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Twitter Suspends 235,000 More Accounts Over Extremism
- RubyMyDear 10y agoI'm a pure functional programmer. I hope I don't get kicked off of twitter for my intolerance of Scheme, Lisp, or F#.
- sixhobbits 10y agoQuis custodiet ipsos custodes [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%...
- cholantesh 10y agoGreat TNG episode.
- privateersman 10y agoAfter thinking about it over the years, I don't think social media is as influential as people think. Look at the UK's past election and referendum to see. A bubble of opinion with a huge disconnect from reality. All I will say is: stay away from these sorts of services if you value your mental health.
- alva 10y agoA fair observation if you use twitter like the majority of users (at least in the UK). The key to getting a decent bellwether is to actively seek out prominent and active users with differing opinions. Regarding social medias influence, while it has been hyped up massively, I do believe it is a significant force. Even if just for the fact that the media class use it extensively. I expect it has an impact on their reporting.
- derefr 10y agoI would say that social media policies have less of an effect in countries where people have freedom of speech+association+assembly, and more important in countries where they don't. People will route around damaged platforms, if they have an alternative.
- TrevorJ 10y agoI think on an individual level it is far more influencing than we realize. We are hard wired to entrench or re-consider our stances on things based on the opinions of our circle of friends. If Social media only presents us with opinions that reaffirm our own, that's a very powerful signal. I am pretty convinced this has a lot to do with the trend towards extreme polarization of politics for example. The echo chamber allows both sides to entrench further, while both fully believe that the majority of people believe as they do.
- r_smart 10y agoMy argument against you from the same example: Look how uniform young people were in the decision (obviously the people who spend the most time using social media).
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Senji 10y agoAlso the same people being exposed daily to the govt approved propaganda through school and university.
- Karunamon 10y agoHuh, they finally nuked the convicted ISIS preacher's account.[1][2] Took long enough - that account's been spewing hate since at least last April. It's almost like their priorities are backwards... [1]: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/anjem-choudary-verdict-youtube-twitter-facebook-isis-terrorism-posts-not-deleted-a7194041.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/anjem-choudary-ve... [2]: https://twitter.com/anjemchoudary?lang=en https://twitter.com/anjemchoudary?lang=en
- ptaipale 10y agoI think it's been spewing hate much longer than that? That was just when some attempts were made to close it. The British authorities just didn't have much tools for it, which sounds funny when they are otherwise enforcing various super-injunctions very greedily.
- Karunamon 10y agoI lay the blame completely on Twitter in this case. That account was reported multiple times by me and people I know on the service, and they sat on their hands for well over a year. It shouldn't take a national/law enforcement influence for a company to not give platform to literal terrorists once brought to their attention. Meanwhile, saying something not particularly nice is grounds for immediate suspension. Kind of screwed up that they take mean words (regardless of their content) more seriously than terrorism, you know?
- ptaipale 10y agoI can't think of any other reason than that Choudary was good business for Twitter. They got so many advertisements delivered to potential suicide bombers, machete attackers and Syria jihadists that it was profitable.
- mindslight 10y agoThe groupthinking majority loves censorship. (this is one reason why we avoid building/using centralized trash)
- helthanatos 10y agoCentralized trash?
- gmisra 10y agoTrying to be both a platform and a community are goals which are often in conflict, especially in terms of operations. Communities really need things like trust, reputation, moderation, rules, and enforcement. These are things that are hard to enforce programmatically, and often require a lot of customization. e.g. reddit started as a platform for communities, but the success of /r/all made it more a community of communities, at which point some of the more extreme communities became a liability and had to be censored. In contrast, imgur appears to have managed the separation between the two quite well. It is still unclear what twitter wants to be.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Senji 10y agoImgur is filled with just one demographic, and it's the lowest of the youtube-comments-section-tier underage poster milieu.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- siculars 10y agoBeyond the obvious censorship slippery slope, strategically, should these extremist accounts be suspended? Wouldn't it be more beneficial to analyze their social graph and other intel to find out who these people are?
- at-fates-hands 10y agoAgree 100% I think Ted Nugent said it clearly when he said (and I'm paraphrasing here), "We need to give these people a public platform so we can keep tabs on them. I want to know what these crazy people are thinking and planning." I think this should be the same thing. If we're all about free speech, that includes speech we also might not like so much. It also allows us to keep tabs on these people and who they're connected to (who's behind the accounts as well as who follows them) so we can better mitigate the threats they're posing. Censoring them does nothing but push them back into the shadows where their communications then become encrypted, unavailable and out of the public eye.
- mkaziz 10y agoExactly - you want this information unavailable and out of the public eye. You don't want teenager X in the US becoming enamoured with publicly spewed IS ideology and deciding to do something to help them out. Teenager X is the sort of person who wouldn't actively seek out IS, but if it's directed at him, well, he may listen. The question of who decides what gets culled is a different and far more nuanced question to answer - but I for one am glad that these accounts are getting closed down.
- siculars 10y agoTwitter doesn't work that way. You can't "direct" your message at someone unless you pay for an ad. People need to seek out these messages.
- mkaziz 10y agoIt does if friend Y starts retweeting those kinds of messages. Or if you happened to follow a dormant account that has since been commandeered by IS. There's a million ways for those kinds of messages to enter your stream.
- helthanatos 10y agoI'm surprised I wasn't suspended...
- ctdonath 10y agoSuch sites need think real hard about whether they want to be a moderated community or a common carrier. Moderated community? have to hire a lot of people to monitor & cull content, publish clear rules about what's acceptable and what's not, and take their lumps when action/inaction has problematic consequences. Common carrier? then make clear nothing is moderated save for blatant criminal violations (at which point police are informed), and legal (if objectionable) content is simply published/transferred without hinderance. Tough call. Twitter et al are trying to be both; this will backfire bad at some point.
- ProAm 10y agoThese sites do not care, they want to make money. They will do whatever will achieve that goal. This is a needed PR move by Twitter to curb the amount of bad press they are getting. Twitter is in stagnation and bad press will not help them gain any momentum.
- downandout 10y agoThere is no inherent right to free speech on Twitter. Free speech has always had legal limits, and private organizations such as Twitter are fully within their rights to further limit speech on their platforms as they see fit. Terrorist groups (including ISIS) have publicly claimed that they are having success using social media as a recruitment tool, so this seems like an appropriate response.
- VOYD 10y ago"Free Speech" doesn't in every country as a right the way it does in the US. And "hate speech" even the US I snot covered.
- daxelrod 10y agoHate speech is absolutely protected under the US's First Amendment. http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-colleges-hate-speech-1st-amendment-20151030-story.html http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-colleges-hat... Here's a quick summary of Supreme Court hate speech cases: http://civilliberty.about.com/od/freespeech/tp/Hate-Speech-Cases.htm http://civilliberty.about.com/od/freespeech/tp/Hate-Speech-C...
- greydius 10y agoThis is not a free speech issue as far as the US constitution is concerned. Twitter is not part of the government.
- downandout 10y agoCorrect, which is essentially what I said in my comment. But this article talked about free speech, and everytime this issue comes up, people start moaning that their right to free speech is being inhibited, apparently not realizing or caring that they have no such right on a privately owned and operated platform. That's why I brought it up.
- r_smart 10y ago
- micaksica 10y agoI am left with a great feeling of unease if not disgust at the Valley's long con on the concept of free expression. Social media likes to say it's the great equalizer, the democratic weapon. Twitter likes to pretend it's single handedly responsible for the Arab Spring, and with great irony they are now suppressing some of the results of that message that are no longer "on brand". Social media isn't about, and has never been about, freedom of expression, as much as sometimes we seem to think it is. It's about saying whatever you need to to get scale, and then suppressing dissident communities that might cost you ad revenue or you personally find distasteful once you have the power and authority to do so. It's a cultural appropriation of a hacker ethos for the sake of a business purpose. As for this action, very few things enrage me as much as Wahhabism and Islamic extremism; in fact, sometimes I struggle with the cognitive desire to write off Islam and the Muslim world as a whole because of ISIL and its followers. However, I don't believe that this idea makes much sense. You cannot kill a meme by driving it off your platform; religious zealots have traditionally faced much worse persecution than being banned from a service. They will spring up again in places harder to detect, with tools that strengthen their communities. Their enclaves will no longer coexist alongside peaceful messages; they will be harbored entirely within their own safe spaces, echo chambers that strengthen their hatred in their isolation. Instead of a potential ISIL sympathizer seeing ISIL messages alongside trending topics against extremism and terrorism, they will spend time on extremist forums in which there is no dissenting opinion. They will not see pictures of people lamenting the death, they will have communities where this death is entirely praised. Instead of seeing football scores or other young people facing their same problems that may have differing religious opinions, they will find more people willing to indoctrinate them when exploring whether or not they find meaning in Islamic extremism. Twitter may think they are taking the oxygen out of the atmosphere by banning them, but in reality they are simply shifting the fire to someplace where it can burn hotter.
- onion2k 10y agoThose other platforms already exist. Twitter's actions won't change that. If someone wants to see extremist material they can, and will, by visiting those other sites. That was the case before and it continues to be. The difference now is that they'll find it a little harder to find them because there won't be a handy Twitter feed to search, and people who haven't sought that material won't see retweets from those accounts. That's a net benefit.
- smsm42 10y agoI seriously doubt there are 235,000 actual terrorists around that tweet. Or that banning people from twitter does anything to combat the real threats of terrorism. It may feel good for them to feel like they are fighting terror, but I seriously doubt that makes any difference. And I'd rather see people supporting ISIS out in the open where people that hopefully do have effective ways to combat ISIS can see them then in some darknet corners where they can fester without anybody knowing.
- csense 10y agoWhy are there so many extremists?
- ptaipale 10y agoBell curve? Not just in intelligence, but in psychological factors leading to hate. If you have a billion people, the 0.1 % of its extreme nutters will be a crowd of a million.
- x0137294744532 10y agoMany propaganda accounts get closed only to have new ones with similar names created shortly after. Several dozen of those accounts might be linked to one particular person/cell/organisation...
- Grue3 10y agoThey are only extremist from Twitter (Americentric) point of view. In other places it might well be considered a mainstream ideology.
- chvid 10y agoCensorship should not be a job for some big corporation. It should be done by the government, checked by the legal system and based upon open and clear legislation. This is why we need the open web and why monopoly social media like Twitter and Facebook are so dangerous.
- WalterBright 10y ago> It should be done by the government There's not been a good history with that.
- sp332 10y agoFree speech is not an obligation for a corporation either. At least they're being transparent about it (this time anyway).
- metaphorm 10y agothe 1st amendment of the U.S. Constitution puts very strict limitations on what kind of speech/expression can be limited by legislation.
- grandalf 10y agoThis fascinatingly illustrates a concept that Chomsky emphasizes, but is rarely so glaringly obvious: In the US the government does not need to crack down on free expression the way the government in China or Singapore does, because American corporations happily apply censorship without any legal requirement to do so. This is why some stories are essentially missing from our newspapers and news broadcasts, etc. I highly recommend the documentary "Manufacturing Consent" which features a lot of Chomsky's ideas on this kind of thing.
- Senji 10y agoYou can always get your underground news from places like 4chan/8chan and various IRC channels.
- walls 10y agoI really wish Twitter had some kind of release mechanism for suspended names. Here's another 235k account names that will never be available again.
- thescriptkiddie 10y agoThis is thoroughly disgusting, but I guess now we at least know that Twitter is evil. Maybe we'll get a decentralized alternative to Twitter out of it.
- paulcole 10y agoJust curious, but is there any mass-market decentralized service that is actually widely used by normal people?
- notdonspaulding 10y agoBesides email, you mean?
- paulcole 10y agoThat's a pretty good example. But for the average normal person, email is very centralized-- aol, hotmail, yahoo, etc. Centralized in the sense that they've handed all control over to a 3rd party, which I thought was the point the op was making.
- s_q_b 10y agoThis is immoral, and amounts to censorship. The moment we believe an idea is too dangerous for our citizens to express is the day American democracy dies. Yes, Twitter is a non-governmental entity and has the legal right to do whatever it wishes. But that does not make their decision any less wrong. It also does not matter how incendiary the accounts were. You may be burning Mein Kampf instead of On Liberty, but you're still burning books. Edit: Changed "private" to "non-governmental" to prevent confusion.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- grandalf 10y agoThe notion that "terrorism" is a tactic and not a label for groups has been widely observed. War has been referred to as "politics with guns". How petty to try to constrain the free speech of vocal adversaries. The US has invested billions trying to make the world hate Muslims and it's clearly not working well enough. I'd like our president to vocally criticize Twitter for this move and request that free expression be restored.
- Senji 10y ago>The US has invested billions trying to make the world hate Muslims and it's clearly not working well enough. Muslims do that for themselves, just look at Rotherham and the soon not to be country Sweden.
- pmarreck 10y agoSo much for free speech. Muzzling people will only make them more vehement and is not the best long term solution.
- overcast 10y agoFree speech isn't a universal concept in the world. Would you be OK with extremist organizations having their own channel on cable? Twenty four hours a day of hate speech, and recruiting your children to join them. Of course you wouldn't. Free speech ends when you're using it to harm others as far as I'm concerned.
- randyrand 10y agoTV is privately owned. It's unrelated. That said, I would be perfectly fine with ISIS be allowed to hand out flyers around town. It's their right.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- CaptSpify 10y ago> Twenty four hours a day of hate speech, and recruiting your children to join them. Of course you wouldn't. I would. In fact, we have something similar already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Broadcasting_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Broadcasting_Network
- pnathan 10y agoOne thing I am keenly uncomfortable and aware of is the merging of the public and private fora. There is a huge difference in our law, yet they are merging. I'm not sure what is to be done, but it seems very clear that Something should be done.
- norea-armozel 10y agoI don't understand how some people think that it's the job of a private corporation to handle social media like it's a common utility. Twitter isn't the only major social media site/app today since there's SnapChat, WeChat, Instagram, Facebook, and many more. So if you get banned on Twitter just go to another site. Hell, it's easier still to make another account (just have to be careful not to be flagged as a bot). This is why I don't cry when a person (or even I) get banned. We have the whole Internet and all it's products minus one of them.
- Karunamon 10y agoI don't understand how some people think that it's the job of a private corporation to handle social media like it's a common utility. For one, because said corporations carry on like it is. As an example, Twitter pretends it's responsible for the Arab Spring. Reddit up until very recently was loudly and repeatedly touted by its founders as a platform for free speech. You can hardly blame the users for getting the impression that the marketing is making for them! So if you get banned on Twitter just go to another site. Meanwhile, you've lost your social network and get to start over again from square one. This is not a minor annoyance.
- norea-armozel 10y ago>For one, because said corporations carry on like it is. As an example, Twitter pretends it's responsible for the Arab Spring. Reddit up until very recently was loudly and repeatedly touted by its founders as a platform for free speech. That constitutes false advertising at worse. This doesn't come under censorship in any way. >Meanwhile, you've lost your social network and get to start over again from square one. This is not a minor annoyance. And so a website owner is obliged to give you free reign on their site? Sorry if I don't agree but the fact of the matter is that leaning on a walled garden to keep your friends is IMO a bad idea. I've been hit by the ban hammer more than once on sites like Twitter and I've learned it's best to keep your friends on your contact list on the old phone. Yes, it's not as hip or cool but luckily many contact apps have social media fields.
- CaptSpify 10y ago