“The entire Human Rights team has been cut from the company.” | Hacker News Reader

“The entire Human Rights team has been cut from the company.”

twitter.com

Twitter said child porn didn't violate their policies, so I'm not sure what these people were doing.

Twitter banned people whose speech deviated from the state-approved narrative over the last two-plus years. So I'm not sure what these people were doing.

Twitter collaborated with American intelligence organizations to suppress accurate reporting to related to a favored political candidate during a democratic election. So I'm not sure what these people were doing.

They were Tweeting.

Many worried about what Twitter's changes would mean for under-represented groups. Given this news and Twitter also cutting its accessibility department, I think we can see their new attitude towards minorities isn't particularly friendly.

The cold and disappointing truth is that the only institutions with the power to actually do something about human rights are all captured and steered to acquire wealth & power under the auspices of human rights & 'saving the earth'.

And yes, if you ask me, making whole swaths of populations more poor and less powerful is the same as increasing the power and wealth of this group of usurpers.

This is all possible because most people are good and support human rights because (to me, and us commenting) to do otherwise is ghoulish. So through social manipulation & constant reinforcement of what is good for human rights and telling the public who is doing all this good for humans is critical to grift I described above in the abstract.

So clearly, even though twitter human rights dept has little to no actual power to improve human rights, this department is critical to shaping the narrative to the public that the institutions who DO have power to help 'human rights' are actually doing so.

Look at the world today and you know in your heart things are getting worse but watch with a keen eye at how viciouly the levers of propaganda are fought for.

They did have quite a bit of power in situations where Twitter was being used for coordinated inauthentic behavior in regions where ethnic cleansing and genocide were under way.

Under-represented...where exactly? I'm interested in hearing which groups that you think are under-represented based on their percentage of the population.

Or it will be the end of the insane "approved visible minorities" privileges and the beginning of a system where no one is a special snowflake and everyone is treated equal.

Or even better:

More poor trailer-park-raised peomle in positions of power ! Economic class is the new race (spoiler: is always has been)

What exactly did the Twitter "Human Rights team" do? Was this some kind of content moderation team, or paper pushers who made stuff like slide decks and trainings on "UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights" that no one really cared about?

Twitter is not a profitable company and Elon must turn it into one. So, bluntly, what positive impact was that team making to the bottom line?

Some may be tempted to look for political meaning behind this decision but this is a business and I think there is no need to look beyond hard-fact business calculations here.

I’m sure it helped keep advertisers on the platform, given that it contributes to brand safety.

Your conclusion does not follow. More accurate and likely is that the brands will now feel free to no longer be extorted on Twitter by the whole NGO shaming and naming blackmail/guilt tripping industry. The only things these groups and people are ever successful at is lining their pockets, employing friends and family, expanding their extortion racket, and flying around speaking of how virtuous they are. I know them and live among them. It’s nauseating and clearly psychopathic.

But maybe I’m wrong, did this Twitter human rights team (why?) speak out about the human trafficking of immigration? And its sex trade/trafficking? Did it speak out against the violation of the human rights of the indigenous people who are inundated by immigration and are being plundered by it? Did they speak out against the decimation of emigrant communities that are emptied out and decimated? Did they call for stopping the use of tech products or electric vehicles that are built on slavery mining of rare earth minerals? Did this human rights team speak out against the political prisoner incarceration and clear human rights abuses of trump supporters? Did they speak for the rights and against the US and UK governments’ atrocity against Julian Assange? … and did they do any of that without simply receiving money/access/image and then claim their “partners” are working to improve?

I look forward to someone providing me some insight. Last I heard Twitter was still a hotbed of sex trafficking and sexual slavery, and its associated pornography. Pedophiles are constantly (just the other day) caught/exposed by use of Twitter.

That you can't see the value in having such a team - that having such a team is essential for a company like twitter to operate - is completely baffling to me. Not having one will make advertisers pull out and make the company much less profitable.

Frankly, I don't see how having a team that works "to implement the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights, to protect those at-risk in global conflicts & crises including Ethiopia," makes any difference to advertisers (but honestly I don't quite get what the team was doing concretely within Twitter... well, maybe Elon didn't, either!)

Advertisers can be spooked by the contents of tweets. Basically few brands want to be associated with extremist or otherwise 'damaging' contents but that's very different and rather touches moderation. That's why advertisers are currently cautious, not because of Human Rights (capitalised) in global conflicts...

I think advertises might get spooked by twitter facilitating a genocide.

edit: You mentioned Ethopia -- https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/16/ethiopias-invisible-ethn...

How is twitter facilitating a genocide. The article makes no mention of it.

They’re not, that’s what they had someone working to prevent!

What exactly was prevented?

> twitter facilitating a genocide.

Where twitter employees on the ground training and supplying death squads, helping them hunt down X group.

How does a social media site facilitate genocide?

The same way traditional media does?

c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Lib...

Are you trolling?

Yeah but that could be part of be normal. Moderation team

Have you seen what's been happening in Ethiopia for the last few years? Or elsewhere? The stakes are much higher than the bottom line. These platforms have been used to for coordinated campaigns to instigate and stoke mass interpersonal violence. The Human Rights team responded to that vulnerability.

Sounds like they weren't doing a very good job then.

Yeah but how does that need a separated team? Nobody wants to advertise Coca-Cola next to pictures of human right abuse anyway

Elon Musk has now taken several steps that make advertisers nervous (this step one included). As such, by his own admission, Twitter is now suffering a massive fall in revenue. Therefore, such cuts are the very definition of "penny wise, pound foolish." A few more cuts like this and Twitter will go the way of Tumblr (bought for $1.1 billion and sold for $3 million). If your whole business model is advertising then you need to care about the audience that you hope to sell to your advertisers, and if you don't care about that audience, it will shrink, at which point your advertising revenue will decline.

If Twitter’s business model had been advertisement, Twitter would not have banned people with money to spend.

What exactly do you believe their business model to be?

Regwall / dark patterns: <https://nitter.net/shannonrsingh/status/1588591603622772736>

Why do we need human rights? Elon will tell you what your rights are. Also he would probably like to have twins with you

Twitter does not need a human rights team. Just saying it’s not a branch of the UN and it’s not trying to project soft power on Americans enemies

Wise move - that kind of work is better left to representatives of the people via their elected officials and existing laws.

So, playing your game for a second, how do the laws implemented by the elected officials, elected by the people actually make it into execution. Maybe Twitter should hire a human rights attorney to work with the elected officials elected by the people to implement those laws!

Law enforcement is typically tasked with this. We don't need twitter playing Batman for the world.

I think the point will be that law enforcement doesn't enforce them (or a great many other laws, such as substandard housing conditions which don't get fixed by landlords)

Right, that's what I said.

Afghans, specifically mentioned in this twitter thread, don't have an elected government.

I believe the Taliban has an account and has not been banned, which seems tough to justify from any human rights perspective. Probably best to just not operate in these markets at all.

"I am enormously proud of the work we did to implement the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights, to protect those at-risk in global conflicts & crises including Ethiopia."

What does that mean, concretely? What does it achieve? Activating Starlink in such areas actually achieves something, this on the other hand sounds like futile feel-good bureaucracy.

Concretely it means that they had data scientists who monitored networks of coordinated inauthentic behavior that were being used to stoke mass interpersonal violence in regions undergoing political turmoil. A recent example is in Tigray but it's been happening nonstop all over the world. Wherever there's social tension, some government or organization is going to be interested in stoking it for their gain.

Searched but couldn't find anything that seemed contextually relevant, what is mass interpersonal violence? Seems like it must be a code word for something I'm not familiar with. All references I see for interpersonal violence seem to be synonymous with domestic violence.

Basically I'm referring to weaponized mob violence, the kinds of things that have occurred in Ethiopia or Myanmar recently but also elsewhere.

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