Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet
fightthefuture.org
fightthefuture.org
If we're going to have censorship on the big platforms (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and backbone providers (ISPs, Cloudfront), us normal human beings need the right to appeal, public auditing, bright line rules, and due process rights.
It's not wrong for Twitter to have rules to protect the weak from the strong, and individuals from the mob, but it needs to be accountable and above board about all of it or it will make the problem far worse.
EDIT:
Just to provide an example, here are a few ways this notification could have been so much better.
1) List the specific rules violated. Link to the public process for rule review and adoption.
2) Link to ids and contact information for any human beings who made the decision.
3) Link to code and data sets for any algorithm behind the decision.
4) Provide and link to an appeal procedure instead of just a compliance procedure.
Imagine how much better that openness would be for Twitter's users. (While somewhat onerous for Twitter the company.)
Most western democracies long since scrapped proper education because it's easier to win the support of the population with propaganda^H public relations than it is to make a reasoned argument.
[1]See Huxley, Brave new world.
This is not a new phenomenon. There have always been snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves. Societies that have very strict control over what people can and cannot say (think the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea, where you could be jailed for counter-revolutionary speech or misleading the people) still had lots of problems with snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves, but they also had a problem with people going to jail (or worse) for saying "the state is the cause of this famine", "the state killed a bunch of innocent protesters", "I disagree with the current economic system", "I am angry that the state took my land from me and gave it to someone else", "the rent is too damn high", "maybe we shouldn't build so many nuclear weapons", and "I don't support Chairman Mao/Uncle Joe".
I will assume that any Ministry of Truth that you would support would set out to be expressly non-political at its inception, but giving any one organization the power to restrain the expression of ideas is openly inviting those with an agenda to attempt to co-opt it into suppressing opinions and arguments critical of their agenda. This is an inherent drawback to giving anything power - it inherently becomes political even if the original intent is for it to not be political.
I would rather live in a society where snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves are punished after they commit their crimes than have a single person's freedom to say "fuck the government" suppressed because they misquoted a statistic.
Every loves this idea right up until the point they realize that their own and the Ministry's opinions do not align.
Private sector actors cannot do that.
But what's wrong with what we do now, private actors who try to build reputations as having possession of truth and we muddle along with those who sound most plausible to us? Sure, some people choose the wrong sources, but that seems a smaller risk than Everyone choosing the wrong source.
Are you saying you'd prefer that people be forced to follow their decisions? Or that information they declare "incorrect" be banned? That's not democratic, that's authoritarian.
>Most western democracies long since scrapped proper education because it's easier to win the support of the population with propaganda^H public relations than it is to make a reasoned argument.
In my mind, the correct response to the rise of FAKE NEWS (aka: yellow journalism, sensationalism, propaganda, public relations, advertisement) is to focus on teaching critical thinking skills, not to have a censor that says 'You can say this thing but not that thing'.
Will bad people have harmful, self serving opinions? Yes, they will. That's part and parcel of living in a free society.
Drinking bleach will not cure autism, but their are desperate parents out there ready to walk into that bear trap and opportunistic people are ready to spring it.
Is it possible to enumerate the set of all ideas that cannot be expressed, and if so, how do you enumerate this set, and who has the power to determine the members of this set?
Advocating that someone should have their child drink bleach to cure their autism is a despicable act, and is likely criminal after the fact, but that's the difference here - it's criminal after someone takes action on it.
Quoting Justice Brandeis from Whitney v. California:
>Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears. To justify suppression of free speech, there must be reasonable ground to fear that serious evil will result if free speech is practiced. There must be reasonable ground to believe that the danger apprehended is imminent. There must be reasonable ground to believe that the evil to be prevented is a serious one. [...] If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.
I can’t imagine the flack that would come when some robot labels trans people’s gender identity as NOT TRUE based on biological grounds.
I think that any group labeling things TRUE and NOT TRUE will only make things worse.
If you don't like an idea you're free to ignore it. Freedom of speech is really about the freedom for each of us to hear. What you're really advocating is that you don't want other people to have access to ideas with which you personally disapprove. This is such an authoritarian notion that I don't understand how it has become a socially acceptable idea to espouse.
We got fed up of people being murdered because they're black, Jewish, gay, trans, female, etc etc.
You want to cut out the only escape hatch people have. You think we have it all figured out... what is right and wrong. That we are able as a society to correctly label what speech should be allowed, and what shouldn't. But we aren't. We need free speech in order to figure out right-from-wrong. To hash things out verbally and in written form so that we DONT act out horrible ideas.
The power to decide what's "correct" will be abused to block correct information that damages someone powerful.
Clearly the mods should remove andy_ppp’s comment immediately, if not be held liable for hosting it in the first place. </s>
That is a terrifying argument.
I’ve only heard two arguments- let Twitter do what they want (viva Capitalism!) or have government regulate (viva Socialism!).
I wish there was more thought given by Twitter, and others, to just self apply free speech rights and stick to using the current legal system to restricting speech. There’s a ton of law to protect people from damaging speech (harassment, slander/libel, dangerous threats, etc). It’s quite possible that Twitter can just use a more rational standard for their process.
What the Government can't do is tell Twitter what statements it is or is not allowed to publish (authoritarianism).
And unless you are okay with your bank providing unfettered access to your ID, account number and PIN, I'd imagine that you are not in favor of general unfettered access either.
Democracy may require access to information but civilization requires that information not be universally shared.
The difference between WSJ and Twitter is that the WSJ has competitors (NYT, Politico, even Fox News and crazies like Infowars) whereas Twitter does not. We live in a world (unfortunately) where the President of the United States and his administration heavily relies on Twitter - it's no longer someones backyard social group. For Twitter to play the censor is no longer acceptable, although we still expect twitter to keep its users safe from harassment and mobs.
So yes, it's unacceptable for Twitter to play the censor or ban people from public service announcements or policy statements by their elected officials. If Twitter is going to facilitate administration statements and my local government agencies letting me know critical information, they are no longer an entirely private platform.
I agree that having restrictions on information access and communication is a slippery slope in the non-fallacious sense, at least with the solutions we usually discuss.
But I’m optimistic that the failure conditions might be more specific than they seem to the current state of affairs — self curated social graphs of unlimited size and bandwidth. Perhaps dramatically limiting scope, connectedness, or agency over whose views you have access to (think true random, not AI) would lead to less or different issues. I don’t know, because these experiments would take a lot of investment, but the point is that it may not be as black and white as you make it out to be.
We live in a world where the authority we defer judgement to has split up, into less balanced partisan entities. Not saying pre-internet news were unbiased, but public sources tended to be better curated. (At least where I live, I'm sure Fox has always been this horrid)
This is why filter bubbles and building psychological profiles for everyone to target them with political messages and free access to all information, correct and incorrect, does not work. It's a net negative to democracy and this neo-greek ideal of the marketplace of ideas is a sham.
I have no idea how to fix this, but it needs fixing.
The whole point of the marketplace is to sift through all the bad stuff and find the diamonds in the rough. You can't have a market without bad stuff, and the benefit of having a market is that it finds good stuff.
A world with less bad ideas is a world with less good ideas.
It's not impossible to create. It's not necessarily bad. But it would make our society much less dynamic.
And don't start with "but how do we tell them apart" - sometimes it is very clear cut.
This might work if you leave the system undisturbed, but there are other forces involved in this process your model doesn't account for.
It's the equivalent of buying out EC2 instances for an hour or so and "recalibrating" your P2P mesh. And it wouldn't fix itself.
If information would be in a book and I could go to a library and seek it out - don't ban anything!
But if messages are replicated in covert manner with lots of money thrown at news anchors, op-ed writers, sponsoring, bribes, syndication, SEO it is a different story.
And money is not the only problem. Cognitive psychology has progressed a lot and it is possible to engineer "information" that is very likely to spread in a viral manner. Push the right reader gratification buttons and off you go leveraging the social networks.
It is important I believe to distinguish between information and data. Information must be accessible but what is happening is we are flooded with replicated data containing almost no information. It used to be that volume of data was often a reasonable proxy for importance - not anymore so. I think people are catching up to this but unfortunately it also makes it easier to sell crackpot theories.
This is easy for "world is flat vs round". There is much more nuance to, for example, "this is discriminatory vs not".
But, a lack of anonymity brings a whole host of other problems.
Sybil attacks are a consequence of anonymity combined with low cost of identity creation, and inability to distinguish between different identities.
The fix for Sybil attacks generally involves making identity creation more expensive, or providing a means for distinguishing more valuable identities. On HN, for instance, the karma score is one such mechanism.
These systems can work without removing anonymity.
And I never said anonymity was easy or without trade-offs.
Preserving anonymity is essential for whistle blowers and other vulnerable people.
The best technology that we have right now to fight incorrect information is an educated citizenry of people free to decide the facts for themselves and debate them openly.
We can invest in this proven technology by improving that education, freedom, and open debate.
How do we determine what's spam? What's advertising? What's XSS? You have a first amendment right to type any of these things into an input box. Does that mean the organization receiving your message legally has to post it, even if it fails to meet a basic requirement of not breaking their platform or insulting their user-base?
Are terms-of-service a violation of someone's first amendment? In my case where I am the only employee of my small platform, do I not have a first amendment right to not host content I disagree with on my domain with my own servers?
People with private blogs needs to be absolutely free to control commenting however they would like.
I believe that we can respect both of these positions easily, 99% of the time, with our court systems deciding on some of the grey in the middle.
What counts as a "private" blog? That seems like an arbitrary distinction.
Unlike in the 1800 when everyone could just go the the town square or publish their own pamphlet and have almost equal reach, today most discussion happens in 2-3 outlets: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
Whether those started as private companies, whether those are not public goods, etc, should be irrelevant. They have de facto captured a big chunk of the conversation that shapes the public opinion.
I'd argue the same was true for TV and newspapers in the 1900-2000 -- they had a disproportionate power of shaping public opinion, and a monopoly of control on it. That was bad -- and it was already said that "he who controls the mass media, controls democracy". Even if people still had the "first amendment right" to open their own newspaper (as if that's practical), or whatever.
But at the time, at least, newspapers and tv stations had limited pages and run time, expensive production costs, and it was at least reasonable that they couldn't include everybody's voice.
Today, services like Twitter, Facebook, etc, not only have small marginal costs for including another voice, but they encourage and actively want to add more (all) people in their platform. So there's no excuse (from that point) of censoring people.
And there's always email.
That's mostly a reason why Reddit (and others) should also be included in the list.
But even if we don't have all outlets, enforcing freedom of speech to say, the top-3 by users, is good enough for a start...
>And there's always email.
Yes, just like one is always free to think what they want inside their head, or tell it like it is, within their home.
I'm not talking about that, nor care about that "freedom".
And for those that just want to get their message out, well it's never been easier or cheaper to start a web site on any number of different hosting services. If they can't manage to gain an audience on their own site then their content is crap. The percentage of traffic on other sites is completely irrelevant; any user can jump to another site with literally a single click.
Yes.
And "hateful" is a weasel world, assuming in advanced what the comments that would get censored are.
The comments could also be unpleasant but not hateful, unpopular but not hateful, not to the taste of some group (e.g. evangelicals or vegans) but not hateful, stuff societies want to ignore and hide (e.g. past crimes or system injustices) but not hateful, sexually explicit but not hateful, out of the mainstream but not hateful, and several other categories, including hateful, but rightly so (e.g. "let's bring down this fucking oppressive dictatorship and put these bastards in prison" written referring to a country under military control, or the same such against some company's like Monsanto bad practices, etc).
>Are terms-of-service a violation of someone's first amendment?
I could not care less. That's a provincial US issue. We should care what the world should be, not think in the confine's of century old laws.
In the 21st century, some terms-of-service, especially of powerful players, should be considered a restriction on freedom of speech.
Even if one still has the freedom to open their own platform, or take a box, step on it, and say what they like to the crowds in the middle of Central park...
Not all words need to be respected. Sometimes people need help, and sometimes they ask for it in subliminal ways.
And of course it's a provincial US issue. The entire internet as we know it cannot exist without provincial US law holding it together, and a provincial US economy to keep it online. We own the internet. We own Microsoft. We own Android. We own Google and Apple and Facebook and Twitter and everyone else who matters. There are competitors in these fields, but they're not concentrated enough in any other nation to make a difference. If America fell off Earth tomorrow the internet and all the technology that connects to it would be useless. Full stop.
And that should be a good thing. Healthy for your point. You don't want the internet governed on the world stage, especially if you're American.
Grab your soap box and try that "easing of restrictions on freedom of speech on a global scope" bullshit in China. Even Chinese citizens will laugh at you. They don't care about their freedoms nearly as much as you do.
[1] https://cdn.hillreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/gab-...
Saying what's "distasteful" is about arbiters of taste, and we shouldn't allow that. John Waters was "distateful" at some point, Rock music was, famous painters were, Henry Miller was, tons of movies, and tons of other things besides. Inflammatory stuff, doxing, etc, should be punishable under common law (libel, privacy laws, etc). Hate on the other hand is one of the basic human sentiments. Why censor it altogether? Besides, usually the case is that some hate is OK (if it's towards our enemies) but other hate is bad (if it's aimed towards our side). Again, arbiters of hate, like arbiters of taste.
>And of course it's a provincial US issue. The entire internet as we know it cannot exist without provincial US law holding it together, and a provincial US economy to keep it online.
Given the state of the modern internet, I'm not sure if that's for the better.
I'd take an old-style, CERN-invented internet back, any day of the week.
>We own Microsoft. We own Android. We own Google and Apple and Facebook and Twitter and everyone else who matters.
You say that as if it's a good thing.
>Grab your soap box and try that "easing of restrictions on freedom of speech on a global scope" bullshit in China. Even Chinese citizens will laugh at you. They don't care about their freedoms nearly as much as you do.
Well, if they don't, then I don't care about their freedoms either. I care about my freedoms, and of those countries that do care about their freedoms.
I don't want to "bring democracy" to places that don't want it (resource-grab style). I want to enjoy democracy (and fuller than today's theater of it) in places that do want it.
From just a practical perspective, if your goal is an increase in unfettered speech on these platforms, or the Internet in general, where would you want them to be besides the United States? Since you're talking about what would and would not, (or should and should not) be allowed, I assume some form of government is enacting and enforcing this as law.
I'm not aware of any nation that takes as close to absolutist of an approach to free speech other than the US. Even in the US we're currently in a relatively anomalous period of expansive free speech protection, historically speaking.
Relevant to this conversation, "hate speech" itself is a particularly common subject of bans in other nations otherwise generally considered equal to or greater than the US where "freedom" is concerned.
I think such platforms should be publicly run, perhaps something like a UN-project, and follow absolutist rules of free speech.
To me, something as crucial as a 2 billion strong method of communication (like FB), or the primary platform for web search for 8 billion people (Google, that is) shouldn't be run from a single country, nor be run for profit, nor be subject to private interests.
Especially regarding e.g. Google search, the global political, economic, public opinion shaping, etc power this gives a single private company, and to the country where it resides, is absurd.
Such services should be more like a "total archive" than a reflection of seasonal/regional/private interests, ideologies, and wills.
I was making the comparison because you were comparing the internet to the world. You can't (read: shouldn't) really do that. The internet is an American invention built with selfless American principals and ingenuity. Gifting it to to the world is one thing, but assume it's for the worlds benefit (as you did in your OP) is naive. The internet, as the free world knows it, is an American invention built in an American image using American resources in an American economy with American resources. It isn't compatible with Chinese or Iranian or Russian politics, and they struggle with that. That's their problem.
When I said "they don't care as much as you do" I meant to say "they don't care as much as you do about them." In other words, you're fighting for the rights of a populace that won't fight for it's own rights. Instead they'll stand by and watch you die in vain. There is no martyr-ism in giving the Chinese civil rights. They don't understand it and they don't want it. They want a strong labor market. They want cheap goods. They don't care about being able to call out jews on some insecure gab loaded with technical debt that prevents them from being secure. They simply don't fucking care. So you making any argument on their behalf is wasted. Especially on someone else in the US. Lets talk about the internet we created for ourselves and when the Chinese get off their asses and contribute to it we can worry about them. Banggood and Alibaba doesn't count. They never will. They are B class companies and in the absence of an A class company they would still rather look for another A to shadow than become one themselves. That's their business model and it ensures their survival in an unstable market. We don't worry about those problems because we don't have too.
So worry about us. You're trying to assert your first amendment right as a consumer over mine as a content aggregator. Our rights are equal in the scope of the law. Maybe because Facebook is publicly traded there is recourse for you, but demanding FB "switch off" content moderation for the first amendment is short sighted. You signed a fucking agreement. Period. If you want to post about how jews are awful, do that on your own dime. Not Zuck's, and certainly not mine.
If your shit didn't stink so bad maybe someone with a brain and money would come hang out with you.
* Email providers have zero responsibility for filtering information
* Email users form their own networks dynamically through actual relationships rather than some artificial structure of "followers"/"friends"
* Email users never get banned from sending email (although maybe in some cases an individual service may ban extreme abusers)
* Email's operation is totally independent of irrational mobs/corporate interests/whatever
In short, I think the core problem with this situation is in your first line: social media has become a "main communication provider" and it's fundamentally unfit for purpose. Email and other protocol-based communication independent of platforms (IRC is another good example) is still the best solution for a primary communication provider.
Email goes over common carrier networks between private hosts and so is pretty close to a common carrier network. Twitter isn't and doesn't. Maybe there should be a way for web services to provide a similar service with similar protections.
If it were true, it would be true for both Twitter and email. Messages from both systems hop between neutral providers in the exact same manner.
Any time Twitter has been called to account for what it publishes, it claims it's not a publisher. Give them what they want.
Any discussion of “common carrier” is entirely orthogonal, and basically nonsensical in the context of something like Twitter.
“Common carrier” generally arises as a trade-off for a government granted monopolies based on limited access right-of-ways. This was true for railways, and true for telephone wires. Why would this apply to a random service like Twitter?
Sending an email is a private communication. Sending a tweet is a public communication.
Your email provider is not a publishing platform any more than the paper store or the USPS is a publishing platform.
Twitter is a publisher, although as an Internet publisher disseminating user generated content, they are protected by law from the typical liability that publishers sometimes face for the communications that they publish.
To say twitter is not for fit for its purpose is bizarre. Twitter is one of the most powerful publishing tools ever created.
The OP hits at a fundamental problem. I'm not sure there's a clear path forward.
Twitter, on the other hand, is publishing these messages on their site. It's very easy for them to simply stop publishing those messages. Because Twitter is in charge of Twitter, it also has to be concerned about it's brand. The more public nature of Twitter also help this along, of course.
If something like this was to happen in the ActivityPub or XMPP space, the way of handling it would probably be something in closer to email than twitter.
It’s common for technologists to assume the underlying technology / implementation is relevant, when in fact it’s really just the user facing functionality that counts.
Shifting the conversation from publishing to the audience, completely glosses over the actual minutia at hand.
OP meant to say publishing platforms not communication provider because of course there is absolutely no natural monopoly for email providers, but clearly natural monopolies for social networks.
Spam is a nuisance. It’s simply not how someone reaches 100 million followers.
ActivityPub let's you build federated interconnected social networks, an interoperable solution like email.
>* Email providers have zero responsibility for filtering information
Not necessarily true. Spam filtering is an expected feature nowadays, I would say, bit you're right that e-mail providers aren't required to do that sort of thing. Still, known spam IPs are regularly blacklisted from major e-mail providers.
>* Email users form their own networks dynamically through actual relationships rather than some artificial structure of "followers"/"friends"
Mailing lists and newsletters are more like a social network than typical e-mail. But the fundamental difference isn't how users form their networks, it's how the networks are structured: on Twitter, I take a message and broadcast it to everyone and Twitter puts ads around it, and other people see it even if they don't "know" me. The equivalency is e-mail:Twitter DMs :: massive mailing list:Twitter.
>* Email users never get banned from sending email (although maybe in some cases an individual service may ban extreme abusers)
You can get booted from a mailing list, and other users can block you, but more or less it's true that Microsoft won't ban me from Exchange servers. And that's kind of the thing, e-mail isn't centrally hosted. Mastodon has attempted this with a Twitterlike social media platform.
>* Email's operation is totally independent of irrational mobs/corporate interests/whatever
E-mails killer feature, for sure.
>In short, I think the core problem with this situation is in your first line: social media has become a "main communication provider" and it's fundamentally unfit for purpose. Email and other protocol-based communication independent of platforms (IRC is another good example) is still the best solution for a primary communication provider.
Agree, and I think this is why lots of online communities treat traditional social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat) like little broadcast hubs where you basically show the world your best in little snippits. On Twitter: post a joke or a funny thread; on Instagram: post your outfit, or your view, or your dinner; on Facebook: post your graduation and family photos; on Snapchat(/Instagram Stories): post about the little things you encounter throughout your day. Once you deviate from this framework – e.g. posting "politically incorrect" or intentionally controversial content – then you are subverting and ultimately trying to dismantle the cultural expectations for those platforms. The culturally accepted place for controversial content is in private conversations: Discord, WhatsApp, iMessage, e-mail, phone calls. Because then your victims have a way to defend themselves.
The argument over "free speech" on Twitter is undertaken, almost 100% of the time, in bad faith. Twitter is a bullhorn, P2P messaging is where free speech is truly (and should always be) protected. If you take a megaphone into Union Square, and start hurling slurs and threats at people, you will be removed or arrested the same way you'd be removed from Twitter for the same actions.
On Twitter you're not talking to "somebody", you're talking to "everybody". If you want to be controversial, take it to private conversation. Causing people pain in public isn't related at all to free speech – it's just another form of harassment.
The manner in which emails are classified as spam is something that will always be highly subjective, leaving room for malevolent manipulation to occur. I'm fact, there may be precedent for this dating back to the 2016 election. There was a brief period where all Trump campaign emails were being flagged as spam by Gmail's filter algorithms. Google had plausible deniability in stating that it was a glitch caused by their algorithm's ability to globally flag senders whose emails are overwhelmingly deleted before being opened by users.
Oh wait.
(They aren't quite directly comparable, but they are for the point you are making, where one side of the equation is popular attention...)
I already know people in security who get death threats. I can't even imagine what it'd be like for people in moderation.
It has been disconcerting to me for a long time now, even back when I was told that I do not know how the internet works when I foresaw the very outcome we are currently in, back about 20 years ago now. What has really happened here, is a kind of fascism (the alignment of state and industry) not by the grass roots so much as it was approached in the past, but through a top down consolidation, concentration, and now ever increasing and tightening control over all aspects and manners of freedom and liberty, under the guise of doing things for others' best interests, which of course always align more closely with the interests of the power seeking than the blissfully unaware recipients of this benevolent good intention of the power hungry.
I do not foresee a positive future at this point, because the very mindset of the trend curve has solidly crossed with the power broker curve, and there is ever weaning realization that the only way to resolve these matters in anything but a violent manner is that everyone be allowed the God given rights that the US Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments to the Constitution) prohibits the government from violating.
Those include free speech and assembly (of any kind, regardless of whether you agree with it), freedom to arms to protect yourself from the very government mob that demands to take the right to protect yourself from it (it's a self-fulfilling and self-validating argument that is rather genius), and other inalienable rights that are innate to actual Americans (and anyone who were to adopt the same) and God given (which you presumably should not and do not prescribe to if you do not believe in God from which they are unavoidably and declaratively derived) that are not necessary to be listed here for reasons of brevity and their only tangential relation to the topic.
It has always surprised me, and it is one of the most interesting questions for me, how that a presumably extremely logical and systematic cohort of humans as the ones assembled in this forum, would seemingly lack any semblance of a capacity to understand the consequences of making fundamental changes to a system, in what appears to be some bizarre and inverted assumption that no change to a system will in any way result in negative outcomes. Unless of course the very prime assumption is a desire to sabotage the system, whether you are a knowing and willing participant, or just a placed saboteur ... a rube, not in any way understanding that he was placed to spread his negative impact on the system from within.
Lots of fascists demand freedom of speech. And what do they do with that freedom? Assemble mobs online to harass people who say things they disagree with. Or take control and then ban books and “intellectuals” and so forth.
If you don’t like the example of “fascists,” there are plenty of other examples you could pick, like press barons. History abounds with examples of people using democracy to acquire enough power to uninstall democracy.
This is a hard problem. There are no easy or simple or ideologically pure solutions. Absolute freedom of speech leads to people using that freedom to deny other people that freedom. Absolute freedom to own a weapon leads to people using that freedom to deny other people the freedom to live, much less own a weapon of their own. And so on. And so forth.
TL;DR:
There are no simple solutions to problems involving systems where people are prepared to act in bad faith to abuse the simple solutions.
My personal claim: The above does not mean, of course, that there are no solutions, or that the only options are “unrestricted and absolute freedom” versus tyranny. It’s just that there are no simple solutions.
——
Related:
There is a reason that we are having this discussion on a forum that explicitly does NOT grant unrestricted free speech.
Let’s ask ourselves this question: What would Hacker News look like if we turned of spam filtering, moderation, flagging, banning, sorting comments by votes, greying out downvoted messages, &c.?
What value would it have as a community? As a source of information?
Would you find yourself feeling smarter and better educated about an issue after reading the comments on a subject? Or would you feel like you lost 50 points of IQ to toxicity?
Would you consider it a good use of your time to independently verify each and every claim people made? What about disproving known rubbish claims?
How would you feel about logging in every day and having the exact same debate with the exact same people who seem to have an infinite amount of time available to make false claims?
Edit:
Also, it always riles me up when someone refers to social media as a “main communication” provider. What fraction of the population gets its political discourse off of Twitter?
I’m not sure how but I want that fraction to get before appropriate rights are defined and adopted.
The US common carrier rules were only enacted in 1934 [1] so it took a while before phone companies were forced to respect some US rights. Twitter is only 15 years old so it’s likely that this private company (and others) will be regulated just like the private telephone companies were regulated.
I had hoped that technology had advanced enough so respecting human rights would be embedded into the design. But now I think it will take laws and regulations which will inevitably, and sadly I think, also squelch innovation.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274564/monthly-active-tw...
Twitter themselves say monetizable active users are around 40% of worldwide monthly active users. Your statista link links to that. That takes your percentage of US down to 8%. Account for Twitter exaggerating or missing out on anything and the number of users who don’t follow political discourse and you’re likely below 5%.
As I understand it, whether social media companies are platforms or publishers forms the actual core and substance of this debate about "free speech."
edit Apparently there is no legal distinction between a platform and a publisher? It looks like this article may explain the confusion that I myself had. => https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190613/03172142391/once-...
This is wrong. There is no such distinction between platforms and publishers and the opposite is actually true. The law explicitly states that website owners are not responsible for content provided by other parties and are also explicitly permitted to curate their platforms for what they deem to be objectionable content.
To whom is Twitter responsible? If shareholders/investors then it should do whatever seems most likely to make it the most money. If "users" then it should do whatever seems most likely to make the most users happy.
There are valid moral arguments on both side of the censorship debate, and ultimately it comes down to subjective judgement and a gut call by twitter management. There's a lot of people claiming moral imperatives and "what is right" as if "right" was an absolute and not like, their opinion, man.
Which "the old" specifically? What did my great grandfather use to directly contact the Henry Ford and get into a flame war with him about how his newfangled "horseless carriage" was killing his equestrian breeding business?
What bizarro ideas people have.
Rights exist outside of technologies, technologies, media, etc are just different spaces to apply them.
Twitter, for example, can't treat people of color differently, just because it's a "new technology" and "thus" they should not have any expectation of equality there.
They have the right to be treated as equals, regardless of whether it's a new technology that does the treatment or an old one.
(Note also that what century/decade old laws based on a 3 centuries old constitution that's held as some holy scripture say, are not the be all, end all, and are not necessarily the same thing as what should be right in 2019. I say this cause Americans have the tendency to view everything under this lens, as if they can't possibly conceive of any improvements there, or as if that's even relevant to a global discussion).
>Also, it always riles me up when someone refers to social media as a “main communication” provider. What fraction of the population gets its political discourse off of Twitter?
A large enough for it to be actively targeted by political figures, political campaign advertising, and polling companies (heck, even foreign agents), and a large enough for it to have a big share in shaping public opinion.
So there's that.
At least in Germany, people can sue Twitter and Facebook to have their accounts re-opened. Of course, this option reduces the value of due process rights as one has to be able to fund a lawyer and the court fees...
Because combined, Google, Twitter, and Facebook have an effective monopoly on modern public discourse.
which extensively quotes Twitter and gets much of their leads and sources from Twitter.
Moderation tools have been weaponized in the troll propaganda war.
Post an insightful and highly liked reply to a controversial topic, watch the likes roll in, and then suddenly go dark after about three minutes.
View the thread incognito, and the popular comment cannot be found.
Trolls brigade-block-and-report views they don't like, and your reply gets memory-holed until a human moderator can review it.
Hours or days later your comment gets restored, but the damage is done.
Of course troll armies are mining old tweets for any violation, so they can remove you from the conversation and manufacture the illusion of consensus.
Comparisons with the old media always neglect to mention the unique protections these platforms enjoy. Unlike the old media, they aren't responsible for the content they publish.
If they'd prefer to be treated like publishers, not platforms, they should also have the responsibility of publishers, not the protections of platforms.
But as long as they remain platforms, they have a unique responsibility to respect the freedom of speech of everyone.
As always, the question becomes: who decides which people are to be silenced?
Why? Who cares if someone gets banned from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc? It isn't a big deal. I can see it as annoying, but it doesn't truly matter to anyone without some type of social media addiction. If "censorship" is the problem, we should support the establishment of government run internet forums that would be legally obligated to the serve the interest of the people rather than trying to arbitrarily steer certain popular websites into moderation strategies that don't align with their business or political prerogatives.
Ultimately, companies don't exist in a vacuum. If they don't adhere to the political will of the society they operate in,
There's no reason that those whims must be executed through market instead of through government.
If we want to reclassify social media as common carrier we need regulation to do so but that is not how the internet or social media companies work today. Sadly the internet in of itself doesn't even fall under common carrier.
The problematic case here is that all other common carrier are funded through service chargers where social media is funded through advertising and other revenue streams.
That said it’s not like social media companies aren’t at fault here too they hide behind the notion that they are a common carrier or a publisher when it suits them as in when they don’t want to be directly liable for the content on their platform.
On the other hand they moderate content to appease advertisers even when there is no direct pressure to do so like in this case.
My personal opinion is that Twitter should not ban anyone, if the Twits are sufficiently offensive (not in a personal manner but rather a legal one) then law enforcement should handle it like it would handle any other type of abusive or offensive communication.
If I send you a death threat via the post the postal service won’t ban me the police might come tho if you report me.
Twitter does not have a monopoly over internet communication.
Twitter is a crucial social communications platform for large enough portion of some societies to treat them as a monopoly.
Twitter is not a monopoly or a common carrier. They are a website with a complimentary app that will show you website data.
Because people always have control over the companies serving them, as it should be. Without people exerting control, we won't have - antitrust regulations, civil rights legislations, ADA, EPA regulations, Clean Water Act, Financial regulations etc. And I believe those regulations were essential towards making a better society.
Mind you, I am not advocating for a communism-style abolishing of private property. But neither do I want to see a libertarian wild west of no government control. That is just other extreme. What we have currently seems to be a good trade-off, where companies have a lot of freedoms but political will can step in occasionally to demand changes to the way they operate.
The US is not a democracy. It is a Constitutional Republic. The Constitution limits the Governmental Powers to make laws restricting speech, the Constitution does not give individuals the right to use corporate places of business or platforms to disseminate their speech.
Twitter shouldn't be able to, either.
This is facile: it is both, and there is no contradiction.
> the Constitution does not give individuals the right to use corporate places
Certainly it does: the right of free association. But that's not what you meant; you meant that the Constitution does not compel the corporate place to allow individual speech. Which is true but incomplete, since we have other laws currently about a related concept, "common carriers". The debate is much higher level than the Constitution: it's about how far to extend the idea that a private conveyance has become so essential to public use that it is subject to regulation. (Meaning, yes, that some of the private entity's rights are curtailed.)
It is basic 7th grade civics, Section 4 of the Constitution:
>The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government
Founding Father John Adams:
>"No determinations are carried, it is true, in a simple representative democracy, but by consent of the majority or their representatives."
The word "democracy" appearing in the Constitution: 0
Extra fun fact, the US is not the first Constitutional Republic, it is the 2nd behind San Marino.
> there is no contradiction
If you used democratic republic there is not, where the people vote and elect the representative leaders, then there is no contradiction. But democracy comes from Ancient Greece where all citizens with a right to vote directly decided the issues with votes, issues were not decided by elected representative. Its a significantly different form of government not just a typical HN pedantic point.
>the right of free association
The right to associate has nothing to do with accessing corporate property to disseminate your speech.
Everyone is compelled to use Twitter. Its success, influence, and profit, derive largely from its semi-official adoption by so many corporations and government actors.
It isn't private, and if it wants to be, it can't be used for public business.
I don't know what your comment added to the discussion. Does anyone know?
Your position is basically "I think platforms should be compelled to host every bit of nonsense emitted by every user." The freedom is provided by the multitude of choices!
I think the idea you can make rules for speech that are impartial and universally accepted is an insane idea which shows no signs of being tractable [1]. Despite attempts to quantify speech, every moderation decision is arbitrary at some level, and preserving choice of moderators seems much more important than arguing over rules.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/world/facebook-moderators...
The most recent one I'm aware of was Apple removing them from the app store, which here was a worthless virtue signal because Gab is now entirely on the Fediverse - the app was a clone of a common github repo, of which there are dozens not being removed.
So it really does seem like any real competition is not allowed anymore.
> If we're going to have censorship on the big platforms
We're not "going" to have it. We already have it. Well, maybe not ISPs, but definitely "Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc."
> It's not wrong for Twitter to have rules to protect the weak from the strong, and individuals from the mob
When Gandhi was asked "what do you think about Western civilization", he reportedly said "I think it'd be a good idea". In the same vein, it might be a good idea (not sure, but maybe) for Twitter to have rules to protect individuals from the mob and weak from the strong, but whatever Twitter has now definitely does nothing of the sort. I am not sure if it is possible at all to have such rules, but even if it were, Twitter does not seem to be interested in the least.
If the truly are trying to scrub hate from their platform, I applaud their effort, but they'll never succeed. Hate is too hard to define and so subtle you can't actually remove it all.
If they just want to remove bad words, why not use literal black-text censoring in situations like this, like TV has done for years? Give this user the option of preserving their moronic comment, hate and all, without the bad words that I'm sure advertisers are asking to be removed.
That sort of mindless focus on bad words that might make people uncomfortable instead of you know - actual problems has been with us for centuriea unfortunately and has gotten better compared to regularly enforced obscenity laws - which are fucking obscene to anyone who stops to use their fucking brain for once.
So we were spending all of this money and oppressing with violence because a bunch of people are offended because they were told to be offended? That said use of resources could be used on /anything fucking else/ like patroling, doing reviews of random ceiminal sentences is actual fucking obscenity.
I'm not talking about obfuscated messages. If one were to post "I love you no matter where you fucking come from", they're not being hateful, but they are being vulgar. Is that allows?
On the other hand, if one were to post "I truly believe that all people who are not white are inferior beings that should leave my country", then there's zero vulgarity here but clearly a hateful horrible person I'd like to avoid at all costs.
If the problem is vulgarity, then the solution is well-understood: censor the bad words, let the rest of the message stay. If the problem is hate, then the problem is that it's impossible to ever really get rid of it.
I suspect in the author's case, the problem is that they used vulgarity 9 years ago and the system finally picked up on it.
> Fuck my fucking face I’m about to get skinny as fuck
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/09/dont-worr...
Throwing HATE at a US politician during a US election in public is foreign interference and should be removed on that basis.
That depends whether you are in-group with the censors or out-group. If you're in, you could get away with a lot - from very base and crude language (excluding the taboo words, yes) to graphically describing and encouraging grave bodily harm, murder, rape, etc. If you're out, then you better be extra super vanilla squeaky nice.
One of the reasons that this feels so novel is that this is an example of ex post facto enforcement. In this case, Twitter is punishing the user for an action performed at a point in time before such an action was punishable. (In fact, I haven't checked - it may have been punishable, but the punishment was not usually enforced, which is a separate issue of selective enforcement.) The US Constitution prevents both Congress and the individual States from passing ex post facto laws that punish individuals for actions committed before such action was illegal. Obviously, private corporations are not bound by the same laws as the government. So, as platforms like Twitter continue to update their policies and enforcement mechanisms in response to issues such as hate, and as these definitions are broadened, cases such as this are likely to become more common.
A lot of people my age love The Office, but some of the earlier episodes... well, they haven't really aged well. The show was great at the time, but the first few seasons today would be a giant #MeToo fiasco. Culture changes and moves on, and what was acceptable then probably isn't acceptable now, but that doesn't (shouldn't?) mean Steve Carrel gets blackballed for the comedy he did at the time.
Early Disney cartoons were flat-out racist, but they're still available with a historical context disclaimer that basically says "We disavow everything in here, but it's a greater shame to pretend that this never happened so here it is for the historical record."
One of the most interesting conversations about social media right now I think is how does someone apologize for what they've done, and do it in a genuine and authentic way that can be accepted. When you serve prison time, the idea is you pay your debt to society and move on. With social media, I don't think we've yet figured out how to say "yes, I was a stupid angry person back then but that's not who I am now". Part of the reason is it's really difficult to figure out who's being authentic and who's trying to half-heartedly weasel themselves out of something.
And I don't think you CAN do that on social media because the only way to really make that decision is to know someone in more depth than some multiple of 140 characters. It's a decision that can't be made with the small bite-sized serotonin pings that we've started to define our relationships and judgements around. We've become jacks of all relationships, masters of none.
Of course, that doesn't mean we still can't criticize Twitter - but walking away should be the first step.
Internet communities should aspire to be more like local communities. If you're a jerk in real life, people will show you the door.
Making this about grand abstract concepts like free speech or censorship is internet fun for people who like to debate. But it's overcomplicating the situation. Twitter is just showing a jerk the door. They can rejoin the community after an act of contrition.
The nine year thing is misdirection. Twitter's search algorithm in 2019 will still gladly show that tweet if your search term is just so. If tweets are the inventory on Twitter's store shelves, why would any business want to display the tweet in question at any time?
Academic institutions and governments have already hooked themselves up to the Twitter fire hose. All tweets are saved for archival purposes. Twitter itself doesn't have to muddy its product to provide an archival experience.
This is curatorship; not censorship. Unfortunately reality isn't ~~outrageous~~ _engagement-inducing_ enough to make the front page news.
It's not immediately apparent that he's from and lives in New Zealand unless you really dig through his content, something most readers won't do. In aggregate, this might influence American voters into thinking there's some substance to anti-Palin rhetoric.
Isn't that a form of foreign influence?
Nothing. It's not a bad tweet. It's not threatening violence. It's not racist. It's not hateful towards a particular group. It's just a criticism wrapped in an insult, and frankly, not even a comparatively harsh insult. It's sad that some people think it should be removed.
I don’t think you’re going to convince too many people it’s perfectly OK to shout profanities and insults at people.
They've have been thrown out of the store for sure. They might also have been banned from the store, depending on how it escalated and how they reacted to being thrown out.
The police would have been called if they were banned, and maybe even if they were just thrown out for the day.
Twitter has basically done the same, without the cops. And they even said how to get un-banned, which was to remove the comments that violate their TOS.
I can see the appeal, but I'm not sure about this. There are tons of conversations that are (to my mind) acceptable on Twitter that would be improper on other public settings.
For example there are lots of security vulnerability discussions on Twitter that I think would get you in trouble if you were loudly talking about them while waiting in line at the bank. I've seen impolite and vulgar jokes that are acceptable to share with friends who might follow you on Twitter, but would cause some pearl clutching at my local Whole Foods.
The problem (to my eye) is that Twitter is public, but public behavior isn't universal.
If someone made this tweet now and had their account suspended or the tweet in question was deleted but the account was not suspended, I doubt that we would be discussing this.
I guarantee you you have said something in the past worth banning you from multiple forums by today's standards.
This cumulative outrage recorder doesn't make any sense.
People often play the "it's not misogynist speech" game, but the first thing you did was to dismiss her based on her gender. Your fault here is more than "two party hate," and you still haven't owned up to your misogynist behavior in my opinion.
I think you're missing the point here. It was published 9 years ago. He didn't continue "distributing" it, he published it once and Twitter distributed it for 9 years.
The point, as I understand it, is that Twitter passively agreed that the tweet was just fine for their platform for 9 years. Then, after doing so, their standards changed. Fine, standards are supposed to change. However rather than simply delete the tweet, they suspended the account.
So, in effect, "your account did something that is against the rules, before it was against the rules."
I won't wade into the politics here, but I'm curious how you know that he dismissed her ideas because of her gender? Is there any reason to think that he would have embraced her ideas if she was a he?
Who remembers what they tweeted 9 years ago? Are we all expected to constantly prune our tweets to conform to new rules? Can we even navigate through 9 years of tweets easily?
If Sarah Palin was a "he", he wouldn't have called her a "cunt" and a "whore".
And yes, he continued to distribute it. He put it in a content-distribution platform and left it there, despite the ability to take it down at any time. The fact that he never got called out for it before is not very persuasive to me, any more than "but I've been an asshole for years, it's not fair to call me out for it today."
OP is probably not a terrible person, but this article is not what taking responsibility for your past bad behavior looks like.
I do think that going back a decade with an algorithm and getting people to clean up tweets that likely match a regex filter is whitewashing and it does make twitter a less valuable historical resource. It's a totally different argument from the normal you should be able to say what you want - because I would support censorship of such tweets in the present.
If they want to enforce a policy consistently and not have to face constant complaints, then I don't think grandfathering in old violations after some arbitrary date is going to work.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten,
every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building
has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is
continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.
Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is
always right.”
The question of whether the content flagging was automatic is an interesting one. In other instances, such as James Woods (who is still in Twitter purgatory) [0], the message he received doesn't have any language that indicates that it was manually reported and flagged, which it most certainly was.
Given how slow Twitter has been to roll out features in general, and Jack Dorsey's continued insistence on avoiding heavy handed moderation and policies, I have to doubt that Twitter rolled out an automated content system with such high potential of being an embarrassment. I don't know the author, but just because he isn't a frequent/recent Twitter user doesn't mean that an angry Internet mob from some other community hasn't decided to target his Internet accounts in general.
[0] https://twitter.com/Millerita/status/1119655394899415040?ref...
Maybe twitter could have given him a warning about his tweet and ask if he would like to delete it before the instaban algorithm hit
Getting a message saying something like "this message violates the rules today, so we're going to delete it" or "delete this message within a week or we'll have to ban your account" would seem more reasonable to me than immediate ex post facto enforcement.
That raises a bunch of different questions about what Twitter are doing to change history, and the way they represent their platform, but those are separate to the banning of users based on their history.
Besides, this might be motivated by Twitter acting on a complaint. It could be that Sarah Palin (or someone representing her) complained about the tweet recently, in which case Twitter need to deal with that now.
There is a very reasonable middle ground here. No one is demanding we all submit to corporate thought police. No one is being shunned from social media access without recourse. Just make a minimal effort to conform to routine societal decorum, and you can shit on Sarah Palin all you want.
Absolutely, I have blog posts from 2001 I leave up that are absolutely horrid.
In 2001 I was a 16 year old, who's father had died 12 days before his 13th birthday and was moved to another school a few months later where he had no friends and fell in with the punk/goth crowd. I didn't care about school, all I cared about was music and getting high or running around shows or the mall while tripping. I said stupid shit on livejournal under a username only my friends knew, mostly complaining about my mother and school. I now host those on RyanMercer.com, wholly attributed to me.
That's who I was when I was 16, it's not who I am now.
Now I post about problems we face as a civilization, I post about things that interest me, I post about things that scare me, I post about how we need to come together and put aside foolish things to focus on ensuring a better future for ourselves and our offspring but I'm not going to hide who I was 18 years ago. Now I put thought into my posts, I don't rush to a computer to type "oh my god I hate them all blah blah blah raging against society", I'm not going to try and cover that up as that's part of my experience, who I was is part of who I am, if anything it shows that people can mature.
It’s honestly a very immature tweet. It’s something I wouldn’t say
today. I have personally grown past the hate of the two party system.
I feel like I have a clearer and more mature view on American
elections, as well as seeing past the endless media designed to keep
most people angry. This tweet was from a different era in my life. I’m
not proud of it, yet it is a part of my history. Furthermore, it’s
nearly a decade old.
Or that by allowing them to stay on the platform, they provide an example that people can temper their political extremism over time by maturation and introspection, thereby disproving that the flyswatter techniques you seemingly prefer for the moderation of discourse may be ill-suited to actually promoting healthy discourse?
I'm not following the logic.
Then I read the actual tweet and lost all sympathy. It’s just so horrible, and, I think the author actually shows a lack of growth by dismissing it as this 9 year old “immature” mistake.
The tweet is hateful.
I do find someone old enough to attend a university, calling an elected official stupid cunt and a whore, horrible.
Congrats on your new political maturity, but no mention or reflection on the deeply sexist language you used makes me think that you haven’t grown at all.
'I have personally grown past the hate of the two party system'.
No, your 'hate of the two party system' was not what the problem was and I am pretty sure you are smart enough to figure that out. You were not locked for tweeting against the two party system. Let's not pretend this ban had anything to do with politics. If anything Twitter is full of left-leaning folks many of whom would celebrate such juvenile and crass language.
Talk about erasing the past. I dearly hope knowledge of what came before iPhone and Android isn't washed over like all the non-Apple 8-bit computers.
Today virtually everyone who's 14+ years old has a one, it wasn't like that at all in 2008. And the definition of "smart" definitely changed too.
Just like the age of tablets started when the average 40yo mom started using ipads, not when Microsoft showed their prototype in 2000. Or the age of electric cars didn't start at the end of the 19th century, but a few years ago.
Twitter is a for-profit company offering a product (its customers) to advertisers. As such, they get to delete any content whatsoever, regardless of the reason. They happen to be using a policy that will cause some accounts to be locked. This is going to get a lot worse because advertisers loath anything that doesn't conform.
Twitter and Facebook aren't the problem - they're symptoms of the terrible, low-hanging monetization fruit on today's web.
There are solutions. One is to stop criticizing Twitter for being beholden to its advertisers and instead build/participate in censorship-resistant platforms.
That's going to result in loss of reach, at least for a time. Then again, so does getting blocked.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten,
every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building
has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is
continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.
Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is
always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984
Many of us identify with the author and most content created on social media years ago have no reason to stay around.
It's dishonest, lacks any legitimacy, and it is the root of the culture war. Words only have the consequences the reader or listener gives them, they do not have intrinsic consequences in themselves. The fantasy that mere belief is transformative or redeeming is a seductive deception.
Platforms should demonstrate they are principled before merely driving certain interests, even (especially) if they are convinced those interests are the right ones.
IMHO the fact that the biggest font in this article is used to reprint the reprehensible statement is a clue that this author is actually resisting growth by implying what he said isn't actually that bad, and twitter should keep showing it to more strangers. Real growth would look like deleting the tweet yourself and looking for traces of it in your current language!
Edit: It was one week before the Australian federal election, which does make me suspicious as to the reasoning of my suspension
Edit 2: Since there's a slim chance that someone from Twitter will see this message, if you're able to see why I got suspended, could you Signal me the reasoning (+61-400-777-227)
> As a result we've locked your account.
> What you can do:
> To unlock your account, you must do the following:
> Remove Tweets that violate our rules.
Can you actually remove tweets when your account is locked?
E.g When Google locks your account you lost everything. You certainly cannot talk to them, remove any violating content or fix things. As it looks (unable and unwilling to test), Twitter implemented locking by just prohibiting to post new stuff, but allows you to fix stuff. Which is very fine to me, compared to Google.
When James Gunn was fired from Guardians for something he said in a tweet years before I was dumbfounded. Now Twitter is actively policing old posts?!
People change, nations change. Violent criminals can become bastions of peace and philanthropy. Why is society, or a company, persecuting people for tweets that are years old. If someone says something awful today, deal with it, but 9 years ago?! If there's an offensive 9 year old tweet, delete it and send the user an email saying their tweet was deleted for violating such and such policy but locking an account 9 years after the fact?!
Yes, yes, "everything on the internet is permanent". But every one of my social media streams could benefit from a "Automatically delete after one month" setting.
We grow, we learn. Why not let our social media represent who we are, not who we were?
Not saying it's easy to always find the right line on what should be banned and what not but for clear hate-speech you don't have to provide a platform and if you do, you should be measured in that context.
I did this a while back and am thankful I did. I seemed to say a lot of things that were passable on Twitter 10 years ago but I would not dare to say now :-D (Nothing extreme, but things like "$some_technology f'in sucks" and such.)
I'm very surprised this is called "hateful conduct". It's merely vulgar.
(Edit: And to be clear, I would have been a-okay with Twitter having banned the user at the time, for the content in question!)
Twitter was asking for a phone number to unlock the account. And since I never gave them my phone number, any number could have work. Which mean that if somebody really hijacked my account to spam, they could have just definitely take it for themselves ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . I saw this as what it was: just a attempt at taking even more personal data from me.
I never unlocked the account and I don't use Twitter anymore. And honestly, it has been great. Twitter is just full of people talking about thinks they don't have any knowledge about, overly emotional reaction and everybody trying to be more extreme than the other. Even when being very careful about who you follow, you are not protected since Twitter started to display Tweet from the people followed by the people you followed randomly.
> Is there a list of gender-neutral insults that we can refer to for compliance reasons?
The thing is that even if there is a list like this now, in 9 years saying 'woman' might not even be acceptable because it has 'man' in it. If 'woman' isn't something we say in 9 years, I don't think twitter, in 9 years, should start banning everyone who every tweeted it now.
One of the dangers about doing business with these behemoths.
The obvious and most consistent counterclaim is that these are "private entities who can choose whom to deal with".
That statement is predicated on the facetious assertion that a corporation is a human, and should be treated as such and provided latitude as one. It obviously is not. And with their clout in personnel, money, lawyers, and more - they are a uberhuman.
The path forward seems clear. Corporations should not be treated the same as real humans. And their powers should be limited to prevent these formations of super-countries with draconian and arbitrary laws, just because technology allows them so.
Potentially that Palin is a woman, they've decided that 'cunt' could be based on gender, however I received the same email from Twitter for a (heat of the moment) tweet about Ajit Pai where I called him a cunt, and he is not a woman, so I don't understand their policy. They wouldn't unblock my account until I deleted the tweet.
In the end I just gave up on Twitter. Sad, cause I liked to use it mainly for myself, to follow some people that interest me and to keep a kind of "bookmarks on my thoughts".
Thing is, he's suggesting Mastodon as an alternative... there you would not only get banned for calling a woman a whore, you'd probably get doxxed and then swatted too.
Also calling them a 'cunt'.
Attitudes like the above are why ordinary men and women don't want to become politicians - it's assumed to be OK to insult them in any way. Why not just call Palin a hypocrite?
You should be able to criticise politicians. However if you want better politicians, screaming that they're cunts and whores instead of communicating like an adult won't make that happen.
Edit: replying to below due to rate limit
> If someone cant handle a verbal insult over the internet, I don't think they are fit for office
But it's not 'a verbal insult'. It's thousands. Most humans can't handle a thousand insults a week. It wears at you - SEAL training involves simulating humiliating experiences because most people don't have the mental strength to not crumble. I'd take a bet that includes both me and you.
Edit 2: replying to Iamthirsty
OK. You don't think being constantly insulted would have a chilling effect on someone becoming a representative because ... people can insult people in other professions?
It seems like you believe I think it's hard to work a job where you may be insulted.
This isn't correct. I think it's hard to work a job where you may be insulted a thousand times a day.
That doesn't justify the toxic behavior at all, it is just a statement about reality. And the rude tweets are the lowest form of that, at the higher levels it turns into physical assault and sometimes even murder attempts and the occasional actual murder.
However, when you become a public figure and especially a political one people may feel more entitled to lash out against you, as you literally hold power over their lives, even if they themselves may disagree with you (as in, voted for someone else or the like.)
> If someone cant handle a verbal insult over the internet, I don't think they are fit for office
Then many people immediately jumped on him and made the assumption that he is justifying insults or "toxic behavior". I do not see how this would be the case. Care to explain?
It is not a justification of insults or toxic behavior. He is merely pointing out the fact that if you cannot deal with insults, then this and that. Toxic behavior is, well, toxic, but you have to be able to handle them in a manner that is, say, not self-destructive, while at the same time you being against said toxic behavior.
I agree with him. If you cannot deal with insults thrown at you on the Internet or in real life and it leads to, say, psychological turmoil or whatever, then you should probably do something to alleviate this negative effect insults have on you. This does not justify insults or toxic behaviors. Do you disagree?
You can insult anyone, for any reason—and people do all the time, regardless whether the person is a politician or not, a public figure or not, etc..
Sure, morally it might be unjust to insult a politician, or anyone for that matter. Yet the cool part about the United States is: it’s OK!
Although being a politician, and secondarily a public figure, makes the insults as public as the praises so much so that you, the observer, are more aware of them as a result, doesn’t mean that the same thing wouldn’t happen to anyone else.
Dude, no, no it’s not ok. It’s not ok to have a culture where insults are encounter and ok. Insults can quickly lead to threats. Are often lies and manipulation. Are often racial or sexist or homophobic. And we as a society shouldn’t just stand by and allow it. What is gained by allowing insults? Honest question. Why should we be ok with them?
Now i do have to say what consistories and insult is not the easiest to define. But calling a politician a “whore” is clearly an baseless insult and a lie that brings nothing to any discussion.
On a social level, there is something to be gained from insults: authenticity. Perhaps it comes down to personal preference, but I would rather live in a society where people can speak their mind (and potentially face social backlash for it) than a society where everything is artificially sanitized. Empathy is great to strive for on a personal level, but forcing the appearance of empathy just leads to strained smiles.
My father was the Mayor of a medium sized city and stirred controversy from time to time, and was a favorite target of the local press. He loved it- he took some of the cartoons most designed to poke at him and framed them and put them on the wall in his office.
The give and take is part of the vital breath of democracy- thin skin isn't a useful trait to have in the public square.
He is still beloved by many of the same press on a personal level due to his steady persona and good humor, regardless of the level of agreement with his political views, something sadly missing in the modern political firmament.
I don’t think you understood my comment as a whole. Although it may be morally unjust, it is legal, and therefore “OK” to say whatever you want (bar a call-to-action). So, again, while it may be unjust, in the eyes of the law here, it’s OK. You can’t fordably control discourse—that leads to more negatives than positives. :)
If you look at the careers and upbringing of most high-ranking politicians, I doubt the most obvious distinction to common folk would be particular thick skin -- heck, the sitting POTUS isn't exactly thick skinned and that's arguably the most publicly exposed office in the world.
Hint: it's wealth. The distinction is coming from wealth and having connections with wealthy people who supply you with funding and influence.
White male politicians don’t get much flak for being white or male.
Black women politician would get so much for both her race and gender.
As a women I’d never want to be in the public eye for this reason.
"Stupid white men" was a huge success a few years back.
Obviously you've never had an account on Twitter
According to the screenshot, the author is free to have his account unlocked after the tweet is removed.
Learn from it, remove the post, and move on. Not sure why this is news. It's a little bit of a narcissistic post, I think (A sentiment of "How dare you call me out, I'm an atheist who calls right-wingers names online") and I'm not sure why this is news except some people feel that more right-wing hatred is being suspended than left.
I'm not sure what the solution is, even recent articles on proposed social media legislation[1] led to comments that Trump is trying to "censor the internet".