You can use Twitter completely fine without ever paying any attention to "Trending" or things like that. For many, it probably makes the experience better not to do so. (other recommendation: Twitter lets you mute specific people and phrases. make liberal use of that).

(semi-OT: I'm also surprised how those screenshots are paraded around as "aha! caught them!". Did anyone seriously think there wasn't any moderation of trends etc going on before?)

That's what I'm doing. The only thing I'm noticing in the dev community is the rise of many weird account of "self made developers" that tweet stupid things like "how to add 2 + 1 in JS" that are gaining a lot of followers in a short amount of time.

Looks like there's a network of these guys, doing RTs and talking with their group in order to gain followers.

Most of them sell courses and ebooks.

> Did anyone seriously think there wasn't any moderation of trends etc going on before?

I too am surprised at people who thought the trending list was organic. It's been obvious from the day it appeared that it's curated and/or paid for placements. Purely from a programming point of view, trying to keep hate speech, racism, and shock content out of it automatically would be nigh on impossible (q.v. recent AI attempts to do this sort of thing on News sites and Facebook).

Well, I assume there is equal parts organic, natural propagation, and astro-turfing. I am a curious and analytical mind, so I'd like to believe I know where the rabbit holes begin. The problem for me is informatic.

> (semi-OT: I'm also surprised how those screenshots are paraded around as "aha! caught them!". Did anyone seriously think there wasn't any moderation of trends etc going on before?)

This is pretty similar to conspiracy theorists vs normal people with regards to the US government spying on people before Snowden.

I think "anything based on arbitrary user input on a major platform has some moderation tools" is far from "conspiracy theorists".

How far? As I understand it, the conspiracy here is that Twitter uses these moderation tools to silence people with a certain political perspective. I think — assuming that is indeed the case — this does lean more on the conspiratorial side, and is not akin to moderators banning bots trying to shift cialis pills.

The reason why I liken this to Snowden is because at least anecdotally, the typically dialogue I have seen is

Conspiracy Theorist: "Twitter are shadow-banning people!"

Normal Person A: "That's a dumb conspiracy theory."

Twitter: "We are not shadow-banning people."

Normal Person B: "Here is proof that Twitter shadow-bans people."

Normal Person A: "Well yeah, obviously. It would be pretty naïve to think they weren't always doing this."

---

You can quite accurately substitute Twitter with the US government, shadow-banning with spying, and Normal Person B with Edward Snowden.

I was specifically just talking about the reaction to the trending mod tools existing, as if that was bad or surprising in itself. That there are mod tools doesn't prove that there is political targeting. And in reverse, if you claim that Twitter isn't especially targeting some group, you hopefully aren't basing that claim on a naive "they can't be doing that because they don't have moderation tools".

Yes. We can also remember that Richard Stallman called Snowden a 'Hero' [0] for revealing the PRISIM programme was his strongest evidence around the NSA mass-surveillance and backdoors in general using internet services and companies. Without this, it would still be another 'conspiracy theory' which would have lacked any concrete evidence to support Stallman's claims.

[0] https://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2014/02/18/richard-stallman-calls-...

The most visible part of Web site being moderated is not a scandal.

I think that depends on the nature of the moderation. If a major platform were deliberately amplifying right-wing extremists for example, it would likely be a scandal.

Yes, the the bad thing mentioned in this thread was supposed to be existence of admin moderation tools. Nit the way they use it, but that it even exists.