Twitter Just Permanently Suspended Conservative Writer Milo Yiannopoulos
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Twitter is selling a product, and they have a right to decide what kind of product it is. They have a right to decide what their brand is connected to. If you argue that free speech requires private companies to be neutral toward everyone who wants to use them as a medium, you're also arguing that newspapers must publish any editorials that are sent to them. You're arguing that TV networks accept all ads, no matter how repugnant, and that phone carriers allow stalkers to contact anyone they wish.
People should be willing to die to defend free speech, but let's also be clear on what is and isn't actually an attack on free speech. Yiannopoulos is a troll, and Twitter (in the interest of their shareholders) should have started banning people like him a long time ago.
That's why a bar can kick you out for screaming racial slurs if they want to: it hurts their business by making their customers unhappy. That's also why corporations can donate to any political cause that they want. Some private corporations exist only to be biased! The ACLU is an example.
"Free speech" means, to me, the freedom to speak without fear. Twitter has not given Yiannopoulos a reason to fear speaking. He's just no longer free to use Twitter as a broadcast medium. It's like if Twitter lent him a huge megaphone that said "TWITTER" on it, listened to what he said, and then decided they didn't want him to have it anymore.
A privately-held telecom provider (i.e. utility) disagrees with my political views. As a result my internet service is terminated.
Let's agree the definition of a public utility is "Furnishes an everyday necessity to the public at large".
Has the provider restricted my First Amendment right?
At what point (if ever) would you consider Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter public utilities?
Is Twitter or any other application layer non-government service on the internet a utility? No.
So is this what happened? No.
They didn't ban him for his political views, nor are they a utility.
No, they banned him for soliciting harassment, not for the views which motivated the solicitation of the harassment.
I believe you are referring to twitter being used to silence a dissenting opinion when you said "that policy", in reference to Nero. I actually think it's the other way, the bullying sent toward the SNL actresses' way, the sexist and homophobic comments, those were actually meant to silence a dissenting view, someone those people did not like.
Stopping bullying is a good thing. No good comes from bullying someone you don't like.
On the internet you can choose whatever service you like.
Or, lets go for something simpler: Spam. You're using the telcom provider to send out spam. They cut you off for it.
The only difference between Twitter and old school BBSes in this case is reach. You still need to break out the ban hammer sometimes or it turns into a cesspool.
I disagree. Because Twitter is a private company (and not a public utility), their being able to make this kind of decision is central to what the first amendment is about.
> it does have to do with censorship
Of course it has to do with censorship. Anytime a someone who owns an outlet chooses to allow or not allow their private channel to be used in a particular way, it has to do with censorship.
> article: a day after he incited his followers to bombard Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones with racist and demeaning tweets.
That sounds like fighting words[1] to me. Which, at least under the American constitution, is not covered by FoS. There's going to be internet fallout though, on the internet FoS is synonymous with "say whatever I want to say."
"Inciting" was a reference to the effect he created, without suggesting that we can be certain it was intentional.
Fighting words are not illegal (unless specifically prohibited by statute), they are just outside the Constitutional protection against regulation. So, you could engage in fighting words without crossing any legal line.
But, even if it is protected speech, freedom of speech means that private parties (like Twitter) are generally free to choose not to relay your speech, too.
> legal
Is there any way for his lawyers to know for certain? Online harassment is still incredibly murky in terms of precedent.
Within that context, I want to point out that an action can be within your rights, but still be morally wrong. Influential private companies can create an anti-free-speech culture. This doesn't directly infringe on people's rights, but it paves the way for anti-free-speech legislation.
My other disagreement is whether your internet provider could shut off your internet, and not be infringing your rights. I say 'yes': you and your ISP have a right to sign whatever contract you want, and they can set whatever limitations they want on your use of their property (as can newspapers and online services). The rational way for consumers to deal with is not to get the state to step in, but to push for 'no censorship' contracts.
If you're going to police speech that's merely provocative, as Milo's is, and not expressly illegal (direct actual threats, child porn, etc) then you're going to get yourself in a position where you eventually piss everyone off. Twitter and Facebook are doing an excellent job of that at the moment with conservatives. We'll see long term how many users want to hang around a dry leftist echo chamber.
I can't say that they should disallow illegal speech because governments get this wrong, too. Like how many countries have laws forbidding hate speech. Those laws are as abhorrent as the speech itself because it's stifling discourse.
Facebook started as a way to connect with classmates. Instagram started as picture sharing. Twitter started as a way to message friends.
At what point were those companies suddenly "in the business" of facilitating discourse? Who decides when they are? Why should we have laws that force a company to behave a certain way just because it's popular?
Thankfully, the US has clear laws about this, and private corporations can permit or reject users as they please, as long as they don't do it solely on the basis of gender, race, or religion.
Further, I can't believe that the discourse that is 'stifled' by hate speech terms and conditions on platforms like Twitter was ever valuable in the first place. I can't believe it's more valuable than the discourse of those who are silenced by harassment.
Milo Yiannopoulos was banned repeatedly for violating the rules on Twitter by launching personal attacks and inciting trolling.
He was intentionally provoking bans to enhance the controversy surrounding his brand.
I'm not sure why you think he didn't get exactly what he wanted (except the permanency, I'm pretty sure he didn't want that part)?
A barrage of pictures comparing Leslie Jones to apes and orangutans is not hate? It's a debate?
Twitter has been going after Milo for a while. What twitter did was not just about his tweets related to her.
And rightly so. He's a vile human being.
I also have a problem with this as Twitter investor (I'm a huge critic of Twitter, if you look at my history; and I'm specifically an investor hoping for someone to just buy the company and fire Jack and his team.) I don't know how to balance the harassment policies (which I think should be enforced in some cases) and free speech.
I think free speech is vital to the success of any social media platform. I also know the tendencies of internet trolls is that if you come at them, they often go much harder towards you. It would make more sense if you could auto-block mentions that contain keywords, almost like a spam filter. Basically filter bubbles or groups/channels, with the ability to see unfiltered mentions. I really do not think this solves the problem, as we saw with Reddit, 4Chan, 8Chan, (or basically any forum that has operated since the early 2000s) etc.
When Reddit started mass banning people and subreddits it saw a huge uptick of "shitposts," eventually a lot of those people formed "The_Donald" and now they basically control most of the front page, and have for months. Banning in many instances can give the banned users a much louder voice, especially if they have any sort of movement or following behind them. I think anyone with experience in online forums dating back to the early 2000s knows this to be true. Forum "fallouts" happen often, and usually occur after a significant ban or power grab...it often ends up killing the platform or community. I don't think social media platforms are any different.
I fear unless Jack and many others are removed from the company, it will become like a Yahoo, with core assets that are marked as virtually worthless and no one willing to buy and catch the falling knife.
2) It's possible to inspire your followers to threaten people without making a threat yourself. Yiannopoulos has painted groups he dislikes (feminists, Muslims, etc.) as threatening and dangerous to his followers, which is a tacit justification of violence and threats against them.
#2 Very tenuous justification there. One that twitter certainly doesn't hold other groups to.
His followers have threatened some horrific stuff to lots of people, especially during the height of GamerGate harassment. It has to do with Yiannopoulos only if he intended to create those reactions among his followers, which I (and others) suspect he did. We'll never know for sure.
> #2 Very tenuous justification there. One that twitter certainly doesn't hold other groups to.
Agreed. Perhaps Yiannopoulos has grounds to sue Twitter for unfair treatment. I doubt it, though IANAL.
In this case, Twitter may not be using "inciting followers to make threats using dog-whistle rhetoric" as a criterion for banning people. It would ban Yiannopoulos and not, say, a black nationalist for one simple reason: Yiannopoulos was more famous and created more consternation among potential users.
But honest question, what is the difference between a private business refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay wedding (which courts have ruled illegal), and twitter refusing their platform to a conservative writer.
He's not targetted for either being gay or conservative or any other personal trait other than on their service portraying a seemingly vile human being through targetted harassment of other user(s), which they deemed a breach of their ToS.
Making intentionally inflammatory comments on Twitter is alterable, so it's not analogous to being gay.
What happened is that he used their platform to post impersonating tweets of other users, as well as lead large harassment campaigns against other users. Both are against the Twitter ToS. After repeated ToS violations, he was finally banned.
So no, they did not refuse their platform to a conservative writer. They did not do anything to anyone for their political beliefs. They kicked off a user who had repeatedly broken the rules.
The best I can tell is that he can be an asshole.
Bit odd for you to be so concerned about making up your own mind, yet be so reliant on other people providing you sources.
Besides, I have taken a preliminary look; Milo seems to be an outspoken asshole (and thus poisoning the discourse), but not an outright hateful bigot... feel free to provide evidence to the contrary.
What do you think this is, Reddit?
This is a good characterization of the media's overall response to twitter's banning of Milo. Everyone just keeps saying "he's a terrible person" in dozens of different forms - some rather extreme - but rarely is any real evidence presented. If they present any evidence at all, they cherry pick and take things out of context.
This isn't a blow to free speech. It's Twitter deciding not to let someone use its service and its resources for the purposes of rallying racists to berate an innocent woman who acted in a movie.
On the contrary, private censorship is essential to the marketplace of ideas, since it is exactly private parties choosing how they will participate in that marketplace.
(Where a "private" entity -- or a group of them coordinating formally or informally -- has a, de facto or de jure, protected monopoly on communication in a market, then that entity or entities censoring raises much the same issues as government censorship, but private censorship in general is central to, rather than destructive of, the open marketplace of ideas.)
Why should I protect someone calling Leslie Jones an ape? And do NOT say to simply "ignore it" or to "log off". None of that works. It doesn't stop it, and asking someone in the public eye to not use social media is basically telling them to not have a career.
Banning someone from Twitter is one of the least effective ways to censor an author who has multiple venues which pay them to write. As the linked comic says (I can't believe nobody has linked to it yet, so the obligatory XKCD is below) this is not censorship. This is signaling that his speech was inappropriate and harassment. Being banned from Twitter doesn't stop him from posting on e.g. Facebook. His speech can still be heard by any who want to hear it, this ban merely prevents him from harassing her further.
I have no idea why anyone allowed twitter to ever have as much influence as they do.
And why do you care so much about the harassers, yet offer nothing for those who's speech is silenced because they are harassed off the platform? Do those people not matter?
Who decides where that line is drawn?
>And why do you care so much about the harassers, yet offer nothing for those who's speech is silenced because they are harassed off the platform? Do those people not matter?
The can block/ignore/filter, just like everyone has always done.
Together with other commentators, I have in the past argued for verified identities on social networks, so those responsible for abuse and persecution of public figures and the vulnerable might be held accountable for their actions. That seems redundant when trolls are now so brazen they don’t care about disapproving words from their loved ones back inside Facebook when they leave furious missives using that social network’s commenting system elsewhere on the internet.
So perhaps what’s needed now is a bolder form of censure after all, because the internet is not a universal human right. If people cannot be trusted to treat one another with respect, dignity and consideration, perhaps they deserve to have their online freedoms curtailed. For sure, the best we could ever hope for is a smattering of unpopular show trials. But if the internet, ubiquitous as it now is, proves too dangerous in the hands of the psychologically fragile, perhaps access to it ought to be restricted. We ban drunks from driving because they’re a danger to others. Isn’t it time we did the same to trolls?
- See more at: http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/yiannopoulos/3359/the-internet...
There have been times when liberals were racist (e.g. some, but not most, eugenicists), but generally speaking, conservatives want to preserve the past, and the past is incredibly racist.
Conservatives fought the abolition of slavery, and to this day they support laws that marginalize or infringe upon the rights of homosexuals. A gay conservative is someone acting against his/her interests, and a pro-equality conservative is an oxymoron.
I would admit that I do not have that many gay friends, but the few friends, coworkers and acquaintances I have met over the past 10 years very across the political spectrum just like everyone else. Not all of them are liberal, not all of them were even on the same page as far as things like "gay marriage" went, doesn't mean any of them opposed it, but it doesn't mean that they were active supporters of it either. Not everyone defines themselves by their sexual orientation.
You can be "conservative" (or right wing if you will) on many things like national defense, economics, and public spending while being gay, claiming that somehow you have to accept everything that the "left wing" stands for just because you like individual of the same sex as you are is quite telling, oddly enough this level of framing and bias is almost synonymous with the PC crowd - "but you are 'x' how can you be against 'y'", you call it by different names for it but I've seen way too many "liberals" act like authoritarian douchebags and call people of various "minority" groups what can effectively be analogous to a "race traitor" when they don't share their views or buy into their entire agenda.
You can be an african american and not support BLM, you can be a gay man or woman and believe be against state laws that allow or disallow gay marriage simply by believing that it is not upto the state to police marriage, and you can be a gun toting 2nd amendment defender while being a gay pro abortion pro legalization woman.
Stop trying to infantilize people and stick them into camps, if anything you should take from the recent US election (especially bernie vs trump) is that there are considerably more "opinions" out there than you might expect.
Conservatives tend to be more combative with Islam than liberals are, so the thinking is it's logical to be Conservative now if you want to push gay rights forward. Especially since the Orlando massacre which saw a Muslim terrorist kill 50 unarmed gays.
Being anti-gay rights and anti-Muslim are both conservative viewpoints, but almost no one is 100% conservative or 100% progressive.
When you say it's logical to "be Conservative" to move gay rights forward, I'd suggest changing it to, "be Conservative regarding Islam", which makes the assertion less fraught.
If people are pro-gay rights or pro-equality, they are no longer "conservative" on those issues. They are progressive. They are pro-change instead of pro-tradition.
Doesn't really matter which side you're on. If you're on the left it's obvious that more than 99% of the conservative voters are voting against their own (at least economic) interests. If you're on the right the democratic voters are sheeple and slaves to the lamestream media. I'm not trying to hide my affiliation, but the phrasing on either side is obviously pointing to the same logic. The vast majority of voters are followers, determining votes by proxy of affiliation of people they trust, rather than the complete platform of their candidate.
> political and social philosophy [that] promotes retaining traditional social institutions in the context of culture and civilization
Everything I said is consistent with the definition of conservative. If you think conservatives are pro-gay rights or pro-equality, you are actually defining the word differently than the rest of us, and we're having a pointless semantic argument.
Is it /really/ true that the best contributors are so sensitive? In my experience, these days it's actually the worst contributors or those who contribute not at all who are the most sensitive and liable to throw in the towel.
I'm sympathetic to your view but there is another risk that by overmoderating or catering to the most sensitive of contributors, HN will be left with non-interesting content, or controversial opinions will be silenced.
What possible reason? Is it excerting more effort? Does it in any concievable way affect the world in a negative way?
I'm sure your argument would be other people taking advantage, but being nice isn't the same as being naive. Give people the benefit of the doubt and the world is a better place.
Thankfully most nations laws and most private companies ToS extend beyond just physical harassment. He breached Twitter's ToS multiple times. Now he's banned.