Twitch bans Confederate flag, racist emote usage in new conduct policy
polygon.com
polygon.com
On the other hand (and maybe I'm being overly cynical here), the real reason you rewrite this, as a company, is that your old policy was causing you legal issues, right? This is first and foremost a legal document, yeah? I wonder which of the dozens of public "incidents" informed this decision (or maybe the fact that so many have happened is what spurred the rewrite).
Just something to think about from a "new startup" perspective; if you have users that can post content, you need something like this, and the old "don't be evil" versions probably don't cut it today.
I also wonder why you think it is cynical to point out that a business is acting like a business. Of course they do.
It would be cynical to outright dismiss the possibility that individuals involved in the process also had concerns about things happening on the platform and argue that it was purely for business reasons.
This depends entirely on the kind of culture you want to foster. If you chase advertising money then sure. But the Parlers and 4chans of the world are doing just fine.
I think that's key here in this conversation. The only reason this is being done here is because it helps make them money. It does so by avoiding pushing away advertisers.
And perhaps ban the showing of flags of all nations with laws they consider racist.
My point is that I have trouble taking a company's public justifications seriously, when the company appears unwilling to take the financial/reputational hit of applying that reasoning consistently.
That's a really poignant statement.
I genuinely believe that some people consider the Confederate flag a symbol of the true United States, which was betrayed by the North. And while they lost the civil war, they were still in the right. For these people, the Confederate flag is a symbol of resistance to an oppressive nation state, and flying it is no more "racist" than it would be for someone to fly the flag of Tibet.
And obviously, some other people associate the Confederate flag with institutional slavery.
That's why I think we need to discuss the fact that these policies tacitly involve choices about:
(a) Which groups can and cannot be offended.
(b) Given the large variety of associations that different people can have regarding a particular symbol, which of those many associations are given primacy?
Also, you miss my point. While you might expect different rules for national flags, you wouldn't apply those rules to the flags of a defunct uprising. Even if some people have some beliefs about what the defunct uprising was.
Second, actual breaking point between the states at the time was slavery. The "states right" in question was the one that allowed or disallowed slavery on new territories.
For the sake of the larger discussion, however, let me ask: Suppose that a group takes offense at some symbol, but it's based on a dubious understanding of historical fact.
I'm curious if Twitch's underlying reasoning would consider that to disqualify the viewpoint of those who feel offended by the display of the symbol.
And I also think that trying to frame all these conflicts solely through lens of "offense at some symbol" is reductive. It is popular and easy way to talk about all that.
I apologize for being confusing. I wasn't trying to imply that you in particular should answer that question. I should have written something like, "In the greater context of trying to see if Twitch's tacit reasoning is logically consistent, I'm also curious how they'd deal with ...".
> I am not even sure what disqualify the viewpoint is.
Sorry again for being unclear. Some background, if you're interested:
I'm working on the assumption that there are myriad things in our world that different people find offensive. There's (almost?) no ethical position on which 100% of humans agree.
When companies pick which particular issues on which they'll take public positions, they're implying a few things:
(1) That of all the issues that people have gripes with in the world, this issue is more important to the company than any of the issues on which they're not taking a position.
(2) The people who agree with their position are right, and those who disagree with their position are wrong.
To whit, when Twitch disallows showing the Confederate flag, I would say this disqualifies the viewpoint that it's a symbol primarily regarding states' rights. Sorry if "disqualify the viewpoint" isn't the best term.
>And I also think that trying to frame all these conflicts solely through lens of "offense at some symbol" is reductive.
I didn't mean to be reductive. My larger goal is to understand the implicit reasoning behind companies taking stances like this, and deciding at least for myself if those stances are internally consistent.
When I talk about "taking offense at some symbol", it's one of my straw-man theories regarding the company's justification for proscribing a certain kind of speech on their platform.
And TBH, what I truly suspect is that companies just try to accommodate whatever public sentiment / outrage is currently in vogue, and make public statements rationalizing that position rather than being honest about the arbitrariness of their posturing.
> And obviously, some other people associate the Confederate flag with institutional slavery.
As someone who considers themselves squarely in the first group, but who is cognizant of others’ views and therefore choose alternate symbols, I feel compelled to point out that there is significant overlap. They are far from a “union set” (a pun!) but there are actual racists who use that flag.
I’m just happy that the actual first flag of the Confederacy is largely unmarred in popular culture, along with the Bonnie Blue
Here's my (current) reasoning, explained by example:
(1) Twitch's new rules ban display of the Confederate flag for this reason: "Given its historic and symbolic association with slavery and white supremacist groups in the US".
(2) I'm assuming that Twitch's general reasoning is: "Displaying symbol ${S}, which [some subgroup of humans, selected by an unspecified criterion] ${G} associate with bad-thing ${B} and supremacist group ${R}, will be treated as Hateful Conduct."
(3) Assuming that I've correctly inferred Twitch's reasoning in (2), then here are some real-world examples that I think also meet their reasoning's criteria:
(3a) S="Israeli flag", G="Arabs living in Israel", B="Denying national rights to non-Jews", R="Israeli government". (See [0] below)
(3b) S="PRC flag", G="Uyghers living in PRC", B="religious persecution", R="Non-muslims in control of PRC government." (See [1] below)
(3c) S="Islamic crescent-and-star symbol", G="some Christians living in Muslim countries", B="religious persecution", G="The persons in power who use ${S} and do ${B}". (See [2,3] below; also backed by personal knowledge.)
(3d) S="Political symbols of the U.S. Democratic party", B="advocacy of black slavery", G="black slaves prior to the U.S. civil war".
(3e) S="Political symbols of the U.S. Republican party", G/B/R left as an exercise to the reader. (I'm not trying to pick on Republicans more than Democrats; it's just that the post is getting long and I need to do my day job.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Law:_Israel_as_the_Natio....
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghurs
"Current association".
It deserves the same treatment as a swastika or Nazi flag. Bringing it back isn't some matter of "pride" - it's to let certain people know where you stand
The thing is, there is always a line to be drawn. These are not black and white issues. There is always a line to be drawn.
You're worried about consistency, but it's not inconsistent to draw a line in a grey area in an inherently grey space.
You can still make a good inconsistency argument, but you need to understand where they've drawn their line, by what principles, and show how they've failed to meet them.
I tried to be explicit about my guess at the Twitch's underlying principles in item (2) of my comment.
It seems clear though that my guess could easily be wrong. It would be awesome if they just came out and explained their reasoning.
First, a lot of the comments show some confusion.
"Free". We are not free to do evil, only good, though we can be permissive of certain evil acts committed by others because its punishment would lead to still greater ills.
Speech can also be good or evil. To make slanderous claims is evil because it not only perverts the faculty of speech, but maligns someone innocent of the accusation which brings others into errors about that person and also harms that person. calls for violence are evil. Those who claim free speech means saying whatever you want whenever you want aren't very rigorous and often fall back on some kind of incoherent and insidious skepticism (a la "says who") or relativism. Or they don't really mean it and are reacting to abuses of censorship.
And that's the other side of the coin. Theory is one thing, but out of a concern about the abuse of censorship by tyrants and those in power, we may wish to tolerate evil speech to some degree. So the question now becomes: what are the acceptable limits of the permissiveness in the current conditions?
There is a correct answer, but in practice, that is going to be determined by various political forces acting for various reasons.
While tradition used to have a greater say in determining prohibitions on speech and "expression" for the sake of the common good (seen in blasphemy and pornography laws), today the revolutionary left has taken control and has been busily imposing speech codes that prevent "undesirable" discussion in opposition to the revolutionary ideology, often in the name of "the people". Meaning, we're no longer talking about banning swastikas and other pernicious symbols. We're talking about the silencing of even rationally defended views that don't agree with the revolutionary ideology while giving virtual free reign to toxic leftist polemic because it falls in lockstep with the ideology.
All of this is to say that this move by Twitch is not really that interesting. There are far more dangerous developments in play. And to your point, I do expect even more pressure to be put on religious faiths to conform the revolutionary ideology. Take the Roman Catholic Church, for example. Catholicism was always hated and feared in the United States. And indeed, it had been neutered in various ways to conform to liberal ideological expectations over the course of the 20th century. However, given the proliferation of various novel and exotic sexual identity protected groups, I fully expect the RCC to experience a new period of persecution in the US under the guise of protecting these groups from the supposed persecution by the Church. Either that, or the bishops will continue down the path of going full Protestant and step in line with the demands of the state (and subsequently crumble into even greater irrelevance and apostasy). Probably both and in either case this is a success for revolutionary social engineers. A similar fate awaits others.
He's a victim in all of this too, IMO...
https://www.polygon.com/2018/5/14/17335670/twitch-emotes-mea...
edit: Downvotes, really? I'm not wrong. Read the link, or use Twitch chat for yourself, as I do on a semi-daily basis.
It really feels like some CNN broadcaster said something like "Trump bad, and Trump Pepe!" And suddenly there's this small subset of the population who dropped everything they were doing, faces flushed, veins popping, and started vehemently writing about why this crude depiction of a frog used by teenagers for laughs should be #cancelled. It's absurd. It's like progressives are parodying themselves.
While individuals and private entities are not obligated to follow that law because it is direct at the government people can rightly complain that it is in bad taste when they stray too far from holding themselves to the same standard.
A private entity banning confederate flags and nazi symbols in avatars is palatable enough on its own. But it is decently close to having to censor those sorts of things in legitimate historical contexts. See for example all the genuinely historically centered youtube channels that have to censor those symbols because otherwise the algo will bury them. I think we can all agree that that latter case is not ok and is the kind of censorship that should be complained about. Considering how many historically themed video games there are out there and how strongly people believe in free speech it's understandable why more than a few people do not like this move by Twitch.
You have a right to free speech. You don’t have a right to force everyone to listen. What a fucking awful world that would be.
What would the side effects be of not being able to remove people from your store because they're behaving in a way you don't like? What if YouTube could not, legally, remove content that was "abusive" or "hateful"?
(Again, not saying I think this is how things should be, just trying to entertain the idea a bit.)
This mostly changed due to 'corporate personhood', the idea that corporations should have the same rights as people.
This article goes in to a lot of how this has lead to corporate abuses of power:
https://repository.uchastings.edu/hastings_law_journal/vol41...
This one's an easier read, but basically an editorial on the one above:
https://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate-accountability-histor...
When machine translation gets so good as to be transparent, correct, and effortlessly ubiquitous, we'll probably see more cross-cultural communication. And along with it, a bunch of additional clashes, new taboos, and additional reduction in the range of acceptable expression. I probably say things that someone halfway across the planet thinks are abhorrent all the time, and I only get away with it because we're not interacting yet.
The discussion about what is and what is not reasonable censorship should not be limited to constitution and its meaning.
Amazon thought it was cheaper to spend a billion dollars on Twitch than to build a competitor itself
You either have to be the first mover or a mega-corp to make this happen. It's clearly not something you can do as an individual at this point.
That being said, just because it's hard doesn't mean it's not possible. Parler is a recent example of this.
Recently we've seen DNS providers, CDNs, payment gateways, and even banks shut down services for wrong-thinkers.
Accelerationists are cheering these actions. That should tell you all you need to know about the likely outcome.
Except now it's not normal people, it's hate groups that are being pushed out. This seems like a material change for the better.
If you think this is a recent phenomena or if you think it's somehow only being aimed one way, I suggest you read a bit more American history.
Implying that this is a black-and-white issue or that the current status is objectively superior is disingenuous or ignorant.
Fifty years ago it would have been unthinkable that the fringe groups being violently censored and oppressed would now be in power. Where might we be fifty years from now...
Completely free speech has never existed on internet platforms. E.g. we ban and remove spam comments all the time from forums, blogs and other forms of online discussion. We've also constantly banned bad behavior too (death threats, racism, brigading... etc).
I don't know why you're upset about this particular incident?
This is funny. Do you think someone confused Twitch with the US government? Do you think only the government should be concerned with free speech? Do you think corporate censorship isn’t important?
I see comments like yours frequently and get confused. Of course government censorship is more dangerous than corporate censorship. But saying that Twitch isn’t government is like responding to BLM with “well, technically all lives matter.” Of course it is true, but not really relevant.
The issue here is that Twitch doesn’t seem to respect free speech and build it into their services. Legally, they are allowed to do this. Ethically, that’s bad. Ethically, companies not supporting and building and fostering free speech leads us to some sort of Disney hellscape where all video calls must include smiles or people get booted, etc etc
Slippery slope hyperbole aside, I think it seems pretty fundamental to me that private communication platforms for the general public need to have free speech as an ideal and apply restrictions carefully. Making blanket band without considering context seems like it will make the experience less useful for communication.
That being said, I’m surprised there was even a confederate flag emoji ever available and surprised took this long to remove.
> Completely free speech has never existed on internet platforms
Many of us run an ad blocker in our browser. Is this not censorship of certain types of speech?
I just find it odd that you brought up government like it’s relevant to free speech and censorship by corporations. I’m genuinely curious as to maybe you think corporations censoring speech is appropriate. And I like this forum to be able to ask.
In my mind, I don’t want the phone company bleeping me out when I curse. Or disconnecting my service because they think I might be buying drugs. Phone companies are regulated by government to legally require these kinds of free speech requirements. But that doesn’t mean I can crank call people, or spam people, there’s still rules.
I think my problem with these companies is that they are arbitrary in their restrictions. And they seem biased politically.
Perhaps they aren’t biased. But similarly, while being required to show ID to vote may seem reasonable, in practice it discriminated against certain political parties.
Yes, this is exactly what's happening. Or, maybe the inverse: people think "free speech" means they can say whatever they want without consequences. This is not the letter nor spirit of the law.
No, because forcing social media platforms to publish speech they object to would infringe upon the free speech and free association rights of those platform owners. Twitter has the right to decide what it will and will not allow on its platform, and it has the right to change the rules as it sees fit. And I guarantee that everyone with an account had to agree to terms of service to that effect.
And no, just in case this comes up, Twitter doing so does not mean they somehow stop becoming a "platform" and become a "publisher" and should lose Section 230 protection. That's not how Section 230 works, and the distinction between platform and publisher commonly used in these arguments doesn't really exist in a legal sense - Twitter is allowed to moderate their platform beyond merely removing illegal content, and can even express political bias in doing so - while remaining not liable for user supplied content.
Perhaps we are too used to take free speech on private walled gardens for granted. These sites used to pretend to be proponents of free speech, but now that veil is being lifted and we see what they truely are. Is one not allowed to complain about this transformation? To the casual observer, these sites set the impression that they are a public forum yet they enforce their policies with a strict partisan bias. That is the crux of the issue.
Network effects make Twitch a natural monopoly. Which means that a little bit of regulation to combat that might be a good idea.