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> Hopefully Twitter actually defines a lot of these nebulous and highly-subjective terms going forward.

There is a certain "jurisprudence" to this sort of thing. All laws are written ambiguously; that doesn't mean it's impossible to enforce them or that the laws are useless. Human interaction shouldn't be codified into computer code and in most cases can't be.

Whatever Twitter decides those things are, someone will be upset about it, and someone will contest the definition. That's fine. We already have this kind of thing in HN and Reddit and anywhere else on the internet where any kind of moderation happens. We had it in Usenet and in web forums.

The whole idea that ambiguity in the laws means that we should have absolute "free speech" including the demonstrably toxic and hateful place that Twitter has become is bonkers. Sure, you'll alienate some people who don't like your definitions. But that's kind of the point. To foster the community you want to have.

To be clear, if this were written as a law, it wouldn't survive the first challenge in court.

Edit: By way of further clarification, I realize that private entities have no such burdens when writing policies, but I was responding to a comparison with jurisprudence. That's not just a matter of a board making a call, or a CEO, it's the process by which an entire judiciary, over time, interprets law.

This is really nothing like it, just a set of loosely worded edicts from people who don't actually have to issue them in the first place, except to pretend that they're doing something constructive.

And it doesn't need to be a law either, just like HN doesn't need to set up a court and a trial every time it bans a user. Rough, ambiguous guidelines are ok for most internet communities.

> if this were written as a law, it wouldn't survive the first challenge in court

I think you should see some examples of hate speech law, or things like the UK's maddeningly vague anti-terrorism laws.

It took decades of deprecating and degrading the entire judicial system in the US to get to this point, finally catalyzed by 9/11.

The US literally had "I know it when I see it" as an obscenity definition long before then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

And that standard was upheld by judges who were very clear that they were wearing blindfolds when it came to obscenity law. It is a huge step backwards - Rather, many many small ones by two irredeemable groups, both with good intentions and results that are comparable to serial killers - that we're even talking about "Hate Speech" as if it were a thing.

...and it didn’t survive the lengthy process of legal challenges and revision. See: Miller Test

To be fair, that was not in the Court's opinion — it was in a concurrence by Justice Stewart. People like to quote it, but it wasn't actually the law.

(A concurring opinion is written by one or more justices who joined in the Court's (majority) opinion but wish to write separately to make some separate points or explain where they diverge from the majority opinion.)

The problem is with situations like where our President tweets gifs promoting violence against people and news organizations, or attempts to instigate nuclear war via Tweet. Trump is obviously a gold mine for Twitter right now from both a growth and ad revenue standpoint (not even getting into the bot side of things), so they have a very vested interest in looking the other way.

There's also a lot of dangerous precedent that could be set if they were to block the POTUS.

So do we just say "no violent speech unless you've somehow managed to get elected"?

> There's also a lot of dangerous precedent that could be set if they were to block the POTUS.

What would that be? If anything I’d think that would be a good thing that no one would be above the rules.

It’s not like he doesn’t have other communication methods.

He could go and join Gab with all the other scum.

Would you support banning Obama for creating war with Assad, if he commented about it on Twitter?

I don't deal in hypotheticals. However I think there is a big distinction between tweeting about a war vs. actively trying to instigate one via Tweet.

Obama instigated war with Assad. If he was more active on Twitter he'd have done so via Twitter. It's not a huge stretch to imagine this.

I’ll be more direct - yes. I would absolutely support banning any person, regardless of station, from the platform for violating its rules. Trump would still be the president without Twitter, we’re not talking about impeachment here.

Would you be happy to exclude police, military and government from Twitter as a result of this? We license them to use force on our behalves.

I would absolutely support banning any person, regardless of station, from the platform for violating its rules.

And you're aware that includes all members of government, who are given a mandate for a monopoly on violence? Sorry this wasn't clear from your previous answer.

> The problem is with situations like where our President tweets gifs promoting violence against people and news organizations, or attempts to instigate nuclear war via Tweet.

That is spectacular. Our current culture war is THE reason why the Left is losing.

There seems to be an assumption here and elsewhere, that Twitter or any such company actually has the answers to these questions. I really doubt that they do, and they announce these measures periodically for PR, to crack down on something, or just to reiterate what's always been true: they own their platform and everything on it.

These highly centralized, privatized means of communication have gone from amusing, to sickening.

Glorifying violence would also cover huge amounts of video media.

I'm all for this, but I seriously doubt we'll see Twitter stand up to movie/television studios.

I think the big question here is our President's tweets…

And the mass of replies that each of his tweets garners, most of which I would personally consider to be unilaterally "hateful", especially the ones that seem to always float to the top...

They aren't affected by Twitter's existing rules, and presumably won't be by any new rules, unless they are changing not only the written rules but the unwritten rules controlling whether or not they apply the written rules.

What do you mean by that? Your president's idiotic tweets make Twitter millions, this is the only reason many people hear about Twitter...

There's not much evidence that Trump is making Twitter money. People are not joining Twitter to interact with Trump, or even to read his tweets.

It's why Twitter has allowed Trump's account to get away with clear rule violations.

My understanding is that the military and police, as representatives of an elected government, are legally allowed violence and should also be allowed to exist on Twitter.

They have already responded to this, the rules are applied with some leeway to account for "newsworthiness". The president's tweets will not be taken down and his account won't be banned because of a blind application of the rules.

If Twitter starts censoring mainstream political speech by even the POTUS, I think that'd draw more attention than they want.

Right now and in the future they can censor people that few people care about and probably have a much bigger impact without any outrage outside of niche communities.

Where did they say they were censoring political speech?

It’s perfectly possible to speak about politics without personal attacks or threats.

I live in the UK, we do not have a President here.

Waiting for the rap music ban in addition to majority of video games.

* Every action movie or TV show.

* All form of weapons enthusiasm.

* Pretty much all anime and 'adult' cartoons.

* A lot of tweets praising the military.

* "Punch a Nazi"

B-b-but it's okay to punch them because they are bad

or the US military, with their claims to suspend groups that use violence to advance their cause.

In fact any military, violence being their sole purpose for existing.

Many of these things don't have exact definition in actual laws, either. I assume that a more detailed description will be made available as those policies are put into effect. Law systems generally rely on individuals designated to exercise judgment on a case-by-case basis, and, I assume, this will be the case here, too.

And even with actual law, people who may be satisfied with a particular law, may be very dissatisfied with a particular judge's interpretation and subsequent ruling, but that's how jurisdiction works.

> "What constitutes ______?"

"We'll know it when we see it"

What would be better? Putting down a concrete list of terms that can't be in a name? So, what happens when the hate groups come up with new dogwhistle terms to get around that? We now have to amend the list to add those? And then what happens to those who created their account with that name before it was against the rules?

I nominate the term 'criddler' for the list.

Perhaps instead of a censorship arms race, we could stop trying to police speech & thought?

Is it better to push extremists and other weirdos to the echo-chamber fringe, to forums where they only ever encounter those that agree with them, or is it better to allow them into the public forum, where they will clearly find a huge number of people who disagree and argue with them, to show that their views are not so widely agreed with as they might come to dangerously believe in an echo chamber?

The above is assuming we only ever censor those who "should be censored"; imagine if social media were around during the civil rights movement and apartheid, whom would we then have censored, if you care to guess?

I know there are nuances here I haven't covered, but you can see that there is more to this than is seen at first glance.

We need some kind of un-governed mode of digital communication, as with real speech. No group can realistically stop you from shouting what you want to shout in public when you want to shout it, though you can obviously become a pariah or a prisoner shortly after. The same should be true online, free to face the consequences of your own speech, rather than not to speak at all.

But again, in the absolutism of free speech, you're ignoring things like violent threats and racial slurs. And when you do that, you end up with something like 4Chan. Most people don't go there, for good reason.

And what consequence does someone who makes a lot of sock puppet accounts to send oven memes to Jewish people face? Pretty much none. Yet, those people are still faced with that constantly, and as a result, they choose not to engage. Now you've silenced their right to speech.

Seems like the problem is the system is letting any idiot communicate with you. 0 cost for an idiot to say something to you, via @reply etc.

Create tiers of accounts, a verified account can @reply 100 times a day to people who aren't following them, an anonymous account: 0.

TBH, on Twitter (like on Facebook) you ultimately see posts from people you choose to follow. If you follow idiots, don't be surprised to see idiotic things. If you follow hateful people, don't be surprised to see hateful things.

It turns out, though, that lots of people you’d want to follow for interesting content also take a break from interesting, insightful, or funny tweets to have vitriolic rants.

Perhaps then the rules should enforce some sort of "theme" policy. I.e. if you're a gaming account, it has to stick to gaming content, etc. If it's political commentary, sure, and so forth. It might be difficult, but probably more do-able than the nebulous "abuse" rules that they currently have.

Really, it's what I hoped FB would turn into. I.e. you had "themed" pages, and follow them for posts regarding that theme. However, it seems that what happens is if a page and it's admins start getting any non-negligible amount of followers, they decide that it's their "right" to use it as a platform for opinions on unrelated matters. It's quite frustrating.

True. It's almost as if you had to accept people as a whole, not only the parts of their personality you like.

/s

Yup. So awful. :)

That was the case until the @reply. Plus you probably don't want your followers to see idiots responding to your posts, unless they're following those idiots

You have that. Go start a blog.

It turns out that some ideas are toxic, as in, people get sucked into them, are too stubborn/whatever to admit they were wrong, and become rabid believers of nonsense.

Witness the adherents to the flat earth society or those that stringently don't believe we landed on the moon, never the Googler's sexist manifesto. Anti-semitic screeds like "the Jews run the banks and this is why you're poor!" frequently leak into open comment sections of your local news' website, or YouTube comments.

They're called echo chambers for a reason - semi-public forums become echo chambers because people won't seek out forums where people stringently disagree with them, they'll find supportive or semi-supportive forums, but in some cases those forums are stormfront or 4chan (where copying and pasting n-gger a million times passes for insightful). See also: HN's poor response to the Googler's firing. Vice.com had an infographic on Twitter about this, courtesy of MIT's media lab - https://news2-images.vice.com//uploads/2016/12/TwitterData1-.... Or multiple reports that certain groups of people have Fox News as their exclusive news outlet.

Even without social media, we see the same patterns in the past as we do today. Fun fact: Rosa Parks not the first person to stay seated at the front of the bus, but she had the unimpeachable character to deflect ad hominem attacks. It took a pre-organized movement just waiting for someone like Rosa Parks to refuse to move in order to catalyze change; homeless people, prostitutes, and drug addicts arrested for sitting at the front of the bus need not apply. We see this today, with Colin Kaepernick protesting "wrong" and that we could support Occupy Wallstreet/Black Lives Matter/Antifa if only they weren't protesting wrong.

When Twitter pretends to be powerless to do anything about death/rape threats to women journalists, the light of civilization is dimmed, ever so slightly. When entire classes of people disengage from mainstream discourse because they are being threatened by bodily harm, maybe it is possible that it is disingenuous to pre-conclude that anything possibly resembling censorship will result in a dystopian police state where African Americans are still denied the right to vote.

You’re right, your objections are entirely hypothetical.