
Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident - ColinWright
https://thenextweb.com/twitter/2017/04/11/twitter-delete-united-airlines-tweets/#.tnw_NIWU4Eup
======
danso
Surprised that people here are taking this at face value. Why would Twitter
remove these tweets from random users while leaving the vast majority of
negative tweets in place? No proof has been given. Indeed, this Jay Beecher's
allegedly deleted tweet is visible as far as I can tell:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/dancow/status/851808188567388161](https://mobile.twitter.com/dancow/status/851808188567388161)

edit: To be fair, Beecher says that my tweet refers to tweets he sent out
after the original tweet was deleted. Indeed, his screenshot shows a different
timestamp for the original tweet. Not knowing him at all, I have no reason to
accuse him of deliberately making this up. But burden of evidence is still on
him, and hard to accept claims of random Tweet deleting when, as I write,
#NewUnitedAirlinesMottos is a top trend (as it has been all morning), and we
have much more definitive evidence that Twitter manually shuts down
controversial trending hashtags.

On a sidenote, how is it possible for a user to have a screenshot of an old
tweet unless they took it before it was deleted? Other than a caching issue, I
thought all Twitter clients (especially the official one) removed tweets
marked for deletion? [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5955021/detect-tweet-
dele...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5955021/detect-tweet-deletion-
with-twitter-streaming-api)

~~~
hdhsbshs
My tweet from last night is gone. It's not "alleged".

~~~
danso
Yes, it is still an allegation. Nothing has been proven beyond your assertion.

~~~
bordercases
You could settle this by experiment easily if we're trying to prove this to
you: go ahead and try posting one, in similar vein to the others. There'd be a
false-negative rate if you do it too late so I would try it now.

~~~
danso
I've been posting negative-sentiment tweets about United since yesterday. If
we do accept the premise that Twitter would do something like this, we should
also assume that they'd be selective in which tweets they've deleted, such as
tweets that aren't likely to be noticed when gone.

There are too many independent variables and unknowns for there to be an easy
experiment. In any case, I'd be happy for other kinds of evidence. If Twitter
is silencing tweets about United, is it part of a corporate ad package, in
which case, other folks would've heard about this kind of deal for other
companies?

~~~
d23
Of all tweets to delete, why would they choose ones that aren't likely to be
seen anyway?

~~~
danso
The premise is so unlikely (given what we know of Twitter's past behavior)
that if we accept it, we have to accept motives that are beyond our
understanding. That said, it's hard to conceptualize even just the metric that
they might be optimizing for.

I mean, randomly pruning negative sentiment tweets for a given topic might
allow Twitter to tell United, "Hey, we removed 12,000 negative tweets about
your brand" (leaving out the fact that there are 12,000,000 negative United
tweets total). Or maybe by removing these random tweets, Twitter reduces the
overall spread and diversity of this negative sentiment, as many people are
content to just retweet what the most popular Twitter users have said about
United. But...what would that fix? Twitter already has algorithms in place
that make it hard for you to see things either outside of your own filter
bubble or otherwise not popular content.

For example, it's well known that many bots are triggered to auto-reply to
Trump tweets, as the space devoted to tweet replies are seen as prime
advertising space [0]. But I never see those merch-selling bots. The top
replies I see to Trump tweets are either from my network, or are replies from
popular (usually political) accounts. I have to dig very far to find those
random bot replies.

For me, a major argument against Twitter deleting tweets is that it has many
other effective ways to suppress content that would be virtually undetectable
without wide-scale analysis of their data.

[0]
[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/12/weird...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/12/weird-
media-ecosystem/510911/)

~~~
bordercases
> The premise is so unlikely (given what we know of Twitter's past behavior)
> that if we accept it, we have to accept motives that are beyond our
> understanding.

What you and I both know of Twitter's behavior is unlikely to be shared
knowledge between us, unless it's been your job to follow the company for
awhile in which case I would have to defer to you. But I still expect you to
tell me what it is we should both know.

The Twitter I know is happy to shill for political reasons, that puts the
possibility of money being given for damage control at corporate as being
plausible to me, since there is more money in corporate than politics and
Twitter itself is profit-driven with a shit business model. The Twitter you
know is not? We could both be wrong. Without clarifying what you mean by "what
we know" I wouldn't be so trigger happy with the rhetoric just yet.

~~~
danso
We know these things about Twitter relating to censorship:

They have shut down Twitter accounts for abusing the TOS, and this process is
on a case-by-case basis, and can affect well-known users such as Milo
Yiannopoullous and Martin Shkreli:

[http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/07/19/breaking-milo-
suspe...](http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/07/19/breaking-milo-suspended-
twitter-20-minutes-party/)

[http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/01/08/pharma-legend-
marti...](http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/01/08/pharma-legend-martin-
shkreli-suspended-twitter/)

Twitter also deletes content in response to valid legal requests and copyright
claims, according to their own transparency report:

[https://transparency.twitter.com/en.html](https://transparency.twitter.com/en.html)

We also know that Twitter has applied crowdsourcing/human editing to search
query analysis:

[http://blog.echen.me/2013/01/08/improving-twitter-search-
wit...](http://blog.echen.me/2013/01/08/improving-twitter-search-with-real-
time-human-computation)

I suspect that Trending Topics also has some curation, or at least a manual
blacklist, but couldn't find official mention of that.

We also know that Twitter has been sensitive to the tension between being an
unfiltered source of information and a platform that amplifies abuse. In
January, the company admitted that it "didn't move fast enough" in dealing
with abuse complaints:

[https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2017/01/twitt...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2017/01/twitter-hate-speech-abuse-crackdown/)

In March, they announced new measures for reporting abusive tweets/accounts.
Under a heading "Leveraging our technology to reduce abusive content", they
describe new ways in which an abusive account can be limited, including
suppressing the visibility of tweets: [https://blog.twitter.com/2017/our-
latest-update-on-safety](https://blog.twitter.com/2017/our-latest-update-on-
safety)

So we've seen that Twitter will shut down accounts and tweets based on an
interpretation of TOS (i.e. what constitutes "abuse") in ways that not
everyone agrees with. At the same time, Twitter knows that its special sauce
is unfettered speech, so much so that it was slow to even act on shutting down
accounts openly associated with ISIS:
[https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/02/tw...](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/02/twitter-
isis/460269/)

------
jacquesm
What's really bad is that technically this flight wasn't overbooked at all.
United decided to fly one of their crews when the plane was already booked to
capacity and had _paying passengers_ 'voluntarily' (what a funny way to use
that word) give up their seats so they could move their employees around.

It's a totally ridiculous situation and their media messaging doesn't help at
all.

~~~
maxerickson
Are you sure it wasn't also overbooked?

They pulled passengers to fly crew, but that doesn't mean it wasn't
overbooked.

~~~
jacquesm
They claimed it was overbooked but that has not been substantiated with any
evidence other than the company making that claim and using it to pre-empt
those passengers in favor of their dead-headers. The proof that they are
bullshitting is that the passengers were already on board when suddenly the
plane was declared overbooked.

Which to me sounds like UA using an excuse to bump passengers off a flight
they are already confirmed on in order to fix some kind of crew scheduling
issue.

~~~
tylerjd
That's exactly what they did. Someone up the chain made a mistake. Other
airlines board must-ride passengers (i.e. crew deadheading to the next
destination) before passengers, but this did not happen.

Due to FAA regulations, the movement and sleep requirements of crew is
enforced big time. In this case, they had a higher priority than a full-fare
passenger (Must Ride), and even though it's morally wrong, it is well within
the airline's right to remove any passenger at any time for any reason.

~~~
cmurf
"airline's right to remove any passenger at any time for any reason"

1\. Absurd.

Flight attendant: Sir, you farted, we're going to remove you. Passenger: Umm,
we're at 42,000 feet?! Flight attendant: Too bad, we can remove you at any
time for any reason.

2\. Citation for this "right"?

In the airline's contract of carriage I see explicit reasons for being removed
from an aircraft, and none of them apply to this case.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
If I understand correctly, odor is in fact one explicitly-stated valid reason
for being removed from an aircraft. (Not at 42,000 feet, of course.)

~~~
cmurf
Yes, for United it's contract of carriage rule 21, H, reason 16: malodorous
condition. It's funny that this is under the auspices of safety though. I
guess the logic is if someone stinks enough it might cause disorderly conduct
by other passengers?

------
anotherturn
Given twitters track record upholding user privacy in the face of lawsuits and
the like [0] I'm somewhat skeptical that they'd play ball with United in this
way.

I'd suspect it's more likely that United and their twitter drone army are
"reporting the tweet(s)" as "abusive or harmful" and if enough twitter users
do that it would make sense that twitter would auto-remove / moderate said
tweet.

Of course, it's strange that the originators of the tweet don't get notified
or see their tweet after moderation - so I'm likely wrong.

[0]:[http://time.com/4731403/twitter-donald-trump-alt-uscis-
lawsu...](http://time.com/4731403/twitter-donald-trump-alt-uscis-lawsuit/)

~~~
juliangoldsmith
I'm not sure I'd take Twitter's refusal to unmask an anti-Trump account as
purely upholding privacy. I'd consider Twitter to be pretty anti-Trump, so
politics likely play a part there.

------
jasonlfunk
I'm also a little skeptical of this. It seems too random. If it were an
algorithm, it's hard to know what the parameters were that it was looking for.
And if it as a person, it's hard to know why it was so sporadic and limited.

I wonder if it can just be explained by user error? Do we /know/ these tweets
were actually ever on twitter? Perhaps the tweet about united failed to post.
(It's happened to me). And if that happens to a few people who posted about
United, you then get a conspiracy. But if the same thing happens to the cat
picture you tweeted, it's chalked up to a bug and forgotten.

Though given Twitter's recent track record with "ghost-deleting" and "shadow-
banning", this sort of thing - if true - wouldn't be surprising.

------
hammock
The main threads on Reddit were deleted also:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/undelete/comments/64jbfq/1458098779...](https://www.reddit.com/r/undelete/comments/64jbfq/1458098779_doctor_violently_dragged_from/)

Many more:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/undelete/](https://www.reddit.com/r/undelete/)

~~~
nkkollaw
Jesus Christ, what's going on?

How can we counteract this? They absolutely deserve the bad publicity they're
(or would be) getting!

~~~
542458
Let's not act like this is some massive conspiracy. It's one /r/videos thread
was deleted because it broke the sub's rules. There were literally dozens of
other /r/videos posts on the subject upvoted to /r/all. It's not like the
sub's mods were hiding the incident.

~~~
thescriptkiddie
The /r/videos rule that was broken is "No Police Brutality/Harassment". They
specifically allow videos of police who "have not over-stepped the limits of
the law". Let's not pretend that isn't a politically-motivated rule.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_4_-_no_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_4_-_no_police_brutality.2Fharassment)

~~~
yongjik
I love[1] how police brutality is so common nowadays that a random subreddit
must create rules basically saying "Yeah we've all seen these shit; I know
it's bad but please take it elsewhere because otherwise we'll be swamped."

[1] By which I mean I hate it.

------
chambo622
Twitter had a moment filled with negative tweets about United at the top of
its curated Moments tab for the entire day yesterday. Even now I see a
trending hashtag and moments about the incident. If their goal was to suppress
this story, they couldn't have done a worse job. These accusations sound like
paranoia to me.

~~~
chc
Yeah, looking over my timeline for yesterday, there are still tons of angry
tweets about the incident. This article kind of appears to be jumping to
conclusions.

~~~
tunap
Perhaps they are targeting astroturfing campaign(s).

r/TodayILearned has at least 6 TIL United horror stories ATM.

------
nl
There's an update on the page:

 _Update 2, April 11, 11:15ET: Some readers have suggested that the allegedly
deleted tweets might have initially appeared as replies to now-deleted tweets,
which would explain why they are missing. However, numerous users contacted by
TNW rejected this premise, claiming the missing posts were standard tweets._

I'm betting it is something like this, or a related "Twitter did some weird UI
change which no one understands again".

If it's not, then it's going to be a bug, and Twitter will apologize and
attempt to restore the tweets.

Deleting these tweets isn't in Twitter's interest, no matter how much United
pays for ads.

Edit: looking into this a bit more, it looks like it only affects Tweets which
have @united mentioned. I suspect it's triggering Twitter's anti-Troll
flooding measures, which is clearly wrong.

It'll be interesting to see how Twitter responds, given how slowly they ship
any changes.

~~~
nl
Replying to myself. A number of the accounts listed by thenextweb do have
Tweets to @united visible (now?) prior to them complaining about Tweets being
deleted.

Eg: complaining about Tweet being deleted:
[https://twitter.com/iknowimbitter/status/851640007500718081](https://twitter.com/iknowimbitter/status/851640007500718081)
Original(?) tweet, 7 hours prior:
[https://twitter.com/iknowimbitter/status/851544321564323841](https://twitter.com/iknowimbitter/status/851544321564323841)

Complaint:
[https://twitter.com/TalkIBC/status/851604796113129476](https://twitter.com/TalkIBC/status/851604796113129476)
Original, 1 hour prior:
[https://twitter.com/TalkIBC/status/851581587967934464](https://twitter.com/TalkIBC/status/851581587967934464)

Complaint:
[https://twitter.com/MickFerry/status/851564908915437568](https://twitter.com/MickFerry/status/851564908915437568)
Original, 6 hours prior:
[https://twitter.com/MickFerry/status/851474942789079040](https://twitter.com/MickFerry/status/851474942789079040)

I tend to think my theory about spam/troll filtering might be close to
correct, but I look forward to finding out exactly what happened.

------
bitL
Wonderful, so Twitter is now a tool for corporate propaganda, Google is
providing Censorship-as-a-Service API, Facebook is removing links classified
as "Fake News(tm)", Reddit is deleting whatever mods don't agree with etc.
Seems like we are going full steam into a dystopian society. I think I should
start reading Solzhenitsyn to prepare for what is coming...

~~~
AlexandrB
> Wonderful, so Twitter is now a tool for corporate propaganda, Google is
> providing Censorship-as-a-Service API, Facebook is removing links classified
> as "Fake News(tm)", Reddit is deleting whatever mods don't agree with etc.

This was inevitable. All the above-mentioned services are funded - in large
part - by ads. When it came to choosing between serving the users vs. the
advertisers the latter would always win in the long run because they were the
_paying_ customers.

What's needed is some sort of "public" space on the internet that's not
controlled by corporate (and increasingly advertising) interests. Non-profits
like Wikipedia and archive.org come close, but aren't meant for real time
communication. Ironically, technologies like SMS are also somewhat neutral
because they were conceived before advertising became the dominant business
model on mobile and have no hooks for "curation" and "engagement".

~~~
jerf
"This was inevitable. All the above-mentioned services are funded - in large
part - by ads."

Unsustainable situations always seem to go on for longer than you expect, but
I wonder if we're finally getting to be just a year or three out from
Adpocalypse, when the ad-supported internet companies finally end up having to
face head on that you can not serve two masters.

I wonder if there's going to be a market developing for services that look
like current services, but actually cost money somehow. Probably a billion-
dollar-level opportunity for figuring out how to charge for a Facebook or
Google or Twitter a couple of bucks a month.

(If you are seriously inclined to take this on, which I would support, bear in
mind that the answer to these questions, for all sorts of reasons, is never
"It's just Facebook, with a subscription." Facebook, to take one example, has
been deeply structured around advertising for years now. You can't take the
end result and just remove advertising from it. You need to start back at the
beginning and rethink the whole thing, figuring out how to get people to spend
some money on it. And I can all but promise "It's Facebook, but cares about
your privacy" is a dead letter too, as that has been tried. I don't know what
the answers are, just some of the problems. It'll take some serious thought to
solve this.)

~~~
paulcole
>I wonder if there's going to be a market developing for services that look
like current services, but actually cost money somehow. Probably a billion-
dollar-level opportunity for figuring out how to charge for a Facebook or
Google or Twitter a couple of bucks a month.

You're really overestimating people's willingness to pay for a service that's
already free and convenient. There's really no good comp for tens of millions
of users switching from a free service to a paid service just to avoid
ads/conspiracy theories.

~~~
Cozumel
There are tons of alternative social networks to Facebook, I run several of
them. People are more than happy to pay a few $$ a month to not be tracked,
censored or advertised at.

Even completely free you can be profitable just selling 'credits' to send
e-gifts etc. Facebook is functionally crippled, they still don't even have a
dislike button.

~~~
ColinWright
> _There are tons of alternative social networks to Facebook, I run several of
> them._

Would you care to tell us more about this/these ??

------
Bahamut
Huh, kinda surprised - looks like they deleted my tweet asking United about
this incident.

------
arca_vorago
The real outrage in the airline industry is the fact that we allowed security
theatre in the form of TSA to get so damn powerful in the first place. There
is no reason to be allowing naked x-ray vision scans, pat downs that border on
or actually are assault, etc.

As Bruce Schneier said, the one thing they did right after 9/11 was to make
the cock-pit doors reinforced and locked from the inside.

Do you think rich people on their own jets get TSA patdowns the same way? No.
What we are creating is a state of freedom for the rich, and compliant abuse
for the majority of the citizens.

Since the new TSA regulations, I have only flown twice, for these very
reasons. The first time I was so outraged at the scanners I was going to
protest, but they just sent me through an old school metal detector and I was
on my way. The second time, I only got the scanner leaving London, and being
in a different country I knew I didn't have the same rights of protest as in
the US.

I once called in to NPR while in D.C. when they had a TSA guy on the air. I
asked if it wasn't an obvious conflict of interest for the guy at TSA who
approved the scanner purchase to immediately go to work for that scanner
company, and referenced the above Bruce Schneier quote. I got some deft
wiggling out of an answer and my number was blocked the next time I tried to
call into an NPR show. (not calling too much, had called in maybe 4 times in
the past six months)

It's like someone somewhere said, "the terrorists can't take our freedoms if
we take them away first!" (Of course, the real terrorists are the bankers and
financiers)

We need to rethink the patriot act, the TSA, homeland security, NDAA, AUMF,
and every other peice of legislation the corrupt and/or blackmailed congress
allowed to pass (in violation of their oaths) in the clamor post 9/11.

~~~
kobayashi
>(Of course, the real terrorists are the bankers and financiers)

You lost me at this point. That's hateful populist rhetoric.

~~~
5ilv3r
He's saying they are more likely to hurt you.

~~~
kobayashi
That's not the definition of a terrorist

------
yoran
I wonder why Twitter is doing this? What is their incentive for deleting
negative tweets about another unrelated corporation? It's not like Twitter has
a stake in United. And would they do it just for money? I know they are
turning at a loss but this does not seem like a scalable business model...

~~~
ino
Maybe somebody high up on twitter has a stake in united

------
sagebird
If overbooking ever happens, here is what they should do: Ask a representative
of each atomic passenger group to write down a number of dollars on a napkin,
and the number of tickets they represent. An individual flying alone might
write down $1000-1. A mother of 2 kids might write down $2500-3. Collect the
bids, and sort them. Then if you need to swap 4 seats, select the four lowest
bids, and give them cash.

Overbooking probably makes sense in general - it should lower costs for
everyone in theory. If they used this bid system that I proposed, they would
be less afraid of overbooking, and do more of it - until an equilibrium of
opportunity lost to empty seats equals the expected payout to napkin bidders.

Even if there is no economic benefit to this system, the voluntary aspect will
save some heartache.

~~~
Pigo
This system they have in place is the reason you can find flights for
extremely low fares that were once unheard of. Obviously this could have been
handled better, but I think people should bear in mind that these
inconveniences are the very reason they're saving so much money. This is a
rough instance of it, but if you buy a first class ticket you can bet this
won't be happening to you. All that said, everyone has the right to show
disapproval and take their money elsewhere.

~~~
verulito
I think there's a few tragedies here that people seem to be missing.

1\. A man not clearly identified as a man of authority was empowered to
physically remove a passenger from an airplane. I've seen 3 videos so far and
while it's not obvious that the passenger questioned his authority, he should
have. Given how things unfolded, I wouldn't be surprised to hear next that the
man who removed the passenger was actually a nearby manager who was not
trained or experienced in removing passengers from airplanes.

2\. I think people are actually repulsed by the revocation of permission to
fly. Compliance of a passenger denied boarding simply implies that the
passenger continues to be in his present location. Here compliance required
the passenger to perform work on behalf of the airline. While it's a pretty
minor amount of work, I think people are more accustomed to restrictions of
their actions. They are understandably more sensitive to giving control to
others over what actions they must perform, particularly since it was
unexpected in this scenario and the man in question had no frame of reference
for determining if his actions were reasonable or not.

3\. The execution by the "office" in question was abysmal at best. He showed
no patience or sensitivity and the doctor showed no sign of aggression. The
force used to remove the man was unquestionably extreme. Someone like that
probably would have responded very well to a uniformed police officer. The
other two men had uniforms but they didn't look that official and they weren't
the ones removing the man. Simply bringing out your handcuffs is likely enough
to get compliance. The "officer" should be fired here for performing poorly.

~~~
Pigo
I couldn't agree more with you when it comes to the authority and his
execution. I've just seen a lot of people railing against the system of
overbooking and the general shitiness of modern air travel. I spent most of my
childhood flying as a non-rev thanks to my dad, so I got very used to flying
when there was empty seats, and on occasion I was asked to get out of the
plane after already seated because a higher priority showed up late. It was
always a heart breaker, but that's the life of a non-rev. So I guess I have a
different perspective, and think people should appreciate cheap air travel.
Again, all of that having been said, people should voice their opinions and
hopefully this will change how these incidents are handled.

------
tptacek
This seems extraordinarily unlikely.

~~~
privateprofile
Care to explain why?

~~~
tptacek
And argue with people who badly want it to be true? No, thanks.

------
goodmachine
Twitter presumably just 're-accomodating' these tweets, nothing to worry
about.

------
koolba
Assuming this is true (which I don't believe it is), why would they do this? I
doubt UAL is paying them enough in advertising dollars to justify something
like this.

This isn't like silencing/promoting selective political speech where the
personal ideals of the heads of the company are being pushed forward. Unless
Dorsey _really_ likes flying United.

~~~
mtgx
Even if it's not intentional, they may have some algorithms that "throw the
baby out with the bathwater" as the saying goes.

We're already seeing Google's recent "extremism curation" hit a lot of
youtubers that shouldn't be anywhere close to being impacted by it, and yet
they still are. If Google's DeepMind/Brain AI can't properly curate this sort
of stuff, I can't imagine Twitter is any better at it.

After governments keep pushing them to "deal with extremism" I wouldn't be
surprised if they took overly aggressive actions to be on the "safe side." I
also think they're wrong to do that, but in Google's case they are obviously
concerned about more advertisers dumping them.

~~~
mrdrozdov
I am curious about DeepMind/Brain's role in the curating search results. Would
you mind explaining more?

Also, I am not sure I understand your reference to Youtube. Is this
specifically about Youtube recommended videos in the sidebar?

~~~
vultour
Not sure if it's only about the sidebar, but many youtubers were apparently
deemed 'unsafe' by google and their videos stopped appearing all over youtube.

------
TorKlingberg
I would like to see more proof before I believe anything. People on the
internet (especially Reddit) love to invent conspiracies. Is it likely that
both Twitter and Reddit admins are somehow in cahoots with United Airlines?

------
mmjaa
Tools such as Akasha[1] and IPFS[2] and ZeroNet[3] can't arrive on the scene
soon enough, imho.

I think we're on the cusp of seeing these corporate-tools lose their grip on
the populace, once Akasha becomes usable by the common man.

[1] [https://akasha.world](https://akasha.world) [2]
[http://ipfs.io/](http://ipfs.io/) [3]
[http://zeronet.io/en](http://zeronet.io/en)

~~~
Dylan16807
Hooking it onto blockchains provides what advantage over pure IPFS?

~~~
mmjaa
Think: ownership.

------
radnam
Do not ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity
or in this case probably engineering oversight. No affiliation or affection to
twitter.

~~~
siegecraft
Is it stupidity to think that twitter wouldn't try to monetize itelf by
selling "reputation management services" to corporate customers? I guess one
can get away with a lot of malice if they just affect the outward appearance
of stupidity.

~~~
radnam
Do you know for a fact that Twitter monetizes using "reputation management
systems"? I am just suggesting keeping an open mind.

------
error-code
1) Twitter is a company that owes you, and the public, nothing. The same goes
for Facebook and Google. There is no law I know of that prevents them from
running their platform however they like. So what if they sensor or take
sides? It is their right. If you don't like it, use or build a competing
service (as long as Net Neutrality exists).

2) Negative tweets about United could be considered "Fake News" in my opinion.
Not because I am some "shill" for United. But because the facts are it was
Chicago airport police that escalated the situation to excessive force. The
United employees were not involved in that part at all whatsoever. In fact
they will probably hesitate to call the authorities for help ever again.

------
matt4077
This may serve as an example of a lot of the things wrong in society. First,
as a show of how good faith has broken down. Then, to demonstrate the logical
contortions performed by people who are otherwise perfectly capable of
critical thinking, but really want to see their mistrust in every institution,
or human, be true.

This alleged conspiracy would involve

(a) some rather rapid negotiations for a sum that wouldn't be much below the
market value of Twitter,

(b) the believe that now, 24h+ after it broke on Twitter, it has not made the
jump to many other distribution channels already, and

(c) the complete idiocy of United and Twitter in thinking such a scheme would
not be noticed or, if noticed, would not result in coverage orders-of-
magnitudes worse than what they deleted. Oh, and

(d) apparently they forgot to delete the original tweets, which were the one
actually being shared.

All that is quite implausible, even though it may be possible. Here's an
alternative theory: Twitter has, in an attempt to combat spam, implemented a
filter that registers a sudden rise in certain keywords, maybe within a
negative context. Once triggered, it throttles new tweets that match
automatically, until someone overrides it manually. This system just failed
spectacularly, because it had never before seen such an amount of tweets with
such an imbalance of sentiment.

I'm not saying that the latter theory is true. I just believe it's much more
plausible than Twitter just throwing its business away. And while I don't care
much about this specific company, I believe something larger is amiss when
every single event is always interpreted in the worst (barely) possible way.

If everyone and everything is assumed to be corrupt, pretty soon that's how
it's going to be–either because it doesn't make a difference for the
pitchfork-people if I'm really corrupt (or just incompetent/unlucky) so why
bother? Or because those with pitchforks don't see problem with becoming
corrupted themselves. Everyone is doing it, after all.

So, in an attempt to stem the tide of corruption, people scream for
transparency, and everyone is accused, everyone is a subject, everyone is
under investigation. That, however, cannot work: a liberal democracy does not
have the means to audit and control everyone. A free society, and an advanced
economy, is sustained by 98%+ doing the right thing even when nobody is
looking. That, and the trust it brings, and the institutions it makes
possible, is basically the difference between Canada and Somalia.

So I'll delay my scorn for a day and see what Twitter has to offer, and I'll
needle the guy I know there with jokes and watch him turn red, and I'll know
that moment of shame is (for him) more of an incentive to do better than a
million hateful tweets would ever be.

~~~
corey_moncure
I was in the same camp until I personally witnessed administrative-level
collusion to block certain topics on Reddit. I observed the entire event, from
the initial breaking story, to its meteoric amplification, and finally to the
censorship and aftermath. I didn't believe it was possible, or that such
things were happening, until I saw it happen for myself.

Since then, I have seen it happen many times on various platforms. Twitter is
particularly guilty of suppressing hash tags that go against their politics.
Google does the same by manipulating their trending topics report.

~~~
iamnothere
I don't see why this comment was killed. The comment does seem to be relevant
to the broader discussion, and it isn't aggressive or hostile in tone. I don't
fully agree with all parts of it, but it should be allowed to stand in the
conversation.

~~~
corey_moncure
I believe they shadowbanned me for that comment. Can you see this one?

~~~
iamnothere
Yes, I can see it, so if you were shadowbanned then you aren't anymore. (For
the record, I'm not sure if HN issues shadowbans for anything other than
obvious spam.)

------
deletia
Interesting sidenote:

Last Thursday, after Trump illegally bombed Syria, #HandsOffSyria was becoming
reasonably popular on Twitter. I remember making a few offhand tweets with the
hashtag and the app on my phone suggesting it.

Last Saturday, I happened to be photographing the #HandsOffSyria protest which
was going on in Toronto. I made a tweet about it and noticed that, oddly
enough, the Twitter app was no longer suggesting the tag.

Seems to be working again now fwiw ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Perhaps the (presumed human) moderators at hasty (or unpopular) decision
makers?

------
iambateman
If there was a large-scale quiet-down campaign in force at Twitter, it would
almost certainly be a shadow ban. Offending tweets would still be visible to
everyone, they would just simply not show up in feeds.

Considering Twitter Moments ran a wildly negative story for the whole day
yesterday about this, I think we can safely rule out collusion.

Someone else mentioned an army of flaggers marking these tweets as offensive
and automatically get pulled, which makes more sense to me.

------
pmarreck
1) Tweets should be immutable (since they are in essence immutable anyway as
soon as a single Internet copy is made)

2) The evidence here is slim

------
diogenescynic
I'll definitely not be flying United or Delta ever again after this incident.
Over-selling spaces on a plane is a scummy practice and shokldn't be allowed.
When someone needs to cancel they still pocket the change fee or keep tne
entire fee if they miss the flight. Seems like borderline fraud.

~~~
scrollaway
Overbooking is an extremely common practice. In fact, I don't know of a single
airline that _doesn 't_ overbook. On a plane with hundreds of seats you almost
always get cancellations; the small amount of times you don't, you almost
always get people volunteering to be pushed to the next flight in exchange for
money (I've done it myself a few times as I don't mind working in airports).

Cases like these are exceedingly rare. There's a million fucked up things with
how they handled the situation, starting with assaulting the passenger.
Overbooking itself is the last thing you should be worried about.

~~~
sf_rob
As with you, I'm not opposed to overbooking, but:

1) Overbooking should be handled at the gate.

2) I'd like to see an incredibly high legal ceiling for compensating
passengers who voluntarily reschedule. $800 (4x the ticket price) or we'll
drag some of you out of the plane is ridiculous. And let's not forget that the
ceiling is only a legal limitation; it was United's discretion to stop the
bidding at the legal ceiling and use force.

~~~
scrollaway
> _Overbooking should be handled at the gate_

It generally is. No idea why it wasn't in this case.

United completely fucked this up in so many ways. Like you said:

1\. The overbooking issue should have been handled at the gate. Deplaning
should only be done in extreme circumstances, this was not one.

2\. The extra crew should have been boarded on a different flight when they
didn't get enough volunteer leavers.

3\. A much higher ceiling should be placed on the ticket compensation for the
extreme cases, through an auction. I don't know if this is legally possible
though, but if it's not I'm sure something can be worked out in miles/free
future tickets/etc. Pre-flight deplaning costs a lot more in wasted
time/delays and even more when it's forced with extra costs in bad
press/publicity, security calls, etc. This is a classic example of wasting
millions to save hundreds.

4\. Security obviously used excessive force. The entire ordeal should have
been halted and the CEO should have immediately spoken against their actions
rather than come out supporting them.

It's one thing to make idiotic decisions, follow idiotic policies and cost
people money. Physical assault is in a completely different ballpark. We have
video evidence of what happened -- I hope to see the officer fired and
prosecuted. I'm not holding my breath though.

------
GiorgioG
Can Twitter just die already?

------
oblib
Facebook deleted my post with a link to the post the man's wife made that had
a video of it, also deleted were the comments I and my friends made about it.

I posted the video again from YouTube as soon as I found out.

------
daveloyall
I'm with fennecfoxen and matt4077 on this one: it's a bug in a spam filter.

Or maybe a hate speech or terrorism filter. Does Twitter have those?

Meanwhile, it's a good time for Mastodon (and secure scuttlebutt).

------
gdulli
Without the strictly chronological timeline anymore they can do whatever the
hell they want with your timeline and chalk it up to "the algorithm".

------
mizzao
If this is Twitter's new "PR management" service, I guess they're in for a
whole new level of Streisand effect.

------
codeinstyle
Twitter is already in a bad state as is - I wonder why they decided to turn
it's back on the public now.

------
hdhsbshs
This is true. I just checked mine from last night and it's gone.

I have posted a new one. Let's see if it stays.

~~~
jacquesm
Without a link to your new tweet this coming from an account that was made
just to post this comment does not carry a lot of weight.

~~~
hdhsbshs
You want a link to the deleted tweet? Which by definition of "deleted" is no
more.

~~~
jacquesm
No, to the new one, obviously.

------
golergka
That's what happens when yoy decide to censor "hate speech" or "fake news".

~~~
wccrawford
That's a lesson that's been a while in coming, and I'm not under any illusion
that people are going to learn it any time soon.

------
67726e
Would not at all surprise me. Twitter regularly censors popular right-of-
center Twitter accounts.

~~~
dev_head_up
Was sceptical of this myself until I experienced it. Scott Adams completely
disappeared from my feed for, well I'd like to say months but can't pinpoint
when it started. I assumed he had just given up his account/been banned. Until
one day I searched for him, and there he was still posting. He had actively
tweeted while I was logged on yet it was no-where on my timeline! I scrolled
back a bit collarating tweets that appeared for me on the homepage versus
times that he had posted, he was no-where to be seen and presumably under some
sort of shadow block by Twitter itself. Before someone comes in and says it
was due to preferences etc, I don't follow a huge bunch of accounts, I don't
like/retweet or even tweet.

~~~
cheath
Beware the filter bubble

~~~
andoon
The entire point of Twitter was that there was no such filter, it would just
show the tweets of everybody you followed in a chronological order. That's why
we are all pissed.

~~~
kristiandupont
I don't know if that was the "entire point" of Twitter. I am certainly glad
that there is a bit of filtering. I recall the old days where most of my feed
consisted of noise, today I actually get some value out of it.

~~~
andoon
If there was too much noise in your feed it was because you followed the wrong
people, simply.

~~~
kristiandupont
Sure. But my Twitter feed is not important enough for me to do something about
that. As it is, it's somewhat entertaining (I check it perhaps once a week)
whereas if it was unfiltered I never would. So I am at least one person for
whom it makes business sense for Twitter to filter in order to keep me
engaged.

------
tibbon
Let's say that Twitter isn't doing this; I do know a _lot_ of companies
however that will bend to clients $$$, which is really unfortunate.

The reason we're willing to believe that Twitter is doing this, is because so
many other companies would absolutely delete a few posts in order to appease a
paying client.

Money wins.

------
diegorbaquero
My tweet got "re-accommodated" , just confirmed. What's going on???

------
mrdrozdov
I'm pretty skeptical this is true. I don't think this has to do with Twitter
censoring left or right wing accounts.

~~~
Mendenhall
I did not think this was about politics. I am not sure this is true either but
I thought twitter was trying to curb abusive tweets lately. Perhaps the tweets
towards United were trollish/abusive etc?

~~~
cmdrfred
You can see a great many tweets calling for the death of Trump as well as
white people in general if this is a algorithm problem it seems someone's bias
slipped in.

------
ManlyBread
Why is everyone so outraged about this, I mean twitter is a private company...

~~~
CaptSpify
Sure, private companies can do what they want with their own platform, blah
blah blah. But there's no law against being outraged at a private company.
Just because something is legal doesn't mean I forfeit all rights to be mad
about it.

~~~
ManlyBread
My previous comment was supposed to be sarcastic, guess I failed.

~~~
CaptSpify
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law)
strikes again

------
jankotek
This is ok, what we need is transparency. Twitter should publish price list
and list of its clients...

------
ryanmarsh
Why was this downvoted?

~~~
sctb
We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14087236](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14087236)
and marked it off-topic since the guidelines ask us not to do this.

------
pklausler
Twitter's not deleting the tweets, they're just "reaccommodating" them.

------
xname2
Does twitter shadow ban also?

