3 ms·

> The premise is so unlikely (given what we know of Twitter's past behavior) that if we accept it, we have to accept motives that are beyond our understanding.

> The premise is so unlikely (given what we know of Twitter's past behavior) that if we accept it, we have to accept motives that are beyond our understanding. What you and I both know of Twitter's behavior is unlikely to be shared knowledge between us, unless it's been your job to follow the company for awhile in which case I would have to defer to you. But I still expect you to tell me what it is we should both know. The Twitter I know is happy to shill for political reasons, that puts the possibility of money being given for damage control at corporate as being plausible to me, since there is more money in corporate than politics and Twitter itself is profit-driven with a shit business model. The Twitter you know is not? We could both be wrong. Without clarifying what you mean by "what we know" I wouldn't be so trigger happy with the rhetoric just yet.

danso 10y ago
We know these things about Twitter relating to censorship: They have shut down Twitter accounts for abusing the TOS, and this process is on a case-by-case basis, and can affect well-known users such as Milo Yiannopoullous and Martin Shkreli: http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/07/19/breaking-milo-suspended-twitter-20-minutes-party/ http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/07/19/breaking-milo-suspe... http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/01/08/pharma-legend-martin-shkreli-suspended-twitter/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/01/08/pharma-legend-marti... Twitter also deletes content in response to valid legal requests and copyright claims, according to their own transparency report: https://transparency.twitter.com/en.html https://transparency.twitter.com/en.html We also know that Twitter has applied crowdsourcing/human editing to search query analysis: http://blog.echen.me/2013/01/08/improving-twitter-search-with-real-time-human-computation http://blog.echen.me/2013/01/08/improving-twitter-search-wit... I suspect that Trending Topics also has some curation, or at least a manual blacklist, but couldn't find official mention of that. We also know that Twitter has been sensitive to the tension between being an unfiltered source of information and a platform that amplifies abuse. In January, the company admitted that it "didn't move fast enough" in dealing with abuse complaints: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/twitter-hate-speech-abuse-crackdown/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/twitt... In March, they announced new measures for reporting abusive tweets/accounts. Under a heading "Leveraging our technology to reduce abusive content", they describe new ways in which an abusive account can be limited, including suppressing the visibility of tweets: https://blog.twitter.com/2017/our-latest-update-on-safety https://blog.twitter.com/2017/our-latest-update-on-safety So we've seen that Twitter will shut down accounts and tweets based on an interpretation of TOS (i.e. what constitutes "abuse") in ways that not everyone agrees with. At the same time, Twitter knows that its special sauce is unfettered speech, so much so that it was slow to even act on shutting down accounts openly associated with ISIS: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/02/twitter-isis/460269/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/02/tw...

danso 10y ago

We know these things about Twitter relating to censorship: They have shut down Twitter accounts for abusing the TOS, and this process is on a case-by-case basis, and can affect well-known users such as Milo Yiannopoullous and Martin Shkreli: http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/07/19/breaking-milo-suspended-twitter-20-minutes-party/ http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/07/19/breaking-milo-suspe... http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/01/08/pharma-legend-martin-shkreli-suspended-twitter/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/01/08/pharma-legend-marti... Twitter also deletes content in response to valid legal requests and copyright claims, according to their own transparency report: https://transparency.twitter.com/en.html https://transparency.twitter.com/en.html We also know that Twitter has applied crowdsourcing/human editing to search query analysis: http://blog.echen.me/2013/01/08/improving-twitter-search-with-real-time-human-computation http://blog.echen.me/2013/01/08/improving-twitter-search-wit... I suspect that Trending Topics also has some curation, or at least a manual blacklist, but couldn't find official mention of that. We also know that Twitter has been sensitive to the tension between being an unfiltered source of information and a platform that amplifies abuse. In January, the company admitted that it "didn't move fast enough" in dealing with abuse complaints: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/twitter-hate-speech-abuse-crackdown/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/twitt... In March, they announced new measures for reporting abusive tweets/accounts. Under a heading "Leveraging our technology to reduce abusive content", they describe new ways in which an abusive account can be limited, including suppressing the visibility of tweets: https://blog.twitter.com/2017/our-latest-update-on-safety https://blog.twitter.com/2017/our-latest-update-on-safety So we've seen that Twitter will shut down accounts and tweets based on an interpretation of TOS (i.e. what constitutes "abuse") in ways that not everyone agrees with. At the same time, Twitter knows that its special sauce is unfettered speech, so much so that it was slow to even act on shutting down accounts openly associated with ISIS: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/02/twitter-isis/460269/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/02/tw...