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Twitch bans Confederate flag, racist emote usage in new conduct policy
- dancemethis 6y agoWell, that means all "Pepe" variations are banned? This is good.
- TameAntelope 6y agoI would be very sad if Pepe writ large were banned, he's always been much larger than the racist aspects of how people tried to abuse him. He's a victim in all of this too, IMO...
- aminozuur 6y agoIn Hong Kong, Pepe The Frog is a symbol for freedom and anti-authoritarianism.
- _iyig 6y agoPepe emotes on Twitch are omnipresent, and have no political connotation. https://www.polygon.com/2018/5/14/17335670/twitch-emotes-meaning-list-kappa-monkas-omegalul-pepe-trihard https://www.polygon.com/2018/5/14/17335670/twitch-emotes-mea... edit: Downvotes, really? I'm not wrong. Read the link, or use Twitch chat for yourself, as I do on a semi-daily basis.
- watwut 6y agoAfter seeing the documentary "feels good man" about pepe, I felt sorry for his creator.
- kache_ 6y agofeels bad man
- fennecfoxen 6y agoIt’s interesting. Pepe has never actually really been a hate symbol. He’s an Everyman symbol, in the tradition of Pierrot, the sad clown, the trusting fool, who just happens to be used by a casual online video game culture (which is definitely a superset of various hate groups, but also contains many who are simply there to Minecraft and shoot aliens.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierrot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierrot
- watwut 6y agoPepe was 4chan culture, but was it gaming culture outside of 4chan? Cause I really did not seen it much in general gaming culture, except from chan people.
- fennecfoxen 6y agoIt might be the result of 4chan's influence spreading, mind you, but these days it's part of gaming culture all over Twitch, and maybe 50% of Discord.
- subjectsigma 6y agoThis Pepe shit is crazy to me. Pepe was and still is used as a generic meme in so many contexts it just makes no sense that people declare it a hate symbol. I was watching a keyboard review by a Korean guy the other day and it had pepe meme in the video. He has hundreds of thousands of subscribers. English isn't his first language. You really think he's dog whistling to thousands of racists, or people just like stupid memes? Do you think whoever made this (extremely popular) short is a racist? https://youtube.com/watch?v=gAbi2_n8_Mw https://youtube.com/watch?v=gAbi2_n8_Mw It really feels like some CNN broadcaster said something like "Trump bad, and Trump Pepe!" And suddenly there's this small subset of the population who dropped everything they were doing, faces flushed, veins popping, and started vehemently writing about why this crude depiction of a frog used by teenagers for laughs should be #cancelled. It's absurd. It's like progressives are parodying themselves.
- dkdk8283 6y agoJust more online censorship. What happened to the absolutism of free speech? It feels like the USA is closer to the CCP every day.
- swirepe 6y agoMake your own twitch.
- jonfw 6y agoFacebook, Google, and Microsoft have all demonstrated how difficult it is to break into this market... Amazon thought it was cheaper to spend a billion dollars on Twitch than to build a competitor itself You either have to be the first mover or a mega-corp to make this happen. It's clearly not something you can do as an individual at this point.
- chewmieser 6y agoSupport anti-trust laws to prevent massive conglomerates form smothering all forms of competition then? That being said, just because it's hard doesn't mean it's not possible. Parler is a recent example of this.
- FruityCoconut 6y agoI hope this is a wry joke. Recently we've seen DNS providers, CDNs, payment gateways, and even banks shut down services for wrong-thinkers. Accelerationists are cheering these actions. That should tell you all you need to know about the likely outcome.
- Pfhreak 6y agoRecently? No, services have always been at risk for out groups. It was only a few decades ago that minority and lgbtq folks could lose access to services. Except now it's not normal people, it's hate groups that are being pushed out. This seems like a material change for the better. If you think this is a recent phenomena or if you think it's somehow only being aimed one way, I suggest you read a bit more American history.
- fennecfoxen 6y agoHow do they feel about the Mississippi flag? The one that’s not been totally replaced just yet, I mean.
- yostrovs 6y agoHow about the communist flag of the Soviet Union? The flag that represented enslavement and murder of millions?
- hairofadog 6y agoThe confederate flag is about exactly one thing, which is white supremacy. The other flags being sarcastically listed as replies to this comment stand for higher ideals, whether or not those ideals were misguided and whether or not the nations behind those flags lived up to those ideals. If someone puts a sign up in the break room that says “don’t steal other people’s lunches” and then proceeds to steal everyone else’s lunch, you can still point to that sign and say, yeah, that’s a standard we should strive to live by. It would be more difficult to say that if someone puts a swastika up in the break room.
- fennecfoxen 6y agoI'm not asking someone to judge the ideals of the UK vs the ideals of the Confederacy — it is an exercise in subjectivity for you or I to declare that the UK or the US is or isn't "bad enough," or whether the Confederacy had ideals. This doesn't mean either of us are wrong or that these guidelines can't or shouldn't exist, it just means we're not in a position that our judgements on the matter mean anything. The specific practical matter is that the last actual official Mississippi Flag contains, in one corner, the flag which people think of when you say "Confederate flag" which has specifically been called by Twitch for its association with slavery in America. While the Mississippi flag might in select contexts be used to mean "white supremacy," it also means things that are not identical to the concept of white supremacy: for instance, it means "Mississippi". Is this enough of a difference to allow the Mississippi flag, or is it still associated with slavery in a strong enough matter that it should be banned? One recurring problem with speech codes is ambiguity of this sort. Even though the guidelines Twitch has provided are much more detailed than most online chat platforms have deigned to make available (cough Discord cough) there is still nontrivial ambiguity over these matters — ambiguity which can only really be resolved by authorized representatives of Twitch itself. In the broader world, when such ambiguity exists in the law, we have things like a court system with evidentiary standards and a presumption of innocence; these are things we lack on Twitch.
- zoner 6y agogo gab.com, non need for these tech giants
- TameAntelope 6y agoThe old conduct policy read a bit like copy/paste "well surely we need something here" that grew organically to cover specific situations as encountered, and this new policy looks extremely thought-out, like it was written actually with the protection of users in mind, so I think from that perspective it's an improvement. On the other hand (and maybe I'm being overly cynical here), the real reason you rewrite this, as a company, is that your old policy was causing you legal issues, right? This is first and foremost a legal document, yeah? I wonder which of the dozens of public "incidents" informed this decision (or maybe the fact that so many have happened is what spurred the rewrite). Just something to think about from a "new startup" perspective; if you have users that can post content, you need something like this, and the old "don't be evil" versions probably don't cut it today.
- ab3rC1te 6y agoWell if these companies would simple put they can't be sued for anything which means anything and everything. You wouldn't have all these stupid ass EULA on every damn site.
- maxerickson 6y agoThere's probably some public relations and real actual concern about what people are doing on their platform too. I also wonder why you think it is cynical to point out that a business is acting like a business. Of course they do. It would be cynical to outright dismiss the possibility that individuals involved in the process also had concerns about things happening on the platform and argue that it was purely for business reasons.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y agoif you have users that can post content, you need something like this, and the old "don't be evil" versions probably don't cut it today. This depends entirely on the kind of culture you want to foster. If you chase advertising money then sure. But the Parlers and 4chans of the world are doing just fine. I think that's key here in this conversation. The only reason this is being done here is because it helps make them money. It does so by avoiding pushing away advertisers.
- danishdev 6y ago"Liberalism" It's a pity because it rocks! https://cdn.abcotvs.com/dip/images/808223_062615-cc-confederate-flag-thumb.jpg https://cdn.abcotvs.com/dip/images/808223_062615-cc-confeder...
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- aminozuur 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_censorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_censorship
- lovetocode 6y agoDid they ban the Dixiecrat flag or the actual Confederate flag?
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- Ancapistani 6y agoI suspect very few here know what you’re saying, and that they banned the “Southern Cross”, not the “Stars and Bars”.
- lovetocode 6y agoThat’s what I figured. I’m all about banning this nonsense but at least get the nuances right. The Dixiecrat flag was never a CSA flag.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y agoI'm curious if they'll ban symbols associated with any religions with theologies they would consider to have racist elements. And perhaps ban the showing of flags of all nations with laws they consider racist. My point is that I have trouble taking a company's public justifications seriously, when the company appears unwilling to take the financial/reputational hit of applying that reasoning consistently.
- maxerickson 6y agoConfederate flags aren't national flags, so you are looking for something more than consistency when you make that comparison.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago> Confederate flags aren't national flags That's a really poignant statement. I genuinely believe that some people consider the Confederate flag a symbol of the true United States, which was betrayed by the North. And while they lost the civil war, they were still in the right. For these people, the Confederate flag is a symbol of resistance to an oppressive nation state, and flying it is no more "racist" than it would be for someone to fly the flag of Tibet. And obviously, some other people associate the Confederate flag with institutional slavery. That's why I think we need to discuss the fact that these policies tacitly involve choices about: (a) Which groups can and cannot be offended. (b) Given the large variety of associations that different people can have regarding a particular symbol, which of those many associations are given primacy?
- maxerickson 6y agoLosers gonna loser. Also, you miss my point. While you might expect different rules for national flags, you wouldn't apply those rules to the flags of a defunct uprising. Even if some people have some beliefs about what the defunct uprising was.
- watwut 6y agoI don't think there is any reasonable interpretation of history in which South was betrayed by the North. You might claim that they should have been allowed to leave the union, you might make statements on which way territories should have gone, but it is really hard to see betrayal there. Second, actual breaking point between the states at the time was slavery. The "states right" in question was the one that allowed or disallowed slavery on new territories.
- kthxbye123 6y agoHilarious to see how many people on HN are furious about not being allowed to use an anti-black hate symbol on a private commercial streaming service. Not that they actually hate black people, of course, they’re just very committed to the noble principle of being able to display anti-black hate symbols anywhere, at any time, with zero consequences. To not allow them to do that is basically communism!!
- theloosifer 6y agoYeah free speech is a thing. Fuck off.
- andruc 6y agoThat you are not entitled to without limits.
- djbebs 6y agoIf there are limits, its not free.
- krapp 6y agoIn the real world there are always limits. Absolute free speech, like the free market, has only ever existed in theory. In practice even most free speech absolutists are just quibbling over where to draw the lines of censorship and tolerance.
- kthxbye123 6y agoAm I allowed to come into your house and scream into your ear without limit? Can you expect to go into a synagogue and hang a nazi flag from the rafters without them being able to ban you from the premise? I think that much of this kind of stupid discourse on HN is driven by thiel-worshipping reactionaries who believe weird theories about why their genes make them better than black people, but another huge part of it seems to be literally fourteen year old libertarians. Which are you?
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- throwmylifawy 6y agoWe often talk about the sanctity of "freedom of speech" for people who say harmful things, but what about the people that are suppressed from participating, because of fear of being brigaded, doxxed, or emotionally harmed. These people are being prevented from "freedom of speech" as well. Usually for reasons of being in an out group. Shouldn't the platform be able to censor those who would limit it's growth?
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- danishdev 6y agoYou are late in your monthly payment to BLM and black owned businesses. It's called "corporate freedom"
- stevespang 6y agoLibtards strike again, trying to erase history. What about Israeli flag ? What about CCP flag ? DOJ needs to come down on them hard.