5 ms·

It all boils down to this: a) Should twitter be allowed to cancel accounts who harm twitter? If yes: b) Who decides which accounts harm twitter? If the answe

It all boils down to this: a) Should twitter be allowed to cancel accounts who harm twitter? If yes: b) Who decides which accounts harm twitter? If the answer is "twitter", then they have effectively the right to terminate any account at their will. I don't know what other answer is possible for b) except maybe "the courts", and I'm not sure I like that one. If the answer to a) is no, for which companies does this apply? Must every company work with every potential customer? Who decides which companies must? Going through the options, I only see viable: twitter can ban whomever they like, for whatever reason, except for the usual exceptions (religion, race etc). I wish they wouldn't though.

roenxi 6y ago
> a) Should twitter be allowed to cancel accounts who harm twitter? Although some people agree that is the question, it is not the fundamental one here. Most of the respectable arguments are that Twitter's bans are senselessly harming Twitter. They're building a gaping hole in their offering that a competitor can cover.
- lliamander 6y ago
  The thing is, few other companies will do business with anyone trying to compete with Twitter. Parler was nuked. Gab was almost nuked, but they've managed to survive. There's a huge demand for alternatives to Twitter, but other major tech companies, the corporate press, and many politicians are doing everything in their power to crush those alternatives and prevent them from springing up.
  - ChrisLomont 6y ago
    >few other companies will do business with anyone trying to compete with Twitter. That's because companies don't want associated with the users on those platforms, many of whom left Twitter because twitter didn't want them either. So businesses aren't simply in some evil cahoots with Twitter. They're associated with Twitter because that the users they do want to associate with.
  - beowulfey 6y ago
    Huge demand is maybe an overstatement. A quick google search shows me that Parler had ~4 million active users a couple weeks ago. Twitter has >300 million. That’s about 1-2%. I don’t think that qualifies as huge.
    - zarkov99 6y ago
      Parler had 12 million users at the time it was executed by Amazon.
    - lliamander 6y ago
      4 million people is a lot of people. As someone else pointed out, their user base tripled before they were nuked.
  - takeda 6y ago
    There's a demand for service for narcissists, but it isn't huge. Twitter was becoming irrelevant and the only thing that brought Twitter back from irrelevancy was that POTUS was big user of it.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  Twitter doesn't compete in a free market segment. No upstart is going to come along and beat Twitter because they monopolize users' access to their own social networks (if you want to participate in conversations your friends are having, you can't do so from e.g. Mastodon because your friends almost certainly aren't on Mastodon).
jjk166 6y ago
Just because you have the legal right to do something doesn't mean you should do it or that you should be immune to criticism for doing it. For example, in an at-will employment state, an employer can legally fire you for looking at them funny. No one would argue that an employer shouldn't have the right to terminate an employee if they were bad for the company, nor would anyone object to the employer being able to determine what is good or bad for the company. Nevertheless, such an act is a dick move and the employer should be heavily criticized for doing it.
- asddubs 6y ago
  Seems like a bad analogy. I would absolutely argue an employer shouldn't be allowed to fire you for any reason of their choosing
  - jjk166 6y ago
    For the purposes of this analogy, it doesn't matter what they should be allowed to do, what matters is what they are legally allowed to. Likewise there is a very legitimate argument that laws should be changed so that twitter would not have the legal authority to kick people off its platform arbitrarily, but the entire point of the analogy is that there is a difference between what is legally permissible and socially acceptable.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    Unfortunately, the law in many (all?) states is that employment is “at will”. If your boss doesn’t like the color of your hair, they can fire you on the spot. Doesn’t mean they will, but they can as long as it’s not for a “protected class” reason (as in, they can’t fire you for your race). The justification for “at will” employment is that your duties to the company are also “at will.” If you want, you’re free to walk out the front door on your break and never come back.
skissane 6y ago
> If the answer to a) is no, for which companies does this apply? Must every company work with every potential customer? Who decides which companies must? Regulated public utilities generally speaking can't just drop customers simply because they feel like it or don't like them or view them as a "threat". Thankfully the electricity company can't just disconnect you because they don't like you. So long as you pay the bills, they have to keep you on as customer. (I think they can disconnect you if you violate technical rules about electrical safety, such as trying to draw more power from the network than your connection is authorised – but they can't simply do it because they disagree with your politics, or because you are charged with a crime no matter how heinous, or because some third party is suing you, or so on.) And there is an argument for regulating Twitter/Facebook/etc as public utilities. A lot of people in Australia's conservative ruling party are pretty upset at Twitter. They were asking Twitter to take down a faked image of an Australian soldier slitting a child's throat which was posted by the Chinese government. Twitter refused. Then Twitter banned Donald Trump. Twitter will argue that the two situations were very different, but a number of conservative Australian politicians don't agree. They are calling for government regulations to control when Twitter can remove content or ban people [0]. Effectively, turning it into a regulated public utility, at least in Australia. (If the Australian government goes ahead with this, I can't see any way out of it for Twitter except to either comply or block everyone in Australia from accessing their service.) [0] https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/threat-to-democracy-is-real-mps-call-for-social-media-code-of-conduct-20210112-p56tju.html https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/threat-to-democracy-...
- vimy 6y ago
  > They are calling for government regulations to control when Twitter can remove content or ban people [0]. Effectively, turning it into a regulated public utility, at least in Australia. Poland will do the same.
lliamander 6y ago
> twitter can ban whomever they like, for whatever reason, except for the usual exceptions (religion, race etc). I think we either need to get rid of those exceptions or add more. I'm not sure which.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  Why would those even be exceptions or treated differently. I find it a rather arbitrary standard I so often encounter. How would banning for religion be different than banning for any other opinion? So long as an opinion asserts the existence of a higher being it is inviolate? All I need to claim to be unbannable for saying that vaccines cause cancer is simply add “This was told to me by the almighty creator Zefron of Zefronism” and that small differences turns an ordinary falsehood into a religion? Can I deny the holocaust in Germany by simply making it a tenant of a religion? It seems awfully arbitrary to me.
  - bgilroy26 6y ago
    Before the movement of peoples accelerated greatly in the mid 20th century, identity was determined by a few factors and they were practically constitutive of who people were Think about the adhoc communal living options that are available to people who want to live in intentional community in SF, consider side by side people like conservative Mennonite churchgoers in rural Illinois. The idea is not that anyone can or should pull an L Ron, the point is that those identity factors are more or less taken to be extraneous of someone's behavior They are default bad reasons to ban someone, not an exhaustive list, just good rules of thumb
- davrosthedalek 6y ago
  Historically speaking, the exceptions relate to properties which got many people killed. So from that perspective, I'd hope we'll not add more, but maybe can retire some of them. Not super optimistic about that though.
throwaway894345 6y ago
If Twitter were just a few million users or something, I'd subscribe to the "they're a private entity, let them do what they want", but they monopolize a huge portion of our national (indeed, international) dialogue to the effect that they can unilaterally influence election outcomes for the world's most powerful democracies (at least that's the implication if you subscribe to the 'Russia manipulated Twitter algos in 2016' theory). Unless Twitter's monopoly is broken, content on Twitter (and other monopolistic social media networks) should be regulated as "free speech".
- walleeee 6y ago
  Alternatively, we all could pay a bit less attention to Twitter and avoid the issue
stjohnswarts 6y ago
It's simple, they own the platform, they get to make the call who is on it, including Presidents.
curryst 6y ago
I think the answer to a) depends on whether Twitter wants to continue to have a private monopoly on public discourse. If Twitter wants to maintain that monopoly and their walled garden, then no, they should not be able to arbitrarily ban users. I would like to see online public discourse declared to be part of the social infrastructure and be treated like a utility. Alternately, if Twitter is willing to move to a federated-type model where Twitter users can follow Parler users and vice-versa, I think they should be able to continue to ban people. That neatly resolves this conundrum to me. Twitter loses its absolutely staggering inertia from the size of their userbase. The data becomes open, and social media companies become focused on providing value via exposing you to this data, rather than just by building a moat with it to keep out competitors.

roenxi 6y ago

> a) Should twitter be allowed to cancel accounts who harm twitter? Although some people agree that is the question, it is not the fundamental one here. Most of the respectable arguments are that Twitter's bans are senselessly harming Twitter. They're building a gaping hole in their offering that a competitor can cover.

lliamander 6y ago
The thing is, few other companies will do business with anyone trying to compete with Twitter. Parler was nuked. Gab was almost nuked, but they've managed to survive. There's a huge demand for alternatives to Twitter, but other major tech companies, the corporate press, and many politicians are doing everything in their power to crush those alternatives and prevent them from springing up.
- ChrisLomont 6y ago
  >few other companies will do business with anyone trying to compete with Twitter. That's because companies don't want associated with the users on those platforms, many of whom left Twitter because twitter didn't want them either. So businesses aren't simply in some evil cahoots with Twitter. They're associated with Twitter because that the users they do want to associate with.
- beowulfey 6y ago
  Huge demand is maybe an overstatement. A quick google search shows me that Parler had ~4 million active users a couple weeks ago. Twitter has >300 million. That’s about 1-2%. I don’t think that qualifies as huge.
  - zarkov99 6y ago
    Parler had 12 million users at the time it was executed by Amazon.
  - lliamander 6y ago
    4 million people is a lot of people. As someone else pointed out, their user base tripled before they were nuked.
- takeda 6y ago
  There's a demand for service for narcissists, but it isn't huge. Twitter was becoming irrelevant and the only thing that brought Twitter back from irrelevancy was that POTUS was big user of it.
throwaway894345 6y ago
Twitter doesn't compete in a free market segment. No upstart is going to come along and beat Twitter because they monopolize users' access to their own social networks (if you want to participate in conversations your friends are having, you can't do so from e.g. Mastodon because your friends almost certainly aren't on Mastodon).

jjk166 6y ago

Just because you have the legal right to do something doesn't mean you should do it or that you should be immune to criticism for doing it. For example, in an at-will employment state, an employer can legally fire you for looking at them funny. No one would argue that an employer shouldn't have the right to terminate an employee if they were bad for the company, nor would anyone object to the employer being able to determine what is good or bad for the company. Nevertheless, such an act is a dick move and the employer should be heavily criticized for doing it.

asddubs 6y ago
Seems like a bad analogy. I would absolutely argue an employer shouldn't be allowed to fire you for any reason of their choosing
- jjk166 6y ago
  For the purposes of this analogy, it doesn't matter what they should be allowed to do, what matters is what they are legally allowed to. Likewise there is a very legitimate argument that laws should be changed so that twitter would not have the legal authority to kick people off its platform arbitrarily, but the entire point of the analogy is that there is a difference between what is legally permissible and socially acceptable.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  Unfortunately, the law in many (all?) states is that employment is “at will”. If your boss doesn’t like the color of your hair, they can fire you on the spot. Doesn’t mean they will, but they can as long as it’s not for a “protected class” reason (as in, they can’t fire you for your race). The justification for “at will” employment is that your duties to the company are also “at will.” If you want, you’re free to walk out the front door on your break and never come back.

skissane 6y ago

> If the answer to a) is no, for which companies does this apply? Must every company work with every potential customer? Who decides which companies must? Regulated public utilities generally speaking can't just drop customers simply because they feel like it or don't like them or view them as a "threat". Thankfully the electricity company can't just disconnect you because they don't like you. So long as you pay the bills, they have to keep you on as customer. (I think they can disconnect you if you violate technical rules about electrical safety, such as trying to draw more power from the network than your connection is authorised – but they can't simply do it because they disagree with your politics, or because you are charged with a crime no matter how heinous, or because some third party is suing you, or so on.) And there is an argument for regulating Twitter/Facebook/etc as public utilities. A lot of people in Australia's conservative ruling party are pretty upset at Twitter. They were asking Twitter to take down a faked image of an Australian soldier slitting a child's throat which was posted by the Chinese government. Twitter refused. Then Twitter banned Donald Trump. Twitter will argue that the two situations were very different, but a number of conservative Australian politicians don't agree. They are calling for government regulations to control when Twitter can remove content or ban people [0]. Effectively, turning it into a regulated public utility, at least in Australia. (If the Australian government goes ahead with this, I can't see any way out of it for Twitter except to either comply or block everyone in Australia from accessing their service.) [0] https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/threat-to-democracy-is-real-mps-call-for-social-media-code-of-conduct-20210112-p56tju.html https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/threat-to-democracy-...

vimy 6y ago
> They are calling for government regulations to control when Twitter can remove content or ban people [0]. Effectively, turning it into a regulated public utility, at least in Australia. Poland will do the same.

lliamander 6y ago

> twitter can ban whomever they like, for whatever reason, except for the usual exceptions (religion, race etc). I think we either need to get rid of those exceptions or add more. I'm not sure which.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago
Why would those even be exceptions or treated differently. I find it a rather arbitrary standard I so often encounter. How would banning for religion be different than banning for any other opinion? So long as an opinion asserts the existence of a higher being it is inviolate? All I need to claim to be unbannable for saying that vaccines cause cancer is simply add “This was told to me by the almighty creator Zefron of Zefronism” and that small differences turns an ordinary falsehood into a religion? Can I deny the holocaust in Germany by simply making it a tenant of a religion? It seems awfully arbitrary to me.
- bgilroy26 6y ago
  Before the movement of peoples accelerated greatly in the mid 20th century, identity was determined by a few factors and they were practically constitutive of who people were Think about the adhoc communal living options that are available to people who want to live in intentional community in SF, consider side by side people like conservative Mennonite churchgoers in rural Illinois. The idea is not that anyone can or should pull an L Ron, the point is that those identity factors are more or less taken to be extraneous of someone's behavior They are default bad reasons to ban someone, not an exhaustive list, just good rules of thumb
davrosthedalek 6y ago
Historically speaking, the exceptions relate to properties which got many people killed. So from that perspective, I'd hope we'll not add more, but maybe can retire some of them. Not super optimistic about that though.

throwaway894345 6y ago

If Twitter were just a few million users or something, I'd subscribe to the "they're a private entity, let them do what they want", but they monopolize a huge portion of our national (indeed, international) dialogue to the effect that they can unilaterally influence election outcomes for the world's most powerful democracies (at least that's the implication if you subscribe to the 'Russia manipulated Twitter algos in 2016' theory). Unless Twitter's monopoly is broken, content on Twitter (and other monopolistic social media networks) should be regulated as "free speech".

walleeee 6y ago
Alternatively, we all could pay a bit less attention to Twitter and avoid the issue

stjohnswarts 6y ago

It's simple, they own the platform, they get to make the call who is on it, including Presidents.

curryst 6y ago

I think the answer to a) depends on whether Twitter wants to continue to have a private monopoly on public discourse. If Twitter wants to maintain that monopoly and their walled garden, then no, they should not be able to arbitrarily ban users. I would like to see online public discourse declared to be part of the social infrastructure and be treated like a utility. Alternately, if Twitter is willing to move to a federated-type model where Twitter users can follow Parler users and vice-versa, I think they should be able to continue to ban people. That neatly resolves this conundrum to me. Twitter loses its absolutely staggering inertia from the size of their userbase. The data becomes open, and social media companies become focused on providing value via exposing you to this data, rather than just by building a moat with it to keep out competitors.