Outage-hit Twitter muddies violent speech policy Twitter has announced a zero-tolerance violent speech policy, but its enforcement might be difficult given today's outage – and the growing list (both in quantity and frequency) of other interruptions. In a thread yesterday, Twitter's Safety team said the new violent speech policy prohibits violent threats or wishes of harm, …
It seems a bit haphazard, though that doesn't come as any surprise having dealt with its inconsistently trigger-happy automated tone police: "Twitter users don't normally post stuff like this!" outrage, leaving me scratching my head while I wonder what offended it so at the same time as thinking, "seriously, Twitter, have you ever actually read Twitter?" Anyway, it'll be interesting to see if there's any change from their usual stance where stuff that falls under their policy of actionable conduct seems to be the one thing that guarantees immunity from its capriciousness.
I have been telling my children for a few years now, that courteousy, politeness, and zero use of the f-word, will be a secret weapon that makes them stand out from the rude sweary masses they will work with.
A social network that raises the politeness bar even higher than "no threats to kill", might be a place people want to be.
Perhaps you're misunderstanding how most people use Twitter. It does actually work well (when it's working) as a way for communities to interact and share information, for people to share projects and products they're working on, for educators to publish articles and so on.
Unlike the old town square where the villagers you lived next to were very unlikely to share your niche interests, we now live in a world where we can choose the communities we interact with. In that respect, being "on Twitter" is no different from posting on The Register's forums. If you find that hard to grasp, I suggest you stop using the internet.
Exactly this.
While I've had a Twitter account for long time up, I only used it for the last couple years when I started following a bunch of InfoSec, Kubernetes, and general FOSS people. It's somewhat like being at a convention all the time, as you see new ideas and can interact with others with similar interests. That was until Elon went and made a hash of it. Seeing how he treats his people and courts awful people I won't "support" his company with my eyeballs on ads. On rare occasions I'll still click on a twitter link if it's relevant, but the app and daily looking around is done.
It's a shame, it felt like a cool community and a shudder to think what it looks like now.
It does guess your interests, and most of the time its guesses are way off. The specific list it keeps buried deep in the settings menu always ends up being populated by huge amounts of stuff I've never even heard of let alone shown any interest in; the remainder is pretty low-tech stuff based on keywords that cropped up in recent conversations regardless of whether or not I actually have an interest in it. And it's "for you" trending list seems to think I'm obsessed with football and has been spamming me with typically nothing but football for as long as I can remember. That's in spite of the fact that I loathe football and I've no idea what a "klopp" is, but no matter how often I tell it "I'm not interested in this", there it is again, often immediately. So its algorithms are so bad that not only can it not get it right, it can't stop getting it wrong even when you repeatedly tell it "you got that wrong".
I mostly use it to moan about some sort of issue with a product or service. That usually gets a response, where going through customer service usually does nil.
That said, there used to be a ton of interesting people to listen to. For example, I got a lot of my Kerbal Space Program 2 info from there.
Also, some of the YouTube folks used to tweet "hey, I've got some free time and I'll be at such&such a bar/restaurant/mall/convention/event at so&so time if anyone wants to meet up/chat/have a beer" which was nice.
Clearly it works for some people. The same is true of any mode or scene of communication.
Personally, I created an account not long after Twitter appeared on the scene, as there was a fair amount of chatter about it in the academic field I was then active in (along with my industry work). Under the old Usenet "lurk first" principle I set up a client and followed a dozen or so accounts; I never did "tweet" anything, as I never saw any reason to do so. Some time later Twitter switched to OAuth and broke my client, and I never bothered to get another.
I know (from extensive and often tiresome quoting) that Twitter is very popular in some of my fields, such as IT security, yet I've never found I missed out on any important information by ignoring Twitter. Anything of importance shows up in more useful forms shortly after, if not simultaneously or earlier, elsewhere.
The screaming mob of all 12 people
Screaming at businesses to scare them off Twitter.
You can say anything on Twitter but maybe there should be away to hold someone responsible.
Still if the victim brigade continue to scream at advertisers then it will collapse.
What are the chances that those who align with Elmo's previous outbursts are going to be less likely to be banned than those he doesn't particularly like or agree with?
Although that said, I am very much in favour of people having the ban hammer brought down on them if they wish harm on people... That kind of behaviour has no place in generally civilised discourse.
That's been my experience so far; and that people who object to stuff that align with Elaine's rants are more likely to find themselves suspended for no obvious reason. Which isn't exactly a surprise, but it is tiring that a loud-mouthed, thin-skinned git like him can have so much influence.
Well, that's an interesting question. Would you argue that it's political speech if you replaced Putin with Biden or any other politician? Same with the good old 'Robin Hood Airport tweet' thing. This is where common sense would come in. No, I wouldn't agree with the statement, but I would not particularly be surprised if a ban hammer were to be brought down on someone saying that because the abuse policy says "you don't wish harm on a person". It's not a case of repression. It's a case of applying the rules as they stand, and possibly, just maybe, choosing not to apply them.
:-)
The fact you think that "rightists" were unfairly picked on shows nothing but your lack of morality.
It's not that people were censored because they were right wing, it was because these were generally the sort of people to post hate speech, attacks, out and out lies, and blatantly false propaganda.
Your bubble needs burtsting.
So what this new policy says is that all violent speech is banned, except where Twitter decide that it isn't?
The rules are unequivocal, except that...
""We allow expressions of violent speech when there is no clear abusive or violent context, such as (but not limited to) hyperbolic and consensual speech between friends, or during discussion of video games and sporting events," Twitter said. The company also said figures of speech, satire and "artistic expression when the context is expressing a viewpoint rather than instigating actionable violence or harm" would continue to be permitted."
So in other words the whole thing is as equivocal as it gets. So all you have to do is claim something was "satire" or "artistic impression" and you get away with it.
Twitter (the company rather than the platform) is as big a clusterfuck as you could expect from such a small (and shrinking) organization.
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