Twitter apologizes for 'Kill all Jews' trending topic
thehill.com
thehill.com
"Trending" just means that the topic is being referenced by the largest volume of accounts. Even if you can say with certainty that every one of your accounts represents an actual, legitimate person, you still have the problem that all "trending" does is surface content that's preferred by whichever of your users can mobilize the biggest angry mob. And if you can't say that with certainty (which bot-flooded Twitter absolutely cannot), "trending" becomes a wide open battlefield, trivially subject to exploitation by whoever has the largest budget for sock puppets.
"Trending" isn't an editorial strategy. It is the abdication of editorial strategy. It's being asked by Twitter among others to do much more than it is capable of doing, and their users suffer as a result.
Not sure I understand your point. “Trending” is exactly what it says on the cover. On the other hand, calling topics picked by the editor trending would be a bit of a perversion of the meaning of the word, no?
A human editor might see a topic like this becoming popular and summarize it as "Synagogue Vandalism". They wouldn't just present it as "Kill All Jews" with no other context.
The “trending” you’re referring to would be better described as “high traffic”. There’s a hundred thousand people on the roads rushing to get home right now, that doesn’t mean that traveling by car is “trending”.
Glass houses, hacker news..
Really? "At times?" I was under the impression that trending topics haven't been allowed to appear without human oversight in quite awhile.
They react when they see an issue rather than proactively restrict it.
Basically if you tell me the reason Twitter is better than Gab et al. is that you don't see hate speech on Twitter because that's their policy, yet a user logs in and sees the most blatant stereotypical hate speech possible trending right there at the top of the page, you're not really selling me on what you tell me is supposedly better about your service.
The replies to my previous comment including yours seem to be missing the point: of course Twitter doesn't remotely begin to deliver on any of these promises of "safety," yet Twitter is still presented as the "safe" alternative to Gab et al. Personally I don't mind seeing "hate speech" because a.) I see hate speech about my own race, sex, and religion on a nearly daily basis at this point and b.) I realize that "deplatforming hate" doesn't do anything but cause it to coalesce elsewhere.
By showing that Twitter isn't as "safe" as they claim to be, I'm questioning why we're continuing to use it instead of either a completely-free-speech or a better-curated actually-more-"safe" alternative.
Strange, I have the opposite perception. On Twitter, I am constantly confronted with "kill the jews" kind of hate speech. If you post something with a remotely controversial hashtag, you'll get frothing responses. Oh, and on some days searching for innocent terms gets you tons of NSFW nudes - if you are outraged by that kind of thing.
OTOH, Mastodon is advertized as "safe" alternative - or lets better say "comfy". Whether you feel comfy by being able to express radical free speech and not having to deal with identity politcs, political correctness, "SJWs" and so on. Or whether you are on the other side of that debate and don't want to be bothered by hate speech, misogynism, and other abhorrent things - a loosely federated network like Mastodon offers places for both groups.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
The "karma wall" only keeps the downvote option out of the hands of those who follow short-lived "mobs", it does nothing to stave off the balkanisation of the platform.
I understand of course that that ship has sailed.
Howver, I also believe that the strategy of "keeping the lid on" positions that are hateful or morally undesirable does not work long term. It was completely unthinkable and taboo to voice nazi positions in public in post WW2-Germany, it is even forbidden by law. But this did not irradicate Nazi thought, it just pushed it underground. And look, suddenly with some historical distance it is coming out again. Same in the US with people running around in KKK hoods and waving the confederate flag. Of course, racism was never gone or solved (no matter what we thought as white kids growing up in the 90s), but now it seems to be OK again to be openly racist in certain circles.
To tie it back to the topic, I believe we should not sweep positions we find horrible under the carpet, by saying they are taboo, and pretending we (e.g. Twitter) are impartial and unpolitical. Rather, we have to endure that people hold these positions, and speak out against them. Even if that means that we no longer are "politically neutral".
But since, as they admit, they have historically intervened in the trending rankings, insisting that they are impartial would be lying.
They could decide not to intervene this time, but that would raise he question of why this is less deserving of intervention than past issues, if they were being honest and open.
With the rise of non-suppressed hate speech on Reddit and Twitter and Fox News and the like, we saw a resurgence of terrorism in the US, terrorism which was very clearly inspired by the hate speech (specifically, it's conspiracy theories) and spread ideas that people wouldn't have thought up on their own.
About right-wing terrorism, pretty sure that's independent, as it has always been there.
I would not say right wing terrorism was only inspired by recent online hate speech. The US always had militias, people like Timothy McVeigh, white supremacists, and so on. However, I think that social media made it impossible to "keep the lid on" these ideas. Before we could censor this pretty good in the mass media, but then mass media and mainstream society lost their monopoly of interpretation. Now people with nasty ideas realize they are not alone and come out, and organize.
We could worry about it because the principle might one day be used against us. It's one thing to ban swastikas, but who gets to define what counts as "terrorist"? We already see that being abused to suppress dissidents abroad.
The grandparents original line was
"People just love trolling them because they overreact. Idiots think they're antisemites."
I think it's reasonable to push Nazism underground rather than let it go mainstream and gain some steam. There are enough idiots who would think it legit and instead of eradicating it would grow.
But I agree with not sweeping things under the carpet, ignoring them won't solve the problem but keep them somewhat contained for a while.
Calls for violence are not protected free speech in The Netherlands and I guess most (West) European countries.
You would get fined or even jailed if you would say shit like this in our country. And I'm happy for it. Because it serves no purpose to incite violence. There's no debate to be had. There is nothing that can be debated upon. What is there to debate with people that call to kill all Jews.
No, people can still have their free hate speech, but ideally not on any major social media outlet or news outlet if possible. And anyone calling for the murder on another person belongs in jail.
Shame on Twitter for letting this slip through.
Put another way: why would I paint a target on my back by trying to debate people who actively advocate for my murder? I'm much more likely to shut up and stay safe.
"User XY called to violence against people here. We find this dispicable and totally oppose this kind of ideas. Signed, Twitter CEO. PS: To publically document what kind of person XY is, you can click [here] to read their hateful statement in original."
I'd much rather have Nazis behind a content warning and publically pillored and shamed on twitter, than ban them and let them fester unbothered on Gap.
That is precisely the point of these laws. Certain hate speech and anti constitutional propaganda is marginalized in order to not allow further recruiting and preventing these stances from becoming part of a mainstream debate again.
It's an institutionalized (and therefore controversial) form of social control. The social control of ostracizing certain type of speech is present in all societies, though. If you're among ardent Christians, cursing and blasphemy is going to be 'prohibited', namely sanctioned. If you're among communists, other types of speech are prohibited. In many societies, you are not allowed to talk about certain taboo topics like sex, death, badmouthing someone's parents, etc.
Certainly nobody has ever thought that German anti hate speech laws would make Nazis go away. They were invented to prevent a new Nazi party from rising again (together with other mechanisms like party prohibition by the Supreme Court) - and also, on behalf of the allied occupation forces - to prevent further embarrassment of West Germany abroad.
On a side note, it was never "completely unthinkable and taboo to voice nazi positions in public in post WW2-Germany." It wasn't done in the GDR because of Gulags, whereas in West Germany this was always pretty common. There was even a successor party to the NSDAP that was promptly prohibited. There were right wing terrorists ("Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann") and plenty of old school Nazis who talked and still talk about nazi positions. We even have our own "Nazi grandma", the holocaust denier Ursula Haverbeck, aged 89, who was sentenced 10 month in prison but never went there.
Worse still, it would communicate to advertisers that if Twitter's algos can be gamed so easily, its user base is 'low quality' and not worth serving ads to.
The platforms can try to prevent that, and Twitter does try. But it is simply not possible to catch everything unless every single tweet is reviewed by a human censor. That won't scale, but even if it did, the censors would not always be trustworthy.
Some people seem to be convinced that we can have large social platforms free of hate speech and fake news. It's not possible, because of the users.
What more needs to be done? It's up to individuals to curate their own social environments.
And simply implementing such tools would draw the ire of people on the right, including the party that currently controls the presidency and the congress.
Twitter is in a no-win situation here.