
Twitter Can Only Lose When It Polices Abuse - yummyfajitas
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-02-24/twitter-can-only-lose-when-it-polices-abuse
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pjc50
This is a Bloomberg article by Megan McArdle. I was expecting it to be vocal
in it support of harrasment, but in fact it makes the reasonable point that
any kind of "line" is a judgement call and a slippery slope. Once you start
banning people for death threats, you'll be asked to start banning people for
anti-Erdogan material etc, etc.

However, a lot of what people have been asking twitter to do is not actually
dependent on ideological content but about blocking, block evasion by new
accounts ("eggs"), and the like. See [https://medium.com/art-
marketing/putting-out-the-twitter-tra...](https://medium.com/art-
marketing/putting-out-the-twitter-trashfire-3ac6cb1af3e) (speaking of
censorship, putting that title into google returns one derogatory reference to
the article but _not_ the article itself, whereas on Bing and therefore DDG
it's the top search result!)

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bitwize
It's Twitter's platform; they can do whatever the fuck they want. The First
Amendment does not apply. If they wish to ban hate speech and apply strict
disciplinary action to users who post such speech, more power to them. Let the
conservative hatemongers form their own microblogging echo chamber. I'm sure
it will take off and be read by hundreds of millions like Conservapedia did.
Oh wait...

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cabalamat
> It's Twitter's platform; they can do whatever the fuck they want.

What if the same company controlled Twitter, Facebook, and Google? And what if
that company decided to subtly give more prominence to political views they
liked and less to ones they disliked? They could probably decide an election
by doing that.

> If they wish to ban hate speech and apply strict disciplinary action to
> users who post such speech, more power to them.

And if they choose to give less prominence to politicians who think big
internet corporations should pay more tax, do you still think "more power to
them"? Are you sure you want them to have that much power?

Powrer corrupts. The more power an entity has, the more they will be corrupted
by it, and abuse their power. That's why it is unwise to concentrate power in
a few hands.

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maldusiecle
Right, which is exactly why the same company _shouldn 't_ control Twitter,
Facebook, and Google, whether or not any of the individual companies are
enacting deliberate political censorship.

As it is, though, there are many social media networks, and users are free to
choose the one that fits their needs. If a user finds Twitter too aggressive
in weeding out misogynistic and racist hate speech, they can easily switch to
Reddit, which takes a more hands-off approach.

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benbenolson
Interesting article. However, what the author fails to realize is that Twitter
shouldn't be banning users in the first place-- that's not their job. Their
job is to provide a service that people can use to communicate; policing
content on the site should not be a technology company's job. If you dislike
what someone says, simply unfollow them, and they will disappear from your
sight. It's as simple as that-- out of the billions of people in the world,
there are definitely going to be millions of people that hate you simply
because of your race, beliefs, or country. Simply do not follow these people
if you don't want to see "abuse".

Just because people are offended by what conservatives may say does not mean
that freedom of speech should be limited. "I disagree with what you say, but
I'll defend to the death your right to say it" and all that. We, as
programmers and computer scientists (and some web developers) need to stop
deciding or worrying about what people are and aren't allowed to say-- and
that goes for Twitter, too.

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a_bonobo
>Simply do not follow these people if you don't want to see "abuse".

I don't think that's the solution of abuse, or even the source - trolls on
Twitters keep on making new accounts to @mention their "targets" with
vitriol/threats of violence/etc. The attacked can keep on blocking these new
accounts, but that's it. By default the Notifications tab has everyone
mentioning you - you can set that to "People you follow", but then you can't
interact with your audience, which is the major feature of Twitter.

If I do, let's say, science communication on Twitter, I want to be able to
interact with every "stranger".

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x5n1
need ai or Bayesian filter to detect such attacks and block them from most
users. But leave the user and feed alone, just make sure the target of the
attack and the general public never see the messages. Much like a shadow ban.

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majewsky
I'm skeptical of any form of filtering or censorship. How can you know which
rules the algorithm abides by? If it's some deep-learning-based AI, how would
even Twitter know exactly which rules the AI abides by?

A more transparent solution could be a prominent warning mark on tweets from
people who have more people blocking them than following them.

