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Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet

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Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet

#21
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.

Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet

#22
post #16
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Getting banned for calling someone (a high rank politician!!!) a whore Also calling them a 'cunt'. Attitudes like the above are why ordinary men and women don't want to become politicians - it's assumed to be OK to insult them in any way. Why not just call Palin a hypocrite? You should be able to criticise politicians. However if you want better politicians, screaming that they're cunts and whores instead of commun…

If someone cant handle a verbal insult over the internet, I don't think they are fit for office

Does that justify toxic behavior?

Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet

#24
post #13
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though that said, most law enforcement has a statute of limitations on crimes except the very worst of them like killing another human being. If you're going to go after a fossilized tweet, just remove it, locking accounts after that long seems rather silly unless they are posting new content against the rules.

Even with law enforcement, there is something called statute of limitations for most minor crimes.

Funnily enough, in law enforcement there is similar concept, in US it's called statute of limitations.

Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet

#25
post #9
post #7

Seems more like twitter banned the author 9 years too late.

It is definitely an immature tweet, however I think 9 years can change a person a lot. Maybe twitter could have given him a warning about his tweet and ask if he would like to delete it before the instaban algorithm hit

Twitter could, of course, have just given a warning. But I also don't see any problem treating the tweet as if it were current. The age of the tweet does not change whether it is acceptable or not, does it?

Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet

#26
post #10
post #6

Getting banned for calling someone (a high rank politician!!!) a whore is the state of the internet in 2019. Thing is, he's suggesting Mastodon as an alternative... there you would not only get banned for calling a woman a whore, you'd probably get doxxed and then swatted too.

> Getting banned for calling someone (a high rank politician!!!) a whore Also calling them a 'cunt'. Attitudes like the above are why ordinary men and women don't want to become politicians - it's assumed to be OK to insult them in any way. Why not just call Palin a hypocrite? You should be able to criticise politicians. However if you want better politicians, screaming that they're cunts and whores instead of commun…

‘Ordinary’ men and women don’t want to become politicians for many reasons, but because “it’s assumed to be OK to insult them” isn’t on that list.

You can insult anyone, for any reason—and people do all the time, regardless whether the person is a politician or not, a public figure or not, etc..

Sure, morally it might be unjust to insult a politician, or anyone for that matter. Yet the cool part about the United States is: it’s OK!

Although being a politician, and secondarily a public figure, makes the insults as public as the praises so much so that you, the observer, are more aware of them as a result, doesn’t mean that the same thing wouldn’t happen to anyone else.

Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet

#29
post #13
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though that said, most law enforcement has a statute of limitations on crimes except the very worst of them like killing another human being. If you're going to go after a fossilized tweet, just remove it, locking accounts after that long seems rather silly unless they are posting new content against the rules.

Even with law enforcement, there is something called statute of limitations for most minor crimes.

Depends on the juristiction. The law of England and Wales, for example, does not have any time limitation for prosecution.

Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet

#30

Unaccountable censorship of expression by our main communication providers is incompatible with Democracy. Communication is often a natural monopoly, and you can't just "start a competitor" to Twitter and have the market fix the problem (see gab.ai). If we're going to have censorship on the big platforms (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and backbone providers (ISPs, Cloudfront), us normal human beings need…

I would also argue that unfettered access to incorrect information is also a massive problem for democracy.
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