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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

#71
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…

Really I think those in power not only often deserve it but need the abuse actually.

So often they get higher up and think they should be held to a lower standard. There was oil in the ocean from policies she supported - harsh language is warranted.

Look at people like the former judge and current professional piece of shit Mark Civarella who after selling kids to private prisons for kickbacks, for things that weren't even crimes complained that he was described in too harsh of language.

To be frank if it keeps fragile egoed narcissists out of power we should make barrages of harsh language a job requirement as preventative medicine.

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

#72

I am mostly amazed that Twitter's rule is not simply, "don't harass people". I guess this tweet is an offense specifically because it uses gendered harassment? Is there a list of gender-neutral insults that we can refer to for compliance reasons?

The thing is that this was 9 years ago. The landscape of what was acceptable back then is completely different from what it is now. Going back in time and banning people for this sort of thing is essentially the same as banning movies from the 60's because they don't show enough women driving cars or men helping out in the kitchen.

I don't think that tweet was ever acceptable - calling someone a "cunt", "whore", "idiot" and telling her to "go fuck yourself" all in 140 characters is really going out of your way to be unpleasant.

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

#73
post #35
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…

I don't think what's keeping "ordinary men and women" from becoming politicians is the toxicity public figures are exposed to, considering a lot of "ordinary men and women" (but particularly women, gender-non-conforming men and PoC, especially if they're trans) get the same or worse on a daily basis on social media. If you look at the careers and upbringing of most high-ranking politicians, I doubt the most obvious d…

It’s wealth and maybe being from a race and sex that generally isn’t raked over the coals for simply being black or a women?

White male politicians don’t get much flak for being white or male.

Black women politician would get so much for both her race and gender.

As a women I’d never want to be in the public eye for this reason.

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

#74
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

‘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 Stat…

> Yet the cool part about the United States is: it’s OK! Dude, no, no it’s not ok. It’s not ok to have a culture where insults are encounter and ok. Insults can quickly lead to threats. Are often lies and manipulation. Are often racial or sexist or homophobic. And we as a society shouldn’t just stand by and allow it. What is gained by allowing insults? Honest question. Why should we be ok with them? Now i do have to…

But the thing is a whore is a compliment - at least they only screw the client for money. Politicians with lobbyists are more like rapists for hire really.

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

#75
post #57

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…

So how do you feel about blog platforms or other service providers that allow posting user-supplied comments on their platform? Should companies and non-profits all be required be to expend resources to keep your hateful comments available to the world? How do we determine what's spam? What's advertising? What's XSS? You have a first amendment right to type any of these things into an input box. Does that mean the or…

The big, ostensibly neutral, communications monopolies need their censorship practices heavily regulated.

People with private blogs needs to be absolutely free to control commenting however they would like.

I believe that we can respect both of these positions easily, 99% of the time, with our court systems deciding on some of the grey in the middle.

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

#76

I think Twitter should delete everything older than XX days old, where XX is a number on the order of 15 or 30. The kind of heavily context-dependent short form throwaway expression the site is built for and actively encourages does not age well, and an auto-delete policy that emphasizes that would make the site better and cheaper to operate.

As posted elsewhere in these comments:

     “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten,
     every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building
     has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is 
     continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.
     Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is 
     always right.”
     
     ― George Orwell, 1984
I'm not justifying what Twitter did in this case, but I significantly disagree with the idea of removing old posts.

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

#77

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.

[deleted]

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

#78
Twitter is a pain in the neck in multiple ways. Glad I nixed my account years ago.

They have you in three ways:

1) It is a private service with with broader discretion to censor than non-private services.

2) They consider all of your tweets as one body of current content, without grandfathering old posts.

3) Twitter fears tighter regulation if they don't self-police their content.

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

#79

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.

>incorrect information

This is easy for "world is flat vs round". There is much more nuance to, for example, "this is discriminatory vs not".

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

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want a Ministry of Truth filtering what I'm allowed to hear. In a functional democracy, education and robust debate are supposed to be the defenses against misinformation. Most western democracies long since scrapped proper education because it's easier to win the support of the population with propaganda^H public relations than it is to make a reasoned argument.

Unfortunately looks to me that if you do not have a Ministry of Truth, you end up with a society where private actors pump people with soma[1]. Personally, I am willing to accept a restricted version of Ministry of Truth to avoid that outcome. [1]See Huxley, Brave new world.

>Unfortunately looks to me that if you do not have a Ministry of Truth, you end up with a society where private actors pump people with soma

This is not a new phenomenon. There have always been snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves. Societies that have very strict control over what people can and cannot say (think the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea, where you could be jailed for counter-revolutionary speech or misleading the people) still had lots of problems with snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves, but they also had a problem with people going to jail (or worse) for saying "the state is the cause of this famine", "the state killed a bunch of innocent protesters", "I disagree with the current economic system", "I am angry that the state took my land from me and gave it to someone else", "the rent is too damn high", "maybe we shouldn't build so many nuclear weapons", and "I don't support Chairman Mao/Uncle Joe".

I will assume that any Ministry of Truth that you would support would set out to be expressly non-political at its inception, but giving any one organization the power to restrain the expression of ideas is openly inviting those with an agenda to attempt to co-opt it into suppressing opinions and arguments critical of their agenda. This is an inherent drawback to giving anything power - it inherently becomes political even if the original intent is for it to not be political.

I would rather live in a society where snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves are punished after they commit their crimes than have a single person's freedom to say "fuck the government" suppressed because they misquoted a statistic.

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