Comment by partiallypro
5 years ago
Twitter is well within the rights to do this, but I have seen tweets from blue check marks essentially calling for violence and Twitter didn't remove them. So, does that mean Twitter actually -supports- those view points now? If Twitter is going to police people, it needs to be across the board. Otherwise it's just a weird censorship that is targeting one person and can easily be seen as political.
Everyone is applauding this because they hate Trump, but take a step back and see the bigger picture. This could backfire in serious ways, and it plays to Trump's base's narrative that the mainstream media and tech giants are colluding to silence conservatives (and maybe there could even be some truth to that.) I know the Valley is an echo chamber, so obviously no one is going to ever realize this.
Erm, what? This is just not true, and is a false dichotomy. Moderation is hard. Always has been. Stuff will slip through the cracks.
POTUS has the most popular (and currently most controversial - note, that's _controversial_ not _extreme_ or some other morph) so it's easy to see why Twitter are on top of it. Other blue-checked accounts, whilst more "important" than unverified, just simply don't compare to the importance and prevalance of POTUS' account.
If most of the mistakes happen in one direction, then I would argue that there's some other mechanism at work than just "mistakes".
Update: data https://quillette.com/2019/02/12/it-isnt-your-imagination-tw...
Update: admission https://www.vox.com/2018/9/14/17857622/twitter-liberal-emplo...
Maybe right leaning users have a higher propensity to say offensive/harmful things?
I'm not being facetious. Isn't this something the right is actually proud of? I mean, they actually boast about not being "politically correct" (something the rest of the western world calls "common decency").
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Maybe conservative america needs to appeal to people smart enough to start their own tech companies, so they can compete in the free market to do things the way they like.
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I think the Quillette piece is overstating its evidence to make a rhetorical point. 1) They're only measuring the last enforcement step. 2) n=22 is really small. 3) They're measuring (suspended|trump) and are asserting the relationship is causal. If you download their dataset, you find these 4 people listed under the "supports trump" column: Alex Jones, American Nazi Party, David Duke, Richard Spencer. I think most everyone can agree these 4 weren't suspended because they are conservative or voted for Trump. (The other instances probably aren't partisan either, but not everyone will know about those people)
> database of prominent, politically active users who are known to have been temporarily or permanently suspended from the platform. … Of 22 prominent, politically active individuals who are known to have been suspended since 2005 and who expressed a preference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, 21 supported Donald Trump.
The Vox piece isn't an "admission" that their moderation is biased. Twitter's CEO is "admitting" that the politics of the developers is heavily liberal:
> “We have a lot of conservative-leaning folks in the company as well, and to be honest, they don’t feel safe to express their opinions at the company,” Dorsey said. “They do feel silenced by just the general swirl of what they perceive to be the broader percentage of leanings within the company, and I don’t think that’s fair or right.”
The link you've characterized as an admission discusses internal bias, and doesn't say anything about bias in moderating.
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>Update: admission
This link doesn't say what you claim. It's Dorsey talking about the internal social environment at Twitter's offices, not Twitter's moderation policies.
I’m not convinced by the arguments from your first link. As stated by the article itself, a difference in the number of left-leaning vs right-leaning bans does not prove the standards for censorship are different depending on what side of the political spectrum you fall on. It could be that conservative content violates rules more frequently than liberal or centrist content.
It goes on to say this can’t be possible because it would mean that conservative content would have to violate rules at 4x the rate of others, and that statistically its highly improbable. Why? It’s a known problem that Twitter has a lot of accounts that are fake accounts from bad actors trying to sow discord in the US political system, and those tend to be right leaning. Didn’t Twitter relatively recently do a purge of a large number of accounts that were deemed fake? That could easily skew the numbers, especially because those accounts tend to engage in the kind of rhetoric that gets you banned.
And then the article points to cases where liberal leaning content doesn’t get banned even though it should. I can also find cases where conservative content violates the rules yet it didn’t face consequences, most prominently the president’s account. It’s not just liberals who get a free pass, so I’m not sure what that proves.
Is it possible there is a bias in how Twitter sensors content? Sure. But that article makes it sound like they have a data driven, mathematically rigorous proof that it’s true, and I don’t think they meet that mark.
>This is just not true, and is a false dichotomy. Moderation is hard.
It's absolutely true, and has absolutely nothing to do with moderation "being hard". As someone who absolutely opposes Trump, but also absolutely opposes our many wars and global bombings, I'm horrified on a daily basis (and have been since 2009 when I joined Twitter) by open calls for violence against a wide variety of countries from Syria to Venezuela to Iran. When has Twitter ever suspended anyone (let alone a public figure, or even Trump himself, who has called for violence against other countries many times) a single time for openly calling for violence against the people of any of the countries? The answer is never. Its beyond absurd, bordering on delusional, to pretend that Twitter's actions here weren't nakedly political and have absolutely nothing to do with a standard against, "fomenting violence".
> If Twitter is going to police people, it needs to be across the board.
One way to look at this is that that's exactly what Twitter has started doing. The president violated the TOS, and got the treatment prescribed under the TOS. His EO yesterday essentially asked for everyone to be treated in accordance with the TOS, so he's (ironically) getting exactly what he asked for.
It remains to be seen whether, in compliance with the EO, they apply this to everyone in a transparent and uniform way from now on. I hope they do.
Wait, Trump, the guy who had a platform plank complaining about his predecessors' use of executive orders as "power grabs" [0], actually issued an executive order about Twitter's TOS?
0 - https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-10-19/trump-...
It's nothing new. Politics is a team based sport. My brother calls Obama "King Obama" but is still a huge fan of Trump. I've discussed some of this stuff with him: in his eyes, Obama did stuff he shouldn't have, so Trump can do stuff he shouldn't.
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Don't worry... he also criticized Obama for golfing too much, and has gone golfing more frequently than Obama.
And Senate Republicans have openly asked judges to resign so they can be replaced by conservative judges, and their justification for why it's okay to do this so close to an election but it wasn't okay to confirm Garland so close to an election literally amounts to "Obama's a Democrat, Trump's a Republican."
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There is a worse side effect that comes from conservatives feeling that they have been silenced, as people feel like they have less and less say in a political process they are more and more likely to start employing means outside of it. The real risk here is that if more and more outlets for conservative voices are silenced, whether for good cause or not, this will reinforce the narrative that many of them have that they are the defenders of the truth and right and there is a vast conspiracy operating to seize their guns, deprive them of their rights, and whatever else they can imagine. As that happens there becomes more and more moral justification and greater and greater need there is seen to employ violence in end of their goals.
Ultimately the more and more "dangerous" opinions and people who share those opinions are silenced the more and more dangerous they become in reality.
EDIT: The nature of this comment is intended to be observational not advocational.
Do you believe it’s more dangerous to: A: Remove a post encouraging violence with the risk it’ll anger a group of people? Or... B: Keep it and let it reach 80 million followers?
There’s plenty of evidence that many sites (twitter included) allow violent speech from specific groups because they’re worried of the political backlash. These groups still complain about being silenced just the same, despite blatantly violating the TOS.
It doesn’t work. You’re just giving dangerous and violent people a platform to organize, encourage and enable violence. As a platform owner, you can’t just hope they’ll behave if you treat them nicely.
Alternatively - if those pushing the far-right violent rhetoric don't have as much of an audience, their support may fade because they don't have a platform.
Deplatforming works.
It is an interesting question. Although de-platforming reduces the reach of a group does it increase the overall vitrol of the group, or the level of extremism?
Although it may mean fewer people become part of the community it would also mean that those that remain with it are now more isolated from the outside world and increase the precieved level of persecution? Would this then correlate with an increase in action?
I don't know the answer to this, it seems logical to me that each of these answers would be yes, but I definitely think it is a topic worth investigating and discussing.
> Deplatforming works.
Any evidence for that assertion?
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Do you consider the tweet far-right violent rhetoric?
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Unless the content is called out for inaccuracy, bigotry, etc the user may not even be aware of the issue they create. Like if someone retweets a claim they believe but it is flagged as misleading and fact checked that might be the first time their views were checked and they might recognize their beliefs are wrong and rethink things. But they often won't and I think that is as much part of the problem. Trump won't rethink his position because a tweet was fact checked, he will attack the fact checker and supporters will do the same thanks to his example. There is no self reflection or awareness when called out and the poster becomes defensive, refusing to accept their comment as fake news or bigotry.
If conservatives feel they are being silenced but cannot recognize that the views 'censored' are often bigoted, racist, or simply unpopular or abhorrent outside their bubble, then what do you to? If you call out blatant racism you are less likely to find the user recognize their racism, apologize, and not use such language again and more likely to be called a snowflake and have that behavior turned up a notch. If the original comment is then downvoted by the community or removed by mods then it will enforce that persons view that they are being attacked. This is incredibly common on Reddit where users often include a 'bring on the downvotes' type edit after stating something intolerant or clearly false.
The solution is not to allow these views and opinions to sit unchecked but to recognize a modern civil society must be intolerant of intolerance and moderate appropriately. Downvote and report racist comments. Apply fact checking to statements, even those you believe or feel to be true as that is a sign of bias. If the user doubles down, move on as there is no value in arguing with someone putting their feelings and beliefs/bias above facts and reality. Perhaps when society or their online community turns their back on their comments they will finally have the time to reflect on why and recognize their behavior was unwarranted and unwanted.
> as people feel like they have less and less say in a political process they are more and more likely to start employing means outside of it
Teetering on the brink of an epiphany.
you're saying it like it's not already happening, and it's completely divorce from any actual reality or perception. When they say "I'm being silenced" they are simply pushing buttons they know work with more reasonable people, they are just using the "system" to their advantage. Conservatives in the USA are not a good faith actor and should never be taken at face value.
The problem with your response if you've fundementally divided the world into the fearless, social justice serving left and the corrupt, evil, fascist, right. It can be assumed that the far right is not going to change their mind at any point; however the majority of the world isn't far right or far left. Many people are moderates that could go one way or the other.
By designating everyone who doesn't agree with you as "the right" that can't every act in good faith and is irredeemable you galvanize the more moderates. This incident won't have a substantive impact on the far right, but it may cause a change in opinion in more moderate voices.
Essentially be advocating this black and white extremism you hurt your cause and play into the very narrative that those on the other side are saying.
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I'm a United States citizen.
I'm not a pure conservative, but I expect I hold several views you'd find repugnant and label as "conservative". For instance, I am strongly pro-life. Another one: I believe deeply in the existence of God (and other supernatural beings).
I am, therefore, a bad-faith actor, if I'm following right?
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> Conservatives in the USA are not a good faith actor
None of them? They are ALL acting bad faith? Is that a good faith argument?
The valley being an echo chamber doesn’t necessarily mean those implementing this have their heads in the sand.
It can’t be all perfectly achieved, but to do nothing, as they were before, could be now determined to be a worse case than providing these annotations to flagrant misuse by the highest impact profile that they can’t do away with entirely.
The legal issue is that their legal protection from defamation and libel under section 230 requires them to moderate "in good faith". If they only selective moderate accounts, then that protection may not survive in court.
...but I think a greater concern we can all agree on, is that for the type of communications that Twitter does - Twitter is effectively a monopoly. The people being censored here can't even themselves go to any alternative platform, because there's really no other platform at that scale for that content format.
...that's a bigger problem, because it gives Twitter the power to shape global communications unilaterally. Something no corporation should have the power to do.
I think, broadly, that censorship should be regulated by democratically elected bodies - not corporations.
There is no requirement under section 230 to moderate content in good faith. Selective moderation does not affect their liability. This law was passed democratically, for exactly this purpose.
>"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." This federal law preempts any state laws to the contrary: "[n]o cause of action may be brought and no liability may be imposed under any State or local law that is inconsistent with this section."
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This is absurd. Twitter is a corporation and can choose to present their product as they see fit. And nothing about them is essential. Twitter could go bankrupt and the world would not hurt at all. There are absolutely plenty of ways to disseminate information.
Twitter only has about 150 million daily active users. That's 1/3 of the population of the USA. There is no way in hell Twitter could ever be considered a monopoly when less than 2% of the world's population even uses their platform actively.
>The people being censored here can't even themselves go to any alternative platform, because there's really no other platform at that scale for that content format.
What about setting up a blog on whitehouse.com? Most normal people can't get the same audience, but Trump's not normal.
>If they only selective moderate accounts, then that protection may not survive in court.
Even assuming there was a service moderating by purely political guidelines, I don't see how 230 would stop applying. Otherwise, a lot of websites will be screwed. For instance, any website run by a political party that allows comments.
>that's a bigger problem, because it gives Twitter the power to shape global communications unilaterally. Something no corporation should have the power to do.
The solution to a monopoly abusing its power isn't to write piecemeal law curtailing things as they come up. The solution is to get rid of the monopoly (breaking it up, making it so competitors join the market, etc).
But this order isn't about monopolies. It's a party plank and rallying cry.
The issue is that the rules are being enforced selectively. Just this week Twitter fact checked Trump's opinion on mail voter fraud by linking to other experts' opinions. It seems more like a move to influence the election rather than enforcing the rules.
Let’s entertain the possibility that Twitter is doing this to influence the election.
So what?
There’s no law prohibiting these types of businesses from supporting a political candidate. They could plaster a huge “Vote For X” banner at the top of every person’s profile. Don’t like it? Don’t use it.
It’s not like Twitter is tax-exempt which would prohibit it from endorsing candidates like Churches.
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> The issue is that the rules are being enforced selectively.
It's not only acceptable but actually ethically correct to hold those with more power to higher standards of responsibility.
It's therefore not only acceptable but actually ethically correct to enforce these rules more proactively against the President of the United States than some Russian bot account.
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But you have to remember, they are going to pay more attention to people that have a lot of followers vs the person with 3. Limited resources trying to deal with the people that have the most impact makes sense to me
Personally I think they are just trying to call out a moron. But so what if you are trying to "interfere" with the election. Corporations are allowed to interject their own beliefs and politics too
Selective enforcement happens everywhere in the internet. For example if you go to T_D in Reddit, they will absolutely delete any anti-Trump posts. Does this mean Reddit is influencing elections ?
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They are finally stepping up and enforcing their ToS. I can see this response as a followup to the EIO signed yesterday as an example of what they might have to do if the interpretation of existing law is changed and platforms become liable for content they host. Like, that would induce harsher restrictions on posting and modding content though it would be complicated if that also made twitter a publisher. Their model may no longer be viable at that point as they could be sued for leaving up violent or misleading content AND sued as a publisher for what they take down.
It's within their rights to do take these actions, fact checks and hiding/deleting tweets, to protect their ecosystem. If it is questionably legal because it may influence the election, then I haven't seen the law it is breaking. I see a better argument for showing Twitter promoting Trump's feed to drive clicks as an in kind donation which could quickly break legal campaign donation limits.
Twitter has taken a stand here and I do think they should apply their policies evenly. Will they effectively apply this to everything or even have the capacity built out now to do so? I doubt it. They are a business who needs user engagement to drive profit from ads. If they constrain their most clicked tweets it could lower their revenue even if initially those tweets get attention for being removed.
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Eh? Do you have any examples? This is nothing new, Twitter has been applying this standard to tweets for a very long time (it's part of their ToS!). It usually results in deleting your tweet or an outright ban. The only difference here is that they've kept the tweet up since they deem it to be in the public's interest.
There are tons of examples. Look in almost any thread and there are people calling for public hangings of politicians, assassinations. The "guillotine" crowd. People telling people to burn down the city. Some people saying anti-Semitic stuff...I've reported a lot of this. Twitter usually comes back and say they found it wasn't in violation of anything. There are other politicians, such as Chinese officials, Iranian officials the Twitter has not policed or marked as misleading despite them being outright anti-Semitic or propaganda.
https://twitter.com/RaheemKassam/status/1266340243134963712
EDIT: Scroll down a bit, the original poster made their account private a few moments ago
"Violence" against property doesn't really compare to killing people, IMO.
I don't really even think property damage should be included in the definition of "violence" and maybe Twitter agrees with me.
She also didn't say what to burn down. Trump was very clear that looters are who he wanted shot. Burn it down is a common saying that can mean anything from literally burning stuff to just tearing down a system in order to rebuild.
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It's been a couple of hours - in general, saying stuff like that actually does in fact get Twitter's content moderation to kick in and force you to delete the tweet, and I regularly see folks who aren't conservative get temporary suspensions for it.
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Whatever tweet he retweeted, it's now unavailable. Looks like Twitter's moderation policies are working as expected.
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Damaging property is not violence.
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It wasn't explicitly calling for violence but Elon Musk's recent tweet [1] calling for "politicians & unelected bureaucrats" to be "tarred, feathered & thrown out of town" certainly was trending in that direction and could easily have been interpreted as a call for violence, or at least assault, by some sections of Musk's vast (35 million) collection of followers. Especially when the particular 'unelected bureaucrat' that Musk had been most vociferously complaining about and attacking, the Alameda County Health Officer, had been named in numerous news reports.
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1261100731378982912
Would the same happen if Theil owned Twitter, and fact checked, etc. Joe Biden? IMO we would see the opposite, and liberal politicians calling for Twitter to be taken down. One person's soap box is another's tabloid.
Do you have any examples of liberal politicians calling for social media platforms to be taken down for fact checking or enforcing their terms of service? Simply saying "in my opinion they'd do the same thing" is not convincing.
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> Would the same happen if Theil owned Twitter, and fact checked, etc. Joe Biden?
No, it would not, because generally left-wing people don't spread lies with the intention to dissuade people from voting (quite to the contrary, the left wing is fighting for people to have the right and means to vote) or call for storming the White House and start shooting.
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How about this one:
https://twitter.com/kathygriffin/status/1086927762634399744?...
You could say requesting dox is a form of violence. But it's a lot less violent than ordering the military to shoot people. It's reasonable that a policy of removing tweets that glorify violence would catch one but not the other.
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That's not a violation of the ToS.
The Trump crowd sure hates Kathy Griffin today. Do you guys know that she is a comedian and not the President of the United States?
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> If Twitter is going to police people, it needs to be across the board. Otherwise it's just a weird censorship that is targeting one person and can easily be seen as political.
There is no such requirement.
Twitter is well within its rights and ethically totally clear to "police" a sentiment from the President of the United States, while letting much more severe sentiments from egg accounts go un-policed.
Moderation isn't an algorithm, a binary condition, applied perfectly to an input set to get a deterministic output. It's subjective, and that's both OK and correct.
> ethically totally clear to "police" a sentiment from the President of the United States, while letting much more severe sentiments from egg accounts go un-policed
Debatable
Seriously. Twitter and Facebook are full of liberals talking about "bringing back the guillotine" but I don't see any of that getting censored.
I'm pretty conflicted on this issue overall, but I don't think it's entirely nuts to hold the President of the US to a higher standard than many other accounts.
Be completely honest to a stranger:
When you see content like you are talking about, do you report it using the websites’ tools? Please be honest.
I don't report anything except kiddie diddlers, cuz, in general, reporting is totally lame.
I know what you mean, but that's an insult to actual liberals. You're referring to leftists. They hijacked "liberal" some time ago.
When someone is high profile they will be treated differently. That's just the nature of being high profile. Trump has said a lot of things that would have gotten you or I banned if Twitter noticed. Twitter let Trump slide for a long time, and is finally moderating some of the most egregious examples.
And to be clear, anyone calling for violence should also have similar actions taken against them. But, me shouting get out the guillotine to my 10 followers is different than POTUS saying the same thing.
I’ve seen hundreds of extreme violence towards cops including death and worse. I’ve reported many and nothing happens. Some have many likes and retweets including by blue check marks. The justification of violence and racism towards a certain race and to cops is Alex Jones conspiracy level stupid. The bias is insane to any regular person
It's going to be interesting when you come to the end and are reviewing your life, realizing that you decided to spend what little time you have on this planet being the volunteer gestapo misguidedly trying to defend militarized police from the words of civilians who are upset that they are killing unarmed citizens.
Personal attacks will get you banned here. No more of this on HN, please.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
It will absolutely backfire. Twitter is now going to editorialize re: their users' content. It's impossible to do this without being perceived as being biased, and twitter is already a partisan hellscape, it will only exacerbate the situation.
Instead of being the police, Twitter should do what Rotten Tomatoes does. There are plenty of people - journalists and researchers analyzing the facts behind what celebrities say. They should analyze what the analysts say and display a score.
Even better, directly link the research on the topic, from both sides. Instead of drawing a conclusion on behalf of everybody, give people what they need to draw their own.
That's what already happens. Look at the comments on any prominent person's tweet and you'll see people going back and forth about what's right and what's false.
No one needs to do anything here. People can research and find stuff out for themselves, and come to their own conclusions.
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The problem then becomes, who decides which tweets to fact-check? If most politicians at the higher levels are liars, singling out a few of them is unfair even if Trump is notorious for it.
Twitter can clearly not fact-check every single tweet on its platform. But what if they did it for every tweet (maybe from a verified account) that X people report for being untruthful? Trump would look bad even if Twitter held everyone to the same standard, and the blue checkmark would come with some responsibility not to lie, so why not?
Who decides which Tweats to fact-check: If someone is famous enough, you can bet that there will be at least one reporter frothing for the opportunity to be counted among trusted fact-checkers. Twitter might have to figure out a balance among reviewers but thats a lot less work than fact-checking each message.
[insert black mirror joke reference]
There's also the question of who it is that is predicting violence (or giving a dog whistle signal to his followers that violence is OK.) This is not a blue check mark living in his mom's basement predicting (or asking) for violence, it's the chief executive of the United States.
> I have seen tweets from blue check marks essentially calling for violence and Twitter didn't remove them
Moderation, at scale, is a very tough problem to solve.
It's important context to note that Trump's tweets are the most widely publicized. As such it should be self evident as to why they would focus their limited resources to policing tweets such as his.
I imagine other factors have to do with the technicalities of executing on this, and the user’s visibility and “viral-ity”. On the technical, you can automate the job and have awkward success sometimes if you don’t get a human to intervene and verify what the algo’s flag as potential violation tweets. Now considering the user, the user’s number of followers, whether they are public figures (so because elected, celebrity, activist, etc. reasons) or whether the tweet has gone viral (regardless of the user’s pre-existing popularity). These kinds of things influence because someone with visibility and audience making calls to violence or some other questionable act is distinct in how actionable others around the world are to react to such a figure making questionable statements. So it’s not a matter of policing everyone, because there’s a lot of nuance and challenges. And the answer isn’t to give up because that’s just cowardice in the face of a big social challenge. We’ve got to carefully experiment and wisely assess these cases.
I think many people aren't taking into account the visibility of Trump's twitter. Trump making violence-glorifying or factually incorrect or medically dangerous tweets is far different from other twitter user's or even other blue-check-mark users because his reach is far wider than the vast majority of those users. Further, Trump has an established track record of doing this repeatedly. Those two facts establish a clear and rational basis for targeting his tweets specifically.
Completely agree with your second point though (not that there is any collusion to silence conservatives - but that this whole situation will be taken that way and used to energize that base).
There is video of Twitter employees admitting there are on-going efforts to silence "shitty people" on the platform. It's quite clear who these "deplorables" or "shitty people" are.
What is the most annoying about this, though, is the tweet they chose to "Fact Check". (I use quotation marks because "fact checking" by linking to CNN and WaPo is not fact-checking at all, rather an appeal to a different authority.)
The tweet they chose to police is speculation about the future. If I say the boiling point of water is 50 degrees, you can fact-check that. Its an objective truth that water boils at 100c.
If I say mail-in votes will cause election fraud, you cannot prove or disprove that statement. All you can do is show me someone else's statements, opinions, and predictions on the matter.
Given that Trump says so much objectively false stuff, it annoys me they didn't go after one of those tweets instead.
You catch the most flak when you're over the target...
> If I say mail-in votes will cause election fraud, you cannot prove or disprove that statement
I'm not sure I believe that claim. I think that looking at past history of voting fraud shows pretty conclusively that _vote by mail_ fraud has always been a very low percentage.
Sure, it's possible that _some_ fraud might happen, but looking at data from Oregon, it's happened two times in twenty years (_from my reading of the conservative database that was linked somewhere yesterday -- sorry :) -- I might be off by an order of magnitude, but it's still small_). That seems like an _extremely_ low incidence rate, and seems a small price to may for the idea that maybe more people will be likely to vote, due to not having to stand in line at polling places, deal with vote suppression efforts, or even just because it's more convenient to fill it out on your own schedule ahead of time.
Now, many will say that states like CA and other large states, who haven't had a large-scale rollout of vote-by-mail with the history and planning that Oregon had, will face more fraud than Oregon did. I think that's actually a very believable point -- we are not going to have a perfect rollout. However, I'd also like to point out that we've had two decades of electronic voting machines that have been proven to be absolutely insecure, as well as numerous cases in other states of voters who have been unable to vote because their polling places were under-staffed or closed too early.
Voting by mail is a proven method that scales well to ensure that larger portions of the populace have the opportunity to vote. It's being considered in light of wanting to limit in-person gatherings. It very unlikely that it's some conspiracy to promote fraud.
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Trump should glorify violence. When soldiers achieve their objectives successfully, he should glorify that. When police use a measured and legal amount of violence to enforce law and order he should glorify that.
Liberals will pretend not to understand that to score a quick win.
Everyone cheered in the streets when Obama sent in the SEALs to kill Bin Laden. Violence is tolerable if people don't empathize with the victim, apparently.
There is absolutely some truth that the mainstream media and tech giants are colluding to silence conservatives - the truth is that the mainstream "conservative" position in the US happens to involve behavior that runs afoul of neutral content norms (don't threaten people with violence, don't call them racial slurs, don't dox people, etc.) disproportionately more often than people with other political beliefs. Sure, there are some people of other political persuasions who are "essentially" calling for violence, but there's a large gap between "as MLK said, a riot is the language of the unheard, so I can't condemn it" (and even that is hardly a universal position among non-conservatives) and "I, the actual commander-in-chief of an actual military, am telling that military to use violence against my own people" + "We all think this is good and proper, do it."
This is an uncomfortable, rude, politically incorrect truth - but we're not going to have a productive discussion about "silencing conservatives" if we can't admit it.
It is absolutely possible to advocate for the political positions of conservatives (looking through the 2016 GOP platform, for instance - limited government, federalism, avoiding trade deficits, repeal of Dodd-Frank, auditing the Fed, right-to-work, opposition to abortion, support for the electoral college, removing gray wolves from the endangered species list, etc., etc.) without behavior that runs afoul of the norms. If there's a case where Twitter suspends someone for opposing Dodd-Frank, then we should absolutely criticize Twitter. (And I think there's a legitimate discussion to be had about where the line is about criticizing the government's pandemic response vs. spreading misinformation, for instance.) But saying "Conservatives really like to advocate for shooting people without due process, Twitter doesn't permit the advocacy of shooting people without due process, therefore Twitter is biased against conservatives" is more of a statement about conservatives than about Twitter.
I think this is actually a balanced argument.
HN should have a setting so that the most downvoted posts show up at the top of the page... That would save me a lot of scrolling to get to the unpleasant but accurate content.
> I have seen tweets from blue check marks essentially calling for violence and Twitter didn't remove them
As a Twitter user, I've been concerned with this as well. Clicking on the Minneapolis riots "trend", roughly 1/3 of the top tweets were promoting violence while the overwhelming majority of the remainder were merely sympathetic toward the violence, with only a small sliver denouncing the violence. Note that I don't follow violent or far-left accounts (generally a-political tech accounts, and I'll unfollow people who have especially authoritarian or hateful views in either direction), yet these are overwhelmingly promoted to me (in general, not just in the particular case of the MN riots) either in trends or in the random "here, have this extreme, toxic Tweet from another follower of someone you follow" Tweets that Twitter tosses into my feed. I'm not sure that Twitter is actively promoting extreme left-wing views (it could be that Twitter's user base is really just so far left that its algorithms just can't find any moderate content for me or something), but I don't blame anyone for thinking it does.
EDIT: I'm aware this is a controversial topic, but I'm curious if I'm being downvoted because people don't believe my characterization of my timeline/trends or because my tone was less than thrilled with the volume of left-wing tweets I'm shown or something else. I'm a heretic and I don't deserve my Internet Points, so take them away, but indulge my curiosity about your specific objections! :)
It's because lots of people don't want to admit the issues with the current state of affairs with big-tech social media, such as lopsided and selective enforcement of the rules...
so they must police across the board or police none? Well since it's impossible to police everything what should they do?
In my view at the end of the day Twitter can police whoever they want and users can leave if they don't like it.
The enforcement of rules in rarely applied with 100% accuracy in any realm. Not because the rule enforcers support some infractions, but because they have limited manpower and must prioritize their tasks.
I think you also have to know if the tweet was reported. Obiviously twitter isn't going to read all tweets so only ones that are reported can they act upon.
I don't think any reasonable person would think that Twitter supports violence simply because they aren't removing posts from people who don't matter. When you have limited resources, you have to apply them in a way that has the most impact. Making sure the President of the United States is adhering to their ToS seems like a good place to start.
Remember that Twitter gets something like 500 million tweets per day. If it took someone working minimum wage 15 seconds to decide whether or not a tweet violates their ToS, Twitter would spend 30 million dollars a day on this, and the results probably wouldn't even be that good. So they don't do that, instead focusing resources where they will have the most impact.
I am also pretty sure they are not trying to censor conservative viewpoints. If Joe Biden starts telling people to go shoot looters or that Mitch McConnell murdered one of his aides, I am sure they will add a little note to those tweets.
This is correct.
You are technically correct, however the same logic applies to every type of enforcement.
Ideally the enforcement of every rule should apply to everyone equally, but in practice we see the police behave differently towards different people, we see tax audits and penalties applied mostly to people without the means to defend themselves and we see how apparently the law and government rules don't even apply to Trump. The world still goes on and we somehow deal with all of this.
Twitter enforcing their own rules is just going to be more of the same.
> If Twitter is going to police people, it needs to be across the board.
That assumes that all users on Twitter are equal. By Twitter's own rules [1], there are two classes of users. Elected officials are held to a different standard. That's why this tweet is hidden behind a click, rather than removed. That's why Trump hasn't been banned despite repeatedly violating the TOS that he agreed to when he signed up for his account.
It makes sense to me that if elected officials (a tiny fraction of the population who already have a much bigger voice than the common citizen) are allowed to break the plebeian rules, then social media platforms should be more willing to point out when they're doing so.
[1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/public-intere...
To be fair, in regard's to Trump's Twitter account, a Federal judge has already ruled that Twitter absolutely may not remove his account, and likewise, he may not block people who insult his spray tan, because it's a de facto public forum for interacting with the POTUS.
> ruled that Twitter absolutely may not remove his account
I just skimmed through that ruling, and couldn't find this. Could you cite where she ruled that twitter couldn't remove his account?
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Can you cite other politicians that have been subject to these rules?
A Chinese official, for one
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/technology/trump-twitter-...
> essentially calling for violence
Ironic that a microblogging service leads to lack of nuance. who would of thought?
My first read of trump's tweet was explaining the national guard has to move in because 'looting leads to shooting'. As in, we have to restore order to avoid more people getting shot. At the time Trump tweeted this, there was already one death from a pawn store owner shooting a looter.
So depending on your priors, your PoV, Trump was either promoting violence or trying to quell violence.
culture of 140 characters = more confusion, more division, more tribalism. If we valued well written, long form writing from our leaders we wouldn't be in this mess. Instead, we value twitter and leaders who make great slogans and can push people's buttons in 140 characters.
Don't be so disingenuous. The phrase is famous and it obviously is obviously not intent on trying to quell violence. I know to be contrarian and radically 'rational' is popular among tech types but it doesn't mean you have to bury your head in the sand when what is being said is so clear.
"The phrase is famous"? I don't recall ever hearing it before. Could you stop assuming that we all know what it is intended to mean, and that we are therefore burying our heads in the sand, and actually explain what you think it means and why it means that?
[Edit: Reading further down the discussion gives some context. That's... disturbing. Still, you are also assuming bad faith on the part of others, and that's not how things are supposed to be done on HN.]
yes the phrase is famous, but the tweet was not clear at all. Trump was talking about bringing in the national guard, and who is doing the shooting is totally up to interpretation. You can reasonably read that tweet as "we need to establish order before the shooting starts" That does not imply the national guard will be doing the shooting.
As much as I hate Trump, this isn't a "Trump thing". This was someone with a large following who was very clearly and overtly threatening to turn a situation into a bloodbath.
Twitter regularly hides violent tweets. It is just algo based and nothing to do with conservatives. I mean, it may seem biased if conservatives are posting a lot of violent tweets
Twitter has literally bend over backwards for Trump. They have said that they will not remove him not matter how much he violates their ToS. If even after that it is seen as "silencing their voice", you know it is a bad faith argument. Just the other day he retweeted something heinous about "dead Democrats" and Twitter let that tweet stand. At some point, don't you have to live up to some principles instead of always be scared of bad faith arguments ?
I'm just going to say again that I can't for the life of me understand why people are in agreement that this tweet glorifies violence. It is a call to stop being violent lest violence increase.
Looting always leads to shooting. This is a simple fact.
I'm horrified that so many people think me saying that is glorifying violence. I don't understand it in the slightest. Seeing this tweet by Trump get silenced absolutely convinces me that there is a conspiracy. Not so much against the right, but against truth.
You should read up on the history of the phrase "when looting starts, shooting starts"
I read up on it's use in 1967. ...and it didn't really add anything. Looting leads to police/national guard having to restore order through violence.
There's no hidden meaning here.
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I say with great confidence that Trump is too stupid to know this. Maybe Stephen Miller his far right aide did and pushed the line as a dog whistle but tbh I never heard of it either till now.
This raises an interesting point.
I think the realistic truth is that Trump doesn't really have a precise idea about what he's saying quite a bit of the time. His defenders rush in, and shape his words into their best possible light, and of course his opponents shape his words into their worst possible light.
Which version did Trump mean? Almost certainly neither: his modus operandi has been to say many vague things, and gauge the reaction to determine his next steps. Part of this process means simply speaking a LOT, and saying things that are vague and inflammatory. What better way to read a reaction than to ensure you create a reaction in the first place? In this sense, his words only have as much power as we keep giving them, and yet no one one seems to have learned this lesson.
You seem intelligent and well-spoken. I believe that when you say "looting always to leads shooting" you mean something like "when people are looting, it's unfortunately almost inevitable that there will be violence." (Please correct me if I've got you wrong.) When Trump says it, he doesn't tend to mean anything in particular. As usual, he's trying to drum up controversy.
And so, there's a difference in context between when you might say it, and when the president says it. It's not simply the case that I believe you hold a genuine belief, and that Trump is pressure testing his next controversy. It's also the case that you're a private citizen, willing to explain and qualify your claims, while Trump is the head of country, intentionally saying inflammatory things during difficult times.
[edit]
Apologies, I actually had no idea there was a particular history to the phrase "when looting starts, shooting starts"
You may be right.
My only nit with what you said is with this: "when people are looting, it's unfortunately almost inevitable that there will be violence."
I would say that looting is violence. I would further add three things. 1. that self defense is justified when violence against your person and property is committed. 2. Even more importantly, it is the job of the police to stop these violent crimes, at gunpoint if necessary. 3. Even more tellingly, if anybody here's livelihood or home was getting looted that person would be calling the police to do their job.
Other people will perceive it as glorifying and advocating violence regardless of how you or I see it. You can rightfully be horrified but it doesn't change the fact that this tweet arguably increases the probability of more violence happening. There is at least one person that read this tweet and interpreted it as a call to violence and that is the problem. Words matter and should be used carefully.
Because the exact phrase has historical context [1] in a sense of: if you loot, we shoot. Clearly it wasn’t said in a sense of: looting inevitably leads to violence.
That makes it sound like Trump used it in a similar fashion.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/where-does-phrase-...
Looting doesn't lead to violence, looting is violence.
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Fascist language is generally constructed to externalize blame. That doesn't mean its calls for "peace measures" are not calls to harm those people. Trump has been inciting racist violence for years. Take your head out of the sand. Context matters.
it's almost like the president of the united states is held to a higher standard than some random jackanapes with a "blue check" next to their name.
Only so much as the media and government lets twitter have this within their rights. If it was Peter Theil running Twitter, I don't believe we would see the same reaction from the media.
China is the leader here, let's briefly study how they do social media -- this will show where US is going.
They review everything after an account gets so many likes. The platform is responsible. One day I was doing something dangerous on a live stream -- immediately banned for 48 hours and got a human message. Posts with factual errors about current events -- immediately removed, on pain of platform liability. Human reply. No AI.
The platform is liable for what is published on the platform in the same way a newspaper is liable for what is published in the newspaper.
The liability is changing and so yes Twitter is going to police people.
I welcome this change in liability.
China is a leader in nothing but theft and herd mentality