3 ms·
Does this mean that Swiftian satire such as South Park's episode making fun of prominent Scientologists is now unfit for Twitter?
by drak0n1c 7y ago
Does this mean that Swiftian satire such as South Park's episode making fun of prominent Scientologists is now unfit for Twitter?
- duskwuff 7y agoI don't believe it would be affected -- as I recall, that episode mocks the religion and its members, but doesn't dehumanize them.
- whatshisface 7y agoWhat exactly does "dehumanization" mean?
- jbattle 7y agoDid you read the article? They give some fairly vivid examples
- duskwuff 7y agoIt means precisely what it sounds like -- using language which describes the targeted group as something other than (and lesser than) human. The article gives examples where religious groups are described as "rats", "viruses", "filthy animals", or "maggots".
- whatshisface 7y agoMany cultures use animal analogies to describe nuanced and complicated personality trait combinations. Some of them are more negative than others, referring to combinations of positive and negative traits in varying proportions. Reductively, calling someone a lion is just as dehumanizing as calling them a shark. In the Bible, people are both complemented and insulted with comparisons to lions. Calling someone a shark is more respectful than calling them a rat, unless you're Chinese in which case I'm not sure what rat means. What exactly is banned here? Twitter gave us only the most obvious examples, leaving the hazy zones open for the endless fighting that I predict is about to start.
- tptacek 7y agoWelp, you don't get to do that on Twitter now.
- whatshisface 7y agoSo, I understand the attitude that, "twitter is just a platform, they don't have to be just, why wring your hands so much about what their rules are?" This makes sense if their rules don't matter, so in that case why should they even have rules? That's a position I can understand, where you can post anything on Twitter that's legal under US law.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tptacek 7y agoI'm sorry, I don't understand your logic. If someone has rules, but those rules aren't the same as US law, it seems you're saying, they might as well not have rules at all?
- whatshisface 7y agoYeah, I was kind of tired when I wrote that. My logic was, if handwringing over Twitter's rules isn't justified then the rules must not matter, because handwringing is justified if and only if the rules matter. If the rules don't matter then they don't need rules beyond basic US law, which would imply that this effort wasn't very profitable. So, either Twitter isn't right because they took a rough stab into a subtle area, or they aren't right because they took a stab that didn't need to be taken.
- pvg 7y agoIt's like that time Twitter banned Bob Marley for calling people iron like a lion in Zion.
- drak0n1c 7y agoLooking at Twitter's examples, it's not explicitly mentioned but it looks like it is still permissible to mock a religion and its followers in the manner of Christopher Hitchens, and as long as the religion is not compared to a non-human disease/virus/beast it is OK. Hopefully they keep moderation to clearcut rules like this and avoid touching substantive satire and criticism. It would be helpful if Twitter were bold enough to provide examples of permissible types of criticism/satire.