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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

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want someone to decide what's true because you believe the people aren't capable of doing so for themselves, you've already given up on democracy.

I would like there to be better education and yes, some kind of authority that we can warn people that the information has been reviewed and is likely to be incorrect or lies. Objective reality does exist as does scientific concensus on for example climate change.

Fact checkers and scientists already exist, but in a democracy, the people have the right to choose whether to listen to them or not.

Are you saying you'd prefer that people be forced to follow their decisions? Or that information they declare "incorrect" be banned? That's not democratic, that's authoritarian.

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

#183
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are some ideas that don't deserve a seat at the table. If you don't like an idea you're free to ignore it. Freedom of speech is really about the freedom for each of us to hear. What you're really advocating is that you don't want other people to have access to ideas with which you personally disapprove. This is such an authoritarian notion that I don't understand how it has become a socially acceptable idea t…

> I don't understand how it has become a socially acceptable idea to espouse. We got fed up of people being murdered because they're black, Jewish, gay, trans, female, etc etc.

A lot more will die because you decided amoral corporate entities should have total control over national discourse. My ancestors killed to prevent a situation like that.

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

#184

facepalm I have blog posts from 2001 that make me cringe that I keep up purely to show that I've changed considerably in 18 years. When James Gunn was fired from Guardians for something he said in a tweet years before I was dumbfounded. Now Twitter is actively policing old posts?! People change, nations change. Violent criminals can become bastions of peace and philanthropy. Why is society, or a company, persecuting…

Boy I’m glad my Xanga is long gone. I recall reading what I wrote at 16 at 22 and being mortified. I imagine today I’d die of embarrassment if I so much as glanced at it.

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

#185

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…

Expression is not public communication. Are you not conflating freedom of speech with freedom to be heard/reach an audience? Even 2 centuries ago, the US government wouldn't intervene to force newspapers to publish the op-eds of hateful people looking to grow their followers. Why would Youtube or Twitter have to?

> I can’t imagine anyone going through tweets from 2010 and actively reporting them, so it seems more likely that they must be using some algorithm ...

Moderation tools have been weaponized in the troll propaganda war.

Post an insightful and highly liked reply to a controversial topic, watch the likes roll in, and then suddenly go dark after about three minutes.

View the thread incognito, and the popular comment cannot be found.

Trolls brigade-block-and-report views they don't like, and your reply gets memory-holed until a human moderator can review it.

Hours or days later your comment gets restored, but the damage is done.

Of course troll armies are mining old tweets for any violation, so they can remove you from the conversation and manufacture the illusion of consensus.

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

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>there are some ideas that don't deserve a seat at the table Is it possible to enumerate the set of all ideas that cannot be expressed, and if so, how do you enumerate this set, and who has the power to determine the members of this set? Advocating that someone should have their child drink bleach to cure their autism is a despicable act, and is likely criminal after the fact, but that's the difference here - it's cr…

They should still be allowed to be seen but should be heavily caveatted as NOT TRUE if we know they aren't. Another good one is the reporting on vaccines causing autism, but we all know vaccines save millions of lives.

Twitter obviously should be the ones to determine what is true and false.

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

#187
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you mean on a legal level, it's less about what is gained by allowing insults than it is what is lost by disallowing them. That is, it becomes trivial to ban criticism by labeling it an insult. On a social level, there is something to be gained from insults: authenticity. Perhaps it comes down to personal preference, but I would rather live in a society where people can speak their mind (and potentially face socia…

It is easy to say this as long as you are not the victim of insults.

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

#188

Their notification was fine. The tweet was vile and full of expletives. You'll have trouble finding any business or institution that tolerates speech like that. This isn't the censorship hill anyone should want to die on.

I don't agree. Wartime cartoons are vile yet we rarely censor them because of the historical value. I do think that going back a decade with an algorithm and getting people to clean up tweets that likely match a regex filter is whitewashing and it does make twitter a less valuable historical resource. It's a totally different argument from the normal you should be able to say what you want - because I would support c…

From a self-interested standpoint, I don’t think Twitter cares that much about being a historical resource and this sort of curating / censorship is really about improving Twitter’s bottom line - not some grander notion of creating a totally comprehensive historical archive of every tweet.

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

#189
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If someone calls you a racial slur, is it ok to wait nine years and then punch him in the face?

This isn’t really a punch in the face though, is it? If someone discovered you used racial slurs nine years ago, I think they would be justified in choosing to no longer associate with you or ask you to recant what you had said in the past.

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

#190

The rule of thumb I use is to ask: if someone had shouted this in a supermarket or bank line, what would happen? Internet communities should aspire to be more like local communities. If you're a jerk in real life, people will show you the door. Making this about grand abstract concepts like free speech or censorship is internet fun for people who like to debate. But it's overcomplicating the situation. Twitter is jus…

There's another aspect to this... the user in question lives in New Zealand. Should their foul-mouthed tweet to a US Senator during a US election have the same protections as an American's tweets?

It's not immediately apparent that he's from and lives in New Zealand unless you really dig through his content, something most readers won't do. In aggregate, this might influence American voters into thinking there's some substance to anti-Palin rhetoric.

Isn't that a form of foreign influence?

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