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Twitter Allegedly Deleting Negative Tweets About United Airlines' Passenger Abuse (thenextweb.com)
New submitter dooode writes: As you would have read, United just had another Nazi moment where they had to "re-accommodate" a customer using some (not so gentle) force. The social web seems to have been taken by a storm by this incident. But suddenly people are noticing their tweets are being deleted -- some of them merely status questions. Does twitter make money (read bribes) to delete negative tweets? What do you feel about it? The Next Web adds that "some of the allegedly deleted tweets did not directly mention the incident with the forcibly removed passenger." On the flip side, "some of the initial tweets exposing United Airlines' abusive treatment of passengers are still very much present and actively being reshared on the platform." It's possible that the "allegedly deleted tweets" initially appeared as replies to now-deleted tweets, but TNW says they contacted several users who rejected that premise, "claiming the missing posts were standard tweets."
Steering people to a platform where they get used to being censored is the entire point of Web 2.0, isn't it? What, do you want people to learn how to host their own webpages again? Luddite.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
I have no clue whether they "deleted tweets" and if so which and how many about what.
But can people please stop acting surprised when you centralize your communications on a commercial service you do not control, cannot run yourself on your own node because it's proprietary, and which grants itself 100% control of the contents of your communications, and then that service somehow alters or removes things you say? It's all inside their walled garden. You said that was OK when you signed up.
If you give control to someone, don't complain when they use it.
Twitter has obviously gotten WAY away from being a Common Carrier in any sense, since they are constantly cherry-picking what is and is not allowed to be seen.
Someone needs to file a lawsuit over this and soon, so Twitter can go back to being a platform.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
He brought this on himself ...
I'm not sure about this. You seem to be suggesting that he should have yielded to authoritarianism without being able to state his case. I kinda get it -- he who runs away lives to fight another day. Maybe. Yield to the dictator du'jour. Acquiesce to those in charge simply because they are "in charge". The people have no power. I don't particularly like where this is heading.
I'm trying to imagine the response if it had been an elderly black woman or a man wearing a ghutrah.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
If the rules are that everyone has to do everything a flight attendant asks (as long the flight flight attendant asks nicely) then I'm going to become a flight attendant and (nicely) ask everyone to give me all their money. And then, for an encore, I'll (nicely) ask all the hotties to have sex with me. :)
I would be interested to know if UA uses any of the "reputation management companies" on this list. Do they put in the call to Twitter and other social media platforms, or is it handled directly by corporate?
Either way, its all hands on deck for the corporate shills. They will censor where they can, and are already using character assassination as a tactic.
Steering people to a platform where they get used to being censored is the entire point of Web 2.0, isn't it? What, do you want people to learn how to host their own webpages again? Luddite.
It's clearly hate speech, and should be deleted for that reason.
You wouldn't want people to be able to shout hateful things on the internet, would you?
And besides, it's not the government that's doing it, it's a private company. They can censor anything they want because they're not bound by the constitution, and people are free to leave twitter and start their own social media service.
Also: Gab.aio is a free-speech twitter alternative. Check out their humor channel sometime - it's actually funny!
Seriously, even Hitler never had someone beaten and forcibly removed from an area.... well, not his own people.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
He who runs away lives to run away another day.
There will never be a shortage of people who will toadie up to bullies in the hope of not being bullied themselves.
Just look at the House GOP caucus.
You are welcome on my lawn.
because its a felony to interfere with a flight crew or the police, and in the worst case you'll end up with homeland security blacklisting you. I'm sure they'll all be happy to give him recorded testimonies for his multimillion dollar lawsuit.
Bullshit. It was not a lawful order. You do not have to follow an unlawful order.
He had boarded. All restrictions and regulations about bumping people are before a passenger boards.
"So, even if United argued that there was some ambiguity in “denied boarding” based upon “boarding priority” – and that it could possibly mean removal based upon a removal priority – a court would be forced to rule against this interpretation because United drafted the contract."
Once he is on, then he could potentially be thrown off because of "Refusal of Transport", but...
"The rule, which unlike the denied boarding rule does provide for removal “from the aircraft at any point,” lists some two dozen justifications including: unruly behavior, intoxication, inability to fit into one seat, medical problems or concerns, etc. But nowhere in the list of some two dozen reasons is there anything about over booking, the need to free up seats, the need for seats to accommodate crew members to be used on a different flight etc."
Therefore it's not a lawful order. If a cop tells you to fight another person for his or her amusement or sing Auld Lang Syne, you don't have to follow it.
http://lawnewz.com/high-profil...
Are you an Oprah wannabe?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
>"I think I would have gone quietly and complained afterward."
That strategy is only good for cases where you are merely unhappy, rather than are being treated unfairly. The airlines who do this already know that people who are bumped involuntarily are going to be unhappy, and they don't care, and won't change. Complaining might get you additional compensation, but won't get the airlines to change. By resisting, this guy may have changed things for the better for all of us.
already pointed this out, but it bears repeating: Nothing will come of this because all the major airlines were allowed to merge into 4 big ones and they tacitly collude to avoid competition. So if you need to fly sooner or later you're going to be a customer of United or you're gonna pay though the nose x10 taking the most round about routes possible (fancy going from LA to Phoenix via Barcelona?).
This is why we used to regulate public services like transportation. But as the saying goes ain't nobody got time for that...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Interfering with an air crew can get you 10 years in jail. The reaccommodation they would have gotten would have included bars on the windows.
Everybody who is just now noticing that Twitter is censoring criticism of corporate misconduct (just like Reddit, Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, Hacker News, Github, etc, who are also all censoring the same "right-wing" wrongthink that the Democrats ran on in 2014) really ought to get in touch with the Gamergate people and get caught up on what has been going on on the Internet the past few years. Twitter was also banning people for reporting news about certain Black Lives Matter activists having a history of committing fraud while one of Twitter's executives was in a business arrangement with a Black Lives Matter leader. Twitter is controlled and corrupt, it is obvious, it has been obvious for years, and if you haven't heard about this it is because your other news sources are censored as well.
United ordering him to leave his seat may have been against their own, or FAA, regulations. He has a point there. He could argue to his hearts content to the attendant, pilot, boarding agent, whomever.
Not doing what a police officer orders? At that point it doesn't matter - you have to comply. The place to argue an unlawful police order is a court of law.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
"another Nazi moment"
I've been coming to Slashdot less and less because while my filter for garbage news with garbage sentences like this hasn't decreased, stuff like this is becomes the news around here more frequently.
"He brought this on himself."
Because he lawfully boarded a plane and had a right to stay?
"Next time should they ask pretty please, with a cherry on top?"
Yes, they should, a way of doing that is increasing compensation amounts until enough people take it.
"Disregard a flight crew AND law enforcement at your own peril. News at 11."
So if a flight crew or cop said "stand up and take off all your clothes while I piss on you" you'd simply roll over and take it?
Actually, don't answer that last one.
And negroes should sit in the back of the bus or hop off the bus and quietly complain afterwards. Polite requests have always worked in the past after all.
I've been saving the stream of "united" tweets since Apr 10 15:32. At this point I have close to 4 million tweets saved and over 700MB of data. I may have the deleted tweets, but definitely not if they don't have the word united in them.
I think some users may be confused. I can see in the data that @Jay_Beecher's earliest tweet about united was April 10th 18:12, which seems to be the one he is thinking was deleted. But that tweet is here. If he thinks its gone because he is looking at his normal tweet timeline, then he doesn't understand how Twitter's interface works. It doesn't show tweets that start with an @. Other people I checked (TalkIBC, iknowimbitter, seem to be equally confused.
Based on the data I have, I don't think Twitter deleted any tweets.
As fas as I heard, they actually did that, but stopped at $800.
Which was probably a bad move, because at that point, people are waiting for the psychologically important threshold of $1000 being crossed.
I'm not sure about this. You seem to be suggesting that he should have yielded to authoritarianism without being able to state his case.
This isn't authoritarianism any more than having a post deleted on a web forum by a moderator is authoritarianism. Aircraft owned by airlines are in fact private property.
Are United assholes for doing this? Yep, but don't try to confuse the issue.
Imagine if the car industry operated this way. You buy a car, but when you go to pick it up, eh sorry, we sold it to someone else. Whether it is is legal or not by the airline industry is irrelevant to the more profound and important question: is it right? A contract is a contract, and that the fact that airlines have the power to force an overbooking clause in a ticket sale contract turns it into an "addition contract" that enforces an inequality in bargaining power for the other party (the consumer base.)
Protesting and causing stocks to dive is the only way for the customer base to address that contract inequality in general, and this specific violation of human dignity in particular.