At what point does Twitter restricting world leader tweets become election interference and foreign policy interference. Will Twitter have to register as a foreign agent in Europe?
I've had people telling me for the last 3 years that it's definitely election interference if a private Russian company pays some people to write tweets about US politicians. But now, apparently it's not election interference if Twitter itself applies special restrictions to the accounts of foreign politicians it doesn't like?
> But now, apparently it's not election interference if Twitter itself applies special restrictions to the accounts of foreign politicians it doesn't like?
They're not applying restrictions to the accounts of politicians they _don't like_, they're applying restrictions to politicians that _break Twitter's sitewide rules_.
A politician doesn't want to get restricted? Follow the rules, like everyone else.
Its trivial to devise rules of a discourse that selectively lock out certain ideologies from participating. You can easily use such a system to suppress speech you disagree with as much as you would by just banning them.
Its totally in Twitters right to do it though. If politicians and/or society at large disagree about about not centralizing all your communications on the websites of international corporations.
You mean “certain ideologies” like targeted harassment on the basis of race gender or religion, threats/incitement to violence, support of terrorism or genocide, child sexual exploitation, etc.?
I guess that’s true... but such ideologies have no place in a modern society.
If your ideology can only be expressed using hate, get your own platform. Nobody has a responsibility to amplify such messages.
That's very simplistic thinking. The rules could say absolutely no racism which sounds reasonable but then the definition might get blown wide open when a liberal Gov say they need to restrict immigration, if you don't agree with that person that said it you could easily spin that they broke the TOS.
“We should restrict immigration to limit labor supply so that the native born can earn better wages” is not the same type of message as “immigrants are cockroaches and we should shoot refugees as they cross the border.”
“We should reject colonial oppression of our country” is not the same type of message as “we must wage religious war against our oppressors, and it is righteous to for young men to be suicide bombers”.
“We should end affirmative action on the basis of race because it isn’t fair to individual members of the majority group” is not the same type of message as “all members of X minority are inherently worthless, and we should purge them”.
“Rape accusations should be handled by law enforcement professionals rather than by school administrators, and the evidence should need to meet a high legal standard to be actionable” is not the same type of message as “X person claims they were raped but everyone knows they are a lying slut and were asking for it.”
Etc.
Why do I even have to try and explain this?
> The rules could say absolutely no racism
This is not what the rules do say. What they “could say” is not relevant here. The rules say: “Hateful conduct: You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”
Specifically disallowed are (1) violent threats, (2) wishing, hoping or calling for serious harm on a person or group of people, (3) references to mass murder, violent events, or specific means of violence where protected groups have been the primary targets or victims, (4) inciting fear about a protected category, (5) repeated and/or non-consensual slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone, (6) hateful imagery
It’s very hard to see it, but these rules facilitate bias.
When I listened to the interview on Joe Rogan with the Trust and Safety officer, one of the examples she gave was the Milo Youannopolis quote “the world would have been better off if your mother banged you on the rock as a baby” or something to that effect.
This is gross, and offensive, but not a threat. It’s not a threat to talk hyperbolically about a hypothetical and ridiculous past event.
Unless you already find a person scary.
In which case it very very much sounds like a threat, or an incitement to violence.
Language needs context and if you believe that people with certain characteristics (including political orientation) are more likely to be violently dangerous, it is absolutely natural to view things they say as more threatening than you might otherwise.
It’s still bias.
It’s bias if a policeman finds “I have a gun in the glove compartment, and a license for it” more threatening based on someone’s race.
If it were based on some real or perceived fact about the world, still bias.
Actually definitionally bias.
Humans use bias (context) to make sense of the world. And that context (bias) is necessary for communication to makes any sense.
Which means those rules can only be implemented in a way that reflects the bias of whomever is implementing them.
> Milo Youannopolis quote “the world would have been better off if your mother banged you on the rock as a baby” or something to that effect. This is gross, and offensive, but not a threat. It’s not a threat to talk hyperbolically about a hypothetical and ridiculous past event.
As false positives go, if this is the one you're worried about, you can tell that your case isn't strong by asking exactly what a platform that accidentally threw out that sort of content-baby with the actual-threat bathwater would be losing. Even if "it's not a threat" were inarguably true, it doesn't make much sense as a response, because there's no discourse in there, it's simply abuse, and likely runs afoul of other rules, certainly of other sensible rules that could be established.
But to say it's not a threat really stops short of thinking about what was said. “the world would have been better off if your mother banged you on the rock as a baby” is a statement that bypasses any particular criticism -- the kind of thing that might be a valuable feature in speech and discourse -- and instead simply asserts a total lack of value in someone's life. If you think that discourse is valuable, part of the reason for that has to be that you think ideas matter. What are the consequences if people believe in that idea -- the idea that some specific person's life has a total lack of value because they said something Milo doesn't like?
"Not a threat" is a technical judgment, perhaps even a distinction that matters. But there's absolutely the implication of violence, and hyperbole is not an adequate defense, nor would any sensible person find it so if they were told that someone should have done the world a favor and set them on fire as a child.
> rules can only be implemented in a way that reflects the bias
Which is another way of saying that rules will always be about values, both of those who wrote them and those who carry them out. Whether that's a bug or a feature depends on how fit the values in play are.
So what's the alternative? "The rules aren't perfect, so let's get rid of all of them" is not improving things over "the rules intent is good, but humans implementing them will be biased". The solution would be a way to reduce bias.
Ironically, one true solution to the problem of bias is diversity. The thing the groups who most rail against banning of misgendering or racist language despise. Get a a "good conservative" into the group which enforces the rules, as an ombudsman or a watchdog whatever, the same way we'd do for polticically other, and then it can play out.
Disclosure: I am an european left of center, so from american perspective I'm basically communist. I use conservatives as an example because the seem to be the largest group complaining about things like enforcing harassment policies. To communicate my view on this debate with an example, insisting on misgendering people when that causes them pain is worse than a mere insult, it's equivalent to walking up to veteran with PTSD, pulling out a toy gun to their face and going "BANG". That shit would not offline, and it should not fly as a performative act online to normalize it either.
“The world would be better off if you were dead” is an opinion, not s threat: it states no intent of future action.
> Context is important "Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?"
That's not a threat, it's a solicitation; it requests other to engage in rather states an intent to carry out future action. But “the world would be better off...” is neither, on its face.
Just because something is an option doesn’t stop it from being threatening. A reasonable person could become afraid that they would be harmed by a person that expressed a preference for their death.
Have you heard of the StackOverflow CoC controversy where a larger part of the community, possible the majority, disagree on the exact definition of harassment of other people on the basis of gender identity?
Did you also hear about the Wikipedia Fram controversy where a large party of the community, including the highest democratically appointed authority (arbcom) disagree with the wikipedia foundation on what harassment is?
To take a random sample further from the past, a guild wars 2 developer accused a fan of harassment after criticism of the game story line got posted. The controversy lead to two developers being fired and the company posting a huge apology which said that criticism of the game story line is not harassment and any fan should be free to express constructive views about the art.
A rule that forbids harassment only has meaning based on how harassment get defined, and with current cultural environment that definition is all over the place.
An even more political loaded area, hateful rhetoric is quite common. Here in Sweden there were a brief suggestion to forbid it on the national broadcast channels, but then the idea had to be basically scrapped as the definition could never really be agreed on. If you have one political party using immigrants as the target demographic for all problems, and an other political party using males as the target demographic for all problems, should we ban both? That is not going to happen.
Protected category is interesting but a extremely US centric concept where the federal government specify a list of protected groups and anyone not on it is a free target. It is a list not even all the states agree on, as political views is sometimes added by specific states and others don't. The concept of an "official religion" is also one which is constantly debated, with groups like copyme trying to get included in the protected category. EU has a bit better and broader definition in Article 10, but the enforcement is mostly up to individual nation states.
You still don't get it. People will claim what you're saying violates some rule if they don't you or your position. Doesn't matter if YOU consider it to be reasonable or not. I don't disagree with your distinctions at all but people are shitty and will not be as benevolent as you.
Regarding your examples. If you say "We should restrict immigration to limit labor supply so that the native born can earn better wages", you will be read by many people as if you were saying "immigrants are cockroaches". These people will group you with people who say the latter thing, and with people who imply the shooting part.
I know that for a fact. I live in Europe. We had a migration crisis recently, and no matter what you believed, how nuanced your position was, you always ended up being called either "a compassionless monster who doesn't care about other people dying", or "a traitor supporting parasites in taking our jobs and destroying our economy".
“We should reject colonial oppression of our country” very much implies “we should wage a war against our oppressors” (not sure why you bring religion into this). Suicide bombing didn't enter the western Overton window just yet, but it surely will if things ever get bad enough. For evidence, just skim [0].
> “We should end affirmative action on the basis of race because it isn’t fair to individual members of the majority group” is not the same type of message as “all members of X minority are inherently worthless, and we should purge them”.
That tells me you haven't been on the Internet recently. It absolutely means the same thing in the eyes of a certain vocal minority that currently dominates all social media, and has an uncanny ability to summon Internet mobs in order to ruin people's lives.
> “Rape accusations should be handled by law enforcement professionals rather than by school administrators, and the evidence should need to meet a high legal standard to be actionable” is not the same type of message as “X person claims they were raped but everyone knows they are a lying slut and were asking for it.”
Except in practice the former is understood by many as the latter, and can end up with you in the news headlines and having your life's work taken away from you.
--
Point being, rules like Terms of Service or Codes of Conduct are easily weaponized and used as tools of oppression if they're not backed by impartiality, rationality, a firm commitment to uphold the spirit of those rules and to nip all attempts at rule lawyering in the bud. Otherwise, either the service itself will abuse the rules, or the users that are best at escalating minor disagreements will. I have zero trust in Twitter on this matter.
Do you have an example of Twitter using its discretion to shut down a participant who (in your opinion) did not violate the site’s rules? (Where they didn’t acknowledge it as a mistake and later re-instate that person? Mistakes are obviously not completely avoidable.)
We are talking about what will get you banned from Twitter, not what will get you called a racist jerk or a terrorist sympathizer or whatever by other participants on the site.
All of your acceptable examples most definitely fall under "inciting fear about a protected category".
Also, wouldn't "references to mass murder, violent events, or specific means of violence where protected groups have been the primary targets or victims" prohibit Jews from speaking about the holocaust?
The explainer part of the terms (actually reading then clarified a lot):
> We prohibit targeting individuals with content that references forms of violence or violent events where a protected category was the primary target or victims, where the intent is to harass. This includes, but is not limited to sending someone:
> will you pay me a dollar for each time I'm called a racist, white supremacist, xenophobe, etc.?
I'll pay you a dollar every time your account gets blocked, because I don't give a crap if other users call you mean names for expressing bigoted views. That's not what anything in this thread is about.
> Do you think, for example, Twitter is going to limit engagement on tweets from political opponents calling Trump a racist?
> ... I don't give a crap if other users call you mean names for expressing bigoted views.
Are you trying to prove my point here, or was that inadvertent? I listed a set of political and legal discussions around sensitive topics that happen to involve race and national origin. I didn't even express any personal viewpoints at all. But in your mind, a "carefully and precisely represented right-leaning position" is enough to warrant being slandered for bigotry. Which is precisely the problem here.
> those rules, exactly how you have stated them, can be--and are--used to clamp down on valid political speech.
As far as I can tell Twitter has not “clamped down on valid political speech”, but only on targeted harassment, threats, and so on.
You are complaining that supporting a racist worldview gets someone called out as a racist by other users of the site. But that’s expected and healthy discourse for a democracy. There’s nothing in Twitter’s terms of service that says people can’t make fun of someone or call them racist.
This is entirely different from getting banned by the platform for e.g. inciting violence.
Claiming that a right-leaning political worldview is racist is a nasty ploy, it’s slander to suppress a dissenting opinion. It’s a dodge from someone unwilling or unable to defend their position by engaging in meaningful debate.
However, repeated degrading attacks against someone are against Twitter policy.
> Repeated and/or non-consensual slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone. We prohibit targeting individuals with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category.
When these policies are applied with an uneven hand, they betray the political bias of those applying the policies.
If you have an opinion (any opinion really) about a race or a national origin, that makes you a bigot, yes. Non-bigots don't have opinions on a color of a skin, nor a place of birth.
Those things are not chosen by an individual and therefore should not be discussed nor should the individual be generalized based on them. You can criticize an individual based on their action regardless of where they're from or how they look like. As soon as you start generalizing everyone who looks like them / is born in the same area as them, you become a bigot.
There, you were already so close to being self-aware that I hope I helped you achieve awareness.
I’ve been careful not to, because the point isn’t to argue a side, it’s to discuss how valid political arguments might be suppressed due to wrongful accusations of, e.g. racism or alleged violations of terms / codes of conduct.
To be clear I agree with your first two paragraphs. It’s only the third which alleges that you’re correcting a belief I have, that I do take issue with.
So I think again you’re reading into what I wrote too much. Why beat a dead horse, but the point there is to recognize that e.g. “immigration policy” is necessarily going to impact populations that are predominantly of a certain race and/or national origin. But crucially, it’s not racist to think that a country should have a border or debate how set immigration policies are enforced along that border. It’s not racist to examine sub-populations which are moving illegally across the border, e.g. to examine the prevalence of drug running, human trafficking, or gang activity within that sub-population, or to examine the share of that sub-population that is currently charged or has been found guilty of committing a violent crime versus other populations such as legal immigrants or natural citizens. This is just basic sociology.
So that’s what I mean by “sensitive [political] topics” that happen to involve race and national origin.
So like, "no hate speech" has resulted in minorities being unable to discuss the harassment they receive on a daily basis, and has prevented communities from using re-appropriated terms (or even talking about community events). Have you just not been paying attention to this stuff? :( (Though like, I feel like it would also require not having friends in minority classes, as I've had tons of people I know raise bloody hell over this stuff on Facebook as their posts get pulled.)
Dude, you can get banned permanent from Twitter for writing "men aren't women". Happened to a famous Canadian feminist [0].
Or, I dare you to write some spicy tweets about "white people" and then try the same ones about "black people". Just watch how different your treatment is.
The idea that Twitter Inc. is anything close to even-handed or principles-based in their rules enforcement is a joke. They're entirely converged to a deep San Francisco hardcore-progressive worldview representing about 8% of Americans [1] and perhaps 1% of the world population.
Murphy got banned for referring to a specific individual by their former name and gender rather then their current name. Releasing this type of private information is similar to doxing a person and is considered a form of harassment under twitters rules.
I don't agree. I want these ideologies in the open, where I can see them, examine them, fight them. I do not want them to go "underground" where they can fester and grow uninterrupted and unobserved by the larger society, until they have grown enough to burst and soak society in puss.
Also, I do not want twitter, a private company, to be the gatekeeper, a gatekeeper we cannot observe or control. Especially not then the Saudis invested $300m in that company (or a reddit which had an $150m investment by essentially China).
Freedom of speech is not absolute, but the limits shouldn't be set by some corporation, but by the People.
Typing words on a keyboard is not fighting anything.
Every time you interact on social media like twitter with a public message you disagree with you inform the algorithms that that message is good content. You amplify it.
Like a virus piggybacking on the immune system our intuitive efforts to subvert the message simply expose more people to the message.
bullshit. Dialogue, personal preferred, but "digital" if not otherwise possible, is a way to actually fight ideology and undermine the ideologist and demagogues.
Sure, the twitters and facebooks with their shitty algorithms tuned for maximal addiction and thus indirectly maximal conflict are far from helpful, but that isn't a reason to stop the dialogue. That's a reason to force these corporations to not behave like drugdealers.
What's your approach to fighting ideology? Hiding it (aka censoring it, "deplatforming") doesn't work. Then you only disenfranchise people to a degree where they a least the already mentally unstable will be put in a mental position of "my life is over, I could as well go out with a bang".
The other alternative is to use force of some kind, like imprison people with the "wrong" ideas, "hit a nazi" or outright kill them... also known as fascism. Fighting fascism with fascism from the other direction does not seem to be a viable approach to me either.
I’ve found that you can’t fight ideology. The harder you push against someones identity, challenging their sense of self, the hard they dig in and often begin their own offensive to divert the challenge away from their identity.
Ideology isn’t often rational (unless the identity is based in being rational... but even then thats often more about being a person who is right or smart than actually being rational). You can’t fight it with rationality.
I have no control over you. I cannot change your mind for you. I can only attempt to make it safe for you explore other ideas without loosing your identity. It’s up to you to change your own mind.
> I want these ideologies in the open, where I can see them, examine them, fight them. I do not want them to go "underground" where they can fester and grow uninterrupted and unobserved by the larger society, until they have grown enough to burst and soak society in puss.
Keeping hate groups off of Twitter does more to inhibit their growth than your attempts to debate them.
The neo-nazis didn't have a point worth debating that the public opinion suppressed. But they were in part caused by socio-economical problems that largely went ignored.
Deplatforming works. People like Milo Y were raking in massive amounts of cash, then faded into obscurity when they were deplatformed.
On the other hand, the AfD has received ridiculous amounts of airtime in Germany, frequently setting the topics for public debate formats like Hart aber fair or Anne Will and instead of becoming less popular now made gains in almost every election. Indeed, most political conversations in the public media now either directly reference them or (un)intentionally copy their rhetoric around problems.
Compare that with the widespread distaste for the NPD before the AfD showed up, or look at how the total crapshoot of investigations into the NSU terrorist group or more recently the Identitarian terrorists is reported by the media and treated by politicians -- then compare it with the coverage of the RAF.
Also, Germany banned "symbols hostile to the constitution", not neo-nazis. There were attempts to outlaw the NPD for violating the constitution, but they were completely botched by the investigators' reliance on informants and possibly agents provocateur. The NPD wasn't banned. And there are still frequent neo-nazi demonstrations, so claiming "neo-nazis" in general were at any point banned enough to "thrive in the shadows" or whatever doesn't make sense.
You prove your point by debating the neo-nazis on twitter, winning the argument with facts, and shutting them up. Report back here when you've solved the problem.
The point is not to win stupid internet arguments with people so deeply caught in their cognitive dissonance there is no escaping for them anymore anyway.
The point is to prevent them feeling victimized and recruiting other people by stating they are victimized and censored. Do not underestimate the underdog effect.
The point is to engage them, debunk them, as thoroughly and publicly as possible to disinfect people who are on the verge of being recruited.
The point is not to insult and belittle and censor that blue collar worker deplorable because that person voiced some concerns about immigration for example (even misguided or even racist), because when you do, you create another Trump voter who might even go to a White Supremacists rally later, because at least those people take that person "seriously" (or at least pretend they do) instead of throwing a wave of name calling and open hatred.
The point is to have give the nazis and also the disenfranchised but usually also very hateful and misguided young, mostly white, mostly male fellow human being some people so eagerly call "incels" a place where they can vent their bullshit instead of venting it on the 8ch clones populated only with like-minded people pushing each other further and further, and also keep to an eye on them.
And maybe, just maybe, by not always being a total asshole to them (even tho they are total assholes to other people), not going for the easy "you're an incel nazi scum" kill, you will brick by brick dismantle their wall of mouthfoaming ideology.
Like this guy does rather successfully: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis
You might know him already; he is a the black musician who went out and actually talked to KKK members and now has a nice collection of KKK robes from people he convinced to quit.
>So you're saying the point is to not hurt neo-nazi's feelings, because if you're nice to them, they wouldn't recruit so many people to their cause?
No, I did not say that. I said to treat them as human beings and not deliberately antagonize them with stupid insults. And to take the power of "victimhood" and "underdogness" from them, which they use, like all extremists, as a powerful recruiting tool. Al Quaida and IS do it, the nazis do it. Trump does it. Because it works.
>because if you're nice to them, they wouldn't recruit so many people to their cause?
Did not say that either.
>Are your own feelings hurt that Milo Yiannopoulos
Go fuck yourself, trying to paint me in that corner.
And since you so nicely referred to that wiki, let me refer to it myself.
Gee, I thought your argument was based on the presumption that you were able to engage people in polite civil conversation and change their opinions with calm, logical arguments, and citations to facts and evidence. How is that working out for you?
If you can't change my opinion that your tired old Tone Argument is invalid by telling me to go fuck myself, then how is your polite fight against the neo-nazis on Twitter going? Have you taken your campaign to Telegraph so you can try to change Milo Yiannopoulos's mind without hurting his feelings and making him feel victimized? Because he's not on Twitter any more.
I don't wanna change your opinions. You're not my enemy just a sad troll.
And I have you know I volunteered for Exit in my youth, and we actually helped quite a few neo-nazis quit. The first step was to actually get in touch with them. Not calling them "nazis scum" and screaming "DIE DIE DIE" in their direction helped with that.
Projects like Exit are important to rehabilitate nazis.
Deplatforming and silencing are important to shut down recruitment.
Not every person facing hardship becomes a nazi. It's true that as a society we need to fix the social problems making people vulnerable to nazi recruitment, but we also need to shut down the recruitment wherever possible and allowing it to happen in the open has only resulted in more nazis, not fewer.
You're right that insulting them is unproductive. But giving them a platform is far worse, even -- no, especially! -- when it's "just for debate". Because nazis don't use a debate to defend their arguments, they use it to shape public opinion and knowingly misrepresent facts to create an appealing narrative, and it takes more time, effort and credibility to deconstruct this narrative than to just put it out there.
Compared to the modern Identitarian movement and international white supremacists, the 1990s German neo-nazis were target practice.
Banning Neo-Nazis did work out pretty good in Germany.
It‘s not a perfect or complete solution but exactly the right approach.
Allowing them to only play in the kiddie pool by disallowing symbols and certain speech is also great and works towards making them look ridiculous.
So all in all I give this solution high marks. It obviously cannot alone remove fascism from a society were that was so widespread and deeply ingrained.
Reading all these comments here I can just advise HN people to be a bit more tolerant of imperfect, incomplete and messy solutions to problems. I know, programmers want to have it all neat and clean and complete and with precision but sometimes that’s not anything achievable.
Freedom of speech is the government not throwing you in jail for saying things it doesn't like. What Twitter does or does not allow has nothing to do with freedom of speech.
Always that same, tired argument. Yes, they are a private company. But also yes, private companies can be regulated.
Twitter already cannot refuse service to people based on the color of their skin.
Volkswagen did not implement a "freedom of speech, we're a private company and do as we please"-device but a cheat-device violating environmental regulations.
Utility companies have a "duty to serve" and cannot deny you service because you wrote a bad review about them on yelp.
It has long been my stance that companies whose products have major societal impact especially on the functioning of our democracies should be regulated along the lines of public utilities with a duty to serve. This duty to serve is not boundless, just like with the traditional utilities.
If their ideology promotes lies and violence, then yes. But what evidence do you have that their ideology promotes doing that, or are you just making a false equivalence?
I mean, China's influence was enough for companies like Activision Blizzard to clamp down on people expressing support for Hong Kong, so it's entirely credible.
Turkey's president literally just ran an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal defending his invasion of Syria and telling tall tales of Turkey's humanitarian mission and unique effort to fix migration, violence and instability.
Twitter is swamped with "bots" (be they actual automated accounts, throwaways, state actors or regime-friendly humans) posting and re-posting fraudulent news stories, lies and plain old propaganda in favor of all kinds of national interests and political leanings.
I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter in an attempt at "corporate impartiality" would be more inclined to go after the Kurds or Hong Kong protesters than Turkish and Chinese slurs, dehumanisation and calls for violence. After all, there are probably more "people" reporting these accounts than reporting the various propaganda outlets.
We can cherry pick a few examples of some of the protestors acting violently, then use that to claim the protestors in general are violent. That's what they've successfully done to claim Pepe the frog is racist after all.
There's a video from Hong Kong that went somewhat viral showing a protester jump kick a police officer in the face who was trying to drag and arrest another protester lying on the ground.
The video was widely shared by protester-friendly accounts celebrating the act because several arrested protesters had recently turned up dead or disappeared.
It's very easy to construct a narrative portraying the protesters as violent criminals if you start from the assumption that all police violence is justified and resisting any form of police violence is not.
EDIT: Oh and the problem with Pepe wasn't that "Pepe is racist because someone used it that way", it's that Pepe became popular on 4chan and was then co-opted for racist imagery and embraced by actual racists who then used it unironically, so it eventually became a calling card.
Likewise the "ok hand" gesture and emote was initially planted as a "hoax" white supremacist symbol by 4chan members but then actual white supremacists started using it, first ironically as a nod to the "hoax", then unironically to demonstrate their affiliations to others.
The problem with these "dog whistles" is that they're intentionally ambiguous and can be entirely innocent in the right context. Of course not everyone posting "funny green frog memes" or using the "ok hand" gesture is a nazi, but if someone who's already suspiciously copying far-right rhetoric randomly flashes the ok hand in a photo op, or uses Pepe (or the less subtle NPC meme) they're most likely trying to say something while retaining plausible deniability.
What would you suggest is the minimum evidence necessary to support the view that an ideology promotes violence?
- Isolated incidents of violence on behalf of the ideology?
- A "sufficiently large" number of incidents on behalf of the ideology? If so, could you elaborate on "sufficiently large" as you see it?
- A general tacit approval of violence?
- An explicit approval of violence?
- Something else?
The problem I think that many see is there tends to be extensive cognitive dissonance. People apply one set of standards to groups they like, and another to ones that they don't. I think you'll find that in trying to answer my above question it becomes quite difficult to include the groups you don't like, while excluding the groups you do like. That's even when my framing above which is unrealistically softball. For instance I didn't even mention things like harassment, destruction of property, etc which I think we should also generally be intolerant of - even when it's a group we like engaging in such things.
Honestly no I don't. Locking them out will just lead to false positives and a forever shifting window of what is acceptable. Obviously acceptability shifts with time but if the response to someone genuinely saying "Wait but what about X? Don't BAD PEOPLE hve a point about X?" gets banned for it they are more likely to side with said BAD PEOPLE
For another, even if I missed it or it's implicit in another rule, while I suppose there's an argument that identifiers have political implications... there's plenty of social space for them to be about being polite in the same way that usually, you should use the names people give you for themselves.
Maybe most of all, though, how many of the other rules would you characterize as heavily ideologically driven? Perhaps the one about not threatening violence against an individual or class? Promoting terrorism? Child sexual exploitation? Suicide? Doxing?
Personally, I can think of a pretty wide latitude of discourse ranging over a variety of ideologies that's allowed me even if I'm forbidding those forms of engagement AND have to be careful to use someone's preferred pronouns.
> how many of the other rules would you characterize as heavily ideologically driven?
Most of them. It doesn't mean I always disagree with that ideology, but I do recognize them as ideology with political implications.
> Doxing?
The US has the sex offender register. Germany has the right to be forgotten, including sex offenders. Should a twitter bot in the US be allowed to write about sex offenders or is that doxing?
> Promoting terrorism
Terrorism has sadly become a very muddy word. The recent Turkish offensive into north-eastern Syria see a lot of disagreement on who is a terrorists. In the past we had US policy of counting any dead male in a conflict zone under the age of 15 as a killed terrorist. To me that is the typical examples of a heavily politically driven definition.
>We prohibit targeting individuals with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.
While I don't really have any issues with it being prohibited, I wouldn't put misgendering or deadnaming in the same category as inciting violence or advocating for child exploitation.
"Harmful stereotypes" was the reason that James Damore got fired from Google. Despite the fact his harmful stereotypes were backed up with scientific references.
And refuted not with "uncontested" social science (an oxymoron if there was ever one), but with job termination.
We had someone clearly trying to have a constructive discussion on a topic and he was treated as if he had written the manifesto for the Fourth Reich and was demanding all women be sent back to the kitchen.
There is a time and a place for "constructive discussion" of certain topics and that place is apparently not Google. It might be regrettable that he (supposedly) does not understand it, but really it is not a surprise to me and should not be a surprise to any working individual that your workplace is not a space in which you discuss things of a sensitive nature (especially not if it is very visible). This is the case in almost every large corporation, so the fact that this specific incident is so widely discussed is very strange to me.
It is definitely very much fine to discuss things of sensitive nature at Google, and Google has been explicitly very much encouraging of that. The issue was that only some of the opinions on the issues of sensitive nature were allowed, but it wasn't made clear by written company policy, only by enforcement.
Corporations frequently embellish the truth. Let us not pretend we are so naive that we do not understand that this is the case. Care should be taken when talking about things that people feel strongly about, especially if those people are your boss.
These are hard lessons that everyone who works at a big corporation at a level above janitor has learned within the first year of working there, so to me arguments along the lines of "but they said it would be different this time, they promise" just seem ill-advised to me. As if you are sticking your head in the sand and proceeding as if you can't depend on your own good thinking.
> There is a time and a place for "constructive discussion" of certain topics and that place is apparently not Google
I'd agree with you if he wasn't discussing it in direct reference to how Google approached things like hiring from a strategic perspective. However what he discussed was in the context of how google approaches something.
Secondly from what I've heard Google provided a space for precisely these kinds of discussions, so suggesting he should have known better than to discuss seems pretty unfair to me.
Even if what he said was wrong, wrong, wrong, it really seems to me like he was trying to engage in good faith and people didn't respond to it in good faith at all
There is a reason people who make actual strategic decisions speak as if they are eels covered in oil and it is to avoid situations like the one this person found themselves in.
> Google provided a space for precisely these kinds of discussions, so suggesting he should have known better than to discuss seems pretty unfair to me.
Yes, corporations embellish the truth (or lie, if you want to be that way). At this point, you need to understand this - especially if you work for a corporation that does as many questionable things as Google does. Everyone should be free to make their own decisions of course, this person decided to make an ill-advised argument at work and the consequence was that he cannot work there anymore.
> it really seems to me like he was trying to engage in good faith
Regardless of whether or not I believe this is true, "engaging in good faith" is not a shield against poor decisions.
Plenty of science-based refutations of James Damore's manifesto can be found in HN discussions and throughout the web if you care to look. No, I am not going to provide a canonical list here.
Not to mention math so bad he wouldn't pass a high school stats class. Sampling from a highly cross correlated population expecting to see population-wide gausians; amateur hour before you even got to the phrenology and the misapplication of personality theory.
I feel like 90% of people didn't read the drivel he wrote; I'd have fired him purely for the fact anyone that bad at stats (and proud of it) shouldn't be anywhere near a machine learning team.
That's one of the reasons why it's really weird to generally characterize Twitter's rules as heavily ideological -- whether you consider rules against misgendering and deadnaming a matters of courtesy, or a key rights issue, or an ideological plot, there's so many other rules that are uncontroversial (unless you find yourself in a position where you want to incite violence or advocate for child exploitation).
(Thanks for the text under the subheading, comment above edited with link to it.)
> there's so many other rules that are uncontroversial (unless you find yourself in a position where you want to incite violence or advocate for child exploitation).
It's disingenuous to lump these together as equivalent to misgendering. Child exploitation and violence are against the law of pretty much all nations in the world, and there is a clear consensus. As well as harm caused.
That line hasn't been drawn yet for gender. For one it's not clear how many genders exist. Are they fluid day by day, can people change in and out of them at will. Do I misgender someone if I fail to keep up. Is this a biologically supported concept, should we really open the Pandoras box of forced speech, etc.. etc..
> It is clear to many of us that there are two genders. Particularly to those of us that have studied biology.
Biology addresses sex, not gender (whether ascribed gender or gender
identity), and there are vastly more than two ways in which the various biological attributes grouped under “sex” line up; which is why when (as is, to be sure, quite common) binary sex distinctions in biology and medicine are used they are drawn differently in different contexts.
I mean, there's documented cases of non-chimeric fertile females (in the sense of “people who produce ova and can reproduce with people who produce sperm”, which isn't the only biological definition of sex but is the one most relevant to fertility and reproduction) with 46,XY karyotype and normal male coding sequences in SRY and other genes associated with sex determination. Simplistic generalizations about sex and biology, aside from having dubious relevance to gender discussions, are pretty invariably factually
wrong.
Actually, looking it back up,the particular example I was thinking of, while possibly non-chimeric, was still mosaic with about 80%/20% 46,XY/45,X in the skin but ovaries 93% 46,XY; at any rate, the idea that biological sex is simple and binary is pretty clearly not true except in loose approximation.
Gender (ascribed or identity) is a social (ascribed) or subjective psychological (identity) construct, and biological sex is a matter of arbitrary line drawing across a field with multiple axes of variation. The number of any of the three that exist, or should be recognized as existing is not the same type of question as vaccine safety or climate change, and arguments that are perfectly valid for one of those types of questions are not for the other.
What in your studies of biology has taught you that human societies recognize two genders?
There are animals for example that have 2 sexes but more "genders" (to the extent that it is correct to apply this terminology) - e.g. Ruffs (a european bird) have several male forms that differ in size, plumage and sexual behavior ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruff#Biology_of_variation_amon...).
Even if no similar mechanism exists in humans, there are social constructs that may serve similar roles - there are communities of "3rd gender" people in India for example, for thousands of years now.
Given the rules specifically refer to "targeted" misgendering and deadnaming, I don't see how your concerns about "keeping up" are applicable. Seems clear to me how it works:
Don't seek out some person on twitter and deliberately harass them with the gender they aren't and the name they don't have. Aside, lots of people in this thread appear to be reacting like this is a very complicated rule, but this doesn't seem like something that needs to be carefully interpreted against the standing fabric of society.
Toward your comment, can't we establish harm is caused by targeted misgendering/deadnaming by asking the transgender people who have been harassed by it how they feel about it? Doesn't that seem not even necessary? What line on harm needs to be drawn exactly before we can make a rule "don't deliberately harass transgender people on our platform via their dead identities."
Misgendering isn't about your ability to name someone's gender; it's just having the basic decency to use the pronouns they prefer and core empathy to realize some people may experience the world differently than you.
Just the same as it would be extremely annoying to work with someone that refused to use your name (and not at all forced speech to demand that they get it right; for many trans folx the old name is literally not their legal name anymore). Pronouns are a form of self expression, gender identity is real, and you only need to look at the stats for violence against trans people to the see the active harm in pretending otherwise.
Rules enforcing some level of decency have a place on public forums (even if it's not as cut and dry as pedophilia or violent activity); that's why you're here being transphobic rather than /b/.
> you only need to look at the stats for violence against trans people to the see the active harm in pretending otherwise.
Could you reference some of these stats? This argument comes up very often in discussions about trans peoples issues. But, not once have I seen or read someone citing a particular statistic or even pull up a number out of thin air. It is always claimed, there are stats showing increased violence against trans people. Where are the statistics?
Well, first off, the claim is not increasing violence towards trans people it's just there exists violence towards trans people and framing the debate as "let's talk about whether you exist" does little to help that.
As for sources, hard stats can be difficult for any hate crime (compounded by the fact homicide against trans individuals isn't often recorded as violence against their actual gender) and especially considering that the total trans population is small (and thus vulnerable to effects of small numbers) but the FBI hate crime database [0] and the NCAVP reports [1] are good places to start. Transequality center also collects good resources.
Somehow, I don't believe you've really wondered about this too much...
> Twitters rules are heavily ideologically driven, for instance misgendering is against their rules
You call that ideological, but presumably wouldn’t call Twitter prohibiting calls for genocide ideological. They’re obviously excessively far apart on a continuum, but I’m curious how you’ve decided where to draw your line? Racial slurs? Calls to murder doctors who perform abortion? Promotion of cannibalism? Incitement of violence against the LGBT community? How have you decided misgendering is ideological and (I’d hope) decided that the others are obviously unacceptable?
Just last week I have reported a tweet to Twitter which is --- in my opinion --- "a bit" worse than misgendering, but Twitter in its unparalleled wisdom came to the decision, that this is not hate speech. It said: "straight man should be jailed at 18 and take an exam of being a decent human being to get out". Just imagine someone said the same words with "straight man" replaced by "woman", "gay woman", "trans people", "black people" or "jews". There would be an outrage , and that would be the right reaction in my opinion.
So, I have some questions about Twitter's rules and about the process that applies them.
Discrimination and calls for violence are codified in law and commonly accepted as wrong.
Making up your own category, then forcing other people to name you by that category on pain of committing a "verbal assault" is still a pretty contended topic.
It might be, but gender is a category that has quite some precedent. I'm willing to bet that you would be at least mildly perturbed by being misgendered.
(I'm interpreting "made up category" as "relatively novel category"; all categories are "made up".)
Can you think of any case _at all_ in which purposefully misgendering someone is anything other than outright harassment against a minority who already has it pretty fucking tough?
Maybe someone else was unaware of the other's desired gender. Maybe they don't accept the idea that people get to choose their own gender. The expression of different cultural norms is not necessarily harassment.
> Maybe someone else was unaware of the other's desired gender
Then it wasn’t purposefully doing it, so I’m not sure how it’s relevant to my question
> Maybe they don’t accept the idea that
Plenty of people don’t accept the idea that men and women should be accepted equally, or that you can’t ban black people from living in your apartment, or that men who have sex with other men need to be put to death. That you’ve drawn an arbitrary line doesn’t privilege your line.
People don't get to choose their own gender, they get to choose their own gender expression. Freedom of expression (to some greater extent) is quite popular in most societies. No-one's complaining about good-faith mistakes, but if we could arrange for those mistakes to be very difficult to make then so much the better.
I mean in your country, sure, but let’s not pretend these are universal. Feels like your distinction between ideology and “wrong” is that’s just like, your opinion, man?
Personally I've read "world leader" in this context as meaning "leader who acts at a world level". Like neither Trump nor Putin the leaders of the entire world but they are not equal to the Mayor of Sidney BC.
In a democracy, you don’t get to make the rules. The democratically elected government does. If you don’t want to suffer the fate of other tyrants, follow the rules like everyone else.
One is a private American company abiding the law and exercising it's legal right. The other is a rogue state sponsored disinformation/psyop campaign detrimental to our sovereignty. How is this that difficult?
Domestic companies have been influencing elections for over a decade using advertising along with influence and power in the conglomerated media space. Neither the foreign power nor the large media giants nor the big defense contractors nor big tech actually care at all about individual people. It's turtles all the way down.
I think this is actually kind of a dangerous equivocation to make, and I see it frequently and increasingly. It's very easy to be cynical and say everyone is just out to screw everyone but I refuse to believe that.
To that extent, Twitter controlling the discourse is actually very different than the Russian government controlling the discourse.
...but .. they are. Just because you hate something doesn't make it untrue. Twitter CEOs are probably more aligned with foreign interest than you might think. It barely even matters considering how insignificant an impact the average American has on policy decisions. The system has evolved to give the richest the strongest voice .. and what rich Russians want is probably not so different than what the top 1% of industry leaders in America want. I made a video about this a few years back:
Can you explain the difference? Is it just because Russia is a foreign entity?
What if Twitter had a major Russian investment? What if Twitter was fully operated by the Russian government? What if it was operated by the german government? What if it was operated by the american government? What if it was operated by a man named Jack who has clear political interests? What if Jack only cares about the bottom line? What if Russia supported Hillary instead of Trump?
Does your answer vary between the questions? To me, they are all the same.
One is literally an adversarial nation hellbent on weakening the West’s influence in the world, enacting a strategy straight out of the modern fascist playbook, renowned fascist and political theorist Aleksandr Dugin’s The Foundations of Geopolitics with horrifying efficacy.
But yeah, it’s understandable that someone might equate that with a social media platform being transparent (however belatedly) in their efforts to enforce their own rules.
The problem with centrist lines of thinking such as yours is that it’s all predicated on fallacious logic: the demonstrably false notion that a compromise between two opposing positions is inherently superior to either.
Pray tell, what sort of playbook is America's destabilizing of multiple democratic governments derived from? What playbook was used to lie to the American people and commit war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen?
This perspective that American interference in democratic political processes around the globe is "righteous and justified" must be coming from some book, somewhere.
Pray tell, who are you quoting the phrase “righteous and justified” from? It must be coming from someone’s perspective, but it certainly didn’t come from me.
I’m an American, but I’m not America. I can love my country without condoning war crimes. The one does not contradict the other.
Complicit? You’re deluded. When I said that I love my country, did you think I meant my country’s government? That’s a foreign concept to most Americans.
You live protected by the state, and are the principle beneficiary of its actions as a citizen, therefore you are responsible for the actions of the state.
You can't have all the rewards and none of the responsibilities - either yours is a representative government of and for the people, or it isn't.
Clearly, its not a representative government any more, if you feel you have zero responsibility for its machinations. So, the real delusion is that Americans consider America to be the home of the free and the brave, but really are a nation of slaves and cowards.
Do they not teach critical thinking where you’re from? What a shame.
I’m “protected by the state”? How do you figure? Less than six months ago, there was a mass shooting a few miles from my house, in which twelve people were killed in a government facility, by an employee of the government.
I spend more than a quarter of my income on healthcare coverage for myself and my family, and that’s before I incur any actual medical costs. Americans die every day because they simply can’t afford to be well.
As American citizens, we do have some mechanisms for self-correcting the course our elected leaders have set us on, but most are purely symbolic. The only real means of pressure we have to influence government is our democratic election process, which we now know has been compromised. We have a President who lost the popular vote by millions of votes, due at least in part to a massive flaw in our implementation of a representative democracy is being actively exploited by a foreign power.
What’s worse, the domestic beneficiaries of Russia’s massive influence campaign — Republicans — refuse to pass any bill that will grant more funding toward securing our elections. That’s on top of rampant gerrymandering and straight-up election fraud happening all over the country.
Democracy is under attack by domestic and foreign entities. How are the people — the majority of whom did not vote for our current leadership — to be held accountable?
Do you live within the borders of a state? Then you are protected by it. How is that so hard to understand?
Do you feel confident you can call 911 and get a police response if you need it? Then you are protected by the state, which provides those services.
> How are the people — the majority of whom did not vote for our current leadership — to be held accountable?
Civics 101. All governments are composed of the people they govern.
True, your state has been corrupted. But, you are just as responsible for that as any other citizen. And I think your position is how your state got corrupted in the first place - "I'm not responsible for the crimes of my government!"
Alas, you are. And failing to take responsibility for them is how they get committed so rampantly in the first place ..
The subject is "oppressive regimes which negatively impact the politics of other countries for their own gain" - and the USA is definitely on-topic in that regard.
Selective outrage over political machinations that don't originate from within your own political in-group is also a common tactic - when you've run out of good faith, arguments or otherwise ..
Nope, the subject is "Twitter controlling the discourse is different than the Russian government controlling the discourse", nothing to do with what you're trying to deflect to. Try to focus on that.
Twitter, an American company, attempts to control the discourse - just as most other American media companies attempt to control the discourse, in order to deflect from attention on American's gargantuan list of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Twitter is just one in a long line of goose-stepping corporations doing the bidding of the military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex which stands to profit greatly from its efforts ..
Its the truth. You are being distracted by scary orange puppets and useless news, while the armed forces of the 5-eyes nations have been doing their best to get World War 3 started.
Pay attention. The war is coming your way whether you like it or not.
You just can't stick to the topic, can you? You seem to have specific obsessions that you feel the need to drag into the discussion. Get some fresh air and try behaving like an adult.
Please don't cross into personal attack like this, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. It makes this place worse and, assuming you're right, discredits the truth.
One major difference is that the Russian operation was covert while Twitter is just now announcing their intent to do something before they do it, and it will be clear when they have done it.
It's difficult because they are both private companies. The Internet Research Agency is a private Russian company that was indicted by Mueller for election interference activities, among them paying people to tweet in support of some US politicians.
So what exactly are private companies allowed to do to support or undermine a foreign candidate? Apparently tweeting goes too far. But if you restrict a candidate's tweeting, is that okay?
There are legal and not-so legal ways of supporting candidates.
The FEC explicitly lays out what you can and cannot do. And generally speaking, a candidate requesting aid from a foreign entity in order to undermine an election is illegal. You're going to have to better establish how Twitter is violating the FEC rules if you want to compare the two.
I’m pretty sure Twitter may be seen by some Russian politicians as “detrimental to Russia’s sovereignty” and I’m also pretty sure that the Russian social networks based and working from Russia do in fact respect Russian laws (the same discussion goes for China). I’m also pretty sure that a lot of the recent US foreign involvement can be seen as “rogue”, even by some of the US allies (the most recent and famous example being the Iraq war, with the more recent Syria involvement also being not very well thought out, hence the hasty and sudden pull-out).
> I’m pretty sure Twitter may be seen by some Russian politicians as “detrimental to Russia’s sovereignty”
For what it’s worth, so do I — and I’m not saying that to support them, I don’t like what I see of the behaviour of the Russian government.
For about the last decade, I’ve been of the opinion that the free an open border that is the internet is incompatible with current attitudes towards sovereign control of what happens within a particular national border. Sovereignty includes the ability to limit things, including things other people (like me) don’t want limited. Copyright, “immoral” substances or sexual acts, defamation, revealing state secrets.
I have a question: if a Spanish person living in Spain publishes a South African state secret, has an offence been committed?
It’s not a conflation; the point is that if Twitter _as a communication channel_ holds so much away that Russians can upvote or retweet things to manipulate our democracy, the _how in the world_ are we okay with a private company having the ability to directly and unaccountably manipulate that channel?
I roughly agree that we should require vastly more transparency than we do for all large-platform decisions (traffic/ad/metadata/data-sharing agreements between any number of firms, developer accounts, payment/donation platform accounts, social media accounts, etc.) that can have a really big effect on normal people relative to the platforms implementing them.
But this is still conflation.
1. Unless/until communication is excluded from what can legally be a business, Twitter has a legitimate commercial interest (and probably a legal obligation) to moderate the platform it built to ensure its the company isn't significantly harmed by the behavior of users who are not paying customers.
I doubt anyone can do this with integrity over time when money and power are involved, but unless you're advocating for nationalizing social media platforms or creating some sort of Department of Public Speech to provide "neutral" voter-accountable moderators at no cost, I don't see how you can argue that the organization running a platform doesn't have a legitimate interest in shaping what it is for. No other separate entity--not the IRA nor Facebook nor HuffPo nor Exxon nor Fox news nor the DNC/RNC nor the IRA--have any legitimate right to shape the purpose of Twitter's platform.
I guess the IRA can try to turn Twitter into whatever it wants--but Twitter is completely within its rights to shift policy to address how any entity that doesn't hold a controlling stake uses its platform at scale. Regardless of how Twitter does or does not exercise this right, there will be genuine and malign actors attempting to portray them as only doing X for illegitimate political reasons (to stir up support, circle the wagons, or bully them into doing more or less of X).
2. The mechanisms are very different. If the IRA manipulated democracies by banning people from a platform they built--or if Twitter ran a massive astroturfing operation intended to synthesize the appearance of social consensus on someone else's social media platform--we'd be talking apples-and-apples.
-----
I want to be a little more cautious moving ahead since I'm assuming more here, but outside of and separate from this conflation issue, it seems you're building an argument like:
1. anyone who thinks unchecked state social-media influence operations merit action by a private company with the ability to directly and unaccountably manipulate the channel should instead want to nationalize or close social media to protect everyone from the owners of the platform
2. anyone who doesn't think unchecked state-sponsored social media influence campaigns are big enough of a deal to justify nationalizing or closing social media platforms is being disgenuine (either by over-weighting the influence campaigns, or under-rating the possibility that the platforms owners engage in similar behavior.)
But the opinions aren't mutually exclusive. Someone can think prosecutors have too much power, and advocate for them to use the power they have more-justly. Someone can think platforms are too big to be opaquely-ruled fiefdoms and advocate for long-term solutions while advocating for harm-reduction in the short term.
I think we’re mostly in agreement. Clearly today’s Twitter has a legal right to do what they want with their platform. I think it’s hypocritical to be concerned about Russians manipulating our Democracy indirectly, but not concerned at all about Twitter manipulating it much more directly. And my acknowledging that some people are hypocrites doesn’t imply that everyone who is concerned about Russian meddling is not also concerned about Twitter meddling or vice versa. I’m not persuaded that this all constitutes a conflation; it appears the only distinction is that Twitter is acting legally and Russia is presumably acting illegally (and I’m not sure they are acting illegally), but I’m not convinced that this distinction is a meaningful distinction because there is little consolation to be had in that Twitter can corrupt our Democracy legally.
I fully agree that moderating Twitter while protecting our democracy is a sticky problem, although I think there are many milder options besides those you presented including regulating Twitter as a utility, breaking it up as a monopoly, or even shutting it down altogether (yes, it’s sad to think of the government shutting down a company, but that’s strictly better than a company controlling our government). None of these solutions are nationalizing social media, by the way—not meaningfully.
I’m sure we can find all sorts of reasons why these solutions are imperfect, and I’m sure smarter people than myself can think of better solutions. The fact remains that these big social media companies have far too much power, and even a bad solution is almost certainly better than allowing this considerable attack vector to persist (the attack vector that is open to private companies and state actors alike). By the way, it’s not just our American democracy under threat, it’s every democracy where Twitter et al have strongholds.
> I’m not persuaded that this all constitutes a conflation; it appears the only distinction is that Twitter is acting legally and Russia is presumably acting illegally (and I’m not sure they are acting illegally), but I’m not convinced that this distinction is a meaningful distinction
I don't think this is the right distinction. I think it might help to drill down on legal vs. legitimate, and what we mean by affecting/meddling/influencing/manipulating/corrupting/etc.
1. Let's say you install a little free library (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Free_Library) at the edge of your property and put a dozen of your favorite history books in it. The general understanding is that anyone who walks by is free to take/leave a book. Over time, many books come and go. Sci-fi. Poetry. How-to-draw. Self-help. Pop-sci. An occasional religious text.
A few months later, you notice that of your neighbors, who belongs to a minority religious sect, has started visiting every day. Each time, they take a book and leave one promoting their religion. This doesn't bother you much at first, but you get annoyed when you notice they've replaced most of the library and grow increasingly convinced they don't even read the books they take.
In turn, you throw out the books they've left so far, put in several more of your own history books, and toss any new books they leave once a week. They notice this in turn, and start telling people that you are discriminating against their religion.
The question of whether it's "legal" for them to do this, or "legal" for you to throw out the books they left is in the weeds.
I think better questions are whether they have any legitimate right to turn your little library into an advertisement for their religion, and whether you have a legitimate interest in curating your little library to keep them from doing so. No one else has a legitimate right to repurpose your library, even if every individual action they take otherwise follows the conventions of how free libraries work. It doesn't matter if they do it intentionally or accidentally, nor whether they have good or bad intentions.
2. Our democracy is a different sort of thing--more of a shared emergent process or relation than a thing. Almost everything has some impact on it, and everyone with a legitimate membership claim has a legitimate interest in influencing it. I have a legitimate right to influence it. You have a legitimate right to influence it. Other states and their citizens don't. Exactly which kinds of influence are fair/unfair has to get haggled out through ongoing social process. It gets even fuzzier when we're deciding what kinds of influence are fair for U.S.-based multinational companies. (e.g., are we only concerned about intentional "manipulation"? Is intentional manipulation with a small aggregate effect more or less important than a large inadvertent impact lying in the shadow of performance optimization heuristics that were necessary to keep the service up?)
Every multiverse incarnation of Twitter affects our democracy in some way. Twitter and every platform like it is a snowball of decisions made about UI/X, functionality/features, staffing, business/funding, management, accessibility, moderation, many of which get baked in long before a platform is anywhere near the scale it takes to even produce the emergent ripples that eventually get it labeled as powerful enough to corrupt a democracy. As long as it's legal to make platforms like this, they have a legitimate interest in deciding what their apps/platforms/service do and are for.
---
Neither Russia nor the IRA have a legitimate right to repurpose Twitter or influence our democracy. Stopping them is not cut-and-dry, but I think it's more useful to see it as a nest of logistical/implementation problems. Twitter and many of its employees, at least as the rules of fair play are for now, have a legitimate interest in both making platform decisions, in influencing our democracy. It's fundamentally different because the solutions mostly involve doing democracy to figure out what is and isn't fair. There are some profoundly difficult questions here.
Yes, 'influence' is a question of degree and there is no neat threshold at which one company's influence is too great. Just like there is no neat threshold at which a company is "too monopolistic", yet we still have processes for adjudicating these cases.
Twitter and its many employees and shareholders can vote and lobby, but if they can turn a knob and unilaterally influence elections, clearly they are on the wrong side of that threshold.
The best steelman I can think of is that social media is really analogous to a cable company where each person you're interested in following is a channel. Of course, this falls down for lots of reasons, mostly because Twitter controls which channels you're exposed to and in which proportions--a feature for which there is no real cable analog.
Why does it matter that it’s a state compromising our democracy vs a private company? Anyway, I maintain that Twitter and other major social networks represent such an overwhelming volume of our speech that they are not simply “private companies”. To the OP’s point, their sheer power over the political process is the entire alleged Russian attack vector.
Then you misunderstand the debate. Russia’s attack model isn’t guns and wars, it’s subverting our democracy by influencing who sees what via Twitter et al. If the Russians can change our laws by using social media to covertly influence elections, then clearly Twitter can as well. And “Twitter getting its chain yanked” depends on our ability to audit Twitter’s traffic shaping, which is nonexistent—there is no transparency.
I'd agree with you if Twitter Inc. isn't being fully transparent with its actions or manipulating things on the back end without visibility and favoring one side, like the intentions and effects of the Russian interference.
rogue => arbitrary opinion and not defined legally.
disinformation/psyop campaign => can adequately describe most political campaigns.
detrimental to our sovereignty => does this sound like Chinese reaction to western people commenting on HK?
Not very convincing, in an ideal world everyone would have freedom of expression and freedom to influence other people in all circumstances. Now that doesn't mean freedom from the consequence of it but legally it shouldn't be restricted unless its active hate speech. A Russian posting 'great god emperor Donald Trump' on facebook doesn't fall in that camp.
Except it wasn’t just “a private Russian company”. It was a coordinated, state-sponsored attack using multiple channels both online and offline, to cause disruption in the United States, including in the last Presidential election.
That is very different from a company under the jurisdiction of the US limiting the influence of people who break their rules.
> The Committee found that the IRA's Information warfare campaign was broad in scope and entailed objectives beyond the result of the 2016 presidential election. Further, the Committee's analysis of the IRA's activities on social media supports the key judgments of the January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections," that "Russia's, goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton,· and harm her electability and potential presidency."5 However, where the Intelligence Community assessed that the Russian government "aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him," the Committee found that IRA social media activity was overtly and almost invariably supportive of then-candidate Trump, and to the detriment .of Secretary Clinton's campaign.
> The Committee found that the Russian government tasked and supported the IRA' s interference in the 2016 U.S. election. This finding is consistent with the Committee's understanding of the relationship between IRA ownerYevgeniy Prigozhin and the Kremlin, the aim and scope of the interference by the IRA, and the correlation between the IRA's actions and electoral interference by the Russian government in other contexts and by other means.7 Despite Moscow's denials, the direction and financial involvement of Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, as well as his close ties to high-level Russian government officials including President Vladimir Putin, point to significant Kremlin support, authorization, and direction of the IRA' s operations and goals.
> The Committee found that Russia's targeting of the 2016 U.S. presidential election was part of a broader, sophisticated, and ongoing information warfare campaign designed to sow discord in American politics and society. Moreover, the IRA conducted a vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood. The IR.A's actions in 2016 represent only the latest installment in an increasingly brazen interference by the Kremlin on the citizens and democratic institutions of the United States.
Etc.
If that document doesn‘t do it for you, you can read quite a bit more relevant detail in the (still partly redacted) Mueller report (though the counterintelligence work that the Special Counsel’s office did is not explicitly part of the mandate of that report, so it doesn’t cover the bulk of the evidence about election interference uncovered).
Please note the absolute lack of any kind of evidence in any of the claims you have quoted/forwarded as propaganda against Russia.
Evidence: that is what is needed. Not claims from authority figures, which - particularly in America - is not currently a politically trustworthy means of gaining understanding of world events at the moment.
Real evidence connecting the Kremlin with the IRA should be easy to find. Or, are you only reporting the reports?
The entire US political establishment invested so much of its credibility into "Mueller will prove Trump is a Russian spy" that are you really surprised nobody cares what the US Government thinks anymore? There have been non-stop stories about Russia for years that always collapse.
Anyway, the idea that there was a huge campaign to "denigrate Clinton" from Russia is absurd on its face. She had most of a country trying to denigrate her during that election. Trump won because so many people hated Clinton even more than they disliked Trump.
What motivates you to post thoroughly debunked falsehoods like this?
Don't lecture other people on repeating entirely unsubstantiated claims when they're telling the truth, and you're the one who's actually knowingly spreading lies and misinformation.
Twitter isn't applying special restrictions. They're making special exceptions to keep up notable tweets that should otherwise be removed for policy violations.
I'd hope Twitter is smart enough to have a panel of judges with diverse backgrounds making these decisions (maybe requiring 2/3 majority) and not a single, biased person.
That said, it's usually the little guys that get hit the hardest. You could argue Trump has broken Twitter's T&C multiple times, but if you have enough popular support and eyeballs (and run federal law enforcement), Twitter wouldn't dare pick a fight. But, if a small (enough) account or a politician with less power (in Twitter's business markets) uses similar language they'll get shut down way faster.
Never. World leaders don't have to use twitter, they could host their own platform or use one of the other platforms. Twitter should not be obligated to host anyone's content. It doesn't matter how popular twitter is, it's just a website.
Pretty sure if Twitter decided to allow one candidate to post on its platform but denied another one access, there would be a strong case that Twitter is making an in-kind campaign contribution to the first candidate.
Does the differ from for example a news network that are staunchly aligned with one political party over another and thus painting a very one sided view?
Yes because news networks are publishers. Twitter, Facebook and the rest of the silicon valley social media gang are quick to remind you that they are platforms and not publishers [0].
The platform/publisher paradigm is a false dichotomy because of section 230, as your article points out. The idea that section 230 hinges on some notion of political neutrality is an editorialized opinion by the author, not a statement based on the law. In reality, efforts to legislate political neutrality are not only impossible to enforce, but they would likely be challenged on a 1st amendment basis (i.e. forcing a private entity to broadcast political messages they disagree with on their own dime).
It would not be a strong case. An in-kind contribution is when a party provides a political campaign with a product or service for a reduced cost compared to what it normally charges. Since twitter offers its service for free to everyone, removing access does not constitute an in-kind contribution.
Nope. Fox News, and all news orgs are publishers, Twitter, Facebook and co are platforms. Fox News and CNN are responsible for anything published on their website. Twitter, fb, etc are not.
tl;dr: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 states, "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
The courts have upheld on multiple occasions (Pennie v. Twitter, Inc.; Fields v. Twitter, Inc.; Murphy v Twitter, Inc.) that Twitter is a provider of an interactive computer service.
No, it isn't; that's the point of the hypothetical. We're talking about Twitter banning certain candidates. If they're not banning any candidates, then there's no issue and nothing to discuss here.
You misread the sentence. The meaning of "every" in that sentence was the same was the meaning of "every" in the sentence, "My barber cuts every CEO's hair the same way he cuts my hair." The point of the statement is not to imply every CEO necessarily gets their haircut or is even welcome to do so in that barbershop.
> The meaning of "every" in that sentence was the same was the meaning of "every" in the sentence, "My barber cuts every CEO's hair the same way he cuts my hair." The point of the statement is not to imply every CEO necessarily gets their haircut or is even welcome to do so in that barbershop.
Sorry, not buying your use of the Humpty Dumpty principle here. Providing the service to some candidates at the same price as the rest of the planet, but not providing it to other candidates at all, does equate to a campaign contribution. Twisting the meaning of "every" doesn't change that.
> An in-kind contribution is a non-monetary contribution. Goods or services offered free or at less than the usual charge result in an in-kind contribution.
They're banning violations of their ToS. As long as that is performed equitably, Twitter is in the right to police their private platform using pre-disclosed rules.
The assumption that all users are treated equally is debatable for reasons others have discussed, but what is missing here is the consideration for Twitter's algorithm sort and their continual efforts to force this on users. Even if we assert that all politicians have equal access to the platform and exist under the same ruleset, Twitter modifying the tweet sort order using their own custom brand of black magic and routinely resetting user's feeds to this default sort is very problematic. In this case Twitter is very blatantly modifying what users see and we can't know how this sort is determined. Wouldn't this qualify as meddling with political messages?
If a free platform of mass media is not provided to every candidate but is provided to some candidates while others are banned, then that's effectively advertising for some candidates.
No, they'd still have to offer it at that price (the same price) to all candidates equally - that's basically a way to avoid having to decide whether the offered price is fair or artificial; you can assert that an hour of ads for your cable network costs $0.01, but that's the amount you'll get not only for your favored candidate but also for the same ads for his opponent.
Are you saying political candidacy is now a (potentially even stricter) version of a protected class? It seems very tough-to-swallow to me that someone can make themselves be entitled to the services of any vendor in the nation by mere virtue of running for office. Wouldn't that make it a get-out-of-jail-free card for being a complete jerk to people? Usually, if you do that, people can refuse to associate or do business with you personally, whereas here it seems you're saying they can't, even if the reason is entirely unrelated to their candidacy.
I'm saying that political advertising is highly regulated in many countries.
You're not entitled to the services of any vendor, however, in pre-election period media outlets are (in some countries) prohibited to have any political ads (including pseudo-ads like "accidental talk show interviews with the candidate we like") unless multiple specific conditions are met, one of which is equal access to all parties/candidates. Even if you hate them. If you don't like these conditions, you can refuse to participate in political ads at all, which most media companies won't do because it's a decent source of revenue.
One way how this is soemtimes implemented is that before the pre-election period, you have to submit a public offer for what conditions and prices political adds will be available to any and all candidates; you can refuse to make such a public offer because you hate some of these candidates, but then you're not allowed to place advertisements from the candidates you like as well. Or if you're a foreign company (like Facebook) that doesn't care about some elections at all and does not submit such an offer, then all candidates are prohibited to buy political ads from you.
If your media company wants to support a particular candidate, then the only legal way is to donate money (which gets appropriately reported) and the candidates can (within specific campaign funding limits!) buy ads on equal conditions at equal prices. There's no "corporate money is free speech" assumption like it seems to be in USA, doing "free ad publicity" for candidates is a violation of campaign finance laws and would incur significant fines (IIRC double or triple the market value of that publicity).
But the big media giants squish out third parties all the time. When was the last time we saw three candidates in an American presidential debate? Ross Perot?
He's saying they _can_. If you can make the case that foreign countries can influence elections via social media platforms, how much more then do the platforms themselves have influence?
Not by restricting the posts of world leaders. Twitter is a private company offering a free service that comes without guarantees, even for world leaders.
That's a non-sequitur. The fact their service comes with no guarantees makes no difference whatsoever to the fact that they are in a position, by virtue of the size of their audience, to influence any subject anywhere in the world.
Maybe it's a non-sequitur if we're discussing your personal feelings, but the fact that twitter is a free service offered by a private company without guarantees means that twitter has no obligation to provide service. Just because some group of people decided to congregate on twitter doesn't mean that the fundemebtal nature of twitter transforms into something owned by the commons. If it was twitter's desire to ban all conservatives from the platform that would be their right, twitter owes nothing to the users, the amount of users on twitter is completely irrelevant (and an arbitrary statistic)
>Maybe it's a non-sequitur if we're discussing your personal feelings, but the fact that twitter is a free service offered by a private company without guarantees means that twitter has no obligation to provide service.
Just repeating "non-sequitur" is not an argument. If you have nothing else to add I'll just reiterate what I wrote above. It doesn't matter how popular twitter is, you don't have to use twitter and twitter isn't obligated to provide service for free.
> Though in general, each business may decide with whom they wish to deal, there are some situations when a refusal to deal may be considered an unlawful anti-competitive practice, if it prevents or reduces competition in a market.
So based on your own link, "refusal to deal" has nothing to do with this situation since stifiling the posts of world leaders is not anti-competitive, in fact, it creates a competitive opportunity for platforms that might offer better service to those users.
> Will Twitter have to register as a foreign agent in Europe?
I hope that wont matter. This is outright political censorship. Today its the ToS you agree with that they enforce. Tomorrow its the one you disagree with. This is outright political censorship and it is dangerous. They should now be considered an editor and totally liable for the content on their editorialized website.
Consider that they're already bending their TOS for important world leaders. If a world leader says something bigoted that would get you or I banned, they won't. So it makes sense to soft-ban them.
It doesn't even have to be a "world leader", TOS enforcement seems to be stronly partisan (or worse, completely random) and only really big outcries change that.
After this, if I lived in any non-US country I'd be wanting for them to register or face as much wrath as that country can impose on twitter. The EU should be able to make them feel some pain hopefully.
Twitter's rules are open ended with tons of room for judgement calls.
So now an anonymous, under payed SV employee (or soon an underpaid Indian) will be making decisions that affect the politics of a country? What if the employee making the decision against, say, the leaders of Palestine, is an Israeli? Or the other way around? Surely we can't consider those two impartial to each other. Will we ever know such a situation even happened?
With no public registry of these actions? Their promise to 'maybe' put out a formal announcements when a leader is shadow banned, is that really a promise or will they later reference the fact that they said 'may'?
There's no formal system of recourse? No local representation? And all based on a US system of values?
Seems very sketchy and to me it reeks of fascism. Literally the opposite of democracy and open information.
Doesn't matter if you hate the right or the left. Open and free societies benefit everyone. This is a big step in the other direction.
Twitter not applying the same rules to arbitrarily defined leaders as it applies generally is election interference (or in-kind campaign contribution); and the half-measure at best of restricting third-party retweets for actions that it would, for any other actor, ban the account holder doesn't fundamentally change that.
Yes. It's already been established that Twitter accounts used for government business that block people are violating the first amendment [0]. Twitter deplatforming government officials ought to count as similar censorship.
Private companies are in general allowed to censor what they want. Only the US government is subject to the First Amendment, not Twitter.
However, I think a case could be made that deplatforming one candidate in preference to another would be a donation to the remaining candidates campaign, and could fall afoul of some campaign finance rules.
Twitter should just blanket ban all candidates then. Seriously, all presidential candidates, all senators, all congressmen and women, even local mayors. Ban everyone!
I would be in favor of this, paradoxically. I'd like to think many of the popular politicians would move to the same alternative platform (maybe Parler?), and hopefully pull a bunch of Twitter users with them. Anything that chips away at censorious big-tech monopolies is a move in the right direction.
> However, I think a case could be made that deplatforming one candidate in preference to another would be a donation to the remaining candidates campaign, and could fall afoul of some campaign finance rules.
Could Twitter designate itself (or a subsidiary) as a Political Action Committee so they can deplatform (or promote) whomever they like?
the us government preventing some people form seeing its communications, to a company must host content against its terms when dealing with a politician is a big line to connect
It doesn't work in both directions though. That Trump isn't allowed to block people on a private website he (effectively) uses for official business is not equivalent to that private website being required to facilitate his official business. The first amendment prevents him from blocking because it would suppress the right of the population to address their officials, but it would also support their right to deplatform him as an exercise of Twitter's free speech.
Has there been anything unpalatable shared by or sent from @potus? (I could check, but I’ve blocked the other account for my sanity.) As I understand, most of the less palatable insults come through Trump’s personal account.
Trump has been deemed to be using his "personal" account for official business by the courts, and as such they've ruled that the constitution prevents him from blocking people on his "personal" account.
I'm not sure that effects what Twitter can do at all though.
If it gives access to some leaders, and deplatforms others, then yes, I would argue the same.
It might be "their platform", but it's our E.U., and we can make our laws governing how they operate here.
On many countries we already have laws that tv stations etc should give balanced promotion to political candidates before elections (re: interview time, etc). This includes private media.
If the US wants to sit back and accept it, e.g. Twitter and Facebook deciding "this politician gets a voice here, this doesn't", doesn't mean we should follow suit.
> If the US wants to sit back and accept it, e.g. Twitter and Facebook deciding "this politician gets a voice here, this doesn't", doesn't mean we should follow suit
In Germany, the tv/radio broadcasters can refuse to broadcast the (otherwise mandatory) election spots - if they run afoul of the law, which means they're inciting hatred. This refusal is rare and always contested: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahlwerbespot
In the UK, the spots are allocated to parties rather than candidates, and determined by past election (and to a lesser extent, current opinion poll) performance.
Put that Wikipedia article through google translate, I'd suggest. Depending on the broadcaster different legal requirements apply - but generally if you are big enough to have a full statewide candidate list you're eligible. Different states allow for lower limits than this, and if you're refused you can file a legal complaint.
Those "fairness" and "equal time" doctrines really only exist because broadcast spectrum is a limited resource. Only one candidate can speak at a time on each of a small number of channels. By contrast Internet bandwidth and sites are effectively infinite so there's no need to force access to any particular platform. Just use a different one, we have lots to choose from.
>Those "fairness" and "equal time" doctrines really only exist because broadcast spectrum is a limited resource.
Laws don't exist because of this or that physical necessity. A physical necessity might encourage us to make a law, but in general laws exist because people (or at least, the legislative body) wanted them and can have them enforced. There's no physical necessity that says children should not work in factories, for example. They very well could in the 19th century (and well into the 20th, even in the USA). We just willed it as unacceptable and voted it into law.
So whether fairness doctrines where initially made because of limited time/space on tv, is neither here, nor there. A law could enforce it for any website that operates as a journalistic website, or is above a certain size, etc.
But even under the "law exists because of limited resource" model, the argument is flawed. Specifically:
>By contrast Internet bandwidth and sites are effectively infinite so there's no need to force access to any particular platform. Just use a different one, we have lots to choose from.
That's also neither here, nor there, as some platforms are more dominant than others.
The fact that politician X can get on Facebook, while Y cannot because FB doesn't let them, can already influence elections to the point of election fraud -- even if Y can still open a Tumblr or run their own webpage. It's where the eyeballs are that matters, and "viewer capture" is still a limited resource (that's the same thing that FB and co sell to advertisers: that they are the place where most people are).
And of course this setup (allowing X, disallowing Y candidate) can be leveraged as a mean of influence, from FB or from some country that controls FB for its foreign interests, or be sold as a service to the highest bidder "we advertise you, and disallow your opponent". The deal can be made under the table, if needs be.
Such a law is perfectly reasonable and doable, even if it explicitly regulates only a specific part of social media (say, the top-dogs of user engagement like FB, YT, Twitter and co, and not the long tail, e.g. some random blog or Diaspora).
> in general laws exist because people (or at least, the legislative body) wanted them and can have them enforced.
I think it's actually more common for laws to exist because people wanted them despite enforcement being impossible than because people wanted them and could have them enforced.
Consider things like the Jewish law that a child who disobeys his parents must be stoned to death.
>Consider things like the Jewish law that a child who disobeys his parents must be stoned to death.
Is this a typical "more common" example of law though, or some curiosity from antiquity?
How many modern laws are wanted "despite enforcement being impossible"? (Which as per your example, doesn't even mean "enforcement being impossible" but rather "enforcement being undesirable" or something). We have some laws that we can't enforce in the sense of there's no easy way to practically check if somebody broken it (e.g. pirating some software). But most laws we can and do enforce them if the perpetrator is caught.
Dominance is irrelevant, and a law based on that would be completely unreasonable. Twitter might be popular today, next year it could be something else. And how would you even define "social media" in a way that would pass Constitutional muster?
> Dominance is irrelevant, and a law based on that would be completely unreasonable.
There are quite a few laws in the US that give special legal privileges to some construction such as "the top two political parties" or similar. For example, specifying that a committee's membership be composed of 1/3 one of the top two parties, 1/3 the other of the top two parties, and 1/3 unaffiliated. Or 1/2 one of the top two parties and 1/2 the other one.
You're absolutely correct that this is completely unreasonable, but it's also common as dirt.
It is a way to stealthily enforce the two-party system against the future. It's not much different than explicitly giving the same special legal privileges to "the Democratic Party" and "the Republican Party", except that it is less likely to outrage people.
>Dominance is irrelevant, and a law based on that would be completely unreasonable.
Actually that's exactly how monopoly law works, checking dominance in a market.
It's also not different from the subtle laws (even in US) for determining religion or cult.
>Twitter might be popular today, next year it could be something else.
That's not a problem at all, as a law could e.g. cover all social media companies "above a certain user threshold".
>And how would you even define "social media" in a way that would pass Constitutional muster?
I don't really need to pass U.S Constitutional muster, as I'm speaking about E.U. That said, I'm pretty sure if US legislators wanted it, they could find a way. They have defined what's journalism, they could also define what's social media. Or they could extend the law to all media.
And yet there are kids observing this play out right now, who never knew a world where Twitter (or more broadly, a mass communication "brand" of some sort) wasn't the primary platform by which world leaders directly communicate with their polities, not to mention each other.
The perceptive shift in which it is subconsciously accepted as normal that "any given world leader can be silenced by corporate entity XYZ" (and that conventional diplomatic apparatus is seen as a fusty, high-friction secondary channel to be bypassed when politically expedient) this goes a lot deeper than Twitter or Trump and may have significant repercussions once generational effects start kicking in.
First, you got it backwards. It would be the social media platforms that would want to engage in censorship (and countries in my proposal would enforce them to be open).
Second, they should be careful not to let the door hit them on their way out. They'd lose the money, E.U. gains getting rid of Facebook (and gets the chance to grow its own, open, alternative).
A social-media lose - EU win situation if there ever was one...
The tension is that although it is indeed their platform, the function it plays in society is similar to a public broadcast channel. IMO, a good analogy is the broadcast radio spectrum. Imagine if one or two companies had sole ownership over all of the broadcast radio spectrum, and could decide at their sole discretion who gets to publish. It would be insane, yet with Twitter and Facebook, this is the situation we're in.
IMO this tension is fundamentally what drives so much of the controversy around social media.
This analogy clearly doesn't hold up. It's more like a very successful private broadcast channel, but where making an effective public broadcast channel is too difficult for the government, so we pretend that the private channel is "like a public channel".
No company owns all the internet, thus using the analogy that a few companies own the entire radio spectrum doesn't make sense.
>> The tension is that although it is indeed their platform, the function it plays in society is similar to a public broadcast channel. IMO, a good analogy is the broadcast radio spectrum.
> This analogy clearly doesn't hold up. It's more like a very successful private broadcast channel, but where making an effective public broadcast channel is too difficult for the government, so we pretend that the private channel is "like a public channel".
I think the analogy does hold up. Society limits private property rights all the time for the public good, and that's a good thing.
For instance my private property has drainage and utility easements that allow others to use to for the public good. I don't even own all the property in the area. Theoretically I could go all "muh private property" and demand the government spend a bunch of money to divert water around my land and remove the easement, but that would be silly and wasteful.
Right not we're in a situation where a too few companies control too much of the internet mass media landscape. If that's not remedied with something like antitrust breakups, some kind of "social media access easement" legal framework may be worth looking at.
It's more like a publicly traded company owning a really popular street or city. And these aren't just any cities, more like capital cities (or close to it). But this company still answers to the state. In reality this company owns and operates streets/cities in every country. Hence answers to every State and each of their laws.
Facebook and Twitter don't actually have free speech themselves. We pretend they do, but if they actually tried to enact a strong opinion into their business, banning some large arbitrary group, not just small disruptive minorities. States would just reverse that and say it's unlawful to deny, let's say, all X or Y countries citizens. Or all of Washington.
They are functionally a State apparatus. There's a reason why Facebook and Twitter are blocked whenever a country is in upheaval. But is kept around even in quite oppressive countries. I'm just saying we need to be honest about these State company hybrids.
Absolutely, they have the right to do anything they want on their platform and even take sides when it comes to political factions while restraining speech of other political groups. They even have the right to lie about their policies.
Nobody is forced to use or read hyper global social media such as twitter.
Just like people are free to protest, complain and take action against Twitter by any legal means.
Registering as a foreign agent exists in Russia, but I didn't know it existed in other parts of Europe. I'm not in any way insinuating you're wrong, merely curious about the facts. What other regulations besides the Russian one do you have in mind?
Being anti-Trump doesn't mean you're left leaning. There are many right leaning people who are extremely anti-Trump. Do you think Bill Kristol is "left leaning"?
Yes, but the leaders admitted they're left leaning, therefore, anything anti-trump, conservative or something that is remotely center-right is subject of bans. They banned so many people at this stage I don't need to do examples.
Never? Is Breitbart “election interference” because they post biased coverage in favor of conservatives? Or ActBlue, because they only fundraise for left-leaning politicians and causes?
Good question, but no more than a local newspaper owned by an Australian: the company has a local subsidiary which is legally responsible. There’s been instances where (Uber IIRC) country managers were jailed (for a day).
In general, legislation in Europe on elections is quite strict so it’s unlikely American more free approach to speech will be so strict it’s seen as an interference. For instance, a politician in France has been fined €15k for saying racist things once. With that, you have fewer “Mexico… they are rapists…” to deal with. Politics in Hungary, Poland, Italy might make that less true soon.
Outside of Europe, that’s more common and social media company routinely get into trouble for either censoring or permitting lèse-Majesté, Nobel-prize laureate defending ethnic cleansing, apostasy or defending lynching apostates. It’s a large part of local managers’ role to dance with absurd debates.
There are several world leaders that I'd be happier with if they weren't leaders. (And some local leaders too! There are city councilmen I would send to Mars if I could.)
But I absolutely want and need to know what they're saying. A platform that provides a direct way for them to speak shouldn't be interfering with that.
That sounds awfully naive to me. World leaders have all kinds of options for communicating with the public. Official press releases, for example. Press releases are preferable because when they tell falsehoods, they can be fact checked in the press. We have no obligation to allow them to use social networks for propaganda purposes.
The fact checkers are too often biased/liars/propagandists. I want to hear what someone has to say. As an adult I don’t need someone to translate a tweet for me, nor protect me from its contents. Most media is propaganda today; Twitter is the closest to live news we have, and @Jack is eager to end that too.
I think you make an interesting argument. How do you feel about the limitations of Twitter affecting someone's ability to speak?
The character limit or the layout or any other reality of the platform design.
I haven't really ever used Twitter. I sometimes end up on a developer or product page in doing some web surfing, but I can't think of any information I was able to retrieve through another medium that I would rather have received on Twitter.
For example, some top search results for a developer was a tweet of benchmarks. I read the tweet and then made my way to his site and to a conference video on the subject. I wish his site had been my top search result.
Maybe Twitter is a good forum for "subscribing to notifications" and using it to broadcast external links along with word-bites is a good use of the platform?
I'm interested in how you or anyone think about this, especially about the idea of "translation" and "protection" that various media stamp on issues.
I'm further interested in "live news" and I hold the opinion that live news isn't necessary to me or to be even available to anyone. I'd rather have a transparent recording and processing pipeline that delivers to me newsworthy stories(I can't read everything), but that I could also inspect to see how editorial decisions could have omitted or changed meaning (looking at compiled source material through a search medium designed for that task).
That‘s an interesting position. I have recently watched an interview with Yuval Noah Harari and Steven Pinker where they talked about the possibility and danger of algorithms becoming better at understanding us than we do ourselves. It‘s a real danger as the bar to trick humans into believing and doing things is incredibly low.
As an example take a magician who can trick you into believing things which are not true simply by being clever about how certain things are framed. Another example are experimental set ups in which false memories were reliably induced (just google it).
I am not taking a strong position in the case of twitter here, but I want to highlight that your premise: „I don‘t need someone to protect me from its content“, might be a little bit naive or overconfident in your own ability to „see the truth“. We are limited in what we can make sense of and we are easily manipulable. Mindfulness, self-awareness and self-reflection might be able to raise the bar a little bit but in the end, I wouldn‘t even trust too much in that. I am still often enough fooled by a magic trick even when I KNOW how the trick works.
If you think Twitter is informative and actual news is all fake news I invite you to in depth fact check 10 pages of news stories and 10 pages of your favorite tweets and tell us how it goes. Blog about what you learn even.
> If you think Twitter is informative and actual news is all fake news
That's not what he said. He said he wants to see what people say directly, not filtered through anyone else. Then he can decide for himself what is informative and what is fake news. I feel the same way.
You are yourself a filter as is every useful aspect of human civilization. A tiny fraction of the sensory data around you becomes your perceptions a microscopic portion thereof is communicated to other people. We filter for quality and 90% of everything is crap or noise.
One wouldn't learn physics by seeing what the entire human race had to say on the subject because virtually the whole of humanity knows next to nothing on the topic. We instead filter it by people that are known to be knowledgeable on the topic. People that are paid to teach it, people that work in relevant fields, people that have published papers in journals that themselves act as filters.
When people say they prefer twitter it is because given the entire population of users its trivial for any person to find people who reinforce what they already think no matter how silly. If you believe the flat world was farted out by a goat there are fellow goat worshipers that will by happy to make you feel good by expounding on the topic.
Sure, that's the point. I want to do my own filtering, not depend on someone else's.
> One wouldn't learn physics by seeing what the entire human race had to say on the subject because virtually the whole of humanity knows next to nothing on the topic. We instead filter it by people that are known to be knowledgeable on the topic.
But how do we know who is knowledgeable? There are plenty of websites out there with crackpot content whose authors claim to be knowledgeable.
One common way is to accept some kind of credential that is supposed to correlate with being knowledgeable. For example, person A is a professor of physics, and person B is a random person on the Internet with no credentials, so person A is much more likely to be knowledgeable about physics.
However, that still doesn't mean you should believe everything person A says about physics, because, unfortunately, person A is probably not going to be as careful as they should be about distinguishing actual proven physics, physics that is confirmed by experiment, from their own opinions. Watch a Brian Greene or Michio Kaku special on quantum mechanics and, if you don't know much about physics beforehand, you will come away thinking that Star Trek style transporters are just around the corner. Read a pop science article by a string theorist as a lay person with no background knowledge and you will come away thinking that physicists have experimental proof that a multiverse of 10^500 universes exists.
And this is in physics, a hard science, where we can do experiments that confirm particular predictions of our best current theories, General Relativity and quantum field theory, to thirteen or fourteen decimal places. Imagine what it's like in softer disciplines. And the more important the consequences, the more likely it is that people who are thought to be knowledgeable will fail to distinguish between what's actually known and confirmed and their own opinions. Physicists misleading people about quantum mechanics or string theory is regrettable, but nobody is advocating huge public policy choices based on quantum mechanics or string theory. That's not true in other disciplines.
So the unpleasant fact is that I can't trust others, even experts in their fields, to filter for me. I have to do my filtering for myself. That's why I don't want people to give me their opinions and spin about things. I want to see the raw data so I can decide for myself.
Nothing caricatural here. As Donald Trump would say in numerous of his shameless Twitter rant, "Fake News".
If the (far) right's discourse were aligned to reality and facts, liberal leaning people would have no reason to say reality has a liberal bias.
Beside any political consideration, media, right and left leaning had always bias in the way they present information. Well ahead of social media existence. The difference now is Social Media now gave voice to an army of idiots and the most extreme views, like flat earthers, E.T, far right discourses, once restricted to a few fringe publishing for public exposure, has now find his way to mainstream discourse.
Now _that_ sounds awfully naive to me. Have you seen the CNN leak that came out the other day? "If Jeff Zucker wants impeachment, there's nothing you can do" - direct quote from a CNN media coordinator. Zucker literally tells everyone to bash Trump all day on the daily 9AM conference call. The "press" isn't there to do journalism anymore.
That, and since politics became social media's plague I don't feel like things improved at all. Now everyone is living in their small make belief bubble at either end of the political spectrum, completely isolated from any kind of meaningful discussions, it breeds mob mentality, hate and conflicts.
I don't need to see Trump's idiotic personal attacks on other world leaders or AOC twitting insipid things like "Tax the rich." to farm virtual internet points, all of it is 100% meaningless and has 0 political interest.
It's world politics, not a reddit thread were everyone talks about his favorite marvel superhero for fuck's sake. Just have a look at any of Trump's twit comments, it looks like a parody. We're not that far from "Rich men bad", "Criminal bad", "Tax bad", "Wall good", "Terrorist bad", "Health good": it's level 0 of politics and not too far from level 0 of communication.
we know for a fact that most people are susceptible to misinformation and propaganda. the modern advertising industry should be more than enough proof of that
Are you in favor of denying such people the right to vote? Why or why not? If they're too stupid to think for themselves, should they still be able to vote?
So who gets to decide what is misinformation and propaganda?
Because it seems liberals want to paint any conservative idea as propaganda, just because it's a different though.
From my perspective, and proven via wikileaks, the Democrats have been a propaganda machine, and definitely conspire with the corporate media, but sure, let's target the President.
Well, since it's Twitter's own platform, and they make the rules, they could just as easily ban someone simply because they don't like them. That's how owning things works.
Ah yes, so now we'll fallback to they are a private company because there is no other defense.
They are free to do whatever they want, they are not free from criticism.
That's why I don't deal with Twitter, I support freedom of speech, and clearly they don't. So them, and the Saudi's that own them can go tweet themselves.
It's not a "fallback", I'm pretty sure being a private company is their entire raison d'etre. And, you know, like the sign in every small-town diner says: “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.”
Which is to say, they can give any reason, or no reason at all, for showing a user the door. That's their prerogative as the owners and operators of a business.
Except they've worked hard to intentionally become what can be classified as a public broadcast medium. They can try and refuse service but it's unlikely they won't be compelled by the courts or legislation to provide open access. That means thru can't just live with their own rules.
The point is this: With the CRA, the idea that business owners have freedom of association is officially dead. They must provide service to whomever the government compels them to.
I think the majority of HNers:
- Don't like it when private companies do racism
- Like it when private companies do censorship
So they should just say so. Don't try to bamboozle me with tactical Libertarianism.
I’m the opposite of a libertarian. I completely support the civil rights act and the governments ability to compel businesses to provide service to members of protected classes. Donald Trump does not belong to a protected class. How is this hard to understand, I don’t get it
There are plenty of liberals who should sprout misinformation and should be de-platformed. Many in the anti-vaxxer movement are liberal politically and have caused real harm.
> Personally, I'd rather hear directly from the person, rather than get someone's spin on it.
Well, that's ridiculously easy on Twitter. Just follow them.
What is changing here is whether you hear from them just because your buddy Ed(wina) thinks they said something amazing, when they have a track record for breaking the Twitter rules.
IME, keeping on Twitter's good side is a pretty low bar is you're powerful and well-connected, so you will still hear plenty from the usual suspects.
> I've seen their fact checking, it's hilariously biased.
Twitter recently published their rules for fact-checking, and it involves relying on a very small set of third-party fact-checking organizations.
Twitter is not an RSS feed. Twitter shadow-bans, sorts the tweets based on popularity, ect. Stopping retweets will absolutely affect your ability to see a tweet.
Haven't used Twitter for a year or so now, but last I checked, if you use their Lists instead of the main feed, then tweets are still ordered reverse-chronologically.
I rely heavily on those I follow to retweet interesting tweets. I may not want to read everything lots of people say just to get the interesting bits. For Twitter to decide “you can follow directly, but you can’t spread what they say” is one-off censorship.
> I rely heavily on those I follow to retweet interesting tweets.
That's interesting. I do the exact opposite. I turn off retweets for the vast majority of people I follow because I'm interested in their original ideas and not of random retweets of random stuff. I allow retweets for a very small fraction because they have demonstrated that the stuff they retweet I find actually interesting.
One of the most valuable aspects of social media, especially Twitter, has been that it is not media, in the sense of a middleman---it has served as a dumb pipe, or at least more so than newspapers, TV, etc.
It sounds like that's exactly the concern that motivated Twitter to have this policy. Some politicians are using Twitter in ways that would get normal users banned. But there's a public interest in letting them say what they're going to say. So Twitter lets them stay on the platform, and this policy is about minimizing the fallout damage from that.
That those leaders choose to a) not inform us of massive government policy decisions except by tweet and b) this has geopolitical impacts is a pretty tough issue.
If/when the "leader of the free world" decides not to use Twitter (or make that a subordinate communication channel), things will become normal again.
Trump has a taxpayer supported press secretary. The fact that he no longer has any daily press briefings is on him, not something Twitter is required to make up for.
> A platform that provides a direct way for them to speak shouldn't be interfering with that.
The majority of Donald Trump's power is derived from his ability to say anything he wants (and have his crazy base eat it up). If we took that away from him he would be terribly crippled in what he could do. It seems to me we're really just giving them a platform to abuse.
Deleting things off the source websites has always been overrated as a solution to problems. Its just the easiest, most local ‘solution’ around so naturally people gravitate to it.
Not sure who will end up being satisfied with this.
People who want the "world leaders" deplatformed will be mad they they're still online, and people who like said leaders will cry persecution every time this is invoked, whether it's intentional or some automated system being tripped.
A sizable chunk will not hear about any of this and will wonder why they can't like a tweet (unless this problem is solved with the right UX).
Does the Streisand Effect apply to this too? Does this end up with more quote tweeting?
I understand the general rule against violence, but I feel like, when dealing with elected officials, you have to specify a difference between legitimate military action and calls to civilian violence. I don’t think anyone would object that Twitter hosts an announcement from the Staatsminister of Netherlands that she has decided to join the coalition of the willing and to send troops to Afghanistan, but that’s a clear call to violence and people will die because of that decision.
I honestly don't understand why "world leaders" aren't banned as soon as they break the rules, just like anyone else would be. If I said even a tiny fraction of the things "world leaders" have said, I'd be banned from Twitter in a second, and rightfully so.
Right, but using the example of Britain and Germany back in WW2 removes it from current politics and allows us to think of an example of a clear and direct incitation of violence that almost everyone thinks was legal and morally just and would have been appropriate to Tweet.
Threatening to declare war is a diplomatic tactic. Just because Donald Trump did it doesn't change tactics used by world leaders.
I don't recall any nukes dropping, or armies being deployed--but if you listened to the media around that time, it was 10 seconds to midnight. What we actually did see is people holding hands and crossing borders. Yet still, even today, we hear about the threat of war.
Twitter wouldn't be anywhere near as relevant without world leaders, and by world leaders, we really mean the shitposter-in-chief. A sizable fraction of their engagement over the past four years is directly attributable there, and the second and third order effects are ridiculous.
Twitter's moderation and content policies are such a mess that it is quite possible to get away with spewing hate and violence with impunity, or to get banned for the most anodyne and innocuous remarks. It's entirely reactive and arbitrary.
Average people don't care or use Twitter, the newspapers just tell them in whatever bias way what they wrote. Twitter is nothing without high profile users, especially the main clown. Twitter is used by shulls, activists and media people. The tech crowd is minority.
What organization or individual ever in history could claim to have this kind of power over world affairs? There's never been anyone quite as potently leveraged as Jack Dorsey.
As much as I am in favor of the (superficial, at least) spirit of this decision, I'm torn about the huge corner we're turning as a civilization here.
edit: Downvoters, if you are interpreting this as a veiled swipe at Twitter or indirect support of Trump (& friends), that's neither the intent nor representative of my opinions about these actors in the least.
This may be a touchstone event that bottlenecks perception of the international system in a way that makes the particular provocateurs about as relevant to the long term outcome as Gavrilo Princip was to the formation of NATO or the UN.
I understand that "the media" has held this kind of sway for a long time. But here we are with a single, publicly identifiable organization (and ultimately a private individual) casually invoking their power to mute every world leader at will, with the flip of a switch. This is a new normal.
Twitter can make it's own decisions, not my position to tell them what they can and can't do, but
>The company said the move will help its users stay informed about global affairs, but while balancing the need to keep the site’s rules in check.
Is a baseless lie. And I can't believe they're brazen enough to propose limiting the outreach of world leaders on the site while saying
>help its users stay informed about global affairs
Twitter has been around for over a decade, yet only now are they deciding to take this approach, meaning, regardless of what triggered this new policy, is not rooted in any sort of desire to "keep the site's rules in check".
As soon as they delete and curate content they are also endorsing the content that stays online. If this endorsed content is slander they should be liable.
I'm not sure that anyone concerned with Twitter's policies/content has focused on the retweet-ability of rule violating world leaders. This is a super shallow effort.
Edit: Though the article mentions that violating tweets are totally un-interactive, except that they can be quote retweeted. Still pretty shallow but slightly less than my original comment.
With that said - it's un clear to me what constitutes a rule violating tweet for a world leader. They should come out with some examples of what is and is not a violation, they should also better specify what a world leader is.
The big problem I see, is this still does nothing to inhibit distribution to followers. In an echo chamber, everyone still sees it. It just protects people who already were going out of their way to not interact with it.
The US govt. shouldn't be using some third party tool to communicate with its citizens. Post a blog on usa.gov and say whatever you want, problem solved.
The White House [1], and just about every US government department and agency (e.g. [2], [3], [4]) already has a blog. The fact that most people are unaware they exist is precisely why they also post to third-party platforms.
Does that solve anything though? Surely any such blog posts would get shared on Twitter, by some combination of official, unofficial, and civilian accounts.
It does. Government announcements would still be available online if they were originally posted on a government website and their reposted content was removed from Twitter afterwards. It would be harder to make the case that Twitter is preventing citizens from viewing their governments' announcements if those announcements are also available on government websites, which I believe is the primary concern.
If you think someone else should, I’m sure that Twitter would be happy to delegate that role to anyone more legitimate… Anyone, really. They probably would also love to pay that person. Facebook is trying to set that up, for instance — with very generous conditions: dotation covering a full-time staff, etc.
Dealing with that is a nightmare for specialists and no software developer would want to be embroiled in that.
How much "harm" would be done to society at large if twitter didn't exist?
How much "harm" would be done to society at large if all social media didn't exist? (including things like USENET)
How much "harm" would be done to society if the Internet didn't exist? (excluding things like email)
How much "harm" would be done to society if email didn't exist?
I never lived in a time without a telephone, but I did span the "international calls have to be pre-booked" time, and some of the 'no international subscriber trunk dialling' time.
I remember a time before all this stuff, distinctly/discretely. They don't get identical answers.
> "We want to make it clear today that the accounts of world leaders are not above our policies entirely..."
Thakn you, Twitter. Your bold stance will make it clear where you draw the line, and also where you draw the new line after the President tramples over your line.
>Any user who tweets content promoting terrorism, making “clear and direct” threats of violence, and posting private information are all subject to ban.
I wonder whether threats of military intervention (technically) counts. Interesting food for thought.
Daily reminder that free speech entitles you to protection from the government. It doesn't grant you rights to verbally puke all over any social network you please.
Daily rejoinder that this argument is getting really old when most political speech has moved to online fora controlled by a small number of corporate players which have more power than any traditional publisher ever did due to network effects.
Disagree. Media has always centralized on key players who distribute the information, from newspapers to radio towers to broadcast TV to cable networks, all who maintained a modicum of quality.
The internet is a turn in the opposite direction which is why there has been such an explosion of misinformation and feeding of confirmation bias.
"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day."
Centralized because running a press or a radio tower is expensive. For the same reason, there were a smaller number of channels, and a more unified discourse (everyone reads the same newspaper). Now, neither of these is true. Twitter, Facebook, etc can customize the feed to every user to maximize engagement. At the same time, whatever doesn't fly politically at corporate HQ can be restricted, with as much or as little visibility as they choose.
It's amazing to me how many people on Hacker News, a technical forum full of the most technically capable people in the world, seem to forget that the Internet is still a thing, domain name registrars (and failing that, IP addresses) still exist, and anyone can put almost anything they want on the Internet regardless of their political views.
So many people here seem resigned to this idea that Twitter and Facebook are the only ways to communicate online. I would have thought the most technically capable people in the world would remember that HTML can be served from basically any Internet-accessible computer in the world.
The comment you're replying to said that most political speech has moved to a few platforms. I haven't forgotten that IP addresses exist, but what has that got to do with my comment?
Nobody is preventing you from putting your political musings in a newsletter distributed by carrier pigeon, or setting up a coöperative news telegraph wire, or your own broadsheet printing press.
You are just as free as ever to put HTML on a server and air-drop and spray paint your dotted-quad all over the physical world. You are equally free to get a bullhorn and stand in the desert and preach to the prairie dogs, should you be so inclined.
Has there ever been a situation where someone lost their IP address and was completely banished from Internet because of their free and legal speech, without committing a crime?
Huh? The argument here is "free speech is an important principle, and is being eroded online", then "yes but that only applies to the government", then "no, if the principle is important, it is important whether it is the government or powerful media corporations in control". Saying that the government is free to create a Twitter clone is a non-sequitur.
But yes, to answer your question, the US government has no authority to be in the internet platform business, and that's generally regarded as a good thing.
Free speech doesn’t necessarily only refer to the first amendment. You can talk about that particular legal protection but the principle isn’t limited to it.
If you believe in free speech, those values will probably extend beyond what a court would defend.
But free speech doesn’t mean absolute speech anarchy either.
> We haven’t used this notice yet, but when we do, you will not be able to like, reply, share, or Retweet the Tweet in question. You will still be able to express your opinion with Retweet with Comment.
I think, not able to like/retweet is less of a big deal than unable to reply - not the only way to comment on the tweet is using a quote-tweet, which can only be seen by your own followers. This seems to make it impossible to get a full overviews about the replies to a tweet unless you already know the people that you expect to reply.
I may be wrong, but this seems like a step to increase the filter-bubble effect and potentially strengthen the effect of such tweets instead of restricting them.
“The social media giant said it will not allow users to like, reply, share or retweet the offending tweets, but instead will let users quote-tweet to allow ordinary users to express their opinions.” (Emphasis mine)
And that, my friends, is exactly the problem with Twitter.
The format of the platform encourages opinions, not substantiated arguments. I’m not saying you can’t have substantiated arguments, I’m saying the format doesn’t encourage them. The whole point of Twitter is for influencers to post short quips to evoke emotion and get followers. As McLuhan said, “The medium is the message”. It’s a losing battle.
Twitter leadership has shown they are not a good arbiter of truth. This is a sticky problem. While deplatforming does work for obvious instances of hate&exclusion, I'm not sure handing authoritarians the weapon of "they are silencing me" will help the situation.
I think Twitter should add a “save” feature so that those who want to actually save a reference to a tweet don’t actually have to “like” it. I wonder how much this would change the “heart” counts for world leaders...
People have already been doing this for quite some time, since the media has been rather brazen about "disappearing" articles that expose either their own corruption or the foibles of their paymasters.
Have there been any studies on how many people actually see those tweets, and of those, how many remember the content and then agree/disagree? I'm a bit unsure how data based any of these actions are.
Maybe they want regulation. Currently they get attacked no matter what they do. Regulation allows them to wash their hands of their messiest issue and when anyone gets angry, they can point to the regulations and blame the government.
Honestly the best solution is social networks to be declared as public fora or something definition based on common carrier - they are forced to not discriminate about speech, but they are immune. California has a something about the fora in the state constitution that was relevant about right to protest in malls.
So if I run a forum for discussion of chess, and someone keeps posting long rants about how all the <vulgar word for black people> are low IQ thieves who should be deported to Africa, Jews are keeping white people down and its too bad Hitler was stopped before he finished what he started with them, and also posts his Death Eaters gang rape Hermione fanfiction, and none of this has the slightest thing to do with chess...I should have to leave these posts up and not ban that account, unless I want to take responsibility for everything anyone says on my forum?
Can regulation come soon enough? And what better time than when Congress is split and we have the best hope of something resembling what rational people would create?
I don't know. But if twitter sends the perception that they take a side in the election and in the middle of November 2020 the Republicans have won the house and presidency, they will be in a bad place.
The tweet appears hidden, replaced by a text explaining that it’s unacceptable and a link to reveal the original message.
It seems little but it does send the message that the content is not welcome. I don’t know of any large scale attempt at using that approach to reduce unwanted content. Other approaches, for instance, flagging links as proven false by fact-checkers, has significantly back-fired so I’m curious.
Okay, good to know. It wasn't clear to me what the actual consequence was of forcing a, "retweet with comment" would be, if the comment could just be "." or something.
I think it's excellent that they're restricting the Iranian leader's tweet where he says that Rushdie's death sentence still stands. I think it is equally wrong not to restrict Trump's tweets where he threatens to destroy countries like Iran or North Korea, which is obviously the threat of a terrorist act, involving the murder of millions of innocent civilians. That being the case, it seems clear to me that Twitter is not impartial.
How will they remove bias, as already mentioned in the article:
"Last year, Twitter said it would not ban President Trump despite incendiary tweets, including allegations that he threatened to declare war on North Korea. However, in the case of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, he had one of his tweets deleted from the site."
Right. We're all equal but some people are more equal than others. So it's OK they're above the rules for commoners.
Twitter is rationalizing their unequal treatment of people for the sake of their network traffic and $$$, but what's amazing is people are actually buying this.
I wonder how those same people would rationalize their opposition to other outrageous situations like universities saying "professors can say racist things in the university press and classroom because there is public interest in their words", "CEOs of big international corporations can do hate speech because there is world wide public interest", "it's OK for evil governments to stream threats and false narratives because there is public interest" etc.
Anyone with a verified account gets away with incitement and harassment on a scale that lesser accounts would be sanctioned for. In the one case I saw where a verified account was sanctioned, their friends (actually I suspect its a paid Tweet ring) rallied their hundreds of thousands of supporters. Given that journalists rely heavily on Twitter (its true source of power), they can amplify this outrage.
I got mobbed and threatened with violence from none other than the leaders of the Bay Area Clojure meetup, published author(s), and found my Twitter account instantly suspended on Muni home—guessing somebody in the group knew somebody inside the big T to make the suspension happen, or they just got a big mass of reports in. I was physically at the Meetup when these calls for violence were happening, unbeknownst to me since I don’t use my mobile while at meetups, but it explains some if the eratic behavior. I don’t know where to begin seeking recourse, this was earlier this year. It’s terrifying, indeed.
This is sort of like "If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the banks' problem."
There is a level of power where an attempt at deplatforming would hurt the platform more than the politician, in part because they will make national news wherever they post. Expecting Twitter to pretend people are equal breaks down at the extreme end of the scale.
It's not twitter, it's how the society ran for past 5 millenias.
When the rules gets too inconvenient, we bend them or add a small attache that removes a portion of that rule. Like the Congress, except that our legislature are elected and not influenced by monetary gains.
A lot of people are making claims about a "loss" of free speech due to this change. I don't see how this is an issue.
Twitter's rules are impartial. I don't see how impartial rules can be exclusionary. Well I can to some degree, in the sense that impartial rules such as "no politics in esports" prevents people from protesting injustices, such as Hong Kong, but Twitter's rules are more about not actively promoting violence.
It is entirely possible that these impartial rules may disproportionately affect certain groups/political parties (white nationalists, Trump, etc.) -- this just means those parties need to get in step with baseline moral standards that simply claim actively promoting violence and exclusion is bad.
Also Twitter is a private company. They can choose who is able to use their platform or not. (At least I think that's how it works, maybe not).
The problem is bias. Just like how making hiring based on race illegal people still do it. So if the admins are biased in favor of one party then they will be very lenient against it and very strict against the other. They might have reasons for every ban "You can't incite hatred" while also have reasons for not banning your own "The hatred is justified in this case as the other side is worse", but the end result still becomes very biased.
So in essence the more liberties you give your admins to ban or silence people the more biased your platform becomes.
OT, but Verizon's GDPR prompt/privacy policy is exceptionally scary and even more infuriating than the usual policies. Could we maybe post a link from another source?
Does this apply to the leader of Taiwan, for example? (Depending on who you ask, you'll get different answers about whether Taiwan is an independent country or a region of the People's Republic of China.)
I'm pointing out that the term implies more than the truth, and that it's good there aren't real world leaders. Apparently people don't appreciate my approach to communicating that.
You seem to be under the impression that "world leaders" means "leaders of the world". You'll be relieved to find out it doesn't. It means the most powerful politicians for each country. They are leaders around the world. They don't lead the world, they lead various countries around the world.
Regardless of whether or not this is the first time you've heard the term, it is absolutely not a new term. It has a very long history, it has a well established meaning, and complaining on HN isn't going to change the English language.
So only the President could claim to be a "national leader" in the US? The use of the indefinite article implies there is more than 1 acceptable answer.
Well I don’t know what to tell you except you’re mistaken and that’s not anyone else means by ‘world leader’ which is probably why you find it so confusingly chilling.
The whole thing looks like a clever PR move pursuing several goals:
a) advertise to leaders who hasn't joined jet;
b) appeal to authoritarian leaders who like to ban/firewall platforms in their countries, and thus gain competitive advantage;
c) please Trump.
Retweeting is not free speech. The original tweet is free. Everything after that is leveraged speech. Leveraged by the platform. And the platform is co-responsible for leveraging speech. If Trump’s (or whoever’s) followers want to subscribe to what he has to say, awesome. But if Twitter (or whatever platform) functions as a megaphone for hate speech, or incitement to violence speech, or dangerous and obvious misinformation speech, it should be held accountable. And if it is being held accountable it should have discretion such that they can behave as a responsible megaphone. I’m all about free speech. But building multi billion dollar echo chambers that can be co-opted with impunity in the name of free speech makes zero legal sense and zero common sense.
What about my individual freedom of expression to repeat what someone else said?
If someone else says something first, am I not allowed to repeat it?
Like, let's say I heard something in the park. It would be ridiculous for someone to try and stop me from physically saying the same thing that someone else said.
Good. "World leaders" should be subject to some facsimile of the rules that apply to regular people. This strikes a good balance of neutral reporting and responsible platform stewardship, in my opinion. Note that the media has always exercised this type of judgment, and as imperfect as that judgment is, I think it's better than neutrally amplifying whatever people tell them.
