Meaningless until they enforce this with their star contributors. Otherwise it's just further enforcing a set of rules for stars and another for everyone else.
The bans don't appear to be copied from one instance to another by the software, if that's what you're asking.
What the previous poster was likely referring to is the 5-10¹ instances that are banned by most other instances with the reason "allows controversial content" or "Free speech zone"².
¹: the number banned varies from instance to instance, but it tends to be the same ones.
²: this one was used by an "anarchist" instance that appears to have more rules than most other instances.
No, it's instance by instance. You will see some amount of cooperation, but it's not enforced by any means just a cultural norm created by the twitter refugees to mastodon. GnuSocial has a bit of a libertarian bent, Mastodon instances have a bit of a leftist bent, and of course there's the instances which are both, so it's not really a binary but rather a spectrum. Yes Libertarian and left surprisingly to many are not mutually exclusive.
You can call it freedom, others call it chaos. The important thing is that you have a choice. Some servers are judicious with who they federate with, others are very open, and I think it's good that you can choose.
"Content that glorifies violence or the perpetrators of a violent act. This includes celebrating any violent act in a manner that may inspire others to replicate it"
Does this apply to videos of NFL tackles? Videos of NFL tackles glorify violence and glorify the tackler (the perpetrator of a violent act).
You mean it's not violence to hit somebody with your body so hard they fall to the ground and can result in bone and ligament injuries, or even brain injuries with permanent neurological issues?
You absolutely can, in a boxing ring for example. It's not unconstrained violence if it takes place within a framework of rules - i.e. it's a sport. NFL tackles being the same thing.
A Twitter feed showing _only_ illegal violent NFL tackles? Well, that might just get banned now.
You said "unconstrained", but that's not what this is about. I agree that Twitter has just entered a completely unwinnable situation, and they made a mistake because nothing they do will be balanced by everyone's definition. I'm saying the "it's not violence if it's consensual" point is ridiculous and wrong. Additionally, and perhaps obviously, I was talking about a duel, not a sport [0].
Well we're sort of violently agreeing, albeit obliquely. I owe you a response; you got unfairly downvoted for what was obvious sarcasm and I think my initial response cast your comment in a bad light.
> "it's not violence if it's consensual" point is ridiculous and wrong.
Exactly - provided that it's done outside the boundaries of some sport. But I think an actual lawyer would need to say what that means: could you and I, for example, create a new sport called "Modern Dueling" and construct a set of rules for it which permits us to fight to the death in a seemingly regulated fashion? Almost certainly not: no reasonable person would consent to be bound by those rules. Yet people do die in MMA, for example, and charges are not bought. It's part of the accepted risk of the sport which is regulated and refereed to prevent lasting harm to participants.
Would two knuckleheads who decided to dress up in NFL gear and run full tilt at each other in a parking lot face charges? What if one of them died? I'd guess yes. Again, I agree with you.
I doubt that sports glorify violence in the relevant sense. In particular, I doubt that people who get excited about the NFL or MMA or whatever are inspired to go out and hurt people in real life.
Didn't this argument get pulled out a lot over a decade ago? I remember none of the studies backing up the notion that watching violent entertainment made someone go out and commit violence although there was evidence of increased heart rate. If I recall correctly the lawyer who was trying to get laws changed in Florida got disbarred for doing things like disseminating all this false information
Trump's the cause of half of their readers at this point. They're not getting rid of that, just the uglier (and less likely to bring in advertiser dollars) parts of their userbase. (Note: I have no data to back this up).
Specifically, there's a this policy does not apply to military or government entities loophole to these new rules, which many believe to be a workaround for these rules not applying to Trump.
That only applies to a subset of the rules, the ”Accounts that affiliate with organizations that use or promote violence against civilians to further their causes” part. (And seems to mean that merrely supporting an existing government or military isn't prohibited conduct, even though governments and their militaries sre groups that do, routinely, use violence and the implicit and explicit threat of violence as core operational methods, including against civilians.)
It does not (as stated) apply to the “Content that glorifies violence or the perpetrators of a violent act.”
Nor does it apply to the preexisting hateful conduct policy, “You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease. ”
Of course, they have been inconsistent in enforcing the existing policy and given certain high-profile Twitter users a pass on it without an explicit exception, so one would expect that to continue with the new policies even where no explicit exception applies.
Yeah, this is absolute doublespeak. Twitter's not 'enforcing' anything, and as others have pointed out, they are actually making the situation worse. Now it's clear that even Twitter says if you're rich and famous you can be abusive without the same consequences as someone who is not wealthy. Ridiculous.
Nobody has ever held Trump accountable for anything. Hilariously, Twitter holds a lot of power over Trump due to controlling his popular account. They could hold him accountable. They choose not to. Insane.
> Nobody has ever held Trump accountable for anything. Hilariously, Twitter holds a lot of power over Trump due to controlling his popular account. They could hold him accountable. They choose not to. Insane.
Trump is the elected president of USA, one of the most important country on Earth. The fact that you suggest a private company should police his speak is insane to me.
Sure, Twitter is currently a private company. However, it's also a major forum used in the expression of speech in our country. At what point is a public website considered a public forum?
If we have a constitutional right to free speech, and the majority of Americans use a certain website for speech, why shouldn't their constitutional rights extend onto that site?
> why shouldn't their constitutional rights extend onto that site?
Because their involvement with Twitter is at will, because Twitter is a private institution, and because privacy is scared to our freedom. But mostly perhaps because twitter has not yet been designated a common carrier by the government, which many people are suggesting. I don’t really see twitter as a good fit for that, but then again, I’m not a legal scholar or lawmaker.
To those downvoting me, do you think CNN, BBC and all major news outlets should only report what Trump does, but never actually show a video of him speak to deny him a platform?
Twitter is not journalism. And as you yourself have pointed out, Trump is one of the most powerful people on earth—meaning he has at his disposal more platforms than any of us can even dream of. Twitter can no more "police his speech" than I can police all of Facebook.
What Twitter can do is decide they don't want Trump to be an active member of their community. That is not just within their legal rights; it's well within their moral rights too.
Should twitter also ban the accounts of the president of Russia and the president of China, because of their support of policies which violate human rights? (LGBT, Tibet, democracy, the list is long, pick your favorite).
What about the account of Barack Obama, who supported extra-judicial drone killings of US citizens?
You're conflating a lot here. People think Trump should be banned from Twitter because of the inflammatory content of his tweets, not because of objectionable things he does elsewhere. Unless Barack Obama made a bunch of tweets exhorting drone strikes that I'm unaware of, the comparison you're suggesting doesn't go through.
Twitter isn't news, it's social media. I'm perfectly okay with private organizations policing their own content, especially when hosting that content has costs.
If the President (any of them) posted here at HN, and starting saying things against the site and community rules, then I would 100% hope that the moderators would "police his speak".
The President is a person, not a god. If they want to use a private platform to speak, then they have to accept that platform's rules, just like anyone else. If they don't like that platform's policy, then they can use any other platform in the world.
If Donald Trump joined a site I was in charge of and broke the rules, I'd damn well police 'his speak'. A good community manager needs to be willing to slam the hammer down on anyone who breaks the rules, regardless of whether they're a pariah within the community scraping by with nothing in real life or a government figure, celebrity or billionaire.
The fact Twitter (and a lot of other companies running community/social media sites nowadays) don't seem to have the guts to do this shows how bad they are at enforcing their own 'guidelines'.
But yeah, if Trump joined a service I was in charge of and broke the rules, he'd get punished like any other user would for doing the same thing.
Of course not. He is welcome to issue a press release and even post in on his own website - it is just that nobody reads is there, so he has to post on Twitter.
Fun aside, as being forced to house soldiers on your property is enumerated as forbidden, and that the president is the commander in chief, does that mean Twitter could kick him out based on that?
I think Twitter holds exactly zero power over Trump which is why they won't do anything about him even though they would certainly love to.
He is bringing them traffic and giving them more legitimacy than they have ever had before.
If they banned him he would just switch to another social network and spend the next year telling his supporters to boycott them and then find some creative ways to shaft them through the regulatory state.
Look at the situation with CNN and the ATT/Time Warner merger. Twitter is a very small fish compared to them.
That is interesting, as it reinforces the power of incumbency. If you’re the president you can say whatever you like, but if you’re a presidential challenger you have to play by the rules.
That ad was rejected because of a line that was linked libelously untruthful. In the article you linked it says that Twitter would run the ad with the offending line edited out.
I believe that particular decision was probably somewhat about disagreeing with her politics, but moreso about stopping outright lies ("fake news") from propagating on their platform when they could stop it.
You're talking about the "sale of baby body parts", right?
Scandalous? Yes. Libelous? The NY Times described the practice:
> Companies that obtain [fetal] tissue from clinics and sell it to laboratories exist in a gray zone, legally. Federal law says they cannot profit from the tissue itself, but the law does not specify how much they can charge for processing and shipping.
> ...
> Many [labs] buy the tissue from companies that act as middlemen. Those companies pay small fees, usually $100 or less a specimen, to abortion providers like Planned Parenthood, who say they charge only what they need to cover their expenses. The companies then process the tissue and sell it to researchers for higher prices that reflect the processing.
> The fees, which can run to thousands of dollars for a tiny vial of cells, do not break the law, according to Arthur Caplan, the director of the division of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center.
> “It appears to be legal, no matter how much you charge,” Dr. Caplan said, adding that there appears to be little or no oversight of the processing fees. “It’s a very gray and musty area as to what you can charge.”
Regardless of whether the claims in the video are true or 100% false, Twitter is willing to silence speech from a political candidate under (at the very least) these circumstances.
They refused to run a misleading (at best) ad campaign. I would ask you, do you consider that Breitbart or Fox News should be obligated to run ads for Bernie Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren? Or should they be allowed to reject ads based on content that the ownership disagrees with?
Slippery slope. How many rappers will get banned for promoting violence through their music? Guns, violence and misogyny are part and parcel of rap music these days.
>We consider hateful imagery to be logos, symbols, or images whose purpose is to promote hostility and malice against others based on their race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin.
Let the endless game of whack-a-mole over what is or isn't a dogwhistle commence, I guess.
If conservatives and the right wing are so worried about Nazi bans impacting them, they should perhaps stop being so much like Nazis as to make distinguishing between the two so difficult.
This discussion, and the replies to your comment, reminds me of this quote by Jean-Paul Sarte, which very much applies to the rebranded "alt-right" today:
> Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
you know what, just kick me off. frankly this site has taken on most of the awful qualities of twitter. your guidelines are designed to coerce people into writing pablum and i've decided i don't want to reduce myself any further. enjoy your echo chamber.
I've gone through and reported a number of accounts that seem to violate this policy after the announcement and made note of the usernames and if they were a left wing or right wing organization. I'm curious to see if this will be enforced equally.
Many will report antifa accounts. It will be a shitfest whatever Twitter does: ban - they are pro fascists and can't distinguish between "good" violence versus "bad" violence, no ban - they have double standards for left versus right.
I agree, but our take on this is an incredibly unpopular opinion. The public genuinely loves violence, as long as it's directed against other bad people.
This post is a good example of why spacing is important. Everything after the colon should've been on multiple lines, to separate "ban" and "no ban".
You're being downvoted because people think you're pro-antifa, which is sort of sad. I had to undown your post because it was too difficult to parse initially. Thankfully, your other posts in this topic showed that my parsing was incorrect.
I don't think it's quite equal as there is a clause about protected groups. So I imagine that some abuse can be allowed if the target is not protected. Edits, worth pointing out that the link to the policy in depth adds an "or" to the clause in a less ambiguous way
I'm not sure what a protected group is, whether there's a list somewhere, of it's all relative (who holds more 'power' is less protected)?
I hope Twitter realizes that this kind of skewed enforcement will just amplify the current cultural struggles and strengthen the compartmentalization between the political left and right.
Notable organizations in the list that I noticed:
Anti-Defamation League - The group that decided pepe the frog was a hate symbol
Muslim Advocates, World Jewish Congress - This group doesn't irritate me so much, except there are no advocacy groups for Christians.
National Network to End Domestic Violence - Specifies that they focus on ending female domestic violence only.
Feminist Frequency - Given how few people identify as feminists, I'm surprised this one is here.
There are probably more sketchy ones that I don't know.
> Accounts that affiliate with organizations that use or promote violence against civilians
> Content that glorifies violence or the perpetrators of a violent act.
* "Support our troops"
* "Punch a Nazi"
* Basically any enthusiastic history account.
* Mall ninjas.
* Any action movie/tv property.
* Star Wars.
* UFC
It seems almost puritan to try and deny humanity's love of violence.
> If an account’s profile information includes a violent threat or multiple slurs, epithets, racist or sexist tropes, incites fear, or reduces someone to less than human, it will be permanently suspended.
* A little confused about the 'multiple' requirement. So long as you only hate one thing your good?
* Racist or sexist tropes is a bit hard to pin down. /r/bpt is full of examples of 'racist' tropes that are self-deprecating. I'm not the best at words but they probably want an exception for "laughing with you, not at you."
> intimidates, or uses fear to silence another person’s voice
I can't wait for this to not be applied against people who use public shaming as a silencing tactic.
Also, there's a bit on irony that in that policy is itself a silencing tactic. This is going to cause people afraid of being banned to self-censor because a statement is politically unpopular.
You should read the actual post, not just the comments.
> This policy does not apply to military or government entities and we will consider exceptions for groups that are currently engaging in (or have engaged in) peaceful resolution.
The Glorification of Violence policy says that acts of war, military attacks, state sanctioned executions, and natural disasters are not covered ... UNLESS ... "protected categories have been the primary targets or victims."
The funny thing is that I can't find their definition of "protected category" anywhere, which takes the Orwellian irony of the whole thing to the next level.
If I'm a member of a visibly protected minority group (Black Muslim) and I tweet "Death to Zionist Sodomites occupying Holy Jerusalem" would I be suspended? Asking for a friend.
Probably, as you are violating one of Twitter's partner organizations on the Trust and Safety Council, the ADL, whose mission is to eliminate anti-semitism.
>Any account that abuses or threatens others through their profile information, including their username, display name, or profile bio. If an account’s profile information includes a violent threat or multiple slurs, epithets, racist or sexist tropes, incites fear, or reduces someone to less than human, it will be permanently suspended. We plan to develop internal tools to help us identify violating accounts to supplement user reports.
How can they possibly enforce this hypocritical bullshit while our president violates these policies on a daily basis? Ham handed nonsense.
There's nothing wrong with Twitter operating a highly moderated platform. Hacker News is a successful example.
In both cases though, it's a huge problem that there aren't alternatives that do off truly uncensored speech. At the very least, there needs to be a force that checks these organizations when they step over the line.
It's essentially an example of a benevolent dictator model.
Right now the people moderating are doing a great and largely unbiased job, but if you try to scale, you'll bring in new people, and gradually the quality of those moderators will vary with the larger group.
Reddit's sub-reddit moderator system is just one example of how to scale moderation to millions of users. If a moderator gets out of hand, reddit admins step in or users move to a new subreddit.
There are a virtually unlimited number of systems like this one could create and make work.
Hacker News scaled from hundreds of users to hundreds of thousands of users and is still very high quality. Worse in some ways and better in others. Reddit scaled to tens of millions.
Just because Twitter is run by people that can't scale it doesn't mean it's not possible to scale it.
This is arguable. Our country is changing massively, and because of the network effect[1], social media platforms condense to only a few winners, currently mostly Facebook and Twitter I believe. This oligopoly[2] means that a handful of sites basically run what is considered the internet for most people.
In America, we have a constitutional right to free speech. If in our country, most people speak solely on one of these sites, then why shouldn't our constitutional rights extend onto them?
It is not arguable, it is an unequivocal fact that use of twitter is not necessary.
> that a handful of sites basically run what is considered the internet for most people.
That is the result of individual choices made by those people. That's like lamenting that a handful of musicians basically produce what is considered music for most people... So what?
That's how authoritarianism is and will be implemented in the US: by using the excuse that because a corporation is doing it, then it's not bound by the constitution. "Twitter is a private entity, so they don't have to follow the first amendment." But when the government has privatized and outsourced everything to corporations, then the corporations control the narrative, and censorship becomes de facto instead of by law. Corporations are a workaround to get around constitutional limitations.
If you don't like how a corporations handles speech you don't need to use their services. The social media corporations are not being controlled at this point by the government and these issues of free speech are being implemented not because of the will of the government but because they are wanted by the consumers (even if it doesn't seem that way here). Consumers should be able to use the services they want and they want services without these types of speech
> If you don't like how a corporations handles speech you don't need to use their services.
And what are the alternative services that these people should use? Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. simply don't have any alternatives that are widely used or credible.
This is one of the biggest issues the internet has in general, at least where freedom of speech is concerned. There is no such thing as public property online, and even with alternatives technically existing, this makes it all too easy to de facto censor speech by denying someone an audience.
Indeed, I think a lot of people miss that the nature of public property and governments not being able to censor free speech did basically guarantee people an audience in the olden days. Did you have a message you wanted people to hear? Protest in a heavily trafficked area (like a town centre), and you had an audience of thousands or even millions, regardless of whether they wanted to hear what you had to say or not.
Imagine how much less useful political movements would be if corporations owned everything in the real world and the people protesting had to do so in their own homes/some private property away from the public. That's the situation these social media sites have set up.
But hey, I guess it's not a new thing, nor an issue exclusive to the internet. In some places, a shopping mall or other corporate property might be the 'heart of the local community', and like with Twitter and Facebook, they could ban those they don't like and de facto censor their speech too.
I want to condemn this as too broad reaching, and as hard-to-justify censorship.
Then again, I also don't want to keep seeing things like death threats, bullying, and general hate-laden vitriol. Seriously, look up some of the tweets aimed at August Ames and tell me that's OK in any forum.
Ultimately, I have to fall on the side of moderation in this case. A free-for-all forum has been tried, and it has failed us.
I wish companies would grow some character and tell those they don't want on their platform "Hey we don't like you, get the fuck out". Instead they always resort to incredibly weaselly lawyer-speak statements like "Our trust and safety initiative has concluded that these users have violated our content and user behavior acceptability inclusiveness policies on several occasions". Arbitrary enforcement of rules always sounds like bullshit no matter how you phrase it. Why not just say what you mean?
This is all BS. Twitter has to prove they will enforce their policies, which means banning Trump. Twitter doesn’t have the guts to do that. Yellow-bellies
> this policy does not apply to military or government entities
One rule for them, another rule for us. This sort of thing is how Trump was able to paint "the media" as being full of hypocrites, liars and crooks.
Edited to add: not a Trump supporter myself, by any stretch of the imagination. But this is exactly the sort of thing demagogues like to point to as examples of bias and unfairness. Although Trump himself might not, in this case, as he seems to be one of the beneficiaries.
138 comments
[ 71.9 ms ] story [ 1705 ms ] threadFind a good GNU Social site, and bask in the freedom. it feels like Twitter when it first started.
If you don't like the rules of the red team (Mastodon) you can check out the blue team (GNU Social) or start your own team (or join the Japanese team)
What the previous poster was likely referring to is the 5-10¹ instances that are banned by most other instances with the reason "allows controversial content" or "Free speech zone"².
¹: the number banned varies from instance to instance, but it tends to be the same ones.
²: this one was used by an "anarchist" instance that appears to have more rules than most other instances.
Shared lists:
https://github.com/tootcafe/blocked-instances
https://github.com/MastodonBlocklist/blocklist
https://github.com/ticki/mastodon-blacklist
and others
Does this apply to videos of NFL tackles? Videos of NFL tackles glorify violence and glorify the tackler (the perpetrator of a violent act).
(E.g: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWfmFLYxcQw )
A Twitter feed showing _only_ illegal violent NFL tackles? Well, that might just get banned now.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duel
> "it's not violence if it's consensual" point is ridiculous and wrong.
Exactly - provided that it's done outside the boundaries of some sport. But I think an actual lawyer would need to say what that means: could you and I, for example, create a new sport called "Modern Dueling" and construct a set of rules for it which permits us to fight to the death in a seemingly regulated fashion? Almost certainly not: no reasonable person would consent to be bound by those rules. Yet people do die in MMA, for example, and charges are not bought. It's part of the accepted risk of the sport which is regulated and refereed to prevent lasting harm to participants.
Would two knuckleheads who decided to dress up in NFL gear and run full tilt at each other in a parking lot face charges? What if one of them died? I'd guess yes. Again, I agree with you.
What about rap music and culture in general? So much glorification of violence.
I'm looking forward what they think of communist symbols, or is the rule about symbols purely swastika and symbols the 4chans stupid trolls use.
It does not (as stated) apply to the “Content that glorifies violence or the perpetrators of a violent act.”
Nor does it apply to the preexisting hateful conduct policy, “You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease. ”
Of course, they have been inconsistent in enforcing the existing policy and given certain high-profile Twitter users a pass on it without an explicit exception, so one would expect that to continue with the new policies even where no explicit exception applies.
Nobody has ever held Trump accountable for anything. Hilariously, Twitter holds a lot of power over Trump due to controlling his popular account. They could hold him accountable. They choose not to. Insane.
Trump is the elected president of USA, one of the most important country on Earth. The fact that you suggest a private company should police his speak is insane to me.
Still, a private company can do whatever it wants.
Fact is, regardless, Twitter will never censor Trump or it’ll be the end of Twitter.
But still, it’s a private company that’s not FCC regulated (yet).
If we have a constitutional right to free speech, and the majority of Americans use a certain website for speech, why shouldn't their constitutional rights extend onto that site?
Because their involvement with Twitter is at will, because Twitter is a private institution, and because privacy is scared to our freedom. But mostly perhaps because twitter has not yet been designated a common carrier by the government, which many people are suggesting. I don’t really see twitter as a good fit for that, but then again, I’m not a legal scholar or lawmaker.
What Twitter can do is decide they don't want Trump to be an active member of their community. That is not just within their legal rights; it's well within their moral rights too.
What about the account of Barack Obama, who supported extra-judicial drone killings of US citizens?
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/14/13577464/...
The President is a person, not a god. If they want to use a private platform to speak, then they have to accept that platform's rules, just like anyone else. If they don't like that platform's policy, then they can use any other platform in the world.
A private company cannot and should not police the President’s speech.
However, it can and should (insofar as it does for other users) police the President’s use of that company’s platform for speech.
The alternative is systematically favoring the government against opponents in a way which makes Twitter a de facto government propaganda arm.
The fact Twitter (and a lot of other companies running community/social media sites nowadays) don't seem to have the guts to do this shows how bad they are at enforcing their own 'guidelines'.
But yeah, if Trump joined a service I was in charge of and broke the rules, he'd get punished like any other user would for doing the same thing.
Fun aside, as being forced to house soldiers on your property is enumerated as forbidden, and that the president is the commander in chief, does that mean Twitter could kick him out based on that?
If you want to take it literally, USA is not Trump's property.
He is bringing them traffic and giving them more legitimacy than they have ever had before.
If they banned him he would just switch to another social network and spend the next year telling his supporters to boycott them and then find some creative ways to shaft them through the regulatory state.
Look at the situation with CNN and the ATT/Time Warner merger. Twitter is a very small fish compared to them.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/10/twitter-bans-bl...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule
I believe that particular decision was probably somewhat about disagreeing with her politics, but moreso about stopping outright lies ("fake news") from propagating on their platform when they could stop it.
Scandalous? Yes. Libelous? The NY Times described the practice:
> Companies that obtain [fetal] tissue from clinics and sell it to laboratories exist in a gray zone, legally. Federal law says they cannot profit from the tissue itself, but the law does not specify how much they can charge for processing and shipping.
> ...
> Many [labs] buy the tissue from companies that act as middlemen. Those companies pay small fees, usually $100 or less a specimen, to abortion providers like Planned Parenthood, who say they charge only what they need to cover their expenses. The companies then process the tissue and sell it to researchers for higher prices that reflect the processing.
> The fees, which can run to thousands of dollars for a tiny vial of cells, do not break the law, according to Arthur Caplan, the director of the division of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center.
> “It appears to be legal, no matter how much you charge,” Dr. Caplan said, adding that there appears to be little or no oversight of the processing fees. “It’s a very gray and musty area as to what you can charge.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/28/health/fetal-tissue-from-...
I thought that was Hip-Hop
Let the endless game of whack-a-mole over what is or isn't a dogwhistle commence, I guess.
Do you think twitter should ban antifa accounts because they are affiliated with an org which promotes violence against individuals?
> Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You're being downvoted because people think you're pro-antifa, which is sort of sad. I had to undown your post because it was too difficult to parse initially. Thankfully, your other posts in this topic showed that my parsing was incorrect.
I'm not sure what a protected group is, whether there's a list somewhere, of it's all relative (who holds more 'power' is less protected)?
https://about.twitter.com/en_us/safety/safety-partners.html
Notable organizations in the list that I noticed:
Anti-Defamation League - The group that decided pepe the frog was a hate symbol
Muslim Advocates, World Jewish Congress - This group doesn't irritate me so much, except there are no advocacy groups for Christians.
National Network to End Domestic Violence - Specifies that they focus on ending female domestic violence only.
Feminist Frequency - Given how few people identify as feminists, I'm surprised this one is here.
There are probably more sketchy ones that I don't know.
I'd love to hear them. Would probably make a great blog post in itself
> Accounts that affiliate with organizations that use or promote violence against civilians
> Content that glorifies violence or the perpetrators of a violent act.
* "Support our troops"
* "Punch a Nazi"
* Basically any enthusiastic history account.
* Mall ninjas.
* Any action movie/tv property.
* Star Wars.
* UFC
It seems almost puritan to try and deny humanity's love of violence.
> If an account’s profile information includes a violent threat or multiple slurs, epithets, racist or sexist tropes, incites fear, or reduces someone to less than human, it will be permanently suspended.
* A little confused about the 'multiple' requirement. So long as you only hate one thing your good?
* Racist or sexist tropes is a bit hard to pin down. /r/bpt is full of examples of 'racist' tropes that are self-deprecating. I'm not the best at words but they probably want an exception for "laughing with you, not at you."
> intimidates, or uses fear to silence another person’s voice
I can't wait for this to not be applied against people who use public shaming as a silencing tactic.
Also, there's a bit on irony that in that policy is itself a silencing tactic. This is going to cause people afraid of being banned to self-censor because a statement is politically unpopular.
So, every US federal agency's, and every local police force's twitter accounts will be shut down?
> This policy does not apply to military or government entities and we will consider exceptions for groups that are currently engaging in (or have engaged in) peaceful resolution.
The Glorification of Violence policy says that acts of war, military attacks, state sanctioned executions, and natural disasters are not covered ... UNLESS ... "protected categories have been the primary targets or victims."
The funny thing is that I can't find their definition of "protected category" anywhere, which takes the Orwellian irony of the whole thing to the next level.
If I'm a member of a visibly protected minority group (Black Muslim) and I tweet "Death to Zionist Sodomites occupying Holy Jerusalem" would I be suspended? Asking for a friend.
You can view Twitter's safety partners here to learn which groups have advisory over what counts as 'hate speech' : https://about.twitter.com/en_us/safety/safety-partners.html
How can they possibly enforce this hypocritical bullshit while our president violates these policies on a daily basis? Ham handed nonsense.
In both cases though, it's a huge problem that there aren't alternatives that do off truly uncensored speech. At the very least, there needs to be a force that checks these organizations when they step over the line.
It's essentially an example of a benevolent dictator model.
Right now the people moderating are doing a great and largely unbiased job, but if you try to scale, you'll bring in new people, and gradually the quality of those moderators will vary with the larger group.
Reddit's sub-reddit moderator system is just one example of how to scale moderation to millions of users. If a moderator gets out of hand, reddit admins step in or users move to a new subreddit.
There are a virtually unlimited number of systems like this one could create and make work.
Hacker News scaled from hundreds of users to hundreds of thousands of users and is still very high quality. Worse in some ways and better in others. Reddit scaled to tens of millions.
Just because Twitter is run by people that can't scale it doesn't mean it's not possible to scale it.
Why? Consumers are not paying twitter for a product or service and use of twitter is not a necessity.
This is arguable. Our country is changing massively, and because of the network effect[1], social media platforms condense to only a few winners, currently mostly Facebook and Twitter I believe. This oligopoly[2] means that a handful of sites basically run what is considered the internet for most people.
In America, we have a constitutional right to free speech. If in our country, most people speak solely on one of these sites, then why shouldn't our constitutional rights extend onto them?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly
> that a handful of sites basically run what is considered the internet for most people.
That is the result of individual choices made by those people. That's like lamenting that a handful of musicians basically produce what is considered music for most people... So what?
And what are the alternative services that these people should use? Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. simply don't have any alternatives that are widely used or credible.
Indeed, I think a lot of people miss that the nature of public property and governments not being able to censor free speech did basically guarantee people an audience in the olden days. Did you have a message you wanted people to hear? Protest in a heavily trafficked area (like a town centre), and you had an audience of thousands or even millions, regardless of whether they wanted to hear what you had to say or not.
Imagine how much less useful political movements would be if corporations owned everything in the real world and the people protesting had to do so in their own homes/some private property away from the public. That's the situation these social media sites have set up.
But hey, I guess it's not a new thing, nor an issue exclusive to the internet. In some places, a shopping mall or other corporate property might be the 'heart of the local community', and like with Twitter and Facebook, they could ban those they don't like and de facto censor their speech too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[1]: http://blogs.faz.net/deus/2017/12/18/erdogans-mob-und-gruene... (in German)
[2]: https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...
Then again, I also don't want to keep seeing things like death threats, bullying, and general hate-laden vitriol. Seriously, look up some of the tweets aimed at August Ames and tell me that's OK in any forum.
Ultimately, I have to fall on the side of moderation in this case. A free-for-all forum has been tried, and it has failed us.
One rule for them, another rule for us. This sort of thing is how Trump was able to paint "the media" as being full of hypocrites, liars and crooks.
Edited to add: not a Trump supporter myself, by any stretch of the imagination. But this is exactly the sort of thing demagogues like to point to as examples of bias and unfairness. Although Trump himself might not, in this case, as he seems to be one of the beneficiaries.
that's an interesting angle.