Twitter has barred hundreds of accounts for posing as liberal activists

In my view, there's a difference between letting people say stupid things, and letting people deliberately say misleading things that are clearly for the purpose of influencing an election (spreading the wrong election date.)

I don't see anything wrong with Twitter not tolerating people spreading the wrong election date because 'free speech, don't be so offended'.

There's definitely a large cultural problem both with people being overly defensive and overly offensive (and I think a majority of people who seem to fall into one of these camps actually fall into both, just depending on the topic). On both sides, there's a gradient of behavior with no practical definition, and at the extremes of each, harsh reaction to that behavior becomes inevitable, since we're humans. On the defensive side, this is the transition between "I disagree but support your right to say it" and attacking a person who has said or done something that isn't particularly hateful or violent. On the offensive side, this is the transition between a harsh but grounded joke aimed at somebody's flaws as a way of making a point, and naked hatred (which may be framed as a joke, as all things can be).

I think we absolutely must address both problems somehow, but I also think that the movement of the offensive tendencies toward their respective extreme is much more damaging and more directly at fault for most of the current breakdown of human interaction. If person A mocks person B and implies that they should be lynched, and person B punches person A, they have both crossed the lines of reason on their positions (A: offensive, B: defensive), but boy am I not overly worried about B's behavior in context (that's a broad analogy, and a representation of my perspective rather than a universal example - it's not a comparison to the article's subject, which is a much more grey example of hatred vs reaction).

Of course, people will always see their group as reasonable and "the other" as unreasonable, especially when the "groups" are so broad that there's no room to stand outside and look in. It's all about as subjective as can be. Unfortunately, that doesn't make the practical outcome of such subjective interpretation any less concrete or unavoidable. I'm not sure what will end up causing this to deescalate, since both sides are utterly dug in.

> Someone I follow posts something I think is intelligent and polite, and the replies are filled with people launching tangential attacks and making weird accusations.

You can still curate this experience. There are accounts that I will never read the replies from, and there are accounts that I know will have great replies.

There are other accounts where I will. I ban, mute, and use the "don't show retweets from this user" feature liberally.

> suppose hoards of people with political opinions you detest start creating accounts that pose as "your side", using the worst possible arguments for your positions, insulting everyone, and making "your side" look stupid and cruel. Is that a kind of speech you want to protect?

If you're talking about the NPC accounts, they are clearly satire by their tweeting style and avatar.

Actual subversive impersonation is tricky, but I would hope that those kinds of accounts get outed by the side of the people they are subverting and the side they are subverting can condemn those arguments, positions, and tactics.

> Would you distinguish satire from impersonation? ... is clearly self-identifying as a satire of Donald Trump. Nobody is going to confuse that account with the real one.

> But suppose hoards of people with political opinions you detest start creating accounts that pose as "your side", using the worst possible arguments for your positions, insulting everyone, and making "your side" look stupid and cruel.

Personally I'd distinguish satire from impersonation in this case as the banned accounts have:

- Grey flat colored faces

- A nose made out out of two straight black lines

- The username "npc" followed by a number

For example, every avatar the image underneath the headline in the article linked to in this page:

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/17/business/17NPC/17...

It's not a particularly subtle distinction.

> making "your side" look stupid

Just wanted to quote that again.

Repeating it all those times hasn't made it true.

Do you think pointing out someone else appears to have stock opinions and doesn't actually think about the world around them is "shouting fire in a crowded theatre"?

This is the kind of post the NPC meme is parodying. Instead of parroting mindless talking points, why don't you learn about the history of the quote "shouting fire in a movie theater"? Learn about Schenck decision and how "shouting fire in a movie theater" was used to justify a criminal offense against individuals distributing anti-draft flyers to military-aged men. YES. Common anti-draft speech practiced wherever today was once as dangerous as what you're implying. This decision's first amendment implication was finally overturned in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969.

Make up your own mind, and form your own opinions. This meme is not dangerous, it's exposing a dangerous pattern. A pattern of people parroting simplistic ideas with no knowledge of the context involved. A pattern which effects most sides of the political aisle. Don't be an NPC, learn and grow, become a player.

Except there's no crowded theater and no fire. It's time to put that rusty excuse to rest - the fact that some speech can cause bad consequences in extremely specific narrow case does not mean that now you can justify any speech restriction by "but fire in theater! Checkmate, free speech!"

Anti-FGM activism and and reformist Islam have both been labelled hate speech according the SPLC:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/opinion/southern-poverty-...

While Twitter bans criticism of the left using the NPC meme, @dbwrf, a pro (yes they exist) FGM group is not only still up but also running a Twitter ad campaign supporting FGM.

Bernie is anti open borders, calling it basic globalist shilling. "It would make everybody in America poorer—you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state"

I bet if you repeated his opinion but didn't use his name on Facebook, some, uh, [leftward people with very reflexive opinions] would show up to argue with you.

Well, not Bernie himself but Bernie supporter has been beaten up as "fascist" in Portland for showing up with American flag: https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2018/08/he_bro...

I can imagine some of these people would gladly call Bernie himself fascist - after all he's a Senator in the US government which they despise. So you may not be counting for that long.

"If someone is behaving badly in a company or even in a casual group, you don't just ignore them."

I think I agree, but it goes against the grain of what people previously thought you should do on the internet.

>harassment campaigns or spreading misinformation

I am genuinely curious about the flora of the NPC movement. I mean, this territory between meme and organized campaign is really interesting and it's sad it comes at the cost of society.

> this thread has degraded extremely rapidly

The internet in a nutshell.

Great link, with great links! I'll be avidly reading those over the next few days. "...Latour can actually write well when he wants to." Golden!

The PoMo "side" is not exactly the Leftist side, however. If reformed PoMo enthusiasts expect all this to go away now that they've seen the error of their ways, they will be disappointed. The discourse from 4chan etc is not only a reaction to a particular political circumstance, but also to the experience of real people in economic, advertising, media, social, etc arenas. The channers have found something that empowers them to speak back to dominant narratives that exclude them, and they're not going to give it up just because e.g. Latour has changed his mind.

I guess? It's so self-invalidating that I'm having trouble seeing the point. Do they understand that they're engaging in the exact behavior they're criticizing? If they do and see it as clever irony, it hasn't come across in the bits I've seen. If they don't then it seems a vigorous self-own.

> "well those people are reacting exactly how we thought they would"

Almost like NPCs...

>take Pepe - the only reason it caught on was because the left took the bait and lost their shit over it.

Pepe was popular way before it was a political meme.. Pepe comes from a book released in 2006, and according to KYM feelsbadman became a meme in 2009.

To me, the real explanation for a lot of this bizarre nonsense is because journalists are spending all day on Twitter which in reality isn't the real world it's technically just a very popular internet forum with a few famous users and they've begun to not understand that what happens on the internet forum Twitter does not represent what's actually happening in the real world.

This is how internet forum drama gets mistaken as actually something people in the real world actually think about.

Once you start to see this it becomes so strange that you can even tell when a journalist is a Twitter addict just from some of the terms and thinking they start to include in their articles.

There is very much a Twitter hivemind heavy users start to tap into, and unlike say Reddit users or even 4chan users they mistake Twitter as being the real world and the hivemind as reality.

4chan is too stupid to tell the difference between a bot and a liberal

How in the world is criticizing the capacity of a persons ability to critically think by using memes Propaganda.

I'm right wing and I find the boxed responses from leftest to line up with some of the NPC stuff I saw.

Actually, propaganda is agreed to be a good thing for a democracy. It's why we have free press and free speech laws.

Many of the founders ran printing presses or newspapers to push their own propaganda. The most prominent being alexander hamilton and the NY Post.

What is bad for democracy is censorship ( aka one sided propaganda ).

It is no more propaganda than #maga or #orangecheeto or #impeachtrump. It is political satire and commentary.

Propaganda for what?

Sigh. So people who would normally vote liberal are now going to vote on the wrong day because they got the election day date from a troll account mocking their liberal position--and they didn't bother to remember that elections are always on Tuesdays or to use google?

Pretty sure like 0.001% of those accounts did that. But it's a good excuse, granted.

I think the real reason they got banned is that under every tweet of every blue-checkmark liberal on Twitter you'd find dozens of replies of accounts called NPC209834029 with the same avatar nodding and saying the same platitudes. But of course, when all the replies to all Trump tweets are from blue-checkmarks shitting on him, Twitter doesn't seem to care. :P I think neither should be banned, but I guess they know better.

So basically satire banned on Twitter, if it comes from the right. These accounts were in no way misleading; one would never confuse them for actual liberal activists.

Could say the same about most journalism today as well.

"NPC meme" is to 2018 as "Common Sense" is to 1776.

Ok but what makes a certain meme have enough power that it then has fecundity/fidelity? There must be a resonance between powerful memes and 'human nature' or else they surely wouldn't propagate (e.g. fear of death, in the case of the 'hell' meme).

I suppose what I'm wondering is: is this meme making people fret that they might actually be NPCs? It must be resonating with people or else there wouldn't be uproar.

>unless it's being repeated without any attempt to consider broader implications.

That's just it, I think. The meme was taken in by a crowd that itself does not practice introspection. I don't think the New York Times is too far off when they mention its spread by "attention-starved gamers": disenfranchised young men attempting their own first run at exercising a naive political opinion over the internet.

At it's core, it shouldn't be a conservative meme at all, if anything it's a "free thinker" or a libertarian / anarchist point of view. I think it is labelled "conservative" is because the left have reacted strongly against it, thereby defining it, and reinforcing the forms that cause that reaction by their opposition. It's a kind of virus which gets stronger the more anti viral counter measures are applied.

Anyhow, I first heard about someone calling other people an NPC in a robert anton wilson celebration event 5 years ago by a man on acid talking about how many people in the world are NPCs when you try to talk to them about something real or important. I thought it quite funny, was a bit uneasy, sort of agreed, and sort of disagreed.

> I totally fail to see why it's a conservative meme at all

It's not a conservative meme. 4chan trolls != conservatives != The Right != Republicans != ... Almost nothing fits neatly into a bipolar spectrum of "us vs them" and 4chan culture is mostly about being where the normal people don't want to go.

On /b/ you can find posts complaining about Jews controlling the economy, trans people swapping pictures, memes about niggers cucking white bois, incest fantasies, celebrations of school shootings, people claiming their favorite anime characters as waifu/husbando, complaints about how this is all cancer and needs to stop ...

There is no unified message that would fit into mainstream politics.

If your view is "conservative" == "right-wing" == "capitalism" then I can see why you would say that.

if Twitter were to ban stupid content from its website, not much would remain ; the stupidity of this can't be used as a reason to explain the bans.

It's a joke, you're taking it way too seriously

I think it's actually the reverse. Your critique is that the NPC meme ignores that lots of liberals/progressives exist.

The rightist promoters of the NPC meme would agree with that statement -- but they would say that it's because most are just acting as ideologically/memetically programmed automatons. Crucial to understanding this meme is that its promoters see "libs" not as literal bots, but as humans-with-bot-thinking, who have grown up on a diet of platitudes and mantras without deep analysis.

On the contrary, the left/libs/progressives (whatever you want to call them) on Twitter have had a habit of actually doing what you're saying, when they pull out the "oh look another Russian bot" troll. That meme actually asserts that the number of actual conservatives/right-wingers is literally small and being amplified by actual programmed chatbots.

Is it?

Harmful seems like a stretch.

Responses like these make me think the meme is actually dead-on accurate.

> these where designed to get banned for publicity.

I don't think they were. I think they were designed to be funny and characterize a particular ideology.

As I said in the other comment, this article gives one extremely mild example of incorrect election information and says "a few" of the accounts were participating in that. Why would you ban all of them, including the accounts not spreading misinformation?

>far right twitter accounts

Nazis are everywhere, after all.

And wow is it just embarrassing to see this "incorrect election information" thing being touted here. If someone was actually convinced that the election was a day later because they believed an NPC Twitter account they have only themselves to blame.

The article gives one example and says it was a "few" accounts. Why ban all of them?

If you are misled about when the vote is by a tweet from an account with a wojak avatar, it's probably for the better of mankind if you don't vote... or procreate.

No they're not, their idea of freedom of speech extends no further than "I want to say whatever I want."

Their longstanding history of doxxing, conducting raids, etc. on those who they disagree with are the exact opposite of actual proponents of free speech.

*chan land is chaotic neutral and always has been. Authoritarians just can't handle chaotic. A projection of a high dimensional vector (politics) onto a line (left - right) is always going to be a goof.