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Inside Twitter's Long, Slow Struggle To Police Bad Actors (wsj.com)
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has personally weighed in on high-profile decisions, frustrating some employees. An anonymous reader shares a report: When Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey testifies before Congress this week, he'll likely be asked about an issue that has been hovering over the company: Just who decides whether a user gets kicked off the site? To some Twitter users -- and even some employees -- it is a mystery. In policing content on the site and punishing bad actors, Twitter relies primarily on its users to report abuses and has a consistent set of policies so that decisions aren't made by just one person, its executives say. Yet, in some cases, Mr. Dorsey has weighed in on content decisions at the last minute or after they were made, sometimes resulting in changes and frustrating other executives and employees [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], according to people familiar with the matter. Understanding Mr. Dorsey's role in making content decisions is crucial, as Twitter tries to become more transparent to its 335 million users, as well as lawmakers about how it polices toxic content on its site.
Last month, after Twitter's controversial decision to allow far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to remain on its platform, Mr. Dorsey told one person that he had overruled a decision by his staff to kick Mr. Jones off, according to a person familiar with the discussion. Twitter disputes that account and says Mr. Dorsey wasn't involved in those discussions. Twitter's initial inaction on Mr. Jones, after several other major tech companies banned or limited his content, drew fierce backlash from the public and Twitter's own employees, some of whom tweeted in protest. [...] "Any suggestion that Jack made or overruled any of these decisions is completely and totally false," Twitter's chief legal officer, Vijaya Gadde, said in a statement. "Our service can only operate fairly if it's run through consistent application of our rules, rather than the personal views of any executive, including our CEO."
Last month, after Twitter's controversial decision to allow far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to remain on its platform, Mr. Dorsey told one person that he had overruled a decision by his staff to kick Mr. Jones off, according to a person familiar with the discussion. Twitter disputes that account and says Mr. Dorsey wasn't involved in those discussions. Twitter's initial inaction on Mr. Jones, after several other major tech companies banned or limited his content, drew fierce backlash from the public and Twitter's own employees, some of whom tweeted in protest. [...] "Any suggestion that Jack made or overruled any of these decisions is completely and totally false," Twitter's chief legal officer, Vijaya Gadde, said in a statement. "Our service can only operate fairly if it's run through consistent application of our rules, rather than the personal views of any executive, including our CEO."
Who wants to see my California corn tits?!
Behold! I am a tuna melt sandwich! Tuna salad, melted cheese, toasted bread, all pressed together and grilled.
you mean "everybody who hurt my feelings and whom i don't like"
It's a business decision. Conservatism is fine, nazism gets kicked to the retard bin. The system works more than not. Alex Jones is a dipshit who incited violence against victims of previous violence. That's stupid no matter who. Gone.
Don't like it? Go start the next Nazi imbecile chat app. That's the free market kicking your inbred ass out the business door.
Then when questioned on the application twitter spokespersons seem to offer this as a explanation, "its the algorithm that decides". If this banning / not banning continues then sooner or later, twitter (and others) may soon learn the hard way what "Common Carrier" means.
Passionately Indifferent
Considering the fact that @Jack is a bad actor, I doubt they'll ever do anything about it.
Facebook, twitter, etc should all (voluntarily) require all users to complete an identity verification process, and then real names should be used as handles.
If you aren't anonymous, then you are far less likely to be a jerk.
Most reasonable people are sick and tired of wading through filth whenever they read a news forum, entertainment forum, twitter feed, sports article, you name it. Many sites simply resort to shutting off comments altogether, which eliminates the angry hate filled trash, but also eliminates the relevant insightful commentary.
The solution is to get rid of the the angry hateful speech...regardless of political leanings. If eliminating the hate and trash happens to impact a certain shade of ideology, well maybe those ideologues should assess their own speech and consider why and how many consider it hateful, angry, and vitriolic. That's not our fault...and we're not going to apologize. Clean it up, or go away.
Dorsey didn't deliver on the Alex Jones ban. He chickened out and went for probation. That's breaking ranks.
He pays the price now. Pressure is going to get ramped up until Dorsey is ousted from Twitter. Media hitpieces week in week out until he crumbles or the stock implodes or both.
Because this isn't tech anymore. It's not even business. It's politics.
How does editorial control jibe with the DMCA safe harbor provisions?
Fuck twitter. Everybody's getting onto the decentralized bandwagon. Mastodon is one example of this migration. It enables you to communicate with others without the oppression of mega corporations or be forced to comply with some left-wing agenda. It's decentralized and federated and if some admin doesn't like what you have to say it's just a matter of switching instances or setting up your own. There are already hundreds of instances run by people dedicated to different political dispositions and for the most part everybody can communicate with one another across instances. One example of instances dedicated to a particular political or really in this case philosophical belief is the liberdon instance where libertarians go who don't want to setup there own instance. Read more about it here:
https://freekeene.com/2018/08/27/liberty-activists-migrating-from-twitter-to-censorship-proof-mastodon-decentralized-platform/
To some Twitter users -- and even some employees -- it is a mystery
LOL. No it's fucking not. It's really fucking obvious who gets kicked off the platform.
Are you a prominent conservative political figure that is currently in the focus of a lot of angry liberal people who like to mash the "report" button (for frivolous or false reasons) and aren't too big/connected that there will be business/corporate/financial retaliation if you get kicked off the site?
Congratulations, have a boot to the head! You're banned!
I'm still waiting for publicly known harassers and perpetrators of violent hate speach to get banned from Twitter like: Randi Harper, Zoe Quinn, Manveer Heir, Sarah Jeong, Robbi Rodriguez and all those antifa goons. They are guilty of actions that are at the least worse than conservative entities on twitter are accused of doing and yet they get to spew things like "murder all white people" or send pictures of their hairy assholes to other people, or use twitter to orchestrate a network of followers to harass both online and in real life people whom merely disagree with their ideology.
Persecution syndrome. Taught to fear, and hence afraid of everything, it's no surprise.
"Congratulations, have a boot to the head! You're banned!" - Alex Jones? Who else got banned except actual nazi faggots? Jones got banned for violence incitement, pretty close. You're a moron if you think Twitter should tolerate that.
If you're that stupid, that you call yourself a Conservative is just icing on your funeral cake.
And yet Twitter's executive suite doesn't really care if the service truly operates fairly, it only cares if it has the APPEARANCE of operating fairly... and that can be accomplished without that niggling "consistent application of rules".
You don't have to be a conservative in order to get censored on these sites. You just need to question the political agendas.
Link to data that disproves a shadow-government talking point? Watch the post get removed for "not meeting community standards"
It's just that conservatives disagree with the current talking points far more often than the neo-liberals that you see in the media lately, who are not to be confused with classical liberals who actually do care about freedoms.
I wouldn't call Alex Jones a 'far right wing' player. I'd call him a nutcase cultist. Back when I used to read the Drudge Report page (I quit frequenting it awhile back) if a link from Drudge took me to infowars.com I had a habit of instantly closing the page, because that site is a loony nest. This was particularly the case during the 2016 election, because you're not doing yourself a favor by hanging out in a loony echo chamber if you have sincere beliefs in a thought out political philosophy. There are similar fever swamps on the left, of course.
-------------------
This is an aside, but I was trawling around on the left political sites this weekend and noticed that the main Trotskyite newspaper in the US is now apparently defending Trump of all things.
Switch to Mastadon
Candace Owens was banned from Twitter for simply retweeting what racist NY Times editor/writer Sarah Jeong posted, but changing all racial references from white to black. And Candace Owens is black. Why was she banned? She's a conservative. And that's not allowed.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Cripes, the US labelled the last bunch of neo-liberals as neo-conservatives. We can't now have you introduce the neo-liberal term to represent another bunch of radicals.
I wound up on some stranger's profile - I forget how - and noticed he'd tweeted something anti-white. I saw that he'd also posted a picture with his son who was white. I called him an anti-white faggot. I didn't make any threats, I just called him a naughty name. Banned forever.
Fuck Twitter. Please give me my account back, faggots.
Probably should have started with Jack Dorsey, the writing was on the wall the second they began allowing sponsored tweets. Something the dumbass user base never seems to get with social media: the platform doesn't belong to you, it belongs to them, and so does your ass if you overinvest your time or livelihood into it.
"It's just that conservatives disagree with the current talking points" - No, ACTUAL conservatives might but you? Are right up with Trump in Putin's asshole, face facts anytime. You ARE WALKING the talking points, pizzagater.
because that's what got Alex Jones banned. The final straw was when he mimed a gun shot talking about Mueller. The platforms are worked one of his listeners is going to go off and shoot somebody. This isn't idle speculation either.
I looked up a few of the ones you listed. Manveer Heir is walking the same fine line Jones did with what can only be described as a left wing dog whistle. You're right, he's hot garbage (just trying to make a name for himself stirring up controversy). But I couldn't find an implicit let alone explicit call to violence against white people. The rest are either opportunists or, in Sarah Jeong's case, a dumb kid saying angry things. Again though, couldn't find any calls to violence.
Banning Jones and the like isn't something these platforms want to do. Remember, they're corporations who sell advertising. All they care about is eyeballs. They could care less how they get them. Hell, the reason Trump's president is the media gave him $6 billion in free advertising so they could get eyeballs to do their own ads to. They're worried about getting sued if they don't act and one of Jone's listeners acts on his (pretty blatant and at times outright overt) suggestions of violence.
"Antifa" is blown out of proportion by media. They're the American equivalent of soccer hooligans. And the most the left does is "Punch Nazis". I've yet to see one of them mime a shooting or show up with guns.
TL;DR: The Left isn't getting banned because they don't lean on violence.
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Have an IRc client
DMCA is for copyright. This isn't about copyright, this is about negligence. Jones' listeners already have a history of going off half cocked. My guess is google, Twitter, etc are worried about a negligence lawsuit the next time one of them fires a gun if it hits something.
They could hide behind common carrier, but that's a very high bar to meet. It means being a dumb pipe, like the telephone company. It wouldn't be worth it. They couldn't even ban trolls from flood posting and the like. No social network could survive that.
Instead they're policing their network as best the can. Make no mistake, they didn't want to kick Jones & his ilk off. His viewer's money spends the same as everyone else's and they'd be happy with the advertising dollars. The final straw was when he mimed shooting Bob Mueller.
If you want a sci-fi take on what they're afraid of go read this. I'm not saying Jones is trying to get somebody killed, but I'm saying words have power (as that Pizzagate business proved) and Jones is using them recklessly.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The problem is that Trump has been getting away with breaking so many laws in the past, that the definition of lawbreaking is now 'fluid'. He should have been prosecuted for Atlantic city fraud back in the 90's. Instead he turned FBI informant and nobody touches him. Using company money to pay personal debts is the crime of theft. Falsifying the paperwork around that is the crime of fraud.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/nyregion/donald-trump-atlantic-city.html
He uses charity funds to fix his hotel fountain and nobody bats an eyelid because he's gotten away with that so often in the past. Now we have Fox News claiming collusion with Russia *isn't* a crime. It's amazing to see how far they've shifted from the fake patriotism. He tells them a lie, they know its a lie because they heard him on Cohen's tape, but this is Trump, he always lies, so why point out this particular lie as if its special?
It's election time, and Fox are team red propaganda, and if that means selling out the USA... well it's election time.
So first I searched for "reputation". Nothing. Maybe 60+ comments is too soon? Then I searched for "funny", but that's just the normal disappointment. Then I actually looked at the posts modded "insightful". That's just sad. Final searches for "solution" as in "constructive". Sadder.
Anyway, I'm still fixated on seeking constructive solutions. The approach that most probably applies to Twitter is MEPR (Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation), though it would need some tweaking for that application.
In brief, trolls with earned bad reputations should be helped in rendering themselves less visible, and the more they like to act badly, the less visible they should become. I'm not saying it should be difficult to earn a good reputation, but there's no hurry, and if it's a slower process then the penalty of losing your reputation becomes more serious and worth avoiding.
ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
He's not just proven guilty, he proved it by ADMITTING IT IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN, MULTIPLE TIMES. That he repeats "no collusion" as every 5th sentence now as a nervous tick OUGHT TO BE A SIGN, DIPSHIT TRAITOR.
Good, fuck her for making the obsequiously dumb comparison between white privilege and black reality in America, AND FUCK YOU FOR DEFENDING THAT RETARDED SHIT TOO. #Curb, NEXT.
Because really, all bad actors are bad comedians...
Thank you for your delightfully insightful addition to this conversation. Your well-formed arguments, backed by factual references, has given me pause for thought and may eventually lead me to change my mind on this subject. I look forward to continued engagement that will be, I am certain, educational and enlightening.
If they are going to ban bad actors, william shatner is the worst actor of them all. I don't know if he should be banned though
I see, Trump is the victim, somebody called him a Nazi and because of that some sort of massive deep state/Democrat/media/FBI/Silicon Valley conspiracy is trying to impeach him.
The problem with that is all the evidence and all the guilty pleas and the convictions.
See these are crimes, and if you think Senators in the Republican party won't prosecute him after the election, well you don't think so highly of Republicans.
Twitter said that I have to verify my telephone number so I can continue using the Twitter service. Did not give any plausible argument why they kicked me off.
I simply stopped using twitter and will not come back. F*ck it.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
You understand that modding an AC to -1 for an on topic, detailed explanation with supporting links, just ends up as a penalty in meta-moderation later. I don't mind expanding on the comments, if it'll waste -1 mod points!
It's not a complicated thing. 2012 and Russian spies visit New York offering property deals in exchange for political help in getting sanctions lifted, they operate out of VTB Bank in New York and are prosecuted. Him and Felix Slater (born Felix Mikhailovich Sheferovsky, a Russian mobster) broker a deal
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5616219/Ex-Russian-spy-worked-Trump-Tower-Moscow-deal-Donald-ran-president.html
Trump did his run on the Presidency and was supposed to push a pro-Russian agenda, and he did that. His campaign staff were all approved by Moscow, many met the Russian Ambassador ahead as a sort of job interview, or had previous Russian business links. Even his lawyers for the emoluments clause were one of two companies approved to work in Moscow.
But stuff starts to go wrong, details of meetings leak out, money flows are not concealed properly, one of the launderers, Cohen flips, his campaign managers were sloppy in their communications, coordination with the Russians was sloppy, they say a meeting was about a property deal, he says it was about orphans, Trump himself is sloppy, in front of Whitehouse staff sworn to obey the laws first and their boss second.
And here we are today. *Republican* budget says Trump cannot recognize Crimea as part of Russia, and Trump adds a signing statement to cancel that. You can pretend he's being persecuted by political enemies, but he's not, he's being prosecuted by patriotic Americans.
I love it when you people let the mask slip. Thanks for politicizing Twitter and helping send it to the bottom.
The vast majority of my friends have been banned from Twitter, and they're nowhere near conservative. You're wrong. Twitter just bans thousands of account each day at random.
I don't work for Twitter nor do I give a fuck about Nazi faggots being kicked from it like a dog might kick fleas. Fuck your cultist faggot lifestyle, go to Hell on a white cock as Dorsey fucks you to sweet nazi faggot oblivion.
Twitter is being run by the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations led by Qatar's US-Islamic World Forum and Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal's business partners Suhail Rizvi and Jim Berk. Remember when Saudi Arabia arrested Alwaleed bin Talal and cut off relations with Qatar, before General McMaster fired and replaced Trump's entire national security council and then Alwaleed was released and things returned to normal? Ever wonder what that was about?
They were supported by the Rockefeller-aligned MacArthur Foundation who have staff on the boards of Wikipedia and the New York Times.
And hey look, it's the White House announcing a "global research and action network focused on youth-oriented hate speech online" run by the same exact people and the Muslim Public Affairs Council. But hey, it's not the government censoring you online, it's just the President of the United States whose college expenses happen to have been paid by one Alwaleed bin Talal, and his Homeland Security staff, and a front for al-Qaeda. No big deal!
These websites also want to ban conspiracy theories. I wonder why?
If content is not illegal, Twitter should not be restricting it in any way. Seriously, WTF? You don't have to follow someone you don't like, so you'll never see their posts unless you want to.
This is all about denying a platform to people you disagree with. A bunch of sensitive snowflakes who just can't stand the fact that some other people in the world disagree with them.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
"Mr. Dorsey told one person that he had overruled a decision by his staff to kick Mr. Jones off, according to a person familiar with the discussion."
Ah, here we see another common tactic of the outrage industry: if we can't get X organisation to do what we want, then we'll just make up a rumour implicating one of the senior members, in order to personally pressure them into giving in.
Nice argument, time to empty your piss jugs
While I completely agree with everything you say, did you really just write "speach"? WTF? How American.
Twitter is just a a platform for crazy old Trump to spew hatred, deceit, paranoia, racism, and generally working on destroying America.
Do what I did, close your account.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Are you a prominent conservative political figure that is currently in the focus of a lot of angry liberal people who like to mash the "report" button (for frivolous or false reasons) and aren't too big/connected that there will be business/corporate/financial retaliation if you get kicked off the site?
Congratulations, have a boot to the head! You're banned!
All the evidence I have see suggests that is actually happens to progressive/left leaning users much more often. Especially on YouTube, but Twitter has issues too. A lot of this mobbing gets organized on 4chan, right out in the open, but it's very hard to get a human being at those companies to even notice, let along check the 4chan thread and realize what has happened.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You mean those pesky conservatives? Its not bias...its bad actors...mmkay
I love it when you go all homophobe.. lol
If twitter banned Alex Jones for his nut job conspiracy theories and lies, they'd also have to ban @realDonaldTrump for his abuse, lies, and conspiracy theories. So my conspiracy theory is that Alex still has access because otherwise Trump wouldn't.
Last time I checked, they were only interested in shutting down conservatives.
Eat a cock rightards!
Buy your own rightard servers and coders if you want a platform
Speech = Money
FAGGIT!
I remember the bad old days, when police did the actual policing, and there was due process and stuff.
Oh well. Forward!
> Name one business that uses "not illegal" as its required standard of behaviour for patrons.
The phone company.
These assholes only role is to destroy all what is normal in this world. and on the internet, they spam their false accusations of, well normal people who say what even theqy wanted to say. leftist assholes dosnt read, listen or watch their victimis content from start to finish, they just flag ans spam false accusations. That is what happen to Alex jones and lots of more people. i dont understand how this leftist rage just happens all the sudden?
www.granstrom.fi
For the 100th time, nazional-sozialists were socialists !! (bignannystate-mother-knows-best-social-engineers-stateruneconomy-true-socialists kind).
True, false or otherwise, they were not socialists. Nazis killed socialists.
So if I will you, i'm not a slashdotter ? Or a homo sapiens ? Typical neomarxist thinking....
He knows what it means, but just like his NSDAP cousins, he doesn't like being called what he is.
Tiger sharks and corn snakes didn't pick their own names.
But ok, you don't trust names, OK fair !, then you also think nazis weren't nazis or fascist (because hey FAKE NAMES....).. no ? no ? Or is it only fake name when it suits you ?
I may not agree with all of what Alex Jones has to say, but I have found that having people like him around is a good thing. Sure. He (and others like him) sometimes makes excellent points that few other people would. Now if you absolutely hate everything he says, no problem. But maybe you have people you listen to that I would hate everything they say. If so, shouldn't I be able to kick them out of the system? Who gets to make the decisions. The following quote stuck out for me:
". . Last month, after Twitter's controversial decision to allow far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to remain on its platform . . "
Who gets to decide something is "controversial"?
What if I did not like, say, the Huffington Post? Personally, I cannot say I like or dislike it. Others might. Can they kick it off the internet?
It used to be kicking someone off a site not done unless someone became abusive, used foul language, or promoted something obviously criminal. Then it was logical. Now, even I can see it is becoming to much of a "feel good" and "vengeful" process. This will backfire.
and not just the finger bang. Listen to him and his rhetoric. It's pretty much the 5 minutes of Hate from 1984 stretched out into an 2 hour program. He's made multiple references to blood libel. His audience has already been shown to be a little unhinged (maybe not 'a little'). This isn't me trolling. He's argued that Sandy Hook was a false flag for Pete's sake. He argued that chemicals in our water are turning us Gay.
Furthermore, Jones has many, many times hinted at armed rebellion. He's done this to people who he knows are armed and who have shown themselves to be more than happy to use "2nd amendment solutions".
Now, in Jones' divorce trial he admitted that he doesn't believe any of the nonsense he spouts. That it's all an act. But if anything that makes it worse. He knows the risks of what he's doing. He knows he could be pushing some nutter over the edge and he doesn't care. Google, OTOH, cares, because they don't want the lawsuit when one of them finally snaps and shows up at some QANON target and shoots the place up.
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I don't recall Rachel Maddow miming shooting Trump, and I'm pretty sure if she had Fox News would make damn sure I knew. I don't recall her accusing Republicans of Blood Libel. I don't recall her suggesting armed rebellion against Trump. Jones has done all these things. He did all this while courting an audience that believes Sandy Hook didn't happen. He did all this while he knew (based on testimony given under oath at his divorce trial) that none of the crazy conspiracy theories he spouts are real (which is funny, it's biting him in the ass during his defamation hearing).
If you're gonna do Whataboutism can you at least try harder than that?
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who are both well armed and prone to believe absurd conspiracy theories? Did you do it _after_ one of those people from your audience showed up at a pizza joint with a rifle and fired rounds into it? If so then yes, I would ban you from my platform if I was google or twitter. If only out of fear of a negligence lawsuit.
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with the actual left. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer aren't part of the American Left. They're right wingers running in districts that won't vote for Republicans. There's been attempts to kick them out via primary but they've got so much money they beat them back. Go look up the "Justice Democrats" on google if you want to see the actual American Left.
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The only real viable outcome of these hearings and all the brouhaha of banning and censorship, etc is likely legislation mandating that the terms and conditions for socials sites clearly outline specific behaviors that are prohibited, the penalties for violating the terms and conditions and requiring some form of due process for those who believe they have been wrongly accused and found in violation.
Can't really see the harm in that.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
But Alex Jones BE StaBle GeniUS! No BaN HE! LibTaRDS!
If only someone would have seen this coming...
https://xkcd.com/743/
She's a conservative. And that's not allowed.
Bullshit. If that was true, Donald Trump would have been banned from Twitter years ago for all the racist shit he's posted there.
Jones does not like SOCIALISM in any form. He has talked about that fact a lot in his broadcast. He despices NSDAP.
But becouse national SOCIALIST german workers party (NSDAP) was socialist party and left wing, Jones and people on the right do not like it at all.
They're paid shills.