Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I don't think people are asking for a FB boycott over "dishonesty", despite the way it is being framed. You literally have organisations like Sleeping Giants whose mission is to convince sponsors to dump sites that host conservative content. The current Facebook boycott is Stop Hate For Profit and is focused around hate speech (using the definition of hate speech as defined by the left).

I lean quite heavily left, I'm Australian and my political compass aligns me the most with our Greens party. I follow news sources from both the left and the right and it seems very obvious that the left is asking for some double standards. Twitter is celebrated online for being woke yet no one sees anything wrong with them for allowing people to commit assault and share it on their platform [1]. I actually find the current US political climate quite worrying, one side is being completely silenced in the mainstream media. I think Democracy needs to have multiple voices.

I hope people turn out and vote in the coming US elections because I suspect the Trump voters are going to come in huge numbers. The conditions of one side being silenced are very similar to 2016. ALL the polls showed a landslide for Hillary because people were too scared to admit they were going to vote Trump.

[1] - https://twitter.com/tariqnasheed/status/1273092750699720709




Australia, left leaning.

I think Twitter's response generally on speech has been terrible. Putting a label on a couple of Trump tweets doesn't fix that when they always move second to ban bot nets after Facebook discovers them, or to remove people who call for violence (eg the Alex Jones Sandy Hook conspiracy theory).

> ALL the polls showed a landslide for Hillary

No they didn't. The ones that were incorrect (state polls in a few states) were all within 3% of the correct outcome, with margin of errors of around 2%. Just because some bad modellers used that to make "Hillary is 99% likely to win" doesn't mean the polling showed a landslide.

That national polling was almost exactly correct.


> You literally have organisations like Sleeping Giants whose mission is to convince sponsors to dump sites that host conservative content

So what? There are a lot of controversial political organizations out there, corporations don't have to listen to them unless they feel it is in their best interest as a business.

> I follow news sources from both the left and the right and it seems very obvious that the left is asking for some double standards.

I think that's fair criticism, but twitter has a stated desire to draw the line somewhere, so if you disagree with where they draw it I think it's fair to call them out or ask them to do better, but just keep in mind that fairness is an impossible ask, so imperfect moderation that incrementally improves is the best we can hope for on that website. Yet, I'd suggest we not hope for anything and just let twitter be twitter, there are many better places to be on the internet. Certainly, the conversation we're having right now would be impossible on twitter.

> Twitter is celebrated online for being woke yet no one sees anything wrong with them for allowing people to commit assault and share it on their platform

The only people celebrating twitter's wokeness is twitter, everyone else just rolls their eyes because twitter is a self-indulgent dramafest with very little in the way of productive discourse, it is perhaps the popular platform least suitable to substantive discussion due to the mechanics of the site.

> https://twitter.com/tariqnasheed/status/1273092750699720709

I don't see the problem from twitter's perspective. Yeah, I agree it's assault, but the poster didn't commit the assault as your phrasing suggests, it's a video of a real event and there is a discussion about the event with a diversity of opinions represented in the comments.

> I actually find the current US political climate quite worrying, one side is being completely silenced in the mainstream media.

It's simply false to state that conservatives are being "completely silenced". Every influential conservative you can name has millions of followers on twitter and there are many millions of conservative users all over twitter which is obvious to anyone who has ever used it. Yes, there are more liberals on twitter, but you can't blame them for simply existing on the website in those numbers, if the site is too woke for your tastes just don't use it.

> I think Democracy needs to have multiple voices.

Conservatives overwhelmingly control the federal government and state governments around the country, so I find it difficult to seriously entertain the idea that leftist bias on twitter represents a threat to the conservative voice in democracy.

> The conditions of one side being silenced are very similar to 2016

People see what they want to see, conservatives are more influential now than at any other time in the last 50 years

> ALL the polls showed a landslide for Hillary because people were too scared to admit they were going to vote Trump.

The polls were more or less correct, Hillary Clinton received millions of more votes than Trump, it is only that Clinton's complacency provided Trump's campaign with the opportunity to outmaneuver her in critical swing states, Trump managed to achieve the unlikely odds, but they were still unlikely, it's an open secret that even Trump himself mostly expected to lose.


I stand corrected in that I do not know the current makeup of the state and federal seats in the US. The current media coming out the US implies a huge Democrat power base, at least in the power to influence company policy. I will admit that it can be hard to get an accurate gauge of this, despite browsing both sides, because my own media is very left. I assume it's my own biases that make me disregard some of the rights media.

That being said, some of the media coming from the right seems crazy. If the people that watch that have control then that's crazy news to me. America seems so familiar due to Hollywood but at the same time it's so foreign.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: