Everything that is awful in the diff between X and Twitter is there entirely by decision and design.

It’s fundamentally just another way of boosting account engagement metrics by encouraging repliers to signal that they are smart and clued-in. But it seems to work exceptionally well because it’s inescapable at the moment.

Stop apologizing for Nazis or we'll think you are one.

Elon Musk did two nazi salutes on live television.

There is absolutely no ambiguity here.

I'm sure "The only people who say it's not are <x>" is an abominable thought pattern Nazis and similar types would love everyone to have. It makes for a great excuse to never weigh things on their merits, so I'm not sure why you feel the need to invoke it when the merits are already in your court. I can't look at these numbers https://i.imgur.com/hwm2bI5.png and conclude most Americans are Nazi's instead of being willing to accept perhaps not everyone sees it the same way I do even if they don't like Nazis either.

To any actual Nazi supporters out there: To hell with you

To anybody who thinks either everyone agrees with what they see 100% of the time or they are a literal Nazi: To hell with you as well

So yeah, I believe there are a LOT of Nazi-adjacent folks in this country: they're the ones who voted for Trump 3 times even after they knew he was a fascist piece of garbage.

- Even assuming all who weren't sure (13%) should just be discounted as not having an opinion, like those who had not heard about it (22%), 32% is still not a majority of the remaining (100%-13%-22%) = 65%. 32% could have been a plurality of those with an opinion, but since you insisted on lumping things into 3 buckets of 32%, 35%, and remaining %, the remaining % of 33% would actually get the plurality of those who responded with opinions by this definition.

N.b. If just read straight from the sheet, "A Nazi salute" would have already had a plurality. Though grouping like this is probably the more correct thing to do, it actually ends up significantly weakening the overall position of "more people agree than not" rather than strengthening it.

- But, thankfully, "A Nazi Salute" + "A Roman Salute" would actually have been 32+2=34%, so plurality is at least restored by more than one whole percentage point (if you excluded the unsure or unknowing)!

- However, a "Roman salute" (which is a bit of a farce of a name really) can't really be assumed to be fungible with the first option in this poll. If it were fully fungible, it could have been combined into that option. I.e. there's no way to tell which adults responding "A Roman salute" meant to be counted as "a general fascist salute, as the Nazis later adopted" or meant to be counted as "a non-fascist meaning of the salute, like the Bellamy salute was before WWII". So whichever wins this game of eeking out percentage points comes down to how each person wants to group these 2 percentage points. Shucks!

- In reality, between error margins and bogus responses, this is about as close as one could expect to get for an equal 3 way split between "it was", "it wasn't", and "dunno/don't care", and pulling ahead a percentage point or two is really quite irrelevant beyond that it is, blatantly, not actually a majority that agree it was a Nazi-style salute.

Even though I'm one who agrees with you Elon exhibits neo-nazi tendencies, the above just shows how we go from "Elon replies directly supporting someone in a thread about Hitler being right about the Jewish community" and similar things constantly for years to debating individual percentage points to try to claim our favorite sub-majority says he likely made a one off hand gesture 3 years ago. Now imagine I was actually a Nazi supporter walking into the thread - suddenly we've gone from talking about direct pro-Nazi statements and retweets constantly in his feed to a chance for me to debate with you whether the majority think he made a one off hand gesture 3 years ago? Anyone concerned with Musk's behavior should want to avoid this topic with a 20 foot pole so they can get straight to the real stuff.

Also... I've run across a fair share of crypto lovers who turn out to be neo-nazish, but I'm not sure how you're piecing together that such a large portion of the population is a "crypto-Nazi" when something like only 28% of the population has crypto at all, let alone is a Nazi too. At least we're past "anyone who disagrees with my interpretations can only be doing so as a Nazi" though.

Thanks for the note!

Whether HN wants to endorse a political ideology or not, their approach to handling these issues is a material support of the ideologies these stories and comments are criticizing.

Kinda like the scientists building the atomic bomb.

They'll be in for a rude awakening.

But I generally consider something political if it involves politicians, or anyone being upset about anything someone else is doing, or any topic that they could mention on normal news. I prefer hn to be full of positive things that normal people don't understand or care about.

(As a long-term Musk-sceptic, I can confirm that Musk-critical content tended to get insta-flagged even years before he was explicitly involved in politics.)

edit: back to 8, kinda crazy

I (and others) were arguing that the Trump administration is probably, and unfortunately, the most relevant topic to the tech industry on most any given day. This is because computer is mostly made out of people. The message that these political stories intersect deeply with technology (as is seen here) seems to have successfully gotten through.

I wish the most relevant tech story of every day were, say, some cool new operating system, or something cool and curiosity-inspiring like "you can sort in linear time" or "python is an operating system" or "i made X rewritten in Y" or whatever.

I think in most things, creation is much harder than destruction, but software and software systems are an exception where one individual can generally do more creation than destruction. So, it's particularly interesting (and jarring) when a few individuals are able to make decisions that cause widespread destruction.

We should collectively be proud that we have a culture where creation is easier than destruction. But it's also why the top stories of any given day will be "Trump did X" or "us-east-1 / cloudflare / crowdstrike is down" or "software widely used in {phones / servers} has a big scary backdoor".

"Major Silicon Valley Company's Product Creates and Publishes Child Porn" has nothing to do with politics. It's not "political content." It is relevant tech news when someone investigates and points out wrongdoing that tech companies are up to. If another tech company's product was doing this, it would be all over HN and there would be pretty much no flagging.

When these stories get flagged, it's because people don't want bad news to get out about the company--it's not about avoiding politics out of principle.

I'm not saying you're wrong about it being brigaded by PR bots, I'm saying it's still political. Hell, everything's political.

In 2020, Dang said [1]

> Voting ring detection has been one of HN's priorities for over 12 years: [...]

> I've personally spent hundreds of hours working on this, as well as tracking down voting rings of every imaginable sort. I'd never claim that our software catches everything, but I can tell you that it catches so much that I often go through the lists to find examples of good projects that people were trying ineptly to promote, and invite them to do it again in a way that is more likely to gain community interest.

Of course this sort of thing is inherently heuristic; presumably bots throw up a smokescreen of benign activity, and sophisticated bots could present a very realistic, human-like smokescreen.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22761897

There are all sorts of approaches that a moderation team could take if they actually believed this was a problem. For example, identify the users who regularly downvote/flag stories like this that end up being cleared by the moderation team for unflagging or the 2nd chance queue and devalue their downvotes/flags in the future.

I think the biggest thing HN could do to stop this problem is to not make flagging affect an article's ranking until after a human mod reviews the flags and determines them to be appropriate. Right now, all bad actors apparently have to do is be quick on the draw, and get their flagging ring in action ASAP. I'm sure any company's PR team (or motivated Elon worshiper) can buy "100 HN flags on an article" on the dark web right now if they wanted to.

This just describes HN as a whole, so if this is the concern, might as well shut the site down.

Now that you mention it - I've noticed the same on Youtube ... I used to get suspended every 5 minutes on there.

I understand why you gave the general answer you gave rather than addressing this specific example, but I'll just say this story would be a good place to look for those potential "agenda-motivated" flaggers.

Like, the entirety of DOGE was such an obviously terrible series of events, but for whatever reason, the above were both big cheerleaders on Twitter.

And yeah the moderation team here have been clearly letting everything Musk-related be flagged even after pushback. It's absolutely vile. I've seen many people try to make posts about the false flagging issue here, only to have those posts flagged as well (unapologetically, on purpose, by the mods themselves).

Personally I've never seen anything like this.

Once again - links are trivial to share.

Otherwise this is hearsay.

The ones I reported, I deleted the report emails so I can't help you at this moment. I don't know why you're surprised - you can go looking yourself and find examples

https://x.com/UpwardChanging posts Hitler content, 14 words, black sun graphics, swastikas, antisemitic content etc. 21k followers

https://x.com/hvitrulfur supportively reposts swastika content, white supremacism, anti-black racism, islamophobia, 14 words

https://x.com/unconquered_sol black sun, swastikas, fasces, hitler glorification. 70k followers

2. Seems like case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_guilt which spills into racism/white-supremacy.

3. This is literally art. Not my taste of course.

OP's claim was X is swimming in hate speech.

p.s. communist symbols are banned in a lot of the world too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bans_on_communist_symbols), yet this is ok for bluesky:

* https://bsky.app/profile/mikkel314.bsky.social/post/3mbe62hg...

* https://bsky.app/profile/gwynnstellar.bsky.social/post/3mb5p...

* https://bsky.app/profile/negatron00.bsky.social/post/3mbfnnh...

* https://bsky.app/profile/kyulen742.bsky.social/post/3mb4nkeg...

* https://bsky.app/profile/mommyanddaddyslittlebimbo.com/post/...

They are in here too. But thanks to moderation they are usually more subtle and use dog whistles or proxy targets.

Seems like bot behavior.

There’s one in this thread. A sibling to my comment.

I mean, honestly, you are wasting your time. Why would you expect the website run by the guy who likes giving Nazi salutes on TV to take down Nazi content?

There's no point trying to engage with Twitter in good faith at this point; only real option is to stop using and move on (or hang out in the Nazi bar, I guess).

It's obviously a bad idea from the perspective that Twitter is a social website. But from the perspective it's a Nazi website run by a Nazi for the purpose of spreading Nazi ideology, it makes a lot more sense.

It's a playground for him personally, essentially a real-world sandbox RPG where he gets to choose the NPCs, he gets to make and enforce all of the rules, choose the outcomes, all in service of soothing his massively damaged ego.

If he has to unleash a child raping mecha hitler on the world to do so, then so be it.

And I'm sure that's a factor in why people like Larry Ellison and Saudi princes stumped up some of the money.

I’m not sure if this is much worse than the textual hate and harassment being thrown around willy nilly over there. That negativity is really why I never got into it, even when it was twitter I thought it was gross.

I haven't seen Xi, but I am unfortunate enough to know that such an animated depiction of Maduro also exists.

These people are clearly doing it largely for shock value.

Fuck X.

1. Denmark taxes its rich people and has a high standard of living.

2. Scammy looking ad for investments in a blood screening company.

3. Guy clearing ice from a drainpipe, old video but fun to watch.

4. Oil is not actually a fossil fuel, it is "a gift from the Earth"

5. Elon himself reposting a racist fabrication about black people in Minnesota.

6. Climate change is a liberal lie to destroy western civilization. CO2 is plant food, liberals are trying to starve the world by killing off the plants.

7. Something about an old lighthouse surviving for a long time.

8. Vaccine conspiracy theories

9. Outright racism against Africans, claiming they are too dumb to sustain civilized society without white men running it.

10. One of those bullshit AI videos where the AI doesn't understand how pouring resin works.

11. Microsoft released an AI that is going to change everything, for real this time, we promise.

12. Climate change denialism

13. A post claiming that the Africa and South America aren't poor because they were robbed of resources during the colonial era and beyond, but because they are too dumb to run their countries.

14. A guy showing how you can pack fragile items using expanding foam and plastic bags. He makes it look effortless, but glosses over how he measures out the amount of foam to use.

15. Hornypost asking Grok to undress a young Asian lady standing in front of a tree.

16. Post claiming that the COVID-19 vaccine caused a massive spike (5 million to 150 million) cases of myocarditis.

17. A sad post from a guy depressed that a survey of college girls said that a large majority of them find MAGA support to be a turn off.

18. Some film clip with Morgan Freeman standing on a X and getting sniped from an improbable distance

19. AI bullshit clip about people walking into bottomless pits

20. A video clip of a woman being confused as to why financial aid forms now require you to list your ethnicity when you click on "white", with the only suboptions being German, Irish, English, Italian, Polish, and French.

Special bonus post: Peter St Ogne, Ph. D claims "The Tenth Amendment says the federal government can only do things expressly listed in the Constitution -- every other federal activity is illegal." Are you wondering what federal activity he is angry about? Financial support for daycare.

So yeah, while it wasn't a total and complete loss it is obvious that the noise far exceeds the signal. It is maybe a bit of a shock just how much blatant climate change denialism, racism, and vaccine conspiracies are front page material. I'm saddened that there are people who are reading this every day and taking it to heart. The level of outright racism is quite shocking too. It's not even up for debate that black people are just plain inferior to the glorious aryan race on Twitter. This is supposedly the #1 news source on the Internet? Ouch.

Edit: Got the year wrong at the top of the post, fixed.

What to do about it is to point out to those people in the middle how badly things are being fucked up, preferably with how those mistakes link back to their pocketbook.

They weren't placed there by God.

And you thought that was a different argument than "you shouldn't have worn that skirt if you didn't want to get raped"?

The CSAM machine is only a recent addition.

It's become a bit of a meme to do this right now on X.

FWIW (very little), it's also on a lot of male posts, as well. None of that excuses this behavior.