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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

I've been a moderator. Decisions are made contextually.

One of his complaints is they clearly don't know what the hell is going on in Pakistan and this is a root cause of their mishandling of things.

It is a completely reasonable criticism.

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Is it really reasonable? Twitter fails regularly to take such context into consideration when making moderation decisions in their home country. How could it be reasonable to expect them to get it right when it comes to the context of a foreign country?

Assuming Twitter is serving the Pakistani market, making revenue and paying taxes there, it seems reasonable to ask for the same quality controls as elsewhere. In particular hiring Pakistanis for moderation shouldn't be economically devastating for their operations in this country. So on top of being a very reasonable request it should be a minimum requirement of their operating model.

And why do you think Pakistani Twitter moderators would feel empowered to take down tweets by government officials willing to torture and murder?

The request for Twitter to help in this case only makes sense if it assumed it will be taken by moderators living outside of Pakistan, who don't have to fear government reprisal for their actions.

Hiring locals instead of operating from afar is potentially a means to establish a de facto negotiating position.

"I'm sorry, Pakistan, if you can't behave better, we will have no choice but to evacuate our local offices full of relatively well paid jobs and take our toys and go home. Feel free to explain that to your people however you so wish."

Money talks.

Twitter is nowhere near big enough to hire enough people in a country like Pakistan to matter as much as control of public media does - especially to a fascist government. Not to mention, knowing how such agencies operate, I would bet anything that a good few of any such moderators would be Pakistani secret services agents.

No, but they could roll out a pilot program for establishing local moderating offices and as part of that program establish a list of qualifying criteria for where they are willing to place such.

They could do something akin to what McDonald's did for the beef industry. It adopted Temple Grandin's list of best practices as its standard and this got adopted by the beef industry because McDonald's buys so much beef.

Currently, these big companies typically have a predatory relationship to such countries, so such countries have no motivation to cooperate. Make them trade partners and things begin to change.

First of all, why would an authoritarian government want an impartial moderating office for media in their country? If anything, I expect Pakistan to soon demand government control over censoring Twitter, not the other way arpund.

Second of all, Twitter is a bit player in media. Comparing it to McDonald's is absurd. If we were talking about Facebook, this may be a different matter.

Third of all, government relation to media is significantly different to government's relationship to beef. There is no government in the world that wants a bad beef industry, but many many governments that actively want a biased media industry, and are more than willing to sacrifice monetary concerns to achieve this goal. Countries much smaller (at least in population) than Pakistan have actively kicked out platforms like Twitter - see Russia for example.

I will say it again: it is not realistic to expect a foreign media platform to fight government propaganda inside an authoritarian country. Twitter is not the BBC or Reuters, and even those places don't often try to publish in authoritarian countries.

If they can't take the heat, they can get out of the kitchen. If they want to stay, they need to somehow deal with the reality that they are doing business in a dangerous part of the world and their moderating decisions can impact who lives, who dies, etc.

I have a hard time taking this position seriously -- when did you come to this conclusion? Have you put yourself in the position of someone living in these countries? Some random person having their access to the rest of the world just cut off like that? For their own good?

It wouldn't be a random person. It would be the country.

In this case, the guy with the problem is living outside of the country in question. He would still have access to Twitter but the people causing him problems potentially wouldn't.

My personal background includes a parent who grew up in Germany during WW2 and its aftermath, a parent who was a two-time decorated veteran and an ex boyfriend whose political activism cost him 3 years in prison in his youth. He was questioned under torture.

I mean random person in the veil of ignorance sense. If I was a random person in Pakistan, would my life be better or worse because access to the broader social web was cut off? It seems plain to see that it would be worse for most, and on the average.

So, what part of my position do you not understand? I've consistently advocated for them to improve their moderating practices here.

It's other people who insist that is unrealistic to whom I have replied "If they can't handle the task, they do have the option to simply leave this market instead of making excuses about how they have no choice but to go along with (various bad things)."

I'm not impressed with such excuses. A business located outside of a country with serious problems of this sort is not required to operate in that market. If they choose to, they should make an effort to make moderating policies that reasonably account for the fact that people there have issues not commonly seen in someplace like the US.

There is an option to continue to do the best they can, even if it's not great, because even a poorly moderated twitter is better than no twitter. It's only by over focusing on cases like those in the submission and ignoring all the regular people in Pakistan going about their business not paying a lick of attention to any of this that you could make the case that twitter leaving Pakistan would be an improvement.

I agree - I think demanding Twitter stop its service in countries where tweets are likely to cost people lives is a much more realistic goal, and one I would support.

I'm not personally demanding anything of Twitter.

I'm just talking on a forum on a Sunday afternoon.

How is Twitter's relationship with Pakistan predatory?

Also, what is the equivalent to Temple Grandin's list for moderation of social media?

In practice that would mean the third world would get cut off as not worth it and many complaints about information apartheid or similar condemning terms.

That they fail regularly is not much of a defense. If they want to make money in Pakistan they should understand the place well enough to avoid facilitating crime.

I doubt they make very much money off of Pakistani users. It might even be a small net loss. I don't think twitter publishes ARPU per country though, so this is speculation to some degree.

I think it would be perfectly reasonable to simply choose not to operate in countries where the environment is such that your platform is likely to get people killed.

That would require caring about the welfare of other humans more than caring about money/political "power", which most huge corporate entities these days (and the governments they own) have already proven time and again that they do not.

Would you also expect Google Search to take down links to local media outlets publishing similar stories?

I don't personally think Twitter should be expected to go against the official government narrative of any country they operate in, for what it shows inside that country. Not that it would be immoral to do so, but I find it an entirely unrealistic expectation - Twitter is not the BBC.

As far as I know Facebook is actively taking measures to delete fake news and bring awareness about it. Also watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFLv9ozEZeM

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