Posted by hn1986 9/2/2025
This is a nothing burger.
Somebody may have been trying to help (and I'm sure escalated internally before daring to shadow-ban rather than ban outright for "ban-evasion"), and is getting sabotaged by people who want to score dumb points against Musk, who I'm sure doesn't care either way.
Shadow-banning opposition voices is a gift to governments that fear open debate, and Musk is complicit.
Free speech isn’t free if it only applies where it’s convenient.
Man, this is true across so much of the political landscape.
"Principles" are what we enforce on others and excuse away for ourselves.
Twitter/X has open sourced their algorithm (https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm). So what do you mean by “mess with the algorithm”? And how do you characterize the extreme moderation (AKA censorship) practiced by old Twitter? For example when they banned a sitting president on the flimsiest reasoning, that even their own blog post justifying it could not describe, that their former CEO agreed was a big mistake?
> It's too bad that most people don't care about fascists getting control of these huge media platforms.
Define “fascist”. These days it seems to just mean “someone not aligned with one end of the political spectrum”. The bottom line is Twitter/X is far less censored today than it was a few years ago and it isn’t even close. The vast scheme of censorship it practiced previously dramatically altered elections worldwide.
https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-...
And Elon has forfeited the charitable assumption that he wasn't a fascist when he made the fascist salute at the inauguration. Twice.
At such a public event, it doesn't even matter whether he believes it himself : symbols have power.
> I advise you to save some Flavor Aid for your next informed uninformed opinions
Was this personal attack necessary?
To summarize, you believe that because X once called X’s algo open-source, that it must be open-source (“unless proven otherwise”) in the comment section of an article that (again) explains that Twitter censors any unwanted opinions for self-interest.
I think the Flavor Aid remark was entirely warranted.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/technology/elon-musk-grok...
I might read “breaking news” on Twitter first, but simultaneously I’ll see the other 10 variants of reality about said “breaking news” with no way to discern between them quickly.
By the time you’ve fact checked anything, the regular news has already reported it
only if you don't care if what you're reading is true or not. I never really understood twitter or sites with user generated content as a medium for news. I'm just as well off waiting until some news room checks it and reports it in a format that doesn't have me wasting time scrolling through a sea of posts.
The only thing I need in the next five minutes is an earthquake or flood warning and for that I thankfully live in a place that has a public alert system.
For example, if one values free speech or resistance against reactionaries, then a platform which censors and promotes reactionaries would not be morally viable.
Many people, think they hold a different set of values than they do. When push comes to shove, following rules, stability, and security trump liberty, freedom, and equality. In reality some folks are much easier than even that - a quick bite of hot news releases a squirt of dopamine more enticing than all of these and it's much easier to justify that it didn't really compromise their moral behavior.
But when you are a national level public figure, any micro blogging tool, even one fully dedicated to yourself would be equally suitable. Nobody at that level benefits from being on Twitter.
More than 245 million people worldwide use Twitter daily.
64.14% of Twitter users are men, while 35.86% are Women.
Most of Twitter’s audience (36.6%) belongs to the 25-34 age group.
With 103.96 million users, the United States has the highest number of Twitter users.
Twitter users in the United States spend an average of 34 minutes and 6 seconds daily.
Twitter generated a revenue of $744 million in the first half of 2024.
Also, my original comment was about bandwidth, and you tried to defend Twitter by user retention figures. Which, to me, somewhat implies that Twitter is not getting the UGC it wants, and the real trends on it is going opposite of directions you desire for whoever you would be.
I'm not sure what positive things to say to whoever inclined to defend the choices it makes, with what happened here. It looks like they are just getting started with the downhill ride.
This is an unnecessarily high bar. Otherwise Mastodon works fine and won't be enshittified.
On the other hand, some really just want a gas stove, incandescent light bulbs, and air conditioning. Others just want to film their waiter getting their pronouns wrong live on TikTok so they get in trouble. Are these liberties too much to ask?
There's a certain irony in that each side views these scenarios as equally "bad", but for those in the middle, we'll let common sense decide.
Also, I cannot stand BlueSky, as much I want to like it. There's this intense moralizing and pile-on culture that reminds me of the worst of pre-Musk Twitter. I'll never forget joining BlueSky late last year, posting some very milquetoast, liberal-coded and frankly inoffensive opinions, and finding myself added to lists called "MAGA / Nazi accounts to block". Just absolutely blew my mind and caused me to write off the platform forever.
Also are these official lists or are you just saying "someone out there put my account on their own list of accounts they don't like"? I dont know how the platform works and if its the first then wow but if its the second then I'm reading your comment and subsequent actions differently.
> Also are these official lists
No, user-created & shareable block lists. IIRC this one had a few thousand "followers".
Some tweets that sort of reflect my experience:
(In case anyone is not familiar: “Remigration is a far-right European concept of ethnic cleansing via the mass deportation of non-white immigrants and their descendants, sometimes including those born in Europe, to their place of racial ancestry.”)
I am gobsmacked that this is rarely mentioned whenever there’s news about Twitter. It’s just so stunningly grotesque.
Identical to X, it's a platform that pushes what the corporate overlords want you to think, while making it look organic. Different from X, they push more advertising and pro-USA agenda than pro-right-wing.
User: Nazi
You can curate the content you see on Twitter, and I'm not interested in fascist content. It's as easy as that. A certain population of Blueskyers like yourself are extremely over-dramatic about the political content of Twitter, which hasn't changed all that much from five years ago.