general voices against the narrative set by the DC blob have been banned who were in no way, "conservative". You could ask Wikileaks supporters how they have been treated by Twitter, if you can find any of them that haven't been banned.
I am not sure if they are aware of the Fediverse [1,2]. The Fediverse essentially rebuilds all the social-networking services but as federated services. This means each service can be hosted by multiple instances and instances can communicate with one another, but all still have their internal rules. I think they even used the "-verse" term before the whole Metaverse-hype.
They could move the tracker to a suitable Mastodon instance [3] or even host their own Mastodon instance in order to get a suitable exposure out there (Maybe even use one of the Blogging instances). This would also be a first test how robust the Fediverse is with respect to external pressure.
It is sad that actions like this don't even surprise people anymore. Perhaps this is one of those Twitter actions that falls under the umbrella of "improving community discussions" instead of the first amendment.
What I especially detest is the implication that if you disagree with Twitter's banning Trump, then you must be a Trump supporter. It's the epitome of the "first they came for X" strategy. I can disagree with Trump, and still also disagree with the precedent of arbitrarily banning a political figure for much less than other figures and groups are allowed to get away with.
And what exactly did he post on Twitter to 'try to overthrow the country'?
I'm not a Trump supporter in the slightest – I think he's a ridiculous buffoon – but I loathe even more the politicisation of truth, and the idea that anything goes, provided it attacks the right people.
What you're saying is not true. That shouldn't be a political statement.
Really. I am not a trump fan but this is completely bolocks. Yeah, good for political discourse, but not something reasonable people really believe.
Don’t live in America though, maybe I am wrong.
Likewise, I'm also not a Trump fan and also not American (I'm British), but the American centre-left perspective on the Jan 6 riots is utterly ridiculous. It's yet more predictable histrionics from the bored suburban housewives who - deeply insultingly - arrogate to call themselves the #Resistance, and other such privileged bollocks.
There is no evidence whatever that it was an effort to take over the country - much less that Trump, or anyone beyond possibly a couple of wingnut far-right House reps, conspired to bring it about. It was some angry hicks going on a rumpus.
As a side note, it's disturbing to see that 'the paranoid style in American politics' now extends to the (centre-centre-)Left as well as the Right. First it was the ludicrous fact-free conspiracism about Russia conniving to install Trump as President; now it's the (transitively contradictory) theory that Trump, unable to cheat the election, tried to bring about a coup - not via the enormous tools at his disposal as President, but by supposedly encouraging some morons in fancy dress to storm the Capitol building and then aimlessly wander around stealing petty artefacts.
I suppose the paranoid style is simply a response by the dispossessed - but this is the first time that the rich and comfortable suburban centre has experienced being dispossessed.
It's ridiculous that this utterly obvious joke is being downvoted. I'm amazed -- and I say this kindly, as someone with Asperger's -- at the aggregate autism level on this site.
Why would you be surprised that an account that was accused of being part of a content system spreading misinformation would be suspended?
A person can say what they want but no-one is forced to listen to it or help promote it.
As well, if this account was part of a system of bots and fake accounts that were spreading a particular message isn't that something that you want to see removed from a social media platform?
Isn't authentic information and material important?
I don't support reasonless bans and no communication from Twitter. That said, this account was not particularly useful for tracking the trial. In particular, they were tweeting a lot of what they hoped would happen or wanted to happen. Folks were constantly replying "is that what happened today, or what should happen?" E.g. something like "Now is the time for Federal Agents to show exactly who was on all the CDs". This was not an event that happened in the courtroom. Clearly the prosecution has no desire to reveal all that information when there's still a possibility of going after those parties next. The trial tracker account was no good.
Is there a good case for why someone who doesn't use twitter would create an account and use it now? Trying to figure out what organic growth for them looks like.
A few months ago I created an account for a website I have, followed a few accounts, tweeted once and was then banned for literally no reason. All of this happened in less than 24h.
After that, I try to avoid Twitter when possible.
It's also a cesspool of entitled pseudo-intellectuals (both left and right leaning), so I don't miss it much, honestly.
My view is always a bit alien, but I get the sense if you follow the wrong person out of curiosity you get banned, which takes on weird reputation risk in itself. It seems like a vice anyway. A strange game, the only way to win is to be like everyone else.
I signed up and was immediately banned after following 3 different accounts in fairly rapid succession. I had already been "following" these accounts for some time by directly going to their twitter pages on the website and had them bookmarked, so I just went to each person directly from the bookmarks and hit "follow." This is apparently "Unusual activity." In order to prove I wasn't a bot and continue to use their service, they wanted my phone number (I signed up through the website and don't want the app on my phone). I really don't care about tweeting myself and it was just for the convenience factor of having the accounts all in a single place without having to go to different bookmarks each time, so it's not a big deal to not have an account. It's all publicly available, although they're trying to make it harder to navigate twitter unless you have an account and signed in.
Twitter never doesn't decide it needs your phone number after a short while. Nothing you did or didn't do made that happen. At most you sped it up a couple days.
I tried to open an account a while back as there were a lot of coders on Twitter that I wanted to follow. I almost immediately shut the account down due to 1) the utterly broken search and 2) the sheer number of 'suggested' accounts or trends to follow.
Even if you aren't concerned about issues that this account brings up it is a miserable user experience.
I opened an account 3 weeks ago and had pretty much the same experience. But.. then I unfollowed every verified account and topic, and it got much better. Once you find a few accounts you like it's easier to find more.
Since then I've discovered many cool resources and been invited to niche dev communities. It's too early to say if it's worth it yet but I would say yes if I can grow to a few hundred followers. (At that point you have supported to boost product hunt launches, people to give feedback, amplify your support issues, etc)
despite all this, twitter is still the source where you can find "dissident" voices who speak for themselves. For example with the whole discussion wrt to vaccines, all other sources do some inane level of "censoring" which has no rhyme or reason. HN generally avoids the subject due to politics, reddit allows its $0/month moderators to do whatever the fuck they want, FB ewww i wont even go there, what's left?
For me twitter is the only source where i can subscribe to people who aren't passionate, aren't constantly preaching, and aren't afraid to present their side of the story (they exist, you just have to find them by aggressive elimination)
I think this really just speaks to the problem of people relying on platforms like this for news.
The system can easily be gamed and there is something about the immediacy of it that tends to inflame people. Which I suspect is why there are so many people trying to game them in the first place.
As a whole I don't think we are really mentally and emotionally prepared for this kind of communication.
On one hand, there are a lot of bots which are more or less malicious, e.g. trying to cause political strife or promote scams. On the other hand, Twitter sells advertisers on the idea that they have however many millions of users. So if Twitter was to actually get rid of the bots, then they would cause advertising revenue to drop, which might actually kill the company. So they are stuck with algorithmic techniques which walk a fine line of accuracy.
The solution is probably to mass verify real users (though "real name" verification is problematic). Right now, they use verification as a way to play favorites. Real users with hundreds of thousands of followers can't get verified.
"Just reacting" is questioning Twitter's motives to suspend an account for reporting court proceedings of the most scandalous case in recent US history which entangles everyone on the top political echelons, wall street, hollywood, academia and big tech. Sure go ahead supress the discussion here too.
>Twitter's motives to suspend an account for reporting court proceedings
It's clear Twitter suspended the account for TOS violations, and not the subject matter.
I have no dog in this fight, do not follow the case, but a quick search of Twitter yielded these not-suspended accounts that are "reporting court proceedings" as you say:
So, @hxkandbe's request that we use the suspended account's blog post about the suspension to add some context and clarity is in no way suppressing the discussion, but instead seeking to elevate and inform it.
It's always TOS violations when convenient. Plenty of accounts violate TOS and go untouched.
Not casting judgment on this specific case, but the ease with which it's possible to selectively apply TOS to bans should be concerning to free speech oriented people.
Just make a broad TOS and you can ban anybody you like.
The person running the Maxwell tracking account ran that account too (per their Gab) -- so whatever they were doing to get banned (they apparently had 200k followers a few days after creating their account, so they likely had paid bots) ensnared both.
Not to be conspiratorial, but through a political lens they both serve to serve a similar message. Maybe they're part of a low-profile campaign, who knows.
I'm sure it's just a coincidence that Twitter added the rule banning pictures/reports on non-public persons on the first day of the trial.. which also coincidentally was the day Twitters and other companies CEO/CFO's all suddenly resigned; thus making them non-public persons..
Here's a good youtube account run by a lawyer who has physically been at the trial every day and gives pretty good updates and legal takes: https://www.youtube.com/c/GoodLawgic/videos
The truth has always been a threat to those who hide behind lies. It helps to realize that the world isn't necessarily getting worse as much as our information about it is getting better.
when the account started posting stuff like "when the trial is over we'll be exposing ALL corporate and government corruption!!" I knew its days were numbered (not because anything will actually come of it)
This would all be so much easier if Twitter and other social media companies were actually transparent and explicit about the specific reasons an account was banned. Instead, you are just generically told that you are in violation of the Terms of Service and MAYBE if you're lucky, linked to a certain section of the ToS which might theoretically be relevant to your case. The specific rule that was broken, and examples of behavior which broke that rule are never given.
Whatever the reasoning behind not going into more detail may be is irrelevant. The fact that none is given feeds directly into the narrative that Big Tech is unjustly censoring The Truth That They Don't Want You To Know and only exacerbates the current environment of distrust and disinformation. I feel like this is something that is going to have to change to have any hope of ever returning to some sort of consensus on what constitutes objective reality.
Let's consider that the question can be altered slightly to "how much private space can one single entity acquire?" Perhaps the current understanding of public/private is sufficient, e.g. "a private company can bar who it chooses, given that they do not violate some paradigm of protected classes, etc." The problem is that ONE entity owns a majority of a certain type of "space."
The redefinition would be to say, "once you own more than X% of something, it cannot be governed by existing rules about 'private' spaces?"
This is exactly the key in all conversations about banned accounts on private companies. In my opinion, either our habits regarding information intake using the internet needs to change, so that we use "the old commons" more often. (like real town squares)
Or there NEEDS to be a jurisdiction where if you are big enough, you can't just arbitrarily ban users from your space. The propagation of free thought and sound ideas depends on one of the points completely. There are huge problems, like how a company can be regulated when it is a global company. I don't want US law to facilitate Swedish spaces.
Honestly, the first idea where habits are formed back onto the "old commons" is probably the only real solution. But it's not exactly simple to change the habits of an entire planet.
I'm pretty confident that if a suitable case made it to the supreme court, social media like Twitter would be deemed a de facto public square under the US Constitution.
Hopefully then people would apply a little more critical thought, rather than just parroting private vs public.
It's clear that at a certain scale, a private space becomes de facto public one, similar to anti-trust legislation breaking up perfectly valid private business that also happen to be monopolies.
Thomas might write that in a dissent (in fact, he already has). But he won't find a lot of allies on SCOTUS.
However, the key distinction between limited public forums and private forums is that the government creates the former. Twitter is private, and it has constitutionally-protected freedom of association to choose who it can associate with and constitutionally-protected freedom from being compelled to speak certain viewpoints. Any government that attempts to require social media to let everybody speak will find itself facing a constitutional challenge, as such a law is laughably unconstitutional. (Indeed, Texas and Florida have already written such laws, and they've already been enjoined for the very same reasons).
You are talking about prior case law, while I'm talking about likely future trajectory of case law. The constitution protects what the supreme court deems it to protect, within some reasonable interpretation of the text.
There is no text in the constitution protecting abortions either, yet we have the Roe v Wade result.
Here was the finding:
"The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides a fundamental "right to privacy" that protects a pregnant woman's liberty to choose whether or not to have an abortion. This right is not absolute, and must be balanced against the government's interests in protecting women's health and protecting prenatal life. The Texas law making it a crime to procure an abortion violated this right."
I'm sure any rational observer can infer that the result stretches the definition of the wording to reach that conclusion. I am not anti-choice, just pointing out how loose of an interpretation can be used to reach a result.
It's pretty clear to me that if we enter a world where 95% of communication runs through a handful of companies, that right to free speech is meaningless without protections also against sufficiently sized/impactful organizations. There's certainly a way to reach that conclusion using the current text.
A conclusion could be that the government is infringing on the rights to free speech by not adequately protecting the public from large private entities. That's a pretty easy to reason and grasp result.
Let's revisit this comment in a few years. Pretty confident it will play out this way, especially given the current makeup of the court.
There is no text in the constitution protecting either a right to abortion or any broader right to privacy. There is specific text in the constitution protecting speech and association; in fact, it's the first enumerated right. Abortion has a much higher hill to climb than free association.
Apart from that you are also free to apply freedom of speech as a principle outside the bounds of the law, like many platforms have done most of the time until advertising got out of hand with privacy violations and content restrictions. Don't know how anyone could support more content restrictions... doesn't seem too bright at all, didn't hear any compelling case and you always have the option to not engage.
Yeah, there are also many workarounds aside from censoring. Such as allowing people to select filters/their own curation algorithm and so on.
But it seems to be the European model to censor societally undesirable viewpoints, from my understanding. So free speech from the American perspective does not seem to be a universally held belief.
Personally I think it's worth striving for, but providing tools for those who want to live in a bubble.
There will never be a "correct" single algorithm or filter that can be applied globally. These companies are doing a lot of unnecessary damage to themselves by trying to force it to be that way.
I believe all algorithms for curating what you see on the largest social media platforms should be required to be open source/explained, and that third parties should be able to write their own to be used on those platforms. Idea needs to be fleshed out more, but something along those lines. And all speech that's constitutional should be left untouched (in USA). If you don't like it, filter it out.
Agreed, especially if they would think 10 minutes about the values they allegedly espouse. There will always be something offensive in a culture that is benign or even welcomed in another. Their model is some artifical neutral culture mirroring diplomatic or corporate cultures.
Europes legislators are prominently very old and their fears are projected on the net.
We had hate speech laws for more than 1.5 centuries and still 2 dictatorships in one century and people still believe the state should regulate content and this power won't be abused. I don't know anymore, hereditary brain damage probably. It fits the definition of insanity too.
I believe we need some form of fisher-price browser that keeps some groups demanding moderation in their own land and completely separate them from those that do not like it. Android- and iPhone-countries, slowly running out of ideas...
> I'm pretty confident that if a suitable case made it to the supreme court, social media like Twitter would be deemed a de facto public square under the US Constitution.
1) Everyone agreed that there was no chance of the presence of petitioners implied that they were endorsed by the shopping center. This is key: Pruneyard's speech isn't being impacted, so such a law isn't infringing Pruneyard's rights. This does NOT hold true for social media--the reputation of even the largest social media sites is driven by the content posted on them, which means any restrictions on sites' ability to regulate their own posted content necessarily infringes those sites' rights.
2) The California state constitution has a stronger guarantee than the US constitution, and the right of the protestors to set up a table was only granted by the former and not the latter. But this is only permissible so long as it doesn't infringe the US constitutional rights, which, see the first point.
The issue I see is: that was an outdoor shopping mall where you didn't have to check an "I agree to the terms and conditions" in order to enter. And Twitter's T&C say they can suspend you for any reason.
My point is that most case law was ruled on when businesses were an order of magnitude smaller, and had smaller impact on the individual.
Sometimes difference in scale is also difference in kind.
A lot of prior case law that involved much smaller private entities would be unlikely to hold if retested at current scale, against e.g. Facebook or Twitter.
Even if the mechanism isn't through the constitution, Congress is likely to enact similar protections through new laws sooner or later.
This is getting into the more nuanced argument of “taking private property” for the public good - or at least allowing access to it for first amendment activities.
One issue with “forcing” first amendment protections on a private party is compelling speech from that party (in this case Twitter). If Twitter is entitled to first amendment “protection” from the government then it can’t be compelled to “speak” on behalf of a user.
Prohibiting shopping centers from blocking first amendment activities recognized that there are only so many “publicly available” squares in “real life” where people can exercise their first amendment rights. This doesn’t exactly hold true on the internet. There are an “infinite” number of public squares.
Another way to look at this is how IP “theft” is thought of. If I steal your CD you can’t listen to the music on it - but if I copy the MP3 then no one has been “deprived” of the original. Similarly “anyone” can stand in the “public square” of the internet without depriving someone else of that same space and access - an argument that doesn’t work in real life.
If there are infinite public squares do you need to be given access to all of them? Do you want to be compelled to speak for someone else simply because you’ve become large enough?
As a US citizen I’d prefer that these issues with corporations be addressed via other means that deal with monopoly power, open standards, data privacy/portability and similar. The first amendment is a powerful sword but it’s not a solution to a “bad actor” at the scale of Twitter - break up the company if you don’t like what they’re doing but don’t force them to speak for other people.
> But there aren't and infinite number online or off.
Not literally, no. But there is effectively unlimited room in "cyberspace" for both public and private squares. That people actually choose to congregate in a particular place isn't really part of the definition. You have the right to speak to those who wish to listen—not the right to an unwilling audience or the use of others' property to amplify your message.
> Online, are there any public squares?
Only those that the operators choose to make public. The government could run its own forums where it guarantees access to anyone who wants to speak… not that this is necessarily less prone to censorship. It can't guarantee you an audience (and most sane individuals would probably avoid a completely unmoderated forum given the kinds of speakers they attract), but then that's also true of real-life public squares.
It's quite an interesting question. There are lots of privately owned 'public' spaces in meatspace, and the function of a space (a place where people get together in public) and its ownership (municipal, commons, private) don't always overlap.
Which doesn't necessarily mean that Twitter should be treated as a town square, because it's clearly something different to that. Similar sorts of concerns about the centrality of private spaces to public use led to PruneYard Shopping Center v. Robins, a California case allowing political activity at shopping centres against the wishes of the operator. That case hasn't been widely followed in other states and countries, though, probably for good reasons.
Section 230 is specifically designed to allow them to do that without being liable. Without section 230, a site "curating" by deleting some comments, banning some accounts, etc. would then be liable for any illegal content on the site. The EFF has a very good article on why removing/repealing it would be a horrible idea: https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230
Honestly I read through the substack and its not that good reporting. Not the kind of hard hitting journalism the tag of this post suggests -- not worth your time. Still shouldn't be banned tho!
Can’t have transparency. This account was posting pictures of Bill Clinton on Lolita Jet and Hollywood celebrities on Epsteins Blackbook. The made men protect other made men.
There should be a federal law that requires that these moderation teams keep extensive records of their censorship work product in order to maintain their immunity. This censorship work product would then be have to be made available in discovery.
Lawsuits challenging a censorship action or account suspension relating to censorship should be granted an exception to the otherwise binding arbitration agreement.
The purpose of this would be to deter ad hoc political censorship, and to instead encourage these companies to move towards a more procedure driven censorship system in which they simply respond to court orders and leave everything else up. So, for example, if I sued the John Doe operating this account for copyright infringement or if a law enforcement agency won a court order to get the account taken down for posting illegal pornography, that's fine, that's how things are supposed to work.
If instead the service is just arbitrarily censoring people, they have to keep strict records of their work products and produce those records in discovery. The companies would also have a hard time deflecting responsibility onto individual censors because almost anything that they could possibly do would be within the scope of their employment.
Yes, this would make what most of these companies do with their censorship teams economically impractical. That's the point.
There's several problems with centralized web service corporations maintaining effectively public commons on for-profit "private property" and being regulated by one government or another: they can do anything they want if they don't offend the government structures, they're also at the behest and service of a particular government who can tell them what they can and can't do, they're not classified or regulated as utilities, and can censor any idea or push whatever agendas they like (or whoever pays them enough).
Only a nonprofit out-of-reach of any particular governments' jurisdiction can remain neutral, but they also need minimal, clear, healthy, and conscientious moderation to not be springboards for harmful activities.
I thought that the first amendment was about people rather than companies. In addition to that there are many products where companies have to display certain information, such as age rating for games, health warrnings on cigaretts, food content, allergy warning, nutrition labels, medicine side-effects, etc
It is hard to classify censorship as speech for a site that it is all about user-content.
From a legal perspective, corporations are people too. Age ratings for games are voluntary, not legally required. The Supreme Court has held that governments can impose some limits and requirements on purely commercial speech, but those precedents don't apply to censorship decisions made by private companies. The fact that a site contains mostly user generated content is legally irrelevant.
I understand that some people don't like this situation but that is the reality of US federal law today. It won't change without a Constitutional amendment, or a major realignment of the Supreme Court.
Companies are just people as far as the constitution is concerned (or really they're groups of people, but assembly is also protected by the first amendment!)
The food safety labels is an interesting point, but I'm not even talking about gov regulations here. Just, let's say Twitter deletes your post. What do you sue them for?
The 1a allows twitters employees to express themselves as they wish, even through the company, so their removal of your post is simply their own protected expression.
> I thought that the first amendment was about people rather than companies.
Any amendment written before slavery was abolished probably had a rather flexible view on the whole "people" issue. If an African American can be property then a corporation can be a person.
I meant under the new fantasy legislation, probably different from some of the recent badly drafted / silly state laws trying to do the same thing. This would be what they would have to do to keep their Section 230 immunity.
What you're describing would be a ridiculously massive government overreach into a private company. I'm not American and I'm not some loony libertarian but you have to understand that private companies are and should be free to decide who they allow to use their service and under what conditions (within the bounds of anti discrimination laws).
While I wouldn't be terribly surprised if this user was botting their own account (I remember them tweeting the same photo on their Nancy account twice, attributed to different dates for example) this seems like an abusable ban condition. Couldn't I bot someone else's account in order to get them banned?
Their _entire_ business model is predicated on their algorithm manipulating engagement. There's very little "organic" engagement on social media any more.
This is the case for some community centers, but definitely not all of them. It’s not the case for any of the 4 or 5 that are closest to my home. Many are run by private organizations.
Alternatively, it would be like kicking out the person trashing the place or screaming obscenities and making everyone uncomfortable, which is generally accepted in the real world.
Sort of, we’d only kick out the lout we disagree with but let the other lout that we agree with continue spouting obscenities and we wink at each other and congratulate ourselves on our taste.
Maybe they mean that activity on the account has been retweeted/liked by bots a lot? Seems like social media engagement amplification is all the rage nowadays.
There's multiple huge problems if Twitter takes this approach to rules enforcement even if they're genuinely trying to be honest and unbiased.
1) Every account on Twitter has "bot activity associated with this account": if for no other reason that random advertising bots retweet, follow, or like random people and posts to attempt to blend in as a genuine account and hide their true purpose. This reasoning gives Twitter essentially carte blanche to delete everybody, even assuming they were willing to be fully transparent about the evidence surrounding their bans (which they're not).
2) Bad Actors can easily sabotage accounts they dislike. Here's just 1 method how this can be done: there's 10,001 shady fly by night firms in India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Vietnam, and other countries that offer services to "buy followers" or "buy retweets". It's trivial for somebody without programming skill and even a few hundred dollars to just buy mass spam and shill the hell out of an account (the lower quality the better) until somebody notices and that account gets banned.
You don't even have to assign bad motives to Twitter to see the obvious problems here.
I suspect a key difference here is “all of the users other twitter accounts”. If a bunch of accounts registered to the same email address all start boosting each other that’s probably pretty easy to detect, and distinct from someone else trying to do it to you.
You appear to be assuming that the entire team of people at twitter who work on these problems either haven't considered or aren't able to address these issues. While there often are challenges with moderation and rules enforcement, this kind of stuff is pretty easy to address.
But if you look at that profile, he says he works at Google. Think about that for a second. He claims this is an easy problem. But consider Google's approach to spam detection algorithms and see how there are so many false positives and innocent people getting screwed out of their ad accounts and livelihood. If this kind of stuff was easy, why hasn't anybody informed Google about it?
I'm not trying to pick on anybody here, but I believe there's a level of arrogance in thinking that this form of sabotage is somehow a solvable problem unless you somehow have access to all communications on the planet.
I very specifically said that there were hard problems, just that this wasn't one ;)
In this case, a fairly straightforward account age rule would get you like 95% of the way there. My twitter account, which is 7 years old and has a few hundred followers and tweets once a week isn't going to benefit from this. You don't ban it. Similarly, you don't ban a 7 year old account with 10s of thousands of followers that's been doing the same kind of tweeting for 2 years and recently got a bunch of bot follows.
On the other hand, a 3 week old account with a ton of bot follows is suspicious. This'll miss older accounts that were unused and changed (e.g. if my account suddenly started tweeting 17x a day about divisive political content and suddenly got a bunch of bot follows, so you need slightly fancier approaches).
You probably further improve this with some kind of multifaceted account realness score based on a pagerank like analysis of followers (following bots lowers your score, as does being followed by them). And ofc you still ban the bots, but you don't punish any accounts above a certain threshold of "real".
The other part of it is that randomly sabotaging twitter accounts isn't going to happen very often, it costs money, and unless there's an ROI (extorting people), no one is going to do it except a handful of people for teh lulz or whatever. But importantly, most of those people will be bad at doing this kind of attack in a convincing way.
There are lots of difficult problems, but OP chose one that doesn't happen and is straightforward to address.
Your proposal is quite naive and displays the type of aggressive ignorance all too common among software developers. Aged Twitter accounts with thousands of followers are available for sale if you know where to look. They don't even cost very much. Brigading attacks by flagging content in bad faith are also very common for political and ideological reasons.
>Aged Twitter accounts with thousands of followers are available for sale
Yes, this is mostly irrelevant to what we were discussing though (and goes to the "change in behavior" thing I mentioned, which while more challenging, is still often detectable).
> Brigading attacks by flagging content in bad faith are also very common for political and ideological reasons.
Yes, but this is distinct from trying to frame someone for purchasing/using bot follows, and so is mostly irrelevant to what we were discussing. I agree that this is a challenging problem to solve, it's just not the one that was mentioned.
I'll reiterate:
There are challenging problems in abuse detection. Someone abusively using fake accounts to frame a legitimate user else for using fake accounts isn't a particularly challenging (or relevant) one.
a) There's a difference between addressing a problem and solving it: and I'd say that you're doing the former and not the latter. Your general algorithmic approach is likely to block some problems of course. However, it also creates the door for numerous false positives, especially for a platform like Twitter where an account devoted to noteworthy news or viral content can go from account creation to tens or hundreds of thousands of followers in days or weeks.
b) For your page rank analysis, how do you a priori decide who is a bot or not? Oh I know, you can look at a bunch of data like posting frequency, location, keywords, links posted, and other things, and try and create some clever formula to decide the likelihood that some account is a bot. But at the end of the day, even the best possible approach is going to miss bots created by even half-way clever people, and wrongly screw some innocent people over.
c) What about transparency? How can the public trust any of Twitter's claims that bots did X, therefore we had to ban account Y? Where's the proof? Given that bots on Twitter are endemic, this accusation would always be technically true, to some extent.
d) The amount of money and effort thrown around to influence social media is staggering. Even if you can't program, even an average person can buy tens of thousands of followers for what amounts to pocket change. The crazy Twitter activists who spend 18 hours a day on Twitter wouldn't be willing to spend what amounts to a few days worth of minimum wage work to try and take out some arch-nemesis? A shady political activist who wants to influence politics or hide some damaging info and has access to millions of funding isn't able to arrange this? A nation state who wants to put their thumb on the scale of American public opinion can't spend the tiniest bit of pocket change for a concerted effort to move the scale of public opinion?
e) I don't want to be insulting, but your stated approach and mentality here is exactly why Big Tech algorithms screw over so many innocent people.
As opposed to using Twitter to "naturally" amplify information, just like our forefathers did out in the wild back when we were still in touch with nature and Twitter didn't contain any pesticides or plastic :)
> user "the account was “artificially” amplifying information".
Where does it say the information was false in that sentence? The newspeak worked.
and to go from "artificially" to bots and fake accounts... OK, maybe. But how do you know? Not because they told you in that sentence, that's for sure.
The meaning is clear, and kudos to Twitter for defining it well. But if you think through the usual meanings of the word "artificial" and apply it to this situation, you end up with some amusing conclusions.
Definition of artificial
1 : humanly contrived (see contrive sense 1b) often on a natural model : man-made
// an artificial limb
// artificial diamonds
2a : having existence in legal, economic, or political theory
b : caused or produced by a human and especially social or political agency
// an artificial price advantage
// Within these companies, qualified women run into artificial barriers that prevent them from advancing to top positions in management.— James J. Kilpatrick
3a : lacking in natural or spontaneous quality
// an artificial smile
// an artificial excitement
b : imitation, sham
// artificial flavor
4 : based on differential morphological characters not necessarily indicative of natural relationships
// an artificial key for plant identification
5 obsolete : artful, cunning
Definition 1 doesn't apply: Twitter is an artificial construct to start with.
Definition 2 doesn't apply, or if it does it's a bit of a stretch.
Definition 3 clearly applies. So, "lacking in natural or spontaneous quality".
So, what "amplification" activities on Twitter have a natural or spontaneous quality? Intentional clickbait or flamebait? Using tools to schedule posts in advance to maximize engagement? Jumping on trending hashtags? Paying a person to manage a Twitter account for you? Setting up a bot to automatically post articles from a website? All of these are allowed and can be used to amplify information, but none sound "natural" or "spontaneous" to me.
The meaning is clear and Twitter's rules are (IMO) very reasonable, but there is definitely something euphemistic about the phrase. The literal phrase would be "disallowed amplification", because the only real criteria for what is considered "artificial" are Twitter's own rules for what is allowed and what is not.
I do know what newspeak means because I was directly subjected to it as a kid until late 1989 (am from Romania). In this instance the powers that be just outsourced their censorship to private entities for plausible deniability (I think that’s the correct term). Imo that makes it worse because while one can stage a revolution against a government that is seen as despotic the same cannot be done against private entities in a society like ours.
Yes, and the Dutch East India Company was just a trading operation that had no long-term repercussions on the world. They're both transnationals (something that is an abomination against humanity, in my opinion).
There is no good faith reason to be on Twitter's side unless:
1). You work there, and it aligns with your interests for your current employer to continue to operate and generate profit (likewise if you hold Twitter stock).
2). You genuinely believe Twitter is furthering your goals, and you believe your goals to be parallel with the common good.
Otherwise, Twitter is not a person with a life, emotions, and hardships. It's a hollow corporate shell that's only purpose is to generate profits for shareholders.
Or 3). You still believe in the constitution and first amendment. They have their right to free speech just like I do, and I don't plan on chipping away at that right. If you have such issues with these massive companies perhaps we should address that, instead of trying to strip people of their constitutional rights?
> There is no good faith reason to be on Twitter's side unless:
Where did I say I was on Twitter's side? That's a whole loaded comment full of completely unfounded assertions.
Y'all are raising pitchforks when you haven't actually heard Twitter's side, just their automated message responses.
Personally, I think Twitter is a net negative for society, but there is an implication here that there is some totalitarian government control (i.e. anti first amendment) which is simply not true.
Try to work out the meaning that is clearly in front of you, see if there's anything there, instead of using the dictionary as an artificial body part
Also: You happen to be absolutely wrong. "Newspeak" does a very good job here. Twitter is using dodgy language not in use before to prevent the wrongthink of people questioning their censoring. And it worked quite well!
I am genuinely curious as to why you seem to assert that "Orwellian" can only apply to governments. I personally sense that we are entering an age where corporations can wield power and influence on the same level as governments themselves. And, that they are able to utilize many of the same tactics that states used in the past century.
Why, in your view, would it be incorrect to apply the term to the actions of these private/publicly traded companies?
> I am genuinely curious as to why you seem to assert that "Orwellian" can only apply to governments.
Because that's literally how it's use in the book.
> Why, in your view, would it be incorrect to apply the term to the actions of these private/publicly traded companies?
See point above.
From 1984:
“Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.”
Everyone knows Twitter is a private company, that is besides the point.
Consider this: Whoever governs society is the government. Reality does not have clear lines like a textbook about economics and politics might have. When does a company begin to govern society? In my opinion, companies like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Amazon, etc. are large enough to govern society. And as such they can be considered in a different light than your average corner store down the street.
If you disagree still. Would you consider the historial East India Trading Company a private enterprise, or something inbetween a political organisation and a private enterprise?
Where does the "monopoly on the use of force" come in? Twitter doesn't govern me, because it cannot force me to do anything if I don't have some kind of relationship with it. Same with Amazon or any other corporation. I'm not knowledgable about the East India Trading Company, but without an army and the ability to legally use force/violence to tell people what to do absent a business arrangement with them, I doubt they could be considered government.
EDIT: According to Wikipedia[1], "The company eventually came to rule large areas of India, exercising military power and assuming administrative functions." This sounds like a government power to me, one that Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Amazon don't have. I don't see examples of companies today that have these powers over people in my country, but am willing to be proven wrong.
> Everyone knows Twitter is a private company, that is besides the point.
Except all of the people who think Twitter is violating first amendment rights?[0] The idea of private vs government is pretty core the first amendment debate.
'Company' and 'government' aren't radically different categories. They overlap.
Company = group of people working together;
Government = entity in charge of something
Twitter is a company that governs people's usage of Twitter's platform. If Orwell's concepts are useful for understanding how it operates, we'll use them, and for that Twitter doesn't need to be a state.
First, it's clearly an analogy. It doesn't have to be exactly the same as the book. Second, both involve some more powerful party trying to force-feed an interpretation using deliberately unclear language.
No I think that 'corporate-speak' is the term for that. And it clearly doesn't get the point across since there are any number of people posting that this in an incorrect use of the word.
I think what is happening is that some people want to imply malice by misusing a word.
Companies use twisted non-straightforward language because they have the power to not suffer significant repercussions from doing so, just like a bona fide government. Some customers may see through the bullshit and leave, but on the whole most won't. Impotent totalitarianism is still totalitarianism.
Furthermore, newspeak in 1984 wasn't simply the language the government used to make pronouncements, but rather the language that people were expected to use to communicate (moreso for politically connected people IIRC). I'd say corporate speech with its baked in responsibility-dodging passive-aggression definitively qualifies, as the people making these statements seemingly believe they're communicating in earnest. It's only when they're taken out of the corporate context that their vacuousness becomes apparent.
Near everything about marketing is artificially amplifying information. Most of the time we just call it "click bait" and "SEO". If what the user did was use fake accounts and bots, the reasoning should be "using fake accounts and bots".
My question with this kind of infraction is how do they connect the user to the fake accounts and bots? Can I take down accounts I don't like buy paying a few bucks to a blatant bot farm?
This used to be very common on twitch a few years back. People would viewbot people they didn't like and they'd get 24-72 hour temp bans while it was investigated.
I don't think you really understand what newspeak[0] is supposed to be.
From wikipedia (or a reading of the book)
"Newspeak is a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary designed to limit the individual's ability to think and articulate "subversive" concepts such as personal identity, self-expression and free will."
What you are reacting to is a technical term that Twitter uses to describe a type of activity that they have found on their network. Specifically, using bots and fake accounts to create the impression that a message is popular or being retweeted by actual people.
As noted elsewhere in this topic, Twitter has an actual definition[1] of what this means.
There isn't really any reason to be confused by the wording of the reaon for the account being deactivated.
Newspeak was not confusing either. To an outsider the term reads more as an attempt to obfuscate and misdirect away from what is actually happening, ostensibly precisely what newspeak is meant to do.
(diclaimer: i actually agree on your position but.)
Newspeak is about destroying words to reduce the thought quality. The theory being somthing like: less precise words mean less precise thoughts.
This is the opposite of newspeak, this is creating new words association for new concepts (artificially amplifying information here meaning buying bot comments, retweets and likes). You can agree or disagree, you can find that this formulation lead to misinterpretation (i do), but this is not newspeak.
It's like Jordan Petterson reading of 1984. This really, really angers me. Even with people i kind of agree with. Maybe people should buy a text explanation of Orwell, as this is far from the easiest anticipation book to understand (the US government pushing of this book proves that really well) or read his experiences and how they translate in his books. And maybe tehy should re-read the books too. Winston's job was to remove words from the dictionary, not add new one.
I'm sorry, this is not personnal, but this is the 4rth time THIS WEEK that i hear someone talk to me about newspeak and being dead wrong about it. One of them critizing adding (ADDING ffs!) a new word in a dictionary. This had to come out.
Agree with your sentiment I guess. Don't use the term newspeak though, this is imho disqualifying.
> This really, really angers me. Even with people i kind of agree with.
When lazy or dishonest or weak arguments are used, I get more upset if it’s in support of things I agree with than things I don’t.
It undermines the position and makes it that much harder to discuss it in the future because I now have to disentangle from that on top of actually making a proper argument in favor of the position.
Eh, that's a bit overused and tends to fall into the "slipper slope" fallacy territory a lot of the time it's rolled out. I'm withholding judgement on this one as there seems to be some indication the account was using using sock puppets to make them more popular. If that's true (and it might not be) that would lower the temperature on this ban to a standard TOS violation of a well-known policy.
> tends to fall into the "slipper slope" fallacy territory a lot of the time it's rolled out
Yeah, and the "that's a 'slippery slope' fallacy" rebuttal is often addressing something that is an actual slippery slope a lot of the time it's rolled out. Pointing out a slippery slope by itself isn't proof that the thing in question isn't real or isn't bad. Slippery slopes are real, and are quite often bad.
Fair points: there are instances where long term gradual changes tooks small steps each time to reach a point far from the initial step. In this particular case where there might have been (not sure it's been established definitively) a ToS violation then I don't think we're at that that point if there actually was such a violation.
Slippery Slope isn’t a fallacy. It’s literally how things progress from good to worse.
Identifying early signs of Stalin’s rise to power would be called Slippery Slope these days.
As for twitter, their focus removing on information that is damaging to people in power is concerning. These days private corps wield as much or more power than governments.
I don't think that there is any in Stalin's rise to power[0] that would fit the definition.
The post you are responding to also refers specifically to the Slippery Slope Fallacy[1] which is a different beast than just calling something a 'Slippery Slope'
Ah there it is, the 'slippery slope fallacy' fallacy. Slippery slope arguments are not fundamentally fallacious. There's no such thing as "the slippery slope fallacy". There are slippery slope arguments, some of which are fallacious and many of which are not.
The Nazis had a paramilitary group called the Brownshirts (Sturmabteilung) who would go around physically assaulting anyone saying things they didn't like. Popper's paradox of tolerance invoked the right of self defense against those like them who would with "fists or pistols" silence others. Stuff like this is why the first amendment protects the right to peaceably assemble and petition the government.
That's not how analogies work. If I say "it's like a sauna in here" I'm not saying "this room is literally like a sauna in every possible way, to the same degree that a sauna is like a sauna".
We've banned this account for posting ideological flamewar comments. That's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
After following the account for a bit it was mostly just spreading rumours like "Baldwin deleting account because of Epstein trial" when in reality it was most likely related to the shooting. I can understand that it got suspended by people probably reporting some of these tweets.
Or, as it usually happens in these cases some algorithm suspended the account because too many users reported something and it got flagged and it's not some exciting intervention of the deep state.
That is pretty unlikely and not what was proposed. Pretty sure this would not happen to accounts that are deemed reputable sources. Also I guess there are exclusion lists for prominent people that are not beholden to the TOS.
Many think Epstein was connected to intelligence. Evidence includes making videos of his guests having sex with young girls, a classic intelligence entrapment technique used by every spy agency in the world, a large supply of diamonds and Austrian passport to make a quick escape.
The past 5 years has taught us that on twitter it's ok to imply (and in many cases outright state) that the sitting president of the US is a literally Russian plant) without a fear of a ban.
In a normal world this would mean you could also imply that Epstein is an intelligence asset without fear of a ban.
You can't attack another user like this on HN, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. The damage it causes to the ecosystem outweighs any benefit of behaving this way. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
If you feel another account is abusing HN, emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can take a look at it would be one good alternative.
I apologize. I'm just about worn out by the conspiracy theorists after these last couple of years. That's no excuse – I should have just quietly notified the admins. I'm sorry, it won't happen again.
At some point, you have to use your judgement and evaluate things for yourself. It is regrettable that a label like "patriot" has become something that instantly discredits something for a good chunk of the population. But we have to be vigilant about calling everything a dog-whistle because you risk becoming trapped within your own worldview.
You're being deliberately obtuse. It obviously doesn't end at "patriot". Read the guys post on substack. Look at his Gab(!) profile https://gab.com/NancyTracker
You're projecting your own conspiracy thinking. You're literally seeking hidden, dark meaning in things that are benign (the word `patriot` in this case). That's more revealing than anything.
It depends on the audience. Those who pay close attention to political strategy are more aware of said strategy than those who don't.
I think it is valid to call something a dog whistle as long as it's something where a sizable number of people get differing impressions of the meaning of a statement.
I have personally reported this (and related "tracker" accounts) for disinformation multiple times, so for one, I am glad to see it suspended. Despite the innocent sounding name, it's not just "coverage of the trial" as you would expect. The "tracker" accounts have all signs of belonging to a Russian troll farm and pushing a hostile agenda, which has absolutely nothing to do with justice one way or another.
I expect to see more of these accounts suspended in coming days.
A Russian troll farm pushing a hostile agenda? The account was reporting facts from a trial of a pedophilic rapist who spent years abusing high school age children. Ghislaine Maxwell deserves nothing but hostility being thrown her way.
You guys are an outrage machine that parallels the worst of Reddit.
I can’t wait for you guys to defend spammers with “Gmail censors informative vendors who are trying to honestly sell Viagra and Cialis to suffering people”
I believe HN already has had that for a long time with a minority persistently about GMail being "too powerful" and "ruining their business". If people actually want to talk to you and stop receiving an email they will send a message to you.
@jack was oft accused of abandoning the people and twitter's free speech principles, but with the changes we've seen since he stepped down, it now appears he was the only thing standing between dissident voices (including citizen journalism) and the ruling class establishment.
They have made a recent post about the suspension of said account and all of the users other twitter accounts [1]. It states that twitter told the user "the account was “artificially” amplifying information".
[0] https://patriotone.substack.com
[1] https://patriotone.substack.com/p/twitter-suspension