Herman Cain's verified twitter account shares posthumous attack on Biden/Harris | Hacker News Reader

Herman Cain's verified twitter account shares posthumous attack on Biden/Harris

newsweek.com

36 pointsanonymfus19 comments

Sure seems like Twitter should lock verified accounts of individuals once the individual is deceased

There could be some legitimate value in having accounts continue to operate. This situation is a bad example, but suppose a famous person dies and the deceased's family or attorney wants to give updates to existing Twitter followers on the deceased's last wishes, funeral arrangements, circumstances of their death, etc.

Some possible approaches:

(1) Leave the account open but take away Verified status.

(2) Update accounts to a new state like Verified-Estate or Verified-Family to indicate the account is official, but in a different way. (Or add a separate Deceased status, orthogonal so that an account could be marked as both Verified and Deceased.)

(3) Allow certain specific people (deceased's lawyer, spouse, executor of their estate, etc.) to create a dedicated memorial account, and automatically make the followers of deceased's account followers of this new account.

I think any of these approaches could handle the current situation. #1 would leave it as a ghost account. A political organization shouldn't meet the criteria for #2 or #3.

At a minimum they should take away the verified status.

I believe they've since changed the name on the account to "The Cain Gang", although the handle is still "@THEhermaincain". Still disrespectful when you consider the meaning of chain gangs in American history.

Disrespectful to whom?

Can you elaborate? The parent didn't say it was disrespectful toward individuals, though they may have meant Cain, since he was black. But regardless of whether that intention is true, the parent's point (that making a pun explicitly about chain gangs to label your social/political group is disrespectful) seems like a reasonable opinion, that you may challenge specifically.

I have no opinion on whether it actually is disrespectful, and I'm not weighing in on that.

However, as a point of conversational order, if someone states that something is disrespectful, it's better if they say who they think is being disrespected. Otherwise, the statement is so vague and ill-defined it's hard to know whether to agree or disagree.

In other words, if you don't know what is actually meant, how can you challenge it specifically? The only way I know is to guess at all the possible meanings, then address all of them case by case, which seems a little silly.

To Cain, obviously. He is a Purdue MS Comp Sci graduate and worked in the Navy in a civilian capacity. He has no criminal record, and was a successful entrepreneur, something that is highly under-represented in media and popular culture portrayals of African Americans.

Depiction of criminality however is far from under-represented, and linking his name to forced labour in prison camps is just beyond tasteless.

Pity he will always be remembered as the idiot who chose not to wear a mask and embraced it in his tweets and died because of it.

>disrespectful

Which is a feature, not a bug.

Why is that a feature?

I'm using the phrase "it's a feature, not a bug" to mean "it's intentional".

Yes, this happened after they started posting attacks on Biden/Harris.

Whats to stop someone from getting a verified account for someone and them selling it to the highest bidder? Should Twitter now require that an account no longer from the verified person/org be reverified?

I mean, yes? If you're going to offer a feature that officially marks accounts that have proven their identity, then you need to revoke that marker when the identity changes. If that seems overly complicated, maybe the idea of officially verified accounts is problematic and complicated in other unaddressed ways?

Do the terms of service cover this?

Why is this on HN?

It's a story about technology using the social capital of someone who is deceased. If someone wrote a posthumous editorial in the NYT and signed it with their name, or released an album of new music (not newly discovered or remastered works) we might similarly want to talk about what it means to have a dead person somehow still presenting content.

I mean, his name was Cain...

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