They're trying to get me kidnapped and tortured, but Twitter doesn't care(waqas.xyz)
waqas.xyz
They're trying to get me kidnapped and tortured, but Twitter doesn't care
https://waqas.xyz/post/
243 comments
Twitter is being used by both sides to fight over a narrative. Nothing new in that respect.
It's a narrative that could get one side kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned for years and potentially killed.
I've seen previous incidents where Facebook and other platforms were nightmare fuel for locals and the platform didn't even have moderators who spoke the local language for purposes of reviewing the issue.
These platforms are thrilled to get millions of new users in various countries then wash their hands of the consequences to those users and their real lives. I don't think criticism of this fact is unreasonable. Locals just want a fair shake similar to what Westerners get in such cases.
It's a narrative that could get one side kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned for years and potentially killed.
I've seen previous incidents where Facebook and other platforms were nightmare fuel for locals and the platform didn't even have moderators who spoke the local language for purposes of reviewing the issue.
These platforms are thrilled to get millions of new users in various countries then wash their hands of the consequences to those users and their real lives. I don't think criticism of this fact is unreasonable. Locals just want a fair shake similar to what Westerners get in such cases.
But isn't it more complicated than that? A Western journalist falsely accused of being an agent for a foreign power wouldn't get much help from Twitter either - I'm familiar with a couple who are routinely accused of being Russian agents.
I get why this guy wants more, and I can understand the perspective that Twitter has to take into account the context of local countries and which kinds of speech might be dangerous. But can Twitter really adopt an explicit corporate policy that Pakistan isn't allowed to have as much free speech as the rest of the world because it's too violent?
I get why this guy wants more, and I can understand the perspective that Twitter has to take into account the context of local countries and which kinds of speech might be dangerous. But can Twitter really adopt an explicit corporate policy that Pakistan isn't allowed to have as much free speech as the rest of the world because it's too violent?
> Pakistan isn't allowed to have as much free speech as the rest of the world because it's too violent?
Not all speech is free speech. In the US, there are limitations, such as harmful or offensive content, and this includes speech that is both false and dangerous.
This is not a free speech issue. The OP is being stalked. Fundamentally, stalking is a threat of injury or death, as well as unwanted surveillance by an individual or group, and stalking behavior includes precisely this type of harassment. The OP's life is in obvious danger. This is a criminal issue.
If the OP is in the US, I'd recommend researching how to request political asylum.
Unsolicited advice to all: stay off of any social media unless it includes anonymity. Protect your identity. In the US, only two things can happen to you by participating in non-anonymous social media:
#1) nothing
#2) you get fired
Pakistan has raised the stakes and turned #2 into "you get abducted and killed."
Fuck Twitter. What a shitty platform. If I wanted to effect political change in a third world country, I would found a secret society, secretly install a printing press somewhere, and run it 24/7. That is how you kill fascists.
Not all speech is free speech. In the US, there are limitations, such as harmful or offensive content, and this includes speech that is both false and dangerous.
This is not a free speech issue. The OP is being stalked. Fundamentally, stalking is a threat of injury or death, as well as unwanted surveillance by an individual or group, and stalking behavior includes precisely this type of harassment. The OP's life is in obvious danger. This is a criminal issue.
If the OP is in the US, I'd recommend researching how to request political asylum.
Unsolicited advice to all: stay off of any social media unless it includes anonymity. Protect your identity. In the US, only two things can happen to you by participating in non-anonymous social media:
#1) nothing
#2) you get fired
Pakistan has raised the stakes and turned #2 into "you get abducted and killed."
Fuck Twitter. What a shitty platform. If I wanted to effect political change in a third world country, I would found a secret society, secretly install a printing press somewhere, and run it 24/7. That is how you kill fascists.
I just don't understand what we're talking about here. The source article doesn't say that anyone has stalked him, surveilled him, or threatened him. His complaints are that someone said he's "inciting violence" when that's not an accurate characterization of his perspective, and that someone said he works for an organization he doesn't work for. In the US neither of these things are a big deal and could not be a criminal issue.
Again, I do understand that the stakes are higher in the kind of country where people are routinely lynched for blasphemy. But I don't think it's a lack of cultural sensitivity or some blindness to consequences that stops Twitter from applying different standards here! Most Pakistanis would not, I think, appreciate being told that because they live in the wrong country Twitter won't let them speak so freely.
Again, I do understand that the stakes are higher in the kind of country where people are routinely lynched for blasphemy. But I don't think it's a lack of cultural sensitivity or some blindness to consequences that stops Twitter from applying different standards here! Most Pakistanis would not, I think, appreciate being told that because they live in the wrong country Twitter won't let them speak so freely.
> The source article doesn't say that anyone has stalked him, surveilled him, or threatened him. His complaints are that someone said he's "inciting violence" when that's not an accurate characterization of his perspective, and that someone said he works for an organization he doesn't work for. In the US neither of these things are a big deal and could not be a criminal issue.
No. I'm the one who said he is being stalked.
> In Pakistan, activists and journalists are routinely picked up (abducted) and tortured by the country's police and secret services. Same happened this time, some of the top journalists and anchors were picked up - some without warrants with fake cases filed post-arrest. Some of these journalists remain under custody till date. These journalists, according to reports, have been stripped and tortured under custody.
> The current Minister for Planning and Development falsely accused me of inciting violence, probably in the hopes of building a false case and narrative against me, when I had only called for people to question their politicians. These people were showing their frustration because I was out of their reach and could not be abducted for the time being. What came from the Minister was maybe an exaggeration or a veiled threat, but what started happening after was more insidious. To start off their harassment campaign against me,
He is definitely being threatened and stalked. It's the abuse of the parody account to defame the OP. That would be all fine and good if not for the regular disappearing of Pakistani journalists and protesters. If anything like this happened in the US, let's say the KKK started disappearing journalists and protesters, once that kind of environment existed, any sort of online shenanigans spotlighting private individuals, slandering and defaming them, if it regularly happened to the disappeared before they disappeared, then it would be a very big deal, investigated, prosecuted, with felonies and significant jail time delivered, even without that particular victim being kidnapped or murdered.
No. I'm the one who said he is being stalked.
> In Pakistan, activists and journalists are routinely picked up (abducted) and tortured by the country's police and secret services. Same happened this time, some of the top journalists and anchors were picked up - some without warrants with fake cases filed post-arrest. Some of these journalists remain under custody till date. These journalists, according to reports, have been stripped and tortured under custody.
> The current Minister for Planning and Development falsely accused me of inciting violence, probably in the hopes of building a false case and narrative against me, when I had only called for people to question their politicians. These people were showing their frustration because I was out of their reach and could not be abducted for the time being. What came from the Minister was maybe an exaggeration or a veiled threat, but what started happening after was more insidious. To start off their harassment campaign against me,
He is definitely being threatened and stalked. It's the abuse of the parody account to defame the OP. That would be all fine and good if not for the regular disappearing of Pakistani journalists and protesters. If anything like this happened in the US, let's say the KKK started disappearing journalists and protesters, once that kind of environment existed, any sort of online shenanigans spotlighting private individuals, slandering and defaming them, if it regularly happened to the disappeared before they disappeared, then it would be a very big deal, investigated, prosecuted, with felonies and significant jail time delivered, even without that particular victim being kidnapped or murdered.
Get out of the kitchen if you can't stand the heat.
If social medias don't want to sweat the small stuff -- accountability for being the disease vector for genocide, pogroms, and personal vendettas -- then they shouldn't operate in that capacity.
If social medias don't want to sweat the small stuff -- accountability for being the disease vector for genocide, pogroms, and personal vendettas -- then they shouldn't operate in that capacity.
Yes I agree 100%. If Twitter is going to arbitrate then they better do so fairly and soundly across all peoples. My criticism is of the expectation that such fair arbitration can happen unilaterally in the first place especially in a politically charged environment. Twitter has not demonstrated an ability to be impartial and fair in the past. They are a US company partial to US politics. Specifically, they lean rather liberal in their moderation decisions. As you say, they want users, not justice (even though at certain times they have made small motions towards perceived “social” justice). They are simply not equip to replace the judicial systems of the world and expecting them to do so is a little bit crazy in my opinion. The reality is they have no legal authority anywhere.
I agree the author’s criticism is fair. My point was a reminder that the expectations here may not live up to reality and it might be best to seek other help. Even if Twitter removes this misinformation, the author will not be safe and will likely, if the story is to be believed, be detained and tortured the minute they step onto Pakistani soil, sadly. I think the reminder that “Twitter can’t make you safe” is a fair and practical one too, despite whether it should have to be that way or not.
I agree the author’s criticism is fair. My point was a reminder that the expectations here may not live up to reality and it might be best to seek other help. Even if Twitter removes this misinformation, the author will not be safe and will likely, if the story is to be believed, be detained and tortured the minute they step onto Pakistani soil, sadly. I think the reminder that “Twitter can’t make you safe” is a fair and practical one too, despite whether it should have to be that way or not.
> Maybe Twitter was never about being arbiters of facts and instead just pandering to the popular political narrative of the time?
To some extent they do see themselves as arbiters of truth, you can get auto-banned if you make a tweet and their AI thinks you're spreading falsehoods about COVID or the 2020 US presidential election. It actually happened to me last year over a completely benign joke and i had to wait about six weeks for a mod to get around to reviewing my appeal before i was allowed back on.
If they really cared about protecting middle-eastern activists they could add "israeli spy" to their list of phrases that get you auto-banned.
To some extent they do see themselves as arbiters of truth, you can get auto-banned if you make a tweet and their AI thinks you're spreading falsehoods about COVID or the 2020 US presidential election. It actually happened to me last year over a completely benign joke and i had to wait about six weeks for a mod to get around to reviewing my appeal before i was allowed back on.
If they really cared about protecting middle-eastern activists they could add "israeli spy" to their list of phrases that get you auto-banned.
Preventing harassment isn't the same as "taking a political stance".
Most people don't think their stance is ever political. But it very clearly is here since Twitter would be directly at odds with the Pakistani government if they sided with the journalist.
From his description, he only suspect the government to be behind the troll accounts. So by blocking/fact checking the trolls Twitter wouldn't take any risk it seems. It seems more likely they are unable to understand or verify the messages of the trolls.
I agree—if only it were that clear and simple.
It is simple in many cases that are currently allowed on Twitter. They aren't making a good faith effort to solve the issue. Evidence: Allowing quote tweets directed to users who disabled replies. This is always used as a vector of further harassment.
I dont want political asylum because of many reasons, i have my parents and my family back home. I am not asking Twitter to side with me, you have read my post, you can clearly see that misinfo is being spread about me. These are verifiable lies. They are verifiably dangerous after basic scrutiny, i am asking Twitter to do their job that they already claim that they do. That is provide a space that is safer from harassment and targeted attacks like this one.
Making Twitter safe will not make you safe. It would absolutely be great if Twitter could do more, but the true issue lies elsewhere.
Unless you recognize this, and accept that you don’t always get everything you want, then you may be living in a dangerous delusion.
You don’t want to leave Pakistan, and you also presumably don’t want to compromise your principles, and you also want to not be killed for your journalism… perhaps it is wise to consider whether you can realistically have all of these things you want, when the truth is you probably can’t.
All that being said, I don’t fault you for wanting Twitter to do more. But for your own well being you should not consider that the only angle you need to work on here.
Unless you recognize this, and accept that you don’t always get everything you want, then you may be living in a dangerous delusion.
You don’t want to leave Pakistan, and you also presumably don’t want to compromise your principles, and you also want to not be killed for your journalism… perhaps it is wise to consider whether you can realistically have all of these things you want, when the truth is you probably can’t.
All that being said, I don’t fault you for wanting Twitter to do more. But for your own well being you should not consider that the only angle you need to work on here.
> You don’t want to leave Pakistan
My read is that he's in New York, but has family still in Pakistan.
My read is that he's in New York, but has family still in Pakistan.
> I dont want political asylum because of many reasons
Good point but but he apparently does not even want the relative safety of being able to stay away from Pakistan. We all have family in various places, that’s a given. He could also try to get them out.
Making Pakistan safe for free speech seems beyond optimistic for now.
Good point but but he apparently does not even want the relative safety of being able to stay away from Pakistan. We all have family in various places, that’s a given. He could also try to get them out.
Making Pakistan safe for free speech seems beyond optimistic for now.
[deleted]
The ask here is not for twitter on itself be some kind of safe place. It is for twitter as a company or platform to stop enabling this sort of thing. Or at least, enable it less.
(TRIGGER WARNING: I write long sentences.)
"Making Twitter safe will not make you safe. It would absolutely be great if Twitter could do more, but the true issue lies elsewhere."
Along with the rest of the reply, this is some 100% GRADE A cynicism right here.
To this cynicism - clearly there's a danger to a named journalist just from the 'offended' party reading the product of their journalism (in this case Twitter posts or posts they distribute via Twitter posts), but if as the OP suggests, the government is using Twitter to produce an erroneous record and public justification for extra-judicial violence against journalists and political foes, and that without this ability to use Twitter to manipulate the narrative surrounding an individual target, they would not be as emboldened to perpetrate the violence against that individual, then the use of Twitter by the harassing party here is clearly enabling violence, moving the risk from a general threat to a political journalist's safety to a clear and present danger to the individual.
Waving proverbial hands at this by noting that journalism can be dangerous if the party that doesn't like it can see your journalism, and therefore, promoting, distributing, or publishing it via Twitter isn't Twitter's problem because the threat arises from the the distribution in general, not the medium, ignores the role the author suggests Twitter plays in the manipulation of the public sentiment towards targeted individuals for the purpose of eliminating a critical level of moral outrage that exists as potential blowback and might otherwise provide some degree of safe cover and prevent the extra-judicial violence the 'aggrieved' wish to subject the target to.
Aslo: I'm surprised Twitter doesn't have rules that restrict the use of "parody" accounts against non-verified (or non-verfiable) accounts. I can't imagine that Twitter in the US hasn't previously been confronted with this issue by high-schoolers bullying and or cyber-stalking peers on Twitter with anonymous "parody" accounts.
Back to the cynicism: "Unless you recognize this, and accept that you don’t always get everything you want, then you may be living in a dangerous delusion.
You don’t want to leave Pakistan, and you also presumably don’t want to compromise your principles, and you also want to not be killed for your journalism… perhaps it is wise to consider whether you can realistically have all of these things you want, when the truth is you probably can’t.
All that being said, I don’t fault you for wanting Twitter to do more. But for your own well being you should not consider that the only angle you need to work on here."
What couldn't this be applied to? Think you're child's school bus operator is being negligent by not installing seat belts? Sure, you complaining might help, but the real fault lies with you for letting her get on the bus.
Think the coal mine you work for is shirking their safety responsibilities? Sure, you can complain, but the real problem is you bring willing to go down that mine.
Think too many 737-Maxes are falling out of the sky? Go ahead and complain, but the real fault is yours for flying.
Danger is just standing over here swinging it's arms (and maybe moving around when you aren't looking), it's not dangers' fault of you get in it's way.
"Making Twitter safe will not make you safe. It would absolutely be great if Twitter could do more, but the true issue lies elsewhere."
Along with the rest of the reply, this is some 100% GRADE A cynicism right here.
To this cynicism - clearly there's a danger to a named journalist just from the 'offended' party reading the product of their journalism (in this case Twitter posts or posts they distribute via Twitter posts), but if as the OP suggests, the government is using Twitter to produce an erroneous record and public justification for extra-judicial violence against journalists and political foes, and that without this ability to use Twitter to manipulate the narrative surrounding an individual target, they would not be as emboldened to perpetrate the violence against that individual, then the use of Twitter by the harassing party here is clearly enabling violence, moving the risk from a general threat to a political journalist's safety to a clear and present danger to the individual.
Waving proverbial hands at this by noting that journalism can be dangerous if the party that doesn't like it can see your journalism, and therefore, promoting, distributing, or publishing it via Twitter isn't Twitter's problem because the threat arises from the the distribution in general, not the medium, ignores the role the author suggests Twitter plays in the manipulation of the public sentiment towards targeted individuals for the purpose of eliminating a critical level of moral outrage that exists as potential blowback and might otherwise provide some degree of safe cover and prevent the extra-judicial violence the 'aggrieved' wish to subject the target to.
Aslo: I'm surprised Twitter doesn't have rules that restrict the use of "parody" accounts against non-verified (or non-verfiable) accounts. I can't imagine that Twitter in the US hasn't previously been confronted with this issue by high-schoolers bullying and or cyber-stalking peers on Twitter with anonymous "parody" accounts.
Back to the cynicism: "Unless you recognize this, and accept that you don’t always get everything you want, then you may be living in a dangerous delusion.
You don’t want to leave Pakistan, and you also presumably don’t want to compromise your principles, and you also want to not be killed for your journalism… perhaps it is wise to consider whether you can realistically have all of these things you want, when the truth is you probably can’t.
All that being said, I don’t fault you for wanting Twitter to do more. But for your own well being you should not consider that the only angle you need to work on here."
What couldn't this be applied to? Think you're child's school bus operator is being negligent by not installing seat belts? Sure, you complaining might help, but the real fault lies with you for letting her get on the bus.
Think the coal mine you work for is shirking their safety responsibilities? Sure, you can complain, but the real problem is you bring willing to go down that mine.
Think too many 737-Maxes are falling out of the sky? Go ahead and complain, but the real fault is yours for flying.
Danger is just standing over here swinging it's arms (and maybe moving around when you aren't looking), it's not dangers' fault of you get in it's way.
Good comment. Unusual perhaps on HN (my cynicism again), I actually read it.
I mostly agree. You have a very good point and make it well.
Especially the part about how a better set of Twitter policies and enforcement against this kind of targeting could help to provide cover for hard hitting journalism and thereby contribute to positive impact by that journalism, helping change things for the better.
Fair enough, although then they could also ban Twitter as some countries do.
My main point was that aside from anything Twitter should do, he should also protect himself. The same point is valid in any of the other examples you listed. I won’t fly on a 737 MAX. I’m not going to work in a coal mine. Etc. Of course I will take some worthwhile risks, each one decided in context. All of us do.
Yes it would be good and helpful not just to this guy but to all journalism and to the general public who benefit from light being shone on stuff, for journalists, or anyone for that matter, to be shielded from this kind of nonsense. Even though it may be easier said than done, Twitter should try to do it to the extent that is workable.
They have lots of rules preventing an individual from harassing others. They don’t seem to have rules preventing an entire system of ideologically corrupt people from targeting a person who wants to call out corruption. Again it’s hard though, algorithmically and at scale.
In the meantime he should take steps to get free from that place.
> Danger is just standing over here swinging it's arms (and maybe moving around when you aren't looking), it's not dangers' fault of you get in it's way.
Absolutely. Of course if an unreasonable danger is intentionally or irresponsibly created by people, then those people are at fault, but the general situation in life is you don’t go around walking off buildings and wondering why there is no safety net. Yeah safety nets are great but they are not always practical. At scale, this safety net on Twitter is tremendously hard to do, although maybe they should make a special effort for problematic situations like zealotry and corruption.
I mostly agree. You have a very good point and make it well.
Especially the part about how a better set of Twitter policies and enforcement against this kind of targeting could help to provide cover for hard hitting journalism and thereby contribute to positive impact by that journalism, helping change things for the better.
Fair enough, although then they could also ban Twitter as some countries do.
My main point was that aside from anything Twitter should do, he should also protect himself. The same point is valid in any of the other examples you listed. I won’t fly on a 737 MAX. I’m not going to work in a coal mine. Etc. Of course I will take some worthwhile risks, each one decided in context. All of us do.
Yes it would be good and helpful not just to this guy but to all journalism and to the general public who benefit from light being shone on stuff, for journalists, or anyone for that matter, to be shielded from this kind of nonsense. Even though it may be easier said than done, Twitter should try to do it to the extent that is workable.
They have lots of rules preventing an individual from harassing others. They don’t seem to have rules preventing an entire system of ideologically corrupt people from targeting a person who wants to call out corruption. Again it’s hard though, algorithmically and at scale.
In the meantime he should take steps to get free from that place.
> Danger is just standing over here swinging it's arms (and maybe moving around when you aren't looking), it's not dangers' fault of you get in it's way.
Absolutely. Of course if an unreasonable danger is intentionally or irresponsibly created by people, then those people are at fault, but the general situation in life is you don’t go around walking off buildings and wondering why there is no safety net. Yeah safety nets are great but they are not always practical. At scale, this safety net on Twitter is tremendously hard to do, although maybe they should make a special effort for problematic situations like zealotry and corruption.
Like many people here, I don't know enough about Pakistani politics to weigh in on the objective truth of this situation one way or the other. I would only make 4 small comments.
1) You claim these are verifiable lies. From your perspective that is the case as (unless you're a programmed sleeper agent) you're in position to know the truth about whether you're an agent of some foreign government or not. However, from a neutral or 3rd party perspective, this seems a bit like a he-said/she-said kind of case. And from your perspective, disproving this would be hard as you'd seem to have to prove a negative "I'm not an agent" claim, which is kind of hard to do.
2) A personal opinion, but it would probably be very helpful to your case if you can make a clear, bullet-point list of the alleged verifiable lies, who told them and their position in the Pakistani government, and your rebuttal to their claim. I read your piece and checked out your links, but these are all buried under a wall of text that many people won't have the attention span to process given the format.
3) One of the problems with Twitter is that they try and involve themselves in really tough subjective cases of truthiness. I'm not sure that Twitter trying to fact-check and remove what you believe are lies would be the best outcome here. If I were to give a suggestion to Twitter on how to handle this, the best thing Twitter could probably do would be to either temporarily verify him, or create some kind of temporary "At Risk" badge given to a limited number of people in dicy situations like this to bring attention to their cause so they can't be summarily disappeared without a trial.
4) To any journalists reading this, I hope Waqas' story gives you a renewed appreciation for not trusting government claims at face value. Whether his story is true or not, many journalists seem to too often rush to print government claims about anything and everything as gospel. A journalists' job isn't to be a tape recorder for government officials and merely print their quotes, you've got to dive into the background of their claims and consider the other side. If government officials claim X is a foreign agent, you should consider every angle and claim.
1) You claim these are verifiable lies. From your perspective that is the case as (unless you're a programmed sleeper agent) you're in position to know the truth about whether you're an agent of some foreign government or not. However, from a neutral or 3rd party perspective, this seems a bit like a he-said/she-said kind of case. And from your perspective, disproving this would be hard as you'd seem to have to prove a negative "I'm not an agent" claim, which is kind of hard to do.
2) A personal opinion, but it would probably be very helpful to your case if you can make a clear, bullet-point list of the alleged verifiable lies, who told them and their position in the Pakistani government, and your rebuttal to their claim. I read your piece and checked out your links, but these are all buried under a wall of text that many people won't have the attention span to process given the format.
3) One of the problems with Twitter is that they try and involve themselves in really tough subjective cases of truthiness. I'm not sure that Twitter trying to fact-check and remove what you believe are lies would be the best outcome here. If I were to give a suggestion to Twitter on how to handle this, the best thing Twitter could probably do would be to either temporarily verify him, or create some kind of temporary "At Risk" badge given to a limited number of people in dicy situations like this to bring attention to their cause so they can't be summarily disappeared without a trial.
4) To any journalists reading this, I hope Waqas' story gives you a renewed appreciation for not trusting government claims at face value. Whether his story is true or not, many journalists seem to too often rush to print government claims about anything and everything as gospel. A journalists' job isn't to be a tape recorder for government officials and merely print their quotes, you've got to dive into the background of their claims and consider the other side. If government officials claim X is a foreign agent, you should consider every angle and claim.
If not on Twitter, won't these lies be spread elsewhere?
It sounds like you believe you're in real danger. If so, you have bigger problems.
You mention the comedian and the journalist, and you try to paint this as a giant conspiracy. But what you've laid out in the article seems like it could easily just be people being morons and taking the government's word for everything.
You also don't even mention what you want Twitter to actually do.
Are they supposed to ban those accounts? Are they supposed to label those Tweets as untrue?
While this sounds like an improvement - and probably what they should do - I don't see how this actually helps with your larger problem of potential life and death...
It sounds like you believe you're in real danger. If so, you have bigger problems.
You mention the comedian and the journalist, and you try to paint this as a giant conspiracy. But what you've laid out in the article seems like it could easily just be people being morons and taking the government's word for everything.
You also don't even mention what you want Twitter to actually do.
Are they supposed to ban those accounts? Are they supposed to label those Tweets as untrue?
While this sounds like an improvement - and probably what they should do - I don't see how this actually helps with your larger problem of potential life and death...
So you get your wish, Twitter bans a bunch of tweets.
Your life is still in danger. You haven't changed that situation. You still need to either flee or make plans for your sudden passing.
Your life is still in danger. You haven't changed that situation. You still need to either flee or make plans for your sudden passing.
I’ll admit it’s not clear to me as an outsider to this conflict whether there is clear misinformation or whether this is a matter of political perspective (not because I’m sympathetic to what’s happened in Pakistan, rather because of they style in which you communicated in the post). It is only through discussing this here that I think the tractable request to just remove misinformation is becoming clear. The whole thing about comedy accounts is distracting since parody is allowed, as you know. So I was left confused wether there is factual misinformation, or just a gravely damaging narrative being painted.
If I may, it might help for you to clearly lead with the factually incorrect things being said about you and then dive into supporting evidence to back the misinformation claim.
Still, part of my comment was a serious reminder that Twitter is not a a real authority even if they pretend to be one in fair-weather and if your life is credibly in danger you should seek people and organizations who can actually help you protect it. I truly hope this site can help you find the needed connections.
If I may, it might help for you to clearly lead with the factually incorrect things being said about you and then dive into supporting evidence to back the misinformation claim.
Still, part of my comment was a serious reminder that Twitter is not a a real authority even if they pretend to be one in fair-weather and if your life is credibly in danger you should seek people and organizations who can actually help you protect it. I truly hope this site can help you find the needed connections.
> this is what you get as a society when you let arbitrary entities arbitrate speech: ambiguity and unclear expectations.
The platform allows speech amplification. It used to be that lies could run around the world before the truth could get its boots on. Social apps now make this orders of magniture worse...
Rather than moderating content, Twitter could add systems that automatically tame virality (hide a post for n minutes after x retweets/impressions), with bias against new accounts.
The platform allows speech amplification. It used to be that lies could run around the world before the truth could get its boots on. Social apps now make this orders of magniture worse...
Rather than moderating content, Twitter could add systems that automatically tame virality (hide a post for n minutes after x retweets/impressions), with bias against new accounts.
[deleted]
twitter is interested in making money. there's far more money to be made pandering to governments than in pandering to dissidents. the content moderation policies are just extra steps in justifying that stance.
I am sorry for the responses I am seeing on HN. People with cushy lives who've likely never faced similar danger seem to just not really get it.
I will say that your framing is one that most Westerners will have trouble taking seriously.
It might go over better to document known cases where this pattern occurred and show the similarities. Walk people through it like they are five, so to speak.
I know it's hard to do that kind of objective writing when you are feeling so threatened due to genuine threats, but in my experience that approach works better.
I know you didn't ask for advice. I apologize for my bad habit of trying to be helpful in the only way I know how.
I hope something improves soon.
I will say that your framing is one that most Westerners will have trouble taking seriously.
It might go over better to document known cases where this pattern occurred and show the similarities. Walk people through it like they are five, so to speak.
I know it's hard to do that kind of objective writing when you are feeling so threatened due to genuine threats, but in my experience that approach works better.
I know you didn't ask for advice. I apologize for my bad habit of trying to be helpful in the only way I know how.
I hope something improves soon.
It's strange though, when it involves lgbtq or politics they suddenly understand why Twitter may need to police certain kinds of conversations. But when the actors involved are foreign, suddenly those high minded ideals turn into ambiguity and 'Twitter understandably doesn't want to take a side'. Yet last month I was hearing on this very forum that inaction is indeed pushing a side
I've never seen even the most censorious Americans argue that Twitter should investigate every accusation that person A is paid by group B. That scenario has actually been playing out over the past few days on American politics twitter, with a couple high profile journalists being falsely accused of taking out PPP loans, but Twitter didn't moderate those accusations and as far as I can tell nobody thinks they should have.
I don't mean this as an insult against the author, because of course Americans don't have to fear being kidnapped or tortured over it! But I don't think it's right to see this as some kind of hypocrisy.
I don't mean this as an insult against the author, because of course Americans don't have to fear being kidnapped or tortured over it! But I don't think it's right to see this as some kind of hypocrisy.
I tend to see the reverse. People fume over social networks allowing people in, say, Myanmar to write about alleged events they have no way of verifying with political implications they don't understand in a language they don't understand because people are dying [mostly at the hands of a military that really doesn't care what social media thinks]. Then they get very unhappy if the same social network decides to block obviously mendacious nonsense posted by fellow Americans
Sometimes it's different people making the complaints, but weirdly, sometimes I'm not sure it is...
Sometimes it's different people making the complaints, but weirdly, sometimes I'm not sure it is...
It's not strange. Twitter is a U.S. company, of course it takes a deeper interest in matters of U.S. politics than it does about every other country on the planet.
They said nothing about Twitter's behavior being strange. They said the strange part is people applauding Twitter's content moderation for certain topics, while justifying their inaction on others.
> They said the strange part is people applauding Twitter's content moderation for certain topics, while justifying their inaction on others.
There's nothing strange about that either - Twitter only acts to moderate when it has context and/or gets bad press. It's no surprise that American hot-button issues are the most moderated[1] by Twitter, and less sor for heinous, explicit threats to life in a language spoken by < 1 million speakers halfway around the world, or election misinformation in Kenya. That sort of thing never gets on Twitter's radar, and shouldn't come as a surprise.
1. This is a result of resource constraints, and Twitter's own sense of self-preservation. There is only one jurisdiction that can dissolve Twitter, and is also likely its largest revenue source; naturally, that gets an outsized fraction of Twitter's limited engineer-hours and moderator-hours.
There's nothing strange about that either - Twitter only acts to moderate when it has context and/or gets bad press. It's no surprise that American hot-button issues are the most moderated[1] by Twitter, and less sor for heinous, explicit threats to life in a language spoken by < 1 million speakers halfway around the world, or election misinformation in Kenya. That sort of thing never gets on Twitter's radar, and shouldn't come as a surprise.
1. This is a result of resource constraints, and Twitter's own sense of self-preservation. There is only one jurisdiction that can dissolve Twitter, and is also likely its largest revenue source; naturally, that gets an outsized fraction of Twitter's limited engineer-hours and moderator-hours.
No, read their post again. They're referring to people's perception of Twitter enforcement being strange, not twitter's enforcement.
The threats against lgbtq and especially trans run WILD on twitter. There are whole accounts dedicated to harassing them and outing them to huge amounts of followers. It takes super log for twitter to even delete a tweet.
People with cushy lives, working for some mid-level corp writing CRUD apps used by 20 people, also have never faced the challenges of moderation at million people scale. So, it kind of cuts both ways
Yet somehow they still have the bandwidth to go after people for misgendering or for saying that they're happy that someone died.
I would understand if the rhetoric was centered around "it's very hard for Twitter to do that" but the detraction in the comments reads more "Twitter shouldn't do that".
For me it’s more of a: “this is what happens when you are ideologically inconsistent”. I don't feel like people are saying “Twitter shouldn’t”. I think the correct interpretation is “Twitter can’t”.
I thoroughly despise Twitter because they bless some issues and not others. Even though I support the end game of what they are trying to do (e.g. in the case of LGBTQ agenda topics), I vehemently disagree with the idea that the means to the end should involve policed speech and controlled narratives. Because that’s what fascists do.
So my problem is actually with Twitter. I pity the author. But I blame Twitter for creating the perception that they support the western rights of all individuals across the globe. Because they don’t, and can’t.
I thoroughly despise Twitter because they bless some issues and not others. Even though I support the end game of what they are trying to do (e.g. in the case of LGBTQ agenda topics), I vehemently disagree with the idea that the means to the end should involve policed speech and controlled narratives. Because that’s what fascists do.
So my problem is actually with Twitter. I pity the author. But I blame Twitter for creating the perception that they support the western rights of all individuals across the globe. Because they don’t, and can’t.
I see what you mean. Twitter shouldn't have put themselves in a situation where this is expected of them, because it was never possible. I wholeheartedly agree, I've had my account locked for innocuous tweets that triggered some keywords before.
> also have never faced the challenges of moderation at million people scale. So, it kind of cuts both ways
Not really, given that I can see the billions in cash on hand of these social media companies, which they could use to hire real people instead of intentionally neglecting customer service because it isn't a driver of profits, and instead choosing to dump these costs on the taxpayer of the countries that have to clean up the mess via the legal system. Negligence or even incompetence is not a valid excuse for actively facilitating a spectrum of behaviors ranging from harassment (this case) to fomenting populism (US elections) to outright murder (Myanmar).
Not really, given that I can see the billions in cash on hand of these social media companies, which they could use to hire real people instead of intentionally neglecting customer service because it isn't a driver of profits, and instead choosing to dump these costs on the taxpayer of the countries that have to clean up the mess via the legal system. Negligence or even incompetence is not a valid excuse for actively facilitating a spectrum of behaviors ranging from harassment (this case) to fomenting populism (US elections) to outright murder (Myanmar).
Again, you have no clue how to handle this.
It's not about the money. Assume you can hire 100,000 people. How would you maintain consistency among all those 100,000 people. You'll get huge variance in the kind of decision making from each of those people.
Then you are going to say, codify it and don't allow variations, which means a program / AI can do a better job, which is what most of these firms are optimizing far.
Unless you have personally solved that issue or have an example of someone solving it, it is literally arm-chair critiquing
It's not about the money. Assume you can hire 100,000 people. How would you maintain consistency among all those 100,000 people. You'll get huge variance in the kind of decision making from each of those people.
Then you are going to say, codify it and don't allow variations, which means a program / AI can do a better job, which is what most of these firms are optimizing far.
Unless you have personally solved that issue or have an example of someone solving it, it is literally arm-chair critiquing
It's cute that you assume good faith. Here is evidence they are operating in bad faith. They allow users who are being harassed to disable replies but not quote tweets. These quote tweets are then used as a vector of further harassment and dogpiling. This happened with Steven Pinker for a time period and Amber Heard. They are choosing virality over preventing harassment.
"Assume you can hire 100,000 people. How would you maintain consistency among all those 100,000 people. You'll get huge variance in the kind of decision making from each of those people."
thank you so much! your support means a lot.
> Twitter, despite millions of Pakistani users, it seems has no moderation system that understands local dynamics.
Many would argue they don't even understand the local dynamics of the U.S. It's impossible for twitter to be an arbiter of the truth around the world, and you shouldn't expect them to be. However, I understand that's cold comfort for someone facing the threat of torture, death, or exile from their home, and I think your decision to call out twitter using your own platform to act with respect to your specific circumstances is the right thing to do and really the only way to handle this kind of thing.
Good luck, I hope you stay safe and that the government doesn't succeed in silencing you.
Many would argue they don't even understand the local dynamics of the U.S. It's impossible for twitter to be an arbiter of the truth around the world, and you shouldn't expect them to be. However, I understand that's cold comfort for someone facing the threat of torture, death, or exile from their home, and I think your decision to call out twitter using your own platform to act with respect to your specific circumstances is the right thing to do and really the only way to handle this kind of thing.
Good luck, I hope you stay safe and that the government doesn't succeed in silencing you.
> It's impossible for twitter to be an arbiter of the truth around the world
Twitter only seems interested in this job in the countries and on the side of the factions who are politically helpful to Twitter. Twitter wouldn't care about Pakistan unless the State Department told them to care about Pakistan, and they could just as easily enter the fray by labeling the OPs tweets as deceptive and connected to foreign misinformation as they could enter it on the side of preventing his harassment.
Twitter only seems interested in this job in the countries and on the side of the factions who are politically helpful to Twitter. Twitter wouldn't care about Pakistan unless the State Department told them to care about Pakistan, and they could just as easily enter the fray by labeling the OPs tweets as deceptive and connected to foreign misinformation as they could enter it on the side of preventing his harassment.
> Twitter only seems interested in this job in the countries and on the side of the factions who are politically helpful to Twitter
So what? This is true of every media gatekeeper and always will be. Again, it's impossible for twitter to keep up with every change in the wind across the entire planet; they can't even do a satisfactory job of it in their own country.
> they could just as easily enter the fray by labeling the OPs tweets as deceptive and connected to foreign misinformation as they could enter it on the side of preventing his harassment.
If this story continues to get exposure this will probably happen, meanwhile there are thousands of other stories of threats and abuse that will go unabated and unheard because it's happening to someone that wasn't lucky enough to go viral. Twitter can only do so much, especially while opposing factions fight them every time they do anything.
So what? This is true of every media gatekeeper and always will be. Again, it's impossible for twitter to keep up with every change in the wind across the entire planet; they can't even do a satisfactory job of it in their own country.
> they could just as easily enter the fray by labeling the OPs tweets as deceptive and connected to foreign misinformation as they could enter it on the side of preventing his harassment.
If this story continues to get exposure this will probably happen, meanwhile there are thousands of other stories of threats and abuse that will go unabated and unheard because it's happening to someone that wasn't lucky enough to go viral. Twitter can only do so much, especially while opposing factions fight them every time they do anything.
Sad to say, but people often [want|need|expect] a corporation to act as a [competent|reliable|trustworthy] [government|law-enforcement agency|court].
Corporations are very clearly none of those things, and generally have lots of disincentive against attempting to fake being any of those things.
Corporations are very clearly none of those things, and generally have lots of disincentive against attempting to fake being any of those things.
They have plenty of incentive to fake being those things, and regularly do so, unless there are repercussions for doing that thing.
True, but that's nothing special. If my next door neighbor is a jerk, he may try to pretend that the legal property boundary is 3' into my yard from where it really is, and that his say-so is what determines that boundary.
The types of "faking it" that very quickly separate the real governments from the corporations & pretenders are "make the laws", "collect the taxes", "run the courts", and "back it with force". If the FBI slaps handcuffs on a Twitter CxO and hauls him off to jail, do not expect Twitter to send in their Marine Corps.
The types of "faking it" that very quickly separate the real governments from the corporations & pretenders are "make the laws", "collect the taxes", "run the courts", and "back it with force". If the FBI slaps handcuffs on a Twitter CxO and hauls him off to jail, do not expect Twitter to send in their Marine Corps.
So a liquor store should not be responsible for age restrictions and sell alcohol to minors? I think there is always a sliding point between where the government or companies police the rules. It's an interesting conversation where that point should be.
Abiding by laws is different from creating and/or enforcing them. You can bet a snowballs chance in hell liquor stores wouldn’t sell to 16+ year olds in the US if the law changed to allow it.
Of course they absolutely should be. It's how I learned to build rectification columns from cookware after all. Education is a responsibility of the entire society after all.
It's just the stated goal - minimising alcohol consumption - is phony and misleading.
It's just the stated goal - minimising alcohol consumption - is phony and misleading.
I think this is one case that goes to the heart of what we expect Twitter to be.
If they are supposed to be a public square, a company that is simply meant to offer a technical means of broadcasting your opinions, then we can't also expect them to fight government propaganda, any more than we would expect that of, say, Google Search.
On the other hand, if we want Twitter to be a kind of new media company, than we should indeed hold them to journalistic standards and expect them to cut through government lies wherever they decide to have a presence.
If they are supposed to be a public square, a company that is simply meant to offer a technical means of broadcasting your opinions, then we can't also expect them to fight government propaganda, any more than we would expect that of, say, Google Search.
On the other hand, if we want Twitter to be a kind of new media company, than we should indeed hold them to journalistic standards and expect them to cut through government lies wherever they decide to have a presence.
I'm not saying Twitter is in the right here, but I'm not convinced by the article that Twitter is meaningfully increasing the danger to the OP. Is a corrupt government really going to avoid kidnapping/torturing someone because they're popular on Twitter?
it becomes far easier for the government to kidnap someone after these allegations are circulated. we have seen this countless times, to pave the path of illegal kidnappings detention and torture, they spread this negative propaganda and fake news first.
I believe their point is that Twitter should delete or flag the accounts that are spreading false information about him (the journalist).
> Is a corrupt government really going to avoid kidnapping/torturing someone because they're popular on Twitter?
Is your assumption that corrupt governments must be omnipotent, and don't have to make excuses for their behavior in order to maintain support, or at least to prevent riots?
Is your assumption that corrupt governments must be omnipotent, and don't have to make excuses for their behavior in order to maintain support, or at least to prevent riots?
Being realistic: if your life hangs by the thread of twitter moderation, you should either run and hide, or get your affairs in order. If they really want you dead, even the best possible twitter moderation won't keep you safe. This whole circumstance of people wanting you dead is not twitters fault and there is very little twitter could do to protect you even if their moderation was perfect.
He's not asking Twitter to protect him from murder. He's asking them to do their damn job so the platform cannot be used to facilitate a smear campaign that makes it easy to get away with murder.
It's a very reasonable request.
It's a very reasonable request.
What should Twitter do in this case? You say "their damn job", but their job is to apply their content policies, which they say they are doing. Given only the tweets linked in the article, I can see how a moderator would look at them and not find that they are obviously breaking any rules. They may be false accusations, but Twitter has not agreed to do independent investigations of every report by a user, or take on the responsibility of trying to guess hidden motives of the accused. Twitter moderation is not a sanctuary, or a refuge, or a crusader for justice, it's a pro forma box-checking policy and never claimed to be more than that.
I've been a moderator. Decisions are made contextually.
One of his complaints is they clearly don't know what the hell is going on in Pakistan and this is a root cause of their mishandling of things.
It is a completely reasonable criticism.
One of his complaints is they clearly don't know what the hell is going on in Pakistan and this is a root cause of their mishandling of things.
It is a completely reasonable criticism.
Is it really reasonable? Twitter fails regularly to take such context into consideration when making moderation decisions in their home country. How could it be reasonable to expect them to get it right when it comes to the context of a foreign country?
Assuming Twitter is serving the Pakistani market, making revenue and paying taxes there, it seems reasonable to ask for the same quality controls as elsewhere. In particular hiring Pakistanis for moderation shouldn't be economically devastating for their operations in this country. So on top of being a very reasonable request it should be a minimum requirement of their operating model.
And why do you think Pakistani Twitter moderators would feel empowered to take down tweets by government officials willing to torture and murder?
The request for Twitter to help in this case only makes sense if it assumed it will be taken by moderators living outside of Pakistan, who don't have to fear government reprisal for their actions.
The request for Twitter to help in this case only makes sense if it assumed it will be taken by moderators living outside of Pakistan, who don't have to fear government reprisal for their actions.
Hiring locals instead of operating from afar is potentially a means to establish a de facto negotiating position.
"I'm sorry, Pakistan, if you can't behave better, we will have no choice but to evacuate our local offices full of relatively well paid jobs and take our toys and go home. Feel free to explain that to your people however you so wish."
Money talks.
"I'm sorry, Pakistan, if you can't behave better, we will have no choice but to evacuate our local offices full of relatively well paid jobs and take our toys and go home. Feel free to explain that to your people however you so wish."
Money talks.
Twitter is nowhere near big enough to hire enough people in a country like Pakistan to matter as much as control of public media does - especially to a fascist government. Not to mention, knowing how such agencies operate, I would bet anything that a good few of any such moderators would be Pakistani secret services agents.
No, but they could roll out a pilot program for establishing local moderating offices and as part of that program establish a list of qualifying criteria for where they are willing to place such.
They could do something akin to what McDonald's did for the beef industry. It adopted Temple Grandin's list of best practices as its standard and this got adopted by the beef industry because McDonald's buys so much beef.
Currently, these big companies typically have a predatory relationship to such countries, so such countries have no motivation to cooperate. Make them trade partners and things begin to change.
They could do something akin to what McDonald's did for the beef industry. It adopted Temple Grandin's list of best practices as its standard and this got adopted by the beef industry because McDonald's buys so much beef.
Currently, these big companies typically have a predatory relationship to such countries, so such countries have no motivation to cooperate. Make them trade partners and things begin to change.
First of all, why would an authoritarian government want an impartial moderating office for media in their country? If anything, I expect Pakistan to soon demand government control over censoring Twitter, not the other way arpund.
Second of all, Twitter is a bit player in media. Comparing it to McDonald's is absurd. If we were talking about Facebook, this may be a different matter.
Third of all, government relation to media is significantly different to government's relationship to beef. There is no government in the world that wants a bad beef industry, but many many governments that actively want a biased media industry, and are more than willing to sacrifice monetary concerns to achieve this goal. Countries much smaller (at least in population) than Pakistan have actively kicked out platforms like Twitter - see Russia for example.
I will say it again: it is not realistic to expect a foreign media platform to fight government propaganda inside an authoritarian country. Twitter is not the BBC or Reuters, and even those places don't often try to publish in authoritarian countries.
Second of all, Twitter is a bit player in media. Comparing it to McDonald's is absurd. If we were talking about Facebook, this may be a different matter.
Third of all, government relation to media is significantly different to government's relationship to beef. There is no government in the world that wants a bad beef industry, but many many governments that actively want a biased media industry, and are more than willing to sacrifice monetary concerns to achieve this goal. Countries much smaller (at least in population) than Pakistan have actively kicked out platforms like Twitter - see Russia for example.
I will say it again: it is not realistic to expect a foreign media platform to fight government propaganda inside an authoritarian country. Twitter is not the BBC or Reuters, and even those places don't often try to publish in authoritarian countries.
If they can't take the heat, they can get out of the kitchen. If they want to stay, they need to somehow deal with the reality that they are doing business in a dangerous part of the world and their moderating decisions can impact who lives, who dies, etc.
How is Twitter's relationship with Pakistan predatory?
Also, what is the equivalent to Temple Grandin's list for moderation of social media?
Also, what is the equivalent to Temple Grandin's list for moderation of social media?
In practice that would mean the third world would get cut off as not worth it and many complaints about information apartheid or similar condemning terms.
That they fail regularly is not much of a defense. If they want to make money in Pakistan they should understand the place well enough to avoid facilitating crime.
I doubt they make very much money off of Pakistani users. It might even be a small net loss. I don't think twitter publishes ARPU per country though, so this is speculation to some degree.
I think it would be perfectly reasonable to simply choose not to operate in countries where the environment is such that your platform is likely to get people killed.
That would require caring about the welfare of other humans more than caring about money/political "power", which most huge corporate entities these days (and the governments they own) have already proven time and again that they do not.
Would you also expect Google Search to take down links to local media outlets publishing similar stories?
I don't personally think Twitter should be expected to go against the official government narrative of any country they operate in, for what it shows inside that country. Not that it would be immoral to do so, but I find it an entirely unrealistic expectation - Twitter is not the BBC.
I don't personally think Twitter should be expected to go against the official government narrative of any country they operate in, for what it shows inside that country. Not that it would be immoral to do so, but I find it an entirely unrealistic expectation - Twitter is not the BBC.
As far as I know Facebook is actively taking measures to delete fake news and bring awareness about it. Also watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFLv9ozEZeM
they need to understand the politics of the places they operate in, if they can’t then they shouldn’t operate there - we already saw what happened with facebook in myanmar
I have a very low opinion of twitter and certainly wish they'd do a better job. But the premise of twitter as a shield against state-sponsored kidnapping or murder seems flimsy at best.
That's not the premise. This kind of bullshit is exactly how disempowered groups get painted into a corner.
Sexual assault doesn't typically begin with violent rape. It ends there.
It begins with a million small forms of disrespect.
Political crap follows the same pattern.
If you think it doesn't fucking matter, what the hell do you care how this goes? It matters to him. If you don't care, what's wrong with saying "Twitter should simply do its job, man!"
Sexual assault doesn't typically begin with violent rape. It ends there.
It begins with a million small forms of disrespect.
Political crap follows the same pattern.
If you think it doesn't fucking matter, what the hell do you care how this goes? It matters to him. If you don't care, what's wrong with saying "Twitter should simply do its job, man!"
The premise is that the guy lacks power. Twitter has very little incentive to help him, and a strong disincentive to piss off the Pakistani government.
Wallowing in outrage is pointless as they have to cynically maneuver until they have results. Part of that strategy might involve stirring up people emotionally towards action, but internalizing the martyrdom doesn't achieve anything on its own.
Ironically, this is precisely the type of martyrdom that helps these tech companies strategically in the long term. From their POV, all they have to do is throw a performative bone once in a while and wait for people's outrage rush to ebb away.
Wallowing in outrage is pointless as they have to cynically maneuver until they have results. Part of that strategy might involve stirring up people emotionally towards action, but internalizing the martyrdom doesn't achieve anything on its own.
Ironically, this is precisely the type of martyrdom that helps these tech companies strategically in the long term. From their POV, all they have to do is throw a performative bone once in a while and wait for people's outrage rush to ebb away.
Lol, disrespect is the beginning of rape? By that logic, twitter should censor anyone who says anything someone could interpret anything as disrespectful. Criticizing a bad government could be considered disrespectful by the government officials, would you call that starting a rape? And by that same logic, if someone just grabs someone and goes for it, previously being respectful in every way, somehow it isn't rape because it didn't begin with these lesser acts of disrespect.
> Sexual assault doesn't typically begin with violent rape. It ends there.
> It begins with a million small forms of disrespect.
And? Are you suggesting that "small forms of disrespect" should be treated like violent rape because there's a very vague chance that it might lead there?
> It begins with a million small forms of disrespect.
And? Are you suggesting that "small forms of disrespect" should be treated like violent rape because there's a very vague chance that it might lead there?
I think you're applying too much nuance to this. Reading all the comments, I think everyone generally wants good for the author. There are just a few different ways to communicating that. Roughly they seem to be:
1. epmathy and twitter do better
2. empathy and this is what you get with twitter
3. empath and practical advice
You seem to be railing against (2). Personally I find the bone you're picking to really be besides the point. Most everyone is empathizing with the author's struggle. Nobody here is telling the author to go fuck themselves. Nobody is condoning what Twitter is doing. And certainly nobody is disrespecting the author or supporting the misinformation. So your comment really feels like a non sequitur.
1. epmathy and twitter do better
2. empathy and this is what you get with twitter
3. empath and practical advice
You seem to be railing against (2). Personally I find the bone you're picking to really be besides the point. Most everyone is empathizing with the author's struggle. Nobody here is telling the author to go fuck themselves. Nobody is condoning what Twitter is doing. And certainly nobody is disrespecting the author or supporting the misinformation. So your comment really feels like a non sequitur.
The premise seems more about how easily Twitter can be used to support a coup, suppress journalistic voice, oppress people, and push propaganda.
I don't know if without Twitter all this would be just as easy, through state controlled media, but what I do know is that Twitter could actually be a tool against this, but is failing to be.
Having a popular media outlet that cannot be coopted for propaganda and used for oppression or harm would be a great thing. Twitter clearly failed to be this, and maybe fails really bad at it where it seems like it could easily be a bit better at it.
I don't know if without Twitter all this would be just as easy, through state controlled media, but what I do know is that Twitter could actually be a tool against this, but is failing to be.
Having a popular media outlet that cannot be coopted for propaganda and used for oppression or harm would be a great thing. Twitter clearly failed to be this, and maybe fails really bad at it where it seems like it could easily be a bit better at it.
I dispute that Twitter could be a tool against those things, because that implies that it's within Twitter's capabilities to know everything that is going on in the world in order to distinguish between true and untrue tweets.
Given that limitation, I would argue that the ideal communication medium simply conveys the messages it's given without regard for their contents. What people do with those messages is something that the medium has no power over.
Given that limitation, I would argue that the ideal communication medium simply conveys the messages it's given without regard for their contents. What people do with those messages is something that the medium has no power over.
I don't think Twitter needs to assess what is true or not, but it can try to find ways to know the source and make sure they're not bad actors, paid agents, state sponsors, etc.
For example, OP mentions how they never allowed him to have a verified badge even though he tried. This very much seems like something Twitter could have done. Now to anyone else, his account seems just as fake as any other impersonating him.
It could also put more effort behind investigating reports like the OP did. And it could also have detection and review processes for any kind of tweet that could be defaming. Accusation of criminal acts, labeling of people, mention of violence, arrest, etc.
Finally, this is the Web 3 era, who knows what mechanism it could find to innovate on that front.
The issue I have with what you say is the ideal communication medium ignores the issues with Twitter, such that it doesn't just simply convey content without regard. It selectively prioritizes, automatically suggests, and promotes certain tweets over others. It also gives very little recourse to people receiving the content to do their own due diligence, or to people who are targeted by the tweets to have a means to provide their counterpoint to the same audience, unless they themselves are just as powerful an actor.
You could imagine a relatively simple feature, any Tweet that mentions someone else by name or Twitter alias, that person should be able to attach a response to them that is shown under those tweets automatically. Twitter wouldn't need to choose the truth, but it gives recourse and mechanisms for the process of truth seeking to take place and for the people being shown the tweet more context and therefore better means to make up their own mind.
For example, OP mentions how they never allowed him to have a verified badge even though he tried. This very much seems like something Twitter could have done. Now to anyone else, his account seems just as fake as any other impersonating him.
It could also put more effort behind investigating reports like the OP did. And it could also have detection and review processes for any kind of tweet that could be defaming. Accusation of criminal acts, labeling of people, mention of violence, arrest, etc.
Finally, this is the Web 3 era, who knows what mechanism it could find to innovate on that front.
The issue I have with what you say is the ideal communication medium ignores the issues with Twitter, such that it doesn't just simply convey content without regard. It selectively prioritizes, automatically suggests, and promotes certain tweets over others. It also gives very little recourse to people receiving the content to do their own due diligence, or to people who are targeted by the tweets to have a means to provide their counterpoint to the same audience, unless they themselves are just as powerful an actor.
You could imagine a relatively simple feature, any Tweet that mentions someone else by name or Twitter alias, that person should be able to attach a response to them that is shown under those tweets automatically. Twitter wouldn't need to choose the truth, but it gives recourse and mechanisms for the process of truth seeking to take place and for the people being shown the tweet more context and therefore better means to make up their own mind.
>it can try to find ways to know the source and make sure they're not bad actors, paid agents, state sponsors, etc.
Why would that be relevant? The truth and importance of a message can't be entirely determined by its source.
>OP mentions how they never allowed him to have a verified badge even though he tried. This very much seems like something Twitter could have done. Now to anyone else, his account seems just as fake as any other impersonating him.
I fail to see how that would help. OP says they're accusing him of being an agent. That's something that could be done even without a parody account.
>It could also put more effort behind investigating reports like the OP did. Accusation of criminal acts, labeling of people, mention of violence, arrest, etc.
So, no more news on Twitter? No more whistle-blowing? I mean, what if OP actually is an Israeli agent? Or perhaps you would like Twitter to actually investigate whether he is an agent, in which case you're agreeing with me, that Twitter would need to know everything that's going on in the world.
>The issue I have with what you say is the ideal communication medium ignores the issues with Twitter, such that it doesn't just simply convey content without regard. It selectively prioritizes, automatically suggests, and promotes certain tweets over others.
I agree, Twitter is already not the ideal communication medium. I'm saying that adding censoring to the problems you've already listed takes it farther from the ideal, not closer. It's also unreasonable, because it asks Twitter to be the arbiter of truth.
>You could imagine a relatively simple feature, any Tweet that mentions someone else by name or Twitter alias, that person should be able to attach a response to them that is shown under those tweets automatically.
I don't think it's a bad idea per se, but it seems like it would be easy to thwart it. And I doubt it would have helped OP if it already existed. He's not complaining that he can't reply to those tweets, he's complaining that the tweets exist at all.
Why would that be relevant? The truth and importance of a message can't be entirely determined by its source.
>OP mentions how they never allowed him to have a verified badge even though he tried. This very much seems like something Twitter could have done. Now to anyone else, his account seems just as fake as any other impersonating him.
I fail to see how that would help. OP says they're accusing him of being an agent. That's something that could be done even without a parody account.
>It could also put more effort behind investigating reports like the OP did. Accusation of criminal acts, labeling of people, mention of violence, arrest, etc.
So, no more news on Twitter? No more whistle-blowing? I mean, what if OP actually is an Israeli agent? Or perhaps you would like Twitter to actually investigate whether he is an agent, in which case you're agreeing with me, that Twitter would need to know everything that's going on in the world.
>The issue I have with what you say is the ideal communication medium ignores the issues with Twitter, such that it doesn't just simply convey content without regard. It selectively prioritizes, automatically suggests, and promotes certain tweets over others.
I agree, Twitter is already not the ideal communication medium. I'm saying that adding censoring to the problems you've already listed takes it farther from the ideal, not closer. It's also unreasonable, because it asks Twitter to be the arbiter of truth.
>You could imagine a relatively simple feature, any Tweet that mentions someone else by name or Twitter alias, that person should be able to attach a response to them that is shown under those tweets automatically.
I don't think it's a bad idea per se, but it seems like it would be easy to thwart it. And I doubt it would have helped OP if it already existed. He's not complaining that he can't reply to those tweets, he's complaining that the tweets exist at all.
> Why would that be relevant? The truth and importance of a message can't be entirely determined by its source
You said it yourself, not "entirely", implying it is of relevance. If the information comes from the opposing political party, or from a troll farm, or from a different country as to the one the information is about, or from someone known to be against or for something, knowing the source of the information, the bias, and conflict of interests of the source of information is very important to determine your trust in the information.
> I fail to see how that would help. OP says they're accusing him of being an agent. That's something that could be done even without a parody account.
I'm assuming OP feels that not owning the verified account for themselves hurts him in some way and makes it harder for him to defend themselves against the accusations and slandering. The issue I can see in general is that it means other accounts could pretend to be him, and if he tries and respond to some claims, people reading can assume it's not truly him responding.
> So, no more news on Twitter? No more whistle-blowing? I mean, what if OP actually is an Israeli agent? Or perhaps you would like Twitter to actually investigate whether he is an agent, in which case you're agreeing with me, that Twitter would need to know everything that's going on in the world
You can still have all these things, but simply increase your bar for them. Basically, if someone says something that could be defamation or slander, they should show due cause, if they don't, then it doesn't meet the quality bar for Twitter and Twitter doesn't have to accept hosting the content and promoting it to others. One can still self-publish if they want.
The bar for due cause doesn't have to be very high either, you could simply say that justification must be provided, and only minimal assessment of the justification needs to take place, basically just check that a logical reason was provided, not that the reason is good or undeniable, but simply relevant.
So hopefully I showed how such a process wouldn't impact free speech, nothing gets censored or blocked, but potentially harmful and damaging to other speech is asked to provide a small amount of additional justification for the claims.
> I agree, Twitter is already not the ideal communication medium. I'm saying that adding censoring to the problems you've already listed takes it farther from the ideal, not closer. It's also unreasonable, because it asks Twitter to be the arbiter of truth
I'm not asking for censorship, I'm asking for mechanisms to increase the quality of the discussions and benefit the truth seeking process.
I literally spent like 10min thinking about this and already came up with three possible improvements. Imagine being Twitter and having employees that could have access to all their data and spend much more resources brainstorming on this problem, I'm sure they could come up with even more ideas.
He's complaining that he can't keep up replying to them all. Ya he's also complaining they were posted in the first place, but that's to your point, we're not trying to prevent truth from coming out, but for claims made to have more legitimacy, and for targeted individuals and organizations to have more recourse to defend themselves. All things that actually help distinguish a truth from a lie.
This has to happen in a way that avoids the reader trap. That is, most readers won't go out of their way to fairly evaluate the claims and search for counterpoints or research the bias and conflict of interests, etc.
Take me, I see a tweet, if a reply is posted to it a week later, very likely I don't see that reply. The original tweets message is all I saw and now lives in my subconscious as a data point.
It's things like this that makes it easy to use for propaganda, anytime you can silence your opponents by having more man power then them, like more followers, more people working for you retweeting things, the ability to flood your message over others, it's a system that plays to the benefit of propaganda.
You said it yourself, not "entirely", implying it is of relevance. If the information comes from the opposing political party, or from a troll farm, or from a different country as to the one the information is about, or from someone known to be against or for something, knowing the source of the information, the bias, and conflict of interests of the source of information is very important to determine your trust in the information.
> I fail to see how that would help. OP says they're accusing him of being an agent. That's something that could be done even without a parody account.
I'm assuming OP feels that not owning the verified account for themselves hurts him in some way and makes it harder for him to defend themselves against the accusations and slandering. The issue I can see in general is that it means other accounts could pretend to be him, and if he tries and respond to some claims, people reading can assume it's not truly him responding.
> So, no more news on Twitter? No more whistle-blowing? I mean, what if OP actually is an Israeli agent? Or perhaps you would like Twitter to actually investigate whether he is an agent, in which case you're agreeing with me, that Twitter would need to know everything that's going on in the world
You can still have all these things, but simply increase your bar for them. Basically, if someone says something that could be defamation or slander, they should show due cause, if they don't, then it doesn't meet the quality bar for Twitter and Twitter doesn't have to accept hosting the content and promoting it to others. One can still self-publish if they want.
The bar for due cause doesn't have to be very high either, you could simply say that justification must be provided, and only minimal assessment of the justification needs to take place, basically just check that a logical reason was provided, not that the reason is good or undeniable, but simply relevant.
This person is an Israeli agent
We think this person is an Israeli agent, because they've been spotted talking to Jewish people in New York.
So hopefully I showed how such a process wouldn't impact free speech, nothing gets censored or blocked, but potentially harmful and damaging to other speech is asked to provide a small amount of additional justification for the claims.
> I agree, Twitter is already not the ideal communication medium. I'm saying that adding censoring to the problems you've already listed takes it farther from the ideal, not closer. It's also unreasonable, because it asks Twitter to be the arbiter of truth
I'm not asking for censorship, I'm asking for mechanisms to increase the quality of the discussions and benefit the truth seeking process.
I literally spent like 10min thinking about this and already came up with three possible improvements. Imagine being Twitter and having employees that could have access to all their data and spend much more resources brainstorming on this problem, I'm sure they could come up with even more ideas.
1. Provide more transparency on the source of the information.
2. Provide a way for the targets of Tweets to provide their counterpoint.
3. Increase the requirement for tweets that attack a target to provide justification.
He's complaining that he can't keep up replying to them all. Ya he's also complaining they were posted in the first place, but that's to your point, we're not trying to prevent truth from coming out, but for claims made to have more legitimacy, and for targeted individuals and organizations to have more recourse to defend themselves. All things that actually help distinguish a truth from a lie.
This has to happen in a way that avoids the reader trap. That is, most readers won't go out of their way to fairly evaluate the claims and search for counterpoints or research the bias and conflict of interests, etc.
Take me, I see a tweet, if a reply is posted to it a week later, very likely I don't see that reply. The original tweets message is all I saw and now lives in my subconscious as a data point.
It's things like this that makes it easy to use for propaganda, anytime you can silence your opponents by having more man power then them, like more followers, more people working for you retweeting things, the ability to flood your message over others, it's a system that plays to the benefit of propaganda.
>You said it yourself, not "entirely", implying it is of relevance. If the information comes from the opposing political party, or from a troll farm, or from a different country as to the one the information is about, or from someone known to be against or for something, knowing the source of the information, the bias, and conflict of interests of the source of information is very important to determine your trust in the information.
If you're saying that Twitter could attach that information to tweets so readers can judge for themselves, then I have no problem with that. I thought you meant that Twitter should use it to decide whether to remove tweets.
It still seems beyond the capabilities of Twitter, though. It's like asking the telephone company to have journalistic duties over everything that's said on the network. And I suppose the cynical point is, why would Twitter implement any of the changes you propose? Would it improve the site? Sure, but would it translate to any advantages for the shareholders? Is Twitter responsible for quality of the tweets in the platform?
>It's things like this that makes it easy to use for propaganda, anytime you can silence your opponents by having more man power then them, like more followers, more people working for you retweeting things, the ability to flood your message over others, it's a system that plays to the benefit of propaganda.
It sounds like an inherent problem, though. If you're up against someone who can tweet 100 times faster than you because they have more resources, I don't think there's anything Twitter can do against that.
If you're saying that Twitter could attach that information to tweets so readers can judge for themselves, then I have no problem with that. I thought you meant that Twitter should use it to decide whether to remove tweets.
It still seems beyond the capabilities of Twitter, though. It's like asking the telephone company to have journalistic duties over everything that's said on the network. And I suppose the cynical point is, why would Twitter implement any of the changes you propose? Would it improve the site? Sure, but would it translate to any advantages for the shareholders? Is Twitter responsible for quality of the tweets in the platform?
>It's things like this that makes it easy to use for propaganda, anytime you can silence your opponents by having more man power then them, like more followers, more people working for you retweeting things, the ability to flood your message over others, it's a system that plays to the benefit of propaganda.
It sounds like an inherent problem, though. If you're up against someone who can tweet 100 times faster than you because they have more resources, I don't think there's anything Twitter can do against that.
> I dispute that Twitter could be a tool against those things, because that implies that it's within Twitter's capabilities to know everything that is going on in the world in order to distinguish between true and untrue tweets.
You're saying that omniscience is a necessary condition before Twitter can start doing good in the world, instead of bad? This is a non-sequitur.
> Given that limitation, I would argue that the ideal communication medium simply conveys the messages it's given without regard for their contents. What people do with those messages is something that the medium has no power over.
I would argue that this is ignorant of social psychology. Sunlight isn't the best disinfectant, and people aren't rational non-tribal agents who will all hold hands and sing Kumbaya only if they could have totally unmoderated discourse. Twitter will become an 8chan sewer if your ideology is adopted by them.
You're saying that omniscience is a necessary condition before Twitter can start doing good in the world, instead of bad? This is a non-sequitur.
> Given that limitation, I would argue that the ideal communication medium simply conveys the messages it's given without regard for their contents. What people do with those messages is something that the medium has no power over.
I would argue that this is ignorant of social psychology. Sunlight isn't the best disinfectant, and people aren't rational non-tribal agents who will all hold hands and sing Kumbaya only if they could have totally unmoderated discourse. Twitter will become an 8chan sewer if your ideology is adopted by them.
>You're saying that omniscience is a necessary condition before Twitter can start doing good in the world, instead of bad?
No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying perfect knowledge and perfect filtering are necessary for Twitter to avoid being used to oppress and propagandize.
>Twitter will become an 8chan sewer if your ideology is adopted by them.
The way you're saying it assumes that this is obviously a bad thing, while in fact it's a matter of opinion. I personally think the optimal level of moderation in any discussion forum is that which only prevents disruption of the forum's functioning.
No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying perfect knowledge and perfect filtering are necessary for Twitter to avoid being used to oppress and propagandize.
>Twitter will become an 8chan sewer if your ideology is adopted by them.
The way you're saying it assumes that this is obviously a bad thing, while in fact it's a matter of opinion. I personally think the optimal level of moderation in any discussion forum is that which only prevents disruption of the forum's functioning.
> perfect knowledge and perfect filtering are necessary for Twitter to avoid being used to oppress and propagandize.
That only makes sense if you think that an unmoderated Twitter can't also be used to oppress and propagandize, which is naive.
Revenge porn and harassment has oppressive outcomes. A foreign intelligence agency flooding the zone with misinformation, has the effect of propagandizing.
> the optimal level of moderation in any discussion forum is that which only prevents disruption of the forum's functioning.
There is a theme here of you liking hard categories and arbitrary cutoffs. It suggests to me a rigidity of thought.
> The way you're saying it assumes that this is obviously a bad thing, while in fact it's a matter of opinion.
Of course it's my opinion, what other opinion would I be sharing? I don't want to live in a world where ISIS propaganda is radicalizing millions of people because of free speech purism being applied to a social media company.
That only makes sense if you think that an unmoderated Twitter can't also be used to oppress and propagandize, which is naive.
Revenge porn and harassment has oppressive outcomes. A foreign intelligence agency flooding the zone with misinformation, has the effect of propagandizing.
> the optimal level of moderation in any discussion forum is that which only prevents disruption of the forum's functioning.
There is a theme here of you liking hard categories and arbitrary cutoffs. It suggests to me a rigidity of thought.
> The way you're saying it assumes that this is obviously a bad thing, while in fact it's a matter of opinion.
Of course it's my opinion, what other opinion would I be sharing? I don't want to live in a world where ISIS propaganda is radicalizing millions of people because of free speech purism being applied to a social media company.
>That only makes sense if you think that an unmoderated Twitter can't also be used to oppress and propagandize
So let me get this straight. The only way that the statement "perfect knowledge and perfect filtering are necessary for Twitter to avoid being used to oppress and propagandize" can be true is if "zero filtering would prevent Twitter being used to oppress and propagandize". If you could, please explain how that makes sense.
>There is a theme here of you liking hard categories and arbitrary cutoffs. It suggests to me a rigidity of thought.
OK.
>I don't want to live in a world where ISIS propaganda is radicalizing millions of people because of free speech purism being applied to a social media company.
I think if Western culture offers such a weak argument that it can't compete with such a backwards ideology in a free marketplace of ideas, that it deserves to be trampled by it and forgotten. The worst thing that could be done for ISIS is to give them a megaphone that's as loud as everyone else's.
So let me get this straight. The only way that the statement "perfect knowledge and perfect filtering are necessary for Twitter to avoid being used to oppress and propagandize" can be true is if "zero filtering would prevent Twitter being used to oppress and propagandize". If you could, please explain how that makes sense.
>There is a theme here of you liking hard categories and arbitrary cutoffs. It suggests to me a rigidity of thought.
OK.
>I don't want to live in a world where ISIS propaganda is radicalizing millions of people because of free speech purism being applied to a social media company.
I think if Western culture offers such a weak argument that it can't compete with such a backwards ideology in a free marketplace of ideas, that it deserves to be trampled by it and forgotten. The worst thing that could be done for ISIS is to give them a megaphone that's as loud as everyone else's.
Well you told me my initial interpretation of what you said was wrong, so I tried to find an alternative meaning behind what you were saying. But now I see my initial interpretation was accurate. You are indeed saying that, if Twitter isn't omniscient, then it won't be able to avoid being used to oppress and propagandize because it's not possible moderate perfectly. This is the just the perfect solution fallacy.
"free marketplace of ideas"
>You are indeed saying that, if Twitter isn't omniscient, then it won't be able to avoid being used to oppress and propagandize because it's not possible moderate perfectly. This is the just the perfect solution fallacy.
No. The Nirvana fallacy would be "since moderating imperfectly doesn't completely eliminate the problem of Twitter being used to oppress or propagandize, no moderation should be applied". Actually I'm saying that a) moderating imperfectly doesn't completely eliminate the problem, and b) no moderation should be applied because inconsistent moderation is worse than no moderation (without this being related to the previous point, but just in general).
>You think you can just shine a light on bad ideas and they'll go away
Actually I'm disputing the idea of "good and bad ideas" in this context. Neither Islamism nor any of the examples you gave are good or bad in an objective sense. The most we can say is that they're more or less successful in perpetuating themselves in time, or that they cause more or less of some specific phenomenon. I described Islamism as backwards and stupid but that's my opinion, not an objective measure. If when given sufficient exposure it would win ideologically then I think it should be allowed to win. I see no reason to prevent this.
>If you want to form a worldview based on social psychology
When did I say that?
No. The Nirvana fallacy would be "since moderating imperfectly doesn't completely eliminate the problem of Twitter being used to oppress or propagandize, no moderation should be applied". Actually I'm saying that a) moderating imperfectly doesn't completely eliminate the problem, and b) no moderation should be applied because inconsistent moderation is worse than no moderation (without this being related to the previous point, but just in general).
>You think you can just shine a light on bad ideas and they'll go away
Actually I'm disputing the idea of "good and bad ideas" in this context. Neither Islamism nor any of the examples you gave are good or bad in an objective sense. The most we can say is that they're more or less successful in perpetuating themselves in time, or that they cause more or less of some specific phenomenon. I described Islamism as backwards and stupid but that's my opinion, not an objective measure. If when given sufficient exposure it would win ideologically then I think it should be allowed to win. I see no reason to prevent this.
>If you want to form a worldview based on social psychology
When did I say that?
"no moderation should be applied because inconsistent moderation is worse than no moderation"
The consistency of moderation is a spectrum, from very poor to average to excellent.
You're insisting on drawing a rigid binary of "inconsistent" versus "perfectly consistent", and saying that since "perfectly consistent" is impossible, the only alternative is "inconsistent" which is categorically worse than than no moderation by sheer virtue of the binary category that it's assigned to. This is the perfect solution fallacy.
"Actually I'm disputing the idea of "good and bad ideas" in this context"
Isn't there a word for the fallacy that something can improve a situation and should, but because it can't solve it we should ignore that it's improvement is important ethically?
The nirvana fallacy [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
Right. "The perfect is the enemy of the good".
> we should ignore that [twitters] improvement is important ethically
I have not said this, and I do not think it. What I actually said is that I wish twitter would do a better job, you've managed to somehow invert that.
I have not said this, and I do not think it. What I actually said is that I wish twitter would do a better job, you've managed to somehow invert that.
Total strawman. Nobody is saying Twitter should act as a shield. They're saying Twitter shouldn't actively facilitate that outcome by providing a platform for targeted harassment and lies.
Nobody wanted Facebook to stop a genocide in Myanmar. They just wanted Facebook to not serve the role of actively encourage that outcome.
Nobody wanted Facebook to stop a genocide in Myanmar. They just wanted Facebook to not serve the role of actively encourage that outcome.
Problem is who determines if it’s a smear campaign? The author claims it was, and I tend to believe him but I haven’t investigated. Have you? And then, how determines if it’s extreme enough to warrant some action? In the ideal world sure there would be an army of people investigating every case in detail. But then 1) Twitter becomes the arbiter of truth and 2) definitely can’t scale.
Oh come the fuck on. People on HN need to get over this: At a certain point people and organizations need to stop pretending that “both sides could in theory have a point” and actually take a stand.
“But what if the stand they take is opposite the one you think they should take? How would you like that?”
I wouldn’t, I’d badger them to take my position. Hopefully I’d succeed, and if I didn’t, I’d join a long line of people who were right but unsuccessful. So it goes, life sucks sometimes.
“But what if the stand they take is opposite the one you think they should take? How would you like that?”
I wouldn’t, I’d badger them to take my position. Hopefully I’d succeed, and if I didn’t, I’d join a long line of people who were right but unsuccessful. So it goes, life sucks sometimes.
I don’t want communication platform organizations taking any stands anywhere ever. That sounds dystopian and horrible. Deleting these Tweets won’t change a damn thing and might even be more harmful (what if the author didn't know they were being targeted because Twitter deleted everything, then they hopped back home because Twitter made them feel safe and fuzzy, and the got detained and tortured, for instance). What will change things is people getting off their keyboards and taking stands. You cannot pwn the responsibility off on Twitter moderators. Only the truth can hide the lies.
138 journalists killed in Pakistan since 1990
https://www.dawn.com/news/1595257
At least 39 journalists killed in US due to their work...since 1937
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_i...
These risk levels are not alike.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1595257
At least 39 journalists killed in US due to their work...since 1937
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_i...
These risk levels are not alike.
Morally? Yes, a very reasonable request.
OTOH - is there any large real-world corporation which has ever gotten itself into a sustained info-war conflict with a well-armed and angry nation state, for the purpose of protecting one "ordinary" person from that nation state? I'm guessing "no".
OTOH - is there any large real-world corporation which has ever gotten itself into a sustained info-war conflict with a well-armed and angry nation state, for the purpose of protecting one "ordinary" person from that nation state? I'm guessing "no".
He says he's a journalist. That used to mean something.
So it's rather dismissive and disrespectful to characterize him as an ordinary person with scare quotes no less.
If these platforms feel unable to moderate fairly due to fear of foreign governments, perhaps they should tuck tail and keep their pussy selves out of the conflict entirely.
I'm not impressed with an argument of "We want the money involved but we can't make any meaningful effort to actually enforce the rules we claim we have. Your country is too tough for my sissy self to man up in. I still want the money though."
So it's rather dismissive and disrespectful to characterize him as an ordinary person with scare quotes no less.
If these platforms feel unable to moderate fairly due to fear of foreign governments, perhaps they should tuck tail and keep their pussy selves out of the conflict entirely.
I'm not impressed with an argument of "We want the money involved but we can't make any meaningful effort to actually enforce the rules we claim we have. Your country is too tough for my sissy self to man up in. I still want the money though."
Okay - replace '"ordinary" person' with some polite phrase of your choice, which still makes it clear that the victim is not a head of state, ambassador, top military officer, Speaker of the House, Fortune 50 CEO, etc., etc.
No, I am not arguing that your idealism is morally wrong. I am arguing that the real world very often functions in ways which bear little resemblance to your ideals. No amount of idealism about "the gutter should have been stronger, and the ladder more stable, and..." will change the fact that my brother fell off a roof when young. Nor erase the injuries which he sustained. When I or people I care about are interacting with gutters and ladders, I stay very alert, and strive for "zero idealistic thoughts".
And - this sad state of affairs is nothing new. Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, The Brass Check, and other works (about the deep and systematic moral failings of corporations, journalists, etc.) over a century ago.
No, I am not arguing that your idealism is morally wrong. I am arguing that the real world very often functions in ways which bear little resemblance to your ideals. No amount of idealism about "the gutter should have been stronger, and the ladder more stable, and..." will change the fact that my brother fell off a roof when young. Nor erase the injuries which he sustained. When I or people I care about are interacting with gutters and ladders, I stay very alert, and strive for "zero idealistic thoughts".
And - this sad state of affairs is nothing new. Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, The Brass Check, and other works (about the deep and systematic moral failings of corporations, journalists, etc.) over a century ago.
Idealism?
I'm not an idealist. I'm a pragmatist.
But the internet allows businesses to operate virtually in de facto war zones. This is getting people killed when the business tries to act like they don't need to account for that fact.
If they physically went into a war zone to sell products and it was getting people killed, would that merit a "Too bad, so sad. Gotta make money, doncha know. Can't be worried about niggling details like not getting our customers cavalierly killed."
I'm not an idealist. I'm a pragmatist.
But the internet allows businesses to operate virtually in de facto war zones. This is getting people killed when the business tries to act like they don't need to account for that fact.
If they physically went into a war zone to sell products and it was getting people killed, would that merit a "Too bad, so sad. Gotta make money, doncha know. Can't be worried about niggling details like not getting our customers cavalierly killed."
How could a business possibly account for that in a way that doesn't make doing business over the Internet logistically impossible?
The arguments I'm seeing here boil down to "It's okay to go in with your tank full of tchochky souvenirs and run over a few powerless locals to protect yourself so you can make a few bucks."
The general trend is that, when in doubt, Twitter should cover its own ass. I would like to see a standard of "When in doubt, don't run over pedestrians with your tank."
Surely a company can come up with some best practices that err in the right direction here. Or maybe that's expecting too much of the best of the best of the best, sir!
The general trend is that, when in doubt, Twitter should cover its own ass. I would like to see a standard of "When in doubt, don't run over pedestrians with your tank."
Surely a company can come up with some best practices that err in the right direction here. Or maybe that's expecting too much of the best of the best of the best, sir!
Sorry, but I'm not seeing an answer to my question.
> He says he's a journalist. That used to mean something.
That's a broad and unsupported claim. I'm not aware of any evidence being a journalist previously gave you some sort of immunity / corporate protection against totalitarian states that has now gone away.
That's a broad and unsupported claim. I'm not aware of any evidence being a journalist previously gave you some sort of immunity / corporate protection against totalitarian states that has now gone away.
Nor should it.
No, this is not Twitter’s problem, and if they fulfill this request it just goes down a rabbit hole that eventually creates more liability for the company than what they want to take on.
Twitter has taken the correct action here.
Twitter has taken the correct action here.
Wow, you're morally bankrupt. It's nice to see a well written article like that on the frontpage of this site, but unfortunately the venture capital fueled business model proposed by ycombinator is at the heart of the problem. Liability my ass. This is some disgusting dystopian bullshit. Also if you talk about liability, heard about the Streisand effect? Public opinion about these corporations is low and i think twitter itself isn't doing so well lately. Good riddance.
There is a long history of liability in the USA when you take on editorializing roles. This was broken by the Communication Decency Act (CDA section 230) but case law has is slowly moving back. It is a valid concern.
If CDA 230 were taken away, I wouldn’t be surprised if common carrier laws fell as well. The telephone companies can listen to all phone calls, so they may need to editorialize (mute, disconnect, report to police) on various illegal calls.
If CDA 230 were taken away, I wouldn’t be surprised if common carrier laws fell as well. The telephone companies can listen to all phone calls, so they may need to editorialize (mute, disconnect, report to police) on various illegal calls.
Twitter's response was so soulless, it's unclear if it's a bot. This is what i find most unacceptable. Others have expanded on the censorship problem in this thread.
A response should be delivered quickly and efficiently, and in no uncertain terms. Filling it with heart and soul just gives false hope that some kind of appeal to emotion can be achieved. But it cannot.
Exactly, quickly and efficiently, cause we have to scale to the heavens to please the investors. No time for human decency.
I'm not talking about "some kind of appeal to emotion". This is about human rights in a fascist regime. At some point you have to take a stance. There is so much twitter could have done better. The first step would be to take this serious.
The likes of twitter, facebook, uber, amazon, ... have made the world worse for the sake of their shareholders and you are complicit. I'm sure your salary is fine though.
I'm not talking about "some kind of appeal to emotion". This is about human rights in a fascist regime. At some point you have to take a stance. There is so much twitter could have done better. The first step would be to take this serious.
The likes of twitter, facebook, uber, amazon, ... have made the world worse for the sake of their shareholders and you are complicit. I'm sure your salary is fine though.
A company does not have to take a stance, it is not an individual. Members of the company are free to take whatever stance they wish personally.
[deleted]
> Being realistic: if your life hangs by the thread of twitter moderation, you should either run and hide, or get your affairs in order.
Perhaps a 3rd option is to go on the attack, and find some angle from which to sue Twitter?
Perhaps a 3rd option is to go on the attack, and find some angle from which to sue Twitter?
The focus on Twitter seems a bit strange. Per the author's post, the government of Pakistan is arresting journalists and activists, manufacturing a pretext after the fact:
> In Pakistan, activists and journalists are routinely picked up (abducted) and tortured by the country's police and secret services. Same happened this time, some of the top journalists and anchors were picked up - some without warrants with fake cases filed post-arrest.
Twitter removing the fake claims won't stop the ISI or whoever from kicking his door in, if/when he returns to Pakistan.
> In Pakistan, activists and journalists are routinely picked up (abducted) and tortured by the country's police and secret services. Same happened this time, some of the top journalists and anchors were picked up - some without warrants with fake cases filed post-arrest.
Twitter removing the fake claims won't stop the ISI or whoever from kicking his door in, if/when he returns to Pakistan.
This article reads like an asylum claim. Hopefully they already have permanent legal permanent residence somewhere else, if not they will likely by applying for asylum. It could be the whole thing was written expressly for the purpose of asylum.
Going back to Pakistan at this point would mean basically picking how you want to go out. Either by defending your life in one last moment before a corrupt government takes your down, or letting them beat you in prison and slowly watch your soul and fighting spirit wither away in prison until you die. I presume if that's how they wanted to go, they would have been doing this journalism inside Pakistan right now.
Going back to Pakistan at this point would mean basically picking how you want to go out. Either by defending your life in one last moment before a corrupt government takes your down, or letting them beat you in prison and slowly watch your soul and fighting spirit wither away in prison until you die. I presume if that's how they wanted to go, they would have been doing this journalism inside Pakistan right now.
The US government may be complicit in the dynamics of Pakistan’s government, so I’m not sure they are working under any directives to help asylum seeking muckrakers:
https://youtu.be/3jFNJtjm-wI
https://youtu.be/3jFNJtjm-wI
i am not. i find this accusation disgusting. i do not have a problem, legally, in staying here. my problem is exactly because i WANT to go back and not face any violence.
> i WANT to go back and not face any violence.
In that case you need to arrange for the violent overthrow of the current (ie since ~5 months ago) Pakistani government. The absence/removal of malicious libel from twitter, even if twitter were non-evil enough to bother doing that, will not prevent you from being kidnapped and tortured.
In that case you need to arrange for the violent overthrow of the current (ie since ~5 months ago) Pakistani government. The absence/removal of malicious libel from twitter, even if twitter were non-evil enough to bother doing that, will not prevent you from being kidnapped and tortured.
What bullshit, man. Where were you living last 15 years?
You want to go back to your country and not be killed on the spot, you organize a coup there, not whine on Twitter or to it. Whines don't do shit, it's that simple.
You want to go back to your country and not be killed on the spot, you organize a coup there, not whine on Twitter or to it. Whines don't do shit, it's that simple.
I don't understand, you don't want to be here. You want to go back. But an American technology company is what's stopping you? Once twitter does what you say you can safely go back home?
> go back and not face any violence
Seems kinda unrealistic after the gov’t accused you of inciting violence.
Seems kinda unrealistic after the gov’t accused you of inciting violence.
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> Perhaps a 3rd option is to go on the attack, and find some angle from which to sue Twitter?
Sueing twitter isn't likely to go far. Twitter doesn't have responsibility for their users' speech (with some very specific exceptions that don't include libel or defamation), and doesn't have a legal obligation to operate its moderation system. I don't think there's much to pursue there, unless there's something very unusual in the TOS.
You'd need to sue the people making the claims, but there's jurisdiction issues; if the alleged corruption of the government of Pakistan is the case, suing in Pakistan would seem to be unlikely to result in the desired outcome. On the other hand, a court in the US, where the OP resides, may not be willing to assert jurisdiction over speech by someone in another country, and the speaker is unlikely to participate in a US case.
In any event, such a case is likely to take years, which doesn't address the immediate nature of this issue. But I don't know how Twitter could really evaluate truthfulness of claims like these.
Sueing twitter isn't likely to go far. Twitter doesn't have responsibility for their users' speech (with some very specific exceptions that don't include libel or defamation), and doesn't have a legal obligation to operate its moderation system. I don't think there's much to pursue there, unless there's something very unusual in the TOS.
You'd need to sue the people making the claims, but there's jurisdiction issues; if the alleged corruption of the government of Pakistan is the case, suing in Pakistan would seem to be unlikely to result in the desired outcome. On the other hand, a court in the US, where the OP resides, may not be willing to assert jurisdiction over speech by someone in another country, and the speaker is unlikely to participate in a US case.
In any event, such a case is likely to take years, which doesn't address the immediate nature of this issue. But I don't know how Twitter could really evaluate truthfulness of claims like these.
That won't solve the problem of people wanting him dead.
Yeah. Change my mind: if people want you dead violently, police are likely to be 15 minutes to an hour too late, and the courts a couple years late behind that. Unfortunately violence is often either solved by running away, hiding, or meeting violence with direct self defense.
Maybe after you're lucky, you can win a suit against twitter, after their massive legal team drags it out for years with N number of hurdles. You'd be lucky to sue a nobody in podunk small claims court in time to effect meaningful change for something that needed done in days to weeks.
Maybe after you're lucky, you can win a suit against twitter, after their massive legal team drags it out for years with N number of hurdles. You'd be lucky to sue a nobody in podunk small claims court in time to effect meaningful change for something that needed done in days to weeks.
This is why I prefer “protocols over platforms”.
This entire thing isn’t twitters fault any more than it is WiFi’s, DNS, or TCP’s.
This entire thing isn’t twitters fault any more than it is WiFi’s, DNS, or TCP’s.
What's the fallacy for "X is value neutral so all products of X are also value neutral?" We saw the same pattern in the ethics in science thread or any ethics in technogy thread.
> This entire thing isn’t twitters fault any more than it is WiFi’s, DNS, or TCP’s.
I respectfully disagree. TCP or DNS or WiFi or other technologies are merely means to achieve some result. A tool.
Twitter, like most services, is also built using various technologies and tools. But its main distinguishing property is that it has a large number of users who, for various reasons, are interested in what some other users have to say. Creating such social connections is its main goal.
Now, one might use e.g TCP to spread hate speech all over the internet. But apart from computers dropping these packets, almost no real person will be listening.
Contrast that with a Twitter account that has ~10k followers. If the hate speech is spread from there, it can get a lot of audience very quickly.
Twitter is one of many enablers and hosts of large online communities of people. As such, it should have, in my opinion, some responsibility regarding what goes on within these communities. At a minimum, it should disallow the dissemination of hate speech, actively seek and remove it and block the users who repeatedly spread it.
That being said, it might be difficult to precisely define what constitutes a hate speech and what not. But Twitter should at least be trying.
I respectfully disagree. TCP or DNS or WiFi or other technologies are merely means to achieve some result. A tool.
Twitter, like most services, is also built using various technologies and tools. But its main distinguishing property is that it has a large number of users who, for various reasons, are interested in what some other users have to say. Creating such social connections is its main goal.
Now, one might use e.g TCP to spread hate speech all over the internet. But apart from computers dropping these packets, almost no real person will be listening.
Contrast that with a Twitter account that has ~10k followers. If the hate speech is spread from there, it can get a lot of audience very quickly.
Twitter is one of many enablers and hosts of large online communities of people. As such, it should have, in my opinion, some responsibility regarding what goes on within these communities. At a minimum, it should disallow the dissemination of hate speech, actively seek and remove it and block the users who repeatedly spread it.
That being said, it might be difficult to precisely define what constitutes a hate speech and what not. But Twitter should at least be trying.
What would happen if Twitter was a peer-to-peer FLOSS network? In our current world Twitter is a centralised product backed by a large company, but very little of its user-facing functionality could change and that would no longer be true. Such hypothetical P2P network would definitely have some kind of filtering, but it would likely not be network-wide and might not even be backed by a central entity (think more email anti-spam than moderation).
In such a situation, the expectation about the content moderation would remain the same. Specifically, such a network should still disallow hate speech, actively seek it, remove it and ban users who repeatedly spread it.
Thing is, P2P networks are usually built to make this kind of blanket blocking/banning impossible. Mastodon is more distributed than P2P, but even then moderation only applies to one server. In this case, the operators of popular Pakistani servers could very well side against the author. In a more "pure P2P" setup, I could see users choosing which moderation authorities to follow, so there would be no way to do what you ask. (Most users still wouldn't see it, because who wants to see hate speech, but the choice would be on the users, and again the kind of people this smear campaign is aimed at might not have it hidden.)
That would be true if Twitter was a protocol, or even wanted to be a protocol. It's a platform though, that's its entire business model.
> whole circumstance of people wanting you dead is not twitters fault
The hate speech itself is of course the sole responsibility of whoever created it.
Twitter is, however, fully responsible for allowing it to be spread.
Without a major communication channel which enables this hate speech to reach massive audiences, it would most likely remain isolated to a small number of people. And it probably would not evolve into a hate _action_.
The people behind this hate speech could of course reach to some dodgy places and hire professional mercenaries who might do the dirty jobs for them. But that is risky for them because their true identity might be revealed to the authorities or they might be betrayed or worse.
So what they do instead is they use a public channel, as big as they could find, like Twitter, to reach out to everyone who might be interested to answer their calling. They are counting on the possibility that maybe some psychopath with the will and abilities to do whatever they ask for will just go and do it.
The important part is that Twitter is used here as a communication medium without which the hate speech spreaders would have no major audience to pass their hate onto. The fact that they are allowed to do so absolutely is Twitter's responsibility.
The hate speech itself is of course the sole responsibility of whoever created it.
Twitter is, however, fully responsible for allowing it to be spread.
Without a major communication channel which enables this hate speech to reach massive audiences, it would most likely remain isolated to a small number of people. And it probably would not evolve into a hate _action_.
The people behind this hate speech could of course reach to some dodgy places and hire professional mercenaries who might do the dirty jobs for them. But that is risky for them because their true identity might be revealed to the authorities or they might be betrayed or worse.
So what they do instead is they use a public channel, as big as they could find, like Twitter, to reach out to everyone who might be interested to answer their calling. They are counting on the possibility that maybe some psychopath with the will and abilities to do whatever they ask for will just go and do it.
The important part is that Twitter is used here as a communication medium without which the hate speech spreaders would have no major audience to pass their hate onto. The fact that they are allowed to do so absolutely is Twitter's responsibility.
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He complains that Twitter doesn't know local Pakistani politics, but what would be the answer in this case? Set up national moderation offices? In this very case, they would just say yeah he's a spy... Unless you want random unaccountable expats making judgment calls about your government
Moderation is already localised by language. It's not such a stretch to extend this to some basic regional knowledge.
What the parent post seems to be saying is that it's quite plausible that localised moderation might follow the 'new regime' and instead of the current ignorance, they would strongly side against the OP - there's no reason to presume that 'some basic regional knowledge' would lead moderators to support the OPs political position instead of the position according to which he should be silenced and arrested - it might swing the one way, it might swing the other.
OP claims that synthetic commentators are making claims about them that are demonstrably untrue. This can be (and in other locales is) moderated in a politically neutral way.
I'm fairly sure that in other locales it is moderated in a politically neutral way that does not even attempt to evaluate whether the claims are untrue - the moderators verify if the claims are directly threatening or crude insults, but otherwise moderators don't attempt to determine what is true or not and correct people who say something untrue either intentionally or accidentally.
least Twitter can do is sensitize their moderators, or at least a subset of them, about local issues, maybe not to the level of making them regional experts, but enough so that they can tell a truth from a lie, a dangerous maligning campaign vs a fair critique. I dont think that is a hard problem.
How can you tell a truth from a lie in politics? You can certainly find the position you agree with and hire those guys and claim its always the truth, I guess. Unless you actually somehow know who the Indian secret services are paying. I certainly don't, even if I don't believe that this author is guilty of being a spy. This is judgment calls that a low paid Twitter moderator cannot make with any confidence.
It's not just a hard problem. It's an intractable problem.
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I can see where he’s coming from, but Twitter is a media company. They are not directly responsible for anyone’s safety and have no reason to take down content that isn’t a direct threat or clear defamation. That’s the police or justice system’s job. An unfortunate situation but he is barking at the wrong tree it seems.
>They are not directly responsible for anyone’s safety and have no reason to take down content that isn’t a direct threat or clear defamation.
From the article: the author is asking to have false, defamatory content removed.
> That’s the police or justice system’s job.
That is not an available option to the author of this article. The author is alleging that false posts are being made to lay the groundwork for the author being detained and tortured by the local justice system.
From the article: the author is asking to have false, defamatory content removed.
> That’s the police or justice system’s job.
That is not an available option to the author of this article. The author is alleging that false posts are being made to lay the groundwork for the author being detained and tortured by the local justice system.
>the author is asking to have false, defamatory content removed.
The author is asking to have content that he says is false removed.
>The author is alleging that false posts are being made to lay the groundwork for the author being detained and tortured by the local justice system.
Since the tweets may be used as an excuse to have him detained, removing them will do nothing, because the government could just as easily use a different medium for the same purpose. Twitter can't prevent someone who can and wants to kidnap you from kidnapping you.
The author is asking to have content that he says is false removed.
>The author is alleging that false posts are being made to lay the groundwork for the author being detained and tortured by the local justice system.
Since the tweets may be used as an excuse to have him detained, removing them will do nothing, because the government could just as easily use a different medium for the same purpose. Twitter can't prevent someone who can and wants to kidnap you from kidnapping you.
This is a good point and I think pretty well captures the "and what is Twitter supposed to do about it" angle.
To say "well, thus and such comedian is connected to the regime, that's why he has tweeted about me," well, what level of investigation is Twitter supposed to do that they a) disprove the allegations lobbed at OP (working for RAW provocateurs) and b) are able to support the allegation against the comedian's intent, and thus prove that the whole interaction is as the OP says it is?
Doing so goes beyond moderation, it goes beyond fact checking, it's nearly at the level of a personal background check or a trial.
What is being asked of Twitter seems totally outside the realm of what a social media company should be doing. It seems like OP wanted to do the right thing, to speak truth to power, but is now realizing that power was listening.
An account that publicly exposes your identity is not the right place to antagonize people with machine guns if you are not willing to take on personal risk, and that has nothing to do with moderation policies.
To say "well, thus and such comedian is connected to the regime, that's why he has tweeted about me," well, what level of investigation is Twitter supposed to do that they a) disprove the allegations lobbed at OP (working for RAW provocateurs) and b) are able to support the allegation against the comedian's intent, and thus prove that the whole interaction is as the OP says it is?
Doing so goes beyond moderation, it goes beyond fact checking, it's nearly at the level of a personal background check or a trial.
What is being asked of Twitter seems totally outside the realm of what a social media company should be doing. It seems like OP wanted to do the right thing, to speak truth to power, but is now realizing that power was listening.
An account that publicly exposes your identity is not the right place to antagonize people with machine guns if you are not willing to take on personal risk, and that has nothing to do with moderation policies.
> Since the tweets may be used as an excuse to have him detained, removing them will do nothing, because the government could just as easily use a different medium for the same purpose.
This is nonsense. That's like letting someone use your gun to shoot someone because they'd be able to find a gun somewhere.
This is nonsense. That's like letting someone use your gun to shoot someone because they'd be able to find a gun somewhere.
You're right, Twitter is a gun and tweets are bullets that kill. It's a perfectly apt analogy. /s
So basically meh, they'll torture him anyway?
If we're starting from the assumption that the government is posting false tweets that it'll use as excuses to kidnap and torture people, then I don't see what effect removing those tweets would have. A person under a real threat of violence needs real, physical protection. Anything that can be done over the Internet is insufficient.
It removes pretext used for justification of seizure and torture. Doing nothing enables the oppressor in this case.
>because the government could just as easily use a different medium for the same purpose
Nope, it isn't the police or justice system's job. That's a corporation externalizing the cost of their customer service division onto the taxpayer. Australia for example spends millions of dollars on online safety enforcement because these tech companies refuse to hire real people to remove revenge porn, impersonation, and so on.
That’s not right. The corporation’s job is to follow the law and abide to court orders. Identifying and prosecuting harassers is not “customer service”. If you take customer’s claims at face value what you get is people misusing the system to harass or silence even more people.
They should immediately act on takedown notices, for example in the case of revenge porn, but are not a private replacement for law enforcement.
They should immediately act on takedown notices, for example in the case of revenge porn, but are not a private replacement for law enforcement.
The corporation's minimum burden is to follow the law and abide by court orders.
That doesn't mean a corporation should be exempt from criticism when it does the wrong thing despite fulfilling that minimum burden. Laws are inadequate, and have loopholes.
Example: A corporation could literally make it its mission to funnel all profits into buying dirty coal and burning it for no reason whatsoever. There's nothing illegal about this in many countries.
That doesn't mean a corporation should be exempt from criticism when it does the wrong thing despite fulfilling that minimum burden. Laws are inadequate, and have loopholes.
Example: A corporation could literally make it its mission to funnel all profits into buying dirty coal and burning it for no reason whatsoever. There's nothing illegal about this in many countries.
"They should immediately act on takedown notices, for example in the case of revenge porn, but are not a private replacement for law enforcement."
there is clear defamation. they are claiming that i work for intel agencies of foreign countries, which is not true.
I sympathize with your situation but it doesn’t look that simple.
How could Twitter verify that claim? Who should they trust? If someone was indeed hired by another foreign agency, they might as well deny it for that persons own safety.
The same information war could be playing out on WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook or other networks, TV, radio, newspapers.
How could Twitter verify that claim? Who should they trust? If someone was indeed hired by another foreign agency, they might as well deny it for that persons own safety.
The same information war could be playing out on WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook or other networks, TV, radio, newspapers.
One thing that’s not clear. The tweet you show claims you are “appointed” to a position by a human rights org in India. But your denials all say you aren’t “working” for India, and you claim here for “intel agencies”.
It would be good to be more clear on both sides. Did they appoint you or did you associate in any form? Are they an independent org or a government agency? Maybe there were multiple accusations you are rolling into one?
It would be good to be more clear on both sides. Did they appoint you or did you associate in any form? Are they an independent org or a government agency? Maybe there were multiple accusations you are rolling into one?
The International Human Rights Foundation (IHRF) seems to be an NGO based in New York, perhaps with offices in India as well, but they don't seem to be an organ of the Indian government. The author of this article quotes a tweet trying discredit the IHRF by claiming they are "registered in India" (might be true, but so what?)
Pakistan and India aren’t exactly on great terms.
Defamation is a civil matter and harassment is civil or criminal depending where you live. You'd have better luck going through the police or courts. People deal with similar harassment or misinformation campaigns all the time. It isn't Twitter's job to step in unless you can point to some clear violation of their ToS.
So Twitter provides a platform that actively facilitates defamation, then the individual and justice system has to spend lots of time and money addressing it, then Twitter gets to pocket all the ad revenue from the entire horrible ordeal? That is not fair or just, even if it is legal. And what about people in countries that don't have a functioning justice system. Twitter assists the defamer in screwing over the individual, making money in the process, and there is actually no path to justice? It's a worldview that's only possible to hold from a position of privilege.
It isn't about privilege. You know in a lot of countries it would be considered harassment/defamation by totalitarian governments to speak out against government officials. Should Twitter be on the offense and ban people speaking out against their government in such countries merely because it may be considered harassment there?
Twitter is a US company and therefore it makes sense that they would approach diplomacy from a US-worldview.
It certainly is a shame that people can makeup lies about someone and create a targeted campaign against that individual, but to people on the outside it can be difficult to play referee. Elon Musk proved you can call someone a pedo without any repercussions. This is the guy that claims he is going to take over Twitter in support of free speech. The proper venue to resolve harassment and defamation campaigns is usually the courts, unless you are getting threats and I think that is a much clearer violation of the ToS that is actionable.
Twitter is a US company and therefore it makes sense that they would approach diplomacy from a US-worldview.
It certainly is a shame that people can makeup lies about someone and create a targeted campaign against that individual, but to people on the outside it can be difficult to play referee. Elon Musk proved you can call someone a pedo without any repercussions. This is the guy that claims he is going to take over Twitter in support of free speech. The proper venue to resolve harassment and defamation campaigns is usually the courts, unless you are getting threats and I think that is a much clearer violation of the ToS that is actionable.
> The proper venue to resolve harassment and defamation campaigns is usually the courts
This is why this perspective is so privileged. You're assuming people have access to a functioning legal system through which to correct the issue. In some rich countries, that'd cost a lot of time and money, which many people don't have. And in some poor countries without a functioning state, that's not even an option at all.
It's also an inversion of morality. You're putting 100% of the onus onto the small time individual to correct the issue, and 0% of the onus onto the large corporation that actively facilitated the harassment in the first place by engineering viral mechanics that encourage mobbing. You're also placing the cost burden onto the taxpayers by burdening the judiciary, and allowing the corporation to internalize all of the gains. The victims and society pay the cost, and the corporation makes money off the victimization that it actively facilitated. It's perverse.
> Twitter is a US company and therefore it makes sense that they would approach diplomacy from a US-worldview.
This is just a made up excuse as to why social media companies should be allowed to actively facilitate a spectrum of outcomes ranging from harassment to populism to outright genocide. I don't care if they are a US company or not. What they're doing is wrong.
This is why this perspective is so privileged. You're assuming people have access to a functioning legal system through which to correct the issue. In some rich countries, that'd cost a lot of time and money, which many people don't have. And in some poor countries without a functioning state, that's not even an option at all.
It's also an inversion of morality. You're putting 100% of the onus onto the small time individual to correct the issue, and 0% of the onus onto the large corporation that actively facilitated the harassment in the first place by engineering viral mechanics that encourage mobbing. You're also placing the cost burden onto the taxpayers by burdening the judiciary, and allowing the corporation to internalize all of the gains. The victims and society pay the cost, and the corporation makes money off the victimization that it actively facilitated. It's perverse.
> Twitter is a US company and therefore it makes sense that they would approach diplomacy from a US-worldview.
This is just a made up excuse as to why social media companies should be allowed to actively facilitate a spectrum of outcomes ranging from harassment to populism to outright genocide. I don't care if they are a US company or not. What they're doing is wrong.
> This is why this perspective is so privileged. You're assuming people have access to a functioning legal system through which to correct the issue. In some rich countries, that'd cost a lot of time and money, which many people don't have. And in some poor countries without a functioning state, that's not even an option at all.
I'm not assuming that they are. They may very well in fact not be, but they are an American-based company with a mostly functional legal system so that is the rules they go by. I for one thing it would be much more dangerous for Twitter to play judge, jury and executioner but it seems like that is almost what you're advocating for here.
> It's also an inversion of morality. You're putting 100% of the onus onto the small time individual to correct the issue, and 0% of the onus onto the large corporation that actively facilitated the harassment in the first place by engineering viral mechanics that encourage mobbing.
I don't see how Twitter encourages mobbing. They have privacy controls and you can also block people. If someone is making threats those can be reported to Twitter. Evidenced-base coordinated campaigns can be considered conspiracy and reported as such. Saying things you don't like isn't a conspiracy. Telling people where you live so they can harm you is strictly against their ToS.
Sometimes standing up for and defending yourself takes utilizing the rights given to you by law the best you can. The more you practice it the better you get at it. It isn't on a company to have to get involved in disputes on a public forum that are civil in nature unless they feel that there is a sign of physical danger to the individuals by letting it continue, and even then in there yes rightfully so there are legal remedies to report these types of violations.
I'm not assuming that they are. They may very well in fact not be, but they are an American-based company with a mostly functional legal system so that is the rules they go by. I for one thing it would be much more dangerous for Twitter to play judge, jury and executioner but it seems like that is almost what you're advocating for here.
> It's also an inversion of morality. You're putting 100% of the onus onto the small time individual to correct the issue, and 0% of the onus onto the large corporation that actively facilitated the harassment in the first place by engineering viral mechanics that encourage mobbing.
I don't see how Twitter encourages mobbing. They have privacy controls and you can also block people. If someone is making threats those can be reported to Twitter. Evidenced-base coordinated campaigns can be considered conspiracy and reported as such. Saying things you don't like isn't a conspiracy. Telling people where you live so they can harm you is strictly against their ToS.
Sometimes standing up for and defending yourself takes utilizing the rights given to you by law the best you can. The more you practice it the better you get at it. It isn't on a company to have to get involved in disputes on a public forum that are civil in nature unless they feel that there is a sign of physical danger to the individuals by letting it continue, and even then in there yes rightfully so there are legal remedies to report these types of violations.
> I for one thing it would be much more dangerous for Twitter to play judge, jury and executioner but it seems like that is almost what you're advocating for here.
> It isn't on a company to have to get involved in disputes on a public forum that are civil in nature unless they feel that there is a sign of physical danger to the individuals by letting it continue
Your worldview is that it's fine for corporations to create market failure[1] as long as they are not breaking the law, and then they shouldn't be expected to pay for it or make a good faith attempt to fix it.
I view this as wrong, because there are many things that cause tremendous harm despite being legal. The law has loopholes and is incomplete, the justice system has friction and access issues, and so on. The law should just be the minimum bar.
You already intuitively accept this in your personal life. If I was your neighbor, I could study all the noise ordinance laws and pollution laws, and figure out a way to make your life a living hell without technically breaking any law. You would obviously want me to not do this, despite the fact that I wasn't breaking any law.
Twitter could make many systemic reforms to make conversation healthier without any risk of a slippery slope into censorship. It's not just about putting a human in the loop in order to be "judge, jury and executioner". They could change the social and amplification mechanics. They refuse to do this on purpose. Quite the opposite. They pioneered some of the mechanics that put us into this ditch as a society.
I'd also add that it isn't just about moderation of edge cases. It's also about their neglect to enforce basic things such as preventing clear harassment or impersonation or revenge porn in a timely fashion.
You also have no answer for people with no access to the legal system aside from "tough luck". I don't accept it that someone should need tens of thousands of dollars in order to pursue defamation action in order to fix an injustice that Twitter actively encouraged.
If you truly believe that there is nothing Twitter can do, then they should at least give up more of their cash to the governments of the countries in which they operate in order to refund the taxpayer for the additional cost burden that they've imposed onto the judiciary and society at large. Otherwise it's just theft by indirection.
[1] Externalities such as facilitating populist revolutions, genocide, harassment and financial scams.
> I don't see how Twitter encourages mobbing.
Look at Amber Heard's last Tweet. As odious as her character may be, Twitter has facilitated her harassment by not giving her an option to disable quote retweets. The viral mechanics that Twitter has created has compounded that and magnified it. That's why you putting all the onus onto the victim and judiciary (taxpayer) to sort it out is an inversion of morality. The facilitator of the victimization gets to profit off it while the victim pays the cost.
> It isn't on a company to have to get involved in disputes on a public forum that are civil in nature unless they feel that there is a sign of physical danger to the individuals by letting it continue
Your worldview is that it's fine for corporations to create market failure[1] as long as they are not breaking the law, and then they shouldn't be expected to pay for it or make a good faith attempt to fix it.
I view this as wrong, because there are many things that cause tremendous harm despite being legal. The law has loopholes and is incomplete, the justice system has friction and access issues, and so on. The law should just be the minimum bar.
You already intuitively accept this in your personal life. If I was your neighbor, I could study all the noise ordinance laws and pollution laws, and figure out a way to make your life a living hell without technically breaking any law. You would obviously want me to not do this, despite the fact that I wasn't breaking any law.
Twitter could make many systemic reforms to make conversation healthier without any risk of a slippery slope into censorship. It's not just about putting a human in the loop in order to be "judge, jury and executioner". They could change the social and amplification mechanics. They refuse to do this on purpose. Quite the opposite. They pioneered some of the mechanics that put us into this ditch as a society.
I'd also add that it isn't just about moderation of edge cases. It's also about their neglect to enforce basic things such as preventing clear harassment or impersonation or revenge porn in a timely fashion.
You also have no answer for people with no access to the legal system aside from "tough luck". I don't accept it that someone should need tens of thousands of dollars in order to pursue defamation action in order to fix an injustice that Twitter actively encouraged.
If you truly believe that there is nothing Twitter can do, then they should at least give up more of their cash to the governments of the countries in which they operate in order to refund the taxpayer for the additional cost burden that they've imposed onto the judiciary and society at large. Otherwise it's just theft by indirection.
[1] Externalities such as facilitating populist revolutions, genocide, harassment and financial scams.
> I don't see how Twitter encourages mobbing.
Look at Amber Heard's last Tweet. As odious as her character may be, Twitter has facilitated her harassment by not giving her an option to disable quote retweets. The viral mechanics that Twitter has created has compounded that and magnified it. That's why you putting all the onus onto the victim and judiciary (taxpayer) to sort it out is an inversion of morality. The facilitator of the victimization gets to profit off it while the victim pays the cost.
Twitter has already booted former president of the USA Donald Trump due to similar conduct. As they say, with great power, comes great responsibility. Twitter have shown themselves willing to wield their power for the good of the USA, thus they should also accept their responsibility for the good of all mankind.
It could be argued that since the latter is impossible, they should abstain from the former.
Exactly. People are acting like the conversation here for the past year+ hasn't revolved around social media companies taking responsibility for the negative effects of their products
Trump was inciting civil unrest often, but I believe they set a terrible precedent by banning his account for the “I’m not attending the inauguration” tweet, based on a ton of very subtle inferences.
One cannot reasonably expect them to act as a fact checker & censor for the entire world, nor would that be desirable from a private corporation. What we need is better, regulated moderation systems, and a justice system that can keep up with the pace of social media.
One cannot reasonably expect them to act as a fact checker & censor for the entire world, nor would that be desirable from a private corporation. What we need is better, regulated moderation systems, and a justice system that can keep up with the pace of social media.
The pace of social media is insurmountable. More information is generated per second on social media than any justice system could process in a year.
More information is generated in the material world per second than is generated on social media per year, but we haven't seen that as a reason to dismantle the justice system.
Nobody was advocating for dismantling the justice system.
Social media specifically lends itself to widespread and high frequency libel, fraud, threats, and other illegal acts. What "material world" information manages to do so at a similar rate?
Social media specifically lends itself to widespread and high frequency libel, fraud, threats, and other illegal acts. What "material world" information manages to do so at a similar rate?
The vast majority of social media 'libel, fraud, threats, and other illegal acts' involves an unverified identity as either the sender and/or receiver. It can all be ignored with a click of the button, or often even easier because one never sees it in the first place.
And why does it matter if the total number of messages exceeds our ability to read them? People don't sue over an aggregate of messages but for individual messages. If there are too many people suing then the courts will simply take longer and longer until an equilibrium point is reached.
And why does it matter if the total number of messages exceeds our ability to read them? People don't sue over an aggregate of messages but for individual messages. If there are too many people suing then the courts will simply take longer and longer until an equilibrium point is reached.
What is the alternative?
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its interesting to see supporter of the previous govt who silenced most of the journalists and activists from twitter with heavy handed law enforcement tactics, now claiming to be a freedom of speech proponent
For those who do not know, PTI owned and operated largest bots and trolls network who habitually abused people who ever would disagree with them. Consider them TRUMP supporters like mentality people in Pakistan
For those who do not know, PTI owned and operated largest bots and trolls network who habitually abused people who ever would disagree with them. Consider them TRUMP supporters like mentality people in Pakistan
That's the first thought that occurred to me as well, especially after reading the line "...some of the top journalists and activists...". Well, they've been under more sophisticated harrassment and abuse for close to 4 years now, but all this time... Crickets.
It is clearly wrong that people should be subjected to any abuse/torture/coordinated campaigns regardless of party associations. But forgive me for not being completely empathetic when anyone claims to have become a victim of these campaigns starting around the time of "the coup a few months ago".
It is clearly wrong that people should be subjected to any abuse/torture/coordinated campaigns regardless of party associations. But forgive me for not being completely empathetic when anyone claims to have become a victim of these campaigns starting around the time of "the coup a few months ago".
Something happened this year with Twitter's internal moderation policies. They seemed to have completely stopped enforcing the rules.
I've reported many open bigots calling for violence against the group(s) and/or people they hate. Twitter used to ban people for promoting violence. They don't anymore. Not a single one of the posts or accounts I've reported in the past few months has been banned unless they reached a threshold of other reports that triggers an automatic ban.
Moderators either aren't doing their job or don't exist anymore.
I've reported many open bigots calling for violence against the group(s) and/or people they hate. Twitter used to ban people for promoting violence. They don't anymore. Not a single one of the posts or accounts I've reported in the past few months has been banned unless they reached a threshold of other reports that triggers an automatic ban.
Moderators either aren't doing their job or don't exist anymore.
Poke the bear, and the bear might poke back.
Interesting that this person's conception of free speech allows him to call a parliamentary no-confidence vote a "coup", but doesn't allow government-aligned forces to say he is inciting violence.
Interesting that this person's conception of free speech allows him to call a parliamentary no-confidence vote a "coup", but doesn't allow government-aligned forces to say he is inciting violence.
Twitter is in a bit of a pickle here. One could argue that accusing someone of being an agent of a hostile foreign power is basically libel and should be banned. But it's hard to say how they could have a rule against baselessly accusing a Pakistani of being an agent of Israel or India while maintaining the rule that it is fine to baselessly accuse an american of being an agent of Russia.
> against israel = antisemitism
Being anti-israel against an illegal Apartheid occupation has nothing to do with being antisemitic.
Being anti-israel against an illegal Apartheid occupation has nothing to do with being antisemitic.
It's politically impossible for Twitter to start censoring people who are declaring without evidence that other people are on the payroll of a foreign government or organization and guilty of the capital crimes of espionage and treason.
It's far more likely that they'll start labeling tweets with "This tweet was posted by a probable agent of a foreign government for the purpose of sowing discord."
It's far more likely that they'll start labeling tweets with "This tweet was posted by a probable agent of a foreign government for the purpose of sowing discord."
Should twitter censor such tweets? I don’t think so unless it violates their terms - but if the target disputes it then they should label it as disputed - with link to dispute report if it passes basic checks.
That said I know this can be abused just like dmca take down notices. It’s truly arduous to balance and context matters which in turn requires godly number of man hours.
That said I know this can be abused just like dmca take down notices. It’s truly arduous to balance and context matters which in turn requires godly number of man hours.
Sounds like this dude expects Twitter to be the World Police? I wouldn't expect Twitter as a company to help me if my right to be a gay man in the UK were being infringed; I'd expect the UK government to help me - and beyond that, in the case of a corrupt government, I'd expect other countries to apply pressure internationally to try to resolve the situation.
But no, I would not expect Twitter to be responsible in the same way I wouldn't blame a brand of honey for my murder if that's what my murderer had had for breakfast. There are two parties in this: this dude and the Pakistani Gov, Twitter is just a communications channel - it could just as easy be WhatsApp or TikTok or Facebook or HN.
But no, I would not expect Twitter to be responsible in the same way I wouldn't blame a brand of honey for my murder if that's what my murderer had had for breakfast. There are two parties in this: this dude and the Pakistani Gov, Twitter is just a communications channel - it could just as easy be WhatsApp or TikTok or Facebook or HN.
This coup is supported by the current administration of the US of A - you can ask your friendly, neighbourhood retired intelligence officers for their analysis. Imran Khan was causing issues and he was ousted with US support. There is nothing you can do against the American state when it decides on "regime change".
I have no idea how to help you in this situation, but you may want to reach out to Citizen Lab in Toronto. My understanding is that protecting people like you is their mission.
Site seems unresponsive but was archived: https://archive.ph/KSAjk
Suppose we have access to Twitter's metrics and we can see the profit made via Pakistani accounts and the associated cost (moderation is a cost).
I suspect that the balance is negative for most countries and that is why we cannot expect better moderation.
I suspect that the balance is negative for most countries and that is why we cannot expect better moderation.
In the new (increasingly lawless) world order, not having any enemies is going to be a big advantage. It's a good time to make amends and disassociate from extremist or nationalist groups.
You'd better also drop race, ideologies, and beliefs as well. People will always find something to make you their enemy
Pakistan in a nutshell - the country is ruled by the military, the military is ruled by the ISI. If they have you in their crosshair - run. They will get you.
The military is not ruled by the ISI.
Interesting that he believes the regime change is a coup. Khan, the now-ousted former prime minister, appears to be a Trump-style strong man who is whipping up his supporters with claims that the vote of no confidence which removed him is actually a U.S.-led conspiratorial regime change.
Might be right, and it's absolutely awful if these folks are being unjustly detained and tortured.
Yet, I think it's more complicated than the author would lead us to believe. It's also fascinating how this kind of unrest is unfolding all around the world.
Might be right, and it's absolutely awful if these folks are being unjustly detained and tortured.
Yet, I think it's more complicated than the author would lead us to believe. It's also fascinating how this kind of unrest is unfolding all around the world.
Web3 fixes this but people think it's all about monkey pictures and scams.
I am selling this story to Boulder Weekly. I used to work with @dotMudge.
This is why Elon backed out of the twitter deal due to fake accounts.
He backed out because he overpaid for a company at the height of the boom just as we head into a recession that could well be deeper than 2008
Twitter can not care about that. It is just a platform.
Looks like HN doesn't either, sorry.
Does anyone know how companies like Twitter do moderation in countries like Pakistan. Hiring locals could be dangerous when coup happens. Hiring Pakistani expats (there’s plenty) tricky too as their families are still in danger (I assume their military is sophisticated enough to track whose relative works where). What is the ration of moderators to active user count. Do they specifically hire oppressed groups (i.e. Kurds in Turkey, Tibetans and Uighurs in China, etc) to shed a different opinion?
If OP simple claim that these people had misgendered him instead of threatening his life they would be forever banned from Twitter.
Yes yes, we're all gonna die because people are allowed to post on the internet. Decentralized messaging platforms should be illegal because they can't be moderated. You should only be able to host an internet service with a license and yearly federal inspections to make sure you're properly storing and backing up accountability logs of all users.
> blah blah blah there are insane people in my country who will kill people based on tweets
This is a problem of people and not Twitter. Those are in the west too and growing especially in America. The problem is dumbed down people who believe stuff on the internet. And idiots who react to things, like a white/black shooting a black/white. There is a solution to this: going to jail for murder. Even boomers in the 90s knew not to believe anything online. Twitter has about a million problems with it and lack of moderation certainly is not one of them.
You cannot reasonably ask Twitter to moderate for your locale's social and violent reactionary issues. That implies they need to hire a huge amount of people for every locale in every country and just gives Twitter more monopoly as another company would have to invest a billion dollars to do that before they can even get off the ground. You have just created this idea that storing 100 bytes of text on a server is now a thing that requires billions of dollars of up front investment to do. This is another issue: People are fucking stupid and expect companies to have some "responsibility" now (despite the fact that product quality is at an all time low and they somehow have no issue with that). This is also just conceding that companies are some kind of god (they really aren't. Twitter is a dog shit website that can't go more than one second without showing the text "undefined" in an important field on the page).
Ironically, the people who demand so called justice by moderating more and more shit online (Unreal Engine now has voice analytics to report you to the police or whatever the fuck built right in), are just as bad as the people who foster misinformation against people. We are heading into an era of micro justice which just means the amount of malpolicing will grow in proportion. The end result of constantly trying to solve micro injustices is AI making sure humans don't do anything "bad" and you will literally be unable to involuntarily move your arm a certain way without being punished. There is not even a philosophically correct definition of justice in law. It's literally a bunch of dudes amending a global ruleset to solve the latest problem, based on wildly varying rationales from people each with entirely different value systems.
It's actually hilarious how short sighted and oblivious statements like "it should be illegal to post misinformation online" are. You aren't a mature responsible adult or whatever you think you are. You are just reacting to something in the most straight forward way with no thought about the consequences. It's doubly hilarious for insinuating that posting things online is a big issue that we should focus law on. It's actually pretty fucking obnoxious actually, I'm sick of every thing I do online for the last 20 years being policed by hall monitors tunnel visioned on whatever social injustice issue of the day.
> blah blah blah there are insane people in my country who will kill people based on tweets
This is a problem of people and not Twitter. Those are in the west too and growing especially in America. The problem is dumbed down people who believe stuff on the internet. And idiots who react to things, like a white/black shooting a black/white. There is a solution to this: going to jail for murder. Even boomers in the 90s knew not to believe anything online. Twitter has about a million problems with it and lack of moderation certainly is not one of them.
You cannot reasonably ask Twitter to moderate for your locale's social and violent reactionary issues. That implies they need to hire a huge amount of people for every locale in every country and just gives Twitter more monopoly as another company would have to invest a billion dollars to do that before they can even get off the ground. You have just created this idea that storing 100 bytes of text on a server is now a thing that requires billions of dollars of up front investment to do. This is another issue: People are fucking stupid and expect companies to have some "responsibility" now (despite the fact that product quality is at an all time low and they somehow have no issue with that). This is also just conceding that companies are some kind of god (they really aren't. Twitter is a dog shit website that can't go more than one second without showing the text "undefined" in an important field on the page).
Ironically, the people who demand so called justice by moderating more and more shit online (Unreal Engine now has voice analytics to report you to the police or whatever the fuck built right in), are just as bad as the people who foster misinformation against people. We are heading into an era of micro justice which just means the amount of malpolicing will grow in proportion. The end result of constantly trying to solve micro injustices is AI making sure humans don't do anything "bad" and you will literally be unable to involuntarily move your arm a certain way without being punished. There is not even a philosophically correct definition of justice in law. It's literally a bunch of dudes amending a global ruleset to solve the latest problem, based on wildly varying rationales from people each with entirely different value systems.
It's actually hilarious how short sighted and oblivious statements like "it should be illegal to post misinformation online" are. You aren't a mature responsible adult or whatever you think you are. You are just reacting to something in the most straight forward way with no thought about the consequences. It's doubly hilarious for insinuating that posting things online is a big issue that we should focus law on. It's actually pretty fucking obnoxious actually, I'm sick of every thing I do online for the last 20 years being policed by hall monitors tunnel visioned on whatever social injustice issue of the day.
> There is a solution to this: going to jail for murder.
Couldn't we find a solution that doesn't require the violent death of a person?
Couldn't we find a solution that doesn't require the violent death of a person?
Yes and requiring moderation on internet forums is not one of them. It will stop 0.00001% of cases, while growing malpolicing (especially non useful police who demand more mircrojustice to keep their comfy pay coming in) proportionally with it.
This reminds me of HN. You get banned if you say a bad word. You get banned eventually no matter what unless you're a white collar self censored silicon valley drone with ultra-safe opinions like "the C language should be deprecated after a mere 70 years". You get rate limited if you get too many downvotes in the given time slot. Random IPs are blocked for no reason and the login screen is just a blank page. You get shadowbanned so you don't even know you're banned. All for basically nothing, as HN is basically like 2000s forums but with slightly better discourse and consistency of moderation (and worse in other ways).
This idea that we should have some sort of epidemiologically correct moderation policy on the internet is also bullshit. Moderation on the internet started off as, annoying, childish, 40 year old sysadmins who ban anyone they don't like, SJWs who ban anyone who is "the enemy", right wing equivalent of SJWs who do the same thing, rule fetishists (people in the UK who think insulting the queen or showing the middle finger should be illegal), etc. The idea started off with these selfish / idiotic reasons. Once questioned, they are forced into a corner where they can only rationalize moderation as an epidemiological tool. "Yeah, if we just delete these 1 million posts it's a net gain".
The only reason lack of moderation on big copmany's websites even come up is because they're big companies and they have egg on their face for any slight mishap (or what public perceives as a mishap). It's the most stupid fucking shit.
This reminds me of HN. You get banned if you say a bad word. You get banned eventually no matter what unless you're a white collar self censored silicon valley drone with ultra-safe opinions like "the C language should be deprecated after a mere 70 years". You get rate limited if you get too many downvotes in the given time slot. Random IPs are blocked for no reason and the login screen is just a blank page. You get shadowbanned so you don't even know you're banned. All for basically nothing, as HN is basically like 2000s forums but with slightly better discourse and consistency of moderation (and worse in other ways).
This idea that we should have some sort of epidemiologically correct moderation policy on the internet is also bullshit. Moderation on the internet started off as, annoying, childish, 40 year old sysadmins who ban anyone they don't like, SJWs who ban anyone who is "the enemy", right wing equivalent of SJWs who do the same thing, rule fetishists (people in the UK who think insulting the queen or showing the middle finger should be illegal), etc. The idea started off with these selfish / idiotic reasons. Once questioned, they are forced into a corner where they can only rationalize moderation as an epidemiological tool. "Yeah, if we just delete these 1 million posts it's a net gain".
The only reason lack of moderation on big copmany's websites even come up is because they're big companies and they have egg on their face for any slight mishap (or what public perceives as a mishap). It's the most stupid fucking shit.
Also, this title is the most hyperbolic "wah company bad" bullshit ever written.
Since the title of the OP is the literal truth written plainly, that means that you must think Twitter is bad.
Twitter didn't have a problem banning Trump. Not so easy to pick sides when you're in another country's politics.
Surprised they didn't call him a Qadiani or Gustakh-e-rasul, that might have been actionable.
Extremely sad to hear. I don't think Twitter can be used to promote change. Or get your voice to the masses. They only care about propagating their own propaganda.
Leave Twitter. Try one of the mastodon instances, instead. Be anonymous.
Leave Twitter. Try one of the mastodon instances, instead. Be anonymous.
> I don't think Twitter can be used to promote change. Or get your voice to the masses.
To me, both the effects of and responses to Mr. Ahmed's tweets seem to show that Twitter can be used to promote change and get your voice to the masses. It just doesn't distinguish between "good" change/voices and "bad" change/voices.
To me, both the effects of and responses to Mr. Ahmed's tweets seem to show that Twitter can be used to promote change and get your voice to the masses. It just doesn't distinguish between "good" change/voices and "bad" change/voices.
Wouldn't trying to remain anonymous as a journalist be rather ineffective?
yes, i would lose my audience too that i have built over ten years.
As a US Citizen who has had their twitter posts censored, I consider myself to be a critic of the US Government who has been effectively silenced. At a certain point you have to decide whether you are willing to die for your cause, or live with your shame.
> I feel Twitter should have protected me, instead of protecting the henchmen of a facist regime bent upon silencing critics.
The West no longer deserves its reputation for fighting fascists. Quite the opposite, in fact.
> I feel Twitter should have protected me, instead of protecting the henchmen of a facist regime bent upon silencing critics.
The West no longer deserves its reputation for fighting fascists. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Sympathies to you, man.
Twitter is such a cacophony, like trying to have a conversation in the middle of a rock concert. I get better quality information and news from Hacker News.
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The author doesn't really propose a solution other than Twitter essentially siding with him and take (what appears to me to be) a political stance. Of course moderating political topics isn’t outside Twitter’s wheelhouse, but this is what you get as a society when you let arbitrary entities arbitrate speech: ambiguity and unclear expectations.
On the one hand, it’s reasonable for the author to expect that Twitter removes clear misinformation from their platform since that’s what they purportedly claim to do. On the other hand doing so would go against a national narrative and piss off lots of Pakistanis. Uh oh.
Maybe Twitter was never about being arbiters of facts and instead just pandering to the popular political narrative of the time? Or maybe they are objective and they’re just trying their best and we’re all human and we’ll do better next time? Regardless, this is the reason people get so frustrated with censorship: it cannot be applied objectively and fairly in every case.
Twitter and social commentary aside: sounds like the author needs political asylum or at least real protection. Twitter is not the right entity to depend on to handle this situation, I fear.