This is going to be quite spectacularly broken here in the UK.
It is entirely legal to publish a photo of, say, someone walking down the street without their consent.
It is _not_ legal to do so in such a way that implies endorsement. So you could publish a photo of "people busy shopping in Oxford Street" without getting signed model release from everyone depicted in the photo. But you couldn't publish the same photo and claim "these are 500 happy people who've just bought the new ZogPhone at the Zog Store on Oxford Street!".
That's fine. Typically, every summer, UK newspapers will print a front-cover photo of a crowded beach with a headline about "here's lots of people enjoying the sunshine". (We're British, we love talking about the weather.) And that's the case throughout UK media. I used to edit the best-selling magazine about inland boating. Every month, our cover would be a photo of someone happily steering their boat on a river or canal. We didn't get model release: we didn't need to under UK law.
Those front covers can no longer be tweeted. Twitter now says:
> Under our private information policy, you can’t share the following types of private information or media, without the permission of the person who it belongs to:
> NEW: media of private individuals without the permission of the person(s) depicted.
Is Twitter really going to take down the front page of the Guardian or the Financial Times because they haven't got signed model release for everyone in that crowd photo? I'm not convinced this has been thought through.
"We recognize that there are instances where account holders may share images or videos of private individuals [...], or as part of a newsworthy event due to public interest value, and this might outweigh the safety risks to a person."
And if that wasn't enough, there's also:
"For instance, we would take into consideration whether the image is publicly available and/or is being covered by mainstream/traditional media (newspapers, TV channels, online news sites)"
Which seems to explicitly cover "newspaper front pages" as an exception.
This seems to be explicitly covered in the post, here:
> We will always try to assess the context in which the content is shared and, in such cases, we may allow the images or videos to remain on the service. For instance, we would take into consideration whether the image is publicly available and/or is being covered by mainstream/traditional media (newspapers, TV channels, online news sites), or if a particular image and the accompanying tweet text adds value to the public discourse, is being shared in public interest, or is relevant to the community.
this is how it works in the US too, if you’re in public I can take a photo of you and use it in a lot of ways, I could print a copy and hand it to everyone on earth, but if it’s commercial you will need a signed release form
Consent is implicitly given when you are in public. That's what "public" means, legally. It's a place where there is no expectation of privacy, which by moving into willingly, you are giving up any expectations of privacy willingly. By conducting yourself in public, you are consenting to the loss of privacy.
Twitter should be fine if they're operating under local definitions of legal consent. If they're going to roll their own, things could get legally ugly - paparazzi could have legitimate claims of discrimination and financial damages.
This isn't true everywhere though. You have the right to control over your likeness being posted where I live, people can't just post your face on the internet no matter where you are, public or not.
Well this sounds like a good way to perhaps put a damper on all the cancelling
> We will always try to assess the context in which the content is shared and, in such cases, we may allow the images or videos to remain on the service. For instance, we would take into consideration whether the image is publicly available and/or is being covered by mainstream/traditional media (newspapers, TV channels, online news sites), or if a particular image and the accompanying tweet text adds value to the public discourse, is being shared in public interest, or is relevant to the community.
Oh, never mind. It's now only allowed in situations of cancelling people.
Accounts on Twitter are not provably "people" and even the ones that are demonstrably a given personal identity are not necessarily or provably run and operated by that identity, exclusively. Thus, claiming any type of "canceling" of a "voice" or "identity" is a logical fallacy, given there is no proof of identity occurring on Twitter in any meaningful way.
This logic comes about because of bad assumptions about what a platform is, how it works at scale and how personal rights and liberties are mapped to Internet services, especially those of government. Promoting the idea of "cancel culture" among the population is definitely a thing and easily digested and accepted as a truth, even thought it's really not.
I am not sure how any of your comment disproved cancel culture
Cancel Culture is a form of targeted harassment, generally originating online but not exclusive to that domain, where a group of individuals take offense to comments, opinions, jokes or "hot takes" then having become offend proceed either in coordination with others or not to contact the target of their harassment employers, landlords, business associates, family members, schools, etc in an effort to interfere with the relationships (personal or business) they have with the target of the harassment.
It is very much real, it is very much a reality, and it goes beyond simply "boycotts" of a business with a policy one dislikes.
People continuing to deny the existence of cancel culture highlights either an extreme ignorance of the modern world, or a willful disingenuous gaslighting in order to aid and continue to perpetuate cancel culture. I will leave it open to debate which of the 2 you are.
I think of cancel culture as a cultural shift away from the enlightenment culture explemplified by "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Codified with a question of "should you combat bad speech with good speech or with silencing?"
I think they are linked but I would define the cultural shift as something separate, canceling of people is a symptom / result of this cultural shift so they are linked.
However there are other aspects of this shift that fall outside of cancel culture. For example the fact that a platform like twitter can have a CEO that publicly supports the rejection of the 1st amendment is also a symptom of this cultural shift, a few decades ago that would not have been possible, in fact it likely would have resulted in high level board meetings and a PR disaster in the 80's and 90's if a CEO of a large public company would have stated opposition to free speech.
We has a nation (the US) have lost desire to uphold the cultural principle of free expression, the law has become a needed check on this cultural shift but sadly the law only survives as a check for 2 maybe 3 generations, if we do not do something to shift us back to being a culture that respects free expression the law will fall to the new culture of non-expression or controlled expression and a new dark ages will emerge
The specific concern here is the phenomenon where people post viral videos of others they had a disagreement with in order to try and publicly shame them. I don’t want to insist on calling this “cancel culture” if you don’t like the label, but it’s definitely a real thing and the targets face real off-Twitter consequences.
>I don’t want to insist on calling this “cancel culture”
I mean, you shouldn't call it cancel culture at any point. Depending on the audience, your example could either never be what "cancel culture" means, or be the primary definition. Unless you know that you are addressing one of those audiences alone, then the phrase only creates confusion.
Cancelling seems to refer to two types of actions, deplatforming, and punishing people for saying things you disagree with.
I don't know why deplatforming requires proof of an identity. I think this is you adding to the definition of a word that doesn't follow how everyone uses it.
I am sure this will only be enforced in 1 political direction as well
If you show "private media" of a conservative that is "relevant to the community" but if you should "private media" of a liberal that will be in violation of this new rule I can assure you
Indeed, `Twitter Safety` is explicit about their bias.
`Feeling safe on Twitter is different for everyone` and `The misuse of private media can affect everyone, but can have a disproportionate effect on women, activists, dissidents, and members of minority communities.`
How so? It seems like politicians would certainly be covered by this exception:
> This policy is not applicable to media featuring public figures or individuals when media and accompanying Tweet text are shared in the public interest or add value to public discourse.
I think this is more an attempt at blocking targeted harassment of private individuals.
> media of private individuals without the permission of the person(s) depicted
This is opposition to photography laws in the US and many other countries, that allows the publishing of photographs of private individuals, as long as they can be viewed from a public space.
This will allow them to selectively destroy whoever they want with their technology. Someone like Amy Cooper will turn out to be a public figure--Hunter Biden not so much.
Well, shoot everybody knows who you are now that that drunken tweet of yours from three years ago went viral thanks to a twitter rage mob. So, we reckon that makes you a public figure.
Yeah this is interesting - street photography has historically not involved a lot of consent, and photographers who professionally shoot in public have generally defended their right to do so.
This is an unpopular view but I think that photos of strangers in public are a vital illumination of humanity. You see in people's faces, in the moment, the drama of excitement, love, apathy, boredom, anger - the full range of emotion and what it means to be a human in the world. Actors in movies or staged photos never give us that. They never glow in the way that a person in the street does who is surprised by a friend.
Despite the take that these public photographs are "privacy" violations, I think they should be celebrated. Societally, we should get over ourselves a bit.
> Despite the take that these public photographs are "privacy" violations, I think they should be celebrated
I don't know why your enjoyment of a photo should take priority over the right to privacy of people. In a world where anything could become a meme overnight, I would very much prefer my image to not be tweeted publicly without my consent, specially by people with a large audience.
If the photographer wants to portray those emotions, make the photo and ask later, and delete them if the person doesn't want to have a picture taken of. I understand that for most people the risks will outweigh the benefits.
It's not about "enjoyment". It's about documenting history in a very real and normal way. These are the photos that future historians will study. Would you rather them have a huge black hole because people decided "my privacy rights when I'm in public are more important than everything else", which I honestly see to be a more entitled viewpoint.
I’m not sure “people not yet alive have a right to mundane details of your life” is the less entitled position, tbh. In their defense, they’re not the ones making that argument.
There is absolutely no lack of material of any kind to document this period of history. There will be no huge black hole just because we respect the privacy of people who don’t want to appear in public photos.
Why do you feel it's a violation of your privacy to have a picture of you on the internet on a popular forum? Particularly if the photo or it's caption does not name you, the context in which it was taken, or the date.
I feel like if you carry the argument far enough, then this should extend to satellite imagery of your home. Isn't that an equivalent violation of your privacy? What about traffic cameras and other webcams setup in public places for public consumption online?
If I have an equivalent right to photograph in public, then it's an undue burden on me and a probably an even greater violation of your privacy to chase you and everyone else down and ask for the rights to reproduce it online. I'm not sure this is a feature I want to add to our public spaces.
Because it's my image, and I should be able to exert a reasonable control over it. When someone publishes my image, I lose that control, and in these days that could mean anything, from people ignoring it to people making a meme out of it. And I also I shouldn't have to justify why do I have a right to control my own image.
> I feel like if you carry the argument far enough, then this should extend to satellite imagery of your home. Isn't that an equivalent violation of your privacy?
Yes it is. Luckily published satellite imagery doesn't tend to have enough resolution to actually make out distinguishing details of what would be going on in my backyard, but I'd actually be angry if they did.
> What about traffic cameras and other webcams setup in public places for public consumption online?
Luckily again, those usually don't have enough resolution to make out identifying details.
> If I have an equivalent right to photograph in public,
You don't. Privacy trumps your right to photograph in public. If you feel I'm making a funny face, you don't have the right to make me a photo.
> then it's an undue burden on me and a probably an even greater violation of your privacy to chase you and everyone else down and ask for the rights to reproduce it online
Asking for permission is not a violation of privacy.
> I'm not sure this is a feature I want to add to our public spaces.
The solution is easy: then don't make photos where people are identifiable without their permission. The alternative is you do, and imagine that you post it and someone makes a meme out of someone that appears there. How would you feel about it? Would your opinion change if someone came to you and said "hey, remember that photo you published where I was on it? Well now I'm the laughing stock of half a million people".
This is extremely backwards. You don't need to photograph anyone in public places. Would you be ok with having a photo making a ridiculous face online? Or a photo where it looks like you're going to hit someone? Or a photo ignoring a homeless person? All of those would miss context, of course, but the Internet doesn't need context to do whatever with that pic.
Well, in Spain's it is settled law as you say: you need to ask for consent to distribute images of someone save for a few exceptions, in which "I took a photo of someone in the street" doesn't fit. So it's settled law depending on your country.
I'm inclined to agree with you but the fact that people can now be trivially identified through face recognition in photos changes the considerations here a bit.
This isn’t actually going to be used against most people posting street photographs, just the ones Twitter wants to get rid of for which there isn’t already a tool in the TOS they can selectively apply. Goodthinkful citizens will not be affected.
It seems even more restrictive than that -- the person (or some authority) has to notify Twitter and request its removal. It's focused on preventing doxxing and abuse.
>When we are notified by individuals depicted, or by an authorized representative, that they did not consent to having their private image or video shared, we will remove it. This policy is not applicable to media featuring public figures or individuals when media and accompanying Tweet text are shared in the public interest or add value to public discourse.
That isn't what it says. It says you have to show proof of the consent first.
This makes it super like you can take a photo of anything in public that has random people in the shot
The only portions relevant to this that I see in that blog post are consistent with free-to-post, remove-on-complaint:
>When private information or media has been shared on Twitter, we need a first-person report or a report from an authorized representative in order to make the determination that the image or video has been shared without their permission.
This paragraph wouldn't even make sense if you had to provide proof on upload. Unless this is to say the uploaded proof was counterfeit or something?
>When we are notified by individuals depicted, or by an authorized representative, that they did not consent to having their private image or video shared, we will remove it.
I mean, as I understand it, this policy would only apply if the person in question objected to their picture being taken and disseminated.
And, to be honest, I'm probably OK with that. At the very least I am not convinced by older arguments of "you shouldn't have any expectations of privacy in a public place". I think there is a fundamental difference between other people being able to see you, heck even other people being able to take a picture of you, vs. it automatically being OK for others to disseminate your imagine to literally billions of people, recorded for all time.
>When we are notified by individuals depicted, or by an authorized representative, that they did not consent to having their private image or video shared, we will remove it. This policy is not applicable to media featuring public figures or individuals when media and accompanying Tweet text are shared in the public interest or add value to public discourse.
Imagine a situation where someone punches someone else that is recorded. Millions examples of that on the internet, lols were had, whatever and deleted. Afterward someone makes the claim that it is a hate crime and since twitter isn't the only place where media is stored, do they restore every single instance of the original set of tweets?
What is the dividing line between them? When is something private versus something that is 'to the public interest'
As someone who has been fighting a Sisyphean battle to minimize the Internet footprint/exposure of his photo and other bits of private life, this is a welcome change. So far, in order to keep your face off the internet, you need to 1. Not take pictures of yourself and post them, and 2. Make sure each and every one of your friends know you don't want your photo posted and that they respect your wishes. #2 was a lot easier when everyone in the world didn't have a camera in their pocket at all hours of the day. And, yes, I deliberately ask friends and family to just not post my picture to Social Media, and they constantly forget. With the ubiquity of traffic cameras, business surveillance, Ring door cameras, and so on, it's getting to the point where if you want to keep private, you need to never leave the house, which, sorry, I think is an unreasonable request.
It would be wonderful if I could just generate some perceptual hash of my face, upload that hash to social media sites, and be able to demand they delete (or black out) any instance of my face they find. Yes, this could be abused, but the status quo (no privacy for anyone without exceedingly great OpSec) is worse.
True, but it was also relatively harder for pictures to become famous, and there wasn't massive face recognition systems to use the data in unexpected ways. Also, a lot more people are taking pictures, and though I'm not art-gatekeeping, it's fair to say that at least the motivational context for most photography is different now than it was historically.
We've had people try to take photos of our children without consent while we are at the beach. The people were thinking the kids were doing something cute or that it was funny they were throwing a huge fit.
There does seem to be some difference between being the subject in a photo and happening to be in a being in a photo of a beach sunset.
There have been plenty of time I've seen some cute kids doing something cute. But it feels creepy to take pics of kids you don't know, as the main subject.
On the other hand if im taking photos of something else, while I try not to get random people in the shot, but if I do...
How does Twitter know whether someone has consented or not? They don't. It will start with takedowns due to people claiming that their pic was shown without permission and end with a de facto ban of photos of people. Way it goes.
Are you saying that any means for an individual to have their own image removed would be weaponisation? If so, I disagree.
If you are saying that third-parties will scale up access to Twitter's automation in order to take down virtually anything they wish, well I don't see how the proposed system would be so readily exploited. To issue a take down, you'd need to be in possession of the face.
There is literally no way Twitter will enforce this rule so heavy handedly. Especially since Tumblr, but even without that case study to learn from… a social media platform without human photos is so laughable a concept that I chuckled typing out those words.
I seem to be in something of a minority here but I think this is eminently reasonable.
Almost certainly this will be enforced only following a report. Which means I have a photograph of you which you did not consent to being in and you object to me sharing.
I think in that case it's reasonable to expect me to justify why I should be allowed to share the picture. And I may be able to, but the burden of proof should be on me.
That is fear mongering. Nothing stops you from taking the pictures, nothing stops you from posting the pictures. It only provides a mechanism to allow the unposting of specific reported pictures from twitter. You have to see one heck of a slippery slope to see this policy and jump immediately to "it's impossible to take pictures of public places.'
Accounts are already report bombed off Twitter for tweets that didn't in any way violate the rule they were tagged as violating, and appeals go nowhere. I do not have any trust in Twitter's ability to make this discernment.
Twitter doing a bad job of determining which photos are "in the public interest" and removing photoes that should not be removed still doesn't translate to "you can't take photos of public places" by any measure. At the very worst it just means that people stop posting photos on twitter to avoid one avenue of report bombing.
I have repeatedly argued that we need legal user protections that protect users from large corporations arbitrarily enforcing their rules with no real appeal process or transparency. However, fear mongering with projections that have no basis in reality does not help move us in that direction.
No-one's saying that, those are two bold, unsupported assertions.
Point number 1:
Even if you stretch hard, the closest I can get is 'it wouldn't be permitted to take pictures of public spaces with people in who don't consent to being photographed and then share those on Twitter'.
Point number 2:
It is true that in some countries, you have no (legal) expectation of privacy in a public place. However, it's not universally true. Where I am, for example, in Hungary, actually something very similar to Twitter's new policy is the law[0]).
Although there may be no LEGAL constraint where you live, perhaps you wouldn't want someone standing outside the local reproductive health or women's shelter photographing everyone who goes in and out. I certainly wouldn't.
What I'm saying is that if someone has a photograph of me which I didn't consent to being in, then I think it's reasonable that if I object to them sharing they photo, then they should have the 'burden of proof' that they have a right to share.
I don't think that 'burden of proof' needs to be particularly high, and 'oh, they're just in the background in my photo of the street' or 'I thought it might be interesting that they were snorting cocaine on the main street' is OK.
The problem is that 'public spaces' and 'benefit of privacy' are terms that date back to before the internet.
The trivial difficulty and cost of creating, processing, distributing, and cataloguing data through facial recognition, geolocation, etc. today means it's at least worth considering whether these laws are the best fit for our modern lives, rather than throwing out criticisms as though one specific law is both written in stone and applies everywhere.
This will be enforced selectively to target both journalism Twitter finds inconvenient and political information that doesn't adhere to their politics. I'm glad I moved on from that dumpster fire some time ago.
Good news citizens of San Francisco and Chicago, your looting/shoplifting epidemic is about to vanish completely! Antifa riots? What are those? I mean, if you can't post pics and videos on Twitter, did it even really happen?
The next step is Twitter will have a formal list of approved media outlets (gee I wonder which ones it might be) where if they publish it first, Twitter will allow it. Selective reporting seems to be one of the primary tools for media bias/activism, and this is Twitter figuring out their own way to selectively ban content they don't like instead of the current user generated openness.
It doesn't entirely work until they manage step 3: make Twitter (and Google, Facebook and Amazon) the entirety of the internet. We saw some movements in that direction when Amazon and Apple colluded to remove the Parler Twitter competitor app. They don't (yet) control enough of the internet routing infrastructure to complete their vision, but it's definitely coming.
Twitter fights their users to keep CSAM available, while Parler was pulled down for a handful of posts they claimed they’d have moderated if they discovered them.
Hosting the people who host CSAM while banning the people who actively moderate but missed a few messages shows a clear political bias.
AWS is fine hosting CSAM for Twitter, but Republicans for Parler is just disgusting. Apparently.
> There are so many other cities with more crime and violence but Chicago is the preferred choice when you want to agitate and alarm.
I'm not sure what cities have more crime and violence than Chicago. But if commenting on Chicago is off limits, what cities do people have your blessing to comment on? I would never want to agitate and alarm.
> I'm not sure what cities have more crime and violence than Chicago.
Per capita, Chicago is absolutely not an outlier for these statistics. Is there a particular measurement that you're familiar with that ranks Chicago at the top?
If you rank by total murders Chicago comes in an easy first. Comparing a very large city like Chicago to comparatively smaller cities blurs the numbers when you are talking per capita.
For example St Louis is a small inner city surrounded by numerous suburbs cities that have much lower crime rates. Those low crime suburbs don't get counted into the per capita rate. Chicago is large enough of a city that both the high crime and low crime areas all get counted together.
> If you rank by total murders Chicago comes in an easy first
But ranking by total murders is definitely wrong, isn't it?
You can have criticisms of the per-capita rate, and you can argue that the smaller cities should have their suburbs included. But the alternative of just saying "let's look at the raw numbers independent of population and see which one is better" would be even more absurd.
Just as an example here, there are plenty of reasons to be distrustful of the per-capita comparisons of Covid infection across states, or to argue that they don't capture all of the nuance of what's going on. But nobody would ever seriously argue that those problems mean you should stop paying attention to population size when comparing Covid rates between states. Similarly, it just seems really silly to me to argue that missing suburbs means we should stop controlling for total population in crime data.
If you're responding to me, specifically what bad faith argument did I make? I initially made a moderate (but reasonable) snarky comment towards what I believe to a very bad faith argument by @jf22 where I would posit that he used mind-reading to assign certain motives that do not appear in evidence.
As far as the Google searching goes, I confess to not memorizing the entire corpus of national crime statistics. I should do more objective reading in this regard by looking at official sources like the FBI Criminal statistics. But I looked into the crime stats as per user @Philadelphia's provided Wikipedia link and it appears that Chicago is indeed in the Top 10 range in per-capita murder, if I'm reading that right, and is by far the biggest city in that range, so mentioning it in the context of crime-ridden cities seemed reasonable for that and other factors. But I'm not sure why it wouldn't be reasonable to mention it, why mentioning it would agitate or alarm, or what other cities are appropriate or not appropriate to mention for what reasons.
I'm attempting to be polite and precise in everything I mentioned. If I got any facts wrong, please clarify so I can be further informed. Thank you.
I'm from Chicago. The difference in the amount of crime vs what gets reported on in the Trib and local news is astonishing, and the number of people I know (myself included) who have left Chicago in the last couple years is wild. So, I lived it.
IMO those all provide a very particular, somewhat narrow perspective. I feel I can get a wider sense of what's going on from Twitter. As just one example, mainstream sources were quite blase about the COVID pandemic until very late, while other (it turns out more accurate) perspectives were available on Twitter.
(Edit: Well, w/ the partial exception of HN, of course!)
Twitter is an odd duck. What does it mean to "use" Twitter? If I follow the posts of an actual NYT reporter who is tweeting an event they are at am I using NYT or am I using Twitter? This is different than following what's trending and getting into the muck with other faceless users which is I what I typically ascribe "using" Twitter to mean.
As an aside- a benefit of just not using social media for news is that I miss out on a lot of things that almost always turn out to not be important. There is a higher threshold. I'm not succumbed by some hot issue or crisis for a day that is ultimately meaningless. Coworkers would often ask me my thoughts on an issue and I'd have no clue what they're talking about. It's liberating. Sometimes less is more.
For me, using Twitter means following a bunch of strangers that seem knowledgable about various domains. Obviously, there are a gazillion possible ways to use it. :-) I feel I've learned useful things that I wouldn't know without it, and it's the second-best way I've found, after personal experience, to ascertain the "truth" about the world. (Blogs and substack and forums like HN are similar, but they don't have the same breadth and density.)
Is it a good use of time? Who knows, hard to say. It's interesting, sometimes even addictive.
I do agree that on an emotional level we should be most occupied with living the tangible, real lives in front of us, and not worry too much about history roiling by all around us.
Specifically, Ngo posted a lot of videos of BLM riots, and mugshots of people arrested for said rioting, to show they weren't black and in fact were often teachers, government employees etc. Well the establishment didn't like that at all.
Ngo: "Oregon lawmakers introduced a bill to stop public record access to arrest photographs after I documented who was arrested at the riots last year."
And now Twitter introduces this new policy the day after Jack resigns. Presumably stopping people like Ngo tweeting about arrested people had been a long term desire of the internal faction whose ascent is now complete with the new CEO, so bye bye videos of peaceful protests!
As a San Franciscan, Twitter is the only place I see anyone worried about a looting epidemic. And my peer group is literally "Union Square retail worker," so we're kind of the people everyone keeps telling me are the most freaked out.
Will this drive an increase traffic to things like the fediverse? If it drives people away, is this not good? If hegemonic tech-giants wish to over bureaucratize everything, is the ethical response to decentralize?
A fair amount of people will never leave twitter, and this will only work to continue to keep them disconnected from reality by selectively filtering more information.
Imagine if you take a picture of police doing something wrong in a public place with no legal expectation of privacy, and someone who happens to be in the photo, bystander or not, objects to being photographed under this policy.
> This policy is not applicable to media featuring public figures or individuals when media and accompanying Tweet text are shared in the public interest or add value to public discourse.
1. It’s not clear, at least to me, that this applies to police. They’re employed by the public, but I don’t know if I’d associate them with the common colloquial usage of public figures. That could just be me misunderstanding that usage.
2. The parent comment was about other, private individuals in the same photo. Given Twitter’s very spotty track record of inconsistent moderation (regardless of any real or perceived bias), any grey area here will certainly be a target—whether or not a successful one—for abuse of this new rule. I can, for instance, easily imagine it being used in an attempt to suppress images/video of police responses to confrontations between BLM protestors and pick-your-counterprotestors.
3. Moreover, I can imagine fabricated claims of such moderation action being taken, sewing all sorts of disinformation about events—real or likewise fabricated—and information about them that never existed, or existed in a significantly different form.
4. While I’m generally more in favor [than probably the average HN reader] of privately owned websites being able to moderate their sites as they deem appropriate… this particular example is the first I thought of where this rule as written may have significant, harmful consequences.
This is Twitter we're talking about. Trust me, if you take a picture of police doing something wrong (or even appearing to have done something wrong) Twitter will find a way to make sure the rules don't apply to that picture.
This seems like it aids Police with free speech violating takedown requests. Police want that footage taken off Twitter, the officer only needs to tell Twitter they don't consent. Not that Twitter is a bastion of free speech, but law enforcement can just ask companies to act on their behalf. No violation. And Twitter is shielded from lawsuits.
(IANAL, these are my admittedly simple and probably naïve assumptions)
This seems like a policy change that targets Project Veritas. Not surprising since many of their leaks have been damaging to the political left, which Twitter and its employees (including the old and new CEOs) are politically biased towards.
The exemptions they have set aside will be abused to allow things like leaks of Trump’s tax returns while silencing videos showing CNN’s biased electoral manipulation of viewers:
> This policy is not applicable to media featuring public figures or individuals when media and accompanying Tweet text are shared in the public interest or add value to public discourse.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] thread>NEW: media of private individuals without the permission of the person(s) depicted.
It is entirely legal to publish a photo of, say, someone walking down the street without their consent.
It is _not_ legal to do so in such a way that implies endorsement. So you could publish a photo of "people busy shopping in Oxford Street" without getting signed model release from everyone depicted in the photo. But you couldn't publish the same photo and claim "these are 500 happy people who've just bought the new ZogPhone at the Zog Store on Oxford Street!".
That's fine. Typically, every summer, UK newspapers will print a front-cover photo of a crowded beach with a headline about "here's lots of people enjoying the sunshine". (We're British, we love talking about the weather.) And that's the case throughout UK media. I used to edit the best-selling magazine about inland boating. Every month, our cover would be a photo of someone happily steering their boat on a river or canal. We didn't get model release: we didn't need to under UK law.
Those front covers can no longer be tweeted. Twitter now says:
> Under our private information policy, you can’t share the following types of private information or media, without the permission of the person who it belongs to:
> NEW: media of private individuals without the permission of the person(s) depicted.
Is Twitter really going to take down the front page of the Guardian or the Financial Times because they haven't got signed model release for everyone in that crowd photo? I'm not convinced this has been thought through.
And if that wasn't enough, there's also:
"For instance, we would take into consideration whether the image is publicly available and/or is being covered by mainstream/traditional media (newspapers, TV channels, online news sites)"
Which seems to explicitly cover "newspaper front pages" as an exception.
> We will always try to assess the context in which the content is shared and, in such cases, we may allow the images or videos to remain on the service. For instance, we would take into consideration whether the image is publicly available and/or is being covered by mainstream/traditional media (newspapers, TV channels, online news sites), or if a particular image and the accompanying tweet text adds value to the public discourse, is being shared in public interest, or is relevant to the community.
Twitter should be fine if they're operating under local definitions of legal consent. If they're going to roll their own, things could get legally ugly - paparazzi could have legitimate claims of discrimination and financial damages.
> We will always try to assess the context in which the content is shared and, in such cases, we may allow the images or videos to remain on the service. For instance, we would take into consideration whether the image is publicly available and/or is being covered by mainstream/traditional media (newspapers, TV channels, online news sites), or if a particular image and the accompanying tweet text adds value to the public discourse, is being shared in public interest, or is relevant to the community.
Oh, never mind. It's now only allowed in situations of cancelling people.
This logic comes about because of bad assumptions about what a platform is, how it works at scale and how personal rights and liberties are mapped to Internet services, especially those of government. Promoting the idea of "cancel culture" among the population is definitely a thing and easily digested and accepted as a truth, even thought it's really not.
Cancel Culture is a form of targeted harassment, generally originating online but not exclusive to that domain, where a group of individuals take offense to comments, opinions, jokes or "hot takes" then having become offend proceed either in coordination with others or not to contact the target of their harassment employers, landlords, business associates, family members, schools, etc in an effort to interfere with the relationships (personal or business) they have with the target of the harassment.
It is very much real, it is very much a reality, and it goes beyond simply "boycotts" of a business with a policy one dislikes.
People continuing to deny the existence of cancel culture highlights either an extreme ignorance of the modern world, or a willful disingenuous gaslighting in order to aid and continue to perpetuate cancel culture. I will leave it open to debate which of the 2 you are.
Codified with a question of "should you combat bad speech with good speech or with silencing?"
However there are other aspects of this shift that fall outside of cancel culture. For example the fact that a platform like twitter can have a CEO that publicly supports the rejection of the 1st amendment is also a symptom of this cultural shift, a few decades ago that would not have been possible, in fact it likely would have resulted in high level board meetings and a PR disaster in the 80's and 90's if a CEO of a large public company would have stated opposition to free speech.
We has a nation (the US) have lost desire to uphold the cultural principle of free expression, the law has become a needed check on this cultural shift but sadly the law only survives as a check for 2 maybe 3 generations, if we do not do something to shift us back to being a culture that respects free expression the law will fall to the new culture of non-expression or controlled expression and a new dark ages will emerge
I mean, you shouldn't call it cancel culture at any point. Depending on the audience, your example could either never be what "cancel culture" means, or be the primary definition. Unless you know that you are addressing one of those audiences alone, then the phrase only creates confusion.
I don't know why deplatforming requires proof of an identity. I think this is you adding to the definition of a word that doesn't follow how everyone uses it.
If you show "private media" of a conservative that is "relevant to the community" but if you should "private media" of a liberal that will be in violation of this new rule I can assure you
It is purely a coincidence that "accidental" banning occurs overwhelmingly to people who put forth non-leftist viewpoints!
Similarly, there is no increase in healthy footballers dropping dead on the field. You are simply imagining things.
/s, for the ... slow.
`Feeling safe on Twitter is different for everyone` and `The misuse of private media can affect everyone, but can have a disproportionate effect on women, activists, dissidents, and members of minority communities.`
> This policy is not applicable to media featuring public figures or individuals when media and accompanying Tweet text are shared in the public interest or add value to public discourse.
I think this is more an attempt at blocking targeted harassment of private individuals.
This is opposition to photography laws in the US and many other countries, that allows the publishing of photographs of private individuals, as long as they can be viewed from a public space.
Consider e.g. every photo in https://www.magnumphotos.com/shop/collections/books/rfk-fune... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-J_Day_in_Times_Square -- those folks didn't consent and can't. It's not newsworthy, it's just artistically interesting. Fair enough if Twitter doesn't want to be a platform for it.
> The photograph does not clearly show the face of either person involved, and numerous people have claimed to be the subjects.
Despite the take that these public photographs are "privacy" violations, I think they should be celebrated. Societally, we should get over ourselves a bit.
I don't know why your enjoyment of a photo should take priority over the right to privacy of people. In a world where anything could become a meme overnight, I would very much prefer my image to not be tweeted publicly without my consent, specially by people with a large audience.
If the photographer wants to portray those emotions, make the photo and ask later, and delete them if the person doesn't want to have a picture taken of. I understand that for most people the risks will outweigh the benefits.
I feel like if you carry the argument far enough, then this should extend to satellite imagery of your home. Isn't that an equivalent violation of your privacy? What about traffic cameras and other webcams setup in public places for public consumption online?
If I have an equivalent right to photograph in public, then it's an undue burden on me and a probably an even greater violation of your privacy to chase you and everyone else down and ask for the rights to reproduce it online. I'm not sure this is a feature I want to add to our public spaces.
> I feel like if you carry the argument far enough, then this should extend to satellite imagery of your home. Isn't that an equivalent violation of your privacy?
Yes it is. Luckily published satellite imagery doesn't tend to have enough resolution to actually make out distinguishing details of what would be going on in my backyard, but I'd actually be angry if they did.
> What about traffic cameras and other webcams setup in public places for public consumption online?
Luckily again, those usually don't have enough resolution to make out identifying details.
> If I have an equivalent right to photograph in public,
You don't. Privacy trumps your right to photograph in public. If you feel I'm making a funny face, you don't have the right to make me a photo.
> then it's an undue burden on me and a probably an even greater violation of your privacy to chase you and everyone else down and ask for the rights to reproduce it online
Asking for permission is not a violation of privacy.
> I'm not sure this is a feature I want to add to our public spaces.
The solution is easy: then don't make photos where people are identifiable without their permission. The alternative is you do, and imagine that you post it and someone makes a meme out of someone that appears there. How would you feel about it? Would your opinion change if someone came to you and said "hey, remember that photo you published where I was on it? Well now I'm the laughing stock of half a million people".
Today you do, because it is not a recognized right, just an opinion some people hold.
>When we are notified by individuals depicted, or by an authorized representative, that they did not consent to having their private image or video shared, we will remove it. This policy is not applicable to media featuring public figures or individuals when media and accompanying Tweet text are shared in the public interest or add value to public discourse.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/private-i...
The only portions relevant to this that I see in that blog post are consistent with free-to-post, remove-on-complaint:
>When private information or media has been shared on Twitter, we need a first-person report or a report from an authorized representative in order to make the determination that the image or video has been shared without their permission.
This paragraph wouldn't even make sense if you had to provide proof on upload. Unless this is to say the uploaded proof was counterfeit or something?
>When we are notified by individuals depicted, or by an authorized representative, that they did not consent to having their private image or video shared, we will remove it.
And, to be honest, I'm probably OK with that. At the very least I am not convinced by older arguments of "you shouldn't have any expectations of privacy in a public place". I think there is a fundamental difference between other people being able to see you, heck even other people being able to take a picture of you, vs. it automatically being OK for others to disseminate your imagine to literally billions of people, recorded for all time.
>When we are notified by individuals depicted, or by an authorized representative, that they did not consent to having their private image or video shared, we will remove it. This policy is not applicable to media featuring public figures or individuals when media and accompanying Tweet text are shared in the public interest or add value to public discourse.
Imagine a situation where someone punches someone else that is recorded. Millions examples of that on the internet, lols were had, whatever and deleted. Afterward someone makes the claim that it is a hate crime and since twitter isn't the only place where media is stored, do they restore every single instance of the original set of tweets?
What is the dividing line between them? When is something private versus something that is 'to the public interest'
If Twitter is the one deleting it, then I guess that's a judgment call at the time, but to me that sounds like it's in the public interest.
You want there to be less leeway?
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/fifteen-years-dmca-abuse
It would be wonderful if I could just generate some perceptual hash of my face, upload that hash to social media sites, and be able to demand they delete (or black out) any instance of my face they find. Yes, this could be abused, but the status quo (no privacy for anyone without exceedingly great OpSec) is worse.
There does seem to be some difference between being the subject in a photo and happening to be in a being in a photo of a beach sunset.
1. Target identifies disputed photo of themself.
2. Twitter issues a dispute ID / QR
3. Target sends in a fresh selfie with the dispute ID printed or on a screen alongside.
4. Twitter performs face analysis of both images and OCR of ID.
5. If faces match and ID is validated, Twitter takes down the disputed image.
If you are saying that third-parties will scale up access to Twitter's automation in order to take down virtually anything they wish, well I don't see how the proposed system would be so readily exploited. To issue a take down, you'd need to be in possession of the face.
Almost certainly this will be enforced only following a report. Which means I have a photograph of you which you did not consent to being in and you object to me sharing.
I think in that case it's reasonable to expect me to justify why I should be allowed to share the picture. And I may be able to, but the burden of proof should be on me.
Then it's impossible to take pictures of public spaces. There's a reason why you do not have the benefit of privacy in a public space.
I have repeatedly argued that we need legal user protections that protect users from large corporations arbitrarily enforcing their rules with no real appeal process or transparency. However, fear mongering with projections that have no basis in reality does not help move us in that direction.
https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1465831941157052416
Point number 1: Even if you stretch hard, the closest I can get is 'it wouldn't be permitted to take pictures of public spaces with people in who don't consent to being photographed and then share those on Twitter'.
Point number 2: It is true that in some countries, you have no (legal) expectation of privacy in a public place. However, it's not universally true. Where I am, for example, in Hungary, actually something very similar to Twitter's new policy is the law[0]).
Although there may be no LEGAL constraint where you live, perhaps you wouldn't want someone standing outside the local reproductive health or women's shelter photographing everyone who goes in and out. I certainly wouldn't.
What I'm saying is that if someone has a photograph of me which I didn't consent to being in, then I think it's reasonable that if I object to them sharing they photo, then they should have the 'burden of proof' that they have a right to share.
I don't think that 'burden of proof' needs to be particularly high, and 'oh, they're just in the background in my photo of the street' or 'I thought it might be interesting that they were snorting cocaine on the main street' is OK.
The problem is that 'public spaces' and 'benefit of privacy' are terms that date back to before the internet.
The trivial difficulty and cost of creating, processing, distributing, and cataloguing data through facial recognition, geolocation, etc. today means it's at least worth considering whether these laws are the best fit for our modern lives, rather than throwing out criticisms as though one specific law is both written in stone and applies everywhere.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/14/hungary-law-ph...
The next step is Twitter will have a formal list of approved media outlets (gee I wonder which ones it might be) where if they publish it first, Twitter will allow it. Selective reporting seems to be one of the primary tools for media bias/activism, and this is Twitter figuring out their own way to selectively ban content they don't like instead of the current user generated openness.
Twitter fights their users to keep CSAM available, while Parler was pulled down for a handful of posts they claimed they’d have moderated if they discovered them.
Hosting the people who host CSAM while banning the people who actively moderate but missed a few messages shows a clear political bias.
AWS is fine hosting CSAM for Twitter, but Republicans for Parler is just disgusting. Apparently.
https://boundingintocomics.com/2021/01/23/twitter-faces-laws...
There are so many other cities with more crime and violence but Chicago is the preferred choice when you want to agitate and alarm.
I'm not sure what cities have more crime and violence than Chicago. But if commenting on Chicago is off limits, what cities do people have your blessing to comment on? I would never want to agitate and alarm.
Per capita, Chicago is absolutely not an outlier for these statistics. Is there a particular measurement that you're familiar with that ranks Chicago at the top?
If you rank by total murders Chicago comes in an easy first. Comparing a very large city like Chicago to comparatively smaller cities blurs the numbers when you are talking per capita.
For example St Louis is a small inner city surrounded by numerous suburbs cities that have much lower crime rates. Those low crime suburbs don't get counted into the per capita rate. Chicago is large enough of a city that both the high crime and low crime areas all get counted together.
But ranking by total murders is definitely wrong, isn't it?
You can have criticisms of the per-capita rate, and you can argue that the smaller cities should have their suburbs included. But the alternative of just saying "let's look at the raw numbers independent of population and see which one is better" would be even more absurd.
Just as an example here, there are plenty of reasons to be distrustful of the per-capita comparisons of Covid infection across states, or to argue that they don't capture all of the nuance of what's going on. But nobody would ever seriously argue that those problems mean you should stop paying attention to population size when comparing Covid rates between states. Similarly, it just seems really silly to me to argue that missing suburbs means we should stop controlling for total population in crime data.
As far as the Google searching goes, I confess to not memorizing the entire corpus of national crime statistics. I should do more objective reading in this regard by looking at official sources like the FBI Criminal statistics. But I looked into the crime stats as per user @Philadelphia's provided Wikipedia link and it appears that Chicago is indeed in the Top 10 range in per-capita murder, if I'm reading that right, and is by far the biggest city in that range, so mentioning it in the context of crime-ridden cities seemed reasonable for that and other factors. But I'm not sure why it wouldn't be reasonable to mention it, why mentioning it would agitate or alarm, or what other cities are appropriate or not appropriate to mention for what reasons.
I'm attempting to be polite and precise in everything I mentioned. If I got any facts wrong, please clarify so I can be further informed. Thank you.
(Edit: Well, w/ the partial exception of HN, of course!)
As an aside- a benefit of just not using social media for news is that I miss out on a lot of things that almost always turn out to not be important. There is a higher threshold. I'm not succumbed by some hot issue or crisis for a day that is ultimately meaningless. Coworkers would often ask me my thoughts on an issue and I'd have no clue what they're talking about. It's liberating. Sometimes less is more.
Is it a good use of time? Who knows, hard to say. It's interesting, sometimes even addictive.
I do agree that on an emotional level we should be most occupied with living the tangible, real lives in front of us, and not worry too much about history roiling by all around us.
https://twitter.com/NellieBowles/status/1465724183044841473
It does seem crafted to gatekeep citizen journalists who are a major thorn in the corporate media's official narrative.
Ngo: "Oregon lawmakers introduced a bill to stop public record access to arrest photographs after I documented who was arrested at the riots last year."
And now Twitter introduces this new policy the day after Jack resigns. Presumably stopping people like Ngo tweeting about arrested people had been a long term desire of the internal faction whose ascent is now complete with the new CEO, so bye bye videos of peaceful protests!
> This policy is not applicable to media featuring public figures or individuals when media and accompanying Tweet text are shared in the public interest or add value to public discourse.
2. The parent comment was about other, private individuals in the same photo. Given Twitter’s very spotty track record of inconsistent moderation (regardless of any real or perceived bias), any grey area here will certainly be a target—whether or not a successful one—for abuse of this new rule. I can, for instance, easily imagine it being used in an attempt to suppress images/video of police responses to confrontations between BLM protestors and pick-your-counterprotestors.
3. Moreover, I can imagine fabricated claims of such moderation action being taken, sewing all sorts of disinformation about events—real or likewise fabricated—and information about them that never existed, or existed in a significantly different form.
4. While I’m generally more in favor [than probably the average HN reader] of privately owned websites being able to moderate their sites as they deem appropriate… this particular example is the first I thought of where this rule as written may have significant, harmful consequences.
This is Twitter we're talking about. Trust me, if you take a picture of police doing something wrong (or even appearing to have done something wrong) Twitter will find a way to make sure the rules don't apply to that picture.
(IANAL, these are my admittedly simple and probably naïve assumptions)
Edit: words
The exemptions they have set aside will be abused to allow things like leaks of Trump’s tax returns while silencing videos showing CNN’s biased electoral manipulation of viewers:
> This policy is not applicable to media featuring public figures or individuals when media and accompanying Tweet text are shared in the public interest or add value to public discourse.