Twitter’s Speech Problem: Hashtags and Hate
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Let's say some racist group was spewing hatred on Twitter. Now, let's say someone was, rightfully, offended and then went and tattle tailed to Twitter or the legal authorities. What is their benefit from that? Those people still think and believe exactly the same things. You could say at the very least it reduces the spread of certain and so forth, but I don't think it does; just because they can't say it on Twitter doesn't mean it is not said hundreds or thousands of times a day. I don't know why anyone would want the government to be our nanny in this case. If anything, taking action like this just eggs them on.
I hope that you and your brother find a safe place to share your information without being harassed.
But "free speech" has real, human, costs; just as censorship does.
Though, on the other hand having this brought up in the news whenever they want to censor a new company keeps the arguments about censorship current and lets people see the backwardness of countries not embracing free speech.
The argument against offensive or incorrect speech is not less speech, but more speech. Win in the argument with words not violence.
For example, what they've done to Brigitte Bardot for voicing her opinions publicly.
Made her pay fines under "incitement to racial hatred"?
I don't see how censoring the tweets will fix that or change anything. So much for fraternité.
When you say US do you mean "United States of America." Racism is so common in the US that I'm surprised that anyone would not know.
Edit: grammar
> France is pretty racist and hateful in general ...
That's a separate issue from hashtags. I think that is totally irrelevant. Let's say, just hypothetically, French culture is such that the racism there is expressed through hashtags twitter. Now, let's say in the US, the culture is such that racists prefer to make disgusting racist comments on YouTube AND perform lynchings and enact legislation prevent people of the same race from drinking at the same water coolers. Does that make the French more racist or hateful? I don't really see the point.
Also, let's, for argument's sake, keep the racism discussion to Twitter. Does it really matter if the racism is in tweets or hashtags in the picture?
If you REALLY want to see examples of racism in the United States, I can produce them. But do you REALLY think I am just "hand waving" when I dispute that it's absurd to think there is no at least the same amount of racism in the US?
Not when they're trending nationally.
But hashtags are not a measure of the level of racism or hate in a country.
The point is that they were trending.
1. Twitter is much more mainstream in the US than in France and other European countries. One source I found shows the active users by country [1]. Using those numbers and assuming 320 million population for the US and 65 mil. for France one can see that 7.15% of US americans are active per month while only 3.3% of French are active per month. My interpretation is that the twitter users in France are much less representative than in the US. Also it is much easier for a very small but active community to break into the trending charts. Another hypothesis which I sadly could not find any numbers for is that the average twitter user in the US is posting MUCH more than the average french. Thus it is much more harder for fringe opinions to rise to the top trending.
2. Trending hashtags don't have to mean people have to endorse it. It could be a critical retweet or other kind of dismissal of racism. So just the fact that a racist hashtag is in the trending topic could also be interpreted as that people in france give a much larger response to racists tweets and try to express their dismay and thus circumstantially also push that hash tag. (I don't want to say that this actually happened)
But just these two points alone show why trending hashtags are a very weak indicator.
[1] http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/twitter-countries-acti...
There's a good reason people left Europe to build new lives in Canada and USA, because they left behind the old world entrenched hatred, corruption and religious intolerance.
US may be responsible for institutionalized modern slavery with their insanity prison system, but at least you don't have mainstream political parties calling for the death of romani and jews like they do in France, Greece, Italy and Hungary.
Even the Netherlands has seen it's fair share of ultra fascist political parties that used soccer jingles to rally hooligans to their cause and beat immigrants in the streets. That these fascist parties would now use Twitter to further organize their members is not surprising but at least on Twitter there's a diaspora of people to refute their bullshit racism and scapegoating. Simply censoring it will not make it go away.
Speaking of Italy Berlusconi used Holocaust Memorial Day a few hours ago to praise the leadership of Mussolini. No I didn't make that up. That's how screwed Europe is right now.
Referring to Europe like one entity is like me saying "Look at how corrupt Cuba is, that's how screwed up North America is right now"
There is a law in France (and in most west europe countries as UK, Germany etc) that prohibit racist/sexist/religious/etc discriminations and hate encouragement.
Unlike USA, most european countries put boundaries to free speech. It do not mean that there is censorship. Nor it mean that it's illegal to think that jews stinks or whatsoever. You can think whatever you want, and tell whatever you want in your private circle, nobody will arrest you for that. But if you use your _public_ free speech to propagate these ideas you will have to face a court.
I know it can seems strange to US people, just like the ability to buy an AR-15 in a WallMart seems strange to us...
But that's our law, and it have been democratically voted.
Now the interesting question in the article is: Do French people that tweet are subjet to French or US laws ? Should Twitter obey to the laws of it's users or only to american laws ?
"All the French are racists", "French should filter web content at ISP level", etc subjects are just bullshit.
And yeah they could sue me if they prove the diffamation i.e. that my statement was false and only stated in the attend to cause damages to WalMart.
The US also put limits on free speech, FWIW: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_excep...