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Well, Twitter is a US company and has an incentive to please US officials. Thus the context of terrorism in modern America and American politics is broadly rel

Well, Twitter is a US company and has an incentive to please US officials. Thus the context of terrorism in modern America and American politics is broadly relevant. It might be terrorists you don't like this time, but what about next time when it's terrorists you support? Who gets to decide what groups deserve that label? Donald Trump? > ... corporations' right to make moral judgements about whether they wish to offer free recruitment advertising for suicide bombers should be sacrificed to the false idol of the First Amendment. Fine if society actually needs companies to make moral judgments on behalf of the public. In the US there has been widespread opposition to the basic freedoms provided by the bill of rights over the past decade or so. What we are seeing is a combination of companies helping with the US propaganda narrative about terrorism by silencing opposing voices. Worse, we are seeing companies like Twitter and Facebook turn into moral filters. Someone is deciding what is "terrorism", what is "fake news", etc. These are not the services that platform companies provide, they are the services that religious leaders provide.

notahacker 9y ago
> Who gets to decide what groups deserve that label? Donald Trump? Twitter, on Twitter's platform. And yes, people are perfectly free to disagree with Twitter's characterisation of particular groups and comments. I'm afraid we're going to have to agree to disagree on the notion that platforms which distribute more criticisms of US policy to more people on a daily basis than most revolutionary subversive movements manage in their entire history are going out of their way to be helpful to the US propaganda narrative, or indeed the implicit argument that promotion of ISIS can be judged to be a threat to humanity only in terms of US propaganda narratives.
- grandalf 9y ago
  > platforms which distribute more criticisms of US policy to more people on a daily basis than most revolutionary subversive movements manage in their entire history This characterization of dissent is highly misleading. Dissent should be thought of as speech that the powerful interest actually wants to suppress. In the US, our powerful interests love speech such as "Trump is a clown" or "Obama is not a US citizen" because they are nonsense issues that have nothing to do with policy, yet they animate voters effectively. To the powerful interests, the ideal electorate is one that is deeply passionate about issues that pose no threat to the status quo. To use a more specific example, much campaign funding is raised by rallying groups to donate based on issues that are unlikely to result in policy change.

notahacker 9y ago

> Who gets to decide what groups deserve that label? Donald Trump? Twitter, on Twitter's platform. And yes, people are perfectly free to disagree with Twitter's characterisation of particular groups and comments. I'm afraid we're going to have to agree to disagree on the notion that platforms which distribute more criticisms of US policy to more people on a daily basis than most revolutionary subversive movements manage in their entire history are going out of their way to be helpful to the US propaganda narrative, or indeed the implicit argument that promotion of ISIS can be judged to be a threat to humanity only in terms of US propaganda narratives.

grandalf 9y ago
> platforms which distribute more criticisms of US policy to more people on a daily basis than most revolutionary subversive movements manage in their entire history This characterization of dissent is highly misleading. Dissent should be thought of as speech that the powerful interest actually wants to suppress. In the US, our powerful interests love speech such as "Trump is a clown" or "Obama is not a US citizen" because they are nonsense issues that have nothing to do with policy, yet they animate voters effectively. To the powerful interests, the ideal electorate is one that is deeply passionate about issues that pose no threat to the status quo. To use a more specific example, much campaign funding is raised by rallying groups to donate based on issues that are unlikely to result in policy change.