The Twitter purge demonstrates corporations now purport to determine what speech is acceptable.
Twitter has begun to purge alleged hate speakers, including extremists. However, people banned in recent years include those with credible claims to be middle of the road Conservatives and Human Rights activists. A few years ago I was permanently suspended, but legally persuaded them to unban me. I then used the unban to delete my accounts in disgust. I then had to threaten them again to make them ban people impersonating me with my old names. Aside from me, they even failed to ban an account claiming to link to the “child porn captial [sic] of the internet” until they received multiple media inquiries. I have little time for Twitter. However, why are we as a society allowing corporations to police free speech?
Twitter is a social media company partially owned by a Saudi Arabian prince. Saudi Arabia being a country where the monarch is an actual, old fashioned monarch who holds legislative and executive power and most public offices are held by members of his extended family.
Even left wingers are beginning to realise that it is scary to allow corporations motivated by profits unfettered power. Aside from their calls for censorship, I could agree with almost everything far left Senator Al Franken says in his Guardian article (archive) –
“In 2014, Facebook published its findings from an experiment in which it altered its News Feed algorithm for a segment of its users – unbeknownst to them, of course – and filtered posts based on their emotional content. As orchestrated by the altered algorithm, some users saw predominantly positive content while others saw mostly negative content. Unsurprisingly, the big takeaway was that Facebook has the power to influence our psychological state.
That’s scary.”
There is little more to say. When Al Franken is (almost) on the same page as Breitbart news and Steve Bannon, society has a major problem. I have no tears for the Twitter purge. I saw this coming and left last year. Mainstream Conservatives (not alt-Right, not neo-Nazis) need to set up social media that is functional, allows us to function and enticing to ordinary non-political people. Gab is a start. I think we do need to allow the alt-Light and alt-Right because censorship is unhealthy for democracy – that is not the same as endorsing the alt-Right.
What cannot happen is we allow multi-national corporations to decide for us what speech is acceptable. In the United States it is tantamount to an end-run around the 1st Amendment. In the EU it overrides the European Convention on Human Rights. This has to change.
Twitter’s enforcement is such a joke, I’ve been reporting death threats, violent rhetoric, harassment, etc. and all of those accounts are still up, even after their latest PR stunt. Now, none of that stuff was directed at me (the report feature does ask that), but I don’t understand how someone can clearly threaten to kill someone and have nothing be done.
Meanwhile, popular streamer BroTeamPill was banned pre-purge for saying “fag hag.” http://archive.is/SVe2p
Twitter personality Mombot was shadow banned, however a man that sent her a DM asking for photos of her children so he could “print out their pictures and cum on them” is, of course, unbanned. http://archive.is/6Zrwf#selection-7125.0-7124.3
I don’t know if you’ve seen this yet, Anita Sarkeesian (of Feminist Frequency, which is one of Twitter’s “trust and safety” council members) engaged in targeted harassment of someone for talking positively about Gamergate, discussion of which has been rekindled recently due to Erik Kain speaking about it. Not only did she drop the f bomb as well as an acronym version (which you may recall people were banned or had their accounts locked for doing to Verified Twitter accounts earlier this year), she also quote tweeted her victim, which in the Twitter community is the equivalent of painting a target on someone in hopes your followers attack them as well. http://archive.is/c446d
Thinking of Twitter’s “trust and safety” partners, the scam Crash Override Network is still listed as a “global partner” for the United States despite no activity on their social media, including Twitter itself, for close to two years. http://archive.is/ZE2Yi (The kicker? The final post on most of the CON social media was an announcement that you could now donate to this scam through FemFreq. http://archive.is/r7Dln http://archive.is/FYXyK http://archive.is/1rDVk)
The CON email “crisis helpline” has also been down for around a year or x amount of days past one because it has been offline since December 2016. http://archive.is/YljHb#selection-285.26-285.39
This is somewhat related, you might get a kick out of this: Part 1 http://archive.is/xyRS8 Part 2 http://archive.is/S1yfI
I really hope Twitter implodes or gets new leadership soon, you can’t even look at the President of the United States’ tweets without seeing vile comments being spewed at every single thing he says.