Comment by garbagetime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by garbagetime | Hacker News Reader

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The situation is very simple:

1. PG broke Twitter's rules

2. Twitter suspended PG's account

3. Twitter changed its rules

4. Twitter reinstated PG's account

Whether you like my use of the words 'ban' and 'evasion' ultimately isn't super relevant to my point.

I'm not 'defending' Twitter's actions. I'm interpreting reality. I'm discussing a matter of fact. The question is: did PG break Twitter's rules? The answer: yes. You may dislike Elon Musk. You may dislike me. You may dislike Twitter's (now deleted) rule. But this basic factual claim will remain correct.

HN has an infinite track record of being very wrong. I take my comment being flagged as a much greater endorsement of it than had it been "upvoted". You can find countless HN users in this thread getting the basic facts of the situation wrong (yourself included). And it's not just that these are ignorant people searching for the truth. These are not enquiring minds. Any amount of sincere reflection would have revealed the truth. These are people actively claiming clear untruths as the truth. Why should I care about being downvoted, if these are the people downvoting me? Any time I am upvoted I should take it only as a sign to take a step back and think: "have I made some kind of blatant logical error?"

The account did not break Twitter's rules.

- The tweet did not link to Mastodon.

- The tweet did not name a Mastodon handle.

- The tweet is not similar to any of the examples provided in the deleted policy (“follow me @username on Instagram”, “username@mastodon.social”, “check out my profile on Facebook - facebook.com/username”).

- The tweet did not bypass restrictions on external links via means such as URL cloaking or plaintext obfuscation, with the example provided being “instagram dot com/username”.

- The CEO of Twitter stated that "casually sharing external links" to competing platforms is "fine" when the deleted policy was in place: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604593057676300288

Even though the account did not break Twitter's rules, you believe that it should have broken Twitter's rules because the tweet said something that hurts Twitter's business prospects. This is what you are erroneously using the phrase "ban evasion" to describe, even though Twitter's policy on ban evasion (https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/ban-evasion) defines it as something done only by accounts that were previously banned or suspended.

HN does have it right this time. HN users are fully capable of seeing that the novel definition of "ban evasion" you invented specifically for your argument does not match the definition used in https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/ban-evasion.

Using a hyperlink is not neccessary to break the rule. Naming a Mastodon account (or any account) is not neccesary to break the rule. Breaking the rule in the same way that it was broken in the examples given is not neccesary to break the rule. Elon stated in various places that attempts such as PG's to break the rule (which is about the promotion of prohibited social media) without getting banned would not be tolerated. In one instance he referred to such an attempt as 'ban evasion' (this was in a Twitter space, I'll find it when I'm back at my PC).

Elon's phrase "casual sharing" is not inclusive of PG apparently denouncing Twitter and promoting his Mastodon account in its place. PG's Tweet was anything but casual. If PG had linked to some post he found interesting that happened to be on Mastadon, that might qualify as casual.

I never claimed that my use of the phrase 'ban evasion' matched the use in the Twitter user agreement. HN and I are in agreement on that count (as I have stated elsewhere in this thread).

Frankly, you have bad reading comprehension, most likely due to motivated interpretation i.e. you tend to see what you want to be there rather than what is actually there.

> Elon stated in various places that attempts such as PG's to break the rule (which is about the promotion of prohibited social media) without getting banned would not be tolerated.

The expectation is that you either break the rule and get suspended, or you don't break the rule and don't get suspended. This acccount didn't break the rule (or the ban evasion policy) as it was written but still got suspended because Twitter still deemed the tweet to be against its interests, even though Twitter didn't bother to codify this in the rule. Twitter can suspend any account on its platform for any reason it wants, of course, but the resulting backlash led to the account being unsuspended.

You resorting to personal attacks shows that you have lost the argument. If you still want to discuss this, there are other comments in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34044151, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34040165, and a bunch of other threads and subthreads. I am disengaging. Merry Christmas.

If a person can read he should be able to see that PG's Tweet broke the rule. There's nothing too complicated about it - the rule clearly stated that X was not allowed, and PG did X.

You seem like someone who can read, so the charatable interpretation is that there is some kind of mental block that's stopping you from seeing the clear truth.

If you want to stop talking, OK. Either way I hope you have a merry Christmas.

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