
Social media companies step up battle against militant propaganda - hokkos
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-shooting-socialmedia-insig-idUKKBN0TO0OS20151207
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alfiedotwtf
This just smells like the start of censorship creeping into these platforms...

Twitter was pivotal in the Arab Spring. I can't see Twitter ever being pivotal
again in future struggles if regimes can demand them to censor rebellious
accounts

It's not "social" if the society can be censored.

Edit: Now that Twitter will be closing "terrorist" accounts, how long until
Japan demand Twitter to close the @SeaShepherd account?

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brokentone
I'm of the belief that most active terrorist orgs are unlikely to have a
strong Facebook presence, and that even if they do, they're unlikely to do
anything of a threatening nature there. If anything, it would seem as though
you might want to keep whatever is happing there for honeypot reasons.

~~~
CM30
To be fair, you'd be surprised how many criminals seem to seek glory for their
actions and then wonder how they get arrested afterwards.

Just ask all the criminals who stole things, got involved in selling drugs,
etc, then boasted about it on Facebook. There have been cases of criminals
boasting about their killings online, or their plans for mass attacks. I
remember the shock when one of these crimes had turned out to have been
planned on 4chan or another similar site.

People who break the law are often driven as much by personal fame and glory
as anyone else, and both the internet companies shutting their accounts and
the police and security services carefully monitoring them are good ideas for
just that reason.

~~~
jonesb6
The 4chan example was the mass shooting at a community college in Oregon.

Personally I find a connection between how many people see computing as a
black box, and the criminals who insist on posting there deeds to social media
and elsewhere. To them it's a magical conduit to millions of people. I wonder
if there's a deeper study into this because as a software developer I find it
hard to believe that others can't at least get a sense that it's all derived
from 1's and 0's.

