> Twitter doesn't have perfect execution of their moderation across all of their tweets, obviously, but they are at least making a good faith effort to remove content that has explicit calls to violence.
Isn't that mainly due to their amount of revenue? Are newer services supposed to be shut down because they can't(yet?) compete with Twitter on budget for moderation?
> This whole situation feels messy and gross but I think they’re absolutely right that Twitter has massively overstepped what would reasonably be considered moderation.
On the contrary, Twitter has repeatedly failed to enforce their own rules/TOS, primarily to benefit a single extremist political faction.
> But there’s also a larger thing here where Twitter apparently has moderation tools so powerful that they can immediately trigger bans for things other than what they’re actually looking for. The actual execution leaves a lot to be desired here, but the itchy trigger finger cannot be denied. Somehow they can do this, but racial slurs are generally pretty okay, white supremacy is largely ignored, and every Twitter troll I’ve reported for harassment gets a three-week investigation and then a “We find they did not violate our rules” email.
This is one of the things that annoys me most about major sites like Twitter or YouTube. Inconsistent enforcement of rules and little to no avenue for appeal.
> In some sense of the word they are already shut down.
C'mon. Let's call a spade as spade: you wanted to complain about moderation and you shoehorned it into conversation. In no way does it make Twitter "shut down".
> (Of course you'll be able to find a bunch of death threats from random accounts all over, I could find a handful in a few minutes, but that's largely outside of anyone's control.)
I think this is what I don’t understand about the general sentiment that Twitter is some kind of uber-censored platform. Sure, high profile accounts and tweets can sometimes be removed, but have you ever tried reporting tweets?
9 out of 10 times that I report tweets threatening violence or harm against someone, I get a notification a few hours later that the “moderation team” has reviewed that tweet and found it not to be in breach of any policies.
Twitter’s reporting system is ineffective at best, and I almost wish I had seen the kind of heavy handed moderation that people prescribe to Twitter here.
> Is there a reason you can't turn all of the bans (of legal stuff) into filters?
Among other reasons, because Twitter is a brand with an image to maintain. They don't want to be known as a safe hangout for Nazis and other unsavory content.
I'm genuinely curious: how so? I'm all for the idea of aligning moderation with the law of the land, but to be honest I'm not in-the-loop enough to know what people are upset about in the first place, except banning Trump I guess?
I can see how the Twitter UI kinda sucks in some ways, but it gets the job done. I'm fairly new to Twitter, and I'm pretty impressed at the level of participation from well-known individuals, and I'm also impressed with the ability to sniff out breaking news.
If the "broken" part of Twitter is people arguing all the time, how is that different from other corners of the internet?
>By this logic why was @blcklivesmatter not kicked off Twitter etc long ago?
Do you mean why wasn't twitter kicked off AWS for users making calls for violence? If so: because Twitter has a moderation strategy in place that clearly isn't perfect but has proven to AWS that they're taking it seriously.
If you actually meant why wasn't @blcklivesmatter kicked off twitter I guess I'm not sure what relevance that has to Parler being kicked off AWS. But my first guess would be: because they deleted the offending tweets and stopped making repeated posts calling for violence?
I don't use twitter, do you have some examples of recent @blcklivesmatter tweets that are actively calling for violence against elected officials that haven't been moderated or removed?
> If Twitter is going to police people, it needs to be across the board. Otherwise it's just a weird censorship that is targeting one person and can easily be seen as political.
There is no such requirement.
Twitter is well within its rights and ethically totally clear to "police" a sentiment from the President of the United States, while letting much more severe sentiments from egg accounts go un-policed.
Moderation isn't an algorithm, a binary condition, applied perfectly to an input set to get a deterministic output. It's subjective, and that's both OK and correct.
>On the contrary, Twitter’s users generally seem to believe that Twitter’s moderation is abysmal
If that's the case why would anyone move to a platform that has less moderation?
Twitter is the bottom of the list when it comes to MAU among social networks (FB, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat and Reddit all have a higher MAU). Sure Twitter is overrepresented in the tech world, but it's not that captive. There are larger audiences elsewhere. And, to be fair, almost every other platform has a heavier hand when it comes to moderation than Twitter. Twitter still allows porn!
Twitter, is probably the best product you can build when it comes to a text based, real time, social network. If there was a better product people would have moved. When it comes down to it, most complaints come down to "I wish the Twitter moderation rules applied to everyone else but me".
> People are leaving the site because of it, and advertisers are pulling ads”
This seems to be, arguably, where the real problems start. I doubt many people expect Twitter to host actually illegal content. However, as long as a social media site is beholden to advertisers, it's going to have an existential requirement to pull certain content, irrespective of how they or anyone else feels about those restrictions.
Until Twitter can figure out a way to fund itself other than by advertising, the idea of it being a free speech platform is a pipe dream.
>I kinda sympathize with the sentiment to create a more relaxed version of Twitter where only the obvious in terms of free speech is excluded
How does this happen though? When someone is "cancelled on Twitter" what does that mean? Is it Jack Dorsey going in a banning your account? Twitter suspensions, by the actual company, are relatively well reasoned. What most people don't like is the Twitter mob, who does not work for Twitter. Despite people saying they want "more free speech" what they actually want is to suppress the free speech of others so they can say what they want.
>Twitter won't be able to afford to host anything remotely controversial (i.e., interesting) for fear of upsetting the thought police.
What interesting controversial content are they banning specifically? Ethnonationalist propaganda?
I'm really annoyed by the common effect where people complaining about censorship on the big platforms always complain about it in vague abstract terms, because that gets a lot more support than complaining about people getting banned for targeted harassment or encouraging forcible removal of non-whites... Shout-out to a pithy evergreen tweet on this: https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174....
>They curated feeds specifically trying to find offensive content and then refresh their feeds until they could find an ad placed near offensive content.
You agree, then, that twitter is doing the thing that they said it did. What's your point.
Isn't that mainly due to their amount of revenue? Are newer services supposed to be shut down because they can't(yet?) compete with Twitter on budget for moderation?
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