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Twitter Rolls Out New Anti-Abuse Tools
An anonymous reader writes: After facing criticism that it gives trolls and hatemongers a platform to intimidate people, Twitter has now rolled out a new set of tools and policies to handle abusive tweets. Previously, they only prohibited threats of violence that were "direct" and "specific," but now that's been expanded to all threats of violence or tweets promoting violence. They said, "Our previous policy was unduly narrow and limited our ability to act on certain kinds of threatening behavior." Twitter has also added non-permanent bans, as well as this: "[W]e have begun to test a product feature to help us identify suspected abusive Tweets and limit their reach. This feature takes into account a wide range of signals and context that frequently correlates with abuse including the age of the account itself, and the similarity of a Tweet to other content that our safety team has in the past independently determined to be abusive." Twitter's general counsel recently said, "Freedom of expression means little as our underlying philosophy if we continue to allow voices to be silenced because they are afraid to speak up. We need to do a better job combating abuse without chilling or silencing speech."
"Freedom of expression means little as our underlying philosophy if we continue to allow voices to be silenced because they are afraid to speak up."
So to protect against silencing, you're going to silence?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Nice try. "Thanks to gamergate", three women have been forced from their homes from threats that law enforcement officers found credible enough to suggest that. Trying to pretend that gamergate has done anything but abuse people defines you as - at best - an imbecile.
It causes you physical pain that few here buy into the "mysogyny and harrassment" narrative, doesn't it?
The cover-up didn't work.
The week-long gaming press news blackout and ongoing user comment/forum censorship (in former free-speech strongholds such as 4chan and Reddit, no less) didn't work.
The coordinated, ongoing smear campaign that began with the "Gamers are Over" articles hasn't worked.
The endless train of embarrassingly desperate counter-hashtags hasn't worked.
The Wikipedia and Nightline hit pieces only damage those outlets' credibility for short-term effect.
The SVU episode . . . hahaahhahaha WOW, where do I even begin . . . it is progapanda that couldn't be more precisely crafted to the corrupt press's specifications (i.e. "narrative"), and broadcast to a national non-gamer audience, much of which likely accepted it as reality. It was a wake-up call to quite a few previously unaware or neutral parties, especially game devs*.
Eurogamer is the latest games journalism site to update its ethics policy in the wake of Gamergate, joining PC Gamer, IGN, the Escapist, and of course Kotaku/Gawker (though in Gawker's case, they put up more of a fight and the Gamergate pressure to be ethical had to be routed through the FTC).
Gamergate also got Brad Wardell (CEO of Stardock) some long-overdue apologies for hit pieces run against him:
https://twitter.com/iamDavidWi...
http://www.gamepolitics.com/20...
http://www.zenofdesign.com/in-...
Ask yourself how much of this you've seen reported in the corrupt media (which at this point, sadly, clearly includes Slashdot). Of course none of it ever had a chance of appearing in the Wikipedia article. Nothing enrages anti-Gamergaters more than someone covering both sides of the story, and that should tell you something.
Their side thrives only in an environment of propaganda and censorship, and evaporates when faced with integrity and transparency. They prove the need for Gamergate every time they write an article based on the assumption that terrorism and child porn^W^W^W^W misogyny and harassment have become the root passwords to the Constitution^W^W journalistic ethics.
* like Mark Kern and Ken Levine, who had nothing to do with Gamergate, but were so disgusted by the SVU episode that they publically called on the gaming press to stop slandering gamers. Both were instantly swarmed by anti-GG on twitter, and VG24/7 ran a hit piece on Kern without even getting his side of the story, and refused even after he specifically asked them. I think Eurogamer saw exactly what happened to Kern, and it's no accident that tha