Alas, there isn't really anything there about what he has been saying, just someone else saying he's a terrible person. Well, okay, but I'd like to make my own mind up about whether someone is hateful or not.
If someone makes a claim, the onus is on them to provide compelling evidence to justify that claim.
Besides, I have taken a preliminary look; Milo seems to be an outspoken asshole (and thus poisoning the discourse), but not an outright hateful bigot... feel free to provide evidence to the contrary.
> Alas, there isn't really anything there about what he has been saying, just someone else saying he's a terrible person.
This is a good characterization of the media's overall response to twitter's banning of Milo. Everyone just keeps saying "he's a terrible person" in dozens of different forms - some rather extreme - but rarely is any real evidence presented. If they present any evidence at all, they cherry pick and take things out of context.
Yes it does. Censorship by public or private entities is dangerous because it destroys the open marketplace of ideas. The best ideas, given time, will rise to the top, and censorship in all forms prevents this from happening. Speech that is agreeable to the public/government/whatever doesn't need any protection, but speech that isn't does. We all should protect speech in all forms even if it's hateful or abhorrent.
No, it doesn't. No one should be forced to see your hate and harassment.
Why should I protect someone calling Leslie Jones an ape? And do NOT say to simply "ignore it" or to "log off". None of that works. It doesn't stop it, and asking someone in the public eye to not use social media is basically telling them to not have a career.
Yiannopoulos can still be hateful and abhorrent on Breitbart.com and many other widely-read outlets. He can hold an anti-Leslie Jones rally on a major street in the US, and police will protect him (including black police).
This isn't a blow to free speech. It's Twitter deciding not to let someone use its service and its resources for the purposes of rallying racists to berate an innocent woman who acted in a movie.
The naïve "all speech is sacred and any censorship is wrong" does not work in the real world. for example, if you yell "fire" in a crowded theatre, you will be prosecuted. Now that we've established that there can (and indeed must) be limits on speech, it's up to a mature society to devise limits which protect speech but also respect others rights.
Banning someone from Twitter is one of the least effective ways to censor an author who has multiple venues which pay them to write. As the linked comic says (I can't believe nobody has linked to it yet, so the obligatory XKCD is below) this is not censorship. This is signaling that his speech was inappropriate and harassment. Being banned from Twitter doesn't stop him from posting on e.g. Facebook. His speech can still be heard by any who want to hear it, this ban merely prevents him from harassing her further.
> Censorship by public or private entities is dangerous because it destroys the open marketplace of ideas.
On the contrary, private censorship is essential to the marketplace of ideas, since it is exactly private parties choosing how they will participate in that marketplace.
(Where a "private" entity -- or a group of them coordinating formally or informally -- has a, de facto or de jure, protected monopoly on communication in a market, then that entity or entities censoring raises much the same issues as government censorship, but private censorship in general is central to, rather than destructive of, the open marketplace of ideas.)
Let me get this straight, Milo is of foreign-descent, homosexual, and has inter-racial relationships, but is a hardcore conservative? Why people take him seriously, I will never know.
You'd be amazed how many Neoreactionaries are gay guys from foreign countries. I've never known what to make of this phenomenon, but it's fascinating to watch.
They don't, but homophobia, denial that sexuality is mutable, denial that homosexuality exists, and racism are all driven by conservatives.
There have been times when liberals were racist (e.g. some, but not most, eugenicists), but generally speaking, conservatives want to preserve the past, and the past is incredibly racist.
Conservatives fought the abolition of slavery, and to this day they support laws that marginalize or infringe upon the rights of homosexuals. A gay conservative is someone acting against his/her interests, and a pro-equality conservative is an oxymoron.
If that was the case, the circus that is US politics wouldn't exist.
Doesn't really matter which side you're on. If you're on the left it's obvious that more than 99% of the conservative voters are voting against their own (at least economic) interests. If you're on the right the democratic voters are sheeple and slaves to the lamestream media. I'm not trying to hide my affiliation, but the phrasing on either side is obviously pointing to the same logic. The vast majority of voters are followers, determining votes by proxy of affiliation of people they trust, rather than the complete platform of their candidate.
They do. I wasn't telling anyone what their interests are. I was describing what conservatives think based on the definition of the word.
If people are pro-gay rights or pro-equality, they are no longer "conservative" on those issues. They are progressive. They are pro-change instead of pro-tradition.
The logic (agree with it or not) is that the biggest threat to homosexuals in 2016 is Islam and Sharia. There are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, at least half who want homosexuality banned. And Muslim countries are much more likely to legislate religious doctrine than Western countries right now.
Conservatives tend to be more combative with Islam than liberals are, so the thinking is it's logical to be Conservative now if you want to push gay rights forward. Especially since the Orlando massacre which saw a Muslim terrorist kill 50 unarmed gays.
Being anti-gay rights and anti-Muslim are both conservative viewpoints, but almost no one is 100% conservative or 100% progressive.
When you say it's logical to "be Conservative" to move gay rights forward, I'd suggest changing it to, "be Conservative regarding Islam", which makes the assertion less fraught.
Except Christian areas are just as likely to legislate religious doctrine. All of the gay marriage bans in the US were driven by Christian groups, and mostly enacted in Christian heavy states. The countries in Africa which are outlawing homosexuality are doing so largely lead by Christians. And there is no way you can tell me Russia is a Muslim country.
You seem to be painting with a very broad brush, friend. Perhaps you don't know as much about conservatives as you think. Just because some conservatives hold antiquated views doesn't mean it's true of all (or even the majority) of conservatives.
I'm using the definition of "conservative", which Wikipedia describes as:
> political and social philosophy [that] promotes retaining traditional social institutions in the context of culture and civilization
Everything I said is consistent with the definition of conservative. If you think conservatives are pro-gay rights or pro-equality, you are actually defining the word differently than the rest of us, and we're having a pointless semantic argument.
I really doubt so, even if you might be thinking of "conservatives" in the very narrow sense of US southern republicans.
I would admit that I do not have that many gay friends, but the few friends, coworkers and acquaintances I have met over the past 10 years very across the political spectrum just like everyone else.
Not all of them are liberal, not all of them were even on the same page as far as things like "gay marriage" went, doesn't mean any of them opposed it, but it doesn't mean that they were active supporters of it either.
Not everyone defines themselves by their sexual orientation.
You can be "conservative" (or right wing if you will) on many things like national defense, economics, and public spending while being gay, claiming that somehow you have to accept everything that the "left wing" stands for just because you like individual of the same sex as you are is quite telling, oddly enough this level of framing and bias is almost synonymous with the PC crowd - "but you are 'x' how can you be against 'y'", you call it by different names for it but I've seen way too many "liberals" act like authoritarian douchebags and call people of various "minority" groups what can effectively be analogous to a "race traitor" when they don't share their views or buy into their entire agenda.
You can be an african american and not support BLM, you can be a gay man or woman and believe be against state laws that allow or disallow gay marriage simply by believing that it is not upto the state to police marriage, and you can be a gun toting 2nd amendment defender while being a gay pro abortion pro legalization woman.
Stop trying to infantilize people and stick them into camps, if anything you should take from the recent US election (especially bernie vs trump) is that there are considerably more "opinions" out there than you might expect.
Milo has joined Team Conservative in the left-right culture war, but that doesn't make him a conservative. Left/progressive and right/conservative seem to be identities rather than ideologies. They're pretty much just two opposing tribes waging an endless, annoying war, mostly on the internet.
About damn time. It's a shame that it took him & his followers harassing a celebrity to get this done, given how many people they've threatened before, but hardly surprising.
1) GP said "they've threatened", which referred to the followers, rather than Yiannopoulos himself.
2) It's possible to inspire your followers to threaten people without making a threat yourself. Yiannopoulos has painted groups he dislikes (feminists, Muslims, etc.) as threatening and dangerous to his followers, which is a tacit justification of violence and threats against them.
> #1 Was anyone actually threatened or just insulted and, regardless, what does that have to do with Milo?
His followers have threatened some horrific stuff to lots of people, especially during the height of GamerGate harassment. It has to do with Yiannopoulos only if he intended to create those reactions among his followers, which I (and others) suspect he did. We'll never know for sure.
> #2 Very tenuous justification there. One that twitter certainly doesn't hold other groups to.
Agreed. Perhaps Yiannopoulos has grounds to sue Twitter for unfair treatment. I doubt it, though IANAL.
In this case, Twitter may not be using "inciting followers to make threats using dog-whistle rhetoric" as a criterion for banning people. It would ban Yiannopoulos and not, say, a black nationalist for one simple reason: Yiannopoulos was more famous and created more consternation among potential users.
Everything and everyone the left disagrees with now gets labeled as "hate" and increasingly gets flagged and then banned. Why is the left so afraid of a debate?
I don't think anyone thinks that the new GB movie is a leftist propaganda, it's a bad movie and people now blame the reception on the fact that they've replace the cast with women.
They could've used the American pie cast and it would not have mattered they made GB into a Tyler Perry movie that's why it tanked.
Speaking about Ghostbusters. Remember the 2nd movie where the mayor says "Being miserable and treating other people like dirt is every New Yorker's god-given right." And before that he said "What do you want me to do, go on television and tell 3 million people they have to be nice to each other?" LOL, I totally agree with this. Why is Twitter trying to be the nice police?
Twitter seems to really drag their feet deleting accounts of Islamic radicals inciting violence and Black Libes Matter sympathizers celebrating cop killings. If they even bother to do anything.
If you're going to police speech that's merely provocative, as Milo's is, and not expressly illegal (direct actual threats, child porn, etc) then you're going to get yourself in a position where you eventually piss everyone off. Twitter and Facebook are doing an excellent job of that at the moment with conservatives. We'll see long term how many users want to hang around a dry leftist echo chamber.
All these social media platforms are bad at this. They're in the business of facilitating discourse and giving people a platform to speak. IMO they have an ethical responsibility to protect speech in all forms, unless it's inciting violence/child porn/etc.
I can't say that they should disallow illegal speech because governments get this wrong, too. Like how many countries have laws forbidding hate speech. Those laws are as abhorrent as the speech itself because it's stifling discourse.
Do they? Do they have an obligation to protect the speech of all the people calling Leslie Jones an ape on Monday? What about the speech of those that are silenced because they know that the racist trolls will come out of the woodwork whenever they say anything?
Further, I can't believe that the discourse that is 'stifled' by hate speech terms and conditions on platforms like Twitter was ever valuable in the first place. I can't believe it's more valuable than the discourse of those who are silenced by harassment.
> They're in the business of facilitating discourse and giving people a platform to speak
Facebook started as a way to connect with classmates. Instagram started as picture sharing. Twitter started as a way to message friends.
At what point were those companies suddenly "in the business" of facilitating discourse? Who decides when they are? Why should we have laws that force a company to behave a certain way just because it's popular?
Thankfully, the US has clear laws about this, and private corporations can permit or reject users as they please, as long as they don't do it solely on the basis of gender, race, or religion.
> Everything and everyone the left disagrees with now gets labeled as "hate" and increasingly gets flagged and then banned. Why is the left so afraid of a debate?
Milo Yiannopoulos was banned repeatedly for violating the rules on Twitter by launching personal attacks and inciting trolling.
He was intentionally provoking bans to enhance the controversy surrounding his brand.
I'm not sure why you think he didn't get exactly what he wanted (except the permanency, I'm pretty sure he didn't want that part)?
I'm sorry, but read through what happened to Leslie Jones yesterday and tell me that wasn't hate. This is not a matter of debate; it's a matter of harassment.
Well if there are enough complaints about the guy, maybe it really is harassment and not just the same "culture war" nonsense. When people are constantly pushing the bounds of civility, and encouraging their followers to do the same, you need to reign it in or it ruins the platform for everyone else. It's not like there's a shortage of places for them to take their circus to.
Free speech is vitally important, but this decision has nothing to do with it. Yiannopoulos can still speak and write in many other public places, including any public part of the US, his own personal blog, and any other unrestricted platform (such as Facebook).
Twitter is selling a product, and they have a right to decide what kind of product it is. They have a right to decide what their brand is connected to. If you argue that free speech requires private companies to be neutral toward everyone who wants to use them as a medium, you're also arguing that newspapers must publish any editorials that are sent to them. You're arguing that TV networks accept all ads, no matter how repugnant, and that phone carriers allow stalkers to contact anyone they wish.
People should be willing to die to defend free speech, but let's also be clear on what is and isn't actually an attack on free speech. Yiannopoulos is a troll, and Twitter (in the interest of their shareholders) should have started banning people like him a long time ago.
hmmm.... It certainly has nothing to do with the first amendment protections since twitter is a private company, but - at least from my POV - it does have to do with censorship, bias, and, depending on how you define it, free speech.
Yes! It absolutely is censorship and bias. I agree with that. But private corporations are allowed to censor and be biased.
That's why a bar can kick you out for screaming racial slurs if they want to: it hurts their business by making their customers unhappy. That's also why corporations can donate to any political cause that they want. Some private corporations exist only to be biased! The ACLU is an example.
"Free speech" means, to me, the freedom to speak without fear. Twitter has not given Yiannopoulos a reason to fear speaking. He's just no longer free to use Twitter as a broadcast medium. It's like if Twitter lent him a huge megaphone that said "TWITTER" on it, listened to what he said, and then decided they didn't want him to have it anymore.
Is it really censorship if they're only "targeting" people who happen to be rude to other users? Or personalities who encourage their followers to do so enmass.
The only difference between Twitter and old school BBSes in this case is reach. You still need to break out the ban hammer sometimes or it turns into a cesspool.
It doesn't make sense as an analogy to this situation. Public utilities are usually public (at least in the US) because they need to be monopolies. You can't have 10 companies running competing power lines throughout a city, so you have one. Because you only have one, it gets heavily regulated to ensure fairness. The same is true of broadcast frequencies.
Public utilities more commonly exist as oligopolies–not dissimilar to the social media market, in which the number of (major, national) firms can be counted on one hand.
They did ban him for his political views. But it's clever how you snuck in that one subjective statement into an otherwise objective line of reasoning.
They did not ban him for his political views. They banned him for impersonating tweets of another user, and for leading a harassment campaign against other users. Nothing to do with his political views.
That policy is used to silence dissenting opinion. Don't spread this PR. It's equivalent to police claiming they detained you for a broken tail light. Dorsey and his Saudi owners are on a purge.
I believe you are referring to twitter being used to silence a dissenting opinion when you said "that policy", in reference to Nero. I actually think it's the other way, the bullying sent toward the SNL actresses' way, the sexist and homophobic comments, those were actually meant to silence a dissenting view, someone those people did not like.
Stopping bullying is a good thing. No good comes from bullying someone you don't like.
I would like to change your scenario to one that more closely mirrors the situation at hand: You are using their service to harass other users. Your targeted harassment of these other users causes them to cancel the service.
Or, lets go for something simpler: Spam. You're using the telcom provider to send out spam. They cut you off for it.
> It certainly has nothing to do with the first amendment protections since twitter is a private company
I disagree. Because Twitter is a private company (and not a public utility), their being able to make this kind of decision is central to what the first amendment is about.
> it does have to do with censorship
Of course it has to do with censorship. Anytime a someone who owns an outlet chooses to allow or not allow their private channel to be used in a particular way, it has to do with censorship.
> article: a day after he incited his followers to bombard Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones with racist and demeaning tweets.
That sounds like fighting words[1] to me. Which, at least under the American constitution, is not covered by FoS. There's going to be internet fallout though, on the internet FoS is synonymous with "say whatever I want to say."
It wasn't really fighting words. Yiannopoulos is smart and may have had some legal advice on top of that, so he never does anything that crosses the (legal) line.
"Inciting" was a reference to the effect he created, without suggesting that we can be certain it was intentional.
> It wasn't really fighting words. Yiannopoulos is smart and may have had some legal advice on top of that, so he never does anything that crosses the (legal) line.
Fighting words are not illegal (unless specifically prohibited by statute), they are just outside the Constitutional protection against regulation. So, you could engage in fighting words without crossing any legal line.
But, even if it is protected speech, freedom of speech means that private parties (like Twitter) are generally free to choose not to relay your speech, too.
smt88 is entirely correct. In fact, his arguments in this thread are excellent, and there's nothing I want to add. Rights are a political concept, and the right to free speech is entirely an issue of government censorship. A private company witholding a service from you cannot infringe your rights.
Within that context, I want to point out that an action can be within your rights, but still be morally wrong. Influential private companies can create an anti-free-speech culture. This doesn't directly infringe on people's rights, but it paves the way for anti-free-speech legislation.
My other disagreement is whether your internet provider could shut off your internet, and not be infringing your rights. I say 'yes': you and your ISP have a right to sign whatever contract you want, and they can set whatever limitations they want on your use of their property (as can newspapers and online services). The rational way for consumers to deal with is not to get the state to step in, but to push for 'no censorship' contracts.
In what world is a targeted harassment campaign considered "freedom of speech"?
And why do you care so much about the harassers, yet offer nothing for those who's speech is silenced because they are harassed off the platform? Do those people not matter?
>In what world is a targeted harassment campaign considered "freedom of speech"?
Who decides where that line is drawn?
>And why do you care so much about the harassers, yet offer nothing for those who's speech is silenced because they are harassed off the platform? Do those people not matter?
The can block/ignore/filter, just like everyone has always done.
I understand that the first amendment protects against government censorship, and not the censorship of a private company.
But honest question, what is the difference between a private business refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay wedding (which courts have ruled illegal), and twitter refusing their platform to a conservative writer.
1) He's not banned for being a conservative, nor writer.
2) They (likely) did not order a cake with writing on it targetting someone. They just wanted a cake for themselves.
IANAL, but I'm assuming the bakery got ruled against on grounds of bias crimes against sexual orientation.
He's not targetted for either being gay or conservative or any other personal trait other than on their service portraying a seemingly vile human being through targetted harassment of other user(s), which they deemed a breach of their ToS.
Gays can't decide whether or not to be gay, just as people can't decide the color of their skin. The US values protecting people against discrimination based on unalterable traits.
Making intentionally inflammatory comments on Twitter is alterable, so it's not analogous to being gay.
Twitter did not refuse their platform to a conservative writer. He had been using Twitter for years.
What happened is that he used their platform to post impersonating tweets of other users, as well as lead large harassment campaigns against other users. Both are against the Twitter ToS. After repeated ToS violations, he was finally banned.
So no, they did not refuse their platform to a conservative writer. They did not do anything to anyone for their political beliefs. They kicked off a user who had repeatedly broken the rules.
In general this is my prob with society today. Why do we have to be nice to people? Why do we have to show empathy? Why can we not say hateful things? No violence/assault no harm.
Why shouldn't we be (at least at first try to be) nice to people?
What possible reason? Is it excerting more effort? Does it in any concievable way affect the world in a negative way?
I'm sure your argument would be other people taking advantage, but being nice isn't the same as being naive. Give people the benefit of the doubt and the world is a better place.
Thankfully most nations laws and most private companies ToS extend beyond just physical harassment. He breached Twitter's ToS multiple times. Now he's banned.
I can tell you what the answer is on Hacker News, at least. You have to treat others respectfully here because if we allowed users not to, the community would decay, the best people (who incidentally have no trouble being respectful) would leave, and this place would become uninteresting, like scorched earth. That's the biggest risk to this site so we take it seriously.
I see this sort of argument a lot and I don't know how true it is.
Is it /really/ true that the best contributors are so sensitive? In my experience, these days it's actually the worst contributors or those who contribute not at all who are the most sensitive and liable to throw in the towel.
I'm sympathetic to your view but there is another risk that by overmoderating or catering to the most sensitive of contributors, HN will be left with non-interesting content, or controversial opinions will be silenced.
You don't have to be nice to people, or show empathy, or refrain from saying hateful things; however, we are equally free to avoid associating with you.
It’s clear that existing hate speech laws are inadequate for the social media era. And if we decide, as we perhaps might, that a lifetime ban on the internet is unworkable and disproportionately punitive, given the centrality of the internet to our professional and personal lives these days, what on earth are we to do? No one has yet offered a convincing answer. In the meantime, we are all, bit by bit, growing ever more fearful of the next wave of molestation.
Together with other commentators, I have in the past argued for verified identities on social networks, so those responsible for abuse and persecution of public figures and the vulnerable might be held accountable for their actions. That seems redundant when trolls are now so brazen they don’t care about disapproving words from their loved ones back inside Facebook when they leave furious missives using that social network’s commenting system elsewhere on the internet.
So perhaps what’s needed now is a bolder form of censure after all, because the internet is not a universal human right. If people cannot be trusted to treat one another with respect, dignity and consideration, perhaps they deserve to have their online freedoms curtailed. For sure, the best we could ever hope for is a smattering of unpopular show trials. But if the internet, ubiquitous as it now is, proves too dangerous in the hands of the psychologically fragile, perhaps access to it ought to be restricted. We ban drunks from driving because they’re a danger to others. Isn’t it time we did the same to trolls?
A private company can do whatever they want on their platform. The problem I have is that they pretend that they are unbiased arbiters, when history suggests otherwise.
I also have a problem with this as Twitter investor (I'm a huge critic of Twitter, if you look at my history; and I'm specifically an investor hoping for someone to just buy the company and fire Jack and his team.) I don't know how to balance the harassment policies (which I think should be enforced in some cases) and free speech.
I think free speech is vital to the success of any social media platform. I also know the tendencies of internet trolls is that if you come at them, they often go much harder towards you. It would make more sense if you could auto-block mentions that contain keywords, almost like a spam filter. Basically filter bubbles or groups/channels, with the ability to see unfiltered mentions. I really do not think this solves the problem, as we saw with Reddit, 4Chan, 8Chan, (or basically any forum that has operated since the early 2000s) etc.
When Reddit started mass banning people and subreddits it saw a huge uptick of "shitposts," eventually a lot of those people formed "The_Donald" and now they basically control most of the front page, and have for months. Banning in many instances can give the banned users a much louder voice, especially if they have any sort of movement or following behind them. I think anyone with experience in online forums dating back to the early 2000s knows this to be true. Forum "fallouts" happen often, and usually occur after a significant ban or power grab...it often ends up killing the platform or community. I don't think social media platforms are any different.
I fear unless Jack and many others are removed from the company, it will become like a Yahoo, with core assets that are marked as virtually worthless and no one willing to buy and catch the falling knife.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 84.7 ms ] threadThe best I can tell is that he can be an asshole.
Bit odd for you to be so concerned about making up your own mind, yet be so reliant on other people providing you sources.
Besides, I have taken a preliminary look; Milo seems to be an outspoken asshole (and thus poisoning the discourse), but not an outright hateful bigot... feel free to provide evidence to the contrary.
What do you think this is, Reddit?
This is a good characterization of the media's overall response to twitter's banning of Milo. Everyone just keeps saying "he's a terrible person" in dozens of different forms - some rather extreme - but rarely is any real evidence presented. If they present any evidence at all, they cherry pick and take things out of context.
Why should I protect someone calling Leslie Jones an ape? And do NOT say to simply "ignore it" or to "log off". None of that works. It doesn't stop it, and asking someone in the public eye to not use social media is basically telling them to not have a career.
This isn't a blow to free speech. It's Twitter deciding not to let someone use its service and its resources for the purposes of rallying racists to berate an innocent woman who acted in a movie.
Banning someone from Twitter is one of the least effective ways to censor an author who has multiple venues which pay them to write. As the linked comic says (I can't believe nobody has linked to it yet, so the obligatory XKCD is below) this is not censorship. This is signaling that his speech was inappropriate and harassment. Being banned from Twitter doesn't stop him from posting on e.g. Facebook. His speech can still be heard by any who want to hear it, this ban merely prevents him from harassing her further.
https://xkcd.com/1357/
On the contrary, private censorship is essential to the marketplace of ideas, since it is exactly private parties choosing how they will participate in that marketplace.
(Where a "private" entity -- or a group of them coordinating formally or informally -- has a, de facto or de jure, protected monopoly on communication in a market, then that entity or entities censoring raises much the same issues as government censorship, but private censorship in general is central to, rather than destructive of, the open marketplace of ideas.)
There have been times when liberals were racist (e.g. some, but not most, eugenicists), but generally speaking, conservatives want to preserve the past, and the past is incredibly racist.
Conservatives fought the abolition of slavery, and to this day they support laws that marginalize or infringe upon the rights of homosexuals. A gay conservative is someone acting against his/her interests, and a pro-equality conservative is an oxymoron.
Doesn't really matter which side you're on. If you're on the left it's obvious that more than 99% of the conservative voters are voting against their own (at least economic) interests. If you're on the right the democratic voters are sheeple and slaves to the lamestream media. I'm not trying to hide my affiliation, but the phrasing on either side is obviously pointing to the same logic. The vast majority of voters are followers, determining votes by proxy of affiliation of people they trust, rather than the complete platform of their candidate.
If people are pro-gay rights or pro-equality, they are no longer "conservative" on those issues. They are progressive. They are pro-change instead of pro-tradition.
Conservatives tend to be more combative with Islam than liberals are, so the thinking is it's logical to be Conservative now if you want to push gay rights forward. Especially since the Orlando massacre which saw a Muslim terrorist kill 50 unarmed gays.
Being anti-gay rights and anti-Muslim are both conservative viewpoints, but almost no one is 100% conservative or 100% progressive.
When you say it's logical to "be Conservative" to move gay rights forward, I'd suggest changing it to, "be Conservative regarding Islam", which makes the assertion less fraught.
> political and social philosophy [that] promotes retaining traditional social institutions in the context of culture and civilization
Everything I said is consistent with the definition of conservative. If you think conservatives are pro-gay rights or pro-equality, you are actually defining the word differently than the rest of us, and we're having a pointless semantic argument.
I would admit that I do not have that many gay friends, but the few friends, coworkers and acquaintances I have met over the past 10 years very across the political spectrum just like everyone else. Not all of them are liberal, not all of them were even on the same page as far as things like "gay marriage" went, doesn't mean any of them opposed it, but it doesn't mean that they were active supporters of it either. Not everyone defines themselves by their sexual orientation.
You can be "conservative" (or right wing if you will) on many things like national defense, economics, and public spending while being gay, claiming that somehow you have to accept everything that the "left wing" stands for just because you like individual of the same sex as you are is quite telling, oddly enough this level of framing and bias is almost synonymous with the PC crowd - "but you are 'x' how can you be against 'y'", you call it by different names for it but I've seen way too many "liberals" act like authoritarian douchebags and call people of various "minority" groups what can effectively be analogous to a "race traitor" when they don't share their views or buy into their entire agenda.
You can be an african american and not support BLM, you can be a gay man or woman and believe be against state laws that allow or disallow gay marriage simply by believing that it is not upto the state to police marriage, and you can be a gun toting 2nd amendment defender while being a gay pro abortion pro legalization woman.
Stop trying to infantilize people and stick them into camps, if anything you should take from the recent US election (especially bernie vs trump) is that there are considerably more "opinions" out there than you might expect.
2) It's possible to inspire your followers to threaten people without making a threat yourself. Yiannopoulos has painted groups he dislikes (feminists, Muslims, etc.) as threatening and dangerous to his followers, which is a tacit justification of violence and threats against them.
#2 Very tenuous justification there. One that twitter certainly doesn't hold other groups to.
His followers have threatened some horrific stuff to lots of people, especially during the height of GamerGate harassment. It has to do with Yiannopoulos only if he intended to create those reactions among his followers, which I (and others) suspect he did. We'll never know for sure.
> #2 Very tenuous justification there. One that twitter certainly doesn't hold other groups to.
Agreed. Perhaps Yiannopoulos has grounds to sue Twitter for unfair treatment. I doubt it, though IANAL.
In this case, Twitter may not be using "inciting followers to make threats using dog-whistle rhetoric" as a criterion for banning people. It would ban Yiannopoulos and not, say, a black nationalist for one simple reason: Yiannopoulos was more famous and created more consternation among potential users.
I suppose I have to add that this is not for ideological reasons but because such personal attacks are bottom-of-the-barrel sludge.
https://twitter.com/nero
If you're going to police speech that's merely provocative, as Milo's is, and not expressly illegal (direct actual threats, child porn, etc) then you're going to get yourself in a position where you eventually piss everyone off. Twitter and Facebook are doing an excellent job of that at the moment with conservatives. We'll see long term how many users want to hang around a dry leftist echo chamber.
I can't say that they should disallow illegal speech because governments get this wrong, too. Like how many countries have laws forbidding hate speech. Those laws are as abhorrent as the speech itself because it's stifling discourse.
Further, I can't believe that the discourse that is 'stifled' by hate speech terms and conditions on platforms like Twitter was ever valuable in the first place. I can't believe it's more valuable than the discourse of those who are silenced by harassment.
Facebook started as a way to connect with classmates. Instagram started as picture sharing. Twitter started as a way to message friends.
At what point were those companies suddenly "in the business" of facilitating discourse? Who decides when they are? Why should we have laws that force a company to behave a certain way just because it's popular?
Thankfully, the US has clear laws about this, and private corporations can permit or reject users as they please, as long as they don't do it solely on the basis of gender, race, or religion.
Milo Yiannopoulos was banned repeatedly for violating the rules on Twitter by launching personal attacks and inciting trolling.
He was intentionally provoking bans to enhance the controversy surrounding his brand.
I'm not sure why you think he didn't get exactly what he wanted (except the permanency, I'm pretty sure he didn't want that part)?
A barrage of pictures comparing Leslie Jones to apes and orangutans is not hate? It's a debate?
Twitter has been going after Milo for a while. What twitter did was not just about his tweets related to her.
And rightly so. He's a vile human being.
Twitter is selling a product, and they have a right to decide what kind of product it is. They have a right to decide what their brand is connected to. If you argue that free speech requires private companies to be neutral toward everyone who wants to use them as a medium, you're also arguing that newspapers must publish any editorials that are sent to them. You're arguing that TV networks accept all ads, no matter how repugnant, and that phone carriers allow stalkers to contact anyone they wish.
People should be willing to die to defend free speech, but let's also be clear on what is and isn't actually an attack on free speech. Yiannopoulos is a troll, and Twitter (in the interest of their shareholders) should have started banning people like him a long time ago.
That's why a bar can kick you out for screaming racial slurs if they want to: it hurts their business by making their customers unhappy. That's also why corporations can donate to any political cause that they want. Some private corporations exist only to be biased! The ACLU is an example.
"Free speech" means, to me, the freedom to speak without fear. Twitter has not given Yiannopoulos a reason to fear speaking. He's just no longer free to use Twitter as a broadcast medium. It's like if Twitter lent him a huge megaphone that said "TWITTER" on it, listened to what he said, and then decided they didn't want him to have it anymore.
The only difference between Twitter and old school BBSes in this case is reach. You still need to break out the ban hammer sometimes or it turns into a cesspool.
A privately-held telecom provider (i.e. utility) disagrees with my political views. As a result my internet service is terminated.
Let's agree the definition of a public utility is "Furnishes an everyday necessity to the public at large".
Has the provider restricted my First Amendment right?
At what point (if ever) would you consider Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter public utilities?
On the internet you can choose whatever service you like.
Is Twitter or any other application layer non-government service on the internet a utility? No.
So is this what happened? No.
They didn't ban him for his political views, nor are they a utility.
No, they banned him for soliciting harassment, not for the views which motivated the solicitation of the harassment.
I believe you are referring to twitter being used to silence a dissenting opinion when you said "that policy", in reference to Nero. I actually think it's the other way, the bullying sent toward the SNL actresses' way, the sexist and homophobic comments, those were actually meant to silence a dissenting view, someone those people did not like.
Stopping bullying is a good thing. No good comes from bullying someone you don't like.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA44q8W_Xt0
Or, lets go for something simpler: Spam. You're using the telcom provider to send out spam. They cut you off for it.
I disagree. Because Twitter is a private company (and not a public utility), their being able to make this kind of decision is central to what the first amendment is about.
> it does have to do with censorship
Of course it has to do with censorship. Anytime a someone who owns an outlet chooses to allow or not allow their private channel to be used in a particular way, it has to do with censorship.
> article: a day after he incited his followers to bombard Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones with racist and demeaning tweets.
That sounds like fighting words[1] to me. Which, at least under the American constitution, is not covered by FoS. There's going to be internet fallout though, on the internet FoS is synonymous with "say whatever I want to say."
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_words
"Inciting" was a reference to the effect he created, without suggesting that we can be certain it was intentional.
> legal
Is there any way for his lawyers to know for certain? Online harassment is still incredibly murky in terms of precedent.
Fighting words are not illegal (unless specifically prohibited by statute), they are just outside the Constitutional protection against regulation. So, you could engage in fighting words without crossing any legal line.
But, even if it is protected speech, freedom of speech means that private parties (like Twitter) are generally free to choose not to relay your speech, too.
Within that context, I want to point out that an action can be within your rights, but still be morally wrong. Influential private companies can create an anti-free-speech culture. This doesn't directly infringe on people's rights, but it paves the way for anti-free-speech legislation.
My other disagreement is whether your internet provider could shut off your internet, and not be infringing your rights. I say 'yes': you and your ISP have a right to sign whatever contract you want, and they can set whatever limitations they want on your use of their property (as can newspapers and online services). The rational way for consumers to deal with is not to get the state to step in, but to push for 'no censorship' contracts.
I have no idea why anyone allowed twitter to ever have as much influence as they do.
And why do you care so much about the harassers, yet offer nothing for those who's speech is silenced because they are harassed off the platform? Do those people not matter?
Who decides where that line is drawn?
>And why do you care so much about the harassers, yet offer nothing for those who's speech is silenced because they are harassed off the platform? Do those people not matter?
The can block/ignore/filter, just like everyone has always done.
But honest question, what is the difference between a private business refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay wedding (which courts have ruled illegal), and twitter refusing their platform to a conservative writer.
He's not targetted for either being gay or conservative or any other personal trait other than on their service portraying a seemingly vile human being through targetted harassment of other user(s), which they deemed a breach of their ToS.
Making intentionally inflammatory comments on Twitter is alterable, so it's not analogous to being gay.
What happened is that he used their platform to post impersonating tweets of other users, as well as lead large harassment campaigns against other users. Both are against the Twitter ToS. After repeated ToS violations, he was finally banned.
So no, they did not refuse their platform to a conservative writer. They did not do anything to anyone for their political beliefs. They kicked off a user who had repeatedly broken the rules.
What possible reason? Is it excerting more effort? Does it in any concievable way affect the world in a negative way?
I'm sure your argument would be other people taking advantage, but being nice isn't the same as being naive. Give people the benefit of the doubt and the world is a better place.
Thankfully most nations laws and most private companies ToS extend beyond just physical harassment. He breached Twitter's ToS multiple times. Now he's banned.
Is it /really/ true that the best contributors are so sensitive? In my experience, these days it's actually the worst contributors or those who contribute not at all who are the most sensitive and liable to throw in the towel.
I'm sympathetic to your view but there is another risk that by overmoderating or catering to the most sensitive of contributors, HN will be left with non-interesting content, or controversial opinions will be silenced.
Together with other commentators, I have in the past argued for verified identities on social networks, so those responsible for abuse and persecution of public figures and the vulnerable might be held accountable for their actions. That seems redundant when trolls are now so brazen they don’t care about disapproving words from their loved ones back inside Facebook when they leave furious missives using that social network’s commenting system elsewhere on the internet.
So perhaps what’s needed now is a bolder form of censure after all, because the internet is not a universal human right. If people cannot be trusted to treat one another with respect, dignity and consideration, perhaps they deserve to have their online freedoms curtailed. For sure, the best we could ever hope for is a smattering of unpopular show trials. But if the internet, ubiquitous as it now is, proves too dangerous in the hands of the psychologically fragile, perhaps access to it ought to be restricted. We ban drunks from driving because they’re a danger to others. Isn’t it time we did the same to trolls?
- See more at: http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/yiannopoulos/3359/the-internet...
I also have a problem with this as Twitter investor (I'm a huge critic of Twitter, if you look at my history; and I'm specifically an investor hoping for someone to just buy the company and fire Jack and his team.) I don't know how to balance the harassment policies (which I think should be enforced in some cases) and free speech.
I think free speech is vital to the success of any social media platform. I also know the tendencies of internet trolls is that if you come at them, they often go much harder towards you. It would make more sense if you could auto-block mentions that contain keywords, almost like a spam filter. Basically filter bubbles or groups/channels, with the ability to see unfiltered mentions. I really do not think this solves the problem, as we saw with Reddit, 4Chan, 8Chan, (or basically any forum that has operated since the early 2000s) etc.
When Reddit started mass banning people and subreddits it saw a huge uptick of "shitposts," eventually a lot of those people formed "The_Donald" and now they basically control most of the front page, and have for months. Banning in many instances can give the banned users a much louder voice, especially if they have any sort of movement or following behind them. I think anyone with experience in online forums dating back to the early 2000s knows this to be true. Forum "fallouts" happen often, and usually occur after a significant ban or power grab...it often ends up killing the platform or community. I don't think social media platforms are any different.
I fear unless Jack and many others are removed from the company, it will become like a Yahoo, with core assets that are marked as virtually worthless and no one willing to buy and catch the falling knife.