There isn't really a distinction between these two.
The crackdown on abuse was absolutely necessary, although it doesn't really go far enough, because the platform was getting a name for driving off high-profile users.
When twitter starts having strong opinions about what content is acceptable or not outside of abuse, then it becomes a very liberal echo chamber which drastically biases all the conversations that go on in it.
The issue, and this isn't a twitter specific issue, is that the line between preventing abuse and censoring content is not a clear or distinct line at all - some users want every art installation to have a trigger warning before it while other users hold the firm political opinion that the mixing of different races is unethical.
It's not clear that Twitter (or Facebook, or Reddit) has ever been good at navigating that line, or that they should be in that business. Reddit is somewhat successful in that most of the moderation happens at least at a subreddit level, so that if you disagree with a given community you can simply move to a different one.
Those aren't even slightly equivalent positions, though. One is a request that material dealing with shocking or upsetting subjects be marked as such so that people who may be affected can avoid it, and the other is unsubstantiated racism that has been known as wrong for a century or more.
For twitter in particular, there's an important difference between expressing an opinion to the world in general (or at least your followers) versus actually "@"ing somebody. While you might argue that people should be allowed to post anti-miscegenation rants into the void, posting them @ a mixed-race couple is clearly abuse.
But neither of them, in and of themselves, is abuse. Yes, they might be promulgated in a way that becomes abusive (sending racist opinions repeatedly as you mention, or sending your followers to harass a PR department because they didn't include a trigger warning), but censoring either opinion, outside of abuse, falls into the same trap of playing not the responsible platform, but engaging in censorship. If you consistently censor one and not the other, then you are a biased censor.
Imagine that every time you went to look at a digital representation or photo of art, you had to click through a trigger warning.
Seems like it could, in some cases, be a bit excessive. Although I understand if some people find still lifes of fruit terrifying.
> you consistently censor one and not the other, then you are a biased censor.
Why are we pretending being biased against racism is a bad thing?
Welcome to the real world. Same as it ever was.
Technically speaking they're categorically equivalent in that they're both sanctionable under freedom of speech. From that perspective, whether or not you find one or the other more sanctionable has more to do with your personal opinions than it has to do with accuracy.
Since Twitter is a private organization it can freely decide to curtail freedom of speech on its platform, because that right is not guaranteed (or rather, relevant) in the private sphere. But that puts it into an uncomfortable position because it must then start being opinionated itself. Which opinions are the "right" ones? Which curtails are merely reducing spam and abuse, and which ones are censoring honest but unpopular opinions?
Now that aside, I agree with you that there is a difference between broadcasting unpopular opinions and targeting unpopular opinions towards another person. This makes the situation more difficult for Twitter, but there's a credible argument that curtailing the expression of those opinions in either context is censorship, while curtailing the expression of those opinions in the targeted context is spam and abuse reduction.
Twitter is fully allowed to engage in censorship, but it's probably strictly more beneficial from an inclusionary standpoint to invest in sophisticated tools for empowering users to reduce the spam and abuse targeting them (or which they come across) than it is to invest in sophisticated tools for curtailing "wrong opinions" across the entire platform. Most people can agree on the most extreme opinions that should be censored (though obviously not everyone). But it's hard to make companies the arbiter of which other opinions to get rid of, because from the obvious extreme ones there is a long, long tail of benign opinions that many people will reasonably (and unreasonably) take offense to.
For what it's worth, I think the situation is extremely complex and companies like Twitter are (somewhat unfairly) demonized for not doing enough, or doing too much to reduce the problem. But I don't think there's a substantially easier or more straightforward way of navigating these waters than Twitter has done, given the same capability and information.
No, the popular, "politically correct" opinion has not been in favor of interracial relations for "a century or more".
50 years ago, much of Dr. King's work for human rights was considered by the authorities to be a grave threat to national security that was controlled by the USSR and needed to be "neutralized". Aren't those all criteria that Twitter would accept for banning someone?
Do you think the censors at Twitter have infallable moral compasses that are superior to society's?
Society has a better moral compass, in aggregate, than the content allowed by the combination of bots and low-paid workers that moderate Twitter. I say that means that Twitter needs to catch up. You seem to be saying that means Twitter should never moderate anything, which seems like exactly the wrong direction to me.
Not at all - if one is willing to accept @mention from a random twitter user instead of only from a pre-cleared group of one's contacts, one does not get to post action claim that the @mention of his or her account is abuse because one does not like the content of that mention.
So do you truly mean to claim that if a given user accepts any public replies, they may never claim that any public reply of any kind, regardless of content or intent, is abuse?
Could you link an example?
It’s the bizarre inconsistency of it that’s most grating - content can result in bans or not depending on... as far as anyone can tell, a roll of the dice. For any number of instances where a fascist says something awful and gets away with it, you can find much more banal things that get leftists banned.
Person A starts a thread.
Person B who A doesn't know says something dehumanizing to person A.
Person A says "fuck off and die".
Person A gets shadowbanned for a week.
There was even a time when, due to their bad automated processes, you could get shadowbanned for using the word "queer" in a positive sense.
(Hilariously, Twitter's position on shadowbanning is that they do no such thing, they just hide your tweets from everyone's timeline, which is exactly what everyone means when they say "shadowban".)
That's not a death threat. That's mean and callous and rude, but it's not a threat.
Let's try it with this example. Is someone who genuinely and openly holds the opinion that all men are rapists, but not otherwise engaging in abuse, worth banning?
When we start going down this path of trying to get rid of "undesirables", we start engaging in censorship.
It was never worthy of engagement anyway, so perhaps stop creating strawpeople with it.
You can't be a professed neo-nazi without engaging in abuse. Nazism is explicitly a genocidal ideology and calling for genocide is abuse.
> When we start going down this path of trying to get rid of "undesirables", we start engaging in censorship.
Yes. Lets get started.
The end game here will be the end of anonymous Twitter and a smaller but much more valuable user community. To that end the market is wrong on focusing on declining user growth. Twitter is moving in the right direction: eliminating abusive users and bots and increasing average revenue per user.
(Twitter also has a lot of upside potential when it comes to how they can monetize users. But they are very, very cautious and moving very slowly here. It's a bit frustrating... they are leaving a lot of money on the table... but there's also something to be said for not wanting to piss off users.)
Or very conservative echo chamber? Have you seen comments on practically any article critical of the current political administration?
Frankly, people don't want bad actors, or trolls in their conversations. It provides no value except to the bad actor and other bad actors. If every time you were having a conversation at a bar someone butted in to talk to you about chemtrails you would stop visiting that bar until the person was asked to leave.
Thank you for saying this. It can't be said enough that the Twitter platform is not a public accomodation, and that Twitter needs to make a choice between banning troll and/or abusive accounts and convincing more valuable people to stay on their platform. We seem to be having a collective problem telling the guy with the chemtrail stories that he's the a-hole even though he strongly believes otherwise.
I came across this: http://ritholtz.com/2018/07/self-inflicted-wounds-drag-faceb... and he also said it well:
"But the bottom line is this: once you welcome holocaust deniers onto to your property, because, Hey! Its just their opinion! you have crossed a certain line. Other people — moral, rational, intelligent human beings who prefer reality to the fake ideological insanity these folks live in — they begin to say good-bye, and in increasingly larger numbers. People like Alex Jones who say Sandy Hook never happened, the birthers 9/11 truthers — thats a dinner party I won’t be attending."
If people send you messages online on a public social media platform (which you can turn off at anytime), it is not a big deal. Massive difference between both. Twitter already provides several tools like blocking notifications from unknowns and making your profile private if you want to reduce the noise, but fundamentally Twitter is based on public broadcast so perhaps you would be better suited to something like Snapchat which focuses on private personal connections instead.
The timeline is fine, follow and interact with whoever you want. If someone you don’t know talks to you, you can turn off notifications for unknowns or block them specifically.
While I do agree they go too far, if banning hate speech/harassment/racism/etc... causes a "very liberal echo chamber" then maybe the non-liberals need to look at cleaning up their house.
> Reddit is somewhat successful
Reddit is a cesspool of white supremacists, incels, etc...
What an absurd statement. There are certainly some nasty subreddits on there, but the site's overall community seems to be 90% or more left-leaning and very anti-racism. And reddit banned most white supremacist and incel subreddits in the past few years.
https://boingboing.net/2018/07/24/alex-jones-claims-robert-m...
Scenario One: I, a real, active user that discusses a variety of topics, says something someone doesn't like and twitter decides to ban/shadow ban me.*
Scenario Two: I set up a network of fake accounts to automatically tweet, dm or @mention people pushing the same thing over and over to thousands of users.
Twitter has a block/ignore function. That is all that is needed to deal with scenario one in the vast majority of cases. When companies start introducing their politics and speech preferences into a global communications platform in the form of censorship and banning, the utility of that platform drops immediately. Consider if anyone ever said something in an email or sms that someone else disagreed with, we took away their ability to use email or sms. I know it's not apples to apples since those are primarily one-to-one platforms but you can see what I mean.
Meanwhile, combating scenario two almost always has a positive effect, but apparently is too hard of a problem for Twitter and its $2b/year budget to tackle as evidenced by the complete and utter lack of progress on that front since, from what I can tell, the platforms humble beginning in 2006.
*Note this is a hypothetical, my account is and has been in good standing since I signed up but I've seen many accounts go away or be silenced in this fashion.
Edit: Had wrong date for twitters inception. Fixed.
Harassing people through SMS is a criminal offence in the UK and a number of other countries.
It's well intentioned but international enforcement just isn't that simple.
"I think waffles are better than pancakes" is a pretty easy distinction.
"I think slavery should still be legal" - not so much. Is that just a really shitty and ridiculous opinion, or harassment?
Law has been around for a very long time and harassment vs speed has been successfully understood and prosecuted for a very long time. If it's a passing comment on a social network then no matter how dispicable it is, it's just a comment. Ignore and block it, and move on with your life.
Twitter repeatedly conflates organised spam / abuse / brigading, with sincere criticism and disagreement. They've shown a shocking disregard for differences of opinion, while refusing to develop tools to allow users with large followings to quickly cut off a mob attack.
This has put them in a position where they're both overly censorious - removing satire accounts, shadow banning without notice and using 'verified' status as a form of punishment; and simultaneously failing to engage with real abuse of the platform.
Presumably because to deal with real abuse and spam would be difficult and costly. Look how long it took them to remove fake / bot users who were being used to target political campaigns.
Citation needed. Has this actually happened to someone in real life?
Also, if you use Gmail to threaten someone, yes you should be blocked from using the service. Twitter is not email, Twitter is Gmail.
Censoring people (at times classifying a person-associated account as a ‘bot) on one side of the political spectrum more than the opposing side is an altogether different thing.
The latter is what brings the accusations of censorship.
You can't get too many followers in too short of a time or you're considered a bot. If you are not active enough you're a bot. If you speak ill of Twitter well that's a an account suspension.
My lowly account of a few people I know was locked once no explanation but the bot accounts manage seem to just fine.