Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

>> epidemic abuse by trolls,

I am soo tried of hearing this excuse for mass censorship

First of it MASSIVELY over used to the point where people call anyone that disagrees with them "a troll" or a bot.

Twitter is hurting their own brand by their obvious political bias and selective enforcement of rules largely dependent on outrage mobs to "report" rule violations.

Like real names policies before it, these types of "verification" scheme do little to curb actual abuse, and in many cases shuts out moderate voices

Twitter is already quickly heading off a cliff where 2 political extremes are left yelling past each other (not actually communicating or discussing anything), and this policy will do nothing to change that

//disclosure, I have never, and will never have a twitter account




Wait so you don't actively participate in Twitter and yet you feel entitled to give a valid opinion about how the abuse works?

Cause let me tell you, the number of accounts I've seen whose commentd get overrun with bots is not trivial at all.


and you know they were bots how?


They give away themselves fairly easy:

* Random meaningless names like "lucy2342", "23markbeard" * No profile picture or a very obviosly random picture * Generic descriptions that dictate obvious political alignment like "Mother. Southwest USA, Republican, MAGA!" * No original content in their timeline except for retweets of political articles from garbage content farms * Really bad English grammar for whenever the bot requires human intervention.

They generally brigade tweets and have a complete lack of interests outside of this narrow activity.


1. It’s very strange for someone to both claim that they never use Twitter and also claim “abuse” is an overblown excuse. Twitter is currently the model platform for large scale mob justice and harassment. 2. The “real name” policy is effective on Facebook for the type of abuse Twitter is trying to curtail. It would help if you explain why you feel the real name policy is ineffective. In any case, only Facebook (the product) actively enforces a real name policy.


Facebook is a dying platform, but I would love to understand why you believe it was an effective policy.

It is not really enforced either, I know several people that have multiple accounts under fake names on Facebook


Not having an account is not the same thing as not using Twitter, you can read tweets without an account


Having to provide a phone number isn't mass censorship.

Twitter is hurting their own brand by their obvious political bias and selective enforcement of rules largely dependent on outrage mobs to "report" rule violations.

Like real names policies before it, these types of "verification" scheme do little to curb actual abuse, and in many cases shuts out moderate voices

Guess what, I just reported a guy with 106k followers that is inciting thousands of them to get ready for mass hangings of their political enemies "at a scale which will rock this world for 100 years" with gruesomely detailed threats against specific individuals. A self-professed adherent of the same conspiracy theory/cult committed a murder in New York just a week or two ago.

But I'm the bad guy in this scenario for saying that organizing murder might violate the Terms of Service.


Nice strawman you made there

You know full well that is not the type of reporting that I was talking about.

There are outrage mobs mass reporting people over jokes, things they find "offensive", and hurt feeling.


Oh, but you were being totally sincere when you took my comment about 'epidemic abuse by trolls' and complained that such terms were 'MASSIVELY over used to the point where people call anyone that disagrees with them "a troll" or a bot.'

I don't care what you were talking about. I was clarifying what I had been talking about before you came along and attempted to change the subject.


What's "MASSIVELY overused" is the trope where getting banned from a website equates to mass censorship. You're not entitled to a platform on twitter. If you get banned from twitter go do something else on the internet or beg for forgiveness and use their platform under their terms.


I always fine is amusing when Authoritarians that support censorship all of a sudden love liberty when they can use it to support censorship

The fact that I do not have a "right" to use twitter has no bearing on if Twitter engages in mass censorship of their platform, I did not claim that I have a right to use twitter, or that twitter did not have a right to censor it

Twitter can come out tomorrow and say only left identitarians are welcome on twitter, and everyone else would be banned. That would be be mass censorship AND with in their rights as a private company


I'm guessing we'd agree that Twitter has an overt bias. I'd suspect we'd disagree about which way it leans.

Which sort of suggests to me that we're both wrong.


the left bias of twitter is well documented and more or less admitted to by the execs.

There is zero evidence they would be right biased




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: