Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by LocalH » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 12:20 AM UTC

moate wrote: post #358

LocalH wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the social pressure to "not give a platform to " means that it becomes practically impossible for certain groups to have their voice heard? The point I'm getting at, is when you chip away at free speech like that, no matter how laudable the goals, the inevitable result is less free speech for all.

Yes and? I don't believe in 100% free speech. I don't think it's needed for society to function. That's fine if you do. But slippery slope arguments or "when the tides change" future-scenarios aren't super convincing. I'm fine with being intolerant of intolerance. I also understand it's personal opinion. That's how the world works. It's a bunch of individuals trying their best to get by in their lives. I say we ban t…

I'm not so much afraid of the fight, as I am cognizant of the fact that once you enact a restriction on something, it's extremely difficult to reverse that restriction. I'm also trying to consider future generations - I see no reason to ignore the effects our current actions could have on them.

It's easy to think "the government will never use these exceptions to silence speech critical of the government" but quite honestly, I don't have faith in my fellow man in that context, or at least not the typical politician. History has proven that governments can and will abuse any tool they are given. Such abuses currently happen, today, in the modern world. I'm a firm believer in a small government that stays as much out of people's lives as possible, at least directly.

I respect your difference of opinion, however. I agree with the idea that "platforms" can control who publishes through their infrastructure. I also feel that everyone should have access to some platform, even if it's not the most popular one. Thus, when it comes to the backbone of the internet, I don't think providers should be able to pick and choose who they host, as long as there is no otherwise illegal content (copyright infringement, child abuse, etc). If any companies should be considered true common carriers, it would be those on the backbone.

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

#362

Post by metalliqaz » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 5:18 PM UTC

sarah180 wrote: post #329

metalliqaz wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "it was a while ago" is not really a defense when you're still distributing that content. I think you're missing the point here. It was published 9 years ago. He didn't continue "distributing" it, he published it once and Twitter distributed it for 9 years. The point, as I understand it, is that Twitter passively agreed that the tweet was just fine for their platform for 9 years. Then, after doing so, their standar…

It wasn't an attack on her ideas. It was an ad hominem attack: he called her a gender-coded name that reduces her to a piece of anatomy in a starkly vulgar way. People do this to women all the time, and they don't do it to men in the same way. You don't have to believe this for it to be true. And yes, he continued to distribute it. He put it in a content-distribution platform and left it there, despite the ability to…

Do you even remember what you put on Twitter, Facebook, various internet forums 9 years ago? I've moved on from nearly everything further back than 2 months.

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

#363

Post by smsm42 » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:22 PM UTC

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…

"The market", however, is not some magic entity than can fix things. The market is you, me and him and her. The market is people. If people would be talking about gab.ai as free-speech alternative to censorious Twitter, it would work as such. If people would insist that gab.ai is a neo-Nazi site where only violent psychopaths about to commit mass shooting are visiting, and should be banned everywhere, then "the market" would not fix any problems. The market is us, so if we want less censorship, we should be actively supporting platforms that have less censorship, and actively fighting platforms that have more of it.

> If we're going to have censorship on the big platforms

We're not "going" to have it. We already have it. Well, maybe not ISPs, but definitely "Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc."

> It's not wrong for Twitter to have rules to protect the weak from the strong, and individuals from the mob

When Gandhi was asked "what do you think about Western civilization", he reportedly said "I think it'd be a good idea". In the same vein, it might be a good idea (not sure, but maybe) for Twitter to have rules to protect individuals from the mob and weak from the strong, but whatever Twitter has now definitely does nothing of the sort. I am not sure if it is possible at all to have such rules, but even if it were, Twitter does not seem to be interested in the least.

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

#364

Post by smsm42 » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:28 PM UTC

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 reading on culture these days is that one can usually get away with spouting horrendous, hateful ideas

That depends whether you are in-group with the censors or out-group. If you're in, you could get away with a lot - from very base and crude language (excluding the taboo words, yes) to graphically describing and encouraging grave bodily harm, murder, rape, etc. If you're out, then you better be extra super vanilla squeaky nice.

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

#365

Post by smsm42 » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:31 PM UTC

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.

"foreign interference" is bullshit. Anybody can express their opinion about US politicians, and if US electorate is too stupid to decide for themselves what they want without excluding any outside information, like Soviet Union did and North Korea still does - it's not a democracy anyway, it's idiocracy and thus would not have any value to preserve. Fortunately, it's just a lie - US people are just fine and capable of independent reasoning, and there's no threat of "foreign influence", it's a canard invented by political operators to mask their failures and provide excuses for censorship.

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

#366

Post by smsm42 » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:35 PM UTC

mattnumbers wrote: post #92

IANAL. 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…

Twitter rules are not law, so by law they can do whatever they damn well please. Including banning your account randomly, deleting any tweet they like, or anything in between. Legally, they owe you or any of their users exactly nothing. However, you also owe them nothing - you can stop using Twitter any second. Which I wholeheartedly recommend to everybody. I did it years ago and it's not hard. If you don't like what they're doing - just walk away.

Of course, that doesn't mean we still can't criticize Twitter - but walking away should be the first step.

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

#367

Post by frenchyatwork » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 8:18 PM UTC

zaroth wrote: post #256

frenchyatwork wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the more relevant distinction here is that email is federated. Once Mailchimp has sent out the emails, there's not much it can do, and it would be pretty unreasonable to force Mailchimp to review filter all their emails. Twitter, on the other hand, is publishing these messages on their site. It's very easy for them to simply stop publishing those messages. Because Twitter is in charge of Twitter, it also has…

Do you think Federation will be a distinction the public and politicians will make when the next manifesto is posted on Mastadon instead of 8chan? It’s common for technologists to assume the underlying technology / implementation is relevant, when in fact it’s really just the user facing functionality that counts.

You have a good point. I suspect if the manifesto was private on mastodon it would be pretty similar to email, but if it was a public post, like public twitter posts, the effect would be the same.