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Comment by mandmandam | Hacker News Reader

> Overall, I don't really see too much that would cause me to gasp with horror.

I didn't "gasp", but, silently blocking an esteemed scientist is indeed horrible.

He, and who knows how many others, presented sensible analyses against extended lockdowns in schools. This dissenting view, like with the lableak theory, was systematically blocked from ever reaching journalists eyes, and thus from reaching parents minds.

The harm done to an entire generation of children is very real. The opportunity cost from wasting vaccinations in children is very real. The discussion was warped, and the narrative was rammed down people's brains. There are second-order effects with that kind of brain power-washing at mass scale.

This wasn't an isolated incident either. Literally millions of posts were removed and shadowbanned to various degrees. No one at any of these companies has suffered any semblance of accountability in any form.

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> The dissenting view, like with the lableak theory, was systematically blocked from ever reaching journalists eyes, and thus from reaching parents minds.

I would hope that journalists conduct their research through better means than solely reading Tweets. That would be an exceptionally lazy standard, one which would merit a failing grade for a high school paper.

That being said, "systematically blocked from ever reaching journalists eyes" seems basically false given that this person co-authored a story that was published in the Wall Street Journal! [1]

> Literally millions of posts were removed and shadowbanned to various degrees. No one at any of these companies has suffered any semblance of accountability in any form.

Being punished for exerting control over what is publish on your private web site seems to me like massive government overreach to me. I don't think anyone would administer web forums if the government started telling them how they could and could not moderate posting.

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[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as...

Yes someone published a story in the Wall Street Journal, but this thread is talking about Twitter. Twitter is not exonerated because some other outlet did something differently.

The point here is that they were specifically responding to government requests to censor information. That is truly government overreach, but in the opposite direction to what you claim.

>Being punished for exerting control over what is publish on your private web site seems to me like massive government overreach to me. I don't think anyone would administer web forums if the government started telling them how they could and could not moderate posting.

Just wait until you realize that corporations at a certain scale become a form of government themselves!

> I would hope that journalists conduct their research through better means than solely reading Tweets.

That's not a good reason to suppress scientists tweets.

Also, many of the best journalists of the past decades have been loudly warning of being shadowbanned, supressed, deranked etc.

> I don't think anyone would administer web forums if the government started telling them how they could and could not moderate posting.

A large part of these Twitter reveals show just how much government connections pushed extreme "moderation" (read: censorship) of specific issues.

Not really. Biden just asked twitter take down his sons dick pics.

> silently blocking an esteemed scientist is indeed horrible

My understanding is that anyone using the chrono timeline could still his tweets as they happened. Twitter deciding not to promote his tweets in the algo timeline seems far away from blocking.

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