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Being realistic: if your life hangs by the thread of twitter moderation, you should either run and hide, or get your affairs in order. If they really want you

Being realistic: if your life hangs by the thread of twitter moderation, you should either run and hide, or get your affairs in order. If they really want you dead, even the best possible twitter moderation won't keep you safe. This whole circumstance of people wanting you dead is not twitters fault and there is very little twitter could do to protect you even if their moderation was perfect.

DoreenMichele 4y ago
He's not asking Twitter to protect him from murder. He's asking them to do their damn job so the platform cannot be used to facilitate a smear campaign that makes it easy to get away with murder. It's a very reasonable request.
- xwdv 4y ago
  No, this is not Twitter’s problem, and if they fulfill this request it just goes down a rabbit hole that eventually creates more liability for the company than what they want to take on. Twitter has taken the correct action here.
  - jona-f 4y ago
    Wow, you're morally bankrupt. It's nice to see a well written article like that on the frontpage of this site, but unfortunately the venture capital fueled business model proposed by ycombinator is at the heart of the problem. Liability my ass. This is some disgusting dystopian bullshit. Also if you talk about liability, heard about the Streisand effect? Public opinion about these corporations is low and i think twitter itself isn't doing so well lately. Good riddance.
    - sroussey 4y ago
      There is a long history of liability in the USA when you take on editorializing roles. This was broken by the Communication Decency Act (CDA section 230) but case law has is slowly moving back. It is a valid concern. If CDA 230 were taken away, I wouldn’t be surprised if common carrier laws fell as well. The telephone companies can listen to all phone calls, so they may need to editorialize (mute, disconnect, report to police) on various illegal calls.
      - jona-f 4y ago
        Twitter's response was so soulless, it's unclear if it's a bot. This is what i find most unacceptable. Others have expanded on the censorship problem in this thread.
        xwdv 4y ago
        A response should be delivered quickly and efficiently, and in no uncertain terms. Filling it with heart and soul just gives false hope that some kind of appeal to emotion can be achieved. But it cannot.
        jona-f 4y ago
        Exactly, quickly and efficiently, cause we have to scale to the heavens to please the investors. No time for human decency. I'm not talking about "some kind of appeal to emotion". This is about human rights in a fascist regime. At some point you have to take a stance. There is so much twitter could have done better. The first step would be to take this serious. The likes of twitter, facebook, uber, amazon, ... have made the world worse for the sake of their shareholders and you are complicit. I'm sure your salary is fine though.
        xwdv 4y ago
        A company does not have to take a stance, it is not an individual. Members of the company are free to take whatever stance they wish personally.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  I have a very low opinion of twitter and certainly wish they'd do a better job. But the premise of twitter as a shield against state-sponsored kidnapping or murder seems flimsy at best.
  - DoreenMichele 4y ago
    That's not the premise. This kind of bullshit is exactly how disempowered groups get painted into a corner. Sexual assault doesn't typically begin with violent rape. It ends there. It begins with a million small forms of disrespect. Political crap follows the same pattern. If you think it doesn't fucking matter, what the hell do you care how this goes? It matters to him. If you don't care, what's wrong with saying "Twitter should simply do its job, man!"
    - dcow 4y ago
      I think you're applying too much nuance to this. Reading all the comments, I think everyone generally wants good for the author. There are just a few different ways to communicating that. Roughly they seem to be: 1. epmathy and twitter do better 2. empathy and this is what you get with twitter 3. empath and practical advice You seem to be railing against (2). Personally I find the bone you're picking to really be besides the point. Most everyone is empathizing with the author's struggle. Nobody here is telling the author to go fuck themselves. Nobody is condoning what Twitter is doing. And certainly nobody is disrespecting the author or supporting the misinformation. So your comment really feels like a non sequitur.
    - Bakary 4y ago
      The premise is that the guy lacks power. Twitter has very little incentive to help him, and a strong disincentive to piss off the Pakistani government. Wallowing in outrage is pointless as they have to cynically maneuver until they have results. Part of that strategy might involve stirring up people emotionally towards action, but internalizing the martyrdom doesn't achieve anything on its own. Ironically, this is precisely the type of martyrdom that helps these tech companies strategically in the long term. From their POV, all they have to do is throw a performative bone once in a while and wait for people's outrage rush to ebb away.
- bell-cot 4y ago
  Morally? Yes, a very reasonable request. OTOH - is there any large real-world corporation which has ever gotten itself into a sustained info-war conflict with a well-armed and angry nation state, for the purpose of protecting one "ordinary" person from that nation state? I'm guessing "no".
  - DoreenMichele 4y ago
    He says he's a journalist. That used to mean something. So it's rather dismissive and disrespectful to characterize him as an ordinary person with scare quotes no less. If these platforms feel unable to moderate fairly due to fear of foreign governments, perhaps they should tuck tail and keep their pussy selves out of the conflict entirely. I'm not impressed with an argument of "We want the money involved but we can't make any meaningful effort to actually enforce the rules we claim we have. Your country is too tough for my sissy self to man up in. I still want the money though."
    - bell-cot 4y ago
      Okay - replace '"ordinary" person' with some polite phrase of your choice, which still makes it clear that the victim is not a head of state, ambassador, top military officer, Speaker of the House, Fortune 50 CEO, etc., etc. No, I am not arguing that your idealism is morally wrong. I am arguing that the real world very often functions in ways which bear little resemblance to your ideals. No amount of idealism about "the gutter should have been stronger, and the ladder more stable, and..." will change the fact that my brother fell off a roof when young. Nor erase the injuries which he sustained. When I or people I care about are interacting with gutters and ladders, I stay very alert, and strive for "zero idealistic thoughts". And - this sad state of affairs is nothing new. Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, The Brass Check, and other works (about the deep and systematic moral failings of corporations, journalists, etc.) over a century ago.
      - DoreenMichele 4y ago
        Idealism? I'm not an idealist. I'm a pragmatist. But the internet allows businesses to operate virtually in de facto war zones. This is getting people killed when the business tries to act like they don't need to account for that fact. If they physically went into a war zone to sell products and it was getting people killed, would that merit a "Too bad, so sad. Gotta make money, doncha know. Can't be worried about niggling details like not getting our customers cavalierly killed."
- karaterobot 4y ago
  What should Twitter do in this case? You say "their damn job", but their job is to apply their content policies, which they say they are doing. Given only the tweets linked in the article, I can see how a moderator would look at them and not find that they are obviously breaking any rules. They may be false accusations, but Twitter has not agreed to do independent investigations of every report by a user, or take on the responsibility of trying to guess hidden motives of the accused. Twitter moderation is not a sanctuary, or a refuge, or a crusader for justice, it's a pro forma box-checking policy and never claimed to be more than that.
  - DoreenMichele 4y ago
    I've been a moderator. Decisions are made contextually. One of his complaints is they clearly don't know what the hell is going on in Pakistan and this is a root cause of their mishandling of things. It is a completely reasonable criticism.
    - dnissley 4y ago
      Is it really reasonable? Twitter fails regularly to take such context into consideration when making moderation decisions in their home country. How could it be reasonable to expect them to get it right when it comes to the context of a foreign country?
      - satellite2 4y ago
        Assuming Twitter is serving the Pakistani market, making revenue and paying taxes there, it seems reasonable to ask for the same quality controls as elsewhere. In particular hiring Pakistanis for moderation shouldn't be economically devastating for their operations in this country. So on top of being a very reasonable request it should be a minimum requirement of their operating model.
        tsimionescu 4y ago
        And why do you think Pakistani Twitter moderators would feel empowered to take down tweets by government officials willing to torture and murder? The request for Twitter to help in this case only makes sense if it assumed it will be taken by moderators living outside of Pakistan, who don't have to fear government reprisal for their actions.
- yibg 4y ago
  Problem is who determines if it’s a smear campaign? The author claims it was, and I tend to believe him but I haven’t investigated. Have you? And then, how determines if it’s extreme enough to warrant some action? In the ideal world sure there would be an army of people investigating every case in detail. But then 1) Twitter becomes the arbiter of truth and 2) definitely can’t scale.
  - DoreenMichele 4y ago
    138 journalists killed in Pakistan since 1990 https://www.dawn.com/news/1595257 https://www.dawn.com/news/1595257 At least 39 journalists killed in US due to their work...since 1937 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_i... These risk levels are not alike.
  - Uehreka 4y ago
    Oh come the fuck on. People on HN need to get over this: At a certain point people and organizations need to stop pretending that “both sides could in theory have a point” and actually take a stand. “But what if the stand they take is opposite the one you think they should take? How would you like that?” I wouldn’t, I’d badger them to take my position. Hopefully I’d succeed, and if I didn’t, I’d join a long line of people who were right but unsuccessful. So it goes, life sucks sometimes.
    - dcow 4y ago
      I don’t want communication platform organizations taking any stands anywhere ever. That sounds dystopian and horrible. Deleting these Tweets won’t change a damn thing and might even be more harmful (what if the author didn't know they were being targeted because Twitter deleted everything, then they hopped back home because Twitter made them feel safe and fuzzy, and the got detained and tortured, for instance). What will change things is people getting off their keyboards and taking stands. You cannot pwn the responsibility off on Twitter moderators. Only the truth can hide the lies.
CoastalCoder 4y ago
> Being realistic: if your life hangs by the thread of twitter moderation, you should either run and hide, or get your affairs in order. Perhaps a 3rd option is to go on the attack, and find some angle from which to sue Twitter?
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  That won't solve the problem of people wanting him dead.
  - notch656a 4y ago
    Yeah. Change my mind: if people want you dead violently, police are likely to be 15 minutes to an hour too late, and the courts a couple years late behind that. Unfortunately violence is often either solved by running away, hiding, or meeting violence with direct self defense. Maybe after you're lucky, you can win a suit against twitter, after their massive legal team drags it out for years with N number of hurdles. You'd be lucky to sue a nobody in podunk small claims court in time to effect meaningful change for something that needed done in days to weeks.
- pseudo0 4y ago
  The focus on Twitter seems a bit strange. Per the author's post, the government of Pakistan is arresting journalists and activists, manufacturing a pretext after the fact: > In Pakistan, activists and journalists are routinely picked up (abducted) and tortured by the country's police and secret services. Same happened this time, some of the top journalists and anchors were picked up - some without warrants with fake cases filed post-arrest. Twitter removing the fake claims won't stop the ISI or whoever from kicking his door in, if/when he returns to Pakistan.
  - notch656a 4y ago
    This article reads like an asylum claim. Hopefully they already have permanent legal permanent residence somewhere else, if not they will likely by applying for asylum. It could be the whole thing was written expressly for the purpose of asylum. Going back to Pakistan at this point would mean basically picking how you want to go out. Either by defending your life in one last moment before a corrupt government takes your down, or letting them beat you in prison and slowly watch your soul and fighting spirit wither away in prison until you die. I presume if that's how they wanted to go, they would have been doing this journalism inside Pakistan right now.
zionic 4y ago
This is why I prefer “protocols over platforms”. This entire thing isn’t twitters fault any more than it is WiFi’s, DNS, or TCP’s.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  What's the fallacy for "X is value neutral so all products of X are also value neutral?" We saw the same pattern in the ethics in science thread or any ethics in technogy thread.
- pbasista 4y ago
  > This entire thing isn’t twitters fault any more than it is WiFi’s, DNS, or TCP’s. I respectfully disagree. TCP or DNS or WiFi or other technologies are merely means to achieve some result. A tool. Twitter, like most services, is also built using various technologies and tools. But its main distinguishing property is that it has a large number of users who, for various reasons, are interested in what some other users have to say. Creating such social connections is its main goal. Now, one might use e.g TCP to spread hate speech all over the internet. But apart from computers dropping these packets, almost no real person will be listening. Contrast that with a Twitter account that has ~10k followers. If the hate speech is spread from there, it can get a lot of audience very quickly. Twitter is one of many enablers and hosts of large online communities of people. As such, it should have, in my opinion, some responsibility regarding what goes on within these communities. At a minimum, it should disallow the dissemination of hate speech, actively seek and remove it and block the users who repeatedly spread it. That being said, it might be difficult to precisely define what constitutes a hate speech and what not. But Twitter should at least be trying.
  - dvdkon 4y ago
    What would happen if Twitter was a peer-to-peer FLOSS network? In our current world Twitter is a centralised product backed by a large company, but very little of its user-facing functionality could change and that would no longer be true. Such hypothetical P2P network would definitely have some kind of filtering, but it would likely not be network-wide and might not even be backed by a central entity (think more email anti-spam than moderation).
pbasista 4y ago
> whole circumstance of people wanting you dead is not twitters fault The hate speech itself is of course the sole responsibility of whoever created it. Twitter is, however, fully responsible for allowing it to be spread. Without a major communication channel which enables this hate speech to reach massive audiences, it would most likely remain isolated to a small number of people. And it probably would not evolve into a hate _action_. The people behind this hate speech could of course reach to some dodgy places and hire professional mercenaries who might do the dirty jobs for them. But that is risky for them because their true identity might be revealed to the authorities or they might be betrayed or worse. So what they do instead is they use a public channel, as big as they could find, like Twitter, to reach out to everyone who might be interested to answer their calling. They are counting on the possibility that maybe some psychopath with the will and abilities to do whatever they ask for will just go and do it. The important part is that Twitter is used here as a communication medium without which the hate speech spreaders would have no major audience to pass their hate onto. The fact that they are allowed to do so absolutely is Twitter's responsibility.
- twoxproblematic 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

DoreenMichele 4y ago

He's not asking Twitter to protect him from murder. He's asking them to do their damn job so the platform cannot be used to facilitate a smear campaign that makes it easy to get away with murder. It's a very reasonable request.

xwdv 4y ago
No, this is not Twitter’s problem, and if they fulfill this request it just goes down a rabbit hole that eventually creates more liability for the company than what they want to take on. Twitter has taken the correct action here.
- jona-f 4y ago
  Wow, you're morally bankrupt. It's nice to see a well written article like that on the frontpage of this site, but unfortunately the venture capital fueled business model proposed by ycombinator is at the heart of the problem. Liability my ass. This is some disgusting dystopian bullshit. Also if you talk about liability, heard about the Streisand effect? Public opinion about these corporations is low and i think twitter itself isn't doing so well lately. Good riddance.
  - sroussey 4y ago
    There is a long history of liability in the USA when you take on editorializing roles. This was broken by the Communication Decency Act (CDA section 230) but case law has is slowly moving back. It is a valid concern. If CDA 230 were taken away, I wouldn’t be surprised if common carrier laws fell as well. The telephone companies can listen to all phone calls, so they may need to editorialize (mute, disconnect, report to police) on various illegal calls.
    - jona-f 4y ago
      Twitter's response was so soulless, it's unclear if it's a bot. This is what i find most unacceptable. Others have expanded on the censorship problem in this thread.
      - xwdv 4y ago
        A response should be delivered quickly and efficiently, and in no uncertain terms. Filling it with heart and soul just gives false hope that some kind of appeal to emotion can be achieved. But it cannot.
        jona-f 4y ago
        Exactly, quickly and efficiently, cause we have to scale to the heavens to please the investors. No time for human decency. I'm not talking about "some kind of appeal to emotion". This is about human rights in a fascist regime. At some point you have to take a stance. There is so much twitter could have done better. The first step would be to take this serious. The likes of twitter, facebook, uber, amazon, ... have made the world worse for the sake of their shareholders and you are complicit. I'm sure your salary is fine though.
        xwdv 4y ago
        A company does not have to take a stance, it is not an individual. Members of the company are free to take whatever stance they wish personally.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
MichaelCollins 4y ago
I have a very low opinion of twitter and certainly wish they'd do a better job. But the premise of twitter as a shield against state-sponsored kidnapping or murder seems flimsy at best.
- DoreenMichele 4y ago
  That's not the premise. This kind of bullshit is exactly how disempowered groups get painted into a corner. Sexual assault doesn't typically begin with violent rape. It ends there. It begins with a million small forms of disrespect. Political crap follows the same pattern. If you think it doesn't fucking matter, what the hell do you care how this goes? It matters to him. If you don't care, what's wrong with saying "Twitter should simply do its job, man!"
  - dcow 4y ago
    I think you're applying too much nuance to this. Reading all the comments, I think everyone generally wants good for the author. There are just a few different ways to communicating that. Roughly they seem to be: 1. epmathy and twitter do better 2. empathy and this is what you get with twitter 3. empath and practical advice You seem to be railing against (2). Personally I find the bone you're picking to really be besides the point. Most everyone is empathizing with the author's struggle. Nobody here is telling the author to go fuck themselves. Nobody is condoning what Twitter is doing. And certainly nobody is disrespecting the author or supporting the misinformation. So your comment really feels like a non sequitur.
  - Bakary 4y ago
    The premise is that the guy lacks power. Twitter has very little incentive to help him, and a strong disincentive to piss off the Pakistani government. Wallowing in outrage is pointless as they have to cynically maneuver until they have results. Part of that strategy might involve stirring up people emotionally towards action, but internalizing the martyrdom doesn't achieve anything on its own. Ironically, this is precisely the type of martyrdom that helps these tech companies strategically in the long term. From their POV, all they have to do is throw a performative bone once in a while and wait for people's outrage rush to ebb away.
bell-cot 4y ago
Morally? Yes, a very reasonable request. OTOH - is there any large real-world corporation which has ever gotten itself into a sustained info-war conflict with a well-armed and angry nation state, for the purpose of protecting one "ordinary" person from that nation state? I'm guessing "no".
- DoreenMichele 4y ago
  He says he's a journalist. That used to mean something. So it's rather dismissive and disrespectful to characterize him as an ordinary person with scare quotes no less. If these platforms feel unable to moderate fairly due to fear of foreign governments, perhaps they should tuck tail and keep their pussy selves out of the conflict entirely. I'm not impressed with an argument of "We want the money involved but we can't make any meaningful effort to actually enforce the rules we claim we have. Your country is too tough for my sissy self to man up in. I still want the money though."
  - bell-cot 4y ago
    Okay - replace '"ordinary" person' with some polite phrase of your choice, which still makes it clear that the victim is not a head of state, ambassador, top military officer, Speaker of the House, Fortune 50 CEO, etc., etc. No, I am not arguing that your idealism is morally wrong. I am arguing that the real world very often functions in ways which bear little resemblance to your ideals. No amount of idealism about "the gutter should have been stronger, and the ladder more stable, and..." will change the fact that my brother fell off a roof when young. Nor erase the injuries which he sustained. When I or people I care about are interacting with gutters and ladders, I stay very alert, and strive for "zero idealistic thoughts". And - this sad state of affairs is nothing new. Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, The Brass Check, and other works (about the deep and systematic moral failings of corporations, journalists, etc.) over a century ago.
    - DoreenMichele 4y ago
      Idealism? I'm not an idealist. I'm a pragmatist. But the internet allows businesses to operate virtually in de facto war zones. This is getting people killed when the business tries to act like they don't need to account for that fact. If they physically went into a war zone to sell products and it was getting people killed, would that merit a "Too bad, so sad. Gotta make money, doncha know. Can't be worried about niggling details like not getting our customers cavalierly killed."
karaterobot 4y ago
What should Twitter do in this case? You say "their damn job", but their job is to apply their content policies, which they say they are doing. Given only the tweets linked in the article, I can see how a moderator would look at them and not find that they are obviously breaking any rules. They may be false accusations, but Twitter has not agreed to do independent investigations of every report by a user, or take on the responsibility of trying to guess hidden motives of the accused. Twitter moderation is not a sanctuary, or a refuge, or a crusader for justice, it's a pro forma box-checking policy and never claimed to be more than that.
- DoreenMichele 4y ago
  I've been a moderator. Decisions are made contextually. One of his complaints is they clearly don't know what the hell is going on in Pakistan and this is a root cause of their mishandling of things. It is a completely reasonable criticism.
  - dnissley 4y ago
    Is it really reasonable? Twitter fails regularly to take such context into consideration when making moderation decisions in their home country. How could it be reasonable to expect them to get it right when it comes to the context of a foreign country?
    - satellite2 4y ago
      Assuming Twitter is serving the Pakistani market, making revenue and paying taxes there, it seems reasonable to ask for the same quality controls as elsewhere. In particular hiring Pakistanis for moderation shouldn't be economically devastating for their operations in this country. So on top of being a very reasonable request it should be a minimum requirement of their operating model.
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        And why do you think Pakistani Twitter moderators would feel empowered to take down tweets by government officials willing to torture and murder? The request for Twitter to help in this case only makes sense if it assumed it will be taken by moderators living outside of Pakistan, who don't have to fear government reprisal for their actions.
yibg 4y ago
Problem is who determines if it’s a smear campaign? The author claims it was, and I tend to believe him but I haven’t investigated. Have you? And then, how determines if it’s extreme enough to warrant some action? In the ideal world sure there would be an army of people investigating every case in detail. But then 1) Twitter becomes the arbiter of truth and 2) definitely can’t scale.
- DoreenMichele 4y ago
  138 journalists killed in Pakistan since 1990 https://www.dawn.com/news/1595257 https://www.dawn.com/news/1595257 At least 39 journalists killed in US due to their work...since 1937 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_i... These risk levels are not alike.
- Uehreka 4y ago
  Oh come the fuck on. People on HN need to get over this: At a certain point people and organizations need to stop pretending that “both sides could in theory have a point” and actually take a stand. “But what if the stand they take is opposite the one you think they should take? How would you like that?” I wouldn’t, I’d badger them to take my position. Hopefully I’d succeed, and if I didn’t, I’d join a long line of people who were right but unsuccessful. So it goes, life sucks sometimes.
  - dcow 4y ago
    I don’t want communication platform organizations taking any stands anywhere ever. That sounds dystopian and horrible. Deleting these Tweets won’t change a damn thing and might even be more harmful (what if the author didn't know they were being targeted because Twitter deleted everything, then they hopped back home because Twitter made them feel safe and fuzzy, and the got detained and tortured, for instance). What will change things is people getting off their keyboards and taking stands. You cannot pwn the responsibility off on Twitter moderators. Only the truth can hide the lies.

CoastalCoder 4y ago

> Being realistic: if your life hangs by the thread of twitter moderation, you should either run and hide, or get your affairs in order. Perhaps a 3rd option is to go on the attack, and find some angle from which to sue Twitter?

MichaelCollins 4y ago
That won't solve the problem of people wanting him dead.
- notch656a 4y ago
  Yeah. Change my mind: if people want you dead violently, police are likely to be 15 minutes to an hour too late, and the courts a couple years late behind that. Unfortunately violence is often either solved by running away, hiding, or meeting violence with direct self defense. Maybe after you're lucky, you can win a suit against twitter, after their massive legal team drags it out for years with N number of hurdles. You'd be lucky to sue a nobody in podunk small claims court in time to effect meaningful change for something that needed done in days to weeks.
pseudo0 4y ago
The focus on Twitter seems a bit strange. Per the author's post, the government of Pakistan is arresting journalists and activists, manufacturing a pretext after the fact: > In Pakistan, activists and journalists are routinely picked up (abducted) and tortured by the country's police and secret services. Same happened this time, some of the top journalists and anchors were picked up - some without warrants with fake cases filed post-arrest. Twitter removing the fake claims won't stop the ISI or whoever from kicking his door in, if/when he returns to Pakistan.
- notch656a 4y ago
  This article reads like an asylum claim. Hopefully they already have permanent legal permanent residence somewhere else, if not they will likely by applying for asylum. It could be the whole thing was written expressly for the purpose of asylum. Going back to Pakistan at this point would mean basically picking how you want to go out. Either by defending your life in one last moment before a corrupt government takes your down, or letting them beat you in prison and slowly watch your soul and fighting spirit wither away in prison until you die. I presume if that's how they wanted to go, they would have been doing this journalism inside Pakistan right now.

zionic 4y ago

This is why I prefer “protocols over platforms”. This entire thing isn’t twitters fault any more than it is WiFi’s, DNS, or TCP’s.

kelseyfrog 4y ago
What's the fallacy for "X is value neutral so all products of X are also value neutral?" We saw the same pattern in the ethics in science thread or any ethics in technogy thread.
pbasista 4y ago
> This entire thing isn’t twitters fault any more than it is WiFi’s, DNS, or TCP’s. I respectfully disagree. TCP or DNS or WiFi or other technologies are merely means to achieve some result. A tool. Twitter, like most services, is also built using various technologies and tools. But its main distinguishing property is that it has a large number of users who, for various reasons, are interested in what some other users have to say. Creating such social connections is its main goal. Now, one might use e.g TCP to spread hate speech all over the internet. But apart from computers dropping these packets, almost no real person will be listening. Contrast that with a Twitter account that has ~10k followers. If the hate speech is spread from there, it can get a lot of audience very quickly. Twitter is one of many enablers and hosts of large online communities of people. As such, it should have, in my opinion, some responsibility regarding what goes on within these communities. At a minimum, it should disallow the dissemination of hate speech, actively seek and remove it and block the users who repeatedly spread it. That being said, it might be difficult to precisely define what constitutes a hate speech and what not. But Twitter should at least be trying.
- dvdkon 4y ago
  What would happen if Twitter was a peer-to-peer FLOSS network? In our current world Twitter is a centralised product backed by a large company, but very little of its user-facing functionality could change and that would no longer be true. Such hypothetical P2P network would definitely have some kind of filtering, but it would likely not be network-wide and might not even be backed by a central entity (think more email anti-spam than moderation).

pbasista 4y ago

> whole circumstance of people wanting you dead is not twitters fault The hate speech itself is of course the sole responsibility of whoever created it. Twitter is, however, fully responsible for allowing it to be spread. Without a major communication channel which enables this hate speech to reach massive audiences, it would most likely remain isolated to a small number of people. And it probably would not evolve into a hate _action_. The people behind this hate speech could of course reach to some dodgy places and hire professional mercenaries who might do the dirty jobs for them. But that is risky for them because their true identity might be revealed to the authorities or they might be betrayed or worse. So what they do instead is they use a public channel, as big as they could find, like Twitter, to reach out to everyone who might be interested to answer their calling. They are counting on the possibility that maybe some psychopath with the will and abilities to do whatever they ask for will just go and do it. The important part is that Twitter is used here as a communication medium without which the hate speech spreaders would have no major audience to pass their hate onto. The fact that they are allowed to do so absolutely is Twitter's responsibility.

twoxproblematic 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]