
Updating our rules against hateful conduct - tareqak
https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2019/hatefulconductupdate.html
======
rubidium
Everyone should read the examples so they have a clear understanding of what
twitter is meaning when they say "dehumanize". It's not "hey I disagree with
these people" it's "hey I want these people dead/injured/equated to shit".

Religious and ethnic persecutions have often gone hand-in-hand. Religious
minorities of all types will be helped by this, and we'll see less hate-speech
on twitter. Seems to be a very reasonable step.

Sidenote: any religion topic really brings out the "I have a problem with
religion" types on HN.

~~~
drak0n1c
Twitter would be better received if it were bold enough to also state specific
examples of permissible religious satire/criticism. I think that would do a
lot to address what people are worried about, and be a step in the direction
of having more concrete rules and predictable enforcement.

~~~
creaghpatr
>Twitter would be better received if it were bold enough to also state
specific examples of permissible religious satire/criticism

Talk about a PR Minesweeper, expert mode.

------
whatshisface
What if someone's holy book contains text that dehumanizes people on the basis
of religion?

~~~
throwaway98434
Criticizing a religion is not the same thing as dehumanizing its followers.

Dehumanization is a defense mechanism which helps us avoid feeling the pain of
realizing that humans sometimes do (subjectively) abhorrent things. It's
seductive to define such people outside the bounds of humanity as it allows us
to excuse treating them poorly. It is nearly always a mistake to do so,
because people are, in fact, people.

~~~
elliekelly
This is the important point everyone seems to be missing. If you look at the
example tweets they all have some aspect of making the [Religious Group] out
to be less than human: rats, virus, maggots, etc.

People can still freely express their distaste for any and all religion on
twitter so long as they don’t dehumanize the people who follow that religion.

~~~
loudtieblahblah
Application will be different from stated intent. How much you want to bet ?

haven't we all seen this in practice long enough now to know how this little
routine goes?

~~~
elliekelly
This kind of attitude with respect to rules and regulations drives me nuts.
Guess what? _Every_ time you have a human applying a rule you’re going to get
results that aren’t entirely consistent. Have you ever managed a team and
given the exact same task with the exact same instructions to two people? Did
you get the exact same work product in return? I very much doubt it.

Rules & regulations should be written, evaluated, and revised the same way
code is. Code doesn’t always run as we intended but we (usually) don’t crucify
the developer. We _learn_ from the misunderstanding, fix it, and then re-
evaluate when the next inevitable misunderstanding comes up. We get feedback
and we iterate. That’s exactly what Twitter is doing. Their first policy
didn’t work out as planned and this is their next iteration based on the
feedback they received on policy v1.0.0

And will Twitter update this policy yet again once they’ve had time to work
out some of the kinks? You can bet on it.

------
luckylion
I get skin color, sex, gender, sexual orientation etc for protection, but
including religion and excluding political word view has always been weird to
me. Calling one of the two innate and deserving of protection and the other a
choice and undeserving seems like a religious answer.

 _Narrow down what’s considered — Respondents said that “identifiable groups”
was too broad, and they should be allowed to engage with political groups,
hate groups, and other non-marginalized groups with this type of language._

And you didn't just tell him to just not de-humanize anybody, instead opting
for "okay, that's fine, just don't mention religion when you do it?

~~~
duskwuff
Yeah, the way this has been introduced into their policies [1] is weirdly
specific. It's prohibited to target _individuals_ with dehumanizing language
if it's related to any protected category, but targeting _groups_ with
dehumanizing language is only prohibited if it's related to religion?

[1]: [https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-
condu...](https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-conduct-
policy)

------
jngreenlee
I'm not convinced centralized models being politically "pushed around" in the
age of the internet will succeed. They may likely be a retreat, and long term
ebb-and-flow from centralized to decentralized poles.

The centralized but politically watched model is also specially susceptible to
Taleb's "The Most Intolerant Wins" theorem.

~~~
bassman9000
Specially when religious (or other kind of) minorities where Twitter HQ are
located won't necessarily be somewhere else.

------
drak0n1c
Does this mean that Swiftian satire such as South Park's episode making fun of
prominent Scientologists is now unfit for Twitter?

~~~
duskwuff
I don't believe it would be affected -- as I recall, that episode _mocks_ the
religion and its members, but doesn't _dehumanize_ them.

~~~
whatshisface
What exactly does "dehumanization" mean?

~~~
duskwuff
It means precisely what it sounds like -- using language which describes the
targeted group as something other than (and lesser than) human. The article
gives examples where religious groups are described as "rats", "viruses",
"filthy animals", or "maggots".

~~~
whatshisface
Many cultures use animal analogies to describe nuanced and complicated
personality trait combinations. Some of them are more negative than others,
referring to combinations of positive and negative traits in varying
proportions.

Reductively, calling someone a lion is just as dehumanizing as calling them a
shark. In the Bible, people are both complemented and insulted with
comparisons to lions. Calling someone a shark is more respectful than calling
them a rat, unless you're Chinese in which case I'm not sure what rat means.
What exactly is banned here? Twitter gave us only the most obvious examples,
leaving the hazy zones open for the endless fighting that I predict is about
to start.

~~~
tptacek
Welp, you don't get to do that on Twitter now.

~~~
whatshisface
So, I understand the attitude that, "twitter is just a platform, they don't
have to be just, why wring your hands so much about what their rules are?"
This makes sense if their rules don't matter, so in that case why should they
even have rules? That's a position I can understand, where you can post
anything on Twitter that's legal under US law.

~~~
tptacek
I'm sorry, I don't understand your logic. If someone has rules, but those
rules aren't the same as US law, it seems you're saying, they might as well
not have rules at all?

~~~
whatshisface
Yeah, I was kind of tired when I wrote that. My logic was, if handwringing
over Twitter's rules isn't justified then the rules must not matter, because
handwringing is justified if and only if the rules matter. If the rules don't
matter then they don't need rules beyond basic US law, which would imply that
this effort wasn't very profitable.

So, either Twitter isn't right because they took a rough stab into a subtle
area, or they aren't right because they took a stab that didn't need to be
taken.

------
ngngngng
I've been deeply concerned with attacks on religious freedom as of late, this
seems like a strong step in the right direction.

~~~
kstrauser
Which religious freedoms have been attacked, and where?

~~~
ngngngng
[https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/other-
examp...](https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/other-examples-of-
attacks-on-religious-conscience-and-free-exercise)

~~~
kstrauser
Sounds like a series of cases where courts ruled that religious reasons were
not justifiable to allow discrimination, as per the Constitution.

------
benmmurphy
I assume it is ok to say religion is a virus, or a particular religion is a
virus but the rule is that you can't say the followers of the religion are a
virus. Likening religion to a memetic virus is not a fringe opinion.

------
ddingus
Hopefully, they recognize the group of people who do not practice religion as
"basis of religion"

~~~
sdinsn
They probably won't.

Atheists are the most oppressed 'religious' group there is but no one will
recognize it.

It's common they are left out of so-called "progressive" movements to support
peace / safety.

------
childintime
Excommunication isn't the solution. Isn't it enough to hide these comments by
default, as on HN?

~~~
tptacek
Comments like those in the examples Twitter provided will reliably get you
excommunicated from HN.

~~~
childintime
HN has dead posters. They are still readable for those that want to. That's
the type of solution I promote.

Digital media, like Twitter, can't be a megaphone to spread hate speech. That
means their algorithms should be smarter, and accept input.

On the other hand, with these media effectively being monopolies, that doesn't
mean they can excommunicate (which is what this is about). That should be
against the law.

Just like when there is just one shop in town: everybody should be allowed to
buy. That doesn't mean the shopkeeper has to smile to every customer. A good
shopkeeper may even be able to get this customer some help.

------
djsumdog
People really need to get off Twitter. There are a lot of servers on the
Fediverse, running Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, Pixelfed and other ActivityPub
webapps. Just because famous person x,y,z or friends a,b,c, aren't on the
Fediverse doesn't mean you shouldn't try it out.

It's like the 1990s, old IRC and AOL chatrooms. You can just follow a lot of
randoms and get into cool threads. There are many instances that have open
speech policies (which are banned by many other instances) and other instances
with standard ban lists. You can choose where you want to sign up. Many of the
people on HN have the knowledge to stand up their own if they want. (I run my
own in Docker using a ruby tool I wrote:
[https://github.com/sumdog/bee2](https://github.com/sumdog/bee2)).

You can even create accounts of different Fediverse servers to get a better
picture of what gets blocked/censored where. The difference with
ActivityPub/Fediverse is you have choices.

Twitter, Reddit, et. al. worry so much about keeping people "safe" that they
have completely killed off any diversity of ideas. Back before Reddit started
their multi-year long banning-of-everything campaign, you had a lot of
different voices, with a lot of different ideology, from conservative to
socialist to libertarian to progressive .. battling it out with some really
great discussion. Now it's all just monoculture.

The places people fled too, like Voat/Gab, are also just monoculture (Gab
recently migrated to their own broken, garbage fork of Mastodon ... as if they
needed a way to make the Mastodon UI worse). Voat is just a cesspool of hate,
and any melting pot where people discussed ideas rationally is kinda gone.

I highly recommend The Coddling of the American Mind, a book that talks about
how people today see "Free speech" as a bad thing, how people say words ==
violence (they don't, violence is violence, and saying words are violence show
you're afraid of ideas).

I've also been reading The Strange Death of Europe, which talks a lot about
migration and religious hate speech. Honestly a lot of the book is garbage and
I didn't like any of the initial arguments, but I also realize it's important
to read about viewpoints I don't agree with. As I kept reading, the author did
make a lot of effort to interview Muslims (both long term residents and
refugees) and he does make a good set of arguments for the difficulty of
criticizing religion in Europe (and I don't agree with a lot of his findings,
but I think his arguments and original research are worth looking at).

We really need to be careful with these new blurred lines around speech and
hate and ideas and ideology and violence. Restricting things on any platform
just gives people with those views, people who get banned, more validity in
the eyes of people who see them as persecuted. The Westburro Baptist Church is
an example of a small, non-evangelistic set of families that barely grow, who
are fully supported by slander lawsuits (they're mostly lawyers). If there
weren't WBC counter protests and publications against them, they'd have no one
to sue, would have run out of money a long time ago, and would have needed to
take real legal case work again. The great irony is the reason they still hold
strong is due to protesters giving them relevance.

~~~
wavepruner
I want to like Mastodon, but there are no like/retweet counts. I have no idea
how to find the good content without sifting through mountains of stuff I
don't want to read.

------
droithomme
Interesting. So criticizing religious positions against abortion, against
vaccines, against homosexuality, and in favor of the flat earth will now
result in post removal. Assuming this policy is going to be impartially and
fairly applied as stated.

~~~
ceejayoz
It's entirely possible to criticize without dehumanizing.

~~~
Nuzzerino
The problem is that it's also possible to criticize in a way where it's simply
not possible to determine if it was a good faith criticism or not. There's a
wide population of people who even optimize for that, they're called trolls.

Moderation mistakes are inevitable, and the consequences of a bad moderation
decision can be as bad, or worse, than the effect of the message itself.

IMO, people should learn to defend themselves against trolls rather than
helplessly relying on a nanny from above to do it. Unfortunately, using those
platforms doesn't give us much of a choice in the matter.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The problem is that it's also possible to criticize in a way where it's
> simply not possible to determine if it was a good faith criticism or not.

That's a problem in some generic sense perhaps, but not with the application
of this policy, which does not rely on a determination of “good faith
criticism”, but instead of dehumanization.

Note that the examples of what is covered all are dehumanizing in a _very_
narrow sense (stating directly that the target groups are vermin, viruses,
etc.): [https://blog.twitter.com/content/dam/blog-
twitter/official/e...](https://blog.twitter.com/content/dam/blog-
twitter/official/en_us/company/2019/dehumanizationreligion.png)

~~~
Nuzzerino
I'd rather see a random list of posts that are actually being deleted rather
than examples that Twitter officially uses, before making the determination
that the rule is applied fairly.

------
08-15
This is strangely specific. Is it still okay to dehumanize people afflicted
with other kinds of mental illnesses?

------
schalab
Twitter needs to be a set of open source protocols and standards like the
internet.

Imagine if all of the internet was owned by one company and they had this kind
of power. This is more power than many governments around the world.

------
jngreenlee
I'm very concerned about loosing the right to attack religion. It's an
important discussion to have and for children to see. All religion is foolish,
and has to be approached from a reality-based context.

~~~
szemet
The reasonable interpretation is that you can attack religion (as an ideology)
but you can not attact religious people based on their religion.

Thats a safe split: ideologies do not have (human) rights anyway...

So e.g. you can freely say that the Bible is stupid but can't say the same
thing about its believers.

~~~
ceejayoz
> So e.g. you can freely say that the Bible is stupid but can't say the same
> thing about its believers.

From the examples they give, I think you can still call them stupid. (After
all, being stupid is very much part of the _human_ condition. It's hardly a
dehumanizing descriptor.) You just can't call them rats, maggots, viruses,
etc. and advocate for their extermination/removal.

