Twitter Announces (More) Hate-Speech Fighting Tools (Again) (cnn.com)

Building on anti-harassment tools announced in November, Twitter is now "trying to shake its reputation as a haven for online harassment" with still more new internal algorithms and features, reports CNN. An anonymous reader quotes their report: The changes include preventing serial abusers from creating new accounts, a new "safe search" function and blocking potentially abusive and "low-quality" tweets from appearing in conversations, Twitter's engineering chief Ed Ho said in a blog post. Twitter is working on identifying users that have been permanently suspended and prevent them from creating new accounts, Ho said. This new measure specifically targets "accounts that are created only to abuse and harass others," he said, a problem that has long plagued the platform.

The new safe search function prevents tweets that are abusive, or from blocked and muted accounts, from appearing in users' search results. Those tweets can still be found if people want to see them, but they "won't clutter search results any longer," Ho said. And Twitter will now collapse tweet replies that are potentially abusive or low quality -- like duplicate tweets or content that appears to be automated. But those tweets "will still be accessible to those who seek them out," Ho said.
The blog post announces Twitter's ultimate goal is "a significant impact that people can feel," arguing that freedom of speech for all viewpoints is "put in jeopardy when abuse and harassment stifle and silence those voices."

Comments

Re: Hate Speech

[Anonymous Coward]

Ars Technica recently banned over 30 users because they referred to Bradley Manning as "him". No trolling, insults, or even hostility. Just using the wrong word.

SJW is a mental illness and a plague. They are fascists in the literal meaning of the word.

Re: Left and further left

[racerx509]

You seemed to have left out the Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs, which went a long way towards splitting the parties.

Conveniently towards the end of your timeline, Nixon during his 1968 campaign appealed to many dixiecrats who were upset about the passage of the civil rights act, stating it was a form of government encroachment on their lives. This in turn led to a party shift where former dixiecrats turned republicans and in time, the former republicans turned progressive. Once the parties flipped, you've got the War on Drugs for the 1970s and 1980s that heavily criminalized communities of color and anti-war liberals. Or as John Erlichman said it "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news,"

Blacks, who were outright demonized by the right, turned to the left, which accepted them because who would not turn down the free vote. The left still treats black voters in a passive-agressive manner, knowing they can reliably count on the black vote, but the relationship is not as antagonistic as what is seen on the right.

So many right wing people love to crow about how Republicans freed the slaves and were responsible for most progressive legislation early on in this country. All that is true, but the conveniently leave out the part where Nixon and Lee Atwater flipped the parties, and when both Reagan and Bush used race based fear mongering to further drive the republican base whiter and more conservative.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/...