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Twitters Says It Will Ban Trump If He Breaks Hate-Speech Rules (qz.com)
Twitter has made a serious effort as of late to limit hate speech on its social media site, especially after Election Day where "biased graffiti, assaults and other incidents have been reported in the news." The company now faces President-elect Donald Trump, who has used Twitter for the past 18 months as a megaphone for his views and rants, which many would consider as "hate speech." According to the American Bar Association, hate speech is "speech that offends, threatens, or insults groups, based on race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or other traits." Quartz reports: While Trump's deceptive tweets may not violate Twitter's rules against harassment, threats and "hateful conduct," Twitter is still keeping an eye on his account for more egregious offenses. This week, the company told Slate it would consider banning key government officials, even the president, if its rules against hate speech or other language were violated. "The Twitter Rules prohibit violent threats, harassment, hateful conduct, and multiple account abuse, and we will take action on accounts violating those policies," a spokesperson wrote. Twitter confirmed with Quartz that everyone, including government officials, were subject to the policy: "The Twitter Rules apply to all accounts," a spokesman wrote. Trump may not have crossed that line yet, but he hasn't exactly refrained from making incendiary claims. Most recently, he claimed that Abdul Razak Ali Artan, who allegedly carried out an attack injuring 11 students at Ohio State University, "should not have been in our country." Artan was a legal permanent U.S. resident, whose family had fled Somalia for Pakistan in 2007. He arrived in the States in 2014.
You need a safe space?
He overall does have a point.
The problem with identifying something somebody says as "hate speech" is that it doesn't really have a well defined boundary as to what is off limits and what isn't, meaning that it's basically up to somebody's interpretation and context as to whether or not something is effectively benign by that standard. This inevitably means that the rules will be selectively enforced.
If social media continues down this path, then it's likely to just become even more of an echo chamber than it already is. Fortunately "generation Z" seems to be eschewing social media so far, and their reasoning tends to be that they want to avoid having their every move traceable by their parents.
Sure, just like a proprietary bakery can refuse to bake a cake for a gay wedding, right?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
As is their right as a private corporation.
Petition Trump to setup tweet.gov. The "1st Amendment Platform for the US Government".
Look I get you kids like Twitter and Facebook but STOP USING THEM if you don't like them. Jesus. I wouldn't think twice about dropping a BBS account or IRC pseudonym. If you really want to spew what ever comes to your head you can use hashtags and join a #TrumpForLife IRC channel and mash the keyboard.
Twitter's now a platform for middle aged women to tweet The View and feel like someone is listening to their opinion. Hence all the Tide, Sharpie, et al accounts. Anything that doesn't fit that isn't profitable.
Many Americans think the answer to those should be "yes" -- and if you say no to this, but yes to Twitter, then you should think very carefully about how much sense it makes to draw the line where you draw it.
We draw the line wherever the fuck we want to, whenever we want to, to whomever we want, for whatever reasons we like. Because we CAN! We have the media and the government on our side. You say shit we don't like and we'll use the media, the government, and propaganda to destroy you, imprison you, or kill you. Simple as that.
And there's not a fucking thing you can do about it because you're weak. You have "principles". Well, congratulations on your "principles". If we're in a good mood we may inscribe them on your tombstones after we use any and all means to defeat and destroy you.
The ends DO justify the means, and we mean to win.
Facebook is for old people, Twitter for a certain segment of the left. Both groups will let it go with their cold, dead hands. The platforms could literally translate each of their posts into Urdu shit porn and they'd still keep logging in.
I honestly only had a Twitter account (aside from tweeting my shits for a time in 2009) for about 3 months this year watching Milo Yiannopoulos troll the shit out of people. After he got banned, there was no point in even going on that cesspool. But the stupid family still uses FB so...
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
And just as much as the freedom of speech protects your ability to say something, it equally protects my right to refuse to provide you with a platform for saying it. The owners of Slashdot have every right to delete this comment that I'm writing right now. They have every right to lock my account and even block my IP address.
The great irony here is that Trump is busy empowering people who oppose net neutrality while his followers complain about a private company controlling the content of their own website. Forget about Twitter, ending net neutrality would allow ISPs to exercise much more strict control over your access to the whole Internet, potentially blocking or slowing traffic that they don't feel is advantageous to their business. If Verizon decides they're anti-Trump, they could just block access to his websites because "Fuck you, it's our network and we'll do what we want." The principle that the Internet is communication infrastructure and should treat traffic without bias-- that's the concept Trump is looking to tear down.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have similar thoughts. Let's send one of our biggest personalities to some woeful startup. I do hope that in the event of such an occurrence, Trump has the business sense to just start his own network or work with someone. Gab is terrible. It uses unlimited up/down voting.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
You might as well say "according to the Powerpuff Girls, donuts are...".
"Hate speech" is not an actual legal concept, and the ABA is not an actual bar association.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
This is not about citizenship. Yes, Twitter can take away your speech on Twitter. Maybe, it is not a big deal — if Twitter bans you, but Reddit still remains a free speech zone.
But people tend to dislike being told, where they can not protest, so I pointed it out to the OP, that he is barking up the wrong tree, as it were. However offensive he is, Trump is not going to come after him — not until he knives a bunch of people or some such.
On contrast, Twitter will shut him up — if he offends a religion more equal than other religions, or an ethnic group more equal than other ethnic groups, and so on — and will not even explain, why exactly.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Some people aren't even that subtle. For example, take Manveer Heir the openly racist developer at Bioware who makes no secret how much he hates all white people by broadcasting it all over Twitter. This is really the problem, they only consider it racism if it's hate speech directed at certain select groups.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Good, let me go and report Leslie Jones' sexism, racism, dogpiling, witch hunting, and encouraged harassment for the nineteenth time this year.
Oh wait, they wont ban a black women celebrity.
There are plenty of people who genuinely ARE being oppressed in this country. Sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes in very blatant ones. Ask any black person if they feel oppressed by the police.
While not black, I am a colored person and I do not feel oppressed by the police although I definitely do not trust them. Perhaps I am not oppressed because I am trying to do something even minorly illegal? Yes, I am well aware of some of the unfair laws that subtly punish blacks more harshly than whites such as the laws on possession of crack cocaine versus powder cocaine. I think I know far better than you what oppression is.
Ask a person with brown skin how easy it is to get a bank loan.
Again, as a colored person, I have no problems getting a bank loan. The only color the lenders see when they talk to me is green. That is, I have money and they feel confident that a loan they make to me will be repaid. I see plenty of other people of all colors who cannot get a loan because they have spent all of their money buying a lot of unnecessary shit. They spend hundreds of dollars a month on fancy cell phone plans, cable television, and all sorts of physical goods that I chose to do without. I wouldn't lend those deadbeats your money never mind my money.
Compare the number of unarmed minorities who get shot by police to the number of white people.
Chris Rock's "How Not To Get Your Ass Kicked by the Police" seems like a good way to avoid getting roughed up or killed by the cops. While all of the incidents where there was video showed excessive use force, it was also true that in every case, the black person who was harmed by the policeman did something (running away, resisting arrest, insisting on vending without a license) that gave the policeman a cause for doing something stupid/venal.
I have been pulled over and frisked before by state troopers for no reason. I kept calm; didn't rant and rave at the officer; didn't make sudden and stupid moves; and did what the officer asked while still making sure at least some of my Constitutional rights were not violated. The officer was polite and then let me go. He didn't say the real reason for pulling me over and frisking me. Maybe I matched the description of someone who was wanted; maybe the officer was hoping I'd do something stupid so he would have an excuse to seriously harm me. But I did not give him any opportunity.
Ask women how things are going with that equal pay for equal work.
They'll get equal pay as soon as they do equal work. Where I currently work, women are typically paid better than men despite not doing equal work because of company policies to appear progressive. You must work in some utopia because every company where I have worked as a technologist, women are not as productive as men.
And stand the fuck up for the anthem too, you aren't being oppressed.
There's a reason the very first Amendment in the Constitution is freedom of speech. Even the Second Amendment, which deals with the defense of the nation, comes second to it. You have every right to sit down or kneel for the Anthem, or burn a flag, whether you are trying to make a statement or just being a dick. It's hard to "Make America Great Again" when you want to remove some of the basic freedoms that make America great in the first place.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
If that is your example of racist, sorry but you have not experienced racism.
150 years ago blacks were slaves, the GOP and whites fought to the death to free them.
50 years ago blacks were treated as second class citizens, again the GOP fought to give them equal status despite the DNC opposition.
That is racism. Trump calling out a "gold star parent" after making unfair attacks on him is not racism (Clinton voted for the war that their son to be killed NOT Trump). Trump not remembering who David Duke is the first time he is brought up in the campaign is not racism.
Grow up. Trump is not racist and you are not helping your cause making false accusations, you are making your side look like crybabies.