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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

There are literally nazis promoting themselves on twitter without censorship

There's all kinds of genocide being promoted on Twitter, and the so-called Nazis are literally the only ones being censored. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander says I. Either Twitter - a for profit entity - is a common carrier or they impose editorial standards, they can't be allowed to get away with playing both sides as it suits them. And by "suits them" I mean, sells the most ads.

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> and the so-called Nazis are literally the only ones being censored

False. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Twitter

“So-called nazis”, huh?

The group of people who literally self identify as Nazis is a very very small group.

The group of people that get accused of being Nazis can span all the way up into the hundreds of millions (Ex: Many people call Trump a fascist, and therefore his X million supports would be fascist under these accusations)

Self-identification isn't the one true criterium. See "I'm not racist but ...".

And yet, if you go around claiming that their are millions or hundreds of millions of Nazis these days, as many people are claiming, you'd be wrong.

The brush that people are painting about who is a Nazi is very broad, these days.

> if you go around claiming that their are millions or hundreds of millions of Nazis these days,

Do you have a source for that?

> The group of people who literally self identify as Nazis is a very very small group.

Luckily self-identification isn't the most reliable way to categorize things. A robin doesn't have to say "I am a robin" in order for you to say "Oh, look, a robin." It's not like suddenly thousands of years of development of classification systems doesn't exist anymore. The group of people who, whether they proclaim it or not, express white-supremacist, nationalist, and vitriolic views is unfortunately not that very small.

Same goes for the other side. It is a fact that in Germany people have been attacked by antifa on the street for "looking like a Nazi" (and no, they were not sporting Hitler moustaches).

Bottomline is that you do not get to judge who is what based on some self-made criteria, just like the legal system enforces a presumption of innocence even in a case of "he was standing over the dead body with bloody hands".

> It is a fact that in Germany people have been attacked by antifa on the street for "looking like a Nazi"

Do you have a source for that?

The "other side" of?

I can't help but wonder why you immediately jump to what they look like rather than by what they say and do in publicly viewable spaces. How much might we wager that, if you actually have a source to show for your fact, what you're talking about has less than 1/10000th the occurrence rate of what the rest of us are talking about?

I'd prefer a term such as "white supremacist" since the NSDAP isn't actually a thing anymore. But we both know that the word can mean anything these days. And we all know they're not the only ones with disturbing or distasteful ideas.

Remember that Twitter was OK with ISIS using it, right up until it started to affect ad revenues, then they made only a half hearted attempt to stop them. Their actual ideology is only, make money.

In Germany you are called a Nazi by some very left wing politicians if you say that maybe the rejected asylum seeker from Pakistan who cut the throat of his 2 year old daughter* should be deported.

* Current news! They just caught him on the run in Spain a few days ago.

So you'll excuse me if I don't take every accusation of nazism 100% seriously.

Do you have a source for this?

Rose McGowan would disagree with your assertion.

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