Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

Off topic to this interesting and really nerdy thread, but does anyone happen to know why, or does this show for anyone else, the "more tweets" segment below this one is a bunch of anti-trans rhetoric? I'm signed in but I only follow some software engineers, I don't follow these people, I've never interacted or liked any anti-trans sentiments. These are the tweets I'm seeing below the linked thread (TW: anti-trans sentiments):

https://twitter.com/SethDillon/status/1505663712266493958 (Babylon Bee complaining about getting suspended after calling Rachel Levine "man of the year")

https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1505670109809070102?s=... JK Rowling pushing her "trans kids regret their choices" rhetoric

https://twitter.com/RevengOfTheFlex/status/15055563131237908... Man going "May transition join a women's MMA league & win it all."

etc etc etc; it's a heap of right-wing nonsense talking points, anti-Ukrainian sentiments crossed with anti-vaxxer posts, a comic claiming BLM embezzled money, a woman saying that if she cheated on a man it's the man's fault, Stonetoss, and even one claiming technology has made us all gay.

What the fuck Twitter? This is not what I signed up for, this is not relevant to my interests, this is not in any way related to anything I've interacted with Twitter for. Is this what you're earning money from these days? If this happens again I'll close my account. That'll teach 'em.

I got the same results. (Not logged in) I'd guess that these things are "trending" in "engagement" today because they are controversial and antagonistic.

My thinking is it is a problem of misaligned incentives. Twitter benefits from outrage through engagement. The perpetrators of hatred benefit from outrage through division. You and I, we do not benefit from this alignment.

That's exactly what I'm thinking; these agitators generate tons of 'engagement' on twitter from both pro- and anti- whatever they're up for, which for Twitter translates to revenue.

It's why they didn't ban Trump for all this time until he was no longer president. I mean sure, as president of the US he would get special treatment, but he didn't use the official twitter account of the US presidency, and he caused a lot of issues. But also a lot of engagement for Twitter; I wouldn't be surprised if all the reactions, retweets and responses to his tweets, and the fact half the world news media would jump on top of anything he tweeted, were responsible for a big chunk of Twitter's usage during that period.

This kind of discourse sort of exculpates the outraged. People have agency, however imperfect. We've gotten in a rut of blaming platforms for people's behavior -- both assholes that post in social media and brittle-porcelaine people who can't stand this torture.

Something needs to be done policy-wise about Twitter and Facebook, but we should also be telling each other to chill the frak out -- and to consider the truths (and every ideology has some truth to it, that's how it acquires verosimilitude and grows) behind the asshole's worldview. Maybe those damn transphobes are looking at some things that we've become blind to.

I am logged in and got the same results despite not following anyone close to connected to those tweets. There seems to be something specific about this thread that Twitter is connecting to the conservative side of the trans rights debate.

Probably because it's trending and the censors haven't gotten around to it yet?

Many people are not at all pleased that this new gender identity belief system is being forced upon them. It's highly controversial to assert that men can become woman and women can become men, and this generates a lot of argument with people who recognise the biological fundamental of sex as holding primacy.

Twitter, being Twitter, is something of a battleground of opinions on this issue - so you're just seeing what are currently hot topics.

These things shouldn't make you this angry.

- BLM is unusually opaque about how it uses donations, particularly for something that's promoted by XKCD (usually a seal of quality).

- The current understanding of gender is very very new, and JK Rowling is 56. Also, are we saying no trans kids ever regret their choices?

- There are complaints by female athletes -- possibly just sour grapes -- that transwomen are unreachably strong. The usual rebuttal is that hormone therapy "undoes" in some sense the muscular advantage that testosterone produces, but the timeline for that is unclear, and not all of the peak male physical superiority is due to sheer muscle (bone structure and mass, etc.) These aren't talking points, it's other people's lives.

At any rate, your complaint is that someone is wrong on the internet! That does happen every once and then.

"More tweets" seems specifically designed to show you content you hate. No idea why. If you followed the people you list above it would show you the most extreme left-wing talking points instead.

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