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You can tell conservative opinions are censored and suppressed by the way they're constantly shoved down our throats every hour of every day.

There's a certain irony in the fact that whoever you're responsing to got their message removed.

Flagged, not removed. Subtle difference, not saying it's huge, but you can still see their comments if you enable showdead in your settings.

Censored by a different name is still censored.

Agreed. I was just pointing out it's not actually removed, and you can still read it (if you go out of your way to do so).

It's not that conservative opinions are censored. It's that bad opinion with zero merit to any reasonable person, such as insults, racism, sexual harassment, etc, are censored.

Unfortunately that means that most conservative opinions are censored.

Or, at least, the ones that matter said by our most popular politicians.

Rephrased, think of it this way: if I talk like Barack Obama at work, I'm fine. If I talk like President Donald Trump, I'm getting sent to HR on my first day. And that has nothing to do with their political leanings.


As though HR are suddenly The Arbiters of Truth and that declining birth rates and increasing isolation are helped by people at working fearing being sent to HR if they make a mistake or say something non-approved.

I mean, yeah, those stats are being helped by HR, but not in the direction any sane person would favour.


You don't have to be "Arbiter of Truth" to say "hey, you're making women uncomfortable, three women have complained about your language, you're fired"

The only people who consistently have issues with HR are pieces of shit.

What I'm trying to say is that Donald Trump says things like "grab her by the pussy" and "[Haitians] are eating dogs and cats" and that's why talking like him would get you censored.

You can be conservative and not racist, or not sexist, or not a piece of shit in general. Most conservatives cannot manage that, no matter how hard they try. At least - most conservatives currently in power in the US.

So, if that's your baseline or your inspiration, then yes, you will PREDICTABILITY be censored. And I garauntee nobody gives a single fuck.


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On X? Citation needed. Elsewhere too.

I don’t use X so don’t know about that one, but I see a plenty of “something something trans people eat the rich ACAB kill all men” on Bluesky.

Yeah they're not anymore. Woke opinions were getting shoved until that abruptly stopped a bit before Trump's second term. Which is weird because this didn't happen in his first term. Now we've got Amazon promoting the Melania movie.

On Twitter in particular, the woke shoving stopped the moment Musk took over, replaced with it shoving whatever Musk is saying. They're doing less censorship now but are also heavily promoting him.


Since the person you responded to got flagged/dead, I want to make sure they and everyone else who might think like them listens to this (an hour long, so yay attention span)

https://www.podbean.com/ew/dir-35im6-2c0a994a

"As the Senate debates the SAVE America Act amid unfounded claims of voter fraud, Jon is joined by Georgetown Research Professor Renée DiResta and Platformer editor Casey Newton to examine what actually threatens our elections. Together, they investigate how algorithms are engineered to push users toward platform owners' preferred ideologies, explore the incentives driving Silicon Valley's rightward shift, and discuss how Republicans have weaponized disinformation to undermine electoral trust and rewrite voting rules in their favor."

One topic they cover is the manner in which the Biden admin was communicating with big tech about mis/dis-information, and the multiple ways the Right has either blown it way out of proportion by not getting the facts right, and the way the Trump admin has been doing as much or worse than Biden admin ever did.


Those "conservative opinions" were usually violent hate speech. There was no shortage of "conservative opinions" pre-buyout.

I think people were just upset certain figures were held to the TOS.


Yeah, the followup to that "censorship of conservative opinions" complaint is always "which opinions are those"

It's a perfect analogue for asking confederate fans, "state's rights to do what?"


In this case, it was the opinions of the politician who would receive more votes than anybody else in the history of the USA just a few years later.

I can't edit any more, but for all those saying "they got banned for saying 'men can't get pregnant'", I can guarantee 9 times out of 10, there was some imagery of a trans person hanging themselves in the comments.

That's how far-right opinions work. A small wedge to normalize the violent message that comes next. A "man getting pregnant" didn't hurt them, but the deluge of death threats from the stochastic response sure hurt a lot more people.

I've spent way too much time on twitter. That site is a cesspit but you cannot reasonably try to say "they're just opinions". It was organized. "influencers" received money to stoke harassment campaigns. Without moderation, aka cutting off the people stoking the harassment flames, it becomes a Nazi bar, just like it is today.

Here is an example of what the bans were trying to prevent, look at the comments of someone's last tweet. They killed themselves. The replies are who complained about censorship: https://x.com/burntfishie/status/1918223771313561872?s=20


It wasn't just far-right messaging being censored. Left-leaning feminists were being banned for stating that men aren't women, see e.g. https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/11/28/meghan-murphy-and-t....

"were usually violent hate speech"

Did we forget "Vote blue no matter who"???

It was often as mundane as disagreeing with ANY democrat politician/their policies.

Sometimes it wasn't even a right-wing voice, but from more Left leaning voices that got banned/ostracized.


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> twitter was actively working with federal government

That's your problem? Wait until you get around to the Snowden Files, you'll be floored.


"working with federal government to censor speech" is a 1A violation on the government's side

Privately owned platforms are not required to respect the First Amendment. Neither Twitter nor X can guarantee your freedoms.

Of course not. Those platforms have 1A rights. In some cases, the US govt violated those rights by pressuring them to take down viewpoints, hence what I said about "1A violation on the government's side."

In other cases, the platform did it all on their own. That's perfectly legal but is also rightfully seen by users as political censorship, something the EFF claims to fight even when it's not from the govt.



What did I say about the laptop? The WH coercion was about covid19.

My bad, I posted below the wrong parent, now I can't delete it.

ah np, HN probably disallows it cause I replied already

The government compelling them is the issue.

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Which of those did Twitter suppress?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspensions_on_X search for "gender", at least one was a Congressman

You're leaving out "gonna be wild!" and a tirade about personally being let down by Mike Pence.

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I'm convinced you didn't actually look through this and just assume that these were bans for mentioning something like "there are only two genders".

I did look through this, and it absolutely corroborates people, including sitting politicians, were banned for believing and stating objective facts about human biology. Sorry that facts get in the way of the narrative.

They … did, though?

You're presumably referencing Missouri v. Biden, to which the EFF did file an amicus[1]. In it, they note,

> Many platforms have potentially problematic “trusted flagger” programs in which certain groups and individuals enjoy “some degree of priority in the processing of notices

> Of course, governmental participation in content moderation processes raises First Amendment issues not present with non-governmental inputs

With their overall opinion being something like "content moderation is normal, the government flagging content is also normal, and there are instances where the government's flagging of content moderation can be fine & not run afoul of 1A, but there are instances where it can, and we urge the court to think"

Note in this case, the platform was removing the content. The government was, in one respect, merely asking. (There were assertions that in other instances, such as public statements, the case was less so.) The court eventually ruled, and the ruling I saw from the 5th circuit seemed reasonable. (I think that was a preliminary injunction. AIUI, the case as a whole was never ruled on, because the Trump administration took over.)

[1]: https://www.eff.org/document/missouri-v-biden-amicus-brief


claiming there was rampant "censorship of conservative opinions" is about as honest as claiming that the Romans were being persecuted by first century christians.

A few of these were actual calls to violence, but most were about political opinion https://ballotpedia.org/Elected_officials_suspended_or_banne...

They also banned NY Post for publishing that Hunter Biden laptop story. Which as much of a nothingburger as that story was, it's insane to get banned for that.


Damn that Biden administration for getting the NY Post in trouble for posting crap while Trump was in office

care to share some quotes from those "conservative opinions" that were censored?


How are those "conservative opinions"? Are you saying the whole thing was right-wing fan-fiction?

Which ones?

Yeah, I remember when the "Twitter Files" were being released and it turned out that Twitter was illegitimately censoring leaked nudes of Hunter Biden. Whyever would non-consensually posted nudes be taken down other than the suppression of conservatism?

They were also censoring Biden's ties to Ukraine. If you'd actually read any coverage on it that wasn't left wing, you would have known that instead of spinning up this strawman version of what happened.

I'm not making a strawman, there were specific post IDs cited by the Twitter Files as being illegitimate suppression, you could stick them into the Wayback Machine and see that they were literally just photos of Hunter Biden's dick.

What censorship?

Conservative talking points were fucking everywhere, and still are.


Well we can tell where you stand when you describe their views as "talking points". Which isn't surprising on HN (reddit but more wordy).

Sorry, does "talking point" have any negative connotation?

English is not my native language - I use it in a neutral manner, including for things I agree with.

And yes, I don't agree with right wing bullshit, but I wasn't being particularly abrasive.


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This Hunter Biden shit is a good example. It was all over the place all the time. I don't even live in the US and kept stumbling on people talking about it in social media.

Conservative talking points are everywhere, even when I try to avoid them myself (for example, on fucking YouTube I am often recommended right wing bullshit when I view anything more political).

Right wingers are always very soy. For people that for years complained about oppression olympics they can't seem to stop crying about being oppressed even when in power.


Conservative opinions like "[group of people] are evil and don't deserve to be happy" and "we need a white homeland"

If you aren't kicking nazis out of your bar, it'll become a nazi bar. Twitter stopped kicking out the nazis


> [group of people] are evil and don't deserve to be happy"

Most of the times I’ve seen such statements on Twitter, the [group of people was one of: men, white people, straight people, cisgender people. Something tells me those statements were not made by conservatives…


I don't deny those opinions exist, but they aren't the ones being propped up by elon

I thought we were talking about pre-Musk Twitter.



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