You are always going to fail at moderating millions of users. It just depends how bad you fail.
I'm noticing
A) twitter users that interest me and don't discuss politics are usually pretty great
B) I generally don't want to read anybody's political opinions on Twitter or most places... people who want to talk about politics mostly seem to be in to fighting a culture war, there might be people who aren't but I don't see them and it isn't the platform's fault or a moderation issue
It seems to be falling out of fashion, but a few years ago a lot of prominent Silicon Valley technologists started intermingling overtly racist and otherwise hateful political Tweets among their otherwise interesting and insightful tech Tweets. I think Twitter and other ideologically-aligned media radicalized them, which is to say that avoiding political accounts is a fine thing except (1) sometimes Twitter turns accounts political and (2) avoiding accounts that Tweet about politics at all is swimming against the current and (3) it sucks to have the all-or-nothing choice between following/not-following an account (rather than being able to follow interesting tech Tweets but uninteresting political Tweets, for example).
Example?
"I don't think California should repeal civil rights legislation in order to allow overt hiring on the basis of race and gender."
"I think we should perhaps reconsider our non-enforcement of property crimes due to the fact that nobody can park on the street, the stores across from me are boarded up, and two pharmacies in my relatively affluent neighborhood just closed due to theft."
"I didn't find it appropriate for the protestors to tear down a statue of Ulysses S. Grant or rename a school from Abraham Lincoln."
"I don't think it should be part of the school curriculum to be talking to preschoolers about gender and sexuality."
"Asians are disproportionally denied access to schools and employment due to arbitrary ethic and racial targets."
Other such hateful things.
To be clear: there is often a lot of gray area and some middle ground to be taken in complex debates. When one side (eg: far-right American trollish behaviour) goes too hard in to the paint, the (over?) reaction by the opposing side(s) often loses perspective and it's the more reasonable opinions in the middle that get squashed in the well meaning attempts to supress troll like extremist influence. I think the above post highlights exactly these kind of opinions that get steamrolled away, even though many of them are within the realm of sensible debate.
All the sarcasm accomplished was an indirect criticism of the prior poster who asserted without evidence tech figureheads were tweeting "overtly racist and otherwise hateful political Tweets". It's pretty uncharitable to assume they were referring to stuff on that list (many of which aren't just in the realm of sensible debate, but are actually majority views-- e.g. #1 we can look to the results of the ballot measure).
I don't think anyone seriously doubts that with enough searching we could find a couple examples that would make their claim technically true, at the very least... without delving into comments within the realm of sensible debate.
We shouldn't need to be so cynical, but if we must we don't need to do it at the expense of other participants here!
Twitter encourages hot-takes. Because of that all sorts of ill considered crap shows up there-- and that includes both inappropriately tarring views as racist as well as racist views that most people would agree are racist.
Would you identify which of your examples is speech that you find objectionable? The last statement about discrimination against Asians seems particularly well-supported by evidence, so it's not clear to me and perhaps others which statement(s) you intend to highlight as the example of "hateful things".
These things need to be discussed, but it’s best left for the people with their skin in it to discuss.
"I hate Muslim men" = banned (Muslim and man are inherent traits)
"I hate Muslim cab drivers" = OK (cab driver is a chosen profession)
I have a friend who was banned for saying something to the effect of "I hope white men have trouble sleeping tonight"
They have specific rules and they apply them. No one is going through millions of tweets every day and seeing if they match an ideology.
https://twitter.com/ButNotTheCity/status/1518051399631785986
Content moderation can be a challenging problem, but this is a clear failure of both algorithmic and human moderation processes, and there are an enormous number of these failures that lead to real harm in the form of radicalization and targeting of individuals and groups online and the real world.
But come on, the account name is, literally on it's own, a violation of the first rule of the Twitter Safety rules.
Also, Muslim isn't an inherent trait. It's a religion that is taught. Even your examples are faulty.
I'll go even farther and say it's nice if you fully share politics with the moderation team and you are too insecure about those politics to entertain other viewpoints. The sort of people about whom John Stewart Mill wrote:
> He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.
That looks like an utopia to me
Where it starts to look biased is that they've drawn two lines in the sand in recent years: 1. No disinformation about a global pandemic, and 2. No using lies about an election to justify violence against the government. And they banned a bunch of people that did that. And yes: it was one side that made those issues "partisan".
I really don't know what you want Twitter to do here. In any other society, those would seem like reasonable rules.
Why was Robert Malone kicked off? Isn’t his opinion more valuable than some random news personality when it comes to Covid? Literally banning a scientist who helped invent the very tech he is discussing. If he’s wrong, that’s fine, but it isn’t about facts — even the debate is banned.
And what exactly constitutes misinformation? I think this is the problem.
(Of course you'll be able to find a bunch of death threats from random accounts all over, I could find a handful in a few minutes, but that's largely outside of anyone's control.)
The only recent example I can think of is the Babylon Bee and, yeah, this was 100% warranted https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2022/03/21/the-babyl...
I think this is what I don’t understand about the general sentiment that Twitter is some kind of uber-censored platform. Sure, high profile accounts and tweets can sometimes be removed, but have you ever tried reporting tweets?
9 out of 10 times that I report tweets threatening violence or harm against someone, I get a notification a few hours later that the “moderation team” has reviewed that tweet and found it not to be in breach of any policies. Twitter’s reporting system is ineffective at best, and I almost wish I had seen the kind of heavy handed moderation that people prescribe to Twitter here.
The fact that moderation tools exist does not imply that they are being used for political censorship. None of the screenshots of "search blacklisted" accounts from the leak showed any evidence of it being used on actual people, they are all random alphanumeric usernames with more reports than tweets.
In fact, the opposite is true. In 2018, when the feature was first rolled out, it was found to be catching several notable conservative commentators because their tweeting behavior is hard to distinguish from trolls and spambots (wonder why...), so those people were explicitly whitelisted so that they would appear in searches and trends despite their bad behavior.
There’s no goalpost moving here - a social media site having the ability to prevent large volumes of spam making its way to the trending page in front of thousands of eyeballs shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. The number of crypto scams in replies to tweets by Elon himself suggests that this tooling is definitely not as draconian in ability as you seem to believe.
Your email provider also has “secret” blacklists, and if incoming email originates from a sender on those lists then it gets put in your junk (or even bounced). Does that concern you?
The tweet is still up, even. Babylon Bee are being asked to delete it as a form of bending the knee to an opposing ideology. It's wrongthink, not hate speech or incitement, that you and Twitter are concerned with.
I don't have a horse in the trans debate, but I have my fair share of opinions that are verboten in progressive circles. It would be stupid of me to deny what is happening there.
Especially in this case where it was targeted at an individual, and not just a conservative blog post on transgenderism being linked to etc. Notice that Ben Shapiro et al have not been banned.
I'm not trying to define hate speech, I'm saying that there's no hate there to begin with and so all we're left with is an argument over reality (or the terms we use to describe it): is a woman an adult human female, or is there something else we have to consider?
In your counterexamples, black people/women are being declared strictly inferior. That's not the case here - Levine isn't lessened by being an adult human male.
If you want something censored, the onus should be on you to prove that it is hateful, not on someone else to prove that it is not. For that, you need to define hate speech and explain how the Babylon Bee's post fits that definition alongside the examples you just gave.
It still is, if we're talking about averages. Extremely well studied too.
Maybe you're brainwashed to the point where everything Twitter bans falls into categories of "hate speech" or "extreme disinformation". That doesn't mean the majority of people out there share your views. Of course, you don't have to deal with those people, because you probably hang out only on websites that reinforce your biases via censorship.
>I'd love an example of how yourself or other you follow are censored.
Unity 2020 campaign account got permanently banned and links to its website were restricted even in private messages. They broke no rules, posted nothing edgy and no one ever coherently explained why this happened.
New York Post got suspended after Tweeting Hunter Biden laptop article link. The suspension was based on clearly fabricated rationale.
These are just two egregious cases that I'm well familiar with. I can post about a dozen more. There are thousands less notable, but no less clear-cut examples out there. There are even more examples that are debatable, but which in totality indicate a pattern or political manipulation.
Funny thing is, I don't even use Twitter. The question is, why does a person like me is more aware of its censorship that someone who claims to be well familiar with the platform?
Maybe you're brainwashed to the point where everything Twitter bans falls into categories of "hate speech" or "extreme disinformation". That doesn't mean the majority of people out there share your views. Of course, you don't have to deal with those people, because you probably hang out only on websites that reinforce your biases via censorship.
The only thing Libs of TikTok posts is videos made by liberals on TikTok. Yet it was deemed hateful? Reposting liberal content is hateful now.
What? How do you know how long they are watched? How do you how long it's watched on Twitter?
> Then labels the videos as evidence of pedophelia/child grooming
Strange way to summarize the captions, the annotations and summaries I've seen were pretty accurate and more specific than your hyperbole.
How many posts have there been on Twitter calling republicans Nazis? Or claiming the 2016 election was stolen? Or calling Clarence Thomas a house —-r or an Uncle Tom.
Libs of Tik Tok is tame by comparison.
"This is a mental illness"
"This teacher has been identified and is employed by @FergFlorSchools"
"3rd grade teacher at @GracemorNKC teaches 8 year olds about gender identity and then “wonders if anyone [students] will change their minds” presumably about their gender. These groomer teachers need to be fired. "
You say "just annotating videos", those political blinders you're wearing must be pretty strong...
In what way was this "100% warranted"? You mean it's "100% warranted" to ban accounts which make fun of people and things you don't like? What about making fun of Trump? Is that fine? Seems to be, and seems to be based entirely on the mod's political persuasions.
Let's talk about Hunter Biden's laptop. This was banned almost immediately under the premise of "hacked material." Okay, seems fair. Except they allowed (and continue to allow) hacked material to circulate about the Canadian Freedom Convoy donors.
Let's talk about covid. Twitter banned any and all mentions (and accounts) which discussed the possibility that covid came from a lab in Wuhan. This is now a leading theory of its origin. Project Veritas, whether you like them or not, have been instrumental in exposing the relationship between Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance. The fact that Fauci oversaw re-defining the term "gain of function research," that he explicitly gave funding to EcoHealth Alliance, knowing they would be funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct gain of function research, and uncovered incorrectly redacted emails between Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance.
Twitter even suspended Chinese virologist Li-Meng Yan who fled the country to talk about the high likelihood of a lab leak.
I feel quite certain you're busy telling yourself "but these are all totally justified!" This means your views align really well with the moderation on Twitter. Where it's fine to ban things like this, but not the hacked private information about Canadian Freedom Convoy donors, or Trump and family hacks, or the doxing of Libs of Ticktok founder Chaya Raichik.
Twitter's moderation is fairly transparent, and mostly consistentish (as it can be, moderating on the scale that twitter does, which i guess is not very consistent at all...). Just because you don't agree with their moderation doesn't make it untransparent, or inconsistent.
This is the one example everyone who is getting their knickers in a twist about Twitter censorship loves to bring up, but it doesn't seem to be a great example. There's only weak circumstantial evidence in favour of the theory and banning discussion of it was something Twitter realised was a mistake and rolled back on.
I don't think it's unreasonable for mistakes to happen as long as they're corrected. I think there are plenty of things you can criticise Twitter for, but this seems like an odd one to highlight.
> Twitter even suspended Chinese virologist Li-Meng Yan who fled the country to talk about the high likelihood of a lab leak.
"Even"? This is a misrepresentation. Yan is a political hack. She refuses to have her work peer-reviewed. See e.g. [0]. She's a useful pawn for Steve Bannon.
[0] https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/pubs_archiv...
The whole point of free speech is that no faction should be allowed to suppress the speech of others, lest such factions prevent consideration of ideas that might eventually prove convincing and true.