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Comment by bentcorner | Hacker News Reader

> This gets my curiosity going, so now I'm paying a lot more attention to conservatives than is normal for me (on Substack, YouTube, and Instagram).

This is a phrase right out of this playbook. No thank you.

https://medium.com/@DeoTasDevil/the-rhetoric-tricks-traps-an...

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I don't get how his comment relates at all to your article. Paying attention to conservatives makes him a white nationalist?

Paying attention to them is fine, I think curiosity is an excellent trait. GP's comment is extremely similar to the "thanks for pushing normal people even further to the right" phrase in my linked article. GP is implying that right-wing talking points are being indirectly validated by twitter, and GP values are being changed because of that.

It's called the Streisand effect.

Fake streisand effect. Pretending even the tiniest act of moderation is a massive campaign to hide information.

How is it fake? I'd have never learned about, e.g., some of the gender critical viewpoints, if Twitter hadn't banned people expressing them. It wouldn't have come on my radar. But since Twitter did ban some of those people, those viewpoints came on my radar (being relayed by others via screenshots), which raised my awareness of it. That fits the definition of Streisand effect.

Because twitter wasn't trying to make those viewpoints go away or hide them from the world. They just didn't want to themselves amplify those views to hundreds or thousands or more people.

Twitter's not trying to keep gender critical viewpoints a secret, or remove them from anywhere outside of twitter.

They did amplify, or I wouldn't have learned about them. Twitter does seem to be trying to keep gender-critical viewpoints secret, but covertly, as they make it really easy to get banned for "hate speech" when you engage in gender-critical speech. The same for other topics that people label as misinformation, such as sharing the actual statistical results from vaccine trials. I never cared about the statistical results until people got banned for sharing them, thus Twitter indirectly amplified.

That is a ridiculously tortured argument. The censor not extending his reach to outside venues doesn't make him any less a censor.

Streisand effect is about information someone is trying to keep hidden. This kind of Twitter moderation fits neither half of that.

I don't want to fuss about what counts as "censorship" or not. That's not productive.

1. Detransition accounts are information 2. Twitter bans users specifically to suppress that information, i.e. minimize its reach, i.e. hide it

Bald-facedly denying censorship is certainly not intellectually productive, might I suggest you simply stop doing that?

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