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Twitter Suspended Hundreds of Thousands of Accounts Amid 'Violent Extremism' (fortune.com)

Posted by msmash on from the taking-a-stand dept.

Twitter said on Tuesday it had suspended more than half a million accounts since the middle of 2015 as the company steps up efforts to tackle "violent extremism" on its microblogging platform. From a report: The company shut down a total of 376,890 accounts in the last six months of 2016, Twitter said in its latest transparency report.

3 of 202 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I tried to Open a Twitter Account by amiga3D · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've made plenty of responses to lefties on twitter. Most of the time I avoid profanity and always avoid obscenities and the F bomb. I'm amazed at people that get on twitter and say horrible things to other people they don't even know. I have had people call me names and just as a social experiment I responded in a reasoned manner ( remembering my 7 habits classes ) and continued to argue my point. At the end I almost always got one of two solutions. Either they called me bad names and then blocked me, or surprisingly, they became calmer and began to debate in a reasoned manner and in the end agreed to disagree. I've trolled on /. a few times but with twitter I've been experimenting and it's an interesting format. Trying to debate with people with 140 characters is a challenge that will sharpen your skills.

  2. Re:I tried to Open a Twitter Account by amiga3D · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Oh no, I don't love everyone. I just miss the good old days when you could be civil even with people you hated.

  3. Re:What's the plan, Stan? by stdarg · · Score: 3, Interesting

    it's absolutely necessary to have open fora -- and for platforms like Twitter etc. -- for the presentation of minority views

    I agree. What does "open" mean though? For that to be meaningful the platform has to be moderated. The quality of the outcome correlates with the quality of the people involved. The fact that you think it's a silly viewpoint tells me that you lack experience in unmoderated discussions with large groups of hostile people. When you have 20 people all arguing slight variations of the same theme against you, and not reading your replies to other people, it's just a quagmire. If you have no way of "muting" most of the people, the exercise is pointless.

    Slashdot is open enough for me and has great moderation because it's mostly great people who mostly value principles like free speech.