The ruling party released a fake document, suggesting that the opposition is engaging in subversive activities. It was fact checked by various independent agencies and found to be a fake document. Twitter added a "manipulated media" label to those tweets. Delhi police, which is directly controlled by the Indian government raided the office of Twitter. It is not done with the intention of finding anything. It is to harass and to "send a message" that such acts won't be tolerated.
What is up with the comments in this thread? How are people seeing this as the Indian government taking a stand against censorship or whatever? The same government is upset that Twitter reinstated several accounts critical of the administration.
In general, Indians living abroad are highly supportive of the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Not his party, or his government, or his policies ... just him personally. Hacker News contains many such people. They are responsible for the bizarre comments you've read on this thread.
On a related note, this thread will soon be flagged, like all threads that are even mildly, indirectly critical of Narendra Modi. Enjoy the thread while it's up.
This generalization comes up in every polarized thread about every polarized topic. Literally every side that feels passionately on such a topic feels like the community is outrageously biased against their side. For every sarcastic and aggrieved "anything that supports $X will get downvoted and flagged" or "anything even mildly critical will get $Y", there are isomorphic comments from the opposing side which are just as sarcastic and aggrieved, only with the obvious bit flipped.
In reality, the community is divided similarly to how society at large is divided. But the actual experience of this is extremely difficult to bear when we're all bumping into each other in one big Brownian room. I wrote about this at length here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
Each side is so upset by the manifestations of the other side that they come to see them as utterly dominating the community. This is out of proportion numerically, but that's because it's not a numerical experience but an emotional one.
We humans place a much greater emphasis on what we dislike than what we like—the bad (e.g. what you disagree with) stands out more than the good (what you agree with), and you are much more likely to notice it and weight it more heavily [1]. This is what leads to false feelings of generality [2]. Unfortunately it also leads to the feeling of being surrounded by enemies or, as I sometimes put it, demons [3]. This dynamic encourages flamewars, because each side feels like it is the righteous underdog in an unfairly biased situation, and anyone who feels that way will feel justified in lashing out in "defense".
If the combatants in such a situation could really see how closely they are mirroring each other, it would surely change something somehow.
I definitely don't mean to pick on you personally, nor the theme of Indian politics in particular; it's just one of many, and this dynamic seems to be universal. I think the next big phase of work we need to do as a community is to develop more awareness of it, and that's work that we all need to contribute to.
Dang, could you share how many times this thread was flagged, if at all? Also, did you or another moderator have to manually unflag it?
Implicit in your comment is the idea that I’m just imagining this, like a paranoid person claiming persecution. But IME, Bay Area Indians are highly supportive of Modi and are highly active on HN. They incite a flame war, flag the thread and the thread vanishes. If a moderator comes across it, they see that there was a flame war and the flag was justified.
I get where you’re coming from - that maybe I’m overestimating the prevalence of apologists for a mass murderer. Maybe I am. But I think you are discounting how effectively they use the mechanics of HN to shut down criticism of their deity.
By the way, your explanation of that persecution complex was good. The challenge is people (like me) looking at and thinking “yeah, sounds correct except in my case, where I know for a fact I’m a persecuted minority on HN”
But maybe it’s enough to convince people in general that there’s no such persecution going on, even if there is. That way comments like mine that imply it’s existence end up with -10 instead of +23 or whatever. So fewer tedious comments, but maybe easier for the downvoting/flaming/flagging cabals (should they exist) to take control of the narrative on HN.
You’ve been doing this a long time. So you’ll probably make a good decision, whatever you decide.
> “yeah, sounds correct except in my case, where I know for a fact I’m a persecuted minority on HN”
Exactly! that's how we all do it. The weird thing is that even when you become aware of it, it doesn't stop. You simply become aware that you think this way, just as everyone thinks this way, and that despite knowing this, you still feel that you are the noble exception to the universal rule—a human among worms, as it were. It is like an optical illusion that persists even after you know that it is an illusion. However, the awareness seems to have the effect of modulating one's behavior, which is the important thing.
I suppose it's still an open question what really has a chance of shifting this at a community level. Asking people to go against human nature is a tall order. One thing I've tried is pointing people to similar-but-opposite generalizations being made by the other side; or showing them long lists of contradictory generalizations, like here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870. I'm not sure it really helps, though.
> But I think you are discounting how effectively they use the mechanics of HN to shut down criticism of their deity
I don't care about Modi but I flagged your comments because I'm tired about the endless whining about "them" supposedly manipulating HN. If you don't like Modi tell me why, don't go around strawmaning and generalizing Indian tech workers.
Entirely unrelated to questions about the balance of the community at large, do you have any sense for how this perspective approach can stand up to things like asymmetric astroturfing (e.g. what are sometimes called "troll farms")?
I don't spend time analyzing HN discourse like I think you probably do as a natural part of your role here, but it occasionally feels (perhaps a little less here?) like the actions of certain entities get a higher percentage of suspiciously blind or low effort defenders and whatabouters than others on high traffic public fora.
nb. Like you, I'm not talking about specifically this thread just the concept in general.
You'd be welcome to email specific examples that you're worried about to hn@ycombinator.com, but based on everything I've seen, the null hypothesis has to be that your perceptions are conditioned by your own passions about said "certain entities", whatever they are. I don't mean to be dismissive (and when people ask us to look into cases they're worried about, we always do); it's just that this is by far the most consistent phenomenon I've observed on HN. Nothing else comes close.
Internet users invest far too much energy into perceptions of "asymmetric astroturfing" and other sinister manipulations. Most of what they think they're seeing is easily shown to be a figment of perceptual bias, driven by their own passions on the topic. When I say "easily shown", I mean even from the public data. People could, but generally don't bother, to check the history of the accounts they accuse. When an HN user was posting about, I don't know, Ansible in 2018, or Forth in 2014, what are the odds that they're a foreign asset or secret shill on $hot-topic of 2021? That's literally what most of this stuff amounts to.
What most needs to happen is for us all to become aware of how these psychological mechanisms function in ourselves, so we can interrupt the process by which they convert into sinister fantasies about others. This isn't unrelated to the "balance of the community at large"—it's at the heart of that question. Not seeing, or not wanting to see, the genuine variation of the community on divisive topics is what leads to sinister fantasies. The odds are overwhelming that the person against you on $hot-topic is not $evil-manipulator, they're simply someone with a different background than you, who is as sincerely persuaded as you are.
Does genuine manipulation also exist? Yes, but even answering 'yes' to that already gives a mistaken impression of the proportions. The group-psychology dynamic I'm describing is responsible for the overwhelming majority of these perceptions. That's why the site guidelines ask people not to go there in the comments, but rather to email hn@ycombinator.com if they have concerns. Then we can look at the data and see if anything objective can be found.
I hope I haven't bitten your head off! My comments on this can get tetchy because of the number of times I've had to repeat myself on this issue. At some point I'm going to compile all this into maybe a single explanation that can just be linked to.
By extension people on HN critical of Modi are mostly neither Indian, never been in India or have no clue what they are talking about other than unsubstantiated criticism for political reason.
Also India leads the way in shutting down the internet at the smallest sign of dissent, under Modi it has slowly but surely devolved into an authoritarian state
That's another broad generalization. I know many Bay Area Indians, and within my personal circles, a majority of them are anti-Modi and have been so pre-Covid too. That said, the amount of unquestionable Trump-like support for Modi is truly baffling.
Modi’s personal popularity among ex-pat Indians is because of his elevator pitch - Make India Great Again. These folks left India because of shortcomings they perceived in the country, from cronyism to redtape to lack of opportunities. And Modi is going to fix all of these problems!
My guess is that people of certain political leanings have seen multiple stories "fact-checked" by Facebook/Twitter/Google as false and suppressed turn out to be true or partially true months down the line. These people are relieved to see another government, any government, give twitter/facebook/google "what's coming to it"
> people of certain political leanings have seen multiple stories "fact-checked" by Facebook/Twitter/Google as false and suppressed turn out to be true or partially true months down the line.
Nothing is perfect, but what are you referring to specifically?
The Hunter Biden laptop story comes to mind. Twitter was even blocking DMs with a link to the story, but it turned out that what was in it was true, even if it was inconsequential. I also remember seeing a Facebook ad that had a video of Biden saying he was going to end fracking, but since his campaign's official stance was that they weren't going end it, the ad was removed for false information.
There is no real doubt that the contents found on Hunter Biden's laptop are authentic. He hasn't denied any of it, nor has any evidence of falsification been found.
That article barely discusses the laptop, and quotes Hunter Biden saying he didn't know if the proported laptop was even his. It says nothing about authenticity of the contents.
Early in 2020 alternative media discussions that COVID may have leaked from a lab were ruthlessly "fack-checked" and censored from social media for misinformation. Now that we know more these claims have become accepted as a very real possibility.
COVID lab theory clams were rated false which means social media platforms throttle their visibility and organizations posting those claims were threatened with suspension.
As politi-facts put it:
"There is no evidence that the coronavirus was made in a lab. The overwhelming consensus among public health experts is that the virus evolved naturally."
Catch-22. When they don’t they’re attacked for harbouring, and allowing the algorithmic spread of, fake news.
Besides, sites like Facebook and Twitter started to “get in the middle of these things” the moment they stopped simply showing you a chronological series of posts from people/pages you follow; to a weighted interest system, based on opaque algorithms.
If Twitter just shows everyone all Tweets, people'd quickly get overwhelmed, and a few very active Twitter users would drown out all the rest. So they add an algorithm that tries to determine which Tweets a user is most likely to want to see - now they're in the middle, deciding what someone sees.
I have followed this building up on Twitter and as someone not intimately familiar with this.
> The ruling party released a fake document
It very well might be(not that I know about this), but how did Twitter figure this out? As far as I understand, there has been accusations from both sides without proof.
I will be really scared if Twitter is taking a stand based on their judgement of what might have happened.
Already, censorship and control by social media platforms is on a slippery slope. We can't let them become the arbiters of truth. It might suit one side today but might not suit the same tomorrow when decision comes from a black box.
Also, yes these platforms are private spaces but they hold too much power in shaping the public discourse.
> It very well might be(not that I know about this), but how did Twitter figure this out? As far as I understand, there has been accusations from both sides without proof.
The article answers your question: A prominent fact-checking organization examined the document. You can then question the fact-checking organization, and eventually nobody can say anything.
Should government be the arbiter of truth? About it's own political candidates?
Neither are they “prominent”, nor do they “check facts”.
Someone has to be the arbiter of the truth. I’d rather it be courts and some legal process, or even the government rather than some so called “prominent fact checking organisation”.
> Neither are they “prominent”, nor do they “check facts”.
What is that based on?
> Someone has to be the arbiter of the truth.
They do? That has never been the case, except in dictatorships where the ruler has claimed to be the arbiter, but few actually believe what they say is truth.
I read through it and it says part of the document has been admitted to be true.
> You can then question the fact-checking organization, and eventually nobody can say anything.
If I am a citizen of the said country, is a private fact checking organisation answerable to me?
I am not saying they are lying, but what are the checks and balances on them.
> Should government be the arbiter of truth? About it's own political candidates?
Elected governments shouldn't be, but isn't this why other arms of the government exist, like judiciary. You might question judidicary as well but at least on some level they are bound by their constitutional duties and have to follow the law of the land.
My worry is, in a lot of places in the world, the more we delegate this trust to private entities, th more powerful we make them. They aren't answerable to people of those countries.
I find your stance slightly bizarre. You don't trust twitter to be the arbiter of truth (which is fair), but you think the Indian government which is widely credited to be falsifying data (I can point you to sources on this, I even personally know a journalist there) will be held accountable to its people?
Sure, it'd be nice to hold your government accountable. But when your ruler is effectively a tyrant in a government that is laughably calling itself a democracy, I'd rather have twitter provide its own opinion as well. Because at the end of the day you as the reader can still decide to ignore twitter's judgment and just read the document as you could before. It's additional information, not censorship - whereas the government wants to limit information.
Nobody is forcing you to trust twitter any more than they're forcing you to trust the government. You can ignore twitter's label and still try to hold the Indian government accountable - it's a non sequitur.
> but you think the Indian government which is widely credited to be falsifying data will be held accountable to its people?
Isn't this what elections are there for?
Didn't the ruling party lose a major election just few weeks back? It was widely covered as a victory against them even in international press.
> Nobody is forcing you to trust twitter any more than they're forcing you to trust the government.
It seems you strongly oppose the current establishment. Would you have been fine if Twitter would have marked content against them the same way? It might have been true but it might also have been pressure by the establishment.
It is not like anyone is asking anyone to trust Twitter. My main issue with that is the sheer power a private company not answerable to the citizens holds.
> Would you have been fine if Twitter would have marked content against them the same way?
100%. My stance is that twitter can add its opinion just the same as anyone. The government trying to censor an opinion is what I consider to be the problem. Even if that opinion is "covid is fake" I think people should be allowed to say it because I believe in free speech.
> My main issue with that is the sheer power a private company not answerable to the citizens holds.
Then you must really hate (almost) every news organization in the world. They literally make it their business to do the very thing you seem to oppose. And as far as I'm concerned they have no more credibility, but that's entirely subjective.
> I think people should be allowed to say it because I believe in free speech.
I do too, but this is the exact problem here. Twitter colored that free speech with what they thought was right.
> Then you must really hate (almost) every news organization in the world. They literally make it their business to do the very thing you seem to oppose
Oh, I do hate them. Passing commentary from high pedestals and this false sense of intellectual rigour about their work, pretending they don't have any biases at all.
This is why when they complain about social media companies eating their lunch, I have no sympathy for them. They just hate the fact that the power that was reserved to just them has been just given away to everyone.
All one needs to understand how good most journalism is to just watch coverage of news about a field they understand well.
> I do too, but this is the exact problem here. Twitter colored that free speech with what they thought was right.
I think this is where we disagree. Yes, twitter added their own opinion, but as far as I'm concerned why is that worse than anyone adding their own opinion to it? My point is twitter adding their opinion should be as inconsequential as a random person with 6 followers replying to the tweet saying "this is fake news." The only difference is because people give twitter more credibility than a random stranger, which is the fundamental problem of trust in society. No amount of laws can fix this if you truly advocate for free speech. People just need to educate themselves better about what to believe.
It might just be labeling today, next time it might be suppression of posts in feeds, eventually they might just shadow block posts or remove them entirely.
Yes, that point is valid. I simplified my argument for the sake of conversation, but there are really two other very real issues I didn't address because it would wildly increase the scope of this conversation (and I don't want to spend hours here).
There's the platform versus publisher issue, where companies are arguably trying to be both.
And there's the social media companies already using black box algorithms to control their feeds.
So I'd argue with twitter everything already falls under the latter issue, which doesn't mean it's okay just that this is larger issue for any social media company and it's more complicated than just free speech (which is already more nuanced than I've described).
So yes, once twitter begins censoring opinions (and arguably they already do simply by having an algorithm make a feed for you) then they are equally culpable.
As to the corporation vs government issue, yes I'd prefer to hold governments accountable for these things and I agree they should be the entities that handle this. But I see that as an ideal and meanwhile I care more about practical solutions to help us improve where we are and hopefully get there some day.
> I read through it and it says part of the document has been admitted to be true.
I don't understand: You asked whether Twitter had any basis for marking it false. I said the basis was (at least in part) a major fact-checking organization. I'm not sure how the above is a response to that. Also, can you provide some basis to your claim? Every lie is partly true; someone who says things that are 'partly true' is a liar.
>> Should government be the arbiter of truth? About it's own political candidates?
> Elected governments shouldn't be, but isn't this why other arms of the government exist, like judiciary.
I strongly disagree: In democracies the judiciary is not at all there to decide truth. It's there to apply the law, which at times involves finding facts of specific situations before it, and then only to a degree sufficient to apply the law. For example, the judiciary is not there to decide the facts of climate change. It is there to apply emissions laws, and to find the facts about what someone may be emitting to the degree needed to apply the law.
In a democracy, it is up to citizens - you and I included - to decide what we believe. There is no authority or mechanism that will save you from that challenging duty. Democracy is a solution, in a sense, to the problem of there being no source of truth. It is governemnt of the people, by the people, for the people.
> In democracies the judiciary is not at all there to decide truth. It's there to apply the law
Yes, and in this case. It would have gone something like this, the side which thinks it has been wrongly represented files a libel lawsuit and then facts are checked and the case is argued in a transparent manner.
What happened right now was action by a black box on commentary from another black box. We know before wars, stories have been carried by private companies("news" organisations) to set the narrative. They turned out to be false but did they ever answer for them? No.
> It is governemnt of the people, by the people, for the people.
But is this by people? I can choose to not believe in it but do you disagree the vast amount of influence these platforms hold and how they can set the tone of the discourse.
Wasn't this the exact alleged issue in 2016 elections? FB's targeting was used to selectively set narrative.
Are we fine with unchecked use of these all mighty tools?
>> In democracies the judiciary is not at all there to decide truth. It's there to apply the law
> Yes, and in this case. It would have gone something like this, the side which thinks it has been wrongly represented files a libel lawsuit and then facts are checked and the case is argued in a transparent manner.
Generally, the most important aspect of free speech is that you can say what you want about the government; there's no such thing as libeling it. Otherwise, libel is a means of the government restricting speech and harassing opponents - a means commonly used by dictators, including Modi.
The idea of trusting the government to control political speech or be the artbiter of truth seems to ignore the obvious, well-established risks.
China had a similar rule for doing business. I worked with a company that that ~60 engineers that never wrote a line of production code in China, because they were afraid of IP leaks.
We've updated the title above. As others pointed out, it's possible that the publication changed their own headline. This case smells like that to me. Btw, one trick is to look at the URL, since those are harder to change after publication. In this case the URL includes the word "raids".
Edit: yep: https://web.archive.org/web/20210524155244/https://techcrunc.... It would be interesting to know why they rolled it back. I haven't read the article, but I bet there was something excessive about the original claim, because they've softened it in two ways: changing "raided" to "visited" and putting scare quotes around "manipulated".
World would be better place if we don't take sides. Most if not all real world issues comes in shades for grey. In this case the controversy indeed started on Twitter. Twitter clearly took a side, and hence owes explanation on why it thinks it is a case of "manipulated media". Did Govt of India require to send trooper to deliver the notice? Absolutely no. As usual, it overreacted.
Could it be that people legitimately disagree with you, without being quislings or whatever? I think what has changed is the deligitimization of differing opinions and the dehumanization of people who hold them. That has become normalized - ok, even encouraged behavior - for a certain political grouping, which is indeed deadly to a democracy, where the foundation is respecting each other's opinions - i.e., we each get an equal vote. If you don't embrace that, then that is what has changed.
Part of freedom is that others are free to do things you don't like and I don't like, including Facebook, Google, and Twitter. The owner of a business can forbid discussion of a topic, such as sports, and kick out or fire anyone who doesn't comply. Heck, they can kick out or fire people for (almost) any reason or without a reason at all. It's their business; they are free.
Free speech is a restriction on the government's actions, not on a business's: Government is limited in restricting speech and similarly it is limited in restricting the behavior of private businesses (though not as limited as when restricting speech).
Private organizations also have good reasons, IMHO, to restrict speech. If you were at a restaurant and insulting people at neighboring tables, the restaurant would be right to kick you out. If you were at a political discussion club and insisted on repeating disinformation, they would be right to kick you out. You would be hurting the experience and value for other members. But private organizations also restrict speech in ways I object to.
Disagreement is awesome. We need more disagreement, carried out in reliably truth-telling public forums (which do not alter the ratio of up/down votes and related algorithms). If a platform wants to only host legal speech complying with its own views (and filter everything else it deems "bad"), then it's a news paper, not a forum. It has editorial responsibilities (and legal penalties and remedies), if so.
Governments using "private" businesses to distort public debate has a long and horrific history (see every major mass-death totalitarian regime; Mao, Hitler, Stalin, ...). So, I am very worried about all media agreeing in lock-step with government! (eg. All global government, media, education, judicial and medical authorities in total agreement with global mass deployment of experimental medical treatments, for example, and sinking/de-platforming all dissent...)
I will lay down my life to ensure you have the right to publicly display your opinion -- especially if I find it ridiculous, or even repulsive. Unfortunately, I suspect you might not agree with likewise protecting mine. And that is very unfortunate, and (I believe), ultimately self-destructive.
Look at this debate. We're debating. HN is one of the few platforms where this is even possible anymore -- and only because it's sort of back-water and nerdy. Nobody, essentially, reads it (among the world of "normals"). And if they did, it would probably fall to a combination of "Endless September" and political pressure.
Are you confusing Facebook, Google and Twitter for the government? Otherwise I can’t understand how you conclude that free speech rights are being violated.
The fact that Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon and Twitter are in total agreement with the current governments of the USA and Canada, and amplify/sink opinions based on their level of compliance with the accepted dogma of both the company and current government -- while simultaneously destroying (Parler) or deplatforming (Gab) any viable alternative platform?
That’s funny, because from what I recall both Parler and Gab incidents happened during a GOP administration that totally controlled all three branches of government.
Maybe some random American social media company whose politics aren't even liked by most Americans shouldn't meddle in the affairs of India. I hope this ends with Twitter being banned. I'm tired of Silicon Valley techies grandstanding about "disinformation" when their entire platforms are nothing but disinformation.
Per the article, the police visited the office to deliver a legal notice, not to investigate the office. In the United States legal notice MUST be delivered in person. It cannot be done over mail or email. I'd expect India is similar.
They had gone to raid the office, but since the Twitter team is working remotely due to Covid, the police couldn't find anyone in the office and changed the narrative to save their face.
> Delhi Police, controlled by India’s central government, on Monday evening searched two offices of Twitter — in the national capital state of Delhi and Gurgaon, in neighboring state of Haryana — to seek more information about Twitter’s rationale to label one of the tweets by ruling partly BJP spokesperson as “manipulated media.”
> An hour into the search process, Delhi Police Special Cell team, which investigates terrorism and other crimes, vacated both of Twitter’s offices because they were closed and there were no Twitter employees to engage with at the premises
Did they stand at the front door knocking for an hour waiting for someone to come out? Did they physically break into the office? Does "closed" mean the office was physically closed/locked? Does "no Twitter employees" mean there were no humans physically present at the office, or does it mean there were no people directly employed by Twitter at the office? E.g., are they not counting security and other 24/7 staff that would normally be at an office building?
Serve notice of what? This didn't seem to be mentioned in the article.
Also, is that a thing police in India do? Here in the US, if documents need to be physically served, it's usually done by a single representative of the court, not a policeman, let alone many police.
Highly misleading title, this was not a raid, they issued a notice as they were putting "manipulated media" tags on well known politicians, it was seen as Twitter directly attempting to shut down democracy in India
