4 ms·

Honest question: is the source of the problem the hateful intent of the message, or the use of "bad words"? My reading on culture these days is that one can usu

by mabbo 7y ago

Honest question: is the source of the problem the hateful intent of the message, or the use of "bad words"? My reading on culture these days is that one can usually get away with spouting horrendous, hateful ideas so long as they do so without using a short list of offensive words. If the truly are trying to scrub hate from their platform, I applaud their effort, but they'll never succeed. Hate is too hard to define and so subtle you can't actually remove it all. If they just want to remove bad words, why not use literal black-text censoring in situations like this, like TV has done for years? Give this user the option of preserving their moronic comment, hate and all, without the bad words that I'm sure advertisers are asking to be removed.

Nasrudith 7y ago
The bad words certainly - it is the banality of "moralistic enforcers" where you can teach young men to drop fire from above but they can't write "fuck" on their bombs because it is obscene. That sort of mindless focus on bad words that might make people uncomfortable instead of you know - actual problems has been with us for centuriea unfortunately and has gotten better compared to regularly enforced obscenity laws - which are fucking obscene to anyone who stops to use their fucking brain for once. So we were spending all of this money and oppressing with violence because a bunch of people are offended because they were told to be offended? That said use of resources could be used on /anything fucking else/ like patroling, doing reviews of random ceiminal sentences is actual fucking obscenity.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
nilkn 7y ago
There are plenty of recent tweets from active accounts that use the same language and display the same hate towards present-day politicians. It's hard to imagine that Twitter is only selecting tweets like this based on language.
danso 7y ago
Twitter uses third-party contractors for human moderation. If the tweet was reported/flagged and made its way into manual review for a human, whoever looked at it probably didn't take more than 30 seconds to decide. Even if Twitter's moderator workforce is U.S. based (and thus, attune to cultural norms), they probably are optimized to issue suspensions for low-hanging fruit. Vulgarity is going to be more of an obvious signal to the average person, than obfuscated hateful messages.
- mabbo 7y ago
  > than obfuscated hateful messages I'm not talking about obfuscated messages. If one were to post "I love you no matter where you fucking come from", they're not being hateful, but they are being vulgar. Is that allows? On the other hand, if one were to post "I truly believe that all people who are not white are inferior beings that should leave my country", then there's zero vulgarity here but clearly a hateful horrible person I'd like to avoid at all costs. If the problem is vulgarity, then the solution is well-understood: censor the bad words, let the rest of the message stay. If the problem is hate, then the problem is that it's impossible to ever really get rid of it. I suspect in the author's case, the problem is that they used vulgarity 9 years ago and the system finally picked up on it.
  - danso 7y ago
    Yes, vulgarity is completely allowed. Here's a tweet that was popular enough for the WaPo to write about, but not actually print: > Fuck my fucking face I’m about to get skinny as fuck https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/09/dont-worry-trump-opponents-your-fast-food-options-are-still-robust/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/09/dont-worr...
koheripbal 7y ago
My issue with it is entirely different - the user isn't American. He lives in New Zealand. Throwing HATE at a US politician during a US election in public is foreign interference and should be removed on that basis.
- nradov 7y ago
  Should Twitter also prohibit US residents from posting disparaging tweets about Vladimir Putin during the next Russian election season?
- lucaspm98 7y ago
  It seems somewhat unrealistic for a user to not be able to express opinions about the politics of another country. Elections more often than not have international implications. For example, as an American I have varying levels of interest in Chinese, Russian, and EU politics. Coordinated interference by foreign governments is a completely different problem.
- smsm42 7y ago
  "foreign interference" is bullshit. Anybody can express their opinion about US politicians, and if US electorate is too stupid to decide for themselves what they want without excluding any outside information, like Soviet Union did and North Korea still does - it's not a democracy anyway, it's idiocracy and thus would not have any value to preserve. Fortunately, it's just a lie - US people are just fine and capable of independent reasoning, and there's no threat of "foreign influence", it's a canard invented by political operators to mask their failures and provide excuses for censorship.
smsm42 7y ago
> My reading on culture these days is that one can usually get away with spouting horrendous, hateful ideas That depends whether you are in-group with the censors or out-group. If you're in, you could get away with a lot - from very base and crude language (excluding the taboo words, yes) to graphically describing and encouraging grave bodily harm, murder, rape, etc. If you're out, then you better be extra super vanilla squeaky nice.

by mabbo 7y ago

Nasrudith 7y ago

The bad words certainly - it is the banality of "moralistic enforcers" where you can teach young men to drop fire from above but they can't write "fuck" on their bombs because it is obscene. That sort of mindless focus on bad words that might make people uncomfortable instead of you know - actual problems has been with us for centuriea unfortunately and has gotten better compared to regularly enforced obscenity laws - which are fucking obscene to anyone who stops to use their fucking brain for once. So we were spending all of this money and oppressing with violence because a bunch of people are offended because they were told to be offended? That said use of resources could be used on /anything fucking else/ like patroling, doing reviews of random ceiminal sentences is actual fucking obscenity.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

nilkn 7y ago

There are plenty of recent tweets from active accounts that use the same language and display the same hate towards present-day politicians. It's hard to imagine that Twitter is only selecting tweets like this based on language.

danso 7y ago

Twitter uses third-party contractors for human moderation. If the tweet was reported/flagged and made its way into manual review for a human, whoever looked at it probably didn't take more than 30 seconds to decide. Even if Twitter's moderator workforce is U.S. based (and thus, attune to cultural norms), they probably are optimized to issue suspensions for low-hanging fruit. Vulgarity is going to be more of an obvious signal to the average person, than obfuscated hateful messages.

mabbo 7y ago
> than obfuscated hateful messages I'm not talking about obfuscated messages. If one were to post "I love you no matter where you fucking come from", they're not being hateful, but they are being vulgar. Is that allows? On the other hand, if one were to post "I truly believe that all people who are not white are inferior beings that should leave my country", then there's zero vulgarity here but clearly a hateful horrible person I'd like to avoid at all costs. If the problem is vulgarity, then the solution is well-understood: censor the bad words, let the rest of the message stay. If the problem is hate, then the problem is that it's impossible to ever really get rid of it. I suspect in the author's case, the problem is that they used vulgarity 9 years ago and the system finally picked up on it.
- danso 7y ago
  Yes, vulgarity is completely allowed. Here's a tweet that was popular enough for the WaPo to write about, but not actually print: > Fuck my fucking face I’m about to get skinny as fuck https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/09/dont-worry-trump-opponents-your-fast-food-options-are-still-robust/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/09/dont-worr...

koheripbal 7y ago

My issue with it is entirely different - the user isn't American. He lives in New Zealand. Throwing HATE at a US politician during a US election in public is foreign interference and should be removed on that basis.

nradov 7y ago
Should Twitter also prohibit US residents from posting disparaging tweets about Vladimir Putin during the next Russian election season?
lucaspm98 7y ago
It seems somewhat unrealistic for a user to not be able to express opinions about the politics of another country. Elections more often than not have international implications. For example, as an American I have varying levels of interest in Chinese, Russian, and EU politics. Coordinated interference by foreign governments is a completely different problem.
smsm42 7y ago
"foreign interference" is bullshit. Anybody can express their opinion about US politicians, and if US electorate is too stupid to decide for themselves what they want without excluding any outside information, like Soviet Union did and North Korea still does - it's not a democracy anyway, it's idiocracy and thus would not have any value to preserve. Fortunately, it's just a lie - US people are just fine and capable of independent reasoning, and there's no threat of "foreign influence", it's a canard invented by political operators to mask their failures and provide excuses for censorship.

smsm42 7y ago

> My reading on culture these days is that one can usually get away with spouting horrendous, hateful ideas That depends whether you are in-group with the censors or out-group. If you're in, you could get away with a lot - from very base and crude language (excluding the taboo words, yes) to graphically describing and encouraging grave bodily harm, murder, rape, etc. If you're out, then you better be extra super vanilla squeaky nice.