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> Twitter and rival Facebook are increasingly caught in a Catch-22 situation—criticized by some users for allowing hateful posts, but blasted by others for remo
by malvosenior 8y ago
> Twitter and rival Facebook are increasingly caught in a Catch-22 situation—criticized by some users for allowing hateful posts, but blasted by others for removing content because it curtails free speech.
I don’t think this is an accurate framing of the problem. What people want is consistency. If you want to ban people for being fringe, obnoxious or worse, you need to do it regardless of who they are.
What happens is one side of the political spectrum gets their worst actors banned while caustic tweeters on the other side of the isle can often be found with blue verification checkmarks (and unchecked aggressive tweets).
Imho Dorsey was correct in not wanting to ban Jones and Spencer because that’s more consistent with how the far-left is treated.
- tomlock 8y agoWho would you consider a visible far-left figure that ought to be banned who hasn't been, and why?
- malvosenior 8y agoI don’t think anyone should be banned. If I had to pick a very visible example of caustic far left tweets I’d say the New York Times tech editor is a good example: https://mobile.twitter.com/nickmon1112/status/1025437806775226368 https://mobile.twitter.com/nickmon1112/status/10254378067752... In fact someone changed those tweets from “white males” to something else and got banned from Twitter.
- tomlock 8y agoAlex Jones' personal account has almost 10 times the twitter following of "the New York Times tech editor" who's name I've actually never heard before. I think Alex Jones' active disparagement of the parents of mass shooting victims is more actively harmful than what you're linking here.
- colordrops 8y ago"active disparagement" does not constitute a very high bar for censorship. A US platform with with an emphasis on free speech should leverage the work put into US legal precedent as closely as possible. There has been a massive amount of thought put into the reasoning behind legal limitations on speech.
- tomlock 8y agoAnd after that "massive amount of thought" there was no legal restriction put on companies that "deplatform" users like Alex Jones. Go figure.
- colordrops 8y agoIt feels to me that you are intentionally misunderstanding my comment. I was suggesting that the platform claiming to support free speech would be true to their word by opening up as much as legally possible, rather than do anything they want just because it's legal.
- tomlock 8y agoDo you feel like I would have gained anything from your observation that thought has been put into the American legal system? That legal system deliberately doesn't place restrictions on platforms like twitter - might I similarly suggest that you should consider that there was a great deal of thought put into that deliberate omission. If a platform like twitter supports free speech as thoughtfully considered by the American legal system, they are acting consistently with that if they deplatform people like Alex Jones. An example of them not acting consistently with that would be taking government direction on silencing users.
- colordrops 8y agoYou are arguing with a straw man. I said nothing about their ability to act arbitrarily within the legal bounds. I also said nothing about them taking government direction on silencing users. The crux of my statement is about how a platform that claims to emphasize free speech should behave. Don't get confused and think I'm talking about how a company is legally required to behave, or the degrees of freedom a company has within the legal system.
- prolikewh0a 8y agoThat's not far left even in the slightest. That's liberalism with extreme identity politics. Marx would never agree with Sarah, as it has nothing to do with class concerns and even further splits the working class. Fred Hampton also often talked about how no matter what race, white, brown, black, the proletariat must come together to overthrow the bourgeois in a proletarian revolution.
- gort 8y agoThen adjust parent's argument to be about how tweets from Team Red and Team Blue are treated.
- mschuster91 8y ago> In fact someone changed those tweets from “white males” to something else and got banned from Twitter. The point is that "white males" are no group protected by any anti-discriminatory law or fall under any "group" that is discriminable against under moral terms. You can legally and ethically flame against "white males" as you choose. The reason is simple: as a collective in Western societies, white males occupy most of society's leading roles and (together with white women) form the majority of Western countries' populations. Discrimination, however, requires a power and numbers majority of the discriminators over those "discriminated"... which simply isn't the case, no matter where in the Western sphere you look. Granted, the demographich statistics for the US show that whites may sooner or later no longer be the dominant ones by numbers... but as long as the representation of non-whites, especially black/brown people of color or people of latino and Asian origin, in ALL OF society is not representative of their numbers, whites simply cannot be discriminated against. As a reason, there's no problem when Twitter bans people who post such stuff.
- black6 8y agoRob Reiner.
- prolikewh0a 8y agoWhy the heck are we banning anything unless it brings physical harm to others? (Alex Jones & Sandy Hook) Far left, far right opinions shouldn't be banned as it would set a precedent that anything outside of the status quo is not valid discourse.
- stass 8y agoTwitter should either be banning both far left and far right extremists, or nobody. Otherwise it should be considers a media, and not an internet service and regulated as such.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> Otherwise it should be considers a media, and not an internet service and regulated as such. It is considered a communications medium (part of the “new media”). Media and internet are not mutually exclusive categories, and the media in the US (outside of broadcast media, where it is the broadcasting, rather than media, aspect that brings regulation) is generally unregulated and largely Constitutionally protected against regulation.
- pietroglyph 8y agoMedia isn't really regulated much different than Twitter, and an "internet service" isn't required to be politically neutral in its handling of what content it chooses to host.
- Waterluvian 8y agoSo I'm (rather intentionally) ignorant to all this stuff. Can you share an example or reference to what a far left extremist looks like? It just doesn't exist in my current mental model. And I recognize this is terrible when my goal is to be judicious and balanced in all opinions.
- stass 8y agoCheck out @ucf_socialism or videos of Senator Maxine Waters calling for attacks on members of administration: https://news.iheart.com/featured/joe-soto/content/2018-06-25-rep-maxine-waters-encourages-supporters-to-harass-trump-administration/ https://news.iheart.com/featured/joe-soto/content/2018-06-25...
- stass 8y agoWe can begin here: https://tinyurl.com/y8rk9yjn https://tinyurl.com/y8rk9yjn I personally reported many accounts, including an antifa group that called for killing cops and white peoples to no avail. At the same time twitter bans people for sharing news about job growth. Go figure.
- rhcom2 8y agoI've never heard of any of these people, certainly none rise to the visibility of Richard Spencer or Alex Jones. Half of these are actual white people complaining about white people...
- dominotw 8y agoOnly one i recognise is saachi kaul from buzzfeed.
- tomlock 8y agoIt's possible to find literally any opinion on twitter. What's the magnitude of this problem compared to Alex Jones' active disparagement of the parents of victims of mass shootings?
- creaghpatr 8y agoHow would such magnitude even be measured? Subjectively, perhaps legally?
- eganist 8y agoIt's pretty straightforward. Twitter even offers it as a feature for your own tweets, something called Tweet Activity (the bar chart icon on every one of your own tweets). The specific stats e.g. impressions, engagements, detail expands, clicks, replies, etc. are all measured. And that's just what's exposed to us. Twitter doubtless has more than that on hand.
- tomlock 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- downandout 8y agoI replied with one of the worst examples of a far-left person that ought to be banned, but it was almost instantly flagged. That kind of shows the problems with politically biased communities like HN and the workforce at Twitter (the people actually making the decisions talked about in the article). Intolerance in such communities has reached such a fever pitch that even legitimate responses to a question soliciting the names of bad actors get flagged.
- leereeves 8y agoSarah Jeong would the most obvious example of Twitter's bias. Candace Owens was suspended for just two tweets copied from Sarah Jeong. Sarah Jeong made hundreds of such tweets without consequence...and the left defended her.
- pvg 8y agoSarah Jeong is not a 'visible far-left figure'. Candace Owens was not suspended for tweets 'copied', she changed the tweets. This bizarre and tediously repeated idea that you can change the actual words of something and not change the meaning and degree of offensiveness doesn't meet the logical argument standard of most toddlers. It's worse than unconvincing, it just makes you sound like an idiot - I'd reconsider using it.
- malvosenior 8y agoNo one is changing the meaning of anything. You're the one making personal attacks against someone who was just answering a question. Plenty of people would see the editorial board of the NYT as "visible" and Jeong is certainly far-left (unless it's a moderate opinion to blast white men publicly for years on end). You should try to stick to arguing the facts and leave the personal attack nonsense out of it. Calling other users "toddlers" doesn't help your argument.
- pvg 8y agoIf you change the words, you've changed the meaning. That seems like it should be uncontroversial and straightforward. If your argument is based on that not somehow being the case, I think we can safely say it's a dumb argument. This isn't a personal attack, and I haven't called anyone a toddler. Although if one then takes it as a personal attack, I'd be inclined to think that person is a bit of a snowflake. But I wouldn't say it because that would be namecalling. Sarah Jeong is not 'far left', nor is writing silly tweets about white men. That's neither a left, nor a right nor a swift uppercut to the jaw.
- 8y ago
- DanBC 8y agoLet's not pretend that left wing violence is anywhere near the scale of violence on the far right. There are literally dozens of murders each year in the US from members of the far right.
- malvosenior 8y agoWe're not talking about violence (and you're statement is pure conjecture anyway), we're talking about tweets and yes the left wing tweets are just as bad as the right wing tweets as I and others have given examples of in this thread.