Hell, why not just make a social network JUST for terrorists with no threat of shutting anybody down and then just tap into that info?
You would think that people aren't that stupid. I would think that too. But after witnessing the whole country (Russia) going down the rabbit hole of paranoid madness with just a couple of years of propaganda, I don't think that anymore.
Keep in mind, we're not just talking about accounts used by actual terrorists to coordinate actual attacks. We're talking about "pro-ISIS" Twitter accounts.
How will we decide who is pro-ISIS? I propose a system of hearings, with the most important ones conducted by a senate committee. The most important question at these hearings will be "are you now or have ever been a sympathizer with Islamic State." If they "fail" the hearing we could put them in some kind of database used by employers and government hiring agents and so forth. A sort of blacklist, if you will.
And anyone on the blacklist doesn't get to use corporate media platforms. It's not a First Amendment violation, you see, because it's VOLUNTARY. Just ask these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un-American_Activities_C...
I didn't say that I want all pro-terrorist accounts to be shut down. I only explained the reasons behind it.
The fact that some position has valid reasons behind it doesn't mean that there aren't reasons against it. It also doesn't mean that it's necessarily the right position.
Please, don't argue with a position you assume some commenter expresses and argue with a position someone actually expresses. Case in point: I don't know whether we should or shouldn't close all pro-terrorist accounts. And I know about first amendment, thank you.
And even if it were, Twitter can ban accounts for any reason.
Your second statement is true, 1st amendment applies only to the government ability to restrict speech.
I didn't think that was a massive thing, until a girl I went to primary school with in NZ (who, it turns out, is ethnic Russian) jumped on me for daring to suggest that Russia's paid internet trolls are a bit of a joke. There was no reasoning, she just kept quoting zerohedge and RT links at me, ignoring anything I said. I just blocked her, but it was so weird to actually be confronted with the effects of this propoganda.
Just curious, but what do you think the world's opinion of CNN is?
Answer: not unbiased news...
It doesn't mean that it's equally biased.
To sibling: only Fox News is owned by Murdoch. You can google for who owns what instead of guessing. MSNBC is biased to the (American) left and CNN is biased to insipidness. All are biased to the establishment and to distract, sensationalism.
generally, within boundaries of popular news sources, one should use a foreign source to get information for a given country. now finding which one is +-balanced for given country is a tricky thing, and probably not constant as time goes by
Come to think of it, maybe Trump is a Russian agent. It would explain a lot.
Authorities' current efforts seem to be more of an attempt to sweep this stuff under the rug. If all this is hidden from the general public, we might be less inclined to scrutinize their bullshit. For all the money and human rights they've consumed here, and the hundreds of thousands killed over there, their various strategies seem to have made the alleged problem worse in every respect. That seems like something we should talk about?
It's true that the mechanisms were different, because social media wasn't a big thing at the time: John Walker Lindh was radicalized before the services that really made "social media" a global force existed.
Not to take any merit from your argument but AQ was good in recruiting online at least for its franchise or affiliate in Yemen under the leadership of the US-born Anwar Awlaki. This is the man who made online propaganda and media blitz as a core element of Islamic terrorism and Jihadism strategy.
Also, please note that Al-Qaeda in Iraq was the progenitor of ISIS but they broke away due to ideological and strategical differences with Ayman Zwahiri the No. 1 AQ leader and they were very hardened under AQ sponsorship.
It wasn't so much a "progenitor of ISIS" as the name taken by the group that later called itself "the Islamic State in Iraq" (and later still, "the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria", and most recently simply "the Islamic State") during the period in which that group (which had been around quite some time previously) adopted the al-Qaeda brand.