Twitter employee deactivates Trump account
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Particularly worrisome is the general left leaning political and social affiliation of such employees. We are an era of systemic censorship of right leaning speech by popular internet platforms.
I'm personally center left, but in no way do I condone the actions of the new breed of leftists, from SJWs claiming "free speech as torture" to wanting "safe spaces" everywhere
Why was the employee allowed access after being fired /leaving is the question.
At some companies, turning in your two weeks notice gets you escorted off the premises immediately, with your personal items following you in a box.
Really, the moment you start to take advertising, you're responsible for content. Professional advertisers have specific rules about content they can associate with. I've worked with them and they're strict about that, for example, they can't show a beautiful fashion spread next to a bloody image in a magazine. That's just basic advertising and branding.
And once you have editorial discretion, you can do whatever you want with content, and no one can complain. Your policy can be made simpler. "Don't piss off Bob" can be a perfectly valid editorial policy, instead of whatever complication Facebook has to go through in determining policy.
I also think this would encourage the creation of more competing social media outlets, which is probably why the dominant ones like to think of themselves as utilities.
edit: yep, seems it does.
Like gab.ai? Not allowed on iPhones.
Perhaps Twitter could be considered a media company with editorial discretion, but Apple?
Either treat these giant SV companies as utilities, or break them up.
These are unnecessary products.
Please don't make smartphones necessary products in everyday life.
In that regard there is no global consensus. And arguments for and against can be quite compelling.
We know that attempting to suppress ideas can have unintended consequences.
Of course who should have the power to identify hate speech and censor content and what the definition of hate speech is, that's debatable. However a platform like Twitter is also private property, another right protected by the constitution and people don't necessarily have free speech rights on somebody else's property.
As for the compelling arguments about letting Nazis speak in order to identify them:
1. read some German newspapers just before 1933 – the same arguments against censorship have been used then as well, nothing new
2. if you want to see actual antisemitism, some literal Nazis, go to https://gab.ai — nothing on Twitter is as bad as what goes on in there and the moderates that are against censoring such opinions usually don't realize how bad they can get or their reach
Again, I'm very much pro free speech. But free speech is not my religion and it needs to be balanced against the other rights that we have as well, like property rights, or the right to feel safe and to be treated fairly and respectfully.
For good reading on the subject, try this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...
It was emotionally difficult for me to get past that first sentence. I otherwise agree the US Constitution, in theory is, potential, exceptionally powerful.
The moment you start restricting it you don't have any. I'm from France and there is no freedom of speech here.
If you think laws made to fight against "hate speech" will stay in their current form you forget about what happened with special anti-terrorist laws. They always get applied to more and more things. What is accepted speech today can be hate speech tomorrow. Remember: the power we let good government get will also be available to shitty government later.
I see this all the time on HN, mostly Europeans. This is false. US freedom of speech is universal, including Nazi or hate. There is no such clause that prohibits hate speech. That's Europe's thing.
There's all kinds of genocide being promoted on Twitter, and the so-called Nazis are literally the only ones being censored. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander says I. Either Twitter - a for profit entity - is a common carrier or they impose editorial standards, they can't be allowed to get away with playing both sides as it suits them. And by "suits them" I mean, sells the most ads.
The group of people that get accused of being Nazis can span all the way up into the hundreds of millions (Ex: Many people call Trump a fascist, and therefore his X million supports would be fascist under these accusations)
The brush that people are painting about who is a Nazi is very broad, these days.
Do you have a source for that?
Luckily self-identification isn't the most reliable way to categorize things. A robin doesn't have to say "I am a robin" in order for you to say "Oh, look, a robin." It's not like suddenly thousands of years of development of classification systems doesn't exist anymore. The group of people who, whether they proclaim it or not, express white-supremacist, nationalist, and vitriolic views is unfortunately not that very small.
Bottomline is that you do not get to judge who is what based on some self-made criteria, just like the legal system enforces a presumption of innocence even in a case of "he was standing over the dead body with bloody hands".
Do you have a source for that?
I can't help but wonder why you immediately jump to what they look like rather than by what they say and do in publicly viewable spaces. How much might we wager that, if you actually have a source to show for your fact, what you're talking about has less than 1/10000th the occurrence rate of what the rest of us are talking about?
Remember that Twitter was OK with ISIS using it, right up until it started to affect ad revenues, then they made only a half hearted attempt to stop them. Their actual ideology is only, make money.
* Current news! They just caught him on the run in Spain a few days ago.
So you'll excuse me if I don't take every accusation of nazism 100% seriously.
If so to whom and how to you identify those people?
Nazism is based on belief that some ethnicities are to be blamed for all evil in the world (defamation), and proposes to deal with that by one ethnicity exterminating or enslaving the others (instigation of violence).
Does it really surprise you it's forbidden in many countries, and many websites doesn't want to have it promoted on their property?
And additionally - twitter is a private website. It's not censorship, when a newspaper chooses who can write articles for them. Make your own newspaper if you disagree.
For good reason! But I don't get why you criticize the fact that there are
> nazis promoting themselves on twitter
What I'm trying to say here is that you should criticize if they do something bad (violence, threat of violence, ...) but not when they promote themselves (which is totally legal).
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
Customer support agents need to take actions against people's accounts. This is literally their job description. This is true at every company.
> you might not have any recourse.
Free service.
> We are an era of systemic censorship of right leaning speech by popular internet platforms.
lol
I filed an official complaint, and Twitter's response was this is not harassment, we won't do anything. I am pretty sure because of my political views the Twitter support representative decided they didn't like me. The hypocrisy, bias, and subjective filtering is rampant in silicon valley. It also unfortunately is a thing here on HN as well. To this day I still get downvoted not for the content of my comments, but because solely people "recognize" me.
(I think there was at least one startup CEO who declared that if he found out that anyone at his company had voted for Trump, that he would fire him/her)
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/23/opinion/trump...
This means there is little left to debate.
We all have two piles: a. Things we want the government to do b. Things we don't
If you're for a balanced budget, you'll oppose current tax cut plans and demand government cut spending. The problem is of course where do we cut spending? Find me a dollar of "waste" and I'll show you someone who benefits from it. Can we please stop pretending?
I expect others who've also worked on Government projects would find that as preposterous as I do.
He’s objectively a problematic person as a leader but since there is no other conservative around now conservatives feel the need to clinch to him more than is healthy.
Regarding the latter, here's Grubhub's CEO calling for Trump voters to resign: The CEO of Grubhub, an online food delivery service, sent a company wide email Wednesday suggesting employees who agree with President-elect Donald Trump’s behaviors and his campaign rhetoric should resign.[1].
I remember reading articles from reputable media outlets for both issues, but I personally do not know peers who feel this way (which makes sense because well, if the news were true, many of them are in hiding). Hence the genuine inquiry towards an actual person -- a HNer -- who would have first hand experience with such attitudes. It's honestly a very rare chance to be able to ask someone this; I frankly only know one GOP voter within the several hundred tech people I am acquainted with.
I sincerely must ask in return whether you are trolling me, since you seem to be unaware of the fact that these issues have been widely reported on in the past.
[1] regrettably the link is fox news: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/11/10/boss-tells-pro-trump-em...
Whether or not it is "moral" to fire people for being a Republican is a separate issue, that you can decide for yourself on.
We are merely stating that these fears are legitimate fears.
That's conveniently completely unprovable. That said, there should be (some) recourse when you feel like you've been treated unfairly. A second opinion or escalation.
On the flip side: Twitter is a company. It might be comprised of people that share a certain opinion and this will show in how they behave. That's how it works with any product or service. There's a gap between what is "morally good" and what you're actually entitled to in terms of treatment by someone else.
Not to invoke Godwin, but Hitler’s opinions on mundane things will always be filtered through the lens of what he did and said otherwise. It is the same for all people.
If you don’t want to damage your reputation, either publish your unpopular opinions anonymously, keep them to yourself, or figure out why your views result in others wanting to threaten you and evolve them into something more palatable to the society in which you live.
Do you really believe that only Republicans would be targeted?
If this stuff becomes normalized the Left needs to understand that there are a whole lot of powerful conservatives in the world, and that left leaning people will be hurt just as much as right leaning people.
Attacks on open discourse, and freedom of thought hurt EVERYONE. And you should be careful what you wish for.
Both “right-leaning” and “left-leaning” people in the United States pretty clearly quality as violence-supporting fuckheads, so I am fine with this being applied universally.
I am surprised that Twitter didn't react more strongly especially given your claim that you received death threats on the platform. Maybe there is something missing here too?
They don't care. Many people get death threats on Twitter a day with no action from the Safety Team (see the replies to their "We're humans too and doing the best we can!" from last month.)
Given Twitter's utter inability to deal with harassment at all, I'd suggest it wasn't anything to do with your political views at all. They're just that shit.
Out of curiosity, how do you know that?
Personally I think the audience on HN is pretty diverse and the response depends a lot on context (TFA), so assuming that you're not writing dumb things, an expressed opinion might not be as popular as you think depending on the audience inclined to read the comments of a particular article. For example I criticize Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and others equally and noticed that for the same negative opinion about them I got vastly different responses, depending on article and timing.
Also, don't get me wrong, but noticed your Twitter profile in your description — and an account with only 286 followers isn't so popular as to be recognizable across the web.
I'm not disputing that you've been harassed on Twitter, I also have friends that have been harassed and Twitter did nothing about it. Just saying, in regards to thinking that your opinions are rejected due to whom you are, just make sure you're not paranoid.
Of course the standard left/right dichotomy is a historical accident and contingent on many local factors. And yet we continue to reify it as if it were some Platonic truth.
This attempted act of censorship by an ex-Twitter employee is a fairly tame example of their tactics, though notable for affecting the President.
(For the downvoters, prove me wrong, how many votes did a far left party get in US elections in the past 20 years? Does the US even have a far left party? :) )
Lea DeLaria: "Or pick up a baseball bat and take out every f-cking republican and independent I see"
Madonna: "I’ve thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House."
Mickey Rourke: "I’ll meet [Trump] in a hotel room any motherf-cking day of the week and give him a Louisville slugger."
Bow Wow: "@realDonaldTrump shut your punk a-- up talking s--t about my uncle @SnoopDogg before we pimp your wife and make her work for us."
Eminem: "And fuck Ann Coulter with a Klan poster. With a lamp post, door handle, shutter. A damn bolt cutter, a sandal, a can opener, a candle, rubber. Piano, a flannel, sucker, some hand soap, butter. A banjo and manhole cover"
Then there's Kathy Griffin's famous photo with a severed "Trump" head, Snoop Dog's video shooting Trump ...
And that's just Hollywood. There's no room here to discuss all the incidents of actual violence, or protesters denying people the right to hear speakers at public universities, etc, etc.
7 celebrities talking shit does not equate a massive, unified, violent left-wing movement in the US with conspiracy-like powers and tactics to censor the right. I think the right is pretty well represented in the US.
Measure the support for the movement by the number of people who celebrated those remarks. A lot of people.
EDIT: Twitter literally suppressed the leaks of DNC and Podesta emails hashtags and admitted to it:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-01/twitter-admits-it-b...
https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/4766f54d-...
Is that conspiracy enough for you?
How about this:
On October 31, 2016, The New York Times reported: "CNN has severed ties with the Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, after hacked e-mails from WikiLeaks showed that she shared questions for CNN-sponsored candidate events in advance with friends on Hillary Clinton's campaign."
And that's just off the top of my head.
EDIT 2: Can you explain how all these very similar headlines were possible without there being a conspiracy? And yes, those are real, I saw it when it happened.
https://pics.onsizzle.com/headlines-think-the-media-got-the-...
https://www.thewrap.com/mickey-rourke-calls-donald-trump-big...
A literal socialist reaching 43.1% of votes not influential enough?
Someone, therefore, from the moderate left getting a sizable minority of votes within the left-most party of a two-party system where the most votes in that party went to a center-right neoliberal is not evidence of the far left having much (or any) influence, especially when it's the best anyone not from the center-right has done in that party for at least a quarter century.
There's circumstantial evidence he was even a Stalinist at one point: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sanders+stalinist+kibbutz
You do realize how closely your argument resembles a "No True Scotsman" in this case, yes?
Person A: "No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."
Person B: "But my uncle Angus likes sugar with his porridge."
Person A: "Ah yes, but no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."
EDIT: Here he is, calling himself a socialist without any qualifiers in 1989: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_QLek6Qvzg
1. People can change.
2. People might moderate their actions when faced with reality (heck, even Trump does/is forced to).
From what I remember back when he was campaigning, most things he was proposing would definitely fall under socialist-democrat in Europe.
And then a decade in the future (might even be more than that, US is resilient) it would have blown up in everyone's faces, just as it did in Venezuela.
The general public has a short attention span, it seldom thinks of what would happen 10-15 years down the road.
The problem is that they aren't the same definitions, and the game being played of pretending that they are is the fallacy of equivocation.
"These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who's the banana republic now?"
Would you describe Venezuelan regime as center-left social democrat?
Who's the banana republic now? Indeed, the irony would be amusing if only this failure did not leave millions and millions of people with no money, no food and no hope.
Can you fit all his voters there?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_sanders
His wiki mentions "socialist" 35 times. Is that not leftist enough for you?
There's circumstantial evidence that he was even a Stalinist at one point: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sanders+stalinist+kibbutz
It's disheartening how deeply the "us vs. them" mindset dominates our politics. You used the term "they" or "them" seven times in your short post. Seven. Who are they? A few trolls on twitter does not equal a meaningful movement. Categorizing half of the American populace based on the views/actions of fringe nutjobs is absurd and not conducive to meaningful discourse.
Having a slang term for "them" (SJW) implies that it's a such a common issue that people face daily, when in reality it's a strawman argument largely fabricated by organizations interested in keeping you squabbling vs examining their policies.
You go on to say "attempted act of censorship by an ex-Twitter employee is a fairly tame example of their tactics" "Their Tactics" as if this incident was part of a master plan orchestrated by a shadowy far-left extremist org. This is pizza-gate levels of delusion.
1) Lena Dunham has called for the extinction of white men. 2) The President of the United States then sent his teen daughter to do an internship with this "fringe nutjob".
Sorry, this crazy, hateful bigot is not "fringe", she's squarely in the mainstream of the modern Democratic Party. They need to fix that if they're planning to ever win a national election again.
Had to Google that. Is there more than the 30 second animation? Because as a straight white male, I didn't feel particularly victimised by it.
If she had done that to any other identifiable group, she would have been hounded from the public sphere.
Instead, she gets rewarded with some personal time with the President's daughter. Do you think Trump, or Bush II, or Bush I, or Reagan, or Nixon... would have sent their child off to intern with someone who called for the extinction of, say, black people? Nope.
And no, that's not the bottom of her lunacy, not by many, many levels.
No.
Sorry, downvoter, but they were. You can, as they say, look it up.
I cannot think of anything more antithetical to the modern "SJW"/"privilege theory"/"identity politics" point of view.
Hopefully I don't get dang'd by observing how common a meme this is.
Companies, public and private, have the legal right to take on whatever political position they have, and beyond having the power to control dialogue, there is no way they can abdicate exercising that power; it's unavoidably emergent from their technology that someone's tweet has to show up top when you log in. This extends to anyone that writes code connecting a query to some media content.
Since asking for Government intervention in this realm is highly illiberal, the exercise of this power is a matter of corporate social responsibility. And how the CSR shakes out around the use of a platform to encourage hate and violence of any stripe is a point of contention.
In twitter's case, one way to do this would be to give users more power over what shows up in their feed, and who they interact with.
Perhaps they could allow users to compile their own community block lists. IE, a group of volunteer moderators would compile their own block lists together, and then if you want to subscribe to the "Trump Trolls block list" then you can feel free to do so.
And the people who DON'T like your block list, can feel free to NOT subscribe to it, or subscribe to their own "liberal trolls block list".
That way everyone wins. The trolls can troll, but you don't have to listen to see them if you don't want to.
They said "center left." That, by definition, means they're not going to be in lockstep.
So you're taking someone that effectively said: "I generally agree with Foo but some of their actions are not to my taste" and responded by finding them guilty of association with the enemy.
--
For the sake of argument, I'm ignoring the fact that the "reactionary" label is thrown around to mean a "contrarian" to the left's memes rather than a bonda fide political "reactionary" (which means something more specific than "contrarian" + "right wing").
From Wiki: "A reactionary is a person who holds political views that favor a return to the status quo ante, the previous political state of society"
Seems dead-on to me.
Also, the employees at company X make +$100K per year, they're totally owning the game of capitalism and therefore life in general - They're damn safe and if they don't feel safe then they should see a shrink.
For context, I used to work for Google's Search Quality Evaluation team, which was in charge of removing spam from search results. No junior user could remove anything without several other people approving it, and senior colleagues were extremely diligent and meticulous. It would have been unthinkable for anybody to remove a website for personal reasons (as in this case), as seems to be the case here.
People actually care about this. Holy cow.
Twitter is a private business and its content is controlled by the company itself. If Twitter comes to the point when they would delete Trump's account, that would be the equivalent of kicking him out of your house. It is your house, your rules.
Right wingers tend to conveniently bend the borderline between public and private whenever it benefits them.
Spot on. The first amendment prohibits government from limiting speech. It does not require private parties to allow arbitrary speech, let alone to broadcast it. One could argue that social media should be regulated as public utilities, subject to rules (but still not first amendment) about what speech must or must not be allowed. I happen to disagree, but even if I agreed it hasn't happened yet and even if it happened it would still be commerce clause rather than first amendment.
> Right wingers tend to conveniently bend the borderline between public and private whenever it benefits them.
So much this. Conservatives and libertarians constantly complain about environmental or financial regulation, but when it comes to "too big to fail" bailouts or stealing taxpayer money to provide free infrastructure (of all kinds) for big business they're mostly silent. Sure, there are always a few who speak up, but "not all libertarians" in economics is a lot like "not all men" in gender relations. It's an excuse, a mere fig leaf of concern that doesn't really conceal a generally neo-feudalist agenda.
P.S. I see some of the snowflakes are taking advantage of the "censorship" options here on HN to downvote, thus essentially proving my point.
[1] https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/926278000152154112
[2] https://twitter.com/winterjessica/status/926270231605055488
So, uhh, might want to be careful there, buddy.
The YouTube recommendation engine is a far bigger culprit. It doesn't take many clicks to go from fairly innocuous, but kid-popular stuff like H3H3 or PewDiePie to one anti-sjw or cultural war video and then the recommendation engine will hand hold them right down the right wing extremism tunnel (or continually show up until they do)
I've seen more #KillAllWhites posts than I've seen Neo Nazis
"Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express “the thought that we hate.”"
-Justice Samuel Alito, 2017
The debate on this topic has unfolded over hundreds, even thousands of years of Western political thought. The philosophy enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is that in fact we should let this speech go on because the alternative of suppressing it is worse for all of us in the long run. There are people of great intelligence and distinction within American society who still feel that this is true.
(It bears mentioning that while Twitter is a private entity and not bound by the same rules as a federal entity, the mass movement of speech from public to private platforms is one of the biggest issues under consideration.)