
Twitter Just Permanently Suspended Conservative Writer Milo Yiannopoulos - Jerry2
https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/twitter-just-permanently-suspended-conservative-writer-milo?utm_term=.gw85D2JjAx#.jgl15YZ86e
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smt88
Free speech is vitally important, but this decision has nothing to do with it.
Yiannopoulos can still speak and write in many other public places, including
any public part of the US, his own personal blog, and any other unrestricted
platform (such as Facebook).

Twitter is selling a product, and they have a right to decide what kind of
product it is. They have a right to decide what their brand is connected to.
If you argue that free speech requires private companies to be neutral toward
everyone who wants to use them as a medium, you're also arguing that
newspapers must publish any editorials that are sent to them. You're arguing
that TV networks accept all ads, no matter how repugnant, and that phone
carriers allow stalkers to contact anyone they wish.

People should be willing to die to defend free speech, but let's also be clear
on what is and isn't actually an attack on free speech. Yiannopoulos is a
troll, and Twitter (in the interest of their shareholders) should have started
banning people like him a long time ago.

~~~
elgabogringo
hmmm.... It certainly has nothing to do with the first amendment protections
since twitter is a private company, but - at least from my POV - it does have
to do with censorship, bias, and, depending on how you define it, free speech.

~~~
DrFunke
I’d like to posit this scenario to everyone, and hear your responses:

A privately-held telecom provider (i.e. utility) disagrees with my political
views. As a result my internet service is terminated.

Let's agree the definition of a public utility is "Furnishes an everyday
necessity to the public at large".

Has the provider restricted my First Amendment right?

At what point (if ever) would you consider Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter public
utilities?

~~~
croon
In your scenario: Yes.

Is Twitter or any other application layer non-government service on the
internet a utility? No.

So is this what happened? No.

They didn't ban him for his political views, nor are they a utility.

~~~
mieses
They did ban him for his political views. But it's clever how you snuck in
that one subjective statement into an otherwise objective line of reasoning.

~~~
dragonwriter
> They did ban him for his political views.

No, they banned him for soliciting harassment, not for the views which
motivated the solicitation of the harassment.

~~~
mieses
That policy is used to silence dissenting opinion. Don't spread this PR. It's
equivalent to police claiming they detained you for a broken tail light.
Dorsey and his Saudi owners are on a purge.

~~~
NotSammyHagar
You have it backwards.

I believe you are referring to twitter being used to silence a dissenting
opinion when you said "that policy", in reference to Nero. I actually think
it's the other way, the bullying sent toward the SNL actresses' way, the
sexist and homophobic comments, those were actually meant to silence a
dissenting view, someone those people did not like.

Stopping bullying is a good thing. No good comes from bullying someone you
don't like.

~~~
mieses
Nero's alt-right followers "actually meant" to ridicule her. Twitter actually
silenced him.

------
elgabogringo
Everything and everyone the left disagrees with now gets labeled as "hate" and
increasingly gets flagged and then banned. Why is the left so afraid of a
debate?

~~~
XMPPwocky
What debate was involved here?

~~~
ericras
The debate that's been unfolding for a couple months about the Ghostbusters
movie as leftist propaganda.

~~~
st3v3r
And what part of that debate was calling Leslie Jones an ape?

------
partiallypro
A private company can do whatever they want on their platform. The problem I
have is that they pretend that they are unbiased arbiters, when history
suggests otherwise.

I also have a problem with this as Twitter investor (I'm a huge critic of
Twitter, if you look at my history; and I'm specifically an investor hoping
for someone to just buy the company and fire Jack and his team.) I don't know
how to balance the harassment policies (which I think should be enforced in
some cases) and free speech.

I think free speech is vital to the success of any social media platform. I
also know the tendencies of internet trolls is that if you come at them, they
often go much harder towards you. It would make more sense if you could auto-
block mentions that contain keywords, almost like a spam filter. Basically
filter bubbles or groups/channels, with the ability to see unfiltered
mentions. I really do not think this solves the problem, as we saw with
Reddit, 4Chan, 8Chan, (or basically any forum that has operated since the
early 2000s) etc.

When Reddit started mass banning people and subreddits it saw a huge uptick of
"shitposts," eventually a lot of those people formed "The_Donald" and now they
basically control most of the front page, and have for months. Banning in many
instances can give the banned users a much louder voice, especially if they
have any sort of movement or following behind them. I think anyone with
experience in online forums dating back to the early 2000s knows this to be
true. Forum "fallouts" happen often, and usually occur after a significant ban
or power grab...it often ends up killing the platform or community. I don't
think social media platforms are any different.

I fear unless Jack and many others are removed from the company, it will
become like a Yahoo, with core assets that are marked as virtually worthless
and no one willing to buy and catch the falling knife.

------
zorpner
About damn time. It's a shame that it took him & his followers harassing a
celebrity to get this done, given how many people they've threatened before,
but hardly surprising.

~~~
elgabogringo
Really, who has Milo threatened?

~~~
smt88
1) GP said "they've threatened", which referred to the followers, rather than
Yiannopoulos himself.

2) It's possible to inspire your followers to threaten people without making a
threat yourself. Yiannopoulos has painted groups he dislikes (feminists,
Muslims, etc.) as threatening and dangerous to his followers, which is a tacit
justification of violence and threats against them.

~~~
elgabogringo
#1 Was anyone actually threatened or just insulted and, regardless, what does
that have to do with Milo?

#2 Very tenuous justification there. One that twitter certainly doesn't hold
other groups to.

~~~
smt88
> _#1 Was anyone actually threatened or just insulted and, regardless, what
> does that have to do with Milo?_

His followers have threatened some horrific stuff to lots of people,
especially during the height of GamerGate harassment. It has to do with
Yiannopoulos only if he intended to create those reactions among his
followers, which I (and others) suspect he did. We'll never know for sure.

> _#2 Very tenuous justification there. One that twitter certainly doesn 't
> hold other groups to._

Agreed. Perhaps Yiannopoulos has grounds to sue Twitter for unfair treatment.
I doubt it, though IANAL.

In this case, Twitter may not be using "inciting followers to make threats
using dog-whistle rhetoric" as a criterion for banning people. It would ban
Yiannopoulos and not, say, a black nationalist for one simple reason:
Yiannopoulos was more famous and created more consternation among potential
users.

------
AlwaysBCoding
I understand that the first amendment protects against government censorship,
and not the censorship of a private company.

But honest question, what is the difference between a private business
refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay wedding (which courts have ruled
illegal), and twitter refusing their platform to a conservative writer.

~~~
croon
1) He's not banned for being a conservative, nor writer. 2) They (likely) did
not order a cake with writing on it targetting someone. They just wanted a
cake for themselves. IANAL, but I'm assuming the bakery got ruled against on
grounds of bias crimes against sexual orientation.

He's not targetted for either being gay or conservative or any other personal
trait other than on their service portraying a seemingly vile human being
through targetted harassment of other user(s), which they deemed a breach of
their ToS.

------
pseudo_monkey
Good, just because you may have the right to free speech doesn't mean you
should be given a platform to spread your hate.

~~~
mveety
Yes it does. Censorship by public or private entities is dangerous because it
destroys the open marketplace of ideas. The best ideas, given time, will rise
to the top, and censorship in all forms prevents this from happening. Speech
that is agreeable to the public/government/whatever doesn't need any
protection, but speech that isn't does. We all should protect speech in all
forms even if it's hateful or abhorrent.

~~~
smt88
Yiannopoulos can still be hateful and abhorrent on Breitbart.com and many
other widely-read outlets. He can hold an anti-Leslie Jones rally on a major
street in the US, and police will protect him (including black police).

This isn't a blow to free speech. It's Twitter deciding not to let someone use
its service and its resources for the purposes of rallying racists to berate
an innocent woman who acted in a movie.

------
flukus
If anyone wants freedom of speech then they should be using open platforms,
not corporate controlled ones.

I have no idea why anyone allowed twitter to ever have as much influence as
they do.

~~~
st3v3r
In what world is a targeted harassment campaign considered "freedom of
speech"?

And why do you care so much about the harassers, yet offer nothing for those
who's speech is silenced because they are harassed off the platform? Do those
people not matter?

~~~
flukus
>In what world is a targeted harassment campaign considered "freedom of
speech"?

Who decides where that line is drawn?

>And why do you care so much about the harassers, yet offer nothing for those
who's speech is silenced because they are harassed off the platform? Do those
people not matter?

The can block/ignore/filter, just like everyone has always done.

------
kelukelugames
_It’s clear that existing hate speech laws are inadequate for the social media
era. And if we decide, as we perhaps might, that a lifetime ban on the
internet is unworkable and disproportionately punitive, given the centrality
of the internet to our professional and personal lives these days, what on
earth are we to do? No one has yet offered a convincing answer. In the
meantime, we are all, bit by bit, growing ever more fearful of the next wave
of molestation.

Together with other commentators, I have in the past argued for verified
identities on social networks, so those responsible for abuse and persecution
of public figures and the vulnerable might be held accountable for their
actions. That seems redundant when trolls are now so brazen they don’t care
about disapproving words from their loved ones back inside Facebook when they
leave furious missives using that social network’s commenting system elsewhere
on the internet.

So perhaps what’s needed now is a bolder form of censure after all, because
the internet is not a universal human right. If people cannot be trusted to
treat one another with respect, dignity and consideration, perhaps they
deserve to have their online freedoms curtailed. For sure, the best we could
ever hope for is a smattering of unpopular show trials. But if the internet,
ubiquitous as it now is, proves too dangerous in the hands of the
psychologically fragile, perhaps access to it ought to be restricted. We ban
drunks from driving because they’re a danger to others. Isn’t it time we did
the same to trolls?_

\- See more at: [http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/yiannopoulos/3359/the-
internet...](http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/yiannopoulos/3359/the-internet-is-
turning-us-all-into-sociopaths/#sthash.SNvn8OTL.dpuf)

------
feylikurds
Let me get this straight, Milo is of foreign-descent, homosexual, and has
inter-racial relationships, but is a hardcore conservative? Why people take
him seriously, I will never know.

~~~
dogma1138
Conservatives have to be straight and racist?

~~~
smt88
They don't, but homophobia, denial that sexuality is mutable, denial that
homosexuality exists, and racism are all driven by conservatives.

There have been times when liberals were racist (e.g. some, but not most,
eugenicists), but generally speaking, conservatives want to preserve the past,
and the past is incredibly racist.

Conservatives fought the abolition of slavery, and to this day they support
laws that marginalize or infringe upon the rights of homosexuals. A gay
conservative is someone acting against his/her interests, and a pro-equality
conservative is an oxymoron.

~~~
AlwaysBCoding
The logic (agree with it or not) is that the biggest threat to homosexuals in
2016 is Islam and Sharia. There are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, at least
half who want homosexuality banned. And Muslim countries are much more likely
to legislate religious doctrine than Western countries right now.

Conservatives tend to be more combative with Islam than liberals are, so the
thinking is it's logical to be Conservative now if you want to push gay rights
forward. Especially since the Orlando massacre which saw a Muslim terrorist
kill 50 unarmed gays.

~~~
st3v3r
Except Christian areas are just as likely to legislate religious doctrine. All
of the gay marriage bans in the US were driven by Christian groups, and mostly
enacted in Christian heavy states. The countries in Africa which are outlawing
homosexuality are doing so largely lead by Christians. And there is no way you
can tell me Russia is a Muslim country.

------
emjoes1
In general this is my prob with society today. Why do we have to be nice to
people? Why do we have to show empathy? Why can we not say hateful things? No
violence/assault no harm.

~~~
dang
I can tell you what the answer is on Hacker News, at least. You have to treat
others respectfully here because if we allowed users not to, the community
would decay, the best people (who incidentally have no trouble being
respectful) would leave, and this place would become uninteresting, like
scorched earth. That's the biggest risk to this site so we take it seriously.

~~~
greatemployee
I see this sort of argument a lot and I don't know how true it is.

Is it /really/ true that the best contributors are so sensitive? In my
experience, these days it's actually the worst contributors or those who
contribute not at all who are the most sensitive and liable to throw in the
towel.

I'm sympathetic to your view but there is another risk that by overmoderating
or catering to the most sensitive of contributors, HN will be left with non-
interesting content, or controversial opinions will be silenced.

