Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by JMTQp8lwXL 2195 days ago
Giving examples of the type of content that's permitted from the left, but not the right, could be helpful to your argument. As someone who leans left, it's hard to see the bias. One other piece of contextual relevance is tweets from POTUS stay up due to their newsworthiness. If a Democratic president tweeted identical statements to Trump, I would expect identical treatment: no removal, but tagged with phrases like "Get the facts" (e.g., on coronavirus) or tweets hidden for glorying violence.
2 comments
t-writescode 2195 days ago
The president is a huge exception to the rule. 3 and a half years ago, I think (citation needed) it was found that Twitter was obligated to keep Trump tweets up because he is president and those are now official record. There was that whole big to do wat back then about him deleting one of his tweets and whether that was allowed or not.
link
caymanjim 2195 days ago
Allowed by whom? Twitter can delete anything of Trump's, and can delete his account if they want to.
link
t-writescode 2195 days ago
Things get complicated with the president. This whole thing happened: https://www.politifact.com/article/2017/sep/27/what-does-law...
link
caymanjim 2195 days ago
That's entirely about the government's responsibility to retain records. Twitter has zero obligation.
link
onetimeusename 2195 days ago
Here is a demonstrably false thing that Twitter doesn't censor: https://twitter.com/search?q=black%20egyptians&src=typed_que...

I have not seen them censor the Black Egyptian or Black Moor hypotheses in spite of being associated with Black Supremacy and being "demonstrably false" which is a category of things the #StopHateForProfit campaigns are targeting.

In fairness I don't know what content ends up being blocked, maybe there is a way to see it. But I have seen particular efforts, such as the doctored video Donald Trump recently posted, to tag content as misleading but I have not seen this for the above. As you pointed out, they did the same for coronavirus. Perhaps some of this debate is just about the 'reach' of content but afaict the Black Egyptian disinformation is prevalent. I might be wrong, I don't know all the ins and outs of Twitter blocking.

link