YHK - yet another hacker news clone

X purges 13,000 accounts linked to suspected meddling ahead of US midterms

46 points ilreb 1 hour ago 69 comments

gvfsa 1 hour ago | parent

>...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?

boesboes 1 hour ago | parent

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

gvfsa 1 hour ago | parent

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...

https://help.x.com/en/rules-and-policies/election-integrity-...

knottn 1 hour ago | parent

Getting idiots to not vote undermines elections? Weird.

causesothere 1 hour ago | parent

Yes. Building apathy erodes democracy.

AnimalMuppet 54 minutes ago | parent

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?

stetrain 50 minutes ago | parent

The fewer people who vote, the smaller the group that needs to be influenced to make a difference in the election.

MatekCopatek 51 minutes ago | parent

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?

causesothere 42 minutes ago | parent

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?"

stetrain 23 minutes ago | parent

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.

nozzlegear 1 hour ago | parent

It obviously undermines elections. The only thing weird here is your faux confusion.

pjc50 1 hour ago | parent

Selectively getting people to not vote, yes. It's the reverse of "get out the vote" campaigns.

(Australian compulsory voting: discuss)

ChrisRR 1 hour ago | parent

Why would you get banned for saying that? What a pointlessly argumentative comment

oeitho 54 minutes ago | parent

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.

gvfsa 27 minutes ago | parent

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.

brodouevencode 1 hour ago | parent

Reminder that Twitter (X) has done similar things (shadow-banning) before.

causesothere 1 hour ago | parent

HN does too. It's a standard moderation practice.

lawn 1 hour ago | parent

Knowing Musk, they probably purged pro Democrats while leaving Russian bots alone.

boesboes 1 hour ago | parent

true, luckily they're mostly offline since yandex gone boom

gruez 1 hour ago | parent

There's no evidence of that happening. In fact there's counter-evidence:

https://bsky.app/profile/antibot4navalny.bsky.social/post/3m...

233mhz 1 hour ago | parent

People keep saying this with 0 proof other than the INDEXING "bot" trafick being down on cloudflare dashboard

nozzlegear 1 hour ago | parent

> other than the INDEXING "bot" trafick being down on cloudflare dashboard

So they do have some proof?

gruez 39 minutes ago | parent

OP: >they probably purged pro Democrats while leaving Russian bots alone

In that context it's pretty obvious "bots" are referring to disinformation or "troll" bots, not bots doing indexing/scraping.

customguy 34 minutes ago | parent

> Mr. Franklin claims he went to the moon first, with no proof except a soggy box of matches with the words "moon pie" scribbled on it.

So he has some proof? So the jury is still out, so this is controversial, right?

mingus88 1 hour ago | parent

What a blow to Elon to lose his account in his own platform

olooney 1 hour ago | parent

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.

piva00 1 hour ago | parent

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.

gruez 1 hour ago | parent

>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.

thatsabadlook 1 hour ago | parent

This is the most contorted argument I have ever seen. I admire it on some level. Like we could be friends but I wouldn't let you watch my dogs

bliteben 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah not sure I'd want to be around for his midlife crisis though.

greg7mdp 1 hour ago | parent

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.

tacitusarc 1 hour ago | parent

> The 0.004% richest Americans hold the majority of US wealth

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 47 minutes ago | parent

>The 0.004% richest Amreicans hold the majority of US wealth

Nah, it’s more like the top 5% hold half. The top 0.1% are at ~13%.

stetrain 1 hour ago | parent

I'm sure this was done in a perfectly fair and balanced manner and not in a way that is at all aligned to the CEO's publicly stated politics.

theplumber 1 hour ago | parent

I think most of Trump agenda(I.e anti immigration, anti trans/lgbtq+ policies) would not have survived on social media or at least on Twitter/x. It would have been marked as hatred, bigotry, racism etc so it doesn’t surprise me we now see the other side of the coin.

At some point it we may get balanced policies but we are still far from that as no party seems to want that yet.

baggachipz 1 hour ago | parent

This is absolutely not a "both sides" thing. The owner of the network is spending record amounts of money on getting Republicans elected this cycle (and last). The idea that his social network would do anything counter to the whims of the CEO or his pal is utterly laughable.

a3w 1 hour ago | parent

e.g. anti-anti-facism was missing, which is funniest use of "anti", and saddest for a POTUS.

pjc50 50 minutes ago | parent

I'm reminded of the very real phase "premature anti fascist": https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jul-15-bk-22387...

(I selected that from google as an example of the term but it turns out to be quite a read, of stories from around and before WW2)

krapp 1 hour ago | parent

Trump's movement originated on and proliferated on social media, what are you talking about? Jan. 6th was planned and organized on social media, often openly. His agenda would not have survived without social media.

piyuv 55 minutes ago | parent

What do you mean “it would have been marked as hatred”? It _is_ hatred, bigotry, racism, etc. Trump isn’t shy about showing how racist and hateful he is.

stetrain 54 minutes ago | parent

> I think most of Trump agenda(I.e anti immigration, anti trans/lgbtq+ policies) would not have survived on social media or at least on Twitter/x.

Then how did he get elected in 2016 with a heavy social media presence and then continue using Twitter as his primary direct communication method as POTUS up until 2021?

voidhorse 1 hour ago | parent

Meanwhile: https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-midterms-republicans-do...

Manipulation of elections is OK as long as you do it with money.

bratsche 1 hour ago | parent

Probably 13,000 accounts that suddenly went dark after Ukraine took out some datacenter in Russia recently.

thatsabadlook 1 hour ago | parent

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.

rpmisms 1 hour ago | parent

That's not an accurate characterization of what happened, and I think you know that.

causesothere 58 minutes ago | parent

I don't think anyone knows that, given it's news from the past couple days.

thatsabadlook 25 minutes ago | parent

Do you have updated information about this? I've been following this pretty closely and that's more or less what I've read and seen discussed.

feverzsj 1 hour ago | parent

Posts on "For you" are mostly pro right/republican/Trump these days, even if you block such accounts frequently.

causesothere 1 hour ago | parent

X is a deeply partisan website. It actively censors leftist viewpoints. So it's not surprising it would skew rightward.

This effect is self reinforcing, if you are leftish, and you are in a tightening space, why would you stay?

craftkiller 51 minutes ago | parent

Why are you still using Twitter? It has been years since the purchase, you've had plenty of time to switch.

baggachipz 21 minutes ago | parent

People are just shrugging and going back to it.[1]

It's really disheartening.

[1] https://daringfireball.net/2026/10/x_once_again_marks_the_sp...

syngrog66 1 hour ago | parent

meanwhile Musk spending $250M+ on Republican campaigns. but sure, ban a few Twitter accounts

ChrisRR 1 hour ago | parent

Thank you HN for highlighting new usernames in green

tavavex 55 minutes ago | parent

Sounds like they're just getting rid of competition