I'm more interested in why it took them this long, while they're perfectly fine suspending accounts that are politically opposing to their worldview. How are political dissenters more dangerous than actual terrorists?
There is no direct business value in banning users from your platform. In fact, doing so is a short-term net negative.
This is also why Twitter was so slow to ban bots: you gain a fraction of satisfaction for your users that interact with annoying bots, at the cost of dwindling user numbers.
> suspending accounts that are politically opposing to their worldview
Because highly visible users of their platform (verified celebrities) started DMing the CEO and threatened to leave if bullies were not dealt with. Creating a safe space for the social elite is very much adding business value to Twitter and makes investors happy.
I think Twitter just awaited the US government reaction, and took as long as the law / future business prospects allowed them. That Twitter propaganda has become a major problem for the intelligence agencies and anti-terrorism units is evident. It takes a long time to properly deal with these problems, just like Twitter will probably take years to combat astro-turfing bots meddling with a foreign election (which seems to me, the logical next step in the evolution of mass automatic banning of problematic accounts).
Really? I wish more people would have just come out and said that. Special treatment for the whales explains everything so much better.
But I guess that doesn't sell well to the have-nots, and it needed to be recast as harassment problem at all levels. Which subjugated all of us to years of commentary and squabbling over how we're going to use computers to fix undesirable-but-totally-natural aspects of human behavior. Also explains why the highly-visible people seemed so cool with instituting a privately-controlled nanny state every step of the way.
As a tactic, terrorism describes the infliction of civilian casualties meant to create a disproportionate climate of fear. By this definition, drones used in warfare are a form of terrorism.
In today's world we are not fighting wars in the traditional sense of defending ourselves against aggression. Since there is no obvious threat, the people will not support a pragmatic war of aggression meant to help install US hegemony in oil rich (or otherwise geopolitically important) regions of the world.
So our planners are left with the need to create a moralistic crusade and to marginalize and dehumanize the adversary so that Americans will not care when we find out that many of them (and their civilians) were slaughtered or forced to live in poverty/squalor.
It starts with the framing of the adversary as helpless against an illegitimate regime. The people are framed as victims of their own failure to end up with a better regime, and the moralistic idea of nation building and bringing in democracy is introduced.
Then, the regime is asked to give up power. When it refuses, as all regimes would, the US pretends it has a moral justification to use force against people and infrastructure. There is the heavy implication that a greater purpose exists, such as democracy or women's rights, or stopping the torture policies of the regime, etc.
But in fact no plan exists other than to remove the regime from power. Never before has there been a more hollow policy/intellectual movement than the idea of nation building.
Meanwhile, the US has typically funded various militant groups that oppose the regime, and now those groups are no longer needed. Some decide to seek power in the newly existing power vacuum. They will be branded as terrorists arbitrarily to suit the needs of the US PR campaign.
The word terrorism is used to characterize a person or a set of beliefs or an organization as unworthy of respect and unworthy of humane treatment.
Yet in the US we fail to recognize our drone strikes as the same tactic as suicide bombings, while we create untold pain and suffering abroad.
Both of our major political parties strongly support the endless war and the endless killing and destruction of the political adversaries abroad who dare to try to control their own destinies and the destinies of their region.
Twitter clearly supports this too, and feels obligated to help eradicate the first amendment as much as possible in its own small way, even if it can't actually revoke the amendment.
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 would maybe challenge or tweak the state actors inclusion in potential perpetrators. The bombing of population centers like London, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, etc. during WWII feels like a separate category. Those should still be war crimes, however the fact that they were carried out during an active war by the military would seem to make them a little different than traditional terrorist attacks.
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.
> It is possible to recognize the ethical problems of the drone program while also saying it is on a higher moral ground than the random killing that terrorists employ.
Are those ethical parameters or economic parameters? If every regime that would possibly end up in conflict with the US is expected to develop the satellite technology, smart bomb tech, drone tech, etc., before engaging in battle, that's pretty much impossible for any non-first-world country.
So one must conclude either that any non-first-world country must instantly surrender out of an inability to fight at the same moral level as the US, or that the distinction is not actually a moral one.
In the US, we are told that is a highly important moral distinction... but this is simply because the public prefers to feel the satisfaction of operating from a moral high ground and so it's a great way to sell a population on the idea of sacrificing trillions of dollars (enough to pay for education, healthcare and a 3 day work week for all Americans for decades) so that our nation can do the morally righteous thing and kill (usually brown) people.
This idea isn't uniquely American. Humanity as a whole has decided that there are different levels of morality in warfare and killing. Those standards evolve over time. You example of the American revolutionaries and the extensive use of chemical warfare in WWI are examples of things ebb and flow. But at the heart of it I think most can agree that people have a right to fight for their own freedom, but they do not have the right to indiscriminately kill. That indiscriminate killing is what separates drone warfare from terrorism.
To be clear, North Korea has not threatened starting a nuclear war. They have threatened that if they are attacked, they will respond with nuclear weapons. This is essentially the same threat that all nuclear powers make.
> I think they have to be ethical standards. If they are economic standards then you open up the possibility that any method of war/killing is acceptable in dire economic circumstances.
Why should any method be acceptable? Why not have (for example) Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un put on boxing gloves and determine the fate of NK's nuclear program with a boxing match?
The US has been enacting sanctions on NK for decades which have caused significant suffering of NK's population. The pain and suffering caused by those sanctions, the starving children, etc., are viewed by the US to be the fault of NK's leaders simply because they do not obey US directives.
From the perspective of the US, the sanctions are a humane way of putting pressure on NK's regime that are nonviolent. Are the pangs of hunger felt by the children who are starving or malnourished due to those sanctions nonviolent?
In international conflict, all that matters is one nation's ability to force another nation's hand. Imagine if NK were able to do something to cause Americans to miss three meals per week until the US backed down from its extreme position on NK's regime. We laugh about this because it is so unlikely, but what is the difference?
The hawks will tell us with a straight face that KJU is mentally unstable. Note that all leaders that the US wishes to remove from power are labeled mentally unstable or insane and unpredictable. Our propagandists leverage the fear that many people feel for mental illness and label the enemy with it to make us more easily mistrust and hate the enemy.
By every rational account, KJU is playing a cool, long-term game and is using his power and resources effectively to stave off US bullying. While I would certainly prefer he not have nuclear weapons, there is no evidence that he is unstable or irrational. He simply hasn't gone for the carrots that have been halfheartedly offered, and multiple US presidents have failed to improve the situation.
Is KJU supposed to simply say "OK, Donald Trump, I will step down because I would never threaten to launch a nuclear weapon at a country that declares my regime illegitimate and threatens me with military operations in nearby waters"? It's pretty absurd to think he'd do that. His incentive at this point (based on what has been offered) is to make the US worry that any strikes or attempts to unseat his government could result in a nuke being launched at one of the population centers of the US or a US ally.
Note that KJU has not threatened nuclear war in isolation, it has simply threatened to respond if attacked.
> Those standards evolve over time.
What has occurred is that the US now has much more control over which wars it wishes to enter, and has a more difficult time persuading citizens to risk their lives fighting. So the sort of military that we have today is designed to allow wars to continue in spite of the lack of obvious threats. Since the threats are not obvious, it is not possible to convince the American people to carpet bomb a country that is not obviously at war with us, so a more surgical method must be used in order to get enlistees for optional wars.
The moral progress narrative is just that, a narrative. If we ended up in a fight with a true adversary we would throw it out the window and use all sorts of newly developed weapons (such as EMF weapons that peel the skin off of enemy soldiers, sound weapons that deafen the enemy and cause months of headaches, etc.).
War is about force and coercion, and war requires public support in a democracy. Those two things are (I believe) the fundamentals from which all of the rest of the scenarios (technology, morality, etc.) fall out.
How do you draw the line at what's OK and not OK? As the GP suggests, it seems to be drawn at whatever level of technology the most advanced group has.
Personally, I think terrorism is one of the most moral ways of fighting. By definition, it creates a high level of fear with a small number of casualties. That's far better than, say, trench warfare with a high level of casualties but isolated from the majority of the population.
It's hard to read the rest of your post with that opener.
You may believe that drones are used poorly, and you may believe they naturally result in higher civilian casualties, but there is absolutely nothing that implies that "by definition". Drones are simply another weapon that happens to have human operators located elsewhere.
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.
Now I finally know how my dog feels when he looks at me with his head tilted to one side, his eyes betraying his lack of understanding.
Let's address that point. First, that's a convenient definition that erases the distinction between State and non-State violence which is critical to many people's formulations of what is and isn't permissible.
E.g I wouldn't tolerate my neighbor trying to search my house, but I would step aside for a police officer with a warrant.
Secondly, drone warfare isn't conducted primarily to kill civilian targets. Sure, bystanders do die in the process but there's never been an account of a US drone strike that was motivated by the desire to instill fear in civilians by maximizing civilian causalities.
Terrorists seek to maximize damage. States don't, or at least subject to some constraint. Carpet bombing is terrible on its own merits, but it's not akin to using nuclear / biological weapons.
In today's world we are not fighting wars in the traditional sense of defending ourselves against aggression.
We absolutely are fighting aggression. The Pulse Nightclub? The Twin Towers? Jihadists routinely declare war on America and work towards killing Americans. We're not fighting state actors (with the exception of ISIS) hence the term "asymmetric warfare".
Meanwhile, the US has typically funded various militant groups that oppose the regime, and now those groups are no longer needed. Some decide to seek power in the newly existing power vacuum. They will be branded as terrorists arbitrarily to suit the needs of the US PR campaign.
They were terrorists when we supported them, now they're just terrorists that bother us. Al Queda was a terrorist group when it fought the Soviets, it just became a problem for America when America became the new enemy.
The word terrorism is used to characterize a person or a set of beliefs or an organization as unworthy of respect and unworthy of humane treatment.
You're correct. And it's an important part of mutual radicalization, look at how quickly the left adopted very right wing thoughts after charlotesville. People were calling for punishing the terrorist's family, starting watch lists, and the importance of preemptive self-defense against terrorists.
Yet in the US we fail to recognize our drone strikes as the same tactic as suicide bombings, while we create untold pain and suffering abroad.
They're not the same tactic. The U.S is duty-bound to protect its citizens and the U.S citizens exchange obedience for protection, drone strikes are a mechanism of protecting U.S citizens, the legitimacy of the State depends on the U.S defeating its enemies. Sure, there are less violent ways of accomplishing the goal but that's for the U.S citizens and U.S influencers to decide.
Both of our major political parties strongly support the endless war and the endless killing and destruction of the political adversaries abroad who dare to try to control their own destinies and the destinies of their region.
Hardly. The U.S goes out of its way to support self-rule so long as the people are committed to liberal democracies. Look at all the aid the US dishes out and all the favorable treatment it gives fellow democracies.
What the U.S can't tolerate (and must never tolerate) is the formation of States (like ISIS) that dream of genocide for Americans or American interests or the defeat of freedom and liberty.
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.
I don't think it's terrorism for a few reasons: 1. America took steps to minimize causalities [0] - America dropped pamphlets and warnings prior the attack (although the warnings were dire, they didn't explain exactly how terrible the bombs would be)
2. America didn't exclusively target civilians or the softest targets, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen for their industrial significance and proximity to airbases.
3. America made an attempt to avert the bombing - they told Japan that something terrible would happen if there wasn't unconditional surrender (Japan was okay with conditional surrender but America wasn't). That's probably near enough a threat but also these were warring States so it's different than a street dust-up.
4. America made the utilitarian decision to drop the bomb after considering the alternatives - the reality is that an invasion of Japan would have been more bloody for the Japanese and the Americans. Fun fact: the military commissioned 1 million purple heart medals as preparation for the invasion of Japan [1]
5. I'd say that terrorists have utopian ideologies and they use the goal to sanitize the means. America didn't have any delusions that they'd drop the bomb and then there'd be paradise, they knew it'd be much closer to hell on earth.
I don't think the bombing was defensible, and I'm so incredibly legalistic that I would have preferred that America used the bomb but that America would then have sentenced the aircrews and their commanders to death after a trial at nuremburg. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were crimes against humanity and if we use the nuremburg formulations, they're indefensible and call for capital punishment.
The bombs were critical and effective but indefensible and humanity should wipe the names of the bombers and their military chain of command from the history books (probably including Truman).
[0]: https://www.damninteresting.com/retired/ww2-america-warned-h...
[1]: https://www.stripes.com/blogs-archive/the-rumor-doctor/the-r...
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
sounds damage maximizing to me - provoking a heavy handed response sounds like an issue of damage multiplication. It's not as if all targets are equally valid to terrorists - no one ever suicide bombed a corn field in Nebraska. If the 9/11 hijackers were going for maximum damage, what should they have attacked?
Drone strikes and the policy of global assassination does not keep you safe, it just kills a lot of people
It keeps me more safe than doing nothing, and less safe than other more dramatic attacks - e.g glassing the countries that produce the most terrorists. I'm sure my local police could keep me more safe, but that doesn't discredit the safety they help create.
Re support for democracy, I'm not sure why you believe that given support for Pinochet, sisi, Mubarak, hussein, Saud etc
America supports non-democratically elected leaders in addition to democratically elected leaders. I don't have a list, but I think the only democratically elected government that the US doesn't support is Hamas.
Ironically, no argument could be more US-centric than arguing the concept of terrorism cannot exist outside of the US government's list of enemies du jour or the suggestion that 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.
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.
Twitter, on Twitter's platform. And yes, people are perfectly free to disagree with Twitter's characterisation of particular groups and comments.
I'm afraid we're going to have to agree to disagree on the notion that platforms which distribute more criticisms of US policy to more people on a daily basis than most revolutionary subversive movements manage in their entire history are going out of their way to be helpful to the US propaganda narrative, or indeed the implicit argument that promotion of ISIS can be judged to be a threat to humanity only in terms of US propaganda narratives.
This characterization of dissent is highly misleading. Dissent should be thought of as speech that the powerful interest actually wants to suppress.
In the US, our powerful interests love speech such as "Trump is a clown" or "Obama is not a US citizen" because they are nonsense issues that have nothing to do with policy, yet they animate voters effectively.
To the powerful interests, the ideal electorate is one that is deeply passionate about issues that pose no threat to the status quo. To use a more specific example, much campaign funding is raised by rallying groups to donate based on issues that are unlikely to result in policy change.
More seriously, this is obviously a textbook example of a cognitive bias: There is absolutely no possibility that the number of specific people being blocked for hate speech in the US you are likely to read about come anywhere close to these 300,000.