
Twitter’s New Tool to Crack Down on Politically Incorrect Language - james_pm
http://heatst.com/tech/twitters-new-tool-to-crack-down-on-politically-incorrect-language/
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forbin_meet_hal
The problem is that Twitter doesn't have a philosophical core beyond "PLEASE
DON'T HATE US!!!"

It had an opportunity to develop narrowly drawn rules that could have formed
the bedrock of digital free-speech norms.

Instead, it engages in selective whack-a-mole-style enforcement, with a strong
bias that favors a progressive point-of-view.

This is nothing but a ham-handed patch.

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patrickg_zill
My view is that Twitter could solve many of the problems by creating 2 scores
out of say, 1000, for each user. Given the millions on Twitter a score out of
100 would be too coarse.

1\. Don't censor anything from anyone who I follow.

2\. Score A is a metric based on geographic location similarity to you, and
who you follow. So if you are bicoastal and follow your friends from LA, NYC
you won't have Oregon or Pennsylvania proximity bumping up someone's score.
But a person in Ohio whose friends cover the tri state area will have a
different score for the same twitter account.

3\. Score B is topic similarity and popularity. So if an account is sharing
news about e.g. Docker/Mesos/k8s, and it gets a lot of likes or retweets, then
it has a higher score.

Finally, you put an option in the user settings to block someone commenting on
your TL if score is less than x , and silently down rate if score is less than
that. For both scores A and B.

The above is based on what I have seen on Twitter, which is unknown to you
people doing a sort of drive by harassment, often after someone who disagreed
with you retweets your post.

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CM30
So, why is Twitter such a car crash as far as censorship goes? I've heard of
shadowbanning, account limiting, double standards for freedom of speech based
on political orientation and now stuff like this.

Who's running the show and thinking "yep, censoring more people on one side of
the political spectrum is what we need right now"?

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SamUK96
> So, why is Twitter such a car crash as far as censorship goes?

There's been many theories. The overiding idea being pushed from the "media"
is that Twitter simply doesn't censor enough "hate speech" and "harrassment".

I have a lot of qualms with this though. I mean, FB by a long shot doesn't
censor anywhere near as much. Take a look at basically _any_ thread there. Yet
still...FB seems to manage user-base and stock value wise. So it can't be the
above theory.

The other, for obvious reasons more suppressed, reason is that they censor and
control too much, and the control they _do_ do, is like you say, one-sided and
bias.

There's plenty of evidence that supports bias censorship on Twitter, yet
there's none that Twitter doesn't censor enough, at least when you compare to
Twitter.

To be honest, I'de be pushed to think that people love scapegoating "the other
side", "bigots", etc., for the collapse of Twitter, just so they don't have to
come to the realisation that their political orientstion pushes people away
from a platform. It's essentially admitting defeat right?

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lykron
The Silicon Valley double standard, but I would like a bit more concrete
evidence before I get my pitchfork out.

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analogmemory
I'm sure that'll turn out well... </s>

