Comment by LaurensBER
5 days ago
While Twitter has many problems it does seem to do a reasonable job of not promoting hate and violence towards a large audience. There's many messages critical of immigrants on my timeline but none calling for violence against them (or any other group that Twitter users dislike).
Meanwhile posts about violence against Trump, Musk or celebrating the dead of Kirk did get massive upvotes and visibility on some of the biggest and most popular subs on Reddit.
I have a different opinion of Twitter than you do, but that’s not actually the case I was making. I was pointing out that Twitter’s terms of service were modified to be less aggressive about calls for violence. If you’re correct and Twitter succeeds at not promoting hate and violence… why wouldn’t James Comer want to understand why?
My explicit hypothesis is that he’s not holding these hearings out of a desire to investigate, he’s holding them for other reasons.
Also you’re slipping down a slope here. Originally the question was about promoting violence yet you keep referring to hatred or even being glad someone’s dead. Promoting violence is not the same as being glad someone has passed away.
I created a new account about two months ago to see what’s true about the tales that it’s absolutely crazy what’s there as a new account. And it’s pure racism. At least half of tweets either about some blacks who did something bad, or how whites are suppressed, and we are right. And the whole experiment started by blocking Musk and co, so the intent wasn’t even there. It had a honeymoon phase for a few days, where it seemed the hearsay to be not true, so I didn’t visit for a while. Then I went back after a month, and it’s a racist “paradise” completely since then.
Last time I logged into Twitter to delete my account, many months post Musk, I was presented immediately with disturbing videos of both people and animals beating beat up in the "For you" tab.
And let's not ignore the owner of the site posting inflammatory/hateful/violent rhetoric.
You're either desensitized or simply don't follow accounts that attract any political issues at all if you say that. Twitter is absolutely, depressingly overridden with genocide apologia and putrid racism.
In general I'm not very interested or concerned with American politics since this is outside of my scope of influence. I cannot say how much that influences my experience but I can confidently say that I have not seen any genocide apologia and putrid racism.
The closest that I've seen is conversations about violence rates and nationality (in the context of immigration) but these topics have also been discussed in the liberal left Dutch newspaper (Volkskrant) and conservative center newspaper (Neu Zuricher Zeitung) that I read.
My main point would be that Twitter does a better job at not amplifying calls for violence than Reddit. I, obviously, do not have access to internal Twitter data so my assessment is purely anecdotal but nonetheless seems relevant to the conversation.
> You're either desensitized or simply don't follow accounts that attract any political issues at all if you say that.
There are some other options too. For instance, there are people who honestly believe that Twitter is now a much better place and feel right at home because they are the ones pushing the genocide apologia and putrid racism themselves.
While I understand your frustration projecting American political biased on this does seem a bit extreme.
I'm not an American, nor do I care very much about US politics (outside my sphere of influence). It's hard to discuss exactly what genocide apologia and putrid racism are without a closer definition but I do not see anything on Twitter that's not discussed in the left liberal Dutch newspaper that I read (Volkskrant) or the German conservative center newspaper that I read (NZZ).
2 replies →
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While I understand your frustration I would like to point out that I'm not American.
Other countries do exist and they also use Reddit and Twitter (despite the US politics spam we have to suffer through ;))
At the end of the day both Reddit and Twitter are American companies and algorithmic feeds for users in the US can end up being significantly different from those in other countries.
Trump, Musk and Kirk are all Americans. The topics of the thread was American congress, Rep. Comey’s and how Musk changed twitter.
Imo, assuming you are not talking about what Arabs or whoever outside of America say about it was reasonable. Especially since your comment seemed to talk about American political environment.
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I only have a single Twitter account and can only share what I'm seeing on my timeline.
You might be having a different experience, these timeline are after all personalised ;)
Twitter is absolutely full of calls for violence, i genuinely don't know how you can use the platform and not see any of it