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
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...
That could just be a matter of attempts at a crackdown failing spectacularly. Reddit mods have been pretty aggressive in trying to prune United stories, without actually blocking or removing them. It can be enough, in other words, just to increase the friction in the system, not to eliminate bad press, but reduce its volume and persistence.
I think twitter needs to be a bit more transparent about how this stuff goes. I've also heard a lot about political shadow banning, which, who knows? At a certain point though, where theres smoke theres likely fire
I don't think this should be assumed to be true, but I also don't think it should be rejected out of hand. The correct answer is often the middle-ground: ask twitter for a clarification about what happened to the tweets in question, the trending tag, and what its larger policy is.
Twitter throttles conservative messages and users so we know that Twitter is at least willing to engage in censorship. We'll see if this story develops legs as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The r/videos subreddit has a rule against videos of fights/assault so whoever posted the video you linked to wasn't following directions. Every subreddit has its own rules. The front page of that subreddit is currently dominated by anti-United sentiment that doesn't violate the rules so I don't know what you're trying to imply.
Do people even make a cursory effort to verify these accusations before repeating them?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pretty obvious this is either an algorithmic response to flooding or an algorithmic response to United mass-reporting tweets that @mention them in response to this...
If Twitter wanted to actively work with United on damage limitation they'd start by not running Twitter moments about the event for the whole day and suppressing the circulation of the video, not deleting a percentage of sarcastic @mentions the following day. And probably delete that United CEO response too...
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...
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.
Agree completely. Sadly, betting it will never happen. Nobody in position to dismantle the TSA will ever do it. It'd take someone who's willing to accept the move as political suicide, since they'll be blamed the first time something bad happens.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think United is paying them a ton and has become a top partner:
"We are constantly working to create industry-leading experiences for our customers. Twitter is a place where our customers engage with us 24/7 about a variety of aspects of travel. The new features that Twitter released have enabled us to create real-time engagements with customers to offer an array of services, from discovering where to go on their next trip, to answering common travel questions faster and easier. We’re excited to use these features to deliver additional experiences that connect people and unite the world through travel."
KC Geen, Director of Digital Marketing and Customer Acquisition at United Airlines
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] danso|9 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] hdhsbshs|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] M_Grey|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] overgard|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lagged2Death|9 years ago|reply
What could any ordinary Twitter user possibly provide that you would accept as proof?
[+] [-] alexandercrohde|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imjustsaying|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrdrozdov|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] maxerickson|9 years ago|reply
Really?
[+] [-] jacquesm|9 years ago|reply
It's a totally ridiculous situation and their media messaging doesn't help at all.
[+] [-] maxerickson|9 years ago|reply
They pulled passengers to fly crew, but that doesn't mean it wasn't overbooked.
[+] [-] anotherturn|9 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] juliangoldsmith|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonlfunk|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
Many more: https://www.reddit.com/r/undelete/
[+] [-] gdulli|9 years ago|reply
Do people even make a cursory effort to verify these accusations before repeating them?
[+] [-] odiroot|9 years ago|reply
Media is indeed the fourth power.
[+] [-] nkkollaw|9 years ago|reply
How can we counteract this? They absolutely deserve the bad publicity they're (or would be) getting!
[+] [-] chambo622|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nl|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
Eg: complaining about Tweet being deleted: https://twitter.com/iknowimbitter/status/851640007500718081 Original(?) tweet, 7 hours prior: https://twitter.com/iknowimbitter/status/851544321564323841
Complaint: https://twitter.com/TalkIBC/status/851604796113129476 Original, 1 hour prior: https://twitter.com/TalkIBC/status/851581587967934464
Complaint: https://twitter.com/MickFerry/status/851564908915437568 Original, 6 hours prior: 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.
[+] [-] notahacker|9 years ago|reply
If Twitter wanted to actively work with United on damage limitation they'd start by not running Twitter moments about the event for the whole day and suppressing the circulation of the video, not deleting a percentage of sarcastic @mentions the following day. And probably delete that United CEO response too...
[+] [-] bitL|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bahamut|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arca_vorago|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
You lost me at this point. That's hateful populist rhetoric.
[+] [-] bobwaycott|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drdeca|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yoran|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ino|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sagebird|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] privateprofile|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goodmachine|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koolba|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] caseysoftware|9 years ago|reply
"We are constantly working to create industry-leading experiences for our customers. Twitter is a place where our customers engage with us 24/7 about a variety of aspects of travel. The new features that Twitter released have enabled us to create real-time engagements with customers to offer an array of services, from discovering where to go on their next trip, to answering common travel questions faster and easier. We’re excited to use these features to deliver additional experiences that connect people and unite the world through travel."
KC Geen, Director of Digital Marketing and Customer Acquisition at United Airlines
https://blog.twitter.com/2017/new-apis-to-power-the-future-o...
[+] [-] TorKlingberg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmjaa|9 years ago|reply
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 [2] http://ipfs.io/ [3] http://zeronet.io/en
[+] [-] Dylan16807|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radnam|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] error-code|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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.