Live data from Hacker News

Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet

fightthefuture.org

311–320 of 367 posts

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

#311
post #11

TLDR: don’t act like a c@&t online. And if you did, delete it.

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.

Twitter isn't law enforcement though, and it would be a tough sell to hold them up to the same standard.

According to the screenshot, the author is free to have his account unlocked after the tweet is removed.

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

#312

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…

If we look at some differences between Twitter (or insert your favorite social media platform here) and email: * Email providers have zero responsibility for filtering information * Email users form their own networks dynamically through actual relationships rather than some artificial structure of "followers"/"friends" * Email users never get banned from sending email (although maybe in some cases an individual serv…

Email as a standard is a neutral vector for mass communication but email in it's real-world form as a service provided by large 3rd-parties is not. Email service providers have monopolized the market for personal emails for two reasons, the first being the difficulty of setting up and maintaining a personal email server, and second being the enormously difficult challenge of filtering "spam". Google's Gmail service has a near monopoly over the personal email market and their highly effective spam filters played a huge role in the early success of that platform (large amounts of free storage was the primary reason but their spam filters were also the best at the time). Yes, that's plausible but the context in which it occured does raise questions. On a more anecdotal note, I have noticed that particular emails (membership renewal reminders, specific call-to-action campaign emails, etc) coming from 2nd Amendment groups wind up in my spam folder whereas other, less activity inducing emails from the same groups pass through without issue.

The manner in which emails are classified as spam is something that will always be highly subjective, leaving room for malevolent manipulation to occur. I'm fact, there may be precedent for this dating back to the 2016 election. There was a brief period where all Trump campaign emails were being flagged as spam by Gmail's filter algorithms. Google had plausible deniability in stating that it was a glitch caused by their algorithm's ability to globally flag senders whose emails are overwhelmingly deleted before being opened by users.

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

#313
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused. What technology did twitter replace? Oh it didn’t? This is completely new, the ability to communicate to this many people at once? Okay so what ancient rights are being trampled exactly? If anything we probably need to be censoring people on Twitter right now as it doesn’t seem to convince anyone of anything other than that the people on the other-side of their argument are sub-human. Edit: Also, it alw…

[flagged]

But who gets to decide who gets a platform? What happens when those deciders abuse their power?

The danger in deplatforming is the inevitability of changing social mores. What happens if the pendulum swings the other way and the ones you consider to be on the "right side" of history start getting deplatformed?

If your answer to that is, "oh that won't happen", then you're oh so naive.

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

#314

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…

> normal human beings need the right to appeal, public auditing, bright line rules, and due process rights. Why? Who cares if someone gets banned from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc? It isn't a big deal. I can see it as annoying, but it doesn't truly matter to anyone without some type of social media addiction. If "censorship" is the problem, we should support the establishment of government run internet foru…

It matters to me.

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

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when you have a monopoly over a communication medium Twitter does not have a monopoly over internet communication.

It’s like saying that Time Warner doesn’t have a monopoly over the electromagnetic spectrum, while technically true in practice in some areas they do. Twitter is a crucial social communications platform for large enough portion of some societies to treat them as a monopoly.

Twitter doesn't have a monopoly over communication. Whats app, facebook, gchat, skype, word press blogs, reddit, there are a slew of other communication mechanisms beyond just twitter.

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

#316

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…

It seems to me that the core of this post is that the tweet was left up for nine years and then the account was suspended.

If someone made this tweet now and had their account suspended or the tweet in question was deleted but the account was not suspended, I doubt that we would be discussing this.

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

#317

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…

If there were no alternatives to twitbooktubeit perhaps you would have a point. However, if you don't like the policies of twitter, go to reddit. If you don't like the policies of reddit go to voat. If you don't like all the terrible people on voat, host a forum on a VPC instance.

Your position is basically "I think platforms should be compelled to host every bit of nonsense emitted by every user." The freedom is provided by the multitude of choices!

I think the idea you can make rules for speech that are impartial and universally accepted is an insane idea which shows no signs of being tractable [1]. Despite attempts to quantify speech, every moderation decision is arbitrary at some level, and preserving choice of moderators seems much more important than arguing over rules.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/world/facebook-moderators...

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

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your question implies you consider Twitter a common carrier. Verizon as a phone company falls under common carrier rules. Twitter (social media) does not and therefore, its not the same. If we want to reclassify social media as common carrier we need regulation to do so but that is not how the internet or social media companies work today. Sadly the internet in of itself doesn't even fall under common carrier.

I understand I think when you have a monopoly over a communication medium common carrier laws should apply even without legislation. The problematic case here is that all other common carrier are funded through service chargers where social media is funded through advertising and other revenue streams. That said it’s not like social media companies aren’t at fault here too they hide behind the notion that they are a…

> I understand I think when you have a monopoly over a communication medium common carrier laws should apply even without legislation.

Twitter is not a monopoly or a common carrier. They are a website with a complimentary app that will show you website data.

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

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Ministry of Truth has coercive power. They can arrest you, jail you, torture you, or kill you -- legally -- for the content of your thought and speech. Private sector actors cannot do that.

Sorry, not answering all comments, but we do already have this kind of restricted Ministry of Truth. For example, there are libel laws and you may end up in jail for the content of your speech. And that is in my humble opinion a good thing. (With the painfully obvious disclaimer that I guess needs to anyhow be added in these kind of discussions, no, not all restriction of speech is good, there are really murky waters…

We do not have a Ministry of Truth that restricts and punishes people before for what the have not yet said. We have the rule of law that gets involved after the fact.

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

#320
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…

>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?

Yes.

And "hateful" is a weasel world, assuming in advanced what the comments that would get censored are.

The comments could also be unpleasant but not hateful, unpopular but not hateful, not to the taste of some group (e.g. evangelicals or vegans) but not hateful, stuff societies want to ignore and hide (e.g. past crimes or system injustices) but not hateful, sexually explicit but not hateful, out of the mainstream but not hateful, and several other categories, including hateful, but rightly so (e.g. "let's bring down this fucking oppressive dictatorship and put these bastards in prison" written referring to a country under military control, or the same such against some company's like Monsanto bad practices, etc).

>Are terms-of-service a violation of someone's first amendment?

I could not care less. That's a provincial US issue. We should care what the world should be, not think in the confine's of century old laws.

In the 21st century, some terms-of-service, especially of powerful players, should be considered a restriction on freedom of speech.

Even if one still has the freedom to open their own platform, or take a box, step on it, and say what they like to the crowds in the middle of Central park...

Post reply on HN