Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sneed-oil 1321 days ago
Twitter suppressed the NY Post's story on Hunter Biden's laptop right before the 2020 presidential election. Calling a surgeon who performed sex reassignment surgery a criminal is what got Jordan Peterson suspended until he'll remove that tweet. Trump was banned despite never telling anybody to go inside the Capitol building and even posting a video telling his supporters to go home. Milo Yiannopoulos was banned for making fun of an actress. Alex Jones was banned for posting a video where he insulted a CNN journalist. Nick Fuentes was banned for repeated violations but Twitter has never made clear what the relevant tweets were. These were just off the top of my head. I also remember tweets calling for mass reeducation of white people or the eradication of whiteness being allowed.
2 comments

All of these ideas/notions/opinions/stories were very widely disseminated on Twitter to an audience of millions (BTW, the legality of Trump's behaviour, including what exactly he urged his followers to do, is under ongoing investigation). The suppression of the Post's story on Hunter Biden might have been an overreaction, that story itself was all over Twitter (that's how I heard about it). It's possible some tweets "calling for mass reeducation of white people or the eradication of whiteness" were not removed, but neither were tweets with vile racism/misogyny/antisemitism that constantly flood the platform.

I assume a claim could be made (although it would be hard to support) that, on average, more conservatives are suspended than progressives for similar behaviour but that still amounts to zero conservative ideas suppressed. On the other hand, there's also a bias in violent acts between conservatives and progressives. If there's any conservative content banned or suppressed, I've yet to see a single example.

> If there's any conservative content banned or suppressed, no one has yet to find even a single example.

A pretty common conservative opinion is that there are only two genders, but Twitter doesn't allow misgendering

That doesn't limit in any way the expression of the belief that there are only two genders. Feel free to run a Twitter search and confirm that for yourself (I just did). I have to say I am genuinely curious to find a conservative belief that I wouldn't find thousands of (unironic/uncritical) hits for in a matter of seconds.
It does, you can't tell a non-binary person that they're a man or a woman, if your tweet is reported it will be deleted. If you can find any examples of this they simply haven't been reported or reviewed yet.
Intentional misgendering of an individual could be sexual harassment; it is certainly not a form of "conservative speech" regardless of beliefs. However, the belief that there only two genders is not only not banned by Twitter but is, in fact, widely disseminated.
"I assume a claim could be made (although it would be hard to support) that, on average, more conservatives are suspended than progressives for similar behaviour"

Thanks, that pretty much wraps it up.

Exactly. We don't know whether or not that's true; what we do know is that no conservative ideas are suppressed.
Trump encouraged a violent coup attempt. Twitter didn't want to be culpable in any further attempts to violently overthrow a democratic government

Nick Fuentes is a white nationalist. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi...

How did he encourage a coup?
That is the subject of an ongoing US DOJ and Congress investigations. In case you missed the public hearings (where, for example, DOJ officials testified they were told by the former President to declare the 2020 election fraudulent even though they informed him it wasn't; this is known as a "self-coup"), the House Select Committee is expected to publish its findings in a final report by the end of this year; criminal indictments, if any (although we don't know yet if Mr Trump will be charged with insurrection), would likely be served within a year.