Enforcing New Rules to Reduce Hateful Conduct and Abusive Behavior
blog.twitter.com
blog.twitter.com
> Accounts that affiliate with organizations that use or promote violence against civilians
> Content that glorifies violence or the perpetrators of a violent act.
* "Support our troops"
* "Punch a Nazi"
* Basically any enthusiastic history account.
* Mall ninjas.
* Any action movie/tv property.
* Star Wars.
* UFC
It seems almost puritan to try and deny humanity's love of violence.
> If an account’s profile information includes a violent threat or multiple slurs, epithets, racist or sexist tropes, incites fear, or reduces someone to less than human, it will be permanently suspended.
* A little confused about the 'multiple' requirement. So long as you only hate one thing your good?
* Racist or sexist tropes is a bit hard to pin down. /r/bpt is full of examples of 'racist' tropes that are self-deprecating. I'm not the best at words but they probably want an exception for "laughing with you, not at you."
> intimidates, or uses fear to silence another person’s voice
I can't wait for this to not be applied against people who use public shaming as a silencing tactic.
Also, there's a bit on irony that in that policy is itself a silencing tactic. This is going to cause people afraid of being banned to self-censor because a statement is politically unpopular.
So, every US federal agency's, and every local police force's twitter accounts will be shut down?
> This policy does not apply to military or government entities and we will consider exceptions for groups that are currently engaging in (or have engaged in) peaceful resolution.
The Glorification of Violence policy says that acts of war, military attacks, state sanctioned executions, and natural disasters are not covered ... UNLESS ... "protected categories have been the primary targets or victims."
The funny thing is that I can't find their definition of "protected category" anywhere, which takes the Orwellian irony of the whole thing to the next level.
If I'm a member of a visibly protected minority group (Black Muslim) and I tweet "Death to Zionist Sodomites occupying Holy Jerusalem" would I be suspended? Asking for a friend.
You can view Twitter's safety partners here to learn which groups have advisory over what counts as 'hate speech' : https://about.twitter.com/en_us/safety/safety-partners.html
It does not (as stated) apply to the “Content that glorifies violence or the perpetrators of a violent act.”
Nor does it apply to the preexisting hateful conduct policy, “You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease. ”
Of course, they have been inconsistent in enforcing the existing policy and given certain high-profile Twitter users a pass on it without an explicit exception, so one would expect that to continue with the new policies even where no explicit exception applies.
Nobody has ever held Trump accountable for anything. Hilariously, Twitter holds a lot of power over Trump due to controlling his popular account. They could hold him accountable. They choose not to. Insane.
Trump is the elected president of USA, one of the most important country on Earth. The fact that you suggest a private company should police his speak is insane to me.
Still, a private company can do whatever it wants.
Fact is, regardless, Twitter will never censor Trump or it’ll be the end of Twitter.
But still, it’s a private company that’s not FCC regulated (yet).
If we have a constitutional right to free speech, and the majority of Americans use a certain website for speech, why shouldn't their constitutional rights extend onto that site?
Because their involvement with Twitter is at will, because Twitter is a private institution, and because privacy is scared to our freedom. But mostly perhaps because twitter has not yet been designated a common carrier by the government, which many people are suggesting. I don’t really see twitter as a good fit for that, but then again, I’m not a legal scholar or lawmaker.
What Twitter can do is decide they don't want Trump to be an active member of their community. That is not just within their legal rights; it's well within their moral rights too.
What about the account of Barack Obama, who supported extra-judicial drone killings of US citizens?
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/14/13577464/...
The President is a person, not a god. If they want to use a private platform to speak, then they have to accept that platform's rules, just like anyone else. If they don't like that platform's policy, then they can use any other platform in the world.
A private company cannot and should not police the President’s speech.
However, it can and should (insofar as it does for other users) police the President’s use of that company’s platform for speech.
The alternative is systematically favoring the government against opponents in a way which makes Twitter a de facto government propaganda arm.
The fact Twitter (and a lot of other companies running community/social media sites nowadays) don't seem to have the guts to do this shows how bad they are at enforcing their own 'guidelines'.
But yeah, if Trump joined a service I was in charge of and broke the rules, he'd get punished like any other user would for doing the same thing.
Fun aside, as being forced to house soldiers on your property is enumerated as forbidden, and that the president is the commander in chief, does that mean Twitter could kick him out based on that?
If you want to take it literally, USA is not Trump's property.
He is bringing them traffic and giving them more legitimacy than they have ever had before.
If they banned him he would just switch to another social network and spend the next year telling his supporters to boycott them and then find some creative ways to shaft them through the regulatory state.
Look at the situation with CNN and the ATT/Time Warner merger. Twitter is a very small fish compared to them.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/10/twitter-bans-bl...
I believe that particular decision was probably somewhat about disagreeing with her politics, but moreso about stopping outright lies ("fake news") from propagating on their platform when they could stop it.
Scandalous? Yes. Libelous? The NY Times described the practice:
> Companies that obtain [fetal] tissue from clinics and sell it to laboratories exist in a gray zone, legally. Federal law says they cannot profit from the tissue itself, but the law does not specify how much they can charge for processing and shipping.
> ...
> Many [labs] buy the tissue from companies that act as middlemen. Those companies pay small fees, usually $100 or less a specimen, to abortion providers like Planned Parenthood, who say they charge only what they need to cover their expenses. The companies then process the tissue and sell it to researchers for higher prices that reflect the processing.
> The fees, which can run to thousands of dollars for a tiny vial of cells, do not break the law, according to Arthur Caplan, the director of the division of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center.
> “It appears to be legal, no matter how much you charge,” Dr. Caplan said, adding that there appears to be little or no oversight of the processing fees. “It’s a very gray and musty area as to what you can charge.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/28/health/fetal-tissue-from-...
I thought that was Hip-Hop
You're being downvoted because people think you're pro-antifa, which is sort of sad. I had to undown your post because it was too difficult to parse initially. Thankfully, your other posts in this topic showed that my parsing was incorrect.
I'm not sure what a protected group is, whether there's a list somewhere, of it's all relative (who holds more 'power' is less protected)?
Notable organizations in the list that I noticed:
Anti-Defamation League - The group that decided pepe the frog was a hate symbol
Muslim Advocates, World Jewish Congress - This group doesn't irritate me so much, except there are no advocacy groups for Christians.
National Network to End Domestic Violence - Specifies that they focus on ending female domestic violence only.
Feminist Frequency - Given how few people identify as feminists, I'm surprised this one is here.
There are probably more sketchy ones that I don't know.
I'd love to hear them. Would probably make a great blog post in itself
And what are the alternative services that these people should use? Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. simply don't have any alternatives that are widely used or credible.
Indeed, I think a lot of people miss that the nature of public property and governments not being able to censor free speech did basically guarantee people an audience in the olden days. Did you have a message you wanted people to hear? Protest in a heavily trafficked area (like a town centre), and you had an audience of thousands or even millions, regardless of whether they wanted to hear what you had to say or not.
Imagine how much less useful political movements would be if corporations owned everything in the real world and the people protesting had to do so in their own homes/some private property away from the public. That's the situation these social media sites have set up.
But hey, I guess it's not a new thing, nor an issue exclusive to the internet. In some places, a shopping mall or other corporate property might be the 'heart of the local community', and like with Twitter and Facebook, they could ban those they don't like and de facto censor their speech too.
Find a good GNU Social site, and bask in the freedom. it feels like Twitter when it first started.
If you don't like the rules of the red team (Mastodon) you can check out the blue team (GNU Social) or start your own team (or join the Japanese team)
What the previous poster was likely referring to is the 5-10¹ instances that are banned by most other instances with the reason "allows controversial content" or "Free speech zone"².
¹: the number banned varies from instance to instance, but it tends to be the same ones.
²: this one was used by an "anarchist" instance that appears to have more rules than most other instances.
Shared lists:
https://github.com/tootcafe/blocked-instances
https://github.com/MastodonBlocklist/blocklist
https://github.com/ticki/mastodon-blacklist
and others
Let the endless game of whack-a-mole over what is or isn't a dogwhistle commence, I guess.
In both cases though, it's a huge problem that there aren't alternatives that do off truly uncensored speech. At the very least, there needs to be a force that checks these organizations when they step over the line.
It's essentially an example of a benevolent dictator model.
Right now the people moderating are doing a great and largely unbiased job, but if you try to scale, you'll bring in new people, and gradually the quality of those moderators will vary with the larger group.
Reddit's sub-reddit moderator system is just one example of how to scale moderation to millions of users. If a moderator gets out of hand, reddit admins step in or users move to a new subreddit.
There are a virtually unlimited number of systems like this one could create and make work.
Hacker News scaled from hundreds of users to hundreds of thousands of users and is still very high quality. Worse in some ways and better in others. Reddit scaled to tens of millions.
Just because Twitter is run by people that can't scale it doesn't mean it's not possible to scale it.
Why? Consumers are not paying twitter for a product or service and use of twitter is not a necessity.
This is arguable. Our country is changing massively, and because of the network effect[1], social media platforms condense to only a few winners, currently mostly Facebook and Twitter I believe. This oligopoly[2] means that a handful of sites basically run what is considered the internet for most people.
In America, we have a constitutional right to free speech. If in our country, most people speak solely on one of these sites, then why shouldn't our constitutional rights extend onto them?
> that a handful of sites basically run what is considered the internet for most people.
That is the result of individual choices made by those people. That's like lamenting that a handful of musicians basically produce what is considered music for most people... So what?
Does this apply to videos of NFL tackles? Videos of NFL tackles glorify violence and glorify the tackler (the perpetrator of a violent act).
A Twitter feed showing _only_ illegal violent NFL tackles? Well, that might just get banned now.
> "it's not violence if it's consensual" point is ridiculous and wrong.
Exactly - provided that it's done outside the boundaries of some sport. But I think an actual lawyer would need to say what that means: could you and I, for example, create a new sport called "Modern Dueling" and construct a set of rules for it which permits us to fight to the death in a seemingly regulated fashion? Almost certainly not: no reasonable person would consent to be bound by those rules. Yet people do die in MMA, for example, and charges are not bought. It's part of the accepted risk of the sport which is regulated and refereed to prevent lasting harm to participants.
Would two knuckleheads who decided to dress up in NFL gear and run full tilt at each other in a parking lot face charges? What if one of them died? I'd guess yes. Again, I agree with you.
What about rap music and culture in general? So much glorification of violence.
I'm looking forward what they think of communist symbols, or is the rule about symbols purely swastika and symbols the 4chans stupid trolls use.
[1]: http://blogs.faz.net/deus/2017/12/18/erdogans-mob-und-gruene... (in German)
[2]: https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...
Then again, I also don't want to keep seeing things like death threats, bullying, and general hate-laden vitriol. Seriously, look up some of the tweets aimed at August Ames and tell me that's OK in any forum.
Ultimately, I have to fall on the side of moderation in this case. A free-for-all forum has been tried, and it has failed us.
that's an interesting angle.
One rule for them, another rule for us. This sort of thing is how Trump was able to paint "the media" as being full of hypocrites, liars and crooks.
Edited to add: not a Trump supporter myself, by any stretch of the imagination. But this is exactly the sort of thing demagogues like to point to as examples of bias and unfairness. Although Trump himself might not, in this case, as he seems to be one of the beneficiaries.
How can they possibly enforce this hypocritical bullshit while our president violates these policies on a daily basis? Ham handed nonsense.