
Twitter suspended Indian dairy giant Amul for call to boycott Chinese goods - abc-xyz
https://thestateindia.com/2020/06/06/amuls-account-suspended-for-tweeting-boycott-of-chinese-goods-and-provoking-users/
======
seesawtron
"Let's suspend everything that seems to be offensive but if public starts to
make a big deal out of it, just say there was a bug with our automated
software for filtering content. It's not like anyone will ever look at our
code"

~~~
Simulacra
It would be interesting to see a cataloging of censorship actions by
social/media companies, etc. alongside the response. Ie Company x did y, z
number of times, and blamed a bug w times versus deliberative actions q times.

~~~
seesawtron
they are never going to show their proprietary code

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miked85
Up until now, many have been cheering Twitter bans and attacking FB for not
doing the same since it aligned with their political views. This kind of
behavior by tech giants is bad, regardless if you agree or not with who they
are suspending or banning.

~~~
aplummer
Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s bad. I think they are a private company with free
speech, and people should just not use their products if they don’t like it.

~~~
faned
Would you support changing laws to allow Twitter to ban black people from
their platform?

~~~
renewiltord
I think the constraints on these companies should be the same as in normal
public discourse.

It is strange to me that I can talk to someone on the street about how I'm
trying to minimize my consumption of Chinese goods and how this is worthwhile
and no one would bat an eye but that that is somehow offensive online.

We can then decide if we want to regulate general public discourse about what
we're talking about.

~~~
Fjolsvith
Twitter is not a free speech platform. Simple.

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Magodo
Clickbait. Actual reason cited was account security issues

[https://scroll.in/latest/964035/amuls-twitter-account-
blocke...](https://scroll.in/latest/964035/amuls-twitter-account-blocked-
briefly-social-media-firm-cites-security-processes)

~~~
abc-xyz
As per your article:

> “We have asked Twitter why it blocked our account,” Sodhi said. “We are
> waiting for the reply.”

Sounds like they suffered from more than a simple CAPTCHA before their login
(in which case it also sounds absurd to publicly restrict the account).

Twitter says:

> “Safety and security of the accounts is a key priority for us and to ensure
> an account has not been compromised sometimes we require the account owner
> to complete a simple reCAPTCHA process,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a
> statement. “These challenges are simple for authentic account owners to
> solve, but difficult [or costly] for spammy or malicious account owners to
> complete.”

This makes no sense. It's a ~9 year old verified account with 250k followers,
operated by one of the largest companies in India, with no unusual tweet
activity.

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itsspring
Can we not have opinions on trade and economics on social media now?

~~~
caseysoftware
You didn't read the latest guidelines? They specifically ban [redacted] unless
you're arguing that [redacted] didn't have anything to do with [redacted].
Unless of course, you've accepted money from [redacted], then you are welcome
to criticize [redacted] as long as you mark posts as promotional.

It's really pretty easy. Just visit: [redacted] for more details.

~~~
Y_Y
Biased propaganda. If you want the truth go to [blueacted].

------
bedros
Probably Chinese hackers trying to hack and get access to the account, so it
was suspended

~~~
tomschlick
More likely is that China used many accounts to report it as violence or some
other sensitive category. Automation would have taken it down at that point.

~~~
thedudeabides5
If so, would be the latest in a long and successful strategy of using the
West’s language on offense and identity politics against our speech and media
institutions.

And to be fair, we haven’t really figured out where we stand on this stuff.

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pxtail
I love all recent moves done by social media giants and I hope that they will
continue along this path - it's just boring when only selected type of content
and opinion is allowed. Some people will be able to perceive that published
content is complaisant, inhonest artificial facade and will look around for
other communication solutions.

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cma
Seems to be a mistake, possibly automated:

>On this post, Twitter messaged that your account is temporarily blocked. You
are seeing this message because some unusual activity has occurred from this
account.

~~~
pacala
Wow. Building and operating a massive unaccountable automated system to
deboost and/or silence undesirable speech is now OK because 'it was a
mistake'.

Edit. At what point are the users and/or the public at large owed a detailed
postmortem for those 'mistakes'?

~~~
cma
It seems to be related to hack detection of the account:

[https://scroll.in/latest/964035/amuls-twitter-account-
blocke...](https://scroll.in/latest/964035/amuls-twitter-account-blocked-
briefly-social-media-firm-cites-security-processes)

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bufferoverflow
I wonder if they see the irony of that action.

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treebornfrog
And it begins...

~~~
RandomTisk
The bigotry of big tech began a long time ago.

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sukilot
Was it ever suspended? The screenshot shows clickwall, not suspension.

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josephby
More Modi-fake-news; you can't out-Xi Xi. Good luck guys.

