Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”

This is amazing news, and I hope Twitter adopts this policy for all rules violations. Much better than deleting tweet or banning accounts, this lets people decide what they want to see. (Except for obvious spammers etc. which should probably be banned.)

Even better would be if there were user-configurable "lists", whereby you could decide upfront what you want / don't want to see (like many sites do right now with NSFW content) - the default filter would be very "protective" (no porn, no violence, no gore, no hate speech) but users could turn off any or all of these "filters". The next step is the addition of user-curated "lists" / "filters" (e.g. "no democrats", "no republicans", "no vegans", "no dog lovers", ...).

I believe twitter already does this through shared block lists

They made clear when they introduced this that the “view tweet anyways” approach applies only when the public interest for an account of a public official outweighs the significant harm they consider to be done by allowing what you describe for all users in general. I don’t expect they intend to change their mind on that.

I'm not actually against the idea, but arbitrary blocklists would accelerate bubbling people away from anyone who could possibly think differently from them, which has its own issues.

Most websites hide NSFW content behind a click. That's good manners. Why shouldn't Twitter?

Twitter already does hide NSFW ("objectionable") content behind a click, removing it only when it violates the platform rules of conduct.

They evaluated and rejected hiding "violates Twitter policies" content except in the rare cases where they deem it necessary for the public interest to retain that violating content behind a click barrier.

https://help.twitter.com/en/safety-and-security/offensive-tw... has more details about the current policy, and you can read their blog posts from the past couple years about these policies to gain more context and background.

Radicalism and inciting to violence should be bubbled not amplified.

We can hope Twitter adopts and enforces policies equally across the board, but they won't and I don't think they can either.

As an example of how they won't do so, consider that there are people literally organizing violent riots and destruction of property on Twitter right now, and they have not been banned or had their tweets/accounts hidden. Ilhan Omar's daughter was caught doing so herself, amplifying rioting supported by Antifa and DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), as documented in https://thepostmillennial.com/ilhan-omars-daughter-shows-sup.... While hundreds of people are inciting violence and using Twitter to organize violence in Minneapolis, the company has done nothing to stop it, and yet they're willing to block Trump's tweet on the theoretical enforcement of laws against criminal rioting? Clearly this is a discriminatory bias in action.

As for how they can't do so: Twitter is a Silicon Valley company. It mostly employs young, far left liberals. Its internal culture is heavily influenced by where it is located and the people it employs. Their Hateful Conduct Policy (https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-condu...) is also subject to that cultural/political influence. For instance, this policy notes that "misgendering" is not allowed. But if you're on the other side of the transgender debate, and feel that pronouns should be based on biology-derived gender, and don't think trans women and biological women should be lumped into a group, then you might be banned. Put another way, Twitter has encoded political stances into their operating procedures, and there's no escaping that even if they expressed a wish to treat their customers equally across the board.

There are only two ways out. One option is that Twitter admits it is biased, that they do discriminate against certain viewpoints, and that they do exert editorial control over their platform. The other option is that they return to viewpoint neutrality, avoid censorship/blocking, and only do so to the minimal extent explicitly required by law.

Youre right. Before twitter took this step I was unable to decide whether to read the president's tweets. Every morning I am forced by twitter to read trumps tweets. Thank goodness this is no longer the case. /s

It’s possible to have bias without editorialising, as far as I know Twitter only hides, deletes or bans. It doesn’t edit, the fact checking is appending.

bubbling is radicalism

> But if you're on the other side of the transgender debate

Then you follow twitter's rules on its platform. You're free to misgender people elsewhere.

Moderation, even moderation and policies you personally disagree with does not rise to the level of "editorial control" under the law.

> While hundreds of people are inciting violence and using Twitter to organize violence in Minneapolis, the company has done nothing to stop it, and yet they're willing to block Trump's tweet on the theoretical enforcement of laws against criminal rioting?

Are you certain that no tweets from protestors glorifying violence have been removed? Notably, none of the tweets you mention are condoning violence, so you're actually insisting that twitter hold $random_internet_people_on_the_whole to a higher standard than the president.

You want twitter to take "Bring milk to a protest" more seriously than "when the looting starts, the shooting starts". That's not Twitter's bias showing, that's yours. Under this interpretation, I believe twitter would also have needed to remove tweets organizing the recent Hong Kong protests. Is that what you want?

But then the people who are open to such things stay exposed, while detaching from anyone else, thus ensuring that they spiral ever further into their own viewpoint. That's how you create radicals.

How is appending not editing. If I append a statement to the end of your comment that contradicts your earlier point without your permission, how is that not editorial?

If we're being honest, Twitter is basically a machine that glorifies violence. It rewards it at the platform and algorithmic level.

An endless volume of tweets under every charged trending topic violates these rules, which are being surfaced and promoted by the platform. And it enables mob mentality like nothing we've seen before.

Moderation is mostly just theater, especially as long as the platform itself is quite literally encouraging the core behavior.

Unfortunately, you're bubbling away people who believe in free speech and free thought as well, and there are probably a lot more of those.

edit: Adding a bit more, the people being bubbled away will likely tend to just isolate. You might think you like that idea, but having spent some time in isolation, I will attest that it kind of messes with your head. You lose your "phase lock" with society on a lot of different norms, small and large. The stereotype of the "dangerous loner", though not always fair, attests to this reality.

If you want to keep someone as a useful member of society and not a tragedy-of-the-day, you have to keep talking to them.

According to section 230, it is only relevant if it changes the meaning of the original content. If it's clearly different content, then it's clearly different content.

This is the bit I don't get. I regularly ignore the utterances of all sorts of people I'm not interested in hearing from. Is it really that hard?

> How is appending not editing. If I append a statement to the end of your comment that contradicts your earlier point without your permission, how is that not editorial?

Hi, I think you're wrong. Here's the proof: I haven't edited your comment, but by replying I have just appended a statement to it without your permission.

Yeah, bubbling is not a magic solution. But why amplify these voices? And why on your “private” platform? A lot of unchecked toxicity can lead to Twitters demise. They set some rules to mitigate for that. Seems ok to me for that to be done for Trumps opponents too.

Remember trolls wreaking havoc on forums? Didn’t they have the right for free speech too and nobody complained when rules were added to try to contain them?

Anyone who feels like they're in a filter bubble can easily make another Twitter account to explore different perspectives.

Given that the president is invested with enormous power and has proved both able and willing to upend others' lives for political ends, pretending that he's just another random e-celeb seems kind of disingenuous.

I'd be curious to know a little bit more about what exactly you're referencing here. This does not in any way describe my experience with Twitter, though I understand that's a single anecdote.

I'd recommend the book Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag, read it a while ago, but still relevant, perhaps even more now...

Well the problem then is the overgrowth of executive power in the past two decades. Unfortunately, literally everyone was silent on that during both the Bush and Obama administration as well, and now are complaining that their chickens have come home to roost.

Twitter don't ban for mere misgendering; anti trans Twitter has been left alone to harass for years, although I believe Glinner finally got banned.

Twitter's design is fundamentally broken beyond repair.

Your Twitter feed is yours. It's like your home territory. People feel like they're entitled to defend this territory. Twitter assists inflammatory media as it attempts to invade this territory, originally with retweets, but more recently with algorithmically selected tweets coming from people who you didn't follow, selected for "engagement". But it does more than that. When you defend your territory, your defense ends up on someone else's feed as a provocation.

The original model worked, with tweets from your followers only, and no retweet support except copy and paste and the letters RT. The current model is cursed.

Replying is different than officially annotating though. You can already reply on Twitter.

"literally everyone"

I don't know what world you were living in.

What if they are but just don’t feel like it?

A reply is a reply, regardless of mechanism. Twitter didn't change a single character of Trump's wording, so they didn't "edit" his tweet.

You can globally mute individual words: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/19/21144097/twitter-mute-twe...

All tweets containing muted words will be omitted from your timeline, or if they show up in a thread you're viewing, hidden in-place with a button to reveal. I use this feature liberally. Twitter would be unbearable without it.

I don't know about you but I voted for Obama and regretted it when this happened [1]:

> National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, Pub.L. 112–81. This NDAA contains several controversial sections (see article), the chief being §§ 1021–1022, which affirm provisions authorizing the indefinite military detention of civilians, including U.S. citizens, without habeas corpus or due process, contained in the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), Pub.L. 107–40.

Not to mention his failures to uphold the principles that he ran on: gitmo, whistleblower protections (vis a vis Manning, Asange and Snowden), massacres of civilians ("drone strikes"), etc.

Just because you haven't been watching, doesn't mean that this hasn't outraged the people who do. All of that stuff was covered by NPR at the time, so it's not like any of it was a secret.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorizati...

I have been fairly outraged for the past twenty years. Most people have not.

And to my credit, I haven't actually voted or supported the candidate who went on to be president since 2000.

The world where -- when I call out presidents for abuse of executive power -- I'm met with various justifications for why 'my guy' is doing the right thing. It's ridiculous. Whether it's Bush's response to 9/11 and his wars or Obama's record executive orders, every time I bring these up, I'm met with justifications for why it's okay this one time.

This is what you get when most people do that.

>people literally organizing violent riots and destruction of property on Twitter right now

>Ilhan Omar's daughter was caught doing so herself

Apparently, retweeting a list of supplies to help protect yourself from bodily harm from violent police is "literally organizing violent riots and destruction of property"

Lets take an other example.

There is an original painting of a pipe. Under it I append the comment: "This is not a pipe".

Have I edited the painting and created a new painting? Is it a single art, or a separate painting and a comment? Do I need additional copyright permissions to create a derivative work, or can I use a painting licensed under Creative Common no derivative in order to create my own version of the Treachery of Images? When I publish it, who is the information content provider as defined by section 230?

Can't challenge ideas if you are so afraid that you hide them.

The only way to actually change someone is conversation.

Only those who don't want honest change fight to prevent actual conversation from happening.

Exactly this.

Never give "your guy" powers that you don't want the "other guy" to have.

Because the powers you give to Obama... will end up with Trump - and vice versa.

What Twitter needs is algorithmically enforced moderation. So when a twitter reply calls for extremism, the user will then be prone to see more calls for peace in reply to that comment. Or when somebody asks for dox on a subject, the user then sees tweets mentioning all the previous times doxxing went wrong and innocent people were hurt. The user would not know this was taking place, but they would avoid radicalization and echo chambers currently happening on Twitter. Also instead of showing the opposition to break their thought bubble, which probably wouldn’t be helpful, the user sees their own side, just more moderate and centrist. If no tweets showing moderation exist, twitter could use a bot that appears to be a real human to make these moderating tweets. Most of these twitter conversations are bots anyways.

Still waiting for them to tackle the Ayatollah: https://twitter.com/Khamenei_tv/status/1264541220006739968.

It is not so much the platform as the general internet medium. It lends itself to narcissism. Humans are more gratuitous when speaking to another in person. More attentive to inflections, reactions, emotions, etc.

I get what you're saying, but the flip side of it is that such actions are aiding, enabling, and abetting a crime (in this case, a large number of crimes). The "protect yourself from bodily harm" bit is what enables these rioters to avoid dispersing and ceasing violent destruction of property. And it is obvious from numerous tweets from various DSA and antifa handles that these two groups are very much amplifying and glorifying destructive rioting. This is real material violence, not theoretical violence, and therefore Twitter needs to shut it down if they have a problem with theoretical violence that they think Trump's tweet glorifies.

Calling police "violent" for wanting to stop blatant opportunistic theft and terrorist behavior (e.g. deliberately cutting gas lines to create big explosions) is a stretch. I would call the initial policing incident that tipped off the protests violent, and I would call the destructive rioting violent (as opposed to the initial peaceful protesting). Both acts deserve condemnation and consequences in my view.

Mythic Quest showed us a solution :)

But it can change the meaning. For instance, if I write a tweet that says "I like the joker character" and twitter appends my tweet saying "People that like joker might shoot up a movie theater", you've changed the intent and meaning completely from what was intended... The media tends to do this kind of thing a lot when they take a speech and add their own commentary to change what was said. Appending/elaborating on what someone says makes them your words, not the original authors.

I think the best solution is not algorithmic enforcement, but algorithmic augmentation of group ban-lists.

So like having hashtags in your profile, you could include ban-lists there, and your preferences would be calculated (and people could see what your filters were).

Yes, this wouldn't solve the issue of filter bubbles but the Twitter's algorithms could augment how to weight people's ban-lists with actual mentions/RTs - so I would see someone on only one of my ban-lists but got a lot of RTs/mentions I'd see it. If I find I'm not seeing stuff I should, I could alter my lists

> There is an original painting of a pipe. Under it I append the comment: "This is not a pipe".

You're wondering off and getting lost in the weeds with your example.

Twitter replied on its platform using a new mechanism that it created. Trying to twist that reply into an "edit" (with the implication that it's some kind of illegitimate corruption of the work replied to) is drifting towards a denial of free speech and other nonsensical implications.

> When I publish it, who is the information content provider as defined by section 230?

On Section 230 more generally:

Correcting a Persistent Myth About the Law that Created the Internet (https://www.theregreview.org/2019/07/15/kosseff-correcting-p...):

> Understanding section 230’s history is essential to informing the current debate about the law. And that history tells us that one of the main reasons for enacting section 230 was to encourage online services to moderate content....

> Section 230’s “findings” states that the internet offers “a forum for a true diversity of political discourse.” Nothing in section 230’s history, however, suggests that this goal requires platforms to be “neutral.” Indeed, section 230 allows platforms to develop different content standards, and customers ultimately can determine whether those standards meet their expectations. [Emphasis mine.]

"literally everyone was silent"

This is such a cliche, and yet simultaneously someone in this thread is saying we don't have to worry about the current President becoming a dictator because of the zillion times previous Presidents were accused of wanting to seize power.

How do you think these contradictory cliches thrive alongside each other?

> But it can change the meaning. For instance, if I write a tweet that says "I like the joker character" and twitter appends my tweet saying "People that like joker might shoot up a movie theater", you've changed the intent and meaning completely from what was intended...

So? No one has a "right to the last word," so that when they speak, everyone else has to shut up so their words will be the exclusive influence on their audience.

It's important for free speech that people be able to point out when someone has lied or spread misinformation.

Rioting, looting, and even torching buildings is not the close to the same level of violence as police killings, driving down protestors, or threatening people with guns. Tweets endorsing or even glorifying the former don’t come close to be as dangerous as tweets excusing the latter. Don’t pretend like these two are equivalent.

Technically this is not even bubbling, at least not how google implemented it, as I understand. Im not on Twitter but if anyone knows, does this action by twitter actually bubble Trump away form people who otherwise would have seen his feed?

And by freedom of speech and thought, how about for twitter? Arent’t they a private company?

It seems that this freedom of speech and thought is such a vague concept that gets twisted and turned according to whoever wants to make a point. Let’s have a definition to what exactly it is to cover and then we’ll talk. And no goalpost moving after the definition please:)

Dorsey has explicitly stated that because user-defined filters will lead people to remain blissfully unaware of ideas that challenge their own, he does not want Twitter to follow that path.

It's a tough call. In some sense, for any global website that doesn't want to impose its own moral code upon the world, it makes the most sense to be hands-off and let users judge for themselves what to see and what not to. On the other hand, doing so would amplify the echochamber effect that's already strongly present on Twitter.

Earlier this year, the rapper Zuby was suspended for tweeting "Ok dude" to a trans person:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/ok-dude-twitter-susp...

I'm not quite sure I understand? Isn't what you're citing a case of people continuing to be quiet in the face of executive overreach?

> A reply is a reply, regardless of mechanism

That's certainly wrong. A reply by an ordinary user using the ordinary mechanism is a very different thing than an official editorial note which carries the imprimatur of the platform. And of course they added code to hide it by default, which is an additional level of control which beyond any sort of replying.

They don't have to change the original wording to exercise editorial judgment and power. This seems kind of obvious?

> That's certainly wrong. A reply by an ordinary user using the ordinary mechanism is a very different thing than an official editorial note which carries the imprimatur of the platform.

Sorry, no, It's not wrong. Twitter's reply using a new mechanism it created may be different than one made by an ordinary user, but that difference doesn't turn their reply into an edit.

> And of course they added code to hide it by default, which is an additional level of control which beyond any sort of replying.

Yes, and it's their right to do that.

> They don't have to change the original wording to exercise editorial judgment and power. This seems kind of obvious?

I never said they weren't moderating their platform (which they have every right to do in any way they see fit). I was merely disputing the weird conflation of "reply" with "edit."

That's their right.

This assumes a basic ability to identify double standards and refuse them on principle. And this country really can't do that right now. Republicans are at a whole new level of hypocrisy than the ordinary variety in American politics. Mitch McConnell said it is obvious that we cannot have a supreme court candidate seriously considered during a presidential election year - when it's the black man in the office. And then this year when asked about what happens if there's vacancy he says unquestionably they will ram the candidate through.

This sort of double standard, smirked at, and then dismissed with "both sides are bad" type whataboutism, is uncivil. It's a betrayal. It's a violation of the social contract. And it's only made worse because the Obama candidate who was refused even a hearing? Orrin Hatch, a multiple decades Congressional Republican, had previously told Obama that he should pick Merrick Garland. It was expressly not principled, and then they boast about this.

Were this truly an actual rule, it means no judges can be confirmed if the political party of president and senate differ. It is cynical and hyper-partisan, and there is no person from either party who has been more vile in this regard than Mitch McConnell. In all ways that matter he's worse than Trump, not least of which is, he's actually competent. The country has consistently become more partisan while he has been majority leader. It doesn't correlate with presidents, it correlates with him.