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1061 points danso | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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tomp ◴[] No.23348595[source]
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", ...).

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throwawaysea ◴[] No.23352428[source]
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.

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1. joshuamorton ◴[] No.23353281[source]
> 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?