Updating our rules against hateful conduct
blog.twitter.com
blog.twitter.com
Religious and ethnic persecutions have often gone hand-in-hand. Religious minorities of all types will be helped by this, and we'll see less hate-speech on twitter. Seems to be a very reasonable step.
Sidenote: any religion topic really brings out the "I have a problem with religion" types on HN.
Talk about a PR Minesweeper, expert mode.
This rule's application - like all rules like this - will be stretched and exaggerated to cover much more than intended and will be applied unevenly across demographics.
Just like we see on Reddit when /r/ChapoTrapHouse and /r/Bad_cop_no_donut (both of which I sub to, genuinely) gets a pass, while right wing subs do not, when it comes to violent threats and comments.
Atheists and Christians will get the short end of the stick on this. Mark my words.
Dehumanization is a defense mechanism which helps us avoid feeling the pain of realizing that humans sometimes do (subjectively) abhorrent things. It's seductive to define such people outside the bounds of humanity as it allows us to excuse treating them poorly. It is nearly always a mistake to do so, because people are, in fact, people.
People can still freely express their distaste for any and all religion on twitter so long as they don’t dehumanize the people who follow that religion.
haven't we all seen this in practice long enough now to know how this little routine goes?
Rules & regulations should be written, evaluated, and revised the same way code is. Code doesn’t always run as we intended but we (usually) don’t crucify the developer. We learn from the misunderstanding, fix it, and then re-evaluate when the next inevitable misunderstanding comes up. We get feedback and we iterate. That’s exactly what Twitter is doing. Their first policy didn’t work out as planned and this is their next iteration based on the feedback they received on policy v1.0.0
And will Twitter update this policy yet again once they’ve had time to work out some of the kinks? You can bet on it.
That is all in a matter of perspective. To you it might not be.
Then they probably aren't allowed to tweet their holy book.
You are essentially asking “will Twitter make use/mention distinctions in enforcing this policy”. While it is of course impossible to state for certain in advance, I don't see any particular reason to believe they would either be disinclined to or incapable of doing so.
Which is the whole point.
These issues of free speech have been around for a very long time, especially with regards to religious speech, which is at the bedrock of free speech, and the Western liberal tradition espouses free speech principles not because it didn't realize someone might get offended, but because it's better than the option of having powerful people/institutions pick winners and losers and decide what is acceptable to say.
Under current rules, if enforced across the board, a modern Martin Luther's 95 tweet stream would be banned because it hurt someone's feelings or criticized their religion. Exposes of Jehovah's Witnesses would be banned. Atheist tracts would be banned. The whole system is unworkable, which is why it wont work -- it wont be enforced across the board. What will happen is that Twitter will adopt de-facto 'protected religions' that cannot be criticized -- say Islam -- and then it will pick the losers -- say Christianity.
You're over-reacting to what the linked post from twitter actually says.
But if you think about it, the NPC memes were not arguing that some specific individual was not human, but rather than certain types of reasoning was robotic -- e.g. atavistic, primitive, and automatic. So this was an idea that was being blocked.
Going back to religion, the whole point of religious arguments is that they offend people and challenge the core of their identity. So of course this is going to be used as a weapon against religious views. Especially if your religion includes beliefs that some people are followers of false prophets, children of the devil, etc. Religion is used in many ways as a dividing line over who is favored and who is not.
Narrow down what’s considered — Respondents said that “identifiable groups” was too broad, and they should be allowed to engage with political groups, hate groups, and other non-marginalized groups with this type of language.
And you didn't just tell him to just not de-humanize anybody, instead opting for "okay, that's fine, just don't mention religion when you do it?
[1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-condu...
The centralized but politically watched model is also specially susceptible to Taleb's "The Most Intolerant Wins" theorem.
It would be helpful if Twitter were bold enough to provide examples of permissible types of criticism/satire.
Reductively, calling someone a lion is just as dehumanizing as calling them a shark. In the Bible, people are both complemented and insulted with comparisons to lions. Calling someone a shark is more respectful than calling them a rat, unless you're Chinese in which case I'm not sure what rat means. What exactly is banned here? Twitter gave us only the most obvious examples, leaving the hazy zones open for the endless fighting that I predict is about to start.
So, either Twitter isn't right because they took a rough stab into a subtle area, or they aren't right because they took a stab that didn't need to be taken.
Atheists are the most oppressed 'religious' group there is but no one will recognize it.
It's common they are left out of so-called "progressive" movements to support peace / safety.
Digital media, like Twitter, can't be a megaphone to spread hate speech. That means their algorithms should be smarter, and accept input.
On the other hand, with these media effectively being monopolies, that doesn't mean they can excommunicate (which is what this is about). That should be against the law.
Just like when there is just one shop in town: everybody should be allowed to buy. That doesn't mean the shopkeeper has to smile to every customer. A good shopkeeper may even be able to get this customer some help.
It's like the 1990s, old IRC and AOL chatrooms. You can just follow a lot of randoms and get into cool threads. There are many instances that have open speech policies (which are banned by many other instances) and other instances with standard ban lists. You can choose where you want to sign up. Many of the people on HN have the knowledge to stand up their own if they want. (I run my own in Docker using a ruby tool I wrote: https://github.com/sumdog/bee2).
You can even create accounts of different Fediverse servers to get a better picture of what gets blocked/censored where. The difference with ActivityPub/Fediverse is you have choices.
Twitter, Reddit, et. al. worry so much about keeping people "safe" that they have completely killed off any diversity of ideas. Back before Reddit started their multi-year long banning-of-everything campaign, you had a lot of different voices, with a lot of different ideology, from conservative to socialist to libertarian to progressive .. battling it out with some really great discussion. Now it's all just monoculture.
The places people fled too, like Voat/Gab, are also just monoculture (Gab recently migrated to their own broken, garbage fork of Mastodon ... as if they needed a way to make the Mastodon UI worse). Voat is just a cesspool of hate, and any melting pot where people discussed ideas rationally is kinda gone.
I highly recommend The Coddling of the American Mind, a book that talks about how people today see "Free speech" as a bad thing, how people say words == violence (they don't, violence is violence, and saying words are violence show you're afraid of ideas).
I've also been reading The Strange Death of Europe, which talks a lot about migration and religious hate speech. Honestly a lot of the book is garbage and I didn't like any of the initial arguments, but I also realize it's important to read about viewpoints I don't agree with. As I kept reading, the author did make a lot of effort to interview Muslims (both long term residents and refugees) and he does make a good set of arguments for the difficulty of criticizing religion in Europe (and I don't agree with a lot of his findings, but I think his arguments and original research are worth looking at).
We really need to be careful with these new blurred lines around speech and hate and ideas and ideology and violence. Restricting things on any platform just gives people with those views, people who get banned, more validity in the eyes of people who see them as persecuted. The Westburro Baptist Church is an example of a small, non-evangelistic set of families that barely grow, who are fully supported by slander lawsuits (they're mostly lawyers). If there weren't WBC counter protests and publications against them, they'd have no one to sue, would have run out of money a long time ago, and would have needed to take real legal case work again. The great irony is the reason they still hold strong is due to protesters giving them relevance.
Moderation mistakes are inevitable, and the consequences of a bad moderation decision can be as bad, or worse, than the effect of the message itself.
IMO, people should learn to defend themselves against trolls rather than helplessly relying on a nanny from above to do it. Unfortunately, using those platforms doesn't give us much of a choice in the matter.
That's a problem in some generic sense perhaps, but not with the application of this policy, which does not rely on a determination of “good faith criticism”, but instead of dehumanization.
Note that the examples of what is covered all are dehumanizing in a very narrow sense (stating directly that the target groups are vermin, viruses, etc.): https://blog.twitter.com/content/dam/blog-twitter/official/e...
Only if you "dehumanize" said religious people. All of the examples Twitter posted involved comparing the religious in question to animals (or viruses).
So, I doubt a tweet like "I don't think it's right to let the mother die because of fetus complications" would be removed, but something like "Those Christian pigs think a clump of cells are worthy of having human rights?! What kind of monkeys are leading them!" probably would.
I'm pretty sure you can criticize all of those positions without dehumanizing people on the basis of religion, so that conclusion seems unwarranted, and out of line with the examples of the kinds of posts that would be removed by the policy.
Imagine if all of the internet was owned by one company and they had this kind of power. This is more power than many governments around the world.
Thats a safe split: ideologies do not have (human) rights anyway...
So e.g. you can freely say that the Bible is stupid but can't say the same thing about its believers.
From the examples they give, I think you can still call them stupid. (After all, being stupid is very much part of the human condition. It's hardly a dehumanizing descriptor.) You just can't call them rats, maggots, viruses, etc. and advocate for their extermination/removal.
You aren't losing the right.
You may be losing Twitter's active cooperation if the manner in which you do so is unacceptable to Twitter, but you never had a right to Twitter's active participation in your attacks to lose.
The problem is likely greater in our corporate/mercantilist system where some state-sponsored and some natural monopolies develop. Totally get and appreciate the private property of the corporation argument...it is their town square after all...but when there is only one that is 'allowed' to succeed, what happens?
This then leads to specific tactical rules we have on the books in the US like FTC and even FCC regs, where some may protest unfair commerce.
IANAL but I can see this is a real mess. Also, what is the ROI for Twitter when it comes to policing this? We know FB has been having problems.
I think most of the things regarding regulating speech coming out of twitter are about avoiding being put in the spotlight next year in the next U.S. election. If what happened in 2016 happens again to any social network, the hammer will fall.