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> 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.

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.

Both of those are extreme opinions on different sides of the spectrum. You should have issues with both of them.

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.

Why on earth do you think that a request for trigger warnings is an extreme position? Are you opposed to twitter having a "sensitive content warning" function at all, for example?

The wording wasn't trigger warnings existing in a broad sense. A trigger warning on every art installation is a position many would regard as clearly excessive. Not sensitive content, not things that could be expected to be upsetting to some significant minority of the population, every art installation.

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.

Right, but there isn't actually anyone in twitter calling for a trigger warning on literally every art installation (is there?), whereas there are lots of bona fide racists.

I haven't checked. I have seen enough calls for trigger warnings on assorted things that I can understand where the might-be-a-caricature comes from. I was taking the commentor at their word, rather than presuming to authenticate.

and in doing so you give equal standing to a non-existent problem and the very real problem of the ultra-right racism.

Have you ever watched television? Pre-show content warnings are extremely common. You don't have to click through anything.

I have, though not so much recently. I confess I don't recall a lot of useful content warnings. I might just be out of date.

Television, movies, and game trailers all contain content warnings before airing. Personally I ignore most of them, partially because they usually don't affect me, and because Hollywood and such are pretty good about targeting their trailers (e.g., showing slasher trailers only before a slasher movie and not in front of the latest PG Pixar film)

I don't agree with either, but only one is expressing hatred. Only one deserves banning.

> 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?

Twitter in this way has been exposing the breadth of human opinion to people who may not have been exposed to it before.

Welcome to the real world. Same as it ever was.

Except that's patently false. Twitter is extremely vulnerable to coordinated campaigns to create fake swells of opinion held by few (or even 0) people. Talking to 5 people in Manhattan is more likely to give you a breadth of opinion than listening to 100 thousand automated nazi bots on twitter.

> 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.

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.

>the other is unsubstantiated racism that has been known as wrong for a century or more.

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?

I think the moral compasses of Twitter moderators are quite fallible, but the most extreme way that they could fail would be to stop doing their job.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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?

Yes. Entering a town square one gets to deal with all kind of characters, including the assholes of any and all kinds. If one does not want to deal with them, one simply does not enter the town square and stays in his or her lovely mansion.

So it's also impossible to verbally abuse people in person, since they could have chosen to wear earplugs? If you accept phone calls from unknown numbers, calls can't be abuse?

> 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.

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.

"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."

In practice people don't leave, do they? Instead they pile on and try to harass chemtrails guy into leaving. Twitter is not a bar, so this is not a good analogy. Twitter has infinite space and is specifically intended for the exchange of opinions, not drinking.

Except on Twitter, unlike in reality, you can easily hit "block" and never see that person again.

Except on Twitter, just like in reality, their friends can come after you.

And you can continue blocking them on Twitter, whereas in reality, assault and harassment is already a crime, so I'm not sure what your point is.

Continue blocking, as in whack-a-mole on their brigading followers, or I can continue blocking that one account? If the latter: no shit; if the former: you underestimate the task.

Perhaps I wasn't clear - if people come after you in the physical world (which you cannot escape), that is a crime and we have the appropriate police and judicial departments to take care of it.

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.

Would you rather walk through a clean city street or have to step over trash and needles to get where you need to go? If the place is too difficult to walk through you start to think of taking a new route.

These analogies don’t work because Twitter is unlike reality, as stated.

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.

Which one is Alex Jones advocating for the murder of Robert Mueller?

https://boingboing.net/2018/07/24/alex-jones-claims-robert-m...

Keep in mind your own biais. I am following liberals on twitter, and there has been a big outcry that some of those users had their account deactivated or tweets taken down while @jack is keeping famous neo-nazis on the platform (not talking of Trump supporters here, people that self-identify as nazis and white suprematist). So while it looks for you like Twitter has been becoming a liberal echochamber, to liberal it is becoming a place where neo-nazis are let free while critics are being harassed/taken down.

Indeed. There's a reason leftist types have been escaping gradually escaping to Mastodon instances where they have much more useful content-blocking tools and aren't forced under pain of being banned to share a space with people who literally want them dead. On Twitter, a self-identifying neonazi can spout death threats, and the response to that will get the responder banned.

>Twitter, a self-identifying neonazi can spout death threats, and the response to that will get the responder banned.

Could you link an example?

Not without identifying myself, sorry. I sit in multiple irc channels where this sort of thing regularly happens to members though.

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.

It will be hard to satisfy your demand for proof, because there's no good way to search "tweets you've seen", but I have seen it happen.

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".)

> Person A says "fuck off and die".

That's not a death threat. That's mean and callous and rude, but it's not a threat.

This seems intended as an argument against my post, but I agree entirely.

Is someone who is a professed neo-nazi using your platform, but not otherwise engaging in abuse, worth banning?

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.

When you equate this imaginary feminist position with literally advocating for genocide, you're telling on yourself.

I've been involved in leftist/feminist spaces about a decade both IRL and online and I can assure you that while it certainly never gained mass adoption and may be out of favour now compared to the late 00s early 10s (thank god), calling it an "imaginary" position is disingenuous at best.

Sure, it was a second wave attitude. It's obviously not at all prevalent in the contemporary mainstream, certainly not among people young enough to be active on Twitter. In that sense it's imaginary: it's his imagined view of what feminists on Twitter are arguing for, not an accurate representation of what their views are.

> calling it an "imaginary" position is disingenuous at best

It was never worthy of engagement anyway, so perhaps stop creating strawpeople with it.

I didn't use the word feminist.

You don't think anyone can tell what you mean?

A better example would be TERFs, and they are often worth banning because they act like terrible people.

> Is someone who is a professed neo-nazi using your platform, but not otherwise engaging in abuse, worth banning?

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.

> then it becomes a very liberal echo chamber which drastically biases all the conversations that go on in it.

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...

>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.

It leads to an echo chamber because the people calling for Twitter to clean up their house don't consider death threats, rape threats, etc done in the name of the correct liberal cause to be something that should be banned, and they have enough influence that Twitter often listens to them.

Yeah, none of this is true. The vast majority of users have, again and again, called for Twitter (and Facebook and Google) to perform more censorship because (surprise) absolutely nobody has any interest in reading the tweets of various hate groups and trolls. Twitter et al are now aggressively moving to give users what they want but, if anything, it's too little too late. Twitter has developed a bit of reputation as a haven for trolls and abuse. Their success in fighting these groups off and creating a safe space for reasonable discussion (and therefore a safe space for advertisers) will decide whether the product lives or dies.

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.)