Elon has been pretty actively removing speech from X he disagrees with. Thats just objectively true.
And he's been obviously. And objectively deeply partisan outside of X. The OP's supposition that he'd be partisan on X in the run up to an election is a fair and reasonable one, independent of what Jack did.
Removing hate from a privately-run platform is not censorship. It just feels like censorship to reactionaries because their political beliefs are hateful and do not respect the categorical imperative.
Just to complete the set of views expressed in this thread: it is censorship, and it's also absolutely necessary if you want to have a civil society. Otherwise the whole thing - society, not just the platform - evolves into competitive death threats and thence into actual violence. This includes state violence.
You can no more run a social media website without moderation than you can run a nuclear reactor without a moderator.
It is censorship. Banning any content of any form for any reason, including legality, is censorship.
What people don't want to admit to themselves is that censorship isn't always a bad thing. Realizing that requires a degree of nuance that the internet currently doesn't support.
I heard it described once that leftist thinking typically focuses on the justice of the outcome of systems, whereas rightward thinking often focuses on justice of the system itself.
A right leaning person might say, it is just to prevent people with means from receiving welfare. A left leaning person might say, means testing can leave gaps where some people are unserved.
The right leaning person says, "it is unjust to censor", the left leaning person says, "that system has a side effect -- if you are tolerant of hate speech, others will leave".
I don't know if this holds always, but now that it's pointed out, I see it in a lot of places.
Try to have a rational and calm discourse about trans folks on X. You will necessarily need to compare the lived experiences of trans people and people who are not trans, which will probably result in you using the prefix "cis" (which is the literal opposite of the prefix trans). You will get moderated for doing so.
Cis didn't originate from gender. Cislunar, cisalpine, etc.
And it's ok for you to not identify as cis. You get to have whatever identity you want.
We are discussing a platform that censors discussion when that discussion includes trans and not trans people. Unless you are X, the platform, I don't think your identity is germane. (And once again, you are valid.)
Can you provide some data about the scale of 'conservative voices... censored prior to 2022'? I have used the platform a long time, trying to take in a balanced set of news sources. I do not believe that conservatives ever had a problem getting their voice heard on the platform... All of Charlie Kirk's (vile) tweets are still up, for example.
This is absolutely not a "both sides" thing. The owner of the network is spending record amounts of money on getting Republicans elected this cycle (and last). The idea that his social network would do anything counter to the whims of the CEO or his pal is utterly laughable.
And the Biden campaign illegally worked with the previous owner to censor content in order to influence the election and was never held accountable. Both sides.
Only the left believes in censorship is not objectively true. The Nazis burned books. More recent administrations have banned the words climate change. Books are regularly removed from libraries by right wing administrations.
I can find you many, many cases that demonstrate your claim (only the left believes in censorship) is false.
> I think most of Trump agenda(I.e anti immigration, anti trans/lgbtq+ policies) would not have survived on social media or at least on Twitter/x.
Then how did he get elected in 2016 with a heavy social media presence and then continue using Twitter as his primary direct communication method as POTUS up until 2021?
What do you mean “it would have been marked as hatred”? It _is_ hatred, bigotry, racism, etc. Trump isn’t shy about showing how racist and hateful he is.
Trump's movement originated on and proliferated on social media, what are you talking about? Jan. 6th was planned and organized on social media, often openly. His agenda would not have survived without social media.
I am fine with content policeing actions from being legal but I think we content enforcement of this nature on platforms that live on freedom of press and speech should be forced to publicize when that take action against accounts. Publicize the lists for bans, and reason for it. Here the reason is given but its not account linked so its hard to say if the reason is justifed with the accounts histories.
Maybe the government needs a meta organization that upholds freedom of speech enforcement from platforms and companies that get broad Section 230 protections. I.e Facebook, X, Twitch, Youtube, etc. If a company can just purge you soruce of speech entirely the country protections seem lacking for the public welfare. Curious what other people think. I know an agency like this is rife to partisan infiltration but if its roll is to for unbanning rather than banning I think the scope of its potential abuse would be extremely narrow.
Doubtful... It looks like Starlink showed it's colors to Ukraine and it's admiration for the Russian state what was it within 24hrs of that operation? Yikes.
It's not a proof of anything. If I build a dam to block your local river and you stop getting water, is it a proof there were fish in the river?
People who measure traffic to sites supposedly plagued by russian bots (the ones we care about here: trolls, disinformation, etc.) saw absolutely no dip in traffic
>...as well as content intended to discourage participation.
Uh? That's odd. In my country I don't vote because I don't feel represented and I encourage others in my situation to do the same. Would I get banned for saying that?
Are you a bot from an openly hostile nation? If not, then probably not. But maybe you've already been successfully brain washed, because that's EXACTLY what countries do to undermine each other
No, I read the policy and it doesn't cover what I mentioned. It looks like "content intended to discourage participation" is probably not the best wording...
It's a little more nuanced than that. Not voting can be just as democratic as voting if you're informed about your options and decide none of them represent your position.
But even in situations where someone would potentially want to vote and a tweet misleads them to believe it's not worth it, why is that worse then a tweet misleading them to believe that a certain political option will work in their favor?
If a large percentage of people are influenced to not participate, then the remaining set is a smaller group to mislead in one political direction or another.
More participation makes it harder to influence enough voters in a single direction to make a significant difference in outcomes.
And, at least in US politics, my experience is that most candidates do not stand on a single issue but rather a broad spectrum of political ideology. I think it would be pretty rare for all of the candidates to have no difference in alignment with you on any of the hundreds of issues at play. Especially if you are participating in primary elections which tend to have a greater diversity of positions.
> if you're informed about your options and decide none of them represent your position.
Literally none of "them" represent any part of your position on what is typically a wide array of different issues? Not any of the state and local candidates? Not a single national candidate? You have no position, whatsoever, on local ballot issues?
That seems deeply myopic or extraordinarily unlikely.
I voted third party. I know all about voting with intent. Apathy, however, is caustic. It encourages people to not think they could improve things. To check out, stop listening.
"Listen to that guy" gets people listening and encourages at least the chance of someone going, "wait, actually I don't like what this guy is saying, what are other guys saying?"
So do people that are easily manipulated by propaganda. Do you want such people to vote, to give the election to the best propagandists? Or do you want them to not vote, and deal with the apathy?
Why would any politician care about your concerns if you don’t vote?
I’ve heard this said by acquaintances before, but even when someone finally says what they want to hear they find another reason to not vote… without exception.
Whenever the topic shows up I always tell people to vote and that there’s no good reason to not vote if you legally can.
Because due to demographics I’m in the minority. Democracy caters to the majority. In generic terms, all policies are written to benefit the old in detriment of the young, but they vastly outnumber us, so there’s nothing that can be done about this.
There’s a good reason not to vote: you have to go and vote. If I could vote from home, maybe.
I don’t know which country you’re from, but I’m going to guess that the old are catered to because they actually vote and the young doesn’t.
If the younger generation becomes a sizeable voter demographic, then the politicians will notice. A new party might also show up to take those vote, giving them influence and negotiation power.
But for that to happen, the younger generation have to vote. That’s why I’m so adamant in discussions with acquaintainces that they need to vote and that the only valid reason to not vote is legality.
Twitter over 300 million daily active users. 13,000 is 0.004% of that.
A standard drop of water is 0.05 ml. A standard household bucket is about 3 gallons. So the proverbial "drop in the bucket" is 0.0004%.
So, for all you naysayers out there saying this is just a drop in the bucket, it's literally x10 that.
Why, if they could get this up to a repeatable process and ban 13,000 accounts per day, that would be 1.5% every year. After a couple of years of work, that might even be perceptible to the average user. Sounds like the problem is well in hand.
Without any stats/metrics about engagement of real users with these accounts you have absolute no basis to do any comparison to drops of water.
Not sure why number of accounts matter at all, even more if you are depending on internal Twitter investigations to determine that without knowing any of the methodology to detect those, etc.
But sure, you can always defend Twitter if that's the hill you want to die on.
>Without any stats/metrics about engagement of real users with these accounts you have absolute no basis to do any comparison to drops of water.
I think it's fair to assume that if x.com refuses to provide stats that are easily obtainable for them (eg. views or followers), that those stats aren't favorable to them.
Sometimes 0.004% matters when the population is not homogenous.
The 0.004% richest Amreicans hold the majority of US wealth. I would not be surprised if the 0.004% top X users in terms of followers have a majority of followers as well.
So implying that because 0.004% is a small proportion of total users, this user ban is unconsequential seems flawed to me.
I'm sure this was done in a perfectly fair and balanced manner and not in a way that is at all aligned to the CEO's publicly stated politics.
[dead]
[flagged]
Elon has been pretty actively removing speech from X he disagrees with. Thats just objectively true.
And he's been obviously. And objectively deeply partisan outside of X. The OP's supposition that he'd be partisan on X in the run up to an election is a fair and reasonable one, independent of what Jack did.
[flagged]
Removing hate from a privately-run platform is not censorship. It just feels like censorship to reactionaries because their political beliefs are hateful and do not respect the categorical imperative.
Just to complete the set of views expressed in this thread: it is censorship, and it's also absolutely necessary if you want to have a civil society. Otherwise the whole thing - society, not just the platform - evolves into competitive death threats and thence into actual violence. This includes state violence.
You can no more run a social media website without moderation than you can run a nuclear reactor without a moderator.
It is censorship. Banning any content of any form for any reason, including legality, is censorship.
What people don't want to admit to themselves is that censorship isn't always a bad thing. Realizing that requires a degree of nuance that the internet currently doesn't support.
HN commenters always seem to forget the paradox of intolerance
I heard it described once that leftist thinking typically focuses on the justice of the outcome of systems, whereas rightward thinking often focuses on justice of the system itself.
A right leaning person might say, it is just to prevent people with means from receiving welfare. A left leaning person might say, means testing can leave gaps where some people are unserved.
The right leaning person says, "it is unjust to censor", the left leaning person says, "that system has a side effect -- if you are tolerant of hate speech, others will leave".
I don't know if this holds always, but now that it's pointed out, I see it in a lot of places.
[dead]
Try to have a rational and calm discourse about trans folks on X. You will necessarily need to compare the lived experiences of trans people and people who are not trans, which will probably result in you using the prefix "cis" (which is the literal opposite of the prefix trans). You will get moderated for doing so.
I refuse to use "cis". I'm not a subtype.
That isn't justification to censor the term.
Cis didn't originate from gender. Cislunar, cisalpine, etc.
And it's ok for you to not identify as cis. You get to have whatever identity you want.
We are discussing a platform that censors discussion when that discussion includes trans and not trans people. Unless you are X, the platform, I don't think your identity is germane. (And once again, you are valid.)
Can you provide some data about the scale of 'conservative voices... censored prior to 2022'? I have used the platform a long time, trying to take in a balanced set of news sources. I do not believe that conservatives ever had a problem getting their voice heard on the platform... All of Charlie Kirk's (vile) tweets are still up, for example.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/journalists-who-wrote-ab...
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63999452
https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-suspends-bot-acco...
[flagged]
The guy in office has a press ban
Lol
[flagged]
This is absolutely not a "both sides" thing. The owner of the network is spending record amounts of money on getting Republicans elected this cycle (and last). The idea that his social network would do anything counter to the whims of the CEO or his pal is utterly laughable.
Yeah, X is one sided thing just like Reddit or CNN is more democrat aligned. I think Facebook was quite anti Trump policies for a while as well.
And the Biden campaign illegally worked with the previous owner to censor content in order to influence the election and was never held accountable. Both sides.
[flagged]
What you are saying is objectively false, uselessly partisan, and shows both an obvious and tragic misunderstand of both recent and collected history.
I do not know what your information diet is like, but if you would like help, I'm sure folks would be willing to talk and listen.
[flagged]
Only the left believes in censorship is not objectively true. The Nazis burned books. More recent administrations have banned the words climate change. Books are regularly removed from libraries by right wing administrations.
I can find you many, many cases that demonstrate your claim (only the left believes in censorship) is false.
> I think most of Trump agenda(I.e anti immigration, anti trans/lgbtq+ policies) would not have survived on social media or at least on Twitter/x.
Then how did he get elected in 2016 with a heavy social media presence and then continue using Twitter as his primary direct communication method as POTUS up until 2021?
e.g. anti-anti-facism was missing, which is funniest use of "anti", and saddest for a POTUS.
I'm reminded of the very real phase "premature anti fascist": https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jul-15-bk-22387...
(I selected that from google as an example of the term but it turns out to be quite a read, of stories from around and before WW2)
What do you mean “it would have been marked as hatred”? It _is_ hatred, bigotry, racism, etc. Trump isn’t shy about showing how racist and hateful he is.
Trump's movement originated on and proliferated on social media, what are you talking about? Jan. 6th was planned and organized on social media, often openly. His agenda would not have survived without social media.
What a blow to Elon to lose his account in his own platform
I am fine with content policeing actions from being legal but I think we content enforcement of this nature on platforms that live on freedom of press and speech should be forced to publicize when that take action against accounts. Publicize the lists for bans, and reason for it. Here the reason is given but its not account linked so its hard to say if the reason is justifed with the accounts histories.
Maybe the government needs a meta organization that upholds freedom of speech enforcement from platforms and companies that get broad Section 230 protections. I.e Facebook, X, Twitch, Youtube, etc. If a company can just purge you soruce of speech entirely the country protections seem lacking for the public welfare. Curious what other people think. I know an agency like this is rife to partisan infiltration but if its roll is to for unbanning rather than banning I think the scope of its potential abuse would be extremely narrow.
Meanwhile: https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-midterms-republicans-do...
Manipulation of elections is OK as long as you do it with money.
Thank you HN for highlighting new usernames in green
A fraction of what the UK imprisons for wrong think each year.
Probably 13,000 accounts that suddenly went dark after Ukraine took out some datacenter in Russia recently.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/yandex-outage/
Doubtful... It looks like Starlink showed it's colors to Ukraine and it's admiration for the Russian state what was it within 24hrs of that operation? Yikes.
That's not an accurate characterization of what happened, and I think you know that.
Do you have updated information about this? I've been following this pretty closely and that's more or less what I've read and seen discussed.
I don't think anyone knows that, given it's news from the past couple days.
Posts on "For you" are mostly pro right/republican/Trump these days, even if you block such accounts frequently.
X is a deeply partisan website. It actively censors leftist viewpoints. So it's not surprising it would skew rightward.
This effect is self reinforcing, if you are leftish, and you are in a tightening space, why would you stay?
Why are you still using Twitter? It has been years since the purchase, you've had plenty of time to switch.
People are just shrugging and going back to it.[1]
It's really disheartening.
[1] https://daringfireball.net/2026/10/x_once_again_marks_the_sp...
Spent couple minutes scrolling my For you page and the only one political post was celebrating the Ukrainian strike on the 6 su-34 planes
[dead]
Reminder that Twitter (X) has done similar things (shadow-banning) before.
HN does too. It's a standard moderation practice.
meanwhile Musk spending $250M+ on Republican campaigns. but sure, ban a few Twitter accounts
[dead]
Knowing Musk, they probably purged pro Democrats while leaving Russian bots alone.
true, luckily they're mostly offline since yandex gone boom
There's no evidence of that happening. In fact there's counter-evidence:
https://bsky.app/profile/antibot4navalny.bsky.social/post/3m...
People keep saying this with 0 proof other than the INDEXING "bot" trafick being down on cloudflare dashboard
> other than the INDEXING "bot" trafick being down on cloudflare dashboard
So they do have some proof?
It's not a proof of anything. If I build a dam to block your local river and you stop getting water, is it a proof there were fish in the river?
People who measure traffic to sites supposedly plagued by russian bots (the ones we care about here: trolls, disinformation, etc.) saw absolutely no dip in traffic
> It's not a proof of anything. If I build a dam to block your local river and you stop getting water, is it a proof there were fish in the river?
I mean, we can use a little common sense and assume that there were fish in the river, right? We'd be foolish not to.
OP: >they probably purged pro Democrats while leaving Russian bots alone
In that context it's pretty obvious "bots" are referring to disinformation or "troll" bots, not bots doing indexing/scraping.
> Mr. Franklin claims he went to the moon first, with no proof except a soggy box of matches with the words "moon pie" scribbled on it.
So he has some proof? So the jury is still out, so this is controversial, right?
I don't follow. Could you clarify whether you're asserting Cloudflare's data is worthless, or just that you believe your weird anecdote dismisses it?
>...as well as content intended to discourage participation.
Uh? That's odd. In my country I don't vote because I don't feel represented and I encourage others in my situation to do the same. Would I get banned for saying that?
Are you a bot from an openly hostile nation? If not, then probably not. But maybe you've already been successfully brain washed, because that's EXACTLY what countries do to undermine each other
No, I read the policy and it doesn't cover what I mentioned. It looks like "content intended to discourage participation" is probably not the best wording...
https://help.x.com/en/rules-and-policies/election-integrity-...
Getting idiots to not vote undermines elections? Weird.
Selectively getting people to not vote, yes. It's the reverse of "get out the vote" campaigns.
(Australian compulsory voting: discuss)
Yes. Building apathy erodes democracy.
It's a little more nuanced than that. Not voting can be just as democratic as voting if you're informed about your options and decide none of them represent your position.
But even in situations where someone would potentially want to vote and a tweet misleads them to believe it's not worth it, why is that worse then a tweet misleading them to believe that a certain political option will work in their favor?
If a large percentage of people are influenced to not participate, then the remaining set is a smaller group to mislead in one political direction or another.
More participation makes it harder to influence enough voters in a single direction to make a significant difference in outcomes.
And, at least in US politics, my experience is that most candidates do not stand on a single issue but rather a broad spectrum of political ideology. I think it would be pretty rare for all of the candidates to have no difference in alignment with you on any of the hundreds of issues at play. Especially if you are participating in primary elections which tend to have a greater diversity of positions.
> if you're informed about your options and decide none of them represent your position.
Literally none of "them" represent any part of your position on what is typically a wide array of different issues? Not any of the state and local candidates? Not a single national candidate? You have no position, whatsoever, on local ballot issues?
That seems deeply myopic or extraordinarily unlikely.
I voted third party. I know all about voting with intent. Apathy, however, is caustic. It encourages people to not think they could improve things. To check out, stop listening.
"Listen to that guy" gets people listening and encourages at least the chance of someone going, "wait, actually I don't like what this guy is saying, what are other guys saying?"
So do people that are easily manipulated by propaganda. Do you want such people to vote, to give the election to the best propagandists? Or do you want them to not vote, and deal with the apathy?
The fewer people who vote, the smaller the group that needs to be influenced to make a difference in the election.
It obviously undermines elections. The only thing weird here is your faux confusion.
Why would any politician care about your concerns if you don’t vote?
I’ve heard this said by acquaintances before, but even when someone finally says what they want to hear they find another reason to not vote… without exception.
Whenever the topic shows up I always tell people to vote and that there’s no good reason to not vote if you legally can.
Because due to demographics I’m in the minority. Democracy caters to the majority. In generic terms, all policies are written to benefit the old in detriment of the young, but they vastly outnumber us, so there’s nothing that can be done about this.
There’s a good reason not to vote: you have to go and vote. If I could vote from home, maybe.
I don’t know which country you’re from, but I’m going to guess that the old are catered to because they actually vote and the young doesn’t.
If the younger generation becomes a sizeable voter demographic, then the politicians will notice. A new party might also show up to take those vote, giving them influence and negotiation power.
But for that to happen, the younger generation have to vote. That’s why I’m so adamant in discussions with acquaintainces that they need to vote and that the only valid reason to not vote is legality.
Why would you get banned for saying that? What a pointlessly argumentative comment
Sounds like they're just getting rid of competition
Twitter over 300 million daily active users. 13,000 is 0.004% of that.
A standard drop of water is 0.05 ml. A standard household bucket is about 3 gallons. So the proverbial "drop in the bucket" is 0.0004%.
So, for all you naysayers out there saying this is just a drop in the bucket, it's literally x10 that.
Why, if they could get this up to a repeatable process and ban 13,000 accounts per day, that would be 1.5% every year. After a couple of years of work, that might even be perceptible to the average user. Sounds like the problem is well in hand.
This is the most contorted argument I have ever seen. I admire it on some level. Like we could be friends but I wouldn't let you watch my dogs
Yeah not sure I'd want to be around for his midlife crisis though.
Without any stats/metrics about engagement of real users with these accounts you have absolute no basis to do any comparison to drops of water.
Not sure why number of accounts matter at all, even more if you are depending on internal Twitter investigations to determine that without knowing any of the methodology to detect those, etc.
But sure, you can always defend Twitter if that's the hill you want to die on.
>Without any stats/metrics about engagement of real users with these accounts you have absolute no basis to do any comparison to drops of water.
I think it's fair to assume that if x.com refuses to provide stats that are easily obtainable for them (eg. views or followers), that those stats aren't favorable to them.
Sometimes 0.004% matters when the population is not homogenous.
The 0.004% richest Amreicans hold the majority of US wealth. I would not be surprised if the 0.004% top X users in terms of followers have a majority of followers as well.
So implying that because 0.004% is a small proportion of total users, this user ban is unconsequential seems flawed to me.
> The 0.004% richest Americans hold the majority of US wealth
That is massively false. It’s closer to 5%. Still really bad IMO but 0.004% is a ludicrous thing to claim
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
>The 0.004% richest Amreicans hold the majority of US wealth
Nah, it’s more like the top 5% hold half. The top 0.1% are at ~13%.