Anonymous Claims Twitter Is Suspending 'OpISIS' Member Accounts (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Anonymous has claimed that Twitter mistakenly shut down several of its activist accounts in a widespread cull of pages belonging to terrorist supporters. In an effort to rid the site of an extremist presence, Twitter has recently suspended over 125,000 accounts for 'threatening or promoting terrorist acts, primarily related to ISIS.' However, the international activist group Anonymous is now reporting that among this number were multiple member accounts, which were actively supporting the fight against the Islamic State and helping to seek out terrorist supporters and recruiters online. Twitter has typically re-opened the Anonymous accounts within a matter of hours, bombarded with requests by hacktivists and the wider online community.

Comments

And?

[mitcheli]

So the whole point of OpISIS is to shut down ISIS, and Twitter is shutting down ISIS.. I fail to see the problem here.

Re:And?

[kainewynd2]

I don't believe you're showing the appropriate level of nerd outrage. I mean, how dare Twitter shut down Anonymous accounts!?

Re:And?

[skywire]

You need to work on your reading comprehension.

Re:And?

[Shadow IT Ninja]

According to TFA, some anonymous person who claims to be Anonymous claims that they are the ones reporting the ISIS accounts to Twitter and without them, Twitter would miss many of the terrorist accounts. The problem for Twitter it to figure out which of the anonymous accounts are Anonymous accounts. Of course it's also possible that some anonymous terrorists are falsely reporting Anonymous accounts as terrorists. That's what I would do if I were them. By the way, who's on first?

Re:And?

[evolutionary]

How does this "shut down ISIS"? You think Twitter is the only popular forum. The opponent you can see is far easier to handle than the opponent you can't. It doesn't stop anything, or really even slow it down. It just shows people Twitter removes anything it feels like (they removed people they probably should have left if reducing ISIS is truly their motive) which moves people away from Twitter. First the ISIS supports will move to a different forum, then the people trying to reduce ISIS supporters have to go looking for them to dissuade other recruits. The Internet is not where this stuff begins or ends, and it being such a big place. I'd rather it can be found easily, so it can be address in debate, easily.

Maybe they disagreed with Anita Sarkeesian

[Nova Express]

Judging from the suspension of the account of journalist Robert Stacy McCain, disagreeing with Anita Sarkeesian seems a far more serious offense to Twitter's "Trust and Safety Council" than openly supporting Islamic terrorists.

They also refuse to restore his account or even detail why it was suspended.

Re:Maybe they disagreed with Anita Sarkeesian

[BrookHarty]

If twitter is going to ban people for free speech, then its not an open platform and shouldn't be endorsed by any government agency. Maybe we should ban all government agencies from using facebook and twitter pages since they are not open platforms. The public should not endorse censorship or promoting companies that censor.

Or you could go the other way, and force them not to censor by law. Since they are beyond a typical company and moved into areas of speech and representation. We do want open access for all protected speech, including sexual, religious and ethnic. Its a corporation, and corporations are not people, so they shouldn't get the free speech protections, just like we dont want them to vote with political money.

Word based ban lists

[BrookHarty]

Facebook started word based ban lists few weeks back, and old posts are removed if they have such a word. Tranny is on the list, which for many mechanics wonder wtf facebook was going on about their posts being against decency rules. Also Milo's "Dangerous Faggot Tour" posts are removed due to Faggot being banned. I wonder if there are any smokers who got their posts removed too. There there is the whole Twitter going after Milo, so social media censorship is getting out of hand.

I remember back when Microsoft banned usernames with Gay, and a bunch of people couldnt register if they had Gay in their names.

Its like 1990's internet all over again, banned words everywhere.

Re:Word based ban lists

[bill_mcgonigle]

Its like 1990's internet all over again, banned words everywhere.

Except this time, there's plenty of compute resources to match word closeness and plenty of world-relationship mapping databases that it ought to be fairly straightforward to semantically map (tranny,chrysler,failed) into a different bucket than hate-speech, automatically. Pure stop-lists are just lazy.

Maybe the information-retrieval people aren't on this team.

Re:protected speech

[sexconker]

Speech intended to incite crime (whether violent, like terrorism, or virtual, like unauthorized access to computers and information) is not protected.

Yes it is.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

ANY federal law that abridges freedom of speech is unconstitutional. Further, any law at a state or local level is also unconstitutional as the first amendment describes a right reserved for the people.

If you can conclusively prove that someone's speech directly resulted in violence you can prosecute them for their role in that violence.
However you cannot legally prosecute them for their speech, nor can you legally restrict their speech. The fact that people are prosecuted for their speech and do have their speech restricted is not evidence that speech isn't protected, it's evidence that judges who restrict speech are fucking idiots or tyrants (or both).