They're not applying restrictions to the accounts of politicians they _don't like_, they're applying restrictions to politicians that _break Twitter's sitewide rules_.
A politician doesn't want to get restricted? Follow the rules, like everyone else.
Its totally in Twitters right to do it though. If politicians and/or society at large disagree about about not centralizing all your communications on the websites of international corporations.
Perhaps the Hong Kong protesters opinions should be fall under this new rule. Because of violence and everything.
Turkey has called the Kurds terrorists. America may view them differently.
Turkey's president literally just ran an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal defending his invasion of Syria and telling tall tales of Turkey's humanitarian mission and unique effort to fix migration, violence and instability.
Twitter is swamped with "bots" (be they actual automated accounts, throwaways, state actors or regime-friendly humans) posting and re-posting fraudulent news stories, lies and plain old propaganda in favor of all kinds of national interests and political leanings.
I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter in an attempt at "corporate impartiality" would be more inclined to go after the Kurds or Hong Kong protesters than Turkish and Chinese slurs, dehumanisation and calls for violence. After all, there are probably more "people" reporting these accounts than reporting the various propaganda outlets.
- Isolated incidents of violence on behalf of the ideology?
- A "sufficiently large" number of incidents on behalf of the ideology? If so, could you elaborate on "sufficiently large" as you see it?
- A general tacit approval of violence?
- An explicit approval of violence?
- Something else?
The problem I think that many see is there tends to be extensive cognitive dissonance. People apply one set of standards to groups they like, and another to ones that they don't. I think you'll find that in trying to answer my above question it becomes quite difficult to include the groups you don't like, while excluding the groups you do like. That's even when my framing above which is unrealistically softball. For instance I didn't even mention things like harassment, destruction of property, etc which I think we should also generally be intolerant of - even when it's a group we like engaging in such things.
The video was widely shared by protester-friendly accounts celebrating the act because several arrested protesters had recently turned up dead or disappeared.
It's very easy to construct a narrative portraying the protesters as violent criminals if you start from the assumption that all police violence is justified and resisting any form of police violence is not.
EDIT: Oh and the problem with Pepe wasn't that "Pepe is racist because someone used it that way", it's that Pepe became popular on 4chan and was then co-opted for racist imagery and embraced by actual racists who then used it unironically, so it eventually became a calling card.
Likewise the "ok hand" gesture and emote was initially planted as a "hoax" white supremacist symbol by 4chan members but then actual white supremacists started using it, first ironically as a nod to the "hoax", then unironically to demonstrate their affiliations to others.
The problem with these "dog whistles" is that they're intentionally ambiguous and can be entirely innocent in the right context. Of course not everyone posting "funny green frog memes" or using the "ok hand" gesture is a nazi, but if someone who's already suspiciously copying far-right rhetoric randomly flashes the ok hand in a photo op, or uses Pepe (or the less subtle NPC meme) they're most likely trying to say something while retaining plausible deniability.
Also, I do not want twitter, a private company, to be the gatekeeper, a gatekeeper we cannot observe or control. Especially not then the Saudis invested $300m in that company (or a reddit which had an $150m investment by essentially China).
Freedom of speech is not absolute, but the limits shouldn't be set by some corporation, but by the People.
Keeping hate groups off of Twitter does more to inhibit their growth than your attempts to debate them.
Or ask the Brits how banning the IRA went for them.
The point is to prevent them feeling victimized and recruiting other people by stating they are victimized and censored. Do not underestimate the underdog effect.
The point is to engage them, debunk them, as thoroughly and publicly as possible to disinfect people who are on the verge of being recruited.
The point is not to insult and belittle and censor that blue collar worker deplorable because that person voiced some concerns about immigration for example (even misguided or even racist), because when you do, you create another Trump voter who might even go to a White Supremacists rally later, because at least those people take that person "seriously" (or at least pretend they do) instead of throwing a wave of name calling and open hatred.
The point is to have give the nazis and also the disenfranchised but usually also very hateful and misguided young, mostly white, mostly male fellow human being some people so eagerly call "incels" a place where they can vent their bullshit instead of venting it on the 8ch clones populated only with like-minded people pushing each other further and further, and also keep to an eye on them.
And maybe, just maybe, by not always being a total asshole to them (even tho they are total assholes to other people), not going for the easy "you're an incel nazi scum" kill, you will brick by brick dismantle their wall of mouthfoaming ideology.
Like this guy does rather successfully: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis You might know him already; he is a the black musician who went out and actually talked to KKK members and now has a nice collection of KKK robes from people he convinced to quit.
Deplatforming works. People like Milo Y were raking in massive amounts of cash, then faded into obscurity when they were deplatformed.
On the other hand, the AfD has received ridiculous amounts of airtime in Germany, frequently setting the topics for public debate formats like Hart aber fair or Anne Will and instead of becoming less popular now made gains in almost every election. Indeed, most political conversations in the public media now either directly reference them or (un)intentionally copy their rhetoric around problems.
Compare that with the widespread distaste for the NPD before the AfD showed up, or look at how the total crapshoot of investigations into the NSU terrorist group or more recently the Identitarian terrorists is reported by the media and treated by politicians -- then compare it with the coverage of the RAF.
Also, Germany banned "symbols hostile to the constitution", not neo-nazis. There were attempts to outlaw the NPD for violating the constitution, but they were completely botched by the investigators' reliance on informants and possibly agents provocateur. The NPD wasn't banned. And there are still frequent neo-nazi demonstrations, so claiming "neo-nazis" in general were at any point banned enough to "thrive in the shadows" or whatever doesn't make sense.
It‘s not a perfect or complete solution but exactly the right approach.
Allowing them to only play in the kiddie pool by disallowing symbols and certain speech is also great and works towards making them look ridiculous.
So all in all I give this solution high marks. It obviously cannot alone remove fascism from a society were that was so widespread and deeply ingrained.
Reading all these comments here I can just advise HN people to be a bit more tolerant of imperfect, incomplete and messy solutions to problems. I know, programmers want to have it all neat and clean and complete and with precision but sometimes that’s not anything achievable.
Every time you interact on social media like twitter with a public message you disagree with you inform the algorithms that that message is good content. You amplify it.
Like a virus piggybacking on the immune system our intuitive efforts to subvert the message simply expose more people to the message.
Sure, the twitters and facebooks with their shitty algorithms tuned for maximal addiction and thus indirectly maximal conflict are far from helpful, but that isn't a reason to stop the dialogue. That's a reason to force these corporations to not behave like drugdealers.
What's your approach to fighting ideology? Hiding it (aka censoring it, "deplatforming") doesn't work. Then you only disenfranchise people to a degree where they a least the already mentally unstable will be put in a mental position of "my life is over, I could as well go out with a bang".
The other alternative is to use force of some kind, like imprison people with the "wrong" ideas, "hit a nazi" or outright kill them... also known as fascism. Fighting fascism with fascism from the other direction does not seem to be a viable approach to me either.
I’ve found that you can’t fight ideology. The harder you push against someones identity, challenging their sense of self, the hard they dig in and often begin their own offensive to divert the challenge away from their identity.
Ideology isn’t often rational (unless the identity is based in being rational... but even then thats often more about being a person who is right or smart than actually being rational). You can’t fight it with rationality.
I have no control over you. I cannot change your mind for you. I can only attempt to make it safe for you explore other ideas without loosing your identity. It’s up to you to change your own mind.
Twitter already cannot refuse service to people based on the color of their skin.
Volkswagen did not implement a "freedom of speech, we're a private company and do as we please"-device but a cheat-device violating environmental regulations.
Utility companies have a "duty to serve" and cannot deny you service because you wrote a bad review about them on yelp.
It has long been my stance that companies whose products have major societal impact especially on the functioning of our democracies should be regulated along the lines of public utilities with a duty to serve. This duty to serve is not boundless, just like with the traditional utilities.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-ba...
I guess that’s true... but such ideologies have no place in a modern society.
If your ideology can only be expressed using hate, get your own platform. Nobody has a responsibility to amplify such messages.
Why do I even have to try and explain this?
“We should reject colonial oppression of our country” is not the same type of message as “we must wage religious war against our oppressors, and it is righteous to for young men to be suicide bombers”.
“We should end affirmative action on the basis of race because it isn’t fair to individual members of the majority group” is not the same type of message as “all members of X minority are inherently worthless, and we should purge them”.
“Rape accusations should be handled by law enforcement professionals rather than by school administrators, and the evidence should need to meet a high legal standard to be actionable” is not the same type of message as “X person claims they were raped but everyone knows they are a lying slut and were asking for it.”
Etc.
Why do I even have to try and explain this?
> The rules could say absolutely no racism
This is not what the rules do say. What they “could say” is not relevant here. The rules say: “Hateful conduct: You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”
This is elaborated here if you want to read about it https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-condu...
Specifically disallowed are (1) violent threats, (2) wishing, hoping or calling for serious harm on a person or group of people, (3) references to mass murder, violent events, or specific means of violence where protected groups have been the primary targets or victims, (4) inciting fear about a protected category, (5) repeated and/or non-consensual slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone, (6) hateful imagery
All of your acceptable examples most definitely fall under "inciting fear about a protected category".
Also, wouldn't "references to mass murder, violent events, or specific means of violence where protected groups have been the primary targets or victims" prohibit Jews from speaking about the holocaust?
> We prohibit targeting individuals with content that references forms of violence or violent events where a protected category was the primary target or victims, where the intent is to harass. This includes, but is not limited to sending someone:
> media that depicts victims of the Holocaust;
> media that depicts lynchings.
When I listened to the interview on Joe Rogan with the Trust and Safety officer, one of the examples she gave was the Milo Youannopolis quote “the world would have been better off if your mother banged you on the rock as a baby” or something to that effect.
This is gross, and offensive, but not a threat. It’s not a threat to talk hyperbolically about a hypothetical and ridiculous past event.
Unless you already find a person scary.
In which case it very very much sounds like a threat, or an incitement to violence.
Language needs context and if you believe that people with certain characteristics (including political orientation) are more likely to be violently dangerous, it is absolutely natural to view things they say as more threatening than you might otherwise.
It’s still bias.
It’s bias if a policeman finds “I have a gun in the glove compartment, and a license for it” more threatening based on someone’s race.
If it were based on some real or perceived fact about the world, still bias.
Actually definitionally bias.
Humans use bias (context) to make sense of the world. And that context (bias) is necessary for communication to makes any sense.
Which means those rules can only be implemented in a way that reflects the bias of whomever is implementing them.
Ironically, one true solution to the problem of bias is diversity. The thing the groups who most rail against banning of misgendering or racist language despise. Get a a "good conservative" into the group which enforces the rules, as an ombudsman or a watchdog whatever, the same way we'd do for polticically other, and then it can play out.
Disclosure: I am an european left of center, so from american perspective I'm basically communist. I use conservatives as an example because the seem to be the largest group complaining about things like enforcing harassment policies. To communicate my view on this debate with an example, insisting on misgendering people when that causes them pain is worse than a mere insult, it's equivalent to walking up to veteran with PTSD, pulling out a toy gun to their face and going "BANG". That shit would not offline, and it should not fly as a performative act online to normalize it either.
As false positives go, if this is the one you're worried about, you can tell that your case isn't strong by asking exactly what a platform that accidentally threw out that sort of content-baby with the actual-threat bathwater would be losing. Even if "it's not a threat" were inarguably true, it doesn't make much sense as a response, because there's no discourse in there, it's simply abuse, and likely runs afoul of other rules, certainly of other sensible rules that could be established.
But to say it's not a threat really stops short of thinking about what was said. “the world would have been better off if your mother banged you on the rock as a baby” is a statement that bypasses any particular criticism -- the kind of thing that might be a valuable feature in speech and discourse -- and instead simply asserts a total lack of value in someone's life. If you think that discourse is valuable, part of the reason for that has to be that you think ideas matter. What are the consequences if people believe in that idea -- the idea that some specific person's life has a total lack of value because they said something Milo doesn't like?
"Not a threat" is a technical judgment, perhaps even a distinction that matters. But there's absolutely the implication of violence, and hyperbole is not an adequate defense, nor would any sensible person find it so if they were told that someone should have done the world a favor and set them on fire as a child.
> rules can only be implemented in a way that reflects the bias
Which is another way of saying that rules will always be about values, both of those who wrote them and those who carry them out. Whether that's a bug or a feature depends on how fit the values in play are.
Who exactly is going to decide? Rules and values committee?
> What are the consequences if people believe in that idea
So people are stupid, and the all ideas should be first vetted by non-stupid people. Nice.
For example if you remove the colourful language from it "the world would have been better off if you were dead" sounds rather threatening.
Context is important "Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?"
> Context is important "Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?"
That's not a threat, it's a solicitation; it requests other to engage in rather states an intent to carry out future action. But “the world would be better off...” is neither, on its face.
Did you also hear about the Wikipedia Fram controversy where a large party of the community, including the highest democratically appointed authority (arbcom) disagree with the wikipedia foundation on what harassment is?
To take a random sample further from the past, a guild wars 2 developer accused a fan of harassment after criticism of the game story line got posted. The controversy lead to two developers being fired and the company posting a huge apology which said that criticism of the game story line is not harassment and any fan should be free to express constructive views about the art.
A rule that forbids harassment only has meaning based on how harassment get defined, and with current cultural environment that definition is all over the place.
An even more political loaded area, hateful rhetoric is quite common. Here in Sweden there were a brief suggestion to forbid it on the national broadcast channels, but then the idea had to be basically scrapped as the definition could never really be agreed on. If you have one political party using immigrants as the target demographic for all problems, and an other political party using males as the target demographic for all problems, should we ban both? That is not going to happen.
Protected category is interesting but a extremely US centric concept where the federal government specify a list of protected groups and anyone not on it is a free target. It is a list not even all the states agree on, as political views is sometimes added by specific states and others don't. The concept of an "official religion" is also one which is constantly debated, with groups like copyme trying to get included in the protected category. EU has a bit better and broader definition in Article 10, but the enforcement is mostly up to individual nation states.
I know that for a fact. I live in Europe. We had a migration crisis recently, and no matter what you believed, how nuanced your position was, you always ended up being called either "a compassionless monster who doesn't care about other people dying", or "a traitor supporting parasites in taking our jobs and destroying our economy".
“We should reject colonial oppression of our country” very much implies “we should wage a war against our oppressors” (not sure why you bring religion into this). Suicide bombing didn't enter the western Overton window just yet, but it surely will if things ever get bad enough. For evidence, just skim [0].
> “We should end affirmative action on the basis of race because it isn’t fair to individual members of the majority group” is not the same type of message as “all members of X minority are inherently worthless, and we should purge them”.
That tells me you haven't been on the Internet recently. It absolutely means the same thing in the eyes of a certain vocal minority that currently dominates all social media, and has an uncanny ability to summon Internet mobs in order to ruin people's lives.
> “Rape accusations should be handled by law enforcement professionals rather than by school administrators, and the evidence should need to meet a high legal standard to be actionable” is not the same type of message as “X person claims they were raped but everyone knows they are a lying slut and were asking for it.”
Except in practice the former is understood by many as the latter, and can end up with you in the news headlines and having your life's work taken away from you.
--
Point being, rules like Terms of Service or Codes of Conduct are easily weaponized and used as tools of oppression if they're not backed by impartiality, rationality, a firm commitment to uphold the spirit of those rules and to nip all attempts at rule lawyering in the bud. Otherwise, either the service itself will abuse the rules, or the users that are best at escalating minor disagreements will. I have zero trust in Twitter on this matter.
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_attack#History,_pre-19... One of the interesting things I've learned here today is that apparently, the US trained people to perform suicide bombings with nuclear weapons. The Cold War was an insane time.
We are talking about what will get you banned from Twitter, not what will get you called a racist jerk or a terrorist sympathizer or whatever by other participants on the site.
Or, I dare you to write some spicy tweets about "white people" and then try the same ones about "black people". Just watch how different your treatment is.
The idea that Twitter Inc. is anything close to even-handed or principles-based in their rules enforcement is a joke. They're entirely converged to a deep San Francisco hardcore-progressive worldview representing about 8% of Americans [1] and perhaps 1% of the world population.
[0] https://thefederalist.com/2018/11/25/twitter-permanently-ban...
Your citation makes it pretty clear that's not what really happened, and that none of the tweets at issue said anything like "men aren't women".
https://www.denverpost.com/2017/07/31/facebook-hate-speech/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/04/24/facebook-whil...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-06/facebook-banning-algo...
And a funny thought just popped: Calling a person a "world leader" - that's scary centralization right there.
Twitters rules are heavily ideologically driven, for instance misgendering is against their rules. That already eliminates a bunch of politicians.
The idea that if twitter had a rule against misgendering means Twitter's rules are heavily ideological is... pretty ideological itself.
For one thing, I don't seem to see that rule here:
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules
For another, even if I missed it or it's implicit in another rule, while I suppose there's an argument that identifiers have political implications... there's plenty of social space for them to be about being polite in the same way that usually, you should use the names people give you for themselves.
Maybe most of all, though, how many of the other rules would you characterize as heavily ideologically driven? Perhaps the one about not threatening violence against an individual or class? Promoting terrorism? Child sexual exploitation? Suicide? Doxing?
Personally, I can think of a pretty wide latitude of discourse ranging over a variety of ideologies that's allowed me even if I'm forbidding those forms of engagement AND have to be careful to use someone's preferred pronouns.
While I don't really have any issues with it being prohibited, I wouldn't put misgendering or deadnaming in the same category as inciting violence or advocating for child exploitation.
Sadly, this is a point that is lost on many people.
(Thanks for the text under the subheading, comment above edited with link to it.)
It's disingenuous to lump these together as equivalent to misgendering. Child exploitation and violence are against the law of pretty much all nations in the world, and there is a clear consensus. As well as harm caused.
That line hasn't been drawn yet for gender. For one it's not clear how many genders exist. Are they fluid day by day, can people change in and out of them at will. Do I misgender someone if I fail to keep up. Is this a biologically supported concept, should we really open the Pandoras box of forced speech, etc.. etc..
It is clear to many of us that there are two genders. Particularly to those of us that have studied biology.
When you say "studied biology" do you mean took a few general biology classes in college or did a PhD program in the relevant sub-field of biology?
There are animals for example that have 2 sexes but more "genders" (to the extent that it is correct to apply this terminology) - e.g. Ruffs (a european bird) have several male forms that differ in size, plumage and sexual behavior ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruff#Biology_of_variation_amon...).
Even if no similar mechanism exists in humans, there are social constructs that may serve similar roles - there are communities of "3rd gender" people in India for example, for thousands of years now.
Biology addresses sex, not gender (whether ascribed gender or gender identity), and there are vastly more than two ways in which the various biological attributes grouped under “sex” line up; which is why when (as is, to be sure, quite common) binary sex distinctions in biology and medicine are used they are drawn differently in different contexts.
I mean, there's documented cases of non-chimeric fertile females (in the sense of “people who produce ova and can reproduce with people who produce sperm”, which isn't the only biological definition of sex but is the one most relevant to fertility and reproduction) with 46,XY karyotype and normal male coding sequences in SRY and other genes associated with sex determination. Simplistic generalizations about sex and biology, aside from having dubious relevance to gender discussions, are pretty invariably factually wrong.
Just the same as it would be extremely annoying to work with someone that refused to use your name (and not at all forced speech to demand that they get it right; for many trans folx the old name is literally not their legal name anymore). Pronouns are a form of self expression, gender identity is real, and you only need to look at the stats for violence against trans people to the see the active harm in pretending otherwise.
Rules enforcing some level of decency have a place on public forums (even if it's not as cut and dry as pedophilia or violent activity); that's why you're here being transphobic rather than /b/.
Could you reference some of these stats? This argument comes up very often in discussions about trans peoples issues. But, not once have I seen or read someone citing a particular statistic or even pull up a number out of thin air. It is always claimed, there are stats showing increased violence against trans people. Where are the statistics?
As for sources, hard stats can be difficult for any hate crime (compounded by the fact homicide against trans individuals isn't often recorded as violence against their actual gender) and especially considering that the total trans population is small (and thus vulnerable to effects of small numbers) but the FBI hate crime database [0] and the NCAVP reports [1] are good places to start. Transequality center also collects good resources.
Somehow, I don't believe you've really wondered about this too much...
[0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2017/tables/table-1.xls
Toward your comment, can't we establish harm is caused by targeted misgendering/deadnaming by asking the transgender people who have been harassed by it how they feel about it? Doesn't that seem not even necessary? What line on harm needs to be drawn exactly before we can make a rule "don't deliberately harass transgender people on our platform via their dead identities."
We had someone clearly trying to have a constructive discussion on a topic and he was treated as if he had written the manifesto for the Fourth Reich and was demanding all women be sent back to the kitchen.
These are hard lessons that everyone who works at a big corporation at a level above janitor has learned within the first year of working there, so to me arguments along the lines of "but they said it would be different this time, they promise" just seem ill-advised to me. As if you are sticking your head in the sand and proceeding as if you can't depend on your own good thinking.
I'd agree with you if he wasn't discussing it in direct reference to how Google approached things like hiring from a strategic perspective. However what he discussed was in the context of how google approaches something.
Secondly from what I've heard Google provided a space for precisely these kinds of discussions, so suggesting he should have known better than to discuss seems pretty unfair to me.
Even if what he said was wrong, wrong, wrong, it really seems to me like he was trying to engage in good faith and people didn't respond to it in good faith at all
There is a reason people who make actual strategic decisions speak as if they are eels covered in oil and it is to avoid situations like the one this person found themselves in.
> Google provided a space for precisely these kinds of discussions, so suggesting he should have known better than to discuss seems pretty unfair to me.
Yes, corporations embellish the truth (or lie, if you want to be that way). At this point, you need to understand this - especially if you work for a corporation that does as many questionable things as Google does. Everyone should be free to make their own decisions of course, this person decided to make an ill-advised argument at work and the consequence was that he cannot work there anymore.
> it really seems to me like he was trying to engage in good faith
Regardless of whether or not I believe this is true, "engaging in good faith" is not a shield against poor decisions.
I feel like 90% of people didn't read the drivel he wrote; I'd have fired him purely for the fact anyone that bad at stats (and proud of it) shouldn't be anywhere near a machine learning team.
Most of them. It doesn't mean I always disagree with that ideology, but I do recognize them as ideology with political implications.
> Doxing?
The US has the sex offender register. Germany has the right to be forgotten, including sex offenders. Should a twitter bot in the US be allowed to write about sex offenders or is that doxing?
> Promoting terrorism
Terrorism has sadly become a very muddy word. The recent Turkish offensive into north-eastern Syria see a lot of disagreement on who is a terrorists. In the past we had US policy of counting any dead male in a conflict zone under the age of 15 as a killed terrorist. To me that is the typical examples of a heavily politically driven definition.
> Child sexual exploitation
Combine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent#/media/File:Age... with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_law#/media/File:P... as sets and what we get is a bunch of intersections and symmetric differences. Yes, pre-puberty child sexual exploitation is universally wrong on the planet. The exact line however is heavily ideologically driven with plenty of people with the view that all prostitution is exploitation and any person under the age of 20 is a child.
> Suicide
Are we including physician-assisted suicide? It is a common point that get brought up when suicide discussions get banned.
You call that ideological, but presumably wouldn’t call Twitter prohibiting calls for genocide ideological. They’re obviously excessively far apart on a continuum, but I’m curious how you’ve decided where to draw your line? Racial slurs? Calls to murder doctors who perform abortion? Promotion of cannibalism? Incitement of violence against the LGBT community? How have you decided misgendering is ideological and (I’d hope) decided that the others are obviously unacceptable?
Making up your own category, then forcing other people to name you by that category on pain of committing a "verbal assault" is still a pretty contended topic.
(I'm interpreting "made up category" as "relatively novel category"; all categories are "made up".)
Then it wasn’t purposefully doing it, so I’m not sure how it’s relevant to my question
> Maybe they don’t accept the idea that
Plenty of people don’t accept the idea that men and women should be accepted equally, or that you can’t ban black people from living in your apartment, or that men who have sex with other men need to be put to death. That you’ve drawn an arbitrary line doesn’t privilege your line.
I mean in your country, sure, but let’s not pretend these are universal. Feels like your distinction between ideology and “wrong” is that’s just like, your opinion, man?
So, I have some questions about Twitter's rules and about the process that applies them.
No it didn’t
I fear sometimes that a considerable amount of Americans have no further loyalty to the ideals of this country.
But this is still conflation.
1. Unless/until communication is excluded from what can legally be a business, Twitter has a legitimate commercial interest (and probably a legal obligation) to moderate the platform it built to ensure its the company isn't significantly harmed by the behavior of users who are not paying customers.
I doubt anyone can do this with integrity over time when money and power are involved, but unless you're advocating for nationalizing social media platforms or creating some sort of Department of Public Speech to provide "neutral" voter-accountable moderators at no cost, I don't see how you can argue that the organization running a platform doesn't have a legitimate interest in shaping what it is for. No other separate entity--not the IRA nor Facebook nor HuffPo nor Exxon nor Fox news nor the DNC/RNC nor the IRA--have any legitimate right to shape the purpose of Twitter's platform.
I guess the IRA can try to turn Twitter into whatever it wants--but Twitter is completely within its rights to shift policy to address how any entity that doesn't hold a controlling stake uses its platform at scale. Regardless of how Twitter does or does not exercise this right, there will be genuine and malign actors attempting to portray them as only doing X for illegitimate political reasons (to stir up support, circle the wagons, or bully them into doing more or less of X).
2. The mechanisms are very different. If the IRA manipulated democracies by banning people from a platform they built--or if Twitter ran a massive astroturfing operation intended to synthesize the appearance of social consensus on someone else's social media platform--we'd be talking apples-and-apples.
-----
I want to be a little more cautious moving ahead since I'm assuming more here, but outside of and separate from this conflation issue, it seems you're building an argument like:
1. anyone who thinks unchecked state social-media influence operations merit action by a private company with the ability to directly and unaccountably manipulate the channel should instead want to nationalize or close social media to protect everyone from the owners of the platform
2. anyone who doesn't think unchecked state-sponsored social media influence campaigns are big enough of a deal to justify nationalizing or closing social media platforms is being disgenuine (either by over-weighting the influence campaigns, or under-rating the possibility that the platforms owners engage in similar behavior.)
But the opinions aren't mutually exclusive. Someone can think prosecutors have too much power, and advocate for them to use the power they have more-justly. Someone can think platforms are too big to be opaquely-ruled fiefdoms and advocate for long-term solutions while advocating for harm-reduction in the short term.
I fully agree that moderating Twitter while protecting our democracy is a sticky problem, although I think there are many milder options besides those you presented including regulating Twitter as a utility, breaking it up as a monopoly, or even shutting it down altogether (yes, it’s sad to think of the government shutting down a company, but that’s strictly better than a company controlling our government). None of these solutions are nationalizing social media, by the way—not meaningfully.
I’m sure we can find all sorts of reasons why these solutions are imperfect, and I’m sure smarter people than myself can think of better solutions. The fact remains that these big social media companies have far too much power, and even a bad solution is almost certainly better than allowing this considerable attack vector to persist (the attack vector that is open to private companies and state actors alike). By the way, it’s not just our American democracy under threat, it’s every democracy where Twitter et al have strongholds.
I don't think this is the right distinction. I think it might help to drill down on legal vs. legitimate, and what we mean by affecting/meddling/influencing/manipulating/corrupting/etc.
1. Let's say you install a little free library (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Free_Library) at the edge of your property and put a dozen of your favorite history books in it. The general understanding is that anyone who walks by is free to take/leave a book. Over time, many books come and go. Sci-fi. Poetry. How-to-draw. Self-help. Pop-sci. An occasional religious text.
A few months later, you notice that of your neighbors, who belongs to a minority religious sect, has started visiting every day. Each time, they take a book and leave one promoting their religion. This doesn't bother you much at first, but you get annoyed when you notice they've replaced most of the library and grow increasingly convinced they don't even read the books they take.
In turn, you throw out the books they've left so far, put in several more of your own history books, and toss any new books they leave once a week. They notice this in turn, and start telling people that you are discriminating against their religion.
The question of whether it's "legal" for them to do this, or "legal" for you to throw out the books they left is in the weeds.
I think better questions are whether they have any legitimate right to turn your little library into an advertisement for their religion, and whether you have a legitimate interest in curating your little library to keep them from doing so. No one else has a legitimate right to repurpose your library, even if every individual action they take otherwise follows the conventions of how free libraries work. It doesn't matter if they do it intentionally or accidentally, nor whether they have good or bad intentions.
2. Our democracy is a different sort of thing--more of a shared emergent process or relation than a thing. Almost everything has some impact on it, and everyone with a legitimate membership claim has a legitimate interest in influencing it. I have a legitimate right to influence it. You have a legitimate right to influence it. Other states and their citizens don't. Exactly which kinds of influence are fair/unfair has to get haggled out through ongoing social process. It gets even fuzzier when we're deciding what kinds of influence are fair for U.S.-based multinational companies. (e.g., are we only concerned about intentional "manipulation"? Is intentional manipulation with a small aggregate effect more or less important than a large inadvertent impact lying in the shadow of performance optimization heuristics that were necessary to keep the service up?)
Every multiverse incarnation of Twitter affects our democracy in some way. Twitter and every platform like it is a snowball of decisions made about UI/X, functionality/features, staffing, business/funding, management, accessibility, moderation, many of which get baked in long before a platform is anywhere near the scale it takes to even produce the emergent ripples that eventually get it labeled as powerful enough to corrupt a democracy. As long as it's legal to make platforms like this, they have a legitimate interest in deciding what their apps/platforms/service do and are for.
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Neither Russia nor the IRA have a legitimate right to repurpose Twitter or influence our democracy. Stopping them is not cut-and-dry, but I think it's more useful to see it as a nest of logistical/implementation problems. Twitter and many of its employees, at least as the rules of fair play are for now, have a legitimate interest in both making platform decisions, in influencing our democracy. It's fundamentally different because the solutions mostly involve doing democracy to figure out what is and isn't fair. There are some profoundly difficult questions here.
Twitter and its many employees and shareholders can vote and lobby, but if they can turn a knob and unilaterally influence elections, clearly they are on the wrong side of that threshold.
The best steelman I can think of is that social media is really analogous to a cable company where each person you're interested in following is a channel. Of course, this falls down for lots of reasons, mostly because Twitter controls which channels you're exposed to and in which proportions--a feature for which there is no real cable analog.
Domestic companies have been influencing elections for over a decade using advertising along with influence and power in the conglomerated media space. Neither the foreign power nor the large media giants nor the big defense contractors nor big tech actually care at all about individual people. It's turtles all the way down.
To that extent, Twitter controlling the discourse is actually very different than the Russian government controlling the discourse.
What if Twitter had a major Russian investment? What if Twitter was fully operated by the Russian government? What if it was operated by the german government? What if it was operated by the american government? What if it was operated by a man named Jack who has clear political interests? What if Jack only cares about the bottom line? What if Russia supported Hillary instead of Trump?
Does your answer vary between the questions? To me, they are all the same.
But yeah, it’s understandable that someone might equate that with a social media platform being transparent (however belatedly) in their efforts to enforce their own rules.
The problem with centrist lines of thinking such as yours is that it’s all predicated on fallacious logic: the demonstrably false notion that a compromise between two opposing positions is inherently superior to either.
This perspective that American interference in democratic political processes around the globe is "righteous and justified" must be coming from some book, somewhere.
Which one?
Selective outrage over political machinations that don't originate from within your own political in-group is also a common tactic - when you've run out of good faith, arguments or otherwise ..
Twitter is just one in a long line of goose-stepping corporations doing the bidding of the military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex which stands to profit greatly from its efforts ..
Pay attention. The war is coming your way whether you like it or not.
I’m an American, but I’m not America. I can love my country without condoning war crimes. The one does not contradict the other.
You can't have all the rewards and none of the responsibilities - either yours is a representative government of and for the people, or it isn't.
Clearly, its not a representative government any more, if you feel you have zero responsibility for its machinations. So, the real delusion is that Americans consider America to be the home of the free and the brave, but really are a nation of slaves and cowards.
I’m “protected by the state”? How do you figure? Less than six months ago, there was a mass shooting a few miles from my house, in which twelve people were killed in a government facility, by an employee of the government.
I spend more than a quarter of my income on healthcare coverage for myself and my family, and that’s before I incur any actual medical costs. Americans die every day because they simply can’t afford to be well.
As American citizens, we do have some mechanisms for self-correcting the course our elected leaders have set us on, but most are purely symbolic. The only real means of pressure we have to influence government is our democratic election process, which we now know has been compromised. We have a President who lost the popular vote by millions of votes, due at least in part to a massive flaw in our implementation of a representative democracy is being actively exploited by a foreign power.
What’s worse, the domestic beneficiaries of Russia’s massive influence campaign — Republicans — refuse to pass any bill that will grant more funding toward securing our elections. That’s on top of rampant gerrymandering and straight-up election fraud happening all over the country.
Democracy is under attack by domestic and foreign entities. How are the people — the majority of whom did not vote for our current leadership — to be held accountable?
Do you feel confident you can call 911 and get a police response if you need it? Then you are protected by the state, which provides those services.
> How are the people — the majority of whom did not vote for our current leadership — to be held accountable?
Civics 101. All governments are composed of the people they govern.
True, your state has been corrupted. But, you are just as responsible for that as any other citizen. And I think your position is how your state got corrupted in the first place - "I'm not responsible for the crimes of my government!"
Alas, you are. And failing to take responsibility for them is how they get committed so rampantly in the first place ..
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/video/does-voting-make-a-...
Russia/China/USA etc is a whole different story.
So what exactly are private companies allowed to do to support or undermine a foreign candidate? Apparently tweeting goes too far. But if you restrict a candidate's tweeting, is that okay?
The FEC explicitly lays out what you can and cannot do. And generally speaking, a candidate requesting aid from a foreign entity in order to undermine an election is illegal. You're going to have to better establish how Twitter is violating the FEC rules if you want to compare the two.
disinformation/psyop campaign => can adequately describe most political campaigns.
detrimental to our sovereignty => does this sound like Chinese reaction to western people commenting on HK?
Not very convincing, in an ideal world everyone would have freedom of expression and freedom to influence other people in all circumstances. Now that doesn't mean freedom from the consequence of it but legally it shouldn't be restricted unless its active hate speech. A Russian posting 'great god emperor Donald Trump' on facebook doesn't fall in that camp.
If a company donates services to a campaign, that is considered donation-in-kind under FEC rules. An FEC filing must be made.
Suppression of an opponent sure looks like donating services.
For what it’s worth, so do I — and I’m not saying that to support them, I don’t like what I see of the behaviour of the Russian government.
For about the last decade, I’ve been of the opinion that the free an open border that is the internet is incompatible with current attitudes towards sovereign control of what happens within a particular national border. Sovereignty includes the ability to limit things, including things other people (like me) don’t want limited. Copyright, “immoral” substances or sexual acts, defamation, revealing state secrets.
I have a question: if a Spanish person living in Spain publishes a South African state secret, has an offence been committed?
That is very different from a company under the jurisdiction of the US limiting the influence of people who break their rules.
If this were so, why has no evidence been found after 2 years of desperate searching?
Please stop repeating this entirely unsubstantiated claim.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/18/us/politics/m...
Please feel free to read the whole 85 page document, and stop repeating misinformation about the subject https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
> The Committee found that the IRA's Information warfare campaign was broad in scope and entailed objectives beyond the result of the 2016 presidential election. Further, the Committee's analysis of the IRA's activities on social media supports the key judgments of the January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections," that "Russia's, goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton,· and harm her electability and potential presidency."5 However, where the Intelligence Community assessed that the Russian government "aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him," the Committee found that IRA social media activity was overtly and almost invariably supportive of then-candidate Trump, and to the detriment .of Secretary Clinton's campaign.
> The Committee found that the Russian government tasked and supported the IRA' s interference in the 2016 U.S. election. This finding is consistent with the Committee's understanding of the relationship between IRA ownerYevgeniy Prigozhin and the Kremlin, the aim and scope of the interference by the IRA, and the correlation between the IRA's actions and electoral interference by the Russian government in other contexts and by other means.7 Despite Moscow's denials, the direction and financial involvement of Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, as well as his close ties to high-level Russian government officials including President Vladimir Putin, point to significant Kremlin support, authorization, and direction of the IRA' s operations and goals.
> The Committee found that Russia's targeting of the 2016 U.S. presidential election was part of a broader, sophisticated, and ongoing information warfare campaign designed to sow discord in American politics and society. Moreover, the IRA conducted a vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood. The IR.A's actions in 2016 represent only the latest installment in an increasingly brazen interference by the Kremlin on the citizens and democratic institutions of the United States.
Etc.
If that document doesn‘t do it for you, you can read quite a bit more relevant detail in the (still partly redacted) Mueller report (though the counterintelligence work that the Special Counsel’s office did is not explicitly part of the mandate of that report, so it doesn’t cover the bulk of the evidence about election interference uncovered).
Evidence: that is what is needed. Not claims from authority figures, which - particularly in America - is not currently a politically trustworthy means of gaining understanding of world events at the moment.
Real evidence connecting the Kremlin with the IRA should be easy to find. Or, are you only reporting the reports?
Anyway, the idea that there was a huge campaign to "denigrate Clinton" from Russia is absurd on its face. She had most of a country trying to denigrate her during that election. Trump won because so many people hated Clinton even more than they disliked Trump.
Don't lecture other people on repeating entirely unsubstantiated claims when they're telling the truth, and you're the one who's actually knowingly spreading lies and misinformation.
You should apologize.
I'd hope Twitter is smart enough to have a panel of judges with diverse backgrounds making these decisions (maybe requiring 2/3 majority) and not a single, biased person.
That said, it's usually the little guys that get hit the hardest. You could argue Trump has broken Twitter's T&C multiple times, but if you have enough popular support and eyeballs (and run federal law enforcement), Twitter wouldn't dare pick a fight. But, if a small (enough) account or a politician with less power (in Twitter's business markets) uses similar language they'll get shut down way faster.