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Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet
241–250 of 367 posts
Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet
#242Unaccountable 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…
Twitter is not a democracy. They are a public for profit company first and foremost. They can censor, modify, change anything they want at any point in time. Expect that. Cash is king.
Oh wow I've never heard it put like this before! Censorship is great now!
Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not a company operating in a vacuum but a public company in a democracy and is subject to the laws (and in general, political will) of the society. If companies were free to "censor, modify, change anything they want at any point in time", then we would not have anti-trust laws or close scrutiny of dominant companies. Ultimately, companies don't exist in a vacuum. If they don't adhere to the political will of t…
Vacuum has nothing to do with it. Twitter is a platform, you are not compelled to use it. Don’t like it that is fine but popularity doesn’t imply it requires to operate any way other than the way it decides as a company. Why do we expect companies to act like a government we have control over?
If they have become the de facto public square, an integral location to participate in public society, then they should be subject to society's whims.
There's no reason that those whims must be executed through market instead of through government.
Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not a company operating in a vacuum but a public company in a democracy and is subject to the laws (and in general, political will) of the society. If companies were free to "censor, modify, change anything they want at any point in time", then we would not have anti-trust laws or close scrutiny of dominant companies. Ultimately, companies don't exist in a vacuum. If they don't adhere to the political will of t…
Vacuum has nothing to do with it. Twitter is a platform, you are not compelled to use it. Don’t like it that is fine but popularity doesn’t imply it requires to operate any way other than the way it decides as a company. Why do we expect companies to act like a government we have control over?
If POTUS communicates via Twitter primarily, there’s no option to ‘not use it’. Twitter crossed the line between just a company and a utility a while ago, together with Google and Facebook.
Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet
#245Honest 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…
Twitter uses third-party contractors for human moderation. If the tweet was reported/flagged and made its way into manual review for a human, whoever looked at it probably didn't take more than 30 seconds to decide. Even if Twitter's moderator workforce is U.S. based (and thus, attune to cultural norms), they probably are optimized to issue suspensions for low-hanging fruit. Vulgarity is going to be more of an obviou…
> than obfuscated hateful messages
I'm not talking about obfuscated messages. If one were to post "I love you no matter where you fucking come from", they're not being hateful, but they are being vulgar. Is that allows?
On the other hand, if one were to post "I truly believe that all people who are not white are inferior beings that should leave my country", then there's zero vulgarity here but clearly a hateful horrible person I'd like to avoid at all costs.
If the problem is vulgarity, then the solution is well-understood: censor the bad words, let the rest of the message stay. If the problem is hate, then the problem is that it's impossible to ever really get rid of it.
I suspect in the author's case, the problem is that they used vulgarity 9 years ago and the system finally picked up on it.
Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As I understand it, whether social media companies are platforms or publishers forms the actual core and substance of this debate about "free speech." This is wrong. There is no such distinction between platforms and publishers and the opposite is actually true. The law explicitly states that website owners are not responsible for content provided by other parties and are also explicitly permitted to curate their p…
I don't think people are arguing that what Twitter is doing is legal or illegal, but whether it's morally good or bad, and whether it will promote a better society. These are understandably much less tangible problems.
There's still no difference between "publisher" and "platform". I see Twitter as a giant expansion of the Op-Ed section of the newspaper, not a telephone party line.
To whom is Twitter responsible? If shareholders/investors then it should do whatever seems most likely to make it the most money. If "users" then it should do whatever seems most likely to make the most users happy.
There are valid moral arguments on both side of the censorship debate, and ultimately it comes down to subjective judgement and a gut call by twitter management. There's a lot of people claiming moral imperatives and "what is right" as if "right" was an absolute and not like, their opinion, man.
Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet
#247It really is shocking how much has changed in the past 10 years. This post could have been mainstream late-night comedy, but it's not just that the targets have shifted: it's still OK, good even, to attack Sarah Palin, you just can't do it using certain words. The bigger change seems to be this obsession with words having some kind of incantatory, emanating power (even 9 year old words on a Twitter account), along with the associated fiending about the private thoughts of whoever posted.
Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter is not a democracy. They are a public for profit company first and foremost. They can censor, modify, change anything they want at any point in time. Expect that. Cash is king.
It is not a company operating in a vacuum but a public company in a democracy and is subject to the laws (and in general, political will) of the society. If companies were free to "censor, modify, change anything they want at any point in time", then we would not have anti-trust laws or close scrutiny of dominant companies. Ultimately, companies don't exist in a vacuum. If they don't adhere to the political will of t…
>It is not a company operating in a vacuum but a public company in a democracy
The US is not a democracy. It is a Constitutional Republic. The Constitution limits the Governmental Powers to make laws restricting speech, the Constitution does not give individuals the right to use corporate places of business or platforms to disseminate their speech.
Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Q1 of this year, twitter had 68 million monthly active users in the US [0]. Hard to tell how many of them follow political discourse. But that’s 20% of the population (give or take) and it’s a substantial fraction. I’m not sure how but I want that fraction to get before appropriate rights are defined and adopted. The US common carrier rules were only enacted in 1934 [1] so it took a while before phone companies we…
I have no idea what the real MAU numbers of actual people are but I would think it's maybe a quarter (5%) of the population. There are so many bots on twitter along with company accounts, meme accounts, IFTT automation, etc. that I can't imagine it's 20% of the US using twitter each month.
If you count the number of people indirectly reading twitter through other media the number is much higher than 20%. And it's not just media directly quoting and crediting twitter; I imagine journalists get a very high percentage of their leads and sources through twitter.
Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet
#250IANAL. One of the reasons that this feels so novel is that this is an example of ex post facto enforcement. In this case, Twitter is punishing the user for an action performed at a point in time before such an action was punishable. (In fact, I haven't checked - it may have been punishable, but the punishment was not usually enforced, which is a separate issue of selective enforcement.) The US Constitution prevents b…
It’s novel because Twitter doesn’t normally take any action on hate-speech directed at right-wingers, or whites. No wonder this guy is so surprised!