No it doesn't because it contains no evidence other than Scott Adams's unsubstantiated (and by this point paranoid) claims he's being censored. What he describes is flaky twitter behaviour that happens all the time. Twitter doesn't censor the overt Nazis and racists and they're singling out Scott Adams? Really?
Scott Adams is kind of a nutbar, this kind of paranoia is right up his alley. He thought Hillary Clinton was going to kill him if he said he was planning to vote against her.
It's also not the first time Twitter has censored things. It's been going on for years.
The #GamerGate hashtag at one point, for a period of time, returned results for "wine" and "beach". A very mature and cute nod towards "whine and bitch" because a few Twitter workers were closely related to a few prominent "anti-GamerGate" people. This happened in December 2015, I don't remember the period of time it lasted (hours or days).
Not to mention certain hashtags were prevented from trending or deliberately removed from the 'Trending' area. #GamerGate at one point was large enough to get any hashtag trending that they wanted. Think of it like /r/The_Donald getting to the front page of Reddit prior to the last algorithm change. It would happen and it would happen every day.
Any hashtag that was "obviously #GG" would be removed from the trending list. Any hashtag "hijacked" by #GG would be removed from the trending list. Any tag #GG managed to push into trending would magically disappear not too long after - even though with their numbers they could keep a tag trending for several hours, not just several minutes.
E:
Also Scott Adams isn't the only one to notice this. Many pro-Trump people have checked their engagement numbers pre-inauguration day and post-inauguration day. Going from consistent 1000+ retweets/favs to < 10 with no change in behavior, just that their tweets are no longer showing in their Follower's feeds and thus no longer receiving interactions.
I have been following Adam's blog through the election and his analyses of the psychological factors behind Trump's rise is IMHO required reading, whether you are for Trump or against.
His persuasion techniques didn't work to convince a majority of Americans to follow him, as Adam repeatedly said it would. He is doing a victory lap for being 100% wrong
The object of an election is to win. Trump persuaded the people he was supposed to do to win. Persuading those who don't count is not a winning strategy.
I'm surprised that platforms like Twitter and Facebook aren't seen as de facto utilities, when a certain percentage of the population uses them, and when they're the main method of communication for powerful institutions like corporations and the president.
Because when they aren't, you end up with arguments like "If you want free speech, just don't use private platforms". I don't think that's a reasonable argument anymore...those platforms wedged themselves into being a necessity for public figures.
I wish people would stop saying this: If platforms are treated as public utilities they will be under government control and there will be zeo free speech, and there will be no competition. The solution is for the private marketplace to make better products.
Outside of the State of the Union address, I'm not aware of any "main method of communication" for the POTUS. You could argue the press conferences held by the press secretary are one form, but they're not mandated by the Constitution.
I would say the press conferences are the main method as they are from the White House and happen multiple times a day. I don't know that a Constitutional mandate would have anything to do with it.
And the State of the Union address was delivered in written form to Congress for more than the first century after the Constitution was ratified. Hoover was the last to never give a speech for the State of the Union.
I don't think it's asking too much to google trivially verifiable claims.
"Clinton supporters have convinced me – and here I am being 100% serious – that my safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump. So I’m taking the safe way out and endorsing Hillary Clinton for president." -Scott Adams
Did you [citation needed] his claims that twitter regularly censors political speech? Because there really is no evidence of that.
That's a very different claim than "Clinton will have me killed". It also isn't entirely inconceivable or wrong, as it's actually happened [0]. Maybe after seeing enough videos of physical violence being inflicted against Trump supporters he decided it was best if he wasn't seen as pro-Trump for his own safety?
The actual claim was "Scott Adams is kind of a nutbar, this kind of paranoia is right up his alley." I think you should be easily able to convince yourself of that with a little searching.
No one is debating the first claim. We are debating the second claim which was absurd and completely unambiguous
> He thought Hillary Clinton was going to kill him if he said he was planning to vote against her
You are lying (again). How is this constructive? Intellectual dishonesty swings both ways. You would call me out if the tables were turned. You are better than this.
Let's try this again, politely. I never said that so I'm not lying once or again. You're the one who's in the wrong here - you said Scott Adams's paranoid claims give credence to "censorship" arguments. They don't because they're the claims of a crazy person. When this was pointed out to you, instead of looking into it you were rude (citation needed!). Then you got hung up on a small discrepancy in someone else's supporting claim to 'Scott Addams is a nutbar' and started calling everyone liars and declaring yourself some arbiter of intellectual honesty. How do you get to that from just being wrong on the internet and someone pointing it out to you? Happens to everyone all the time, no big whoop.
> They don't because they're the claims of a crazy person
That is your opinion. Others disagree. For the record: I agree with you. But these are our OPINIONS. Others see a successful artist, pundit, investor, and multimillionaire.
> When this was pointed out to you, instead of looking into it you were rude (citation needed!).
I wanted to know where the Fact of the statement came from. Specifically, the fact that OP claimed Hillary Clinton was going to kill him.
> declaring yourself some arbiter of intellectual honesty
I never once did this. I did call you out for being dishonest and if that makes me an arbiter of intellectual honesty then so be it.
And then you started name calling which was really classy :)
No, that's a fact but even if you call it an opinion you share how can the nonsense he spouts possibly give credence to notions of twitter censorship? That makes no sense at all. Or is intellectually dishonest, if you prefer.
The only explanation I can think of is you didn't know who Scott Adams was or didn't notice the verbiage came from him and then decided to be an ass about it. And I'm sorry, calling people liars and [citation needed] is so far off the classy path that you should not be surprised others follow you into the weeds. You were wrong then rude then insulting :)
There is a reason someone might say "What is your opinion on Scott Adams?" instead of "What is your facts about Scott Adams?" (hint: opinion != facts)
The notion of censorship exists because it happens. Facebook admitted doing it. But I suppose this is another fact you will confuse with an opinion.
And I truly apologize if my "[citation needed]" offended your delicate sensibilities. I thought I was dealing with an adult but your emotional outbursts and insistence that opinions are facts prove you still have a ways to go. A long ways. Good luck!
I was miss-remembering, not lying, but still I think my overall claim holds. No one is or was going to hunt down Scott Adams because he's a Trump supporter.
There is evidence to suggest that being a trump supporter is bad for your health. Google "Trump Supporter Attacked"
There is evidence and admission of guilt that facebook censored right wing "news".
There seems to be evidence that something is going on at twitter. It could be technical in nature, but that is exacly what people said during the facebook stuff (its the algorithm not censorship)
So, no, your "miss-remembered" claim does not hold
Please don't do this on Hacker News. It doesn't pass muster for civility and substantiveness and it tends to raise the level of antagonism, which isn't what we want.
No matter what we're replying to, we have the responsibility to remain thoughtful and charitable so that we can have the kind of civil and interesting discussion we're all here for. Assuming that other users are intentionally making false statements is like a short to ground of sorts—it takes a thread straight down no matter what other more interesting threads we might've had instead (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity).
You're also not the bad guy, we can't moderate everything and it doesn't mean that other participants in the thread are exemplary.
It is irrelevant how famous he is... if he doesn't have evidence to back up his claim then he is a source to dismiss. In fact, when considering the truth of anything that is my main criteria. Im curious what yours must be.
His fame matters because he has lot more twitter followers and each tweet has massive feedback in likes etc. a variety data-set than for example me (with 4 followers). That is where I am coming from.
The uppity in your post, as if you are the only priest of Truth is confirming what I already suspected.
Why is that funny? Adams is making an entirely unsubstantiated, and again self-centered, claim: These sorts of things always get flagged. He's done this time and time again -- if an error (which Twitter has many of, and I respect as a consequence of the scale) happens to him, it's a conspiracy. If he isn't at the top of people's feeds, it's a conspiracy.
Didn't the people like Adams all claim they were going to go to some alternative Twitter? Why haven't they just done that by now?
Are we sure that the "Tweet Unavailable" message isn't just because a tweet was really popular and the script that's pulling the info didn't get a 503 error or something temporarily when it was pulling the tweet content?
Why is it always a conspiracy for something that's explained by something a lot less conspicuous?
Breaking News: Twitter is free to not boost his tweets for any reason of their choice or no reason at all in exactly the same way that Fox news is free to only cover things from a conservative point of view.
Curiously, you only see Scott Adams complaining about one of these things.
There could be so many reasons for tweets becoming unavailable, not related to The World Hates Scott Adams(tm). It appears to happen when you quote someone, then block them, for example. It could also just be a bug. I've seen the "this tweet is unavailable" message tons of times, but never noticed a pattern.
If it's true that this is throttling, a tool used to suppress and censor "any content that disagrees with [Twitter's] political views" then that would be interesting but there's nothing in this post that supports this except a strange video.
The "great video" makes a lot of claims without any proof. It's mostly a long, super aggressive, homophobic[0], rant.
Could it just be selection bias. If you mostly follow aholes on Twitter, and some tweets become unavailable because the quote feature is broken (or something), then it seems like your ahole opinion is being censored?
[0]: Uses language like "I'm the worlds biggest faggot", "fat bull dykes", etc.
This is exactly what I said. The guy in the video seems like the type of personality that would immediately default to "I'm being censored, OH NOEZ!" when a simple technical issue could cause his tweet to show as unavailable. There are any number of reasons that this could happen and the fact that every single piece of info he has is anecdotal and without a pattern is extremely suspect. I mean, this theory could be easily disproved just by showing a left-leaning tweet where it shows as unavailable. This seems like a perfect fit for Occam's Razor.
The problem with this argument is that there have been hundreds or possibly thousands of accounts removed from Twitter since the election simply for political content.
It's not a technical issue, nor is it a secret. It's a purge of content and accounts that Twitter deems offensive because the content and the people who tweet and retweet it are on the opposite side of the political spectrum. And it's not based on a failure to follow community guidelines -- or if it is, those guidelines are very unevenly enforced under the "don't shoot anyone to our left" rule.
Where's the evidence of that removal, then? The most extensive "evidence" of this is maybe 5 accounts getting removed and for every 5 on the right that got removed, there are 5 on the left. Anecdotes are not evidence.
Found the story for you, conveniently dated today and published by AP so you don't have to wonder if it's fake news.
"Also on Tuesday, Twitter said it's creating a "safe search" feature that removes tweets with potentially sensitive content and tweets from blocked and muted accounts from search results. The tweets will still exist on Twitter if people look for them, but won't appear in general search results.
Twitter is also making some replies less visible so only the most relevant conversations surface."
This is exactly what Scott Adams and commenters above complained about, and what others doubted or dismissed as technical glitches. Turns out it's not a technical problem, it's policy.
Sure, Twitter has the right to do it. But please don't dismiss the serious questions about whether they ought to do it and expect me to take you seriously. To my knowledge, unlike the tweets of Islamic terrorists that caused some of their accounts to be deleted, there has been no violence associated with the speech of the "alt-right". There has been violence on the "antifa" side with associated tweets, but there is no mention in the article of any of those accounts being shut down.
These 2 things aren't the same at all. The article is talking about tweets being excluded from search results and users being banned from creating additional accounts. Adams is talking about tweets being censored by claiming that they're unavailable when they are. He wasn't talking about either a search or a specific user being banned, only tweets being censored.
From TFA: "The video describes how Twitter gives a fake message that some tweets are no longer available, to discourage you from clicking to them. The tweets still exist, and you can access them by directly clicking the links in the tweets, but most people would not think to do that."
From the article I quoted: "Twitter is also making some replies less visible so only the most relevant conversations surface."
Way to cherry pick. The article you quoted is talking about search results. That's exactly what I said in my reply to you. You're pretending like they're the same thing when they're not.
You probably won't see this, but Scott Adams and I are not the only ones to notice this. Stay on the right side of the narrative, though; you wouldn't want to run afoul of the powers that be.
I'll get spanked here for sure, but he is right. Facebook did it too, got caught, and admitted it. Half of what I read in the collection of comments looks as credible as fake news. FYI I watch CNN AND Fox. Left and right obviously. Regarding political matters, I deem Fox more credible. They show more of the actual info. CNN has been caught multiple times editing at the perfect moment to change the meaning.
"You can't add too much water to a nuclear reactor"
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