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> Protecting the free speech rights of people who are saying unpopular (but not illegal nor ToS violating) things shouldn't be a barrier to protecting people from harm.

I don't agree with this. Mainly because "protecting people from harm" is not well defined. There are people who seem scared of their own shadow and see nearly everything as potential harm.

EDIT: Not to diminish/trivialize the seriousness of this particular situation, but I still cannot agree with the sentence I quoted as being generally acceptable. As in, I don't want to see a law with that exact sentence in it.

This seems kind of facile.

Women are being threatened with violence, rape and death. Even if these are not threats people intend to carry out, to those receiving them they are deeply distressing. The threats are meant to intimidate and silence. Why should anyone put up with that?

>Why should anyone put up with that?

They shouldn't. Some comments are obviously unacceptable. That's easy. The problem is, as always, where do you draw the line?

It's the comments at the margins of "acceptability" that are the most difficult to deal with and where the arguments of censorship are sure to come from. "You know it when you see it" is not easy to apply.

> The problem is, as always, where do you draw the line?

Threats of unlawful violence. This isn't hard.

> It's the comments at the margins

The US legal system is pretty explicitly biased towards defendants in gray areas, and most marginal cases will never be prosecuted or be thrown out by the judge.

Those that make it through to trial will have a jury determine whether a comment is a threat beyond reasonable doubt, and then the trial judge and at least two appellate judges will have to agree that the jury's verdict was not unreasonable.

Depending on the precise posture of the case, there are tens of judges and an army of clerks beyond that who may see the case cross their desks and provide at least cursory review.

And US courts pay very, very close attention to criminal cases based on speech.

>The US legal system is pretty explicitly biased towards defendants in gray areas

I'm sure Twitter, its users and the legal system are just dying to have marginal cases decided by the courts.

What you've described is the problem I was referring to. One person says one thing, another says something else. A third party has to make the decision on whether it's acceptable or not. That's cumbersome, not very clear cut, and leads to one disgruntled party or at least some controversy.

No third party has to make a decision for Twitter to decide something is unacceptable on its platform, and I would hope Twitter would be much stricter with people who make threats than courts.

> Threats of unlawful violence. This isn't hard.

"Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!"

£385 and £600 costs.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Joke_Trial)

Good. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152125

I agree. It always sounds a bit phony when people bring up the "freedom of speech" defense, as in "if we relinquish our right to use slurs, we won't be able to topple authoritarian tyrannical governments".

The general idea is not worthless, but it's disconnected from reality.

It is not about toppling authoritarian governments. The right to speak freely is important for any democratic system to function. People have to be able to voice their complaints and criticisms.

The problem is that any system that could be used to prevent people from making rape threats on the Internet could and inevitably would be used to silence various forms of dissent. We have seen this sort of thing before:

http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/04/mark-fiore-can-win-a-pulitz...

Your example has nothing to do with the law, and dissent wasn't being silenced. It was entirely down to Apple, which has made a commercial decision not to distribute certain types of material. This doesn't prevent the same material being distributed by other means.

Yes, Apple is the same as Walmart in laying the dead hand of censorship on popular culture with the aim of increasing its own profits, but in most cases, there is not a legal compulsion to do so.

You just supported why twitter will die and people will use other microblogging tools and those who remain like propaganda machine.

Nope.

Otherwise, you've invented a hypothetical problem leading to a hypothetical event.

I hope you come with a big van when you take in all the "i hope you die" commentators on YouTube. Policing the internet of all distressing talk is just a ridiculous idea.

strangely I wasn't suggesting all of the internet should be patrolled, why would you conflate my statement with that?

I think content platforms like twitter do have a responsibility to make their spaces reasonably safe for their users. This means not allowing one user to make threats against another.

There's a difference between hoping bad something might happen to someone, and threatening to rape them, come round to their house and stab them or telling them you've planted a bomb on their car. Would you argue otherwise?

"I hope you die" is not a threat. You are equating utterly different things.

Well, you might think so. But in Britain you might need to go all the way to the High Court to establish the notion that things are not always meant the way they are written: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-19009344

I actually have very little problem with that case. I think the tweet read plainly as a threat and an incredibly stupid thing to say.

I would have been happier if it had been handled with an investigation and warning and not make it to prosecution, but as far as I'm concerned, the guy deserved some nontrivial inconvenience. I'm kind of ambivalent about the fact that the conviction was quashed.

He wasn't even sent to prison. He was fined. I don't think that's a wholly unreasonable way for society to say "don't do that".

Free speech in the UK is under massive threat. But no one really cares. Much like the US reaction to the NSA thing. People think it wont have and effect on them, so they just ignore it. People who do care about free speech, and privacy, are subtly marginalized as radicals, which is presented as being a step or two away from being a terrorist or pervert.

Free speech does not include the right to threaten rape or violence, or to harass women. That is the case both online an offline. Try saying something like this in a loud voice in a pub and see how you get on: https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/363160225873805312

Of course, free speech does allow a nutjob creationist to pervert science education in Texas, but that's another matter.

Define "harassing", and "women" too for that matter.

One of the louder and more influential friends of the woman behind the successful Twitter abuse reporting petition is a particularly charming radical feminist called Cathy Brennan. Brennan believes that trans women are really men attacking women's rights by masquerading as women, and deals with this by systematically outing and doxxing them - we're taking names, photos, addresses, jobs in some cases. She's been known to call the FBI on them and falsely label them as pedophiles (because all trans women are pedophiles in her eyes).

She doesn't consider this harassment. She does, however, consider anyone who objects to her or anyone else doing this - no matter how politely - to be a form of harassment. In addition, she has an organised group of allies with the same views who she gets to dogpile site owners, often successfully. (She's certainly managed to get Wordpress.com blogs reinstated that spectacularly violate the ToS and common decency reinstated, in one case by appealing to Matt Mullenweg directly.)

Naturally, she entirely supports the new Twitter abuse reporting functionality.

So? I don't see how anything useful can be concluded from what you say without invoking one or more fallacies.

The abuse of women on Twitter is vicious and very common. Much of it is also illegal. There's no excuse for ignoring it, and the abuse button looks like the best available answer for roughly 400 million users.

I'll be interested if you can come up with a better one. Complaining about edge-cases has its place but doesn't actually provide an answer.

The problem here is that any system that is used to fight threats of rape or violence will inevitably be used to silence political dissent, criticisms of corporations, etc. The existence of trolls is the price of free speech on the Internet.

And the evidence for that is... where exactly? There's plenty of criticism of corporations and governments, as long as you're not threatening them with violence.

Criticism is silenced by other laws, such as libel. Threats to rape women have nothing to do with it.

...and much like the uk reaction to the gchq thing, as far as i can see.

Protecting the free speech rights of people who are saying unpopular (but not illegal nor ToS violating) things shouldn't be a barrier to protecting people from harm.

Shouldn't be in theory, but essentially everyone with any pull in the public debate seems to want Twitter to ban based on whether the user's opinions are politically correct. So, for example, they argue that telling someone to choke on their own vomit is abusive when their opponents do it to them but a vital part of activism that must be protected when they do it to someone they consider deserving.

There's also signficant debate over whether moderators can even enforce policies in a fair and unbiased way: http://storify.com/andustar/twitter-moderation To be honest, I've never seen it happen ever.

There's a right to free speech in the US but nothing to say it has to exist on any particular platform. This is no different from banning people on forums (except for the unscalable moderation problems, of course).

You get rape threats if you go on Xbox live and the like too. People seem to have mostly dealt with this sort of thing by banning the user from the service.

The behaviour's really not acceptable. But... do we really need the state involved to deal with some teenager who thinks they're funny?

Threats are illegal in the US, too. The laws are just poorly and selectively enforced.