Beyond the obvious censorship slippery slope, strategically, should these extremist accounts be suspended? Wouldn't it be more beneficial to analyze their social graph and other intel to find out who these people are?
Mind you, there are other ways (not available to anyone with access to the Twitter API) to plot terrorist social graphs.
Those who share or are confronted with terrorist propaganda on social networks are not all terrorists. There is a lot of noise. Forcing the terrorists/propagandists underground, separates the wheat from the chaff. Terrorist propagandists know the value of social networks. They do not use them to plot attacks (at least the smarter ones), they solely use them to brainwash naive youth and recruit them for their cause. I feel Twitter is obligated to combat this. Having a lot of users is no excuse for manual and automatic suspension of people sharing dangerous materials.
I do agree that there is a slippery slope: Do we also suspend those who share information and videos from the war front in Syria? Or only those sharing infographics on poisons or glorification of the Paris attacks? Is blocking terrorist propaganda even censorship or just common sense (criminal negligence to keep it up)?
The constant bombardment of war front posts in your timeline is definitely riling up people to go fight a war that is not theirs. Can we solve this problem, while largely keeping free speech intact, or is free speech always a binary issue?
Also compare Twitter with the older ISP's. You'd have a hard time hosting your own site with terrorist propaganda, while nowadays these social networks give you an easy platform to reach many people.
> The constant bombardment of war front posts in your timeline is definitely riling up people to go fight a war that is not theirs.
Are you talking about my twitter timeline in specific? Fight a battle that is not who's? Mine? New Yorkers? Americans? Westerners? Freedom lovers? Christians? Muslems? Jews? Who am I riling up? Anyone who reads my posts? Are you riled up? Please think carefully before volunteering for overseas duty. Perhaps I need a disclaimer?
It is. You just need to be particularly ruthless and employ gulags and other soviet union style tactics.
I think Ted Nugent said it clearly when he said (and I'm paraphrasing here), "We need to give these people a public platform so we can keep tabs on them. I want to know what these crazy people are thinking and planning."
I think this should be the same thing. If we're all about free speech, that includes speech we also might not like so much. It also allows us to keep tabs on these people and who they're connected to (who's behind the accounts as well as who follows them) so we can better mitigate the threats they're posing.
Censoring them does nothing but push them back into the shadows where their communications then become encrypted, unavailable and out of the public eye.
The question of who decides what gets culled is a different and far more nuanced question to answer - but I for one am glad that these accounts are getting closed down.
otoh, by using twitter, they get a free recruitment and propaganda platform. the question becomes: is that more valuable to them than the publicly leaked information is to us. from that perspective, the answer doesn't seem obvious, at least to me.
So do:
- White supremacists groups (of which there are many)
- Black panther party
- Other Jihadi groups
- Other "nefarious" people who advocate "rape culture", misogyny, and sexism
- Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs who are known drug dealers, murderers and rapists
All of these already exist on Twitter, yet somehow ISIS accounts are singled out and shut down? If you want "free speech" it can't be done to one group whose message you don't agree with, but then leave other groups who are just as bad free to operate without any penalty.
If you shut one down, you should be shutting them all down.
And if you think about it, in 1960s and prior, when civil movement wasnt the main stream, I bet twitter will ban Martin Lurther King's account as well.
Would Civil Rights ever have worked with censorship? What about LGBQ?
We're not going to have any success fighting terrorists if we assume that they're stupid. You think ISIS is using Twitter DMs to plot terrorist attacks or something? They've successfully executed a number of attacks worldwide under the noses of some pretty smart and dedicated people, so I'm pretty sure they've already figured out slightly more secure communication channels. It's not like they'll stumble onto PGP and Tor just because they got kicked off of Twitter.
> I want to know what these crazy people are thinking and planning
We already know what they're planning: a fundamentalist Islamic global caliphate. Again, they are not stupid enough to tell us anything more useful than that on Twitter.
> It also allows us to keep tabs on these people and who they're connected to
They're using Twitter to build those connections in the first place. This is about their curbing their ability to broadcast and recruit. You can't gain mindshare from a secret, encrypted chatroom.
> If we're all about free speech, that includes speech we also might not like so much.
The right to free speech does not confer the additional right to airdrop political pamphlets all over New York City, nor the right to stand on someone else's front stoop and scream at passersby, nor, indeed, the right to use the Internet website Twitter dot com to broadcast ideas.
I seriously can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. People broadcast ideas all day on twitter. Did you miss the dumpster fire that was #gamergate? What about the white supremacists who use it as a platform, or people who advocate "rape culture" or black lives matter who advocate violence against police? I can find ALL of these and more - yet we choose to single out one religious ideology we don't like and censor the fuck out of it?
Yeah, in a country with "free speech" that makes perfect sense.
> ...we choose to single out one religious ideology we don't like and censor the fuck out of it?
"We" didn't single out anybody, Twitter did, and they can do that because they own the platform and have absolute authority over who can use it.