> On Aug. 14 the company did suspend Mr. Jones for seven days after CNN flagged tweets to the company. Many staffers viewed that as a half measure and complained that the firm hadn’t acted decisively. Mr. Jones’s account has since been restored.
Wow, did not know it was CNN that flagged the Jones post which got him suspended for 7 days.
That’s the implication but I’m not sure that’s technically what happened. I think CNN incited their readers to report the tweets they highlighted, which is more or less the same kind of thing but adds the plausible deniability of hiding behind an algorithm.
Someone at the hearing should ask did someone at Twitter make an editorial decision based on CNNs reporting?
I’ve seen some highly toxic accounts on Twitter promoting hate, rape and death, and despite being reported, they continue to spread their vitriol.
It’s saddening to think of what could have been; if frequently-visited places with organic subcultures like YouTube or 4chan had implemented some basic, sane moderation from the beginning, they could have far exceeded any of the popular social networks of today.
It's not as easy as it seems. People assume we're in favor of the worst things that appear on HN, when in reality we don't see most of it and certainly aren't in favor. And HN is orders of magnitude smaller than Twitter.
Well, you do a fine job. It's one of the few places I can come and participate in interesting conversations with adults acting intelligently. Thanks for the great work!
Thanks! I can't imagine having to deal with the equivalent problems at Twitter's or Reddit's or Facebook's scale. To me it seems likely that no one knows how.
Maybe some ML can help now? Weigh the content of the reported comments against the reporter's trustability etc., and have actual mods train the system by having the final say on all reports at first before making it fully automated.
Because everyone that tweets more than once a week would be banned. Twitter's KPIs are tied to keeping the eternal flamewar alive. They need people emotionally engaged and saying thing they would decide against posting if forced into a 10-minute cool down period.
Their moderation problem isn't that they're fighting a wildfire. They're trying to protect a few acres while torching the rest.
> Twitter and rival Facebook are increasingly caught in a Catch-22 situation—criticized by some users for allowing hateful posts, but blasted by others for removing content because it curtails free speech.
I don’t think this is an accurate framing of the problem. What people want is consistency. If you want to ban people for being fringe, obnoxious or worse, you need to do it regardless of who they are.
What happens is one side of the political spectrum gets their worst actors banned while caustic tweeters on the other side of the isle can often be found with blue verification checkmarks (and unchecked aggressive tweets).
Imho Dorsey was correct in not wanting to ban Jones and Spencer because that’s more consistent with how the far-left is treated.
Why the heck are we banning anything unless it brings physical harm to others? (Alex Jones & Sandy Hook) Far left, far right opinions shouldn't be banned as it would set a precedent that anything outside of the status quo is not valid discourse.
Twitter should either be banning both far left and far right extremists, or nobody. Otherwise it should be considers a media, and not an internet service and regulated as such.
> Otherwise it should be considers a media, and not an internet service and regulated as such.
It is considered a communications medium (part of the “new media”). Media and internet are not mutually exclusive categories, and the media in the US (outside of broadcast media, where it is the broadcasting, rather than media, aspect that brings regulation) is generally unregulated and largely Constitutionally protected against regulation.
So I'm (rather intentionally) ignorant to all this stuff. Can you share an example or reference to what a far left extremist looks like? It just doesn't exist in my current mental model. And I recognize this is terrible when my goal is to be judicious and balanced in all opinions.
"They engage in violent protest tactics, which has included property damage and physical violence. They tend to be anti-capitalist and they are predominantly far-left and militant left, which includes anarchists, communists and socialists...
Scott Crow, described by CNN as 'a longtime Antifa organizer', argues that destroying property is not a form of violence. The groups have been associated with physical violence in public against police and against people whose political views its activists deem repugnant. Antifa activists used clubs and dyed liquids against the white supremacists in Charlottesville and caused property damage. In one incident, an apparent antifa supporter punched white supremacist Richard Spencer in the face as he was giving an impromptu street interview and on another occasion, in Berkeley, it was reported that some threw Molotov cocktails."
EDIT: And, if you're looking for individuals, these fine folks from the FBI most wanted domestic terrorists:
>Antifa activists used clubs and dyed liquids against the white supremacists in Charlottesville and caused property damage. In one incident, an apparent antifa supporter punched white supremacist Richard Spencer in the face as he was giving an impromptu street interview and on another occasion, in Berkeley, it was reported that some threw Molotov cocktails."
Is it really extremism to punch white supremacists/literal Nazi's though?
Plenty of leftist terror groups there. And most of them are probably on twitter, too. I have very specific interests on twitter, so I know PKK is there. And they advocate for violence.
Wait, now suggesting that people exercise their constitutional right to free speech is supposed to be a ban-worthy offense? I’m getting dizzy from how fast those goalposts are moving.
I was replying to a post asking for examples of far-left extremism. Harassing people is never an acceptable form of free speech (actually a crime), just so you know.
You’re stretching the definition of harassment a lot. Sending death threats is definitely illegal. Following a random ICE agent home is likely illegal. The kind of thing Rep. Waters actually suggested, however, isn’t even remotely illegal — publicly asking high-level officials to justify their policies would be really hard to criminalize unless it was connected to other activity such as trying to detain the person. Think about what you’re saying for a moment: does anyone serious really believe that reporters following someone out the door are engaged in criminal activity?
Media isn't really regulated much different than Twitter, and an "internet service" isn't required to be politically neutral in its handling of what content it chooses to host.
I replied with one of the worst examples of a far-left person that ought to be banned, but it was almost instantly flagged. That kind of shows the problems with politically biased communities like HN and the workforce at Twitter (the people actually making the decisions talked about in the article). Intolerance in such communities has reached such a fever pitch that even legitimate responses to a question soliciting the names of bad actors get flagged.
Sarah Jeong would the most obvious example of Twitter's bias.
Candace Owens was suspended for just two tweets copied from Sarah Jeong. Sarah Jeong made hundreds of such tweets without consequence...and the left defended her.
Sarah Jeong is not a 'visible far-left figure'. Candace Owens was not suspended for tweets 'copied', she changed the tweets. This bizarre and tediously repeated idea that you can change the actual words of something and not change the meaning and degree of offensiveness doesn't meet the logical argument standard of most toddlers. It's worse than unconvincing, it just makes you sound like an idiot - I'd reconsider using it.
Now you're changing words. The root post describes Sarah Jeong perfectly:
> caustic tweeters on the other side of the isle can often be found with blue verification checkmarks (and unchecked aggressive tweets).
She copied everything except the race/ethnicity the tweets were attacking.
And the number of left-wing media outlets that rose to defend her makes me think it's fair to describe this as an issue of bias based on side of the political spectrum, as the root comment said:
> What happens is one side of the political spectrum gets their worst actors banned while caustic tweeters on the other side of the isle can often be found with blue verification checkmarks (and unchecked aggressive tweets).
In short, much of the left-wing defends anti-white racism and Twitter allows it.
I've got a zillion reply thread here explaining at length why this 'replacing just the race/ethnicity' is not remotely the rhetorical killshot you seem to think it is. You are just repeating it to me. I'm not sure what else to tell you at this point.
And I'm not sure how to communicate with someone who dismisses racism as 'silly tweets'.
Our points of view simply do not intersect.
But when you say this isn't a left-wing issue, I think you fail to consider the number of people in the left wing who've argued that "racism against white people is impossible" and the support for Sarah Jeong in the left wing media.
No one is changing the meaning of anything. You're the one making personal attacks against someone who was just answering a question.
Plenty of people would see the editorial board of the NYT as "visible" and Jeong is certainly far-left (unless it's a moderate opinion to blast white men publicly for years on end).
You should try to stick to arguing the facts and leave the personal attack nonsense out of it. Calling other users "toddlers" doesn't help your argument.
If you change the words, you've changed the meaning. That seems like it should be uncontroversial and straightforward. If your argument is based on that not somehow being the case, I think we can safely say it's a dumb argument. This isn't a personal attack, and I haven't called anyone a toddler. Although if one then takes it as a personal attack, I'd be inclined to think that person is a bit of a snowflake. But I wouldn't say it because that would be namecalling.
Sarah Jeong is not 'far left', nor is writing silly tweets about white men. That's neither a left, nor a right nor a swift uppercut to the jaw.
> Sarah Jeong is not 'far left', nor is writing silly tweets about white men.
It sure sounds like it's you changing the meaning of words. Is it a right wing trait to attack men and white people or is it left wing? That statement seems straightforward and uncontroversial.
Candace Owens changed 'white' to 'Jewish' and got suspended. So those words.
As to Jeong's tweets, I don't think they're attacks on men or white people. If you think they are and find them rude and offensive, fair enough, that's a matter of taste. What is not a matter of taste and what I am claiming is an obviously poopy argument is insisting that replacing 'white people' with 'Jews' produces statements of equivalent offensiveness and appallingness. That is not the same ballpark, league or even sport [1].
> That is not the same ballpark, league or even sport
A lot of people will tell you that it actually is equivalent because attacking someone's gender or race is always bad. That seems to be the fundamental disagreement in both sides of this argument.
Thirty Helens will tell you that the quality of an argument is not a function of the number of people repeating it and the quality of this one, even the way you just described it above is plainly miserable. Not all bad things are equivalent. Calling someone a butthead is rude, calling someone a racial slur is also rude but also much worse.
If your argument was that you find her tweets offensive and rude I'd try to convince you you might be misinterpreting them but at the end of the day, it's your feelings and your reaction and it doesn't require any great feats of empathy on my end to acknowledge some might find this stuff bothersome or to nod along at the suggestion that casual generalizations are fraught and the habit of them is to be avoided and is probably just not a great thing to begin with, in almost all contexts.
But that isn't the argument. The argument is that this is the same and deserves identical opprobrium as, say, anti-semitism. You know, anti-semitism, the prejudice with a long history of actual oppression that was also a fundamental tenet of an ideology that perpetrated the industrial extermination of millions of people for their ethnicity, that still exists, the effects of which still reverberate through our culture and society, etc. Compared to some people being miffed at some tweets. To call an argument drawing a parallel between these merely dumb and ignorant is bend-over-backwards polite and charitable.
> Calling someone a butthead is rude, calling someone a racial slur is also rude but also much worse.
But we are talking about racial slurs and not just "rude" language. I don't agree that there's some hierarchy of racism where changing the race moves you up and down the offensive scale. All racism is equally bad, yes even that pointed toward white people.
I'd suggest you do a bit of reading on this because you keep repeating that very premise - it is simple, compelling, seemingly 'fair' and thoroughly wrong. I outlined it above but, obviously, much better and clearer things have been written about it. Racism is not a matter of calling people names.
We're obviously not going to agree on this. It's not just you or I though, this is a huge debate of our times. I truly believe the dictionary definition of racism will continue to be how most people view, define and react to statements like Jeong's. Racism = bad is really tough to argue against.
We'll see if the left can prescriptively redefine what "racism" means to align with their politics. I have serious doubts that it will pick up steam though.
It's not. This particular one is mostly manufactured twitter outrage.
I truly believe the dictionary definition of racism
You aren't using a 'dictionary definition of racism'. You're using one in which evoking literal Nazism is the same thing as being upset at someone's unfunny edgelordery. It's not a good look and you ought to reconsider.
I don’t think anyone should be banned. If I had to pick a very visible example of caustic far left tweets I’d say the New York Times tech editor is a good example:
Alex Jones' personal account has almost 10 times the twitter following of "the New York Times tech editor" who's name I've actually never heard before. I think Alex Jones' active disparagement of the parents of mass shooting victims is more actively harmful than what you're linking here.
"active disparagement" does not constitute a very high bar for censorship. A US platform with with an emphasis on free speech should leverage the work put into US legal precedent as closely as possible. There has been a massive amount of thought put into the reasoning behind legal limitations on speech.
It feels to me that you are intentionally misunderstanding my comment. I was suggesting that the platform claiming to support free speech would be true to their word by opening up as much as legally possible, rather than do anything they want just because it's legal.
Do you feel like I would have gained anything from your observation that thought has been put into the American legal system?
That legal system deliberately doesn't place restrictions on platforms like twitter - might I similarly suggest that you should consider that there was a great deal of thought put into that deliberate omission. If a platform like twitter supports free speech as thoughtfully considered by the American legal system, they are acting consistently with that if they deplatform people like Alex Jones. An example of them not acting consistently with that would be taking government direction on silencing users.
You are arguing with a straw man. I said nothing about their ability to act arbitrarily within the legal bounds. I also said nothing about them taking government direction on silencing users. The crux of my statement is about how a platform that claims to emphasize free speech should behave. Don't get confused and think I'm talking about how a company is legally required to behave, or the degrees of freedom a company has within the legal system.
Don't worry, there's no danger of me becoming confused here. When you condescended to me about how much thought was put into the American legal system surrounding free speech, and then related that to a private company, I knew you were confused. Its quite clear that these thoughtful legal decisions contain no advice for a private company.
Maybe you should explain why it is not applicable, rather than persist in loquacious but insubstantial contradiction. I am stating an opinion of how a company that claims to greatly value free speech should operate. To simply state that I am wrong without any reasoning behind it is a waste of everyone's time.
Because free speech legislation focuses almost entirely on government intervention. Which is a point I made immediately after you condescended to me about America's legal system.
And here's the direct evidence that you are intentionally misunderstanding me. I said absolutely nothing about government intervention on social media platforms.
Flamewars, especially these tedious tit-for-tat ones that go on forever, are just what we don't want on HN. We penalize and eventually ban accounts that can't or won't stop doing this. Please stop doing this.
So you are saying that banning should not be based on whether or not tweets are clearly hate speech, but rather on how many people see them? That doesn’t sound like a good plan.
Absolutely not, and yours is a disingenuous response because you couldn’t have reasonably inferred that I was saying that from my response. You are just trying to stir things up.
Both examples should have been banned. One was just as bad as the other - one of them just had less reach. However, only one was suspended. The other was actually rewarded for her racist tweets, both with new followers among those who agreed with her racist views on her never-suspended Twitter account, and with a shiny new job at the NYT. On what planet is that a reasonable, unbiased outcome?
I do, yes. I also think Sarah Jeong and her ilk should be both banned from Twitter and fired from the NYT. If her comments were directed at any other race, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion - she would have been banned and never hired. That is an extraordinary double standard.
The bottom line is, nobody should be giving those that wish to spew hate speech a large platform with which to do it - regardless of who that hate is directed at.
Edit: The fact that a comment with this sentiment has been downvoted says everything one needs to know about how toxic HN has become.
“Whataboutism” is relevant in a case where there is clear bias. If what Alex Jones posted violated Twitter’s rules, I am perfectly fine with his account being suspended or even permanently banned. I certainly don’t agree with or want to see his whacked out posts. But I’m not at all fine with the rules being selectively enforced, seemingly along political lines.
And yes, if saying that nobody should be given a megaphone with which to spew hateful rhetoric gets downvotes, that is an indication of the toxicity of HN.
But both Jeong and Jones are currently not banned, so I'm not sure why you think saying "what about how Jeong isn't banned" is anything but whataboutism.
They clearly aren't equivalent. What specific people were harmed by Jeong's speech? Were you specifically upset by Jeong's speech? Yes?
Ok, now imagine your child has been shot and then someone says you're a liar, and that since their death people keep showing up at your house and church calling you a liar. Do you think you'd be more or less upset by this?
Were you specifically upset by Jeong's speech? Yes?
Yes, I specifically was indeed very upset by Jeong's speech, as any other human should be (apparently you were not). Nobody should be saying those things about any race, period. Arguably, some of her tweets also called for violence. Her favorite hashtag - "#CancelWhitePeople" - calls for the elimination of white people from the planet.
You're going to try to stick to your argument, but there's no winning this one. Calling for the elimination of an entire race of people is just as bad if not worse than making some ridiculous assertions about a mass shooting being a hoax.
Apparently a lot of people weren't because she still has a job at the New York Times. Clearly your belief that humans should be upset isn't reflected in society or reality.
Your view that you'd be more upset at someone You and I never heard of before this outrage saying white people should be "Cancelled" (lol) than someone deliberately accusing you that you lied about the death of your child is, simply, ridiculous.
What's ridiculous is this argument. Why can't you just admit that they both said terrible things that clearly violated Twitter's policies, and for that, both of them should have been thrown off the platform? You're essentially saying that what she said was OK. You're tacitly endorsing her statements, many of which were incredibly vile.
So, this discussion is over, since I refuse to engage with people that endorse racists or racist statements of any kind. Have a nice life.
I asked for a visible far-left figure that you thought ought to be banned, and I'm saying you haven't found an equivalent to Alex Jones.
I am not endorsing what she said, I simply don't care about it. I'm white. At least, by later definitions of white. By Huxley's original definition my Scottish ethnicity doesn't qualify :)
I have a lot of sympathy for the parents of dead children though.
It has led to people harassing, threatening, and assaulting various people who suffered from the shooting. Even the original disparagement is borderline harassment, regularly being told your greif is a lie and that you should be ashamed of sounds traumatic to experience.
> He was arrested on May 30, and the signs were found in his home.[59] Truelove was convicted of the theft and sentenced to 12 months in prison.[60]
> Mills entered an Alford plea and was thus found guilty; he was given a suspended sentence of one year in jail and two years' probation.
> Lucy Richards, a 57-year-old woman from Tampa, was charged with four counts of transmitting threats in interstate commerce for sending death threats to Lenny Pozner,
So system is working as designed. no?
Is this not enough deterrent for people to not harass people ?
Do you think these three incidents from 4 years ago warrant killing free speech. Do you think these are instances serious enough to sacrifice free speech? They don't even look that much of a big deal based on the sentences given out.
The system is only working if you view this as a detailed recording of every instance of harassment. That seems implausible, and the various citations seem to support the idea there is a lot more harassment happening.
Even if you do think this is all the harassment that has happened, the continued coverage means more harassment is likely. Next time the death threats may not be caught in time.
>Thats some strange logic. You have to weigh pros and cons.
Your argument was that "these incidents don't seem like that big of a deal." So in your fictional world where those three incidents are the only harassment that has happened, it's still a big deal as the system may fail the next time. In reality, there is already a mountain of harassment that the system failed to punish.
Much like speech, misuse of alcohol is already against the law. And people that have shown themselves to be unable to consume alcohol safely can find themselves stripped of various freedoms.
Your argument is all over the place. From "no harm is being done" to "the harm is limited and already being punished" and now "harmful behavior should be tolerated."
That's not far left even in the slightest. That's liberalism with extreme identity politics. Marx would never agree with Sarah, as it has nothing to do with class concerns and even further splits the working class.
Fred Hampton also often talked about how no matter what race, white, brown, black, the proletariat must come together to overthrow the bourgeois in a proletarian revolution.
> In fact someone changed those tweets from “white males” to something else and got banned from Twitter.
The point is that "white males" are no group protected by any anti-discriminatory law or fall under any "group" that is discriminable against under moral terms. You can legally and ethically flame against "white males" as you choose.
The reason is simple: as a collective in Western societies, white males occupy most of society's leading roles and (together with white women) form the majority of Western countries' populations. Discrimination, however, requires a power and numbers majority of the discriminators over those "discriminated"... which simply isn't the case, no matter where in the Western sphere you look.
Granted, the demographich statistics for the US show that whites may sooner or later no longer be the dominant ones by numbers... but as long as the representation of non-whites, especially black/brown people of color or people of latino and Asian origin, in ALL OF society is not representative of their numbers, whites simply cannot be discriminated against.
As a reason, there's no problem when Twitter bans people who post such stuff.
I personally reported many accounts, including an antifa group that called for killing cops and white peoples to no avail. At the same time twitter bans people for sharing news about job growth. Go figure.
It's possible to find literally any opinion on twitter. What's the magnitude of this problem compared to Alex Jones' active disparagement of the parents of victims of mass shootings?
It's pretty straightforward. Twitter even offers it as a feature for your own tweets, something called Tweet Activity (the bar chart icon on every one of your own tweets).
The specific stats e.g. impressions, engagements, detail expands, clicks, replies, etc. are all measured. And that's just what's exposed to us. Twitter doubtless has more than that on hand.
What percentage of the population would you estimate would view actively targeting the families of shooting victims as worse than complaining about white people?
Do you feel like the accounts mentioned, ranked from most influential to least, would have Alex Jones at the very top?
Legal arguments often include reference to a "reasonable person". Legal is subjective.
You... want to begin at a spectacularly dumb outrage shitpost on /r/TheDonald? Nothing sensible should or can begin, end or come within 17.0381 gigaparsecs of there.
No, I'm saying what I said - it's spectacularly dumb and it's a shitpost. The fact that it's from /r/TheDonald just rounds out that assessment, that being a place of spectacularly dumb shitposts. I don't think the tweets are falsified.
I've never heard of any of these people, certainly none rise to the visibility of Richard Spencer or Alex Jones. Half of these are actual white people complaining about white people...
That’s agitprop for Trump fanatics, not a serious list. They have people making jokes or political points – i.e. they apparently seriously think Mike Monteiro’s anti-fascist position is about killing white people! — but there’s nobody on the publicity level of Alex Jones and there certainly aren’t any serious threats which violate Twitter’s terms of service.
In contrast, Alex Jones made specific accusations about specific named people who were already dealing with harassment. The Pizzagate people had a potential mass shooting on their hands. The Sandy Hook parents, Brennan Gilmore, etc. all had credible claims for libel and concerns that his incitement would spur more dangerous activities. When Twitter suspended him for a week it was after a literal call to arms telling people “Now is time to act on the enemy before they do a false flag”.
As for your claim that Twitter is banning anyone for sharing job growth, you really need to cite credible sources for anyone to believe you. The conservative movement loves to loudly proclaim their victim status but the conspiracy theories inevitably turns out to be either misunderstanding how the services work or expecting special treatment.
Why does the account that tweeted "Old. White. Men." deserve to be banned based on that tweet? That's something you are saying should be banned? (Just to be clear, that's one of the 'tweets' you are linking to in that screenshot)
> I personally reported many accounts, including an antifa group that called for killing cops and white peoples to no avail.
Citation needed. Actually quite interested in this one. This seems like something serious.
> At the same time twitter bans people for sharing news about job growth.
Citation needed. Please note, I'm looking specifically for proof that someone who shared job growth information got banned specifically for sharing that job growth information.
Until you provide the requested information, I'll feel comfortable in dismissing anything you say as bs.
So the offending tweet got deleted by twitter, but the account is still up. I scrolled through the first page and they are literally calling for doxing ICE agents right there. Pasted both pics to imgur
Okay, sure, doxing is bad, you've reported it, and as you've said, they've deleted a previous post. I don't know what the threshold is, but pretty sure there is one at some point. That being said, Alex Jones is still up and tweeted 5 minutes ago, and has done things at least as bad, if not worse. So... yeah.
But, that's 1 out of 3 you've "address", and your 1 isn't even compelling. You literally tell me flat out that Twitter is indeed responding to reports and acting on them.
Anyways, please address the other two, and I hope they actually demonstrate what you claim.
So your complaint is that a tweet which you reported was … deleted? Twitter’s process generally sucks but that really doesn’t support the claim that there’s political discrimination going on – I’m certain that if you switched to reporting right-wing extremists, Gamergaters, etc. you’d have the same experience.
Let's not pretend that left wing violence is anywhere near the scale of violence on the far right. There are literally dozens of murders each year in the US from members of the far right.
We're not talking about violence (and you're statement is pure conjecture anyway), we're talking about tweets and yes the left wing tweets are just as bad as the right wing tweets as I and others have given examples of in this thread.
Wow, did not know it was CNN that flagged the Jones post which got him suspended for 7 days.