The threats and violence Twitter won't police

Conservative activist Bevelyn Beatty, Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio, and a third Proud Boy were stabbed in DC just before the election. Beatty was hospitalized with a punctured lung:

https://www.newsweek.com/proud-boys-stabbed-washington-enriq...

On Twitter, many expressed glee at the attack and disappointment that the stabbings were not fatal:

https://twitter.com/ShaunG05712929/status/132404207163692236...

https://twitter.com/SaltPotatoes/status/1324004264524632069

https://twitter.com/DcAntifa/status/1323970794595196928

https://twitter.com/tonica5683/status/1324241314066632705

The tweets remain up.

This all happened a month before the stabbings at a Proud Boys rally in DC (victim affiliations unknown), which received considerably more press attention:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ellievhall/pro-trump-dc...

This is one case I remembered off the top of my head, having followed the past year’s unrest closely (too closely for my mental health, if I’m honest). There are many cases like it, with many similar tweets.

Jack Dorsey gave Colin Kapernick $3 million after he tweeted a call for a violent revolt.

“When civility leads to death, revolting is the only logical reaction, The cries for peace will rain down, and when they do, they will land on deaf ears, because your violence has brought this resistance. We have the right to fight back! Rest in Power George Floyd.”

The mental gymnastics some of you will do to support people simply because they have the same world view as you is disgusting.

How is Jack Dorsey suddenly pulling strings at Apple, Google, and Amazon?

What does Amazon care if Twitter does well? Are either Tim Cook or Sundar Pichai secretly holding significant shares? “Big tech” could collude to make more money (like the time Apple and Google reportedly did to reduce labour costs), I’d certainly buy that. But I don’t understand what is in it for these companies to collude to crush Parler, a company none of the platform companies that removed it compete with.

Twitter’s stock is down since purging one of their largest draws to the site.

Isn’t the simplest explanation here that people are covering their ass? And the examples the article found with 3 retweets are basically a neglible threat?

Has anyone reported these tweets?

(I ask because of the number of times I've gotten calls from my neighbors asking "Is your power off?" and learning that no one had reported the outage.)

Edit: I'm not a Twitter user, so I can't.

> Twitter has the right to police the speech on its platform, but the rules must apply equally to everyone if they claim to be a neutral platform and not a publisher.

sigh

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...

> > If you said "A site that has political bias is not neutral, and thus loses its Section 230 protections"

> I'm sorry, but you are very, very, very wrong. Perhaps more wrong than anyone saying any of the other things above. First off, there is no "neutrality" requirement at all in Section 230. Seriously. Read it. If anything, it says the opposite. It says that sites can moderate as they see fit and face no liability. This myth is out there and persists because some politicians keep repeating it, but it's wrong and the opposite of truth. Indeed, any requirement of neutrality would likely raise significant 1st Amendment questions, as it would be involving the law in editorial decision making.

Debate all you want about whether what Twitter did was moral, it was unquestionably legal, and anyone claiming otherwise either doesn't understand section 230 or is deliberately trying to mislead.

In this case I'm betting it's the latter.

I understood there was a difference between "I hope they all * of *" and "I will * them"

The first example "someone take this" is indirect. Edit: upon reflection this could be a direct threat if the person saying it might make it happen by their influence alone. Like a mob leader saying "someone take out this trash"

The second example is even more indirect. Doesn't say he would do it. Doesn't say anyone else would do it. Doesn't even say what it is. A threat yes, but a veiled threat.

The third example is more of the same. Like saying "I hope you choke on it!" isn't a threat.

Wouldn't it be better for platforms to solve this division problem by setting their algorithms to simply move everyone to the center (by giving preference to moderate posts)? They already do the curation by showing what they think we would like to see, maybe they should show us what we need to see. Ultra left and ultra right are different faces of the same problem.

“Twitter hosts a #KillTrump hashtag. In all of the glorious English language there is no clearer, plainer, or shorter way to call for violence than the word kill followed by someone’s name. But there it is...And this isn’t new, back in June the hashtag #AssassinateTrump was bouncing around the website with gems like “Someone take this clown out NOW.” That tweet is still up.”

I worry about the ability to evenhandedly censor at scale, but the content examples above should be pretty easy to automate the cleansing of if one wanted to. I’m curious how many would bet (and how) regarding Twitter’s reaction if #killbi*den or assassination-focused alternatives became a thing this spring.

We don’t need to speculate about dissemination of ideas - hypotheses harmful to Trump (Russian collusion) are left alone for years, while hypotheses critical of Biden (grifter schemes involving his son) get prominently deplatformed, not just modded with a disclaimer. Both were legitimate news stories, both warranted the public interest, and both involved government investigation.

To be clear, I’m all for Twitter’s right to do this. Wholeheartedly.

I chaff at the promoted perception that they are even-handed in toeing a moral line simply because a) it seems demonstrably false with even casual examination by an honest broker, and b) it forestalls conversation about their behavior as a market actor.

The bigger concern here isn’t Twitter’s own social alignments, but the barriers they and other gatekeepers evidently can enforce to bar competition. It’s interesting that the market competition in this age seems to be aligning with a competition of ideas, because otherwise I’m not sure this would ever come to a head.

To the extent that there’s a public policy issue that needs examining here, I think it’s somewhere in that ball of string: section 230 probably assumed that the Internet would not be run (for all intents and purposes of being an accessible public forum) by oligopolies: nor that so few organizations would have such massive vertical and horizontal leverage. I don’t tend to think that section 230 reform is a good idea, but am inclined to think that this week’s display of power begs for some trust busting.

So what happens when the targets of such examination have traded staff with the political administration, and have such stratospheric piles of cash? The laws are in place - it’s hard to call Twitter, et al innocent monopolies anymore.

Maybe I'm missing something, but this seems purposefully disingenuous. Not to say that there definitely isn't a liberal bias in Twitter moderation, but this article's evidence is that they banned the US president but didn't ban three rando tweets with five or fewer likes/retweets. Surely the more likely case here is that moderation has missed them so far? On the other hand, the KillTrump hashtag is indefensible, since surely this isn't the first time that's appeared, and it seems super easy to spot and ban without needing a ton of user reports (though admittedly, looking right now, all tweets under that hashtag are using it to criticize the hashtag...).

To start with, I don't think this article is even correct—people have been banned for tweets interpreted as calls for violence against Trump before. At least on a temporary basis.

But in general, threats and calls for violence on Twitter are a problem. One that Twitter has been loathe to face for a while. Now they're starting to face it. Maybe they'll take it seriously, and handle it well, and maybe they won't—but when someone starts caring about a thing, saying "well look at these times you used to not care" doesn't really mean much. You're right, they used to not care, but now they're starting to. Let's see where it goes.

Twitter allowed "Hang Mike Pence" to Trend for more than one day recently.

When will they be removed from the App Stores?

It is very easy to understand the situation if you look at specific people and their motivations.

We have a large group of people who are deeply insecure and unsatisfied with their lives. Their jobs price them out of property ownership, they have near zero chance of retirement and very faint perspectives in starting families. All those problems would go away with the raise of the purchasing power of their salary, but the corporate world has found a cheaper solution. People are told to follow their feelings, "bring entire themselves at work", etc. Instead of paying them more, we let it slide when they blow their steam off at someone they don't like. It keeps them busy and it costs zero on the balance sheet. A much better alternative to unionizing or starting competing co-ops, right?

In long-term, this creates a massive divide in the society. Conservative-minded people that are happy with what they have find this childish. Emotional people feel that conservatives have some unfair advantage and try to attack them for it. The recent election is just a good indicator of the divide, since the conservative vs. emotional groups clearly have opposing opinions about it. The corporations are simply supporting the side that costs the less to them, it's business and nothing personal.

In a longer term, it looks like the death of American Dream. You are no longer expected to achieve wealth and financial independence through hard work, and then do what YOU want. Instead, the role model is to dedicate your energy to endless bashing of your peers from the opposing political camp, while the corporations grab an unprecedented share of the economy.

There is no middle ground when it comes to freedom of speech. I find it interesting to read Khamenei's statements, even though I find his regime repugnant for killing gays, jailing dissidents, stifling women's rights, and threatening Israel. It's important that we be able to see what he says. It doesn't mean we're glorifying him or legitimizing him, and those elements in the West or elsewhere who may agree with him will get it from alternative sources anyway.

Likewise, it's important to see what violent elements in our society are saying, even if we disagree with them and find them reprehensible.

You can't stop ideas from flowing; you can slow them down temporarily, by banning them from the mainstream marketplace of idea exchange. But ideas still have a way of leaking through.

If someone is advocating assassination of the President on social media, they should be reported to the FBI. Simply deleting their posting accomplishes nothing.

These media platforms mistakenly think that they are arbiters of ideas and information, when in reality they're just glorified bulletin boards. It should not be up to them to decide on others' behalf what is appropriate to be seen and what is not.

Just my opinions.