It's only nice if you fully share politics with the moderation team. Which currently works in a very mobster-like manner: for my friends - everything, for my enemies - the law. The rules seem to apply one to some, and many times without any evidence.
if and only if you want to use twitter to discuss politics
I'm noticing
A) twitter users that interest me and don't discuss politics are usually pretty great
B) I generally don't want to read anybody's political opinions on Twitter or most places... people who want to talk about politics mostly seem to be in to fighting a culture war, there might be people who aren't but I don't see them and it isn't the platform's fault or a moderation issue
> twitter users that interest me and don't discuss politics are usually pretty great
It seems to be falling out of fashion, but a few years ago a lot of prominent Silicon Valley technologists started intermingling overtly racist and otherwise hateful political Tweets among their otherwise interesting and insightful tech Tweets. I think Twitter and other ideologically-aligned media radicalized them, which is to say that avoiding political accounts is a fine thing except (1) sometimes Twitter turns accounts political and (2) avoiding accounts that Tweet about politics at all is swimming against the current and (3) it sucks to have the all-or-nothing choice between following/not-following an account (rather than being able to follow interesting tech Tweets but uninteresting political Tweets, for example).
I guess I don't think a person owes me a politics-free experience, if they say things I don't like then I don't like what they say and don't want to follow them. No amount of moderation is going to stop people from expressing themselves in ways I don't like and I don't really blame the platform for people turning toxic, it's on the people themselves.
No one is arguing that they owe you a politics free experience, but one obvious solution is to allow people to have “channels” so I can subscribe to your tech opinions or your politics opinions distinctly. There are lots of other things that moderation could improve, like not centering the most toxic versions of each viewpoint.
> a few years ago a lot of prominent Silicon Valley technologists started intermingling overtly racist and otherwise hateful political Tweets among their otherwise interesting and insightful tech Tweets.
"I don't think California should repeal civil rights legislation in order to allow overt hiring on the basis of race and gender."
"I think we should perhaps reconsider our non-enforcement of property crimes due to the fact that nobody can park on the street, the stores across from me are boarded up, and two pharmacies in my relatively affluent neighborhood just closed due to theft."
"I didn't find it appropriate for the protestors to tear down a statue of Ulysses S. Grant or rename a school from Abraham Lincoln."
"I don't think it should be part of the school curriculum to be talking to preschoolers about gender and sexuality."
"Asians are disproportionally denied access to schools and employment due to arbitrary ethic and racial targets."
I don't think the sarcastic response really contributes to the discussion. There is enough toxicity on twitter that if someone digs hard enough they could find examples that aren't twitter-political-bubble-strawmen.
I disagree. I find their examples a good collection of the kind of viewpoints that get caught in the crossfire and disallowed when content moderation goes too far.
To be clear: there is often a lot of gray area and some middle ground to be taken in complex debates. When one side (eg: far-right American trollish behaviour) goes too hard in to the paint, the (over?) reaction by the opposing side(s) often loses perspective and it's the more reasonable opinions in the middle that get squashed in the well meaning attempts to supress troll like extremist influence. I think the above post highlights exactly these kind of opinions that get steamrolled away, even though many of them are within the realm of sensible debate.
I think that highlighting would have accomplished that better without sarcastically presenting them as "bad views".
All the sarcasm accomplished was an indirect criticism of the prior poster who asserted without evidence tech figureheads were tweeting "overtly racist and otherwise hateful political Tweets". It's pretty uncharitable to assume they were referring to stuff on that list (many of which aren't just in the realm of sensible debate, but are actually majority views-- e.g. #1 we can look to the results of the ballot measure).
I don't think anyone seriously doubts that with enough searching we could find a couple examples that would make their claim technically true, at the very least... without delving into comments within the realm of sensible debate.
We shouldn't need to be so cynical, but if we must we don't need to do it at the expense of other participants here!
Twitter encourages hot-takes. Because of that all sorts of ill considered crap shows up there-- and that includes both inappropriately tarring views as racist as well as racist views that most people would agree are racist.
That's true, it probably would have helped had the original poster provided some examples of the supposed racist behaviour to save us the trouble of speculating.
It really isn’t germane and had I posted examples the thread almost certainly would have devolved further since this stuff really brings out the trolls.
This isn't what I had in mind (I tried to signal that by using "overt"). I don't want to drill into details because it seems like it will only invite flame. If there was a DM feature on this site, I'd link you to some stuff to show you what I'm talking about.
Would you identify which of your examples is speech that you find objectionable? The last statement about discrimination against Asians seems particularly well-supported by evidence, so it's not clear to me and perhaps others which statement(s) you intend to highlight as the example of "hateful things".
I guess it helps to share the moderation team's politics if you're on Twitter to talk about politics or other hot button stuff, but I thought it was pretty clear that the GP is not on Twitter for that.
This is a good point, however, I would say that the % of things which are NOT hot button issues has decreased dramatically over the past 5-6 years or so. It's a lot harder to avoid now.
Twitter seems to really want everyone to be talking about politics though. Every time I click on a trending news article "the algorithm" just bombards me with recommends to follow every single politician under the sun. It's a minefield and it turns me off from the service as a whole.
You're confused about this. The current twitter moderation guidelines are fairly clear. A tweet cannot target someone for what I can describe as "inherent traits". The classic example is
"I hate Muslim men" = banned (Muslim and man are inherent traits)
"I hate Muslim cab drivers" = OK (cab driver is a chosen profession)
I have a friend who was banned for saying something to the effect of "I hope white men have trouble sleeping tonight"
They have specific rules and they apply them. No one is going through millions of tweets every day and seeing if they match an ideology.
That's an interesting take. I will share just a single example that flew by earlier this week that is clear evidence of this policy not being followed, either by algorithms, or by manual followup.
Content moderation can be a challenging problem, but this is a clear failure of both algorithmic and human moderation processes, and there are an enormous number of these failures that lead to real harm in the form of radicalization and targeting of individuals and groups online and the real world.
Yet Twitter is full of hate tweets towards white people and men. And they rarely get banned. I've reported hundreds. Do you care to guess how many got banned?
Also, Muslim isn't an inherent trait. It's a religion that is taught. Even your examples are faulty.
I barely use Twitter, but I don't understand using Twitter for political discussions. To me it seems that it is a horrible platform for it. 280 characters isn't enough space to do much actual discussing of politics. It's enough to throw meaningless insults at the other side or post meaningless virtue-signalling type content, and that's about it. Maybe I'm wrong though, because I don't really use the platform much.
It's good for quippy slogans and volume-based demonstrations. One of my favorite accounts @TheWarOnCars, a pro-cycling and transit urbanist podcast, spends most of its timeline retweeting famous people complaining about traffic or parking with the phrase "@Person, welcome to the war on cars". The idea is to point out that, even people who say they love cars and promote suburban-style development, pretty clearly hate the everyday reality of living in a car-centric city when they're not talking in a political context.
> It's only nice if you fully share politics with the moderation team.
I'll go even farther and say it's nice if you fully share politics with the moderation team and you are too insecure about those politics to entertain other viewpoints. The sort of people about whom John Stewart Mill wrote:
> He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.
Is there any friendly place on the internet where you can have open, unrestricted and constructive discussion on politics and deep social issues, with people from various backgrounds and differing opinions ?
That's not the case. Literally everyone who's dealt in inflammatory content (talking about a violent event, say, the recent Ukraine war has been filled with this) has had run-ins with the moderation process at twitter. They issue suspensions for false positives all the time, and everyone thinks it's targetted censorship. It's not.
Where it starts to look biased is that they've drawn two lines in the sand in recent years: 1. No disinformation about a global pandemic, and 2. No using lies about an election to justify violence against the government. And they banned a bunch of people that did that. And yes: it was one side that made those issues "partisan".
I really don't know what you want Twitter to do here. In any other society, those would seem like reasonable rules.
Disinformation about the global pandemic? How do we know if it’s disinformation if it can’t even be debated? It’s a fact that vaccines can cause injury. It’s a fact that there is a risk of myocarditis. But you can’t talk about that.
Why was Robert Malone kicked off? Isn’t his opinion more valuable than some random news personality when it comes to Covid? Literally banning a scientist who helped invent the very tech he is discussing. If he’s wrong, that’s fine, but it isn’t about facts — even the debate is banned.
That simply isn't true. I'd love an example of how yourself or other you follow are censored. I'm deeply familiar with the platform and have not witnessed censorship outside of threats and direct hate speech, as well as extreme disinformation campaigns (ie Trump).
(Of course you'll be able to find a bunch of death threats from random accounts all over, I could find a handful in a few minutes, but that's largely outside of anyone's control.)
> (Of course you'll be able to find a bunch of death threats from random accounts all over, I could find a handful in a few minutes, but that's largely outside of anyone's control.)
I think this is what I don’t understand about the general sentiment that Twitter is some kind of uber-censored platform. Sure, high profile accounts and tweets can sometimes be removed, but have you ever tried reporting tweets?
9 out of 10 times that I report tweets threatening violence or harm against someone, I get a notification a few hours later that the “moderation team” has reviewed that tweet and found it not to be in breach of any policies.
Twitter’s reporting system is ineffective at best, and I almost wish I had seen the kind of heavy handed moderation that people prescribe to Twitter here.
I mean recent Twitter leaks have shown internal tools that let them categorize users into blacklists and the ability censor their tweets so they dont get much reach or engagement by not showing up in Trending lists and etc. The screenshots of the tools came out during the big hack a year ago that was pushing crypto scams.
And why is that a bad thing? Trending blacklists are a standard moderation tool, basically every social media platform uses them nowadays. Without them, bad actors can game the algorithm to get their spam promoted through the trends system.
The fact that moderation tools exist does not imply that they are being used for political censorship. None of the screenshots of "search blacklisted" accounts from the leak showed any evidence of it being used on actual people, they are all random alphanumeric usernames with more reports than tweets.
In fact, the opposite is true. In 2018, when the feature was first rolled out, it was found to be catching several notable conservative commentators because their tweeting behavior is hard to distinguish from trolls and spambots (wonder why...), so those people were explicitly whitelisted so that they would appear in searches and trends despite their bad behavior.
We quickly went from "Twitter isn't a heavily censored platform" to "they have secret blacklists, but it's totally normal and not political and a good thing anyway". This game of moving goalposts is tiresome and clearly disingenuous.
Twitter is a moderated platform. Tooling for moderating content existing does not inherently imply it is being used for political purposes, but you’re more than welcome to contradict that with sources.
There’s no goalpost moving here - a social media site having the ability to prevent large volumes of spam making its way to the trending page in front of thousands of eyeballs shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. The number of crypto scams in replies to tweets by Elon himself suggests that this tooling is definitely not as draconian in ability as you seem to believe.
Your email provider also has “secret” blacklists, and if incoming email originates from a sender on those lists then it gets put in your junk (or even bounced). Does that concern you?
For a vast amount of people (on both sides of the political spectrum, oddly enough), referring to Levine as a man is an objective statement of reality.
The tweet is still up, even. Babylon Bee are being asked to delete it as a form of bending the knee to an opposing ideology. It's wrongthink, not hate speech or incitement, that you and Twitter are concerned with.
I don't have a horse in the trans debate, but I have my fair share of opinions that are verboten in progressive circles. It would be stupid of me to deny what is happening there.
For a long time referring to ____ race (or women, etc) as having a naturally lower intelligence was "an objective statement of reality" to the vast majority of people, so I don't that a compelling argument for defining hate speech.
Especially in this case where it was targeted at an individual, and not just a conservative blog post on transgenderism being linked to etc. Notice that Ben Shapiro et al have not been banned.
> I don't that a compelling argument for defining hate speech.
I'm not trying to define hate speech, I'm saying that there's no hate there to begin with and so all we're left with is an argument over reality (or the terms we use to describe it): is a woman an adult human female, or is there something else we have to consider?
In your counterexamples, black people/women are being declared strictly inferior. That's not the case here - Levine isn't lessened by being an adult human male.
If you want something censored, the onus should be on you to prove that it is hateful, not on someone else to prove that it is not. For that, you need to define hate speech and explain how the Babylon Bee's post fits that definition alongside the examples you just gave.
The fact that your comment is being downvoted is why we need more free speech. The above comment is simply a biological fact. Many people are stuck in echo chambers that make them think their fringe opinions are from the majority, Twitter enables this enormously
Banning the Bee is warranted only in the eyes of transgender ideologues.
The whole point of free speech is that no faction should be allowed to suppress the speech of others, lest such factions prevent consideration of ideas that might eventually prove convincing and true.
>The conservative-leaning parody site, The Babylon Bee, was suspended by Twitter for 12 hours, after it had mockingly awarded transgender government official Rachel Levine the title "Man of the Year."
In what way was this "100% warranted"? You mean it's "100% warranted" to ban accounts which make fun of people and things you don't like? What about making fun of Trump? Is that fine? Seems to be, and seems to be based entirely on the mod's political persuasions.
Let's talk about Hunter Biden's laptop. This was banned almost immediately under the premise of "hacked material." Okay, seems fair. Except they allowed (and continue to allow) hacked material to circulate about the Canadian Freedom Convoy donors.
Let's talk about covid. Twitter banned any and all mentions (and accounts) which discussed the possibility that covid came from a lab in Wuhan. This is now a leading theory of its origin. Project Veritas, whether you like them or not, have been instrumental in exposing the relationship between Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance. The fact that Fauci oversaw re-defining the term "gain of function research," that he explicitly gave funding to EcoHealth Alliance, knowing they would be funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct gain of function research, and uncovered incorrectly redacted emails between Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance.
Twitter even suspended Chinese virologist Li-Meng Yan who fled the country to talk about the high likelihood of a lab leak.
I feel quite certain you're busy telling yourself "but these are all totally justified!" This means your views align really well with the moderation on Twitter. Where it's fine to ban things like this, but not the hacked private information about Canadian Freedom Convoy donors, or Trump and family hacks, or the doxing of Libs of Ticktok founder Chaya Raichik.
> Let's talk about covid. Twitter banned any and all mentions (and accounts) which discussed the possibility that covid came from a lab in Wuhan.
This is the one example everyone who is getting their knickers in a twist about Twitter censorship loves to bring up, but it doesn't seem to be a great example. There's only weak circumstantial evidence in favour of the theory and banning discussion of it was something Twitter realised was a mistake and rolled back on.
I don't think it's unreasonable for mistakes to happen as long as they're corrected. I think there are plenty of things you can criticise Twitter for, but this seems like an odd one to highlight.
> Twitter even suspended Chinese virologist Li-Meng Yan who fled the country to talk about the high likelihood of a lab leak.
"Even"? This is a misrepresentation. Yan is a political hack. She refuses to have her work peer-reviewed. See e.g. [0]. She's a useful pawn for Steve Bannon.
What a shock you are getting downvoted - not sure why, other than you are challenging people’s cherished dogma.
Which is exactly why if Elon can forced moderation to at least be transparent and consistent, and not purely through the lens of political ideology we will all be better for it.
And if it makes people uncomfortable - good! If you are fat, dumb and happy then you really aren’t doing anything. Life without friction is pretty meaningless - probably why so many people are pretty miserable even if they don’t actively realize it. Reading some of the comments in here - the lack of self awareness by many is pretty amazing.
"Transparent and consistent" moderation has nothing to do with freeing it from "political ideology".
Twitter's moderation is fairly transparent, and mostly consistentish (as it can be, moderating on the scale that twitter does, which i guess is not very consistent at all...). Just because you don't agree with their moderation doesn't make it untransparent, or inconsistent.
Libs of TikTok was temporarily suspended twice for targeted harassment. On April 13, 2022, Libs of TikTok was suspended for 12 hours from Twitter for "hateful conduct." Hours after being reinstated, the account was suspended a second time for another 12 hours.
The only thing Libs of TikTok posts is videos made by liberals on TikTok. Yet it was deemed hateful? Reposting liberal content is hateful now.
I spent 2 seconds reading through:
"This polyamorous genderfluid witch is a preschool teacher in Florida. She’s so proud of herself that she discusses her gender and sexuality with 4 year olds"
"This is a mental illness"
"This teacher has been identified and is employed by @FergFlorSchools"
"3rd grade teacher at @GracemorNKC teaches 8 year olds about gender identity and then “wonders if anyone [students] will change their minds” presumably about their gender. These groomer teachers need to be fired. "
You say "just annotating videos", those political blinders you're wearing must be pretty strong...
That is not all it does, it's posts videos that are longer than any of their 'true believer' readers will actually watch. Many of which are at best 'cringe'. Then labels the videos as evidence of pedophelia/child grooming. Which they are clearly not.
So what if they label videos? Not sure how that matters. Mute or block if you are offended. Sticks and stone y’know?
How many posts have there been on Twitter calling republicans Nazis? Or claiming the 2016 election was stolen? Or calling Clarence Thomas a house —-r or an Uncle Tom.
>I'm deeply familiar with the platform and have not witnessed censorship outside of threats and direct hate speech
Maybe you're brainwashed to the point where everything Twitter bans falls into categories of "hate speech" or "extreme disinformation". That doesn't mean the majority of people out there share your views. Of course, you don't have to deal with those people, because you probably hang out only on websites that reinforce your biases via censorship.
>I'd love an example of how yourself or other you follow are censored.
Unity 2020 campaign account got permanently banned and links to its website were restricted even in private messages. They broke no rules, posted nothing edgy and no one ever coherently explained why this happened.
New York Post got suspended after Tweeting Hunter Biden laptop article link. The suspension was based on clearly fabricated rationale.
These are just two egregious cases that I'm well familiar with. I can post about a dozen more. There are thousands less notable, but no less clear-cut examples out there. There are even more examples that are debatable, but which in totality indicate a pattern or political manipulation.
Funny thing is, I don't even use Twitter. The question is, why does a person like me is more aware of its censorship that someone who claims to be well familiar with the platform?
i'm just going to repeat what you said back to you, because it also applies to you.
Maybe you're brainwashed to the point where everything Twitter bans falls into categories of "hate speech" or "extreme disinformation". That doesn't mean the majority of people out there share your views. Of course, you don't have to deal with those people, because you probably hang out only on websites that reinforce your biases via censorship.
