>...as well as content intended to discourage participation.
Uh? That's odd. In my country I don't vote because I don't feel represented and I encourage others in my situation to do the same. Would I get banned for saying that?
Are you a bot from an openly hostile nation? If not, then probably not. But maybe you've already been successfully brain washed, because that's EXACTLY what countries do to undermine each other
No, I read the policy and it doesn't cover what I mentioned. It looks like "content intended to discourage participation" is probably not the best wording...
So do people that are easily manipulated by propaganda. Do you want such people to vote, to give the election to the best propagandists? Or do you want them to not vote, and deal with the apathy?
It's a little more nuanced than that. Not voting can be just as democratic as voting if you're informed about your options and decide none of them represent your position.
But even in situations where someone would potentially want to vote and a tweet misleads them to believe it's not worth it, why is that worse then a tweet misleading them to believe that a certain political option will work in their favor?
I voted third party. I know all about voting with intent. Apathy, however, is caustic. It encourages people to not think they could improve things. To check out, stop listening.
"Listen to that guy" gets people listening and encourages at least the chance of someone going, "wait, actually I don't like what this guy is saying, what are other guys saying?"
If a large percentage of people are influenced to not participate, then the remaining set is a smaller group to mislead in one political direction or another.
More participation makes it harder to influence enough voters in a single direction to make a significant difference in outcomes.
And, at least in US politics, my experience is that most candidates do not stand on a single issue but rather a broad spectrum of political ideology. I think it would be pretty rare for all of the candidates to have no difference in alignment with you on any of the hundreds of issues at play. Especially if you are participating in primary elections which tend to have a greater diversity of positions.
> if you're informed about your options and decide none of them represent your position.
Literally none of "them" represent any part of your position on what is typically a wide array of different issues? Not any of the state and local candidates? Not a single national candidate? You have no position, whatsoever, on local ballot issues?
That seems deeply myopic or extraordinarily unlikely.
Why would any politician care about your concerns if you don’t vote?
I’ve heard this said by acquaintances before, but even when someone finally says what they want to hear they find another reason to not vote… without exception.
Whenever the topic shows up I always tell people to vote and that there’s no good reason to not vote if you legally can.
Because due to demographics I’m in the minority. Democracy caters to the majority. In generic terms, all policies are written to benefit the old in detriment of the young, but they vastly outnumber us, so there’s nothing that can be done about this.
There’s a good reason not to vote: you have to go and vote. If I could vote from home, maybe.
I don’t know which country you’re from, but I’m going to guess that the old are catered to because they actually vote and the young doesn’t.
If the younger generation becomes a sizeable voter demographic, then the politicians will notice. A new party might also show up to take those vote, giving them influence and negotiation power.
But for that to happen, the younger generation have to vote. That’s why I’m so adamant in discussions with acquaintainces that they need to vote and that the only valid reason to not vote is legality.
Not GP, but please take a look at CloudFlare's data. As far as I understand, it was only measuring indexing bots, without attempting to look for anything political or shady.
It's not a proof of anything. If I build a dam to block your local river and you stop getting water, is it a proof there were fish in the river?
People who measure traffic to sites supposedly plagued by russian bots (the ones we care about here: trolls, disinformation, etc.) saw absolutely no dip in traffic
Is it common sense that a river has fish? Yes. Is it common sense that Yandex has russian bots? Yes.
I don't think any of this is controversial. Bloviate all you want about Google and rivers or whatever the fuck, I think we're getting into the weeds and really losing the plot here.
Twitter over 300 million daily active users. 13,000 is 0.004% of that.
A standard drop of water is 0.05 ml. A standard household bucket is about 3 gallons. So the proverbial "drop in the bucket" is 0.0004%.
So, for all you naysayers out there saying this is just a drop in the bucket, it's literally x10 that.
Why, if they could get this up to a repeatable process and ban 13,000 accounts per day, that would be 1.5% every year. After a couple of years of work, that might even be perceptible to the average user. Sounds like the problem is well in hand.
Without any stats/metrics about engagement of real users with these accounts you have absolute no basis to do any comparison to drops of water.
Not sure why number of accounts matter at all, even more if you are depending on internal Twitter investigations to determine that without knowing any of the methodology to detect those, etc.
But sure, you can always defend Twitter if that's the hill you want to die on.
>Without any stats/metrics about engagement of real users with these accounts you have absolute no basis to do any comparison to drops of water.
I think it's fair to assume that if x.com refuses to provide stats that are easily obtainable for them (eg. views or followers), that those stats aren't favorable to them.
Sometimes 0.004% matters when the population is not homogenous.
The 0.004% richest Amreicans hold the majority of US wealth. I would not be surprised if the 0.004% top X users in terms of followers have a majority of followers as well.
So implying that because 0.004% is a small proportion of total users, this user ban is unconsequential seems flawed to me.
Doubtful... It looks like Starlink showed it's colors to Ukraine and it's admiration for the Russian state what was it within 24hrs of that operation? Yikes.
(I wouldn't want to be in a community with the people who went back to the Nazi bar anyway, so it works out for me. Can barely catch up with my Bluesky and Mastodon feeds as-is.)
I am fine with content policeing actions from being legal but I think we content enforcement of this nature on platforms that live on freedom of press and speech should be forced to publicize when that take action against accounts. Publicize the lists for bans, and reason for it. Here the reason is given but its not account linked so its hard to say if the reason is justifed with the accounts histories.
Maybe the government needs a meta organization that upholds freedom of speech enforcement from platforms and companies that get broad Section 230 protections. I.e Facebook, X, Twitch, Youtube, etc. If a company can just purge you soruce of speech entirely the country protections seem lacking for the public welfare. Curious what other people think. I know an agency like this is rife to partisan infiltration but if its roll is to for unbanning rather than banning I think the scope of its potential abuse would be extremely narrow.
gvfsa | 9 hours ago
Uh? That's odd. In my country I don't vote because I don't feel represented and I encourage others in my situation to do the same. Would I get banned for saying that?
boesboes | 9 hours ago
gvfsa | 9 hours ago
https://help.x.com/en/rules-and-policies/election-integrity-...
knottn | 9 hours ago
causesothere | 9 hours ago
AnimalMuppet | 8 hours ago
stetrain | 8 hours ago
MatekCopatek | 8 hours ago
But even in situations where someone would potentially want to vote and a tweet misleads them to believe it's not worth it, why is that worse then a tweet misleading them to believe that a certain political option will work in their favor?
causesothere | 8 hours ago
"Listen to that guy" gets people listening and encourages at least the chance of someone going, "wait, actually I don't like what this guy is saying, what are other guys saying?"
stetrain | 8 hours ago
More participation makes it harder to influence enough voters in a single direction to make a significant difference in outcomes.
And, at least in US politics, my experience is that most candidates do not stand on a single issue but rather a broad spectrum of political ideology. I think it would be pretty rare for all of the candidates to have no difference in alignment with you on any of the hundreds of issues at play. Especially if you are participating in primary elections which tend to have a greater diversity of positions.
myersj | 7 hours ago
Literally none of "them" represent any part of your position on what is typically a wide array of different issues? Not any of the state and local candidates? Not a single national candidate? You have no position, whatsoever, on local ballot issues?
That seems deeply myopic or extraordinarily unlikely.
nozzlegear | 8 hours ago
pjc50 | 8 hours ago
(Australian compulsory voting: discuss)
ChrisRR | 8 hours ago
oeitho | 8 hours ago
I’ve heard this said by acquaintances before, but even when someone finally says what they want to hear they find another reason to not vote… without exception.
Whenever the topic shows up I always tell people to vote and that there’s no good reason to not vote if you legally can.
gvfsa | 8 hours ago
There’s a good reason not to vote: you have to go and vote. If I could vote from home, maybe.
oeitho | 7 hours ago
If the younger generation becomes a sizeable voter demographic, then the politicians will notice. A new party might also show up to take those vote, giving them influence and negotiation power.
But for that to happen, the younger generation have to vote. That’s why I’m so adamant in discussions with acquaintainces that they need to vote and that the only valid reason to not vote is legality.
brodouevencode | 9 hours ago
causesothere | 9 hours ago
Yoric | 5 hours ago
lawn | 9 hours ago
boesboes | 9 hours ago
gruez | 9 hours ago
https://bsky.app/profile/antibot4navalny.bsky.social/post/3m...
233mhz | 9 hours ago
nozzlegear | 8 hours ago
So they do have some proof?
gruez | 8 hours ago
In that context it's pretty obvious "bots" are referring to disinformation or "troll" bots, not bots doing indexing/scraping.
customguy | 8 hours ago
So he has some proof? So the jury is still out, so this is controversial, right?
nozzlegear | 5 hours ago
Yoric | 5 hours ago
233mhz | 7 hours ago
People who measure traffic to sites supposedly plagued by russian bots (the ones we care about here: trolls, disinformation, etc.) saw absolutely no dip in traffic
nozzlegear | 6 hours ago
I mean, we can use a little common sense and assume that there were fish in the river, right? We'd be foolish not to.
233mhz | 4 hours ago
Do you think that if tomorrow a Google data center goes down the NSA spyware, botnets and other online campaigns go down? I very much doubt it
nozzlegear | 3 hours ago
I don't think any of this is controversial. Bloviate all you want about Google and rivers or whatever the fuck, I think we're getting into the weeds and really losing the plot here.
hunterpayne | 4 hours ago
nozzlegear | 3 hours ago
> We can use a little common sense
What you read:
> This assumption is irrefutable proof!
Thanks bud.
mingus88 | 9 hours ago
olooney | 9 hours ago
A standard drop of water is 0.05 ml. A standard household bucket is about 3 gallons. So the proverbial "drop in the bucket" is 0.0004%.
So, for all you naysayers out there saying this is just a drop in the bucket, it's literally x10 that.
Why, if they could get this up to a repeatable process and ban 13,000 accounts per day, that would be 1.5% every year. After a couple of years of work, that might even be perceptible to the average user. Sounds like the problem is well in hand.
piva00 | 9 hours ago
Not sure why number of accounts matter at all, even more if you are depending on internal Twitter investigations to determine that without knowing any of the methodology to detect those, etc.
But sure, you can always defend Twitter if that's the hill you want to die on.
gruez | 9 hours ago
I think it's fair to assume that if x.com refuses to provide stats that are easily obtainable for them (eg. views or followers), that those stats aren't favorable to them.
thatsabadlook | 9 hours ago
bliteben | 9 hours ago
greg7mdp | 8 hours ago
The 0.004% richest Amreicans hold the majority of US wealth. I would not be surprised if the 0.004% top X users in terms of followers have a majority of followers as well.
So implying that because 0.004% is a small proportion of total users, this user ban is unconsequential seems flawed to me.
tacitusarc | 8 hours ago
That is massively false. It’s closer to 5%. Still really bad IMO but 0.004% is a ludicrous thing to claim
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
ericd | 8 hours ago
Nah, it’s more like the top 5% hold half. The top 0.1% are at ~13%.
stetrain | 9 hours ago
voidhorse | 9 hours ago
Manipulation of elections is OK as long as you do it with money.
archagon | 3 hours ago
bratsche | 9 hours ago
thatsabadlook | 9 hours ago
rpmisms | 8 hours ago
causesothere | 8 hours ago
thatsabadlook | 8 hours ago
diath | 8 hours ago
feverzsj | 9 hours ago
causesothere | 8 hours ago
This effect is self reinforcing, if you are leftish, and you are in a tightening space, why would you stay?
craftkiller | 8 hours ago
baggachipz | 8 hours ago
It's really disheartening.
[1] https://daringfireball.net/2026/10/x_once_again_marks_the_sp...
archagon | 3 hours ago
(I wouldn't want to be in a community with the people who went back to the Nazi bar anyway, so it works out for me. Can barely catch up with my Bluesky and Mastodon feeds as-is.)
TiredOfLife | 6 hours ago
syngrog66 | 8 hours ago
ChrisRR | 8 hours ago
tavavex | 8 hours ago
linuxftw | 7 hours ago
xphos | 6 hours ago
Maybe the government needs a meta organization that upholds freedom of speech enforcement from platforms and companies that get broad Section 230 protections. I.e Facebook, X, Twitch, Youtube, etc. If a company can just purge you soruce of speech entirely the country protections seem lacking for the public welfare. Curious what other people think. I know an agency like this is rife to partisan infiltration but if its roll is to for unbanning rather than banning I think the scope of its potential abuse would be extremely narrow.
rasz | an hour ago
Yeah, Im sure its all “After careful review,”
In other news I just read today how Gough Luis account got banned for posting organic content and linking to his own blog. https://goughlui.com/2026/10/15/opinion-death-of-the-old-int...
Sad but accurate summary about current state of internet is “There is no incentive to be honest, aside from having a conscience.”