Twitter Suspends 300k Accounts Tied to Terrorism in 2017

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Culwell_Center_attack

when it was ongoing.

Minutes before the attack:

> #texasattack: "May Allah accept us as mujahideen."

Minutes after:

> Allahu Akbar!!!! 2 of our brothers just opened fire.

Also saw Salafists retweet an old cartoon by Charlie Hebdo of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi hours before the Charlie Hebdo shooting occurred.

I'm divided about this issue. One the one hand, I've seen accounts that glorify the Paris attacks and link to bomb making materials, on the other hand, I've seen lots of video's from Syria and Palestine which does indeed radicalize youth, but is also not directly terrorist propaganda (a lot of this is newsworthy, but does not end up in the news, so it is valuable to share on social media). Should linking to an Anwar al-Awlaki video be grounds for a ban? Remember, these videos are on Youtube.

I like to think back 10-15 years when people had to self-host their websites. Stuff that, back then, would surely get you a knock on the door, slips through daily on social networks. I say: If you can't host it yourself, you can't rely on a third party to host it for you and protect your anonymity.

So yes, chase them underground, and apply more serious tracking to those that are acting more seriously (someone on Telegram writing about terrorism is way more serious than someone on Twitter writing about terrorism). Try to keep social media free of war propaganda. And be careful to not overdo it. America is a country where writing a Facebook post about Apple interspersed with quotes from Fight Club can get you SWATted [1].

[1] http://nyconvergence.com/2011/06/ny-man-uses-fight-club-quot...

And by in solitude I mean, "in isolation from society at large".

If you assume the people you disagree with are "insane" or disregard them as "full of hate" then you'll never understand why they think the way they do and the division in our world continues unabated.

It still blows my mind that people who support the currently elected president, are considered a hate group. If the other candidate had won, would we consider her subreddit a hate sub? Would we care what the losing party thought about her subreddit? We all know the answer to that: "No." I have never before seen an election where "only one candidate is considered a human being."

Strange times.

The study is interesting, but this is decidedly not what it says, and you should be wary of overinterpreting its arguments. If you look at the definition of hate speech they used, it was defined as "the vocabulary of the subreddits in question". This isn't a general complaint about hate speech being slippery and hard to pin down, it's a criticism of the fact that defining it as the specific vocabulary of the subreddits in question is a huge confounder. What the study's conclusion boils down to is:

"If you ban a subreddit, the exact vocabulary (in-jokes, etc) of that subreddit declines."

Well, duh. This is an especially tautological result for communities that have such a rich vocabulary of in-jokes (and slurs) :(

There's not much in the paper to suggest that the emigrants from coontown and FPH aren't expressing the exact same ideas elsewhere, without using the exact same lexicon that they developed in their original communities. I would be surprised if this result didn't replicate for pretty miuch any community that has its own internal vocabulary and in-jokes, such as nominally pro-social-justice subreddits or even narrow political subreddits like /r/anarchism or something.

It's pretty much a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

There is some chance that the bans and content suppression are using the same information.

It's also worth noting that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were acts of terror under most definitions.

This is a good definition, which IIRC was compiled from a lot of other academic sources:

Alex Schmid and Albert Jongman: “Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-)clandestine individual, group, or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal, or political reasons, whereby—in contrast to assassination—the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population, and serve as message generators.”

https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/511...

I used to agree with your assertion. I will explain why I no longer do.

The goal of warfare is very simply to break the will of the opposing population to keep fighting.

Taking out roadways and bridges and sewage treatment plants with smart bombs is another way to break the opponent's will. Not quite as demoralizing as a funeral for a loved one killed by the enemy, but demoralizing nonetheless. That is why we use smart bombs to take out infrastructure... to make life harder for the enemy so that its will is broken.

In the revolutionary war, guerrilla tactics like taking cover behind a tree were considered morally cowardly and abhorrent by the British, yet were embraced by revolutionaries as an effective tactic in an asymmetric battle.

During WW2 the US carpet bombed the Japanese mainland, intent on total devastation of entire cities (civilians included) so that the Japanese would relent and give up the fight.

During the Vietnam war the US used chemical weapons extensively, which had extensive civilian consequences.

The point if the argument so far is to illustrate that the line between acceptable and unacceptable civilian casualties is (for the US, at least) very flexible based on the urgency of the battle. The closer we are to not winning the more readily we will do away with any aversion to civilian casualties. The same is true for any nation or other group of fighters.

The second question is, why has the US invested so much money in smart bombs and drones? We are told that it is because the US has an extremely high moral standard when it comes to warfare, and we are spending Trillions on these weapons systems simply because we value the lives of civilian populations so much that we are willing to make this massive investment.

The real reason we have done this is because after the cold war the US lost its appetite for discretionary war-making. The jig was up. The threat of the spread of communism never panned out and a generation had been deeply impacted by the Vietnam war. Many had seen combat, many had lost friends or family in a war that was widely viewed as a horrible mistake.

In order to sell Americans on war again, our leaders had to be able to launch a hygienic war. Recall during GW1 how we saw live video of bombs dropping precisely onto targets that we were told contained munitions or other weapons bunkers. These bombs could be dropped right next to a hospital or school and create no harm for the patients or students. Finally, the US had technology that allowed the exceptional moral character of our war initiatives to be reflected in the character of the battle. The people were reassured that only the bad stuff was being harmed.

As US entanglement in the middle eastern wars got bigger and bigger, opposition groups grew more resilient to the smart bombs and were able to put up a fight that required something even more precise.

So drones were created that contain precision cameras and weaponry, allowing areal executions of enemies to be undertaken cleanly, without killing anyone who wasn't deemed guilty by whoever in the US had ordered the strike.

This all makes sense if you believe the story that Afghanistan and Iraq (for example) are full of mostly US-loving people and a few hostile combatants who hate us for our freedoms.

In reality, there is widespread public support of so-called terrorist groups, widespread resentment of US involvement. How can the US manage to police this sort of environment?

If you are driving a car and you go too fast you can be caught speeding. The penalty of the time wasted and the cost of the ticket discourages people from speeding. In US drone-controlled areas, the drone killings offer a broad deterrent for behavioral misconduct.

Only if one buys into the US definition of guilt as being appropriately determined by someone who has been authorized to order the strikes is this remotely fair or reasonable.

What is more effective to intimidate a population into compliance, a system with too many false negatives or one with too many false positives? I'd argue that false positives (unwarranted or loosely-justified killings) are exactly the sort of thing that helps enforce the sort of control that the US wants.

Imagine if in the US we heard about people being killed via drone killings on American soil. It would terrify lots of people. Imagine if some foreign body was determining who was guilty and innocent and we had no democratic say in the criteria used to make this determination?

It leaves no choice for the target population but to live in fear and to supplicate to the US and hope for mercy. We Americans are told that there is some incredibly humane stuff going on and that we are able to make all this happen without sending as many American troops into harm's way. But in reality we are being led to believe a story of humane and judicious use of force that is simply a story meant to get us to support the war and nation building efforts and has no basis in reality.

Drones are like lethal sheep dogs herding the population (sheep) in a way that the US wants. They use just enough brutality to get the job done, and the brutality comes in the form of actual death for some, but constant teeth gnashing stress as the propellors are heard overhead, constant empty reassurances given to children that everything will be OK and that they won't be targeted, etc. The purpose of the drones is to keep the level of terror and fear just high enough to get compliant behavior... to coerce the target population into compliance.

By your logic, drones are simply airplanes... simply a transportation device. That is obviously not a useful level of abstraction with which to view their use in war.

In our modern wars, drones are used as intimidation devices, with the sound of their propellers issuing a constant reminder that anyone may be the next to die.

They are thus much more akin to dropped leaflets containing propaganda meant to persuade an enemy population.

In the past, leaflets have been used to do intimidation by declaring the time in the future when a nearby building would be obliterated. The locals, after reading the leaflet and seeing the building obliterated, were meant to have greater respect for the powerful nation that dropped the leaflets and to become more obedient to it.

Thus the context of terrorism in modern America and American politics is broadly relevant. It might be terrorists you don't like this time, but what about next time when it's terrorists you support? Who gets to decide what groups deserve that label? Donald Trump?

> ... corporations' right to make moral judgements about whether they wish to offer free recruitment advertising for suicide bombers should be sacrificed to the false idol of the First Amendment.

Fine if society actually needs companies to make moral judgments on behalf of the public. In the US there has been widespread opposition to the basic freedoms provided by the bill of rights over the past decade or so.

What we are seeing is a combination of companies helping with the US propaganda narrative about terrorism by silencing opposing voices. Worse, we are seeing companies like Twitter and Facebook turn into moral filters. Someone is deciding what is "terrorism", what is "fake news", etc. These are not the services that platform companies provide, they are the services that religious leaders provide.

This isn't a drone strike, but wasn't the goal of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs to kill as many civilians as possible in order to instill so much fear that their country surrendered? If that is the criteria for terrorism, then we have certainly already committed the largest terrorist attack in world history.

That's not usually true. Terrorists often don't go for max deaths but for a specific symbolic target (e.g. Pentagon, wtc etc). What they want is to provoke a response, ideally heavy-handed repression - the aim is to polarise the society targeted, to instill fear and panic, and reveal the implicit violence of government as explicit action.

Drone strikes and the policy of global assassination does not keep you safe, it just kills a lot of people. Re support for democracy, I'm not sure why you believe that given support for Pinochet, sisi, Mubarak, hussein, Saud etc