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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

#221

Post by SuoDuanDao »

ceejayoz wrote: post #208
SuoDuanDao wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large corporations hamstringing reformist politicians rubs some people the wrong way. The major nonhuman players have always participated in politics, but when they prevent others from participating in politics it's seen as another line being crossed.

You're describing a PR issue, not a legal one. Twitter has those, too, like having to carve out an exemption in the rules for Trump's account, or accusations of bias that lead to Congressional hearings.

I guess I should have written "Should Mastercard be required..." Typically these debates are about what should be allowed under the law rather than what's actually allowed under the law today.

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

#222

Post by wccrawford »

tablethnuser wrote: post #172

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…

"if someone had shouted this in a supermarket or bank line, what would happen?"

They've have been thrown out of the store for sure. They might also have been banned from the store, depending on how it escalated and how they reacted to being thrown out.

The police would have been called if they were banned, and maybe even if they were just thrown out for the day.

Twitter has basically done the same, without the cops. And they even said how to get un-banned, which was to remove the comments that violate their TOS.

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

#223

Post by ceejayoz »

root_axis wrote: post #217
hacknat wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny. Yeah, they're not. Political ideology is not a protected class in US law.

edit: What I wrote here is wrong. It was not confirmed it was only a narrow ruling. And as the courts have recently confirmed, even protected classes cannot compel a business into speech that contradicts their own sincerely held moral and ethical beliefs.

SCOTUS hasn't actually decided on that.

The Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling was a narrow one, ruling that Colorado's process explicitly discriminated against the bakers - it showed forbidden anti-religious animus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...

> In a 7-2 decision, the Court ruled on narrow grounds that the Commission did not employ religious neutrality, violating Masterpiece owner Jack Phillips' rights to free exercise, and reversed the Commission's decision. The Court did not rule on the broader intersection of anti-discrimination laws, free exercise of religion, and freedom of speech, due to the complications of the Commission's lack of religious neutrality.

It'll probably be a few more years before we get a better test case for the issue that the Court can't as easily dodge.

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

#224

Post by lm28469 »

protomyth wrote: post #2

I started using Twitter back in 2008. Before the age of smart phones Talk about erasing the past. I dearly hope knowledge of what came before iPhone and Android isn't washed over like all the non-Apple 8-bit computers.

It truly was before the _age_ of smart phones though.

Today virtually everyone who's 14+ years old has a one, it wasn't like that at all in 2008. And the definition of "smart" definitely changed too.

Just like the age of tablets started when the average 40yo mom started using ipads, not when Microsoft showed their prototype in 2000. Or the age of electric cars didn't start at the end of the 19th century, but a few years ago.

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

#226

Post by braythwayt »

RonaldSchleifer wrote: post #113
romaaeterna wrote: post #15

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…

You're missing the obvious solution ... not being authoritarian vile people that censor what others legally say and do in public. It has been disconcerting to me for a long time now, even back when I was told that I do not know how the internet works when I foresaw the very outcome we are currently in, back about 20 years ago now. What has really happened here, is a kind of fascism (the alignment of state and industr…

The problem that all “We should have unrestricted free speech” (and the more general case of “unrestricted freedom to X”) proposals must always solve, is what to do when a group of individuals acting in bad faith use that freedom to effectively deny other people that freedom.

Lots of fascists demand freedom of speech. And what do they do with that freedom? Assemble mobs online to harass people who say things they disagree with. Or take control and then ban books and “intellectuals” and so forth.

If you don’t like the example of “fascists,” there are plenty of other examples you could pick, like press barons. History abounds with examples of people using democracy to acquire enough power to uninstall democracy.

This is a hard problem. There are no easy or simple or ideologically pure solutions. Absolute freedom of speech leads to people using that freedom to deny other people that freedom. Absolute freedom to own a weapon leads to people using that freedom to deny other people the freedom to live, much less own a weapon of their own. And so on. And so forth.

TL;DR:

There are no simple solutions to problems involving systems where people are prepared to act in bad faith to abuse the simple solutions.

My personal claim: The above does not mean, of course, that there are no solutions, or that the only options are “unrestricted and absolute freedom” versus tyranny. It’s just that there are no simple solutions.

——

Related:

There is a reason that we are having this discussion on a forum that explicitly does NOT grant unrestricted free speech.

Let’s ask ourselves this question: What would Hacker News look like if we turned of spam filtering, moderation, flagging, banning, sorting comments by votes, greying out downvoted messages, &c.?

What value would it have as a community? As a source of information?

Would you find yourself feeling smarter and better educated about an issue after reading the comments on a subject? Or would you feel like you lost 50 points of IQ to toxicity?

Would you consider it a good use of your time to independently verify each and every claim people made? What about disproving known rubbish claims?

How would you feel about logging in every day and having the exact same debate with the exact same people who seem to have an infinite amount of time available to make false claims?

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

#227

Post by lucaspm98 »

koheripbal wrote: post #192
mabbo wrote: post #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…

My issue with it is entirely different - the user isn't American. He lives in New Zealand. Throwing HATE at a US politician during a US election in public is foreign interference and should be removed on that basis.

It seems somewhat unrealistic for a user to not be able to express opinions about the politics of another country. Elections more often than not have international implications. For example, as an American I have varying levels of interest in Chinese, Russian, and EU politics. Coordinated interference by foreign governments is a completely different problem.

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

#228

Post by LanceH »

hacknat wrote: post #166
SuoDuanDao wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Mastercard required to do business with the Bernie Sanders campaign, even though his stated policy goals might harm their business?

Funny. Yeah, they're not. Political ideology is not a protected class in US law.

Sometimes it is. Unsolicited phone calls and mailings for instance.

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

#229

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

partlysean wrote: post #160

> It’s honestly a very immature tweet. It’s something I wouldn’t say today. I have personally grown past the hate of the two party system. I feel like I have a clearer and more mature view on American elections… Congrats on your new political maturity, but no mention or reflection on the deeply sexist language you used makes me think that you haven’t grown at all.

Honestly... Way to give a non-apology and twist the narrative.

'I have personally grown past the hate of the two party system'.

No, your 'hate of the two party system' was not what the problem was and I am pretty sure you are smart enough to figure that out. You were not locked for tweeting against the two party system. Let's not pretend this ban had anything to do with politics. If anything Twitter is full of left-leaning folks many of whom would celebrate such juvenile and crass language.

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

#230

Post by root_axis »

ceejayoz wrote: post #223
root_axis wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

edit: What I wrote here is wrong. It was not confirmed it was only a narrow ruling. And as the courts have recently confirmed, even protected classes cannot compel a business into speech that contradicts their own sincerely held moral and ethical beliefs.

SCOTUS hasn't actually decided on that. The Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling was a narrow one, ruling that Colorado's process explicitly discriminated against the bakers - it showed forbidden anti-religious animus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora... > In a 7-2 decision, the Court ruled on narrow grounds that the Commission did not employ religious neutrality, violating Masterpiece owner Jack P…

You are correct. I'll edit my comment.
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