This isn't about shutting her up. Its about Twitter coming out and saying that they agree that she's a loon. No one actually expects a member of Congress to be permanently shut up over something like this.
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When '@dang' comes around here and deletes posts, its about pushing the discussion in the direction they want for this website.
The _ONLY_ moderating action internet citizens have is moderation: deletion of posts, soft-banning, permanent bans, and the like. There's no other possible effect available for Twitter (or other social media) to come down on unruly users.
I disagree. Any communication system can be gamed, but the incentives can be distributed many different ways. If Twitter had shared blocklists for example, it would be easier for people to coordinate that kind of signaling. I think the originally intent was to have it as a platform for positive conversation (so you can favorite or share a tweet but not downvote it); however the structure of the platform meant that disagreement instead became expressed through snark, sarcasm, and pithy one-liners, to the detriment of any real discourse.
> If Twitter had shared blocklists for example, it would be easier for people to coordinate that kind of signaling.
But Twitter doesn't. Hacker News doesn't. Reddit doesn't.
All three of these large Social Media sites require moderators to police the actions of their users. This isn't new or exotic, this is just how the web typically works. Forums, Usenet, Mailing lists, IRC, BBS, its always been like this.
If you want to try to make a new social network with different moderation systems (ex: user-based blocking), feel free to do so. But I've hung out enough on 8-chan to know that you'll have to deal with Swatters and Doxxers almost immediately, who are looking for an unmoderated coordination medium, and they'll take advantage of your features. You'll also have to deal with lesser forms of spam and advertisements: Cryptocoin spam these days, but it used to be Viagra, or Nigerian Prince scams.
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The question isn't "Twitter shouldn't be allowed to moderate its users". The question is if Twitter made the right move here or not.
So now lets actually discuss the crux of the issue: is spreading COVID19 misinformation a big enough reason to warrant a banning? I of course agree with the move. Our hospitals are filling up with the Omicron variant and the vast majority of these patients are not-vaccinated. Twitter leveraging their reputation to say that Marjorie Taylor Green is a net benefit to society.
> Well nothing is preventing them from implementing such features if they want to.
There's nothing preventing you from implementing your own social network with those rules.
Hacker News is a forum for business ideas and web-based technologies after all, built around an angel fund / venture capital slant.
But I'm trying to tell you that you'll end up relying upon user-based moderation for many cases: including simple cases like spam from new users or VPNs. Maybe even IP-based blocking as certain unsavory groups of people tend to cluster around certain IP addresses.
I responded to your statement that 'The _ONLY_ moderating action internet citizens have is moderation [...]'; I'm just pointing out that while that is true for twitter users at present, Twitter could experiment with other approaches if they felt like it. I'm not saying they must or they should, just that nothing prevents them. I responded in handwavey terms because your comment about 'internet citizens' seemed pretty open-ended.
But I'm trying to tell you that you'll end up relying upon user-based moderation for many cases
OK? That's the idea I was exploring. It worked to some extent on NNTP, where people would maintain 'killfiles' and different Usenet groups were more or less protective of their cohesion. I'm not suggesting it as some sort of magic bullet, just saying that centralized moderation is not the only possible approach.
And arguably not, because a huge number of NNTP servers were in fact, moderated. Especially as spam and warez started to appear on servers owned by public institutions (universities and the like), a huge chunk of USENET split into the alt.* unmoderated groups, and the other, centrally moderated groups.
You are basically arguing for some line that needs to be drawn for when services are allowed to ban someone, and then to lift that line to a new level because someone is an elected politician. Twitter - rightly - holds everybody in principle to the same standards. Want to play in the sandbox? Play nice.
Streisand effect only helps them in this case. They don't care about the content of the message or changing minds. They care about the message being tied to twitter and the damage to their brand.
I don't think history has proved the Streisand Effect materializes here. When Twitter and others deplatformed Trump after January 6, his direct lines to his followers were dissolved. He had a subscription email or something that was a failure. I think he's trying to launch a social network soon. He has never managed to get as big of microphone as he had before.
I’m not sure Streisand effect applies here. Anyone roughly aware of American politics knows MTG’s looniness. And Twitter has already banned DJT which was a bigger thing. This isn’t going to bring attention where there wasn’t any already.
Absurd. Of all platforms, Twitter is best positioned to assess how big the Streisand effect really is and measure whether the howls of outrage from her supporters are really louder than the low-level rumble of discontent from her opponents.
They don't want the liability of calling here a liar. But she's big on posting about 'vaccine deaths' and that the vaccine doesn't work against Delta and that people 65 and under don't need to worry about Covid.
So you're saying no elected official should be bound by any laws, contracts or the terms of service of any organization, since doing so could be interpreted as "censorship?"
That if anyone else had said what Marjorie Taylor Greene had said, they would be subject to action by Twitter under its own stated policies, but the rules just shouldn't apply to her?
Twitter isn't the government. Twitter isn't the government. Twitter isn't the government.
Like it or not, they have a perfect right to terminate her account for any legal reason, including breach of contract. For the record, Twitter doesn't even need a "reason" as long as they don't terminate her for an illegal reason.
This might be difficult to understand, but it's not censorship.
Just because Twitter has the right to do something doesn't make it right for them to do it. And that they have the right to do it also doesn't mean that people shouldn't be angry at them for having done it, or use their right to call them out for it. Twitter shouldn't be doing this stuff. You totally can defend their right to do it while damning their actually doing it... but that isn't what you are doing as the person you are arguing with didn't even claim they shouldn't be allowed to do it: they merely said they shouldn't do it.
You mean the "right" to ban Marjorie Taylor Green for breach of contract? Marjorie Taylor Green breached a written agreement she entered into with Twitter. Provided their terms of service aren't illegal, Twitter certainly should be able to enforce them.
> they would be subject to action by Twitter under its own stated policies
When people say "hang the rich" on Twitter do you see them getting banned? Twitter specifically says they do not accept appeal to violence, but in reality they only censor the language they don't agree with.
Yes. Lots of people. They don't have press offices like congresspeople do to complain about it though. Things like "in Minecraft" or "Minecraft parody" are popping up as loopholes that seem to work. All Twitter cares about is plausible deniability if someone strings up Warren Buffet after tweeting about doing it.
Twitter has worldwide reach, so what if a citizen of another country is harmed due to misinformation posted by a US elected official? The citizens of that country didn't elect them.
She’s only elected to be a legislator in the House of Representatives. It’s not like she has a license to kill. That ought to have nothing to do with anything else, including her privileges on any random website.
In an ideal world, because they are now the public square effectively, they should be held to a different stricter standard. As well as other big tech companies (App Store, etc.)
Twitter is not the public square. They app stores are not the public square. No one takes that argument seriously because it's not serious. Is it censorship that most existing book publishers are highly unlikely to publish a book of your or my political opinions? Should a publisher, or anyone else, be compelled to promote speech they disagree with? Would you want someone to compel you to write or publish lies?
Marjorie Taylor Greene has VASTLY more ability to get her messages out, and to therefore express herself, than the average American citizen. She can go on Fox News or MSNBC or she can have her office send out press releases. Please stop saying this is censorship. This is NO WAY meets any accepted definition of censorship in the frame you are using.
I’m not talking about just Twitter or just this issue. And I specified “in an ideal world” which we aren’t in.
In an ideal world, big tech would have more regulation and would have, due to their size, certain regulations on their behavior and who they choose not to do business with, not just in the political sphere.
An example (to draw an extreme example to make my point), Visa and MasterCard (due to their size) couldn’t just say screw OnlyFans. They are too large and influential especially together.
I don't understand why regulating big tech is ideal. Isn't it more ideal for the government to run their own social media, or to have Twitter/Facebook deals that provide a white label version of those services exclusively for government use? I feel like either of those approaches would accomplish a similar goal with fewer compromises than regulation would entail.
> Why should Twitter give up their right to freedom of expression and freedom of association?
The argument "I know they can but that does not mean they should" doesn't imply that when they don't do something they shouldn't do they lose the ability to do it... I shouldn't be a jerk, but I do believe I have the legal right to be a jerk, so I guess by your argument I need to be a jerk and I guess no one should even call me out for it? That doesn't make any sense: Twitter currently can do this stuff; and yet, despite that, they shouldn't.
Twitter is not a conscious being, and cannot experience the subjective feeling of being oppressed. I support maximal liberty for humans, and appropriate protection of those humans from corporations as well as the government. Corporations may be collections of people, but they're a lot more than that - which makes them not human - and in any case they are not loci of experience.
Some users might like a platform where saying obviously false things and potentially dangerous things is not allowed and I don't know why Twitter should not be allowed to provide them with this.
"The majority ruled that the Freedom of the Press clause of the First Amendment protects associations of individuals in addition to individual speakers, and further that the First Amendment does not allow prohibitions of speech based on the identity of the speaker. Corporations, as associations of individuals, therefore have free speech rights under the First Amendment. "
By this logic, your family is also not a conscious being and cannot experience the subjective feeling of being oppressed. Or maybe you have a girlfriend or a boyfriend and a group of friends. Are these groups also unable to experience the subjective feeling of being oppressed?
That's right. But they are able to have what we call a shared experience, which is a little different. However it isn't relevant here, because the shared experience of all the employees of a corporation is not the basis for the legal personhood of corporations. And what is the basis?
class Corporation : public Person
It's for the same reason mediocre OOP programmers use inheritance to borrow some partial implementation. It gets the job done, even if it doesn't quite fit.
Not sure they have to. Gjsman affirmed their right to freedom (they CAN), but would prefer that they exercised that freedom in a certain way (they SHOULD).
Believe it or not, government regulations don't have to be the solution to every little thing.
I just want to be clear that it's incorrect to use the word "censor" or "censorship" to refer to the act of terminating someone's Twitter account for breach of contract.
Furthermore, because Twitter isn't the government, it's probably incorrect to use "censor" or "censorship" at all. "Discrimination" is the correct word to use if a corporation like Twitter terminated her account for an illegal reason. For example: if Twitter terminated her account because she was a woman or a person of color or a member of a protected class.
Even if we use the definition in sense 2 (and I definitely don't think we should) enforcing a contract is not censorship. As far as I am aware, Marjorie Taylor Green was over the age of majority and of sound mind and body - and therefore fully capable of agreeing to the terms of a written agreement - when she agreed to the Twitter terms of service.
You are painfully wrong on the definition of censorship. Censorship is the act of a third party intermediary controlling the content of speech, no matter who that third party is. For example, Merriam-Webster defines "censor" as "a person who supervises conduct and morals". They go on to use the word "official, which you might think implies bona fide government. But they define "official" as "one who holds or is invested with an office", which most certainly applies to private corporations.
By banning people based on the content of their speech, Twitter is precisely engaging in censorship. Just because they haven't called their department head responsible for handing out bans a "Censor" does not mean their constructive behavior is something new that we don't have a word for!
Furthermore, immediately referencing the Bill of Rights to call Twitter's activities "freedom of expression" is wantonly destructive to any sort of discussion. The US Bill of Rights takes natural rights and narrowly frames them in terms of restrictions on government, because that is likely the best that can be done at its level of abstraction. The scale Twitter operates at is much closer to that of government than that of the People - it is most certainly appropriate to say that Twitter is impinging upon individuals' freedom of speech. If you do not agree that it is a concern, then go ahead and make that argument on its own merits. Narrowly construing definitions so that you can discard concerns does not make for productive understanding.
(Having said that my own feeling here is that Ms. Ignorance-as-a-Service has reaped what she has sown, is of a notoriety that is legible to Twitter, and can easily publish on other platforms - compare with all the unnoteworthy individuals who get the automated banhammers with no appeal. And this will ultimately just be a boon to her, just like any other celebrity feud. But let us not twist our own definitions to assuage our cognitive dissonance!)
> Furthermore, immediately referencing the Bill of Rights to call Twitter's activities "freedom of expression" is wantonly destructive to any sort of discussion.
It's absolutely appropriate to reference the Bill of Rights. As a collection of individuals, Twitter is legally entitled to both freedom of expression and freedom of association. That said, Twitter also has every right to ban Marjorie Taylor Green for breach of contract.
> The scale Twitter operates at is much closer to that of government than that of the People.
I'm sorry, but this argument is objectively false. You cannot compare the power of Twitter to the nearly unfathomable power of the three branches of the US government. Twitter can't levy taxes. Twitter can't declare war. Twitter can't prosecute you and/or put you in jail. Twitter simply doesn't have these powers.
Taking your definitions and continuing on with them, there is nothing that distinguishes "US Government" from a private company with whom you're contracting with, whereby it can do all of those internal-facing "exceptional" things you listed. Roughly - your parents were under contract with the company when you were a minor, you assented to the contract when you became of age, and you can terminate the contract at any time by leaving their premises and paying the cancellation fee.
Furthermore by your simplistic definition, the US Government is also just "a collection of individuals". And while that collection has (conceptually) agreed to be bound by the Bill of Rights, there are clearly greater concepts at play than what has been legally defined - the US Bill of Rights does not have a monopoly on the definition of natural rights!
But talking in this framework is ultimately unproductive - it hinders making judgements on the actual details of the relationships, "contractual" or otherwise. And so discussions of individual freedom must necessarily focus on overall qualitative behavior and not simply condoning anything conforming to some axiomatic framework.
Twitter has the right to freedom of expression and freedom of association, and this gives them the perfect right to ban people from their platform if they don't agree with what people say. Just like you have the right to ask people to leave your house or business if you don't agree with what they say. Twitter's rights, and your rights, include banning people from platform/home whose political speech they/you don't agree with - which Twitter didn't even do in this case.
In this case, Marjorie Taylor Green's Twitter account was terminated for breach of contract. She was an adult when she signed a written contract with Twitter and opened her account. According to Twitter, she breached the agreement and they elected to choose a remedy that some people don't like. That's just too bad. She isn't facing arrest or imprisonment as a result of her statements. She can go ahead and sue them in civil court if she disagrees!
< whereby it can do all of those internal-facing "exceptional" things you listed
I'm sorry, I hate to repeat myself, but a corporation cannot levy taxes, cannot jail people, cannot execute someone, cannot declare war, all of which a government can do through a variety of legal means. In fact, the US government has so much power that it can do these things through extra legal means and face no consequences whatsoever.
Twitter does not have this kind of power, and I am rightly suspicious of arguments that attempt to frame the situation otherwise, no matter how elegantly or abstractly presented.
> Twitter has the right to freedom of expression and freedom of association, and this gives them the perfect right to ban people from their platform if they don't agree with what people say
This is the legal analysis of how Twitter can do this, which I understand. But you keep asserting it as if it is some universal truth, without engaging with my actual arguments about the constructive result of such framework.
> a corporation cannot levy taxes, cannot jail people
Except that it can - you can sign a contract agreeing to some schedule of charges (called "taxes") or to have to spend time in a certain place (called "jail").
> cannot execute someone
The only reason you cannot sign a contract that allows for your execution as a consequence of default is because your bare ability to contract has been restricted by the larger government.
> I just want to be clear that it's incorrect to use the word "censor" or "censorship" to refer to the act of terminating someone's Twitter account for breach of contract.
You're right, the censorship happened even before that: Twitter's contract that says "you're not allowed to express any of these opinions" is the root of the censorship.
When the decentralized web, for all intents and purposes died and was replaced by like 5-6 major platforms who largely collude to silence people or perspectives...all the "mah property" take on how this isn't a free speech case goes out the door.
The monopolistic cabal of Twitter, Facebook and Google changes how this should be seen.
Imho - you either break them up into a 100 companies, or you legally ban them from censorship.
I’m not sure what she said, but given the amount of reversals and “facts-later-questioned” concerning this virus, I’d be interested to see if she ever would have it reinstated if she were right about the key points concerning her ban.
Okay, but do you think that a single person following her Twitter is going to say, “Wow, Twitter censored her because she was wrong”?
Of course not. They are going to be livid and more determined in their belief. Anyone defending vaccine should be angry at Twitter for making the situation worse.
Not the point. The ban isn’t to change their mind, it’s to remove a source of toxic discourse on the platform. Now there will be fewer retweets and flame wars instigated by her. And it will hopefully serve as one more reason for those who feel targeted by this to seek an alternative platform.
I'm 100% pro vaccine. I'd rather Twitter were destroyed for doing this than Greene were suspended. I'll happily deal with combating some misinformation, it's an opportunity that is critically important. People with anti vax beliefs don't magically stop existing just because you censor Greene; it hurts, it does not help to do that. Instead, more of them go underground, they vanish from the surface, you don't see them as much, but they're still around spreading those ideas. The notion that you can't have a debate over vaccines in the open air - eg Twitter threads, or comparable - between such sides is disgusting. What other point does Twitter serve then? An official public relations release platform for previously authorized statements and speech. And to let people know what you ate for lunch, its original glorious purpose.
Twitter should be a place where I can argue against Greene's vaccine statements when she Tweets them. She provides an excellent central point of focus to distribute correct information, a honeypot for delivering information that is right. (insert retort: yeah but that doesn't work, you can't convince people; cool, so shut it all down then, civilization is over, give up now; throw them in the gulag, that's where you have to go with that logic if you believe people are permanently beyond reason)
All I can say is that I wish you well in your efforts to convince antivax folks (and those who grift on that, like MTG) on taking the vaccine. Good luck.
Since you are not posting your sources, it's hard to tell what claims of Marjorie Taylor Greene you are referring to. I recently stumbled upon a site that reports on covid data from Denmark. The rate of Omicron infection in both vaccinated and unvaccinated populations >15yo is the same. This corroborates with a recent DHH post surfacing similar Denmark data. There is a distinct uncomfortable possibility that the vaccines targeting a 2 year old variant are, indeed, ineffective as a measure to limit the spread of Omicron. Unfortunately, I can't corroborate with US data because CDC is obstinate in not publishing covid data with a breakdown by date/age/vaccination status/virus variant.
Based in prior variant data, it is likely the vaccines do work to prevent severe omicron cases. Feel free to clarify what is it that the vaccines work for, and which of Marjorie Taylor Greene tweets fell afoul of that.
PS. This post is in no way an endorsement of Marjorie Taylor Greene political activities, of which I know very little other than her being a Republican Congresswoman.
I don't think they're claiming she's wrong. They're claiming her post was "misleading", but misleading to what? Presumably misleading people to believe that a public policy is wrong or ineffective.
> Twitter suspended Ms. Greene’s account after she tweeted on Saturday, falsely, about “extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths.” She included a misleading chart that pulled data from a government database of unverified raw data.
Does anyone have a link to the tweet in question? It's interesting that it was labeled the chart as "misleading" as opposed to based on doctored data. It appears being factual is not enough and you could "mislead" depending on how you present it. But "mislead" from what precisely? A policy decision? It relates to the whole shift from "disinformation" to "misinformation", which has a much broader scope.
Either way, I always feel a little weird about a private corporation censoring a democratically elected politician, especially when concerning political speech. I get that its their platform, but its not without political influence. The white house has admitted to be in close contact with all the large social media companies regarding what is 'misinformation', going so far as to flag posts [0]. There's definitely a risk of political interference
I think that fact is pertinent, but it may also be helpful to think of the distinction between a publisher and a technology. If I write a book called “Vaccines Kill and Trump is Still President”, it feels fair and correct to me that Random House has the right to pass on publishing it but that nobody could stop me from reading it to someone over the phone or mailing it to someone.
The technical answer is: Verizon can't hear what you're saying to your mom, so they don't know/care the content.
The social answer is: ultimately there's no real difference between the two. If you use your Verizon phone to make harassing calls to your mom and she reports those calls to Verizon, or if you do something else that violates your agreement with Verizon, they too have the right to terminate your service:
"We can, without notice, limit, suspend or end your Service or any agreement with you for any good cause, including, but not limited to: (1) if you: (a) breach this agreement or violate our prohibited usage policies..."
Now, because you pay Verizon, and Verizon likes money, they may be more inclined to tolerate certain behavior as long as you pay your bill on time. That's their choice, though.
But if the government is in talks w/ the social media about setting their policy, and they use that policy to ban other politicians, is that not censorship?
If the government leans on Twitter to silence a user, then yes, that would be censorship. There is no evidence this has happened, however; the substack post you referenced is drivel.
The White House admits that they're in regular communication with social media platforms and are flagging problematic posts on facebook. What about that is drivel?
> Q Thanks, Jen. Can you talk a little bit more about this request for tech companies to be more aggressive in policing misinformation? Has the administration been in touch with any of these companies and are there any actions that the federal government can take to ensure their cooperation, because we’ve seen, from the start, there’s not a lot of action on some of these platforms.
> MS. PSAKI: Sure. Well, first, we are in regular touch with these social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff, but also members of our COVID-19 team, given, as Dr. Murthy conveyed, this is a big issue of misinformation, specifically on the pandemic.
> In terms of actions, Alex, that we have taken — or we’re working to take, I should say — from the federal government: We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s office. We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. We’re working with doctors and medical professionals to connect — to connect medical experts with popular — with popular — who are popular with their audiences with — with accurate information and boost trusted content. So we’re helping get trusted content out there.
There's always C-SPAN. She hasn't been censored. She's only been denied a company's message amplification product. Goofball isn't a protected class, so Twitter is under no obligation to serve her.
What would government censorship look like to you? If someone criticizes a government policy, and a private platform censors this person after nudging from the state (which isn't in dispute), is that not censorship?
the complaint seems to be her presentation is misleading. i can understand that. if you give some medical treatment to a large number of people then some of them are going to be harmed by it but the benefits to individuals could still exceed the harm. but if we apply the same kind of logic then i feel twitter's warning text is misleading. it is not the complete picture whether COVID 19 vaccine is considered 'safe' for a person. what is important for an individual when making a decision whether to take the vaccine or not is whether the benefits exceed the costs. a vaccine might be 'safe' but the costs might still exceed the benefits if the risk differential between vaccinated and unvaccinated is low enough.
What's the hospitalization rate and death rate in NY? A large part of why those numbers are so low are vaccines, in addition to masking and omicron being less virulent.
You see, if the vaccine worked as originally advertised, people who are vaccinated should not contract covid. Therefor it does not work as originally advertised.
Now before everyone freaks out - we've changed the claim around what a vaccine does. It's no longer intended to prevent spreading covid or prevent contracting covid, it's just intended to reduce symptoms of covid. So if that's your definition of vaccine efficacy then I would agree her claims were false.
On that point I'd agree. Death from adverse reactions to the vaccine are well below natural rates of death from covid itself, which in my mind should be the key metric.
Elected officials shouldn't have to rely on Twitter or other social media platforms to communicate with their constituencies. This woman seems like a loon to me, but she's a loon with a democratic mandate. If social media is going to be the default communication medium, then perhaps it needs regulation to clarify its relationship with elected officials.
Interestingly, she only got personally banned. Throughout she has maintained a "official business" account, which didn't get used for conspiracy-peddling, which hasn't been banned.
> Ms. Greene’s official Congressional account, @RepMTG, remains active because tweets from that account did not violate the service’s rules.
If social media is that important - and that isn't a decision anyone has actually voted on, it's just something people say now - then the government can build its own social media platform and regulate it as a utility. Having the government take over a private business because it decides the free speech rights of politicians should be more important than the free speech and association rights of everyone else is a bad idea.
This isn't like the FCC regulating the airwaves, the internet isn't a limited spectrum, and there's no reason to act as if the capacity to disseminate information over it is actually a scarce resource.
I mostly agree. Regulating something as a utility doesn't mean the government takes over the company. There are just much more rules for what they can do. For example my electric company has an approval process for price increases.
> If social media is that important - and that isn't a decision anyone has actually voted on, it's just something people say now - then the government can build its own social media platform and regulate it as a utility.
Why does the government need to built its own social media platform? We regulate other privately-owned utilities all the time. Cell phone companies, power utilities, water services, waste management, etc. This is no different - social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are fundamental services in our modern society and it is unacceptable for users to be unfairly discriminated against or banned based on their viewpoints.
> Having the government take over a private business because it decides the free speech rights of politicians should be more important than the free speech and association rights of everyone else is a bad idea.
We already do this all the time in many different ways - it’s called regulation and it is not the same as “taking over” a business, so spare me the hyperbole. The free speech of individuals is more important that the association rights of Twitter or the cabal of other tech oligopolies that are all immune to competition due to their market capitalization and network effects.
> This isn't like the FCC regulating the airwaves, the internet isn't a limited spectrum, and there's no reason to act as if the capacity to disseminate information over it is actually a scarce resource.
Actually it does bear some similarities. The scarcity is not around a ‘spectrum’ but it does exist because these products rely on network effects (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect). These network effects mean that access to users and attention is limited and there is a barrier to entry that prevents market competition from functioning properly. So there absolutely is reason to act as if the capacity to disseminate information is a scarce resource.
Everyone seems to like beating the "regulation" drum but it's not at all clear what that would mean. Companies can no longer ban politicians? Companies can no longer filter "misinformation" (whatever that is)?
Plus, are we trying to force companies to let all speech through (antisemitism OK? True racism OK?), or just to force them to carry what they deem "misinformation"?
It's hard to understand exactly what the goal of this "regulation" are and it's even harder to imagine a regulatory scheme that would accomplish those goals without major unwanted side effects.
> If social media is going to be the default communication medium
I don't think this is really true. Most people in the US don't use Twitter. Not to mention that many users are following entertainment based users or aren't fully consuming posts by those they follow.
Twitter is just an additional stream/supplement to town halls, email lists, websites, news coverage, etc.
Twitter use is near-ubiquitous among journalists, politicians, and those who wield or seek to gain influence. Corporations fire people, companies terminate business deals, and universities expel students based on what gets said on Twitter. News agencies find leads and shape stories using Twitter. Most of what gets said on CNN, NBC, or Fox News is filtered through the lens of writers who use Twitter and care about how Twitter will react. Political fortunes can swing on bad tweets. Most Americans may not use Twitter, but I would say most are still affected by it, whether they know it or not.
Ironically enough the last tweet I saw from her was promoting the idea that people who move from blue states to red should have to wait for 2 years before they're allowed to vote. You can't see her tweets any more since she's been kicked off* but this story adequately summarizes them - I picked a conservative news outlet to avoid the possibility of unfavorable media bias.
* It's really stupid that Twitter makes old tweets invisible. First they're easily accessible by other means to technically savvy people via archive.org or whatever, so this just throws barriers in the way of the least technically educated. Second, it fosters paranoia and mistrust because conversations about the tweets begin to resemble rumors rather than fact.
Television has been the default communication mechanism for many years, and as such is already regulated. I believe the problem with TV is that you cannot lie in political advertising, which is probably why MTG was not using that platform. This is an old and tired argument, dismissed long ago to avoid propaganda and public risks. MTG has not been banned from TV, she has all the Democratic access she needs.
I'd also say constituents shouldn't have to rely on for-profit (and in this case objectively harmful to society) advertising platforms in order to hear from elected officials or government. Where I am, Twitter seems to have become the default channel for many kinds of communication, and those of us who don't use it are excluded.
Every member of Congress is provided with their own website, a subdomain of either house.gov or senate.gov, for the entirety of their term. If your representative neglects that website and chooses to communicate through a private outlet instead, that's something to complain to your representative about.
It's not a case of representatives neglecting that website. It's a case of the people not looking at that website, because they're too busy looking at Twitter instead.
> Open protocols should be the default. We have W3C recommendations that make the federated social web possible.
I agree.
> the audience will move if necessary.
If we let that be the plan, then our filter bubble problem will get even worse. Everyone left of a certain point will only be on Twitter, and everyone else will only be on the fediverse. It's a lot less likely that people will follow anyone they disagree with if they'd need another account they couldn't otherwise use.
I'm not sure if people here are old enough to remember but there was a time in the late 90s where everyone was telling you their AOL Keyword (commercials, tv shows, movie trailers, print media, et cetera).
Walled-garden social is sort of the same thing in a way.
They don't have to rely on Twitter. Politicians have office budgets which include money for sending out mailings to their constituents. Most politicians also have their own email lists to which they send out updates and run polls. There are plenty of venues outside of Twitter to contact constituents.
Twitter itself is under no more of an obligation to publish material from a politician than a newspaper is. Both are corporations that operate under obligations to their shareholders. If a politician really wants to publish something on Twitter, they can pay for promoted ads just like they can with a newspaper. Expecting social media platforms to promote their message for free is hopelessly naive and does not match how democracy has worked for centuries. Sure, newspapers have published political messages for free via editorials and stories, but they are not obligated to do so. Getting the message out has always required time from volunteers and/or money towards supporting the cause.
Newspaper can be sued. Twitter can't (section 230) because they are a platform that can't choose what to publish. But they now giving Congress the finger by acting like newspaper and still can't be sued. Essentially, new media are given protection while old media constrainted. I favor 230 removed or explicitly nullify if media show they can censor.
I wholeheartedly concur that section 230 needs to go or be significantly revised. After seeing my elderly father get phishing ads served up by Google during COVID from completely reasonable searches, I'd like to see it be possible to start going after damages from this kind of activity.
The only reason they use Twitter is because that is a direct way to the public, rather than through those pesky mainstream media who might decide not to air certain statements or write about them in their opinion columns right along the reporting.
It's simply an attempt at an end-run around the free press, that's why it is so popular with the extremists and that's why the extremists do their damnest to create their own 'safe space' for their horrifying little screeds.
So, traditionally, politicians communicated via press release, either personally or via a press office. Of course, this had the disadvantage that newspapers etc might just decline to publish obvious nonsense.
However, there’s presumably nothing stopping her from issuing this nonsense via press release, or on a blog, or similar.
I don't care about the musings of idiotic politicians (and most of them are indeed idiots), but it rubs me the wrong way that Twitter is preventing the people from hearing where their tax dollars are going, and that Twitter has decided to be the arbiter of truth for society.
Also, according to the article, it seems like her strikes were for subjective comments. If this is the case, that strikes me as doubly wrong. According to the article:
> Twitter suspended Ms. Greene’s account after she tweeted on Saturday, falsely, about “extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths.” She included a misleading chart that pulled data from a government database of unverified raw data.
The phrase "extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths" seems to be a true subjective opinion if there were some non-zero number of Covid vaccine deaths. People might disagree on whether an objective number should be subjectively described as high or low, but it seems like that's an opinion.
Also, why describe a chart as misleading? Why not describe it as false information? There's a big difference. Whether you disagree with her data or not, Twitter deciding that a government chart is "misleading" is kind of horrifying as a precedent because data could still be true and marked as misleading. Are they going to ban politicians from discussing budget charts or crime statistics in public debates if they decide that it's misleading with no objective basis?
> The company had issued her a fourth strike in August after she falsely posted that the vaccines were “failing.”
Whether a government policy is failing or not seems highly subjective. Is this really vaccine misinformation?
> Ms. Greene was given a third strike less than a month before that when she had tweeted that Covid-19 was not dangerous for people unless they were obese or over age 65, and said vaccines should not be required.
Based on the survival rates for people in these categories, many people would say that this is accurate and based on a subjective risk-management analysis. It's certainly less dangerous for young and non-fat people. Did this really merit a strike even by their convoluted logic? Certainly not.
> Are they going to ban politicians from discussing budget charts or crime statistics in public debates if they decide that it's misleading with no objective basis?
I’m assuming the “government database” is VEARS, which is using raw, unverified data. It would be like if someone took NextDoor or Shotspotter reports to derive crime statistics.
That's simply not true. A doctor can fill it out for you but can't refuse if you ask him to.
You can also do it yourself online... it's the main reason people are spamming the database.
I’ve also complained to my doctor about undocumented “side effects” from various non-vaccine drugs.
Even though it seemed weird he immediately suggested switching to something else.
Doctors don’t apply a robotic “this could never happen” approach when dealing with unexpected side effects, regardless of whether there’s empirical evidence for them or not.
Imperfect data is still useful for understanding the world, is it not? To use your example: I'm not completely sure that Shotspotter reports are 100% accurate, but I'd be hesitant to move to a neighborhood that was reported to have a steady burst of gunshots, wouldn't you?
In fact, speaking on data, couldn't we say that almost all data is imperfect to some extent? Isn't this especially true of Covid-related data?
ShotSpotter is notoriously inaccurate… It can pick up fireworks and engine backfires. If you happen to live by say a motorcycle club, ShotSpotter might make your block seem far more dangerous than it actually is.
Your comment is interesting and informative but doesn't really answer the question.
Knowing that some data is imperfect, can it still be a useful data point for understanding the world? Is it unreasonable to use ShotSpotter as a tool in your toolbox for understanding the world just because we believe it to be imperfect?
No data source is perfect. In the absence of other data, it’s reasonable to use the least imperfect data source. But for example police will confirm ShotSpotter by locating shell casings, witness statements or EMS/hospital reports, so it’s better to look at aggravated assault and homicide data from the police to draw conclusions.
Likewise for VAERS it makes more sense to look at the abundant amounts of analyzed information, or else provide a critique for why existing analysis was wrong. Presenting low-quality data without caveats or explanation to disprove higher-quality information seems to fall within the realm of misinformation.
Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to have any kind of discourse on a topic like this because people's opinions are too diluted.
When Twitter does an action like this, or any other media platform, it is rarely done by a single person on a whim. It is a collective decision by a number - 2, 3 or maybe more - of people.
The crazy part that this decision is solely one-sided. Twitter doesn't care if this person is right or wrong, their understanding is that this person is spreading misinformation and that's it. And in a case like this, it is most certainly amplified by the stature of the person in question.
Who says the information is right or wrong? Well, I'd bet that it is also a collective of people. In this case, it is probably scientists and health professionals. Who, of course, in due course could also be found out to have been wrong.
But, Twitter is clearly omni-sentient and can see that their decision is the right one.
One thing I don't like about the New York Times is that they obscure the actual information to force you to rely on their presentation. Why can't they just show the tweet in question and explain why it's wrong?
I'm assuming it's something like the numbers of vaccine complications reports have gone up in objective numbers but not relative to numbers of vaccinations and that could look scary on a graph - or something like that.
But why do I have to guess or search out the information myself? I would think a news article could and should easily incorporate this.
The big problem with this reporting style is that reality could be either Twitter unjustifiably censoring people because they don't like their politics by making harsh rule interpretations, or MTG repeatedly sharing harmful misinformation and deserving a ban. Because the NYT won't actually show information the reader is left not knowing and likely believing an interpretation based on what they thought going in to the article.
No matter what their politics are, I would hope that all reasonable people can condemn cancel culture, regardless of the political alignment of the person being cancelled.
I get a lot of value from Twitter because I follow a few awesomely interesting people, but I could probably get the same effect by bookmarking their blogs.
People should have access to all information, and filter for themselves what is trash. I don’t want Twitter, news media, etc. filtering.
I have started to just pay attention to a small number of people: Lex Fridman, Joe Rogan, Matt Taibbi, and Noam Chomsky. That is a small sample size, but enough diversity for me.
I don’t disagree with you, I am just ruminating about making a personal decision to stop using Twitter. I did that years ago for Facebook (now, less than ten minutes a month in FB).
I am having some difficulty deciding whether I think the major Platforms should be public regulated services or the property of companies that can do anything they want to with their property. My opinion changes on this…
It's a fine orthogonal discussion. There are several things worth considering in my mind:
* Perhaps these social media platforms are defectively designed
* Section 230 may need to be amended so that billion-dollar companies have more to hold them to account when things spread on their platforms
* CEOs could be criminally prosecuted when their companies lie (e.g., Facebook's ad revenue fraud in promoting FB video)
I think there are far better reasons to consider leaving social media than them suspending the personal account of a known provocateur who breaks rules all the time (her official government account is intact).
Yes I agree with you too. The issue shouldn’t be whether someone can post whatever they want on someone else’s platform- how did so few platforms(of dubious quality) become the main channels for communication? How did our internet become theirs? How can we fix it?
This leads to 2 twitters, one for each side of the political aisle. Filter bubbles enabled by social media are already bad enough, a complete fracture of the public space along political lines is a distinctly dangerous idea.
I saw a recent meme that said "In the distant past we didn't have cancel culture, we had exile culture. You were just told to leave."
> People should have access to all information, and filter for themselves what is trash. I don’t want Twitter, news media, etc. filtering.
And people still do -- Marjorie can start a blog on a vps and I'm sure most providers would be reasonably okay with it, unless she became a DDoS target (possible).
If you are upset because the people that gave her that platform said "you are doing it wrong" this happens in the physical world too. If you show up to a sports arena (a place with a large group of people that are captive) and hang a sign in the stands with an "unacceptable" message, the arena will ask you to take it down or force you to.
Platforms have a brand, and they are filtering for their own brand reputation.
I hate that our web is more "centralized" but all of these actions are going to enable more decentralization to happen because of it.
Poor analogy. A sports arena is one big room for sport, not messaging. If people stood on soapboxes and yelled their off-topic ideas at everyone in the arena, they would be asked to leave regardless of what their messages were.
Twitter's purpose is publishing messages on any topic. It is not one big room where everyone must hear everyone else. The equivalent "doing it wrong" on Twitter is not (or shouldn't be) dissenting views or objections to vaccines. Doing it wrong on Twitter should be confined to inappropriate use of the API or some other technical misuse that actually impacts other users. Or posting illegal material or hate speech.
I don't remember anyone asking Big Tech companies to act as helicopter parents, protecting readers via censorship from ideas that don't align with current public policy.
If you define cancel culture as angry k pop fans attacking people they don't like, then yes it is probably bad. If you define it as a service banning effective private propoganda machines spewing baseless conspiracy theories to people who are seemingly unable or unwilling to acknowledge reality, then I'm definitely for it. I don't have a lot of faith in people to discern reality from fantasy anymore. If Twitter can stop people acting in bad faith from manipulating people, with real world consequences, then I think that's their obligation, regardless of political alignment. In this case the ban is because of spreading COVID vaccine misinformation. Countless lives could have been saved if this nonsense had never been given a platform.
From the 1940s on there was a Fairness Doctrine for companies with broadcast licenses. The Republicans killed this off in the 1980s, saying private business should be able to do what they want. Hoisted by their own petard.
Is it a manifestation of cancel culture to enforce platform rules (a "code of conduct", if you will)? You can argument that the rules are politically charged. Whether that's okay is determined by whether you think Twitter is a private or a public space.
Humans are a social species, and a lot of what you refer to as "cancel culture" is a reaction to antisocial behavior like racism and sexism and homophobia that actively harms our societies. Some of this behavior has been going on for centuries or longer. People who support so called "cancel culture" simply think that a few millennia of racism and sexism are enough.
Reasonable people should not condemn cancel culture; reasonable people should support efforts to cancel racism, sexism, ageism, and the other -isms that cause profound harm to members of our societies. It's not really that difficult to not make racist, sexist, or homophobic remarks.
I realize now that I have a different definition of “cancel culture” than you and some other people here, which is OK.
I was thinking of what Bill Mahr, on his HBO show, talks about as far as cancelling appearances at universities of people who were invited to talk, and then some subgroup protested that they didn’t like their opinions. I am also thinking of cancelling people whose political opinions vary, and also in this case an elected Congresswoman who has some very wrong ideas about the dangers of vaccinations.
I think that racist, etc. remarks are easier to filter and discard than political ideas. I feel comfortable using automated filters to discard racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks, but I am not comfortable discarding political speech.
I'm going to assume that you have good intent here, but usually "some subgroup" is dog whistle for a repressed group such as persons of color or gay people. I hope that marginalized subgroups continue to protest and get people canceled, and I intend to continue paying and donating my time and effort to make sure they can get the canceling done.
< didn’t like their opinions
Very often these "canceled" opinions include one or more of the "big three": ideology that is sexist, racist, or homophobic. People espousing these beliefs should face consequences for their behavior; they should be canceled. Society does not have to accept the toxic notion that a system should be "fair and balanced" to accommodate poisonous, antisocial ideas and behavior.
The old system, the system that accommodated these poisonous, antisocial ideas was responsible for ruining many lives because people thought it was okay to say that people should not be able to get divorced, or go to college, or have birth control, or earn an equal living, or have a bank account or credit card. Or live in a certain neighborhood. And when it was okay to say it, it was okay to put it into public and private policy alike. You could be fired for being gay, or pregnant, or not hired. You couldn't live in a certain neighborhood if you were African American, unless you wanted to find burning crosses outside your house at night. You could be jailed for engaging in private, consensual gay sex in some US jurisdictions until 2003.
So forgive me if I take a little liberty here. I think it's totally okay for people to assemble and protest a speaker because they don't agree with their political views. It's equally okay for a university to cancel an appearance because they or their students or faculty don't agree with the political positions of the speaker. I can't remember a single instance in my life where I ever made political speech, or any other speech, that called for the repression of any group or sub-group of society simply because I felt like it, or because I read about it in some book written in the Judean or Arabian deserts several millennia ago.
Cancel culture is just the free market at work. I found that explaining it this way to conservatives helped them understand why it was necessary (and I am not assuming you are a conservative).
I don't know who needs to hear this, but if a company suspends a member of the government who has a budget and staff for PR as a function of serving as a member of that government, then that person has not in any meaningful way been censored by the government. This is not the poster case for trying to prove tech has too much power. There's a long list of marginalized people suspended for no good reason who don't get to whine about it on C-SPAN or through their press office.
How many times a year do you watch C-SPAN? How often do you browse the press release page for your local elected official, much less someone else's? Whatever you think of this particular Congresswoman, Twitter is one of the largest and most influential outreach platforms. It's like getting banned from radio in the 1940s and saying, "Who cares? There's still newsletters and speaking engagements." Getting banned from Twitter is a big deal for people who engage with mass audiences.
She still has her congressional account. This is only her personal account.
edit to add: That said, she can say things on C-SPAN that would get the congressional account suspended too (see: Trump hopping accounts as they got suspended after the initial ban). And those things would be reported by people who can do so under the cover of reporting, so it's not like she has any less reach for the goofballery now.
> It's like getting banned from radio in the 1940s
It'd be like getting banned from one station, perhaps. Radio? To my knowledge the FCC has never banned anyone from the airwaves.
This pretense that the big social networks are so big that politicians must be granted access is just poisonous beyond belief to what the internet is. No one is stopping MTG from setting up countless points of her own presence, or sharing links to MTG-related media on Twitter.
Alas, that getting banned from one of the big networks is a crude, de-facto facsimile to a truth is quite the sad sign of the state of affairs. That we have become so very centralized, that our primary way of connecting is via such heavily centralized pillars that hold up so very much of the online experience is nothing short of a travesty. I mainly try to calm myself by reminding myself how recent all this is, how new. And assuring myself of their inability to create new & visionary ways of connecting; the big networks are beholden to their experience as massified, consumerized, common experiences. Their own impermissiveness, their own slowly closing, setting ever more fast in concrete rules & expectations bring hope that the frontier & more open communications might rise again.
> It's like getting banned from radio in the 1940s and saying, "Who cares? There's still newsletters and speaking engagements."
It's more like getting banned from one radio station in the 1940s and going "Who cares? She can still go on a bunch of other radio stations, and most people are capable of tuning in, if they want to."
She's on Facebook. She's on Gab. She's on Parler. She's on Gettr. She went on a cross-country tour last year. She appears on TV and will probably get even more TV appearances out of this. Anyone who wants to hear whatever she's saying has their choice of outlets from which to do so.
Facebook has a habit of politically motivated bans too, so she'll probably get banned from there next just like everyone else has. And Gab and Parler have a really hard time getting users since Google banned them from the Play Store (and I think Apple did the same), so it's disingenuous to pretend that they're equivalents to Twitter.
I don't think "everyone else" has been banned from Facebook; aside from Trump, I can't think of any other American elected official they've banned. Gab and Parler both work fine in a web browser.
TBH, I think that is a bit of a trite diversion/straw man. I don't think anyone is arguing this is an act by the government. However, censorship is not always something government does [1]. This certainly _is_ an act of corporate political censorship.
And if they can easily get away with censoring people who "get to whine about it on C-SPAN", it is certain that you and I and the rest of the plebeians have absolutely no recourse. That is not OK.
One of the examples is when the Dixie Chicks were blacklisted by country radio stations. Surely stations have a First Amendment right to decide to not broadcast songs from a given group, especially when most of the the owners, staff, advertisers, and listeners don't want to hear them.
Another example is when Sinclair Broadcast Group decided to not broadcast Nightline's list of the US soldiers who had died in Iraq. Surely that too was an exercise of Sinclair's right of free association, this time based on their belief that Nightline stepped too far from news into politicizing.
I don't even see how Amazon's ban on preorders of Captain America: The Winter Soldier in disc form can be called 'censorship' - it looks like normal predatory business practices which Disney should be familiar with. (Disney's own self-censorship of Song of the South would be another example of the oddity of extending the concept of "censorship" outside of the political realm.)
To be certain, the examples where a company acted due to concerns about political consequences are censorship. But that's the "normal" government censorship, simply mediated through private organizations.
I completely agree that free association is NOT an absolute right for companies! There is a tension with the rights of others, as with US civil rights laws that prohibit companies that do business with the public from discriminating on the basis of race, religion, etc.
But, what's the tension here?
If Twitter doesn't want to be associated with Greene, well, there's a long history of publishing companies, broadcast stations, newspapers, and more, who have decided to not be associated with someone. After all, that's the essence of free association.
> absolutely no recourse
Exaggeration like that seems a bit of a trite diversion/straw man. Very few of us plebians have "absolutely no recourse". You can hold a sign and protest on the street corner, or print out fliers and pass them out, or go door-to-door.
Those aren't as effective as being Robert Murdoch, but we can't all be media moguls.
What would be OK to you, and also not be unconstitutional? (Or, what amendment would you want?)
Followup question: If I don't agree to Twitter's Terms of Service, and no other service can provide any where to the same recourse as Twitter, can those terms I disagree to be nullified?
> then that person has not in any meaningful way been censored by the government
Censorship is censorship even when it is not done by the government. I am not sure what point you’re making here. Leaving that aside, I would say this is actually also, in part, an action by the government. Glenn Greenwald has written extensively about this (https://greenwald.substack.com/p/democrats-and-media-do-not-...) but the summary is that private companies seeking favor with the current administration are incentivized to take actions that grant the sitting government power, in order to avoid undesired scrutiny or legislative action.
> This is not the poster case for trying to prove tech has too much power.
It absolutely is. There is no reason to take an action like this unless there is power in that action. There’s no negative harm to Twitter in terms of user retention or advertiser attractiveness from having Rep Greene stay on their platform. The reason Twitter’s biased employees and leaders are taking such actions is because they know it will meaningfully impact Rep Greene’s ability to be heard, which favors their politics and ideology. They have that power because Twitter, like most of big tech, is too big and is too shielded from competition due to network effects. Twitter is a telecom utility service, nothing more. It needs to be regulated just like we regulate power utilities or telecom companies.
> There's a long list of marginalized people suspended for no good reason who don't get to whine about it on C-SPAN or through their press office.
Ah yes, everyone who is unjustly censored by a private cabal of hyper-powerful tech companies is “whining”. You know full well that alternate channels don’t have the same visibility or reach, so this is a facile argument, even leaving aside your pejorative framing of those who are against censorship.
The post that got her suspended claimed “extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths.” per the NYT article. I was unable to find a screenshot of the original tweet, seems to have been deleted.
A cursory look at the raw VAERS data from the CDC[1] shows:
Reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem. (...) During this time, VAERS received 10,688 reports of death (0.0022%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine. CDC and FDA clinicians review reports of death to VAERS including death certificates, autopsy, and medical records.
In contrast, the CDC[2] estimates that 817k people have died of Covid-19 in the US which puts the mortality at 248 deaths per 100k individuals. Currently, an unvaccinated individual has 20x the risk of dying from Covid-19 than someone with a booster.
I am no first amendment scholar, but spreading lies that increase people rate of mortality by 20x seems pretty close to the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" exception to protected speech. That puts aside the fact that Twitter is a private platform, thus first amendment laws do not apply.
I agree with the thrust of what you're saying, but wanted to nitpick a bit to point out that there is no 'fire in a crowded theater' exemption to protected speech. Your point that not all speech is protected is, of course, correct.
Thanks for the link, it is always a pleasure to learn from Ken White. The right to free speech (fortunately) seems to have evolved significantly since World War I! It would appear that the modern test to determine first amendment exemption is Incitement to Imminent Lawless Action and was established in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969 [1][2].
*
Advocacy of force or criminal activity does not receive First Amendment protections if (1) the advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action, and (2) is likely to incite or produce such action.
*
From that quote, I think it is pretty clear that the posts from Marjorie Greene would not pass the test and are thus eligible for first amendment protection (if Twitter was a government entity).
Caveat: Not an American, just a curious neighbour to the north.
And that's before you get into VAERS being raw data, not processed data and that the numbers reported by VAERS are going to be higher than the real ones.
We kicked out a bunch of traitors from Congress during the Civil War era, so banning a person from twitter who is actively trying to foster a Civil War by promoting lies and misinformation seems pretty mild.
Banning her or anyone like her who spreads lies is perfectly within Twitter's terms of service. The issues is doing it consistently.
I can't tell you how many times I have reported lies about elections and Covid on twitter and almost always it's "We found nothing wrong with this".
I don't think this is the same old tired argument.
Political groups are not a protected class in the United States, and for good reason. Political affiliation is not an inherent quality of a person. People's political affiliation can, and does, change.
Marjorie Taylor Green had her Twitter account terminated for breaching a written contract between her and Twitter. Her Twitter account was not terminated because she is a Republican, or because she's a woman, or because she's white, or because she's over 40, or because she's heterosexual.
During the civil rights movement, people were denied service because of the color of their skin. This didn't happen to Marjorie Taylor Green.
Politics encompasses everything. And people can switch religion too. So thats not really an argument protected rights are finite and not subject to change.
Also, Lets not pretend politics isn't the reason companies are banning and denying service to people.
They clearly banned her for her right leaning politics, and used terms like "misinformation". Its clearly forcing their politics onto the public by not allowing counter views, the politics that do include race, religion, and other aspects of life.
Civil rights like openly protesting for the opposite political party is indeed being squashed.
This is the same excuse thats used to silence preachers/priests who talk politics, as if the 2 are not the same.
Civil rights is politics. California knew this when they added political association to protected classes.
I would remind you that vaccine hesitancy, vaccine skepticism, and vaccine avoidance are not the sole property of the American political right. To this point, Twitter also banned Naomi Wolf. Google it if you're not familiar. Instagram banned RFK Jr. Google that as well if you want.
< Its clearly forcing their politics onto the public by not allowing counter views, the politics that do include race, religion, and other aspects of life.
Marjorie Taylor Green posted provably false misinformation about vaccines, in clear violation of Twitters terms of service. She entered into a binding contract when she signed up for her Twitter account, and Twitter found a suitable remedy. She breached the contract and they terminated her account.
But never mind private companies. Society does not have to accommodate toxic, antisocial "counter views" in the interest of "fair and balanced". There is nothing "fair and balanced" about lies, and there aren't two sides to every debate. It's very convenient to cry censorship, but where is your call for personal responsibility on the part of Ms. Green?
< They clearly banned her for her right leaning politics, and used terms like "misinformation".
I would be interested in proof that her account was terminated for her right leaning politics.
Thousands and thousand of politicians and others are on Twitter with politics similar to Greene, and they aren't banned. It would be pretty easy for them to just ban whoever has politics that they don't like.
They banned her because she was spreading information that they deemed harmful.
What an absolute boon for Marjorie Taylor Greene. Twitter is not a place where useful, meaningful conversation happens in the political space (especially by people like MTG) but she’ll be able to dine out on this ban for a long time. I expect it’ll be featured in every fundraising email she sends until something changes.
She’s not meaningfully censored, just like Trump wasn’t: every press release he sends gets coverage, he still sends out emails to his millions of followers just fine.
It's hard to see this as a "boon" for Marjorie Taylor Green. If Twitter is such a useless platform, why was she busy using it to promote her ideas?
I absolutely agree that termination of her Twitter account is not meaningful censorship. I'm sure it won't be long before all the networks want to interview her about it. The invitations have probably already been sent.
Twitter is a place that is used by a lot of “journalists” or just people in the media. Participating there is going to get you coverage in other forms of media and free rent in the minds of people in media.
Sometimes the right course of action doesn't fall neatly inside a simple set of rules or inside a binary "this is good, that is bad" narrative. Sometimes very similar circumstances need to be handled in very different ways because of subtle nuances in their contexts. This is why lawyers and philosophers will never be out of work and why we should all be wary of borrowing McPhilosophies from internet memes and Twitter hot-takes without putting in the effort and research to think through the issues for ourselves.
If you find yourself reacting to this news with too neat and tidy of a response, that is a good sign that you may need to spend some time trying to understand and empathize with alternative perspectives and that you may need to spend some time trying to understand why this is such a complicated (and consequential) issue for the United States government and Twitter to navigate.
What goes around will come around. The existence of Twitter as a relevant private company is now limited to 2-4 years, the amount of time the next GOP takes total control of government.
members of congress should not be using commercial social media as their exclusive form of pushing out status updates to the populace.
We have open standards (W3C recommendations) even, and these protocols can be adopted by the content management system used by House.Gov. Congress Critters need to become part of the Fedi.
This just pushes censorship down a level, as we found out with Parler and Gab. Remember when Gab used to use Mastodon, and the major app stores told the authors of Mastodon clients that unless they hardcoded a check to prevent their app from connecting to Gab, their apps would be banned?
that's fine. I'd prefer if official (public) business were conducted through public infrastructure through open protocols rather than via commercial walled-gardens.
They (being the House of Representatives) absolutely should own their namespace and operate under 'house.gov'.
Facebook and Twitter could even provide this service, as a commercially managed hosted endeavor (look at how Gmail is white-labeled as "Google Workspace" and sold as a service on a portable domain name).
The point is that when the government infrastructure refused to censor the "wrongthink" opinions, Apple and Google would ban any clients for those open protocols that don't hardcode a check to refuse to connect to those servers. And don't Google's Terms of Service apply even to Google's white-label services?
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadAnd yes, I know they can but that does not mean they should.
This won’t change minds. This will only harden viewpoints and invite political and regulatory scrutiny.
She is a Congressional Representative.
This isn't about shutting her up. Its about Twitter coming out and saying that they agree that she's a loon. No one actually expects a member of Congress to be permanently shut up over something like this.
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When '@dang' comes around here and deletes posts, its about pushing the discussion in the direction they want for this website.
The _ONLY_ moderating action internet citizens have is moderation: deletion of posts, soft-banning, permanent bans, and the like. There's no other possible effect available for Twitter (or other social media) to come down on unruly users.
But Twitter doesn't. Hacker News doesn't. Reddit doesn't.
All three of these large Social Media sites require moderators to police the actions of their users. This isn't new or exotic, this is just how the web typically works. Forums, Usenet, Mailing lists, IRC, BBS, its always been like this.
If you want to try to make a new social network with different moderation systems (ex: user-based blocking), feel free to do so. But I've hung out enough on 8-chan to know that you'll have to deal with Swatters and Doxxers almost immediately, who are looking for an unmoderated coordination medium, and they'll take advantage of your features. You'll also have to deal with lesser forms of spam and advertisements: Cryptocoin spam these days, but it used to be Viagra, or Nigerian Prince scams.
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The question isn't "Twitter shouldn't be allowed to moderate its users". The question is if Twitter made the right move here or not.
So now lets actually discuss the crux of the issue: is spreading COVID19 misinformation a big enough reason to warrant a banning? I of course agree with the move. Our hospitals are filling up with the Omicron variant and the vast majority of these patients are not-vaccinated. Twitter leveraging their reputation to say that Marjorie Taylor Green is a net benefit to society.
There's nothing preventing you from implementing your own social network with those rules.
Hacker News is a forum for business ideas and web-based technologies after all, built around an angel fund / venture capital slant.
But I'm trying to tell you that you'll end up relying upon user-based moderation for many cases: including simple cases like spam from new users or VPNs. Maybe even IP-based blocking as certain unsavory groups of people tend to cluster around certain IP addresses.
I responded to your statement that 'The _ONLY_ moderating action internet citizens have is moderation [...]'; I'm just pointing out that while that is true for twitter users at present, Twitter could experiment with other approaches if they felt like it. I'm not saying they must or they should, just that nothing prevents them. I responded in handwavey terms because your comment about 'internet citizens' seemed pretty open-ended.
But I'm trying to tell you that you'll end up relying upon user-based moderation for many cases
OK? That's the idea I was exploring. It worked to some extent on NNTP, where people would maintain 'killfiles' and different Usenet groups were more or less protective of their cohesion. I'm not suggesting it as some sort of magic bullet, just saying that centralized moderation is not the only possible approach.
And arguably not, because a huge number of NNTP servers were in fact, moderated. Especially as spam and warez started to appear on servers owned by public institutions (universities and the like), a huge chunk of USENET split into the alt.* unmoderated groups, and the other, centrally moderated groups.
Let her go elsewhere
It's the same reason why we care about murder of an elected official more than a murder of any other person.
She'll go to fox news or parler.
That if anyone else had said what Marjorie Taylor Greene had said, they would be subject to action by Twitter under its own stated policies, but the rules just shouldn't apply to her?
Last I remember Maxine Waters was calling for public harassment without consequence.
Like it or not, they have a perfect right to terminate her account for any legal reason, including breach of contract. For the record, Twitter doesn't even need a "reason" as long as they don't terminate her for an illegal reason.
This might be difficult to understand, but it's not censorship.
When people say "hang the rich" on Twitter do you see them getting banned? Twitter specifically says they do not accept appeal to violence, but in reality they only censor the language they don't agree with.
If you believe these people constitute a direct threat to the safety of the rich, why don't you report them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights
Marjorie Taylor Greene has VASTLY more ability to get her messages out, and to therefore express herself, than the average American citizen. She can go on Fox News or MSNBC or she can have her office send out press releases. Please stop saying this is censorship. This is NO WAY meets any accepted definition of censorship in the frame you are using.
In an ideal world, big tech would have more regulation and would have, due to their size, certain regulations on their behavior and who they choose not to do business with, not just in the political sphere.
An example (to draw an extreme example to make my point), Visa and MasterCard (due to their size) couldn’t just say screw OnlyFans. They are too large and influential especially together.
The argument "I know they can but that does not mean they should" doesn't imply that when they don't do something they shouldn't do they lose the ability to do it... I shouldn't be a jerk, but I do believe I have the legal right to be a jerk, so I guess by your argument I need to be a jerk and I guess no one should even call me out for it? That doesn't make any sense: Twitter currently can do this stuff; and yet, despite that, they shouldn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
class Corporation : public Person
It's for the same reason mediocre OOP programmers use inheritance to borrow some partial implementation. It gets the job done, even if it doesn't quite fit.
Believe it or not, government regulations don't have to be the solution to every little thing.
See saurik's comment below for more.
Furthermore, because Twitter isn't the government, it's probably incorrect to use "censor" or "censorship" at all. "Discrimination" is the correct word to use if a corporation like Twitter terminated her account for an illegal reason. For example: if Twitter terminated her account because she was a woman or a person of color or a member of a protected class.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censor
That doesn't apply? The common definition of censor is not exclusive to government.
By banning people based on the content of their speech, Twitter is precisely engaging in censorship. Just because they haven't called their department head responsible for handing out bans a "Censor" does not mean their constructive behavior is something new that we don't have a word for!
Furthermore, immediately referencing the Bill of Rights to call Twitter's activities "freedom of expression" is wantonly destructive to any sort of discussion. The US Bill of Rights takes natural rights and narrowly frames them in terms of restrictions on government, because that is likely the best that can be done at its level of abstraction. The scale Twitter operates at is much closer to that of government than that of the People - it is most certainly appropriate to say that Twitter is impinging upon individuals' freedom of speech. If you do not agree that it is a concern, then go ahead and make that argument on its own merits. Narrowly construing definitions so that you can discard concerns does not make for productive understanding.
(Having said that my own feeling here is that Ms. Ignorance-as-a-Service has reaped what she has sown, is of a notoriety that is legible to Twitter, and can easily publish on other platforms - compare with all the unnoteworthy individuals who get the automated banhammers with no appeal. And this will ultimately just be a boon to her, just like any other celebrity feud. But let us not twist our own definitions to assuage our cognitive dissonance!)
It's absolutely appropriate to reference the Bill of Rights. As a collection of individuals, Twitter is legally entitled to both freedom of expression and freedom of association. That said, Twitter also has every right to ban Marjorie Taylor Green for breach of contract.
> The scale Twitter operates at is much closer to that of government than that of the People.
I'm sorry, but this argument is objectively false. You cannot compare the power of Twitter to the nearly unfathomable power of the three branches of the US government. Twitter can't levy taxes. Twitter can't declare war. Twitter can't prosecute you and/or put you in jail. Twitter simply doesn't have these powers.
Furthermore by your simplistic definition, the US Government is also just "a collection of individuals". And while that collection has (conceptually) agreed to be bound by the Bill of Rights, there are clearly greater concepts at play than what has been legally defined - the US Bill of Rights does not have a monopoly on the definition of natural rights!
But talking in this framework is ultimately unproductive - it hinders making judgements on the actual details of the relationships, "contractual" or otherwise. And so discussions of individual freedom must necessarily focus on overall qualitative behavior and not simply condoning anything conforming to some axiomatic framework.
In this case, Marjorie Taylor Green's Twitter account was terminated for breach of contract. She was an adult when she signed a written contract with Twitter and opened her account. According to Twitter, she breached the agreement and they elected to choose a remedy that some people don't like. That's just too bad. She isn't facing arrest or imprisonment as a result of her statements. She can go ahead and sue them in civil court if she disagrees!
< whereby it can do all of those internal-facing "exceptional" things you listed
I'm sorry, I hate to repeat myself, but a corporation cannot levy taxes, cannot jail people, cannot execute someone, cannot declare war, all of which a government can do through a variety of legal means. In fact, the US government has so much power that it can do these things through extra legal means and face no consequences whatsoever.
Twitter does not have this kind of power, and I am rightly suspicious of arguments that attempt to frame the situation otherwise, no matter how elegantly or abstractly presented.
This is the legal analysis of how Twitter can do this, which I understand. But you keep asserting it as if it is some universal truth, without engaging with my actual arguments about the constructive result of such framework.
> a corporation cannot levy taxes, cannot jail people
Except that it can - you can sign a contract agreeing to some schedule of charges (called "taxes") or to have to spend time in a certain place (called "jail").
> cannot execute someone
The only reason you cannot sign a contract that allows for your execution as a consequence of default is because your bare ability to contract has been restricted by the larger government.
You're right, the censorship happened even before that: Twitter's contract that says "you're not allowed to express any of these opinions" is the root of the censorship.
Twitter should not censor anybody off their platform when the courts consider them a public forum, let alone elected officials.
The monopolistic cabal of Twitter, Facebook and Google changes how this should be seen.
Imho - you either break them up into a 100 companies, or you legally ban them from censorship.
Now, scientists consider it unlikely, but now you are allowed to discuss it.
Of course not. They are going to be livid and more determined in their belief. Anyone defending vaccine should be angry at Twitter for making the situation worse.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/11/study-finds-reddits-contro...
Twitter should be a place where I can argue against Greene's vaccine statements when she Tweets them. She provides an excellent central point of focus to distribute correct information, a honeypot for delivering information that is right. (insert retort: yeah but that doesn't work, you can't convince people; cool, so shut it all down then, civilization is over, give up now; throw them in the gulag, that's where you have to go with that logic if you believe people are permanently beyond reason)
Based in prior variant data, it is likely the vaccines do work to prevent severe omicron cases. Feel free to clarify what is it that the vaccines work for, and which of Marjorie Taylor Greene tweets fell afoul of that.
PS. This post is in no way an endorsement of Marjorie Taylor Greene political activities, of which I know very little other than her being a Republican Congresswoman.
https://covid19danmark.dk/#gennembrudsinfektioner
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29765351
https://world.hey.com/dhh/should-you-vaccinate-your-kids-169...
What's with this gish gallop style response?
Does anyone have a link to the tweet in question? It's interesting that it was labeled the chart as "misleading" as opposed to based on doctored data. It appears being factual is not enough and you could "mislead" depending on how you present it. But "mislead" from what precisely? A policy decision? It relates to the whole shift from "disinformation" to "misinformation", which has a much broader scope.
Either way, I always feel a little weird about a private corporation censoring a democratically elected politician, especially when concerning political speech. I get that its their platform, but its not without political influence. The white house has admitted to be in close contact with all the large social media companies regarding what is 'misinformation', going so far as to flag posts [0]. There's definitely a risk of political interference
[0] https://mleverything.substack.com/p/what-would-government-ce...
I don't agree with government compelling speech for a private company either.
The technical answer is: Verizon can't hear what you're saying to your mom, so they don't know/care the content.
The social answer is: ultimately there's no real difference between the two. If you use your Verizon phone to make harassing calls to your mom and she reports those calls to Verizon, or if you do something else that violates your agreement with Verizon, they too have the right to terminate your service:
"We can, without notice, limit, suspend or end your Service or any agreement with you for any good cause, including, but not limited to: (1) if you: (a) breach this agreement or violate our prohibited usage policies..."
Now, because you pay Verizon, and Verizon likes money, they may be more inclined to tolerate certain behavior as long as you pay your bill on time. That's their choice, though.
There's obviously a conversation to be had on what should be protected.
> Q Thanks, Jen. Can you talk a little bit more about this request for tech companies to be more aggressive in policing misinformation? Has the administration been in touch with any of these companies and are there any actions that the federal government can take to ensure their cooperation, because we’ve seen, from the start, there’s not a lot of action on some of these platforms.
> MS. PSAKI: Sure. Well, first, we are in regular touch with these social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff, but also members of our COVID-19 team, given, as Dr. Murthy conveyed, this is a big issue of misinformation, specifically on the pandemic.
> In terms of actions, Alex, that we have taken — or we’re working to take, I should say — from the federal government: We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s office. We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. We’re working with doctors and medical professionals to connect — to connect medical experts with popular — with popular — who are popular with their audiences with — with accurate information and boost trusted content. So we’re helping get trusted content out there.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/202...
https://twitter.com/johncardillo/status/1477663920349499400/...
the complaint seems to be her presentation is misleading. i can understand that. if you give some medical treatment to a large number of people then some of them are going to be harmed by it but the benefits to individuals could still exceed the harm. but if we apply the same kind of logic then i feel twitter's warning text is misleading. it is not the complete picture whether COVID 19 vaccine is considered 'safe' for a person. what is important for an individual when making a decision whether to take the vaccine or not is whether the benefits exceed the costs. a vaccine might be 'safe' but the costs might still exceed the benefits if the risk differential between vaccinated and unvaccinated is low enough.
Now before everyone freaks out - we've changed the claim around what a vaccine does. It's no longer intended to prevent spreading covid or prevent contracting covid, it's just intended to reduce symptoms of covid. So if that's your definition of vaccine efficacy then I would agree her claims were false.
Twitter suspended Ms. Greene’s account after she tweeted on Saturday, falsely, about “extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths.”
> Ms. Greene’s official Congressional account, @RepMTG, remains active because tweets from that account did not violate the service’s rules.
It's funny when politicians with entire staff committed to disseminating information complain about censorship.
This isn't like the FCC regulating the airwaves, the internet isn't a limited spectrum, and there's no reason to act as if the capacity to disseminate information over it is actually a scarce resource.
Why does the government need to built its own social media platform? We regulate other privately-owned utilities all the time. Cell phone companies, power utilities, water services, waste management, etc. This is no different - social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are fundamental services in our modern society and it is unacceptable for users to be unfairly discriminated against or banned based on their viewpoints.
> Having the government take over a private business because it decides the free speech rights of politicians should be more important than the free speech and association rights of everyone else is a bad idea.
We already do this all the time in many different ways - it’s called regulation and it is not the same as “taking over” a business, so spare me the hyperbole. The free speech of individuals is more important that the association rights of Twitter or the cabal of other tech oligopolies that are all immune to competition due to their market capitalization and network effects.
> This isn't like the FCC regulating the airwaves, the internet isn't a limited spectrum, and there's no reason to act as if the capacity to disseminate information over it is actually a scarce resource.
Actually it does bear some similarities. The scarcity is not around a ‘spectrum’ but it does exist because these products rely on network effects (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect). These network effects mean that access to users and attention is limited and there is a barrier to entry that prevents market competition from functioning properly. So there absolutely is reason to act as if the capacity to disseminate information is a scarce resource.
Plus, are we trying to force companies to let all speech through (antisemitism OK? True racism OK?), or just to force them to carry what they deem "misinformation"?
It's hard to understand exactly what the goal of this "regulation" are and it's even harder to imagine a regulatory scheme that would accomplish those goals without major unwanted side effects.
I don't think this is really true. Most people in the US don't use Twitter. Not to mention that many users are following entertainment based users or aren't fully consuming posts by those they follow.
Twitter is just an additional stream/supplement to town halls, email lists, websites, news coverage, etc.
> Political fortunes can swing on bad press releases.
> Political fortunes can swing on bad interviews.
> Political fortunes can swing on bad comments at private dinners that become public.
As they should.
https://nypost.com/2021/12/29/rep-greene-suggests-a-national...
* It's really stupid that Twitter makes old tweets invisible. First they're easily accessible by other means to technically savvy people via archive.org or whatever, so this just throws barriers in the way of the least technically educated. Second, it fosters paranoia and mistrust because conversations about the tweets begin to resemble rumors rather than fact.
Open protocols should be the default. We have W3C recommendations that make the federated social web possible.
I agree.
> the audience will move if necessary.
If we let that be the plan, then our filter bubble problem will get even worse. Everyone left of a certain point will only be on Twitter, and everyone else will only be on the fediverse. It's a lot less likely that people will follow anyone they disagree with if they'd need another account they couldn't otherwise use.
Walled-garden social is sort of the same thing in a way.
Twitter itself is under no more of an obligation to publish material from a politician than a newspaper is. Both are corporations that operate under obligations to their shareholders. If a politician really wants to publish something on Twitter, they can pay for promoted ads just like they can with a newspaper. Expecting social media platforms to promote their message for free is hopelessly naive and does not match how democracy has worked for centuries. Sure, newspapers have published political messages for free via editorials and stories, but they are not obligated to do so. Getting the message out has always required time from volunteers and/or money towards supporting the cause.
It's simply an attempt at an end-run around the free press, that's why it is so popular with the extremists and that's why the extremists do their damnest to create their own 'safe space' for their horrifying little screeds.
However, there’s presumably nothing stopping her from issuing this nonsense via press release, or on a blog, or similar.
Also, according to the article, it seems like her strikes were for subjective comments. If this is the case, that strikes me as doubly wrong. According to the article:
> Twitter suspended Ms. Greene’s account after she tweeted on Saturday, falsely, about “extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths.” She included a misleading chart that pulled data from a government database of unverified raw data.
The phrase "extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths" seems to be a true subjective opinion if there were some non-zero number of Covid vaccine deaths. People might disagree on whether an objective number should be subjectively described as high or low, but it seems like that's an opinion.
Also, why describe a chart as misleading? Why not describe it as false information? There's a big difference. Whether you disagree with her data or not, Twitter deciding that a government chart is "misleading" is kind of horrifying as a precedent because data could still be true and marked as misleading. Are they going to ban politicians from discussing budget charts or crime statistics in public debates if they decide that it's misleading with no objective basis?
> The company had issued her a fourth strike in August after she falsely posted that the vaccines were “failing.”
Whether a government policy is failing or not seems highly subjective. Is this really vaccine misinformation?
> Ms. Greene was given a third strike less than a month before that when she had tweeted that Covid-19 was not dangerous for people unless they were obese or over age 65, and said vaccines should not be required.
Based on the survival rates for people in these categories, many people would say that this is accurate and based on a subjective risk-management analysis. It's certainly less dangerous for young and non-fat people. Did this really merit a strike even by their convoluted logic? Certainly not.
I’m assuming the “government database” is VEARS, which is using raw, unverified data. It would be like if someone took NextDoor or Shotspotter reports to derive crime statistics.
Here is the direct link: https://vaers.hhs.gov/esub/index.jsp
Even though it seemed weird he immediately suggested switching to something else.
Doctors don’t apply a robotic “this could never happen” approach when dealing with unexpected side effects, regardless of whether there’s empirical evidence for them or not.
In fact, speaking on data, couldn't we say that almost all data is imperfect to some extent? Isn't this especially true of Covid-related data?
Knowing that some data is imperfect, can it still be a useful data point for understanding the world? Is it unreasonable to use ShotSpotter as a tool in your toolbox for understanding the world just because we believe it to be imperfect?
Likewise for VAERS it makes more sense to look at the abundant amounts of analyzed information, or else provide a critique for why existing analysis was wrong. Presenting low-quality data without caveats or explanation to disprove higher-quality information seems to fall within the realm of misinformation.
They can, and should, ban all these lunatics, and they shouldn't need any kind of ridiculous TOS justification to do so.
When Twitter does an action like this, or any other media platform, it is rarely done by a single person on a whim. It is a collective decision by a number - 2, 3 or maybe more - of people.
The crazy part that this decision is solely one-sided. Twitter doesn't care if this person is right or wrong, their understanding is that this person is spreading misinformation and that's it. And in a case like this, it is most certainly amplified by the stature of the person in question.
Who says the information is right or wrong? Well, I'd bet that it is also a collective of people. In this case, it is probably scientists and health professionals. Who, of course, in due course could also be found out to have been wrong.
But, Twitter is clearly omni-sentient and can see that their decision is the right one.
I'm assuming it's something like the numbers of vaccine complications reports have gone up in objective numbers but not relative to numbers of vaccinations and that could look scary on a graph - or something like that.
But why do I have to guess or search out the information myself? I would think a news article could and should easily incorporate this.
The big problem with this reporting style is that reality could be either Twitter unjustifiably censoring people because they don't like their politics by making harsh rule interpretations, or MTG repeatedly sharing harmful misinformation and deserving a ban. Because the NYT won't actually show information the reader is left not knowing and likely believing an interpretation based on what they thought going in to the article.
I get a lot of value from Twitter because I follow a few awesomely interesting people, but I could probably get the same effect by bookmarking their blogs.
People should have access to all information, and filter for themselves what is trash. I don’t want Twitter, news media, etc. filtering.
I have started to just pay attention to a small number of people: Lex Fridman, Joe Rogan, Matt Taibbi, and Noam Chomsky. That is a small sample size, but enough diversity for me.
I am having some difficulty deciding whether I think the major Platforms should be public regulated services or the property of companies that can do anything they want to with their property. My opinion changes on this…
It's a fine orthogonal discussion. There are several things worth considering in my mind:
* Perhaps these social media platforms are defectively designed
* Section 230 may need to be amended so that billion-dollar companies have more to hold them to account when things spread on their platforms
* CEOs could be criminally prosecuted when their companies lie (e.g., Facebook's ad revenue fraud in promoting FB video)
I think there are far better reasons to consider leaving social media than them suspending the personal account of a known provocateur who breaks rules all the time (her official government account is intact).
edit: one of two accounts. Her personal account, not her official account.
> People should have access to all information, and filter for themselves what is trash. I don’t want Twitter, news media, etc. filtering.
And people still do -- Marjorie can start a blog on a vps and I'm sure most providers would be reasonably okay with it, unless she became a DDoS target (possible).
If you are upset because the people that gave her that platform said "you are doing it wrong" this happens in the physical world too. If you show up to a sports arena (a place with a large group of people that are captive) and hang a sign in the stands with an "unacceptable" message, the arena will ask you to take it down or force you to.
Platforms have a brand, and they are filtering for their own brand reputation.
I hate that our web is more "centralized" but all of these actions are going to enable more decentralization to happen because of it.
Poor analogy. A sports arena is one big room for sport, not messaging. If people stood on soapboxes and yelled their off-topic ideas at everyone in the arena, they would be asked to leave regardless of what their messages were.
Twitter's purpose is publishing messages on any topic. It is not one big room where everyone must hear everyone else. The equivalent "doing it wrong" on Twitter is not (or shouldn't be) dissenting views or objections to vaccines. Doing it wrong on Twitter should be confined to inappropriate use of the API or some other technical misuse that actually impacts other users. Or posting illegal material or hate speech.
I don't remember anyone asking Big Tech companies to act as helicopter parents, protecting readers via censorship from ideas that don't align with current public policy.
Reasonable people should not condemn cancel culture; reasonable people should support efforts to cancel racism, sexism, ageism, and the other -isms that cause profound harm to members of our societies. It's not really that difficult to not make racist, sexist, or homophobic remarks.
I was thinking of what Bill Mahr, on his HBO show, talks about as far as cancelling appearances at universities of people who were invited to talk, and then some subgroup protested that they didn’t like their opinions. I am also thinking of cancelling people whose political opinions vary, and also in this case an elected Congresswoman who has some very wrong ideas about the dangers of vaccinations.
I think that racist, etc. remarks are easier to filter and discard than political ideas. I feel comfortable using automated filters to discard racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks, but I am not comfortable discarding political speech.
I'm going to assume that you have good intent here, but usually "some subgroup" is dog whistle for a repressed group such as persons of color or gay people. I hope that marginalized subgroups continue to protest and get people canceled, and I intend to continue paying and donating my time and effort to make sure they can get the canceling done.
< didn’t like their opinions
Very often these "canceled" opinions include one or more of the "big three": ideology that is sexist, racist, or homophobic. People espousing these beliefs should face consequences for their behavior; they should be canceled. Society does not have to accept the toxic notion that a system should be "fair and balanced" to accommodate poisonous, antisocial ideas and behavior.
The old system, the system that accommodated these poisonous, antisocial ideas was responsible for ruining many lives because people thought it was okay to say that people should not be able to get divorced, or go to college, or have birth control, or earn an equal living, or have a bank account or credit card. Or live in a certain neighborhood. And when it was okay to say it, it was okay to put it into public and private policy alike. You could be fired for being gay, or pregnant, or not hired. You couldn't live in a certain neighborhood if you were African American, unless you wanted to find burning crosses outside your house at night. You could be jailed for engaging in private, consensual gay sex in some US jurisdictions until 2003.
So forgive me if I take a little liberty here. I think it's totally okay for people to assemble and protest a speaker because they don't agree with their political views. It's equally okay for a university to cancel an appearance because they or their students or faculty don't agree with the political positions of the speaker. I can't remember a single instance in my life where I ever made political speech, or any other speech, that called for the repression of any group or sub-group of society simply because I felt like it, or because I read about it in some book written in the Judean or Arabian deserts several millennia ago.
Cancel culture is just the free market at work. I found that explaining it this way to conservatives helped them understand why it was necessary (and I am not assuming you are a conservative).
edit to add: That said, she can say things on C-SPAN that would get the congressional account suspended too (see: Trump hopping accounts as they got suspended after the initial ban). And those things would be reported by people who can do so under the cover of reporting, so it's not like she has any less reach for the goofballery now.
It'd be like getting banned from one station, perhaps. Radio? To my knowledge the FCC has never banned anyone from the airwaves.
This pretense that the big social networks are so big that politicians must be granted access is just poisonous beyond belief to what the internet is. No one is stopping MTG from setting up countless points of her own presence, or sharing links to MTG-related media on Twitter.
Alas, that getting banned from one of the big networks is a crude, de-facto facsimile to a truth is quite the sad sign of the state of affairs. That we have become so very centralized, that our primary way of connecting is via such heavily centralized pillars that hold up so very much of the online experience is nothing short of a travesty. I mainly try to calm myself by reminding myself how recent all this is, how new. And assuring myself of their inability to create new & visionary ways of connecting; the big networks are beholden to their experience as massified, consumerized, common experiences. Their own impermissiveness, their own slowly closing, setting ever more fast in concrete rules & expectations bring hope that the frontier & more open communications might rise again.
It's more like if one company owned a large proportion of radio stations in every town, and that company banned you.
It's more like getting banned from one radio station in the 1940s and going "Who cares? She can still go on a bunch of other radio stations, and most people are capable of tuning in, if they want to."
She's on Facebook. She's on Gab. She's on Parler. She's on Gettr. She went on a cross-country tour last year. She appears on TV and will probably get even more TV appearances out of this. Anyone who wants to hear whatever she's saying has their choice of outlets from which to do so.
And if they can easily get away with censoring people who "get to whine about it on C-SPAN", it is certain that you and I and the rest of the plebeians have absolutely no recourse. That is not OK.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
More specifically, most of the examples at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_censorship seem to be ones where a company exercised its First Amendment right of free association.
One of the examples is when the Dixie Chicks were blacklisted by country radio stations. Surely stations have a First Amendment right to decide to not broadcast songs from a given group, especially when most of the the owners, staff, advertisers, and listeners don't want to hear them.
Another example is when Sinclair Broadcast Group decided to not broadcast Nightline's list of the US soldiers who had died in Iraq. Surely that too was an exercise of Sinclair's right of free association, this time based on their belief that Nightline stepped too far from news into politicizing.
I don't even see how Amazon's ban on preorders of Captain America: The Winter Soldier in disc form can be called 'censorship' - it looks like normal predatory business practices which Disney should be familiar with. (Disney's own self-censorship of Song of the South would be another example of the oddity of extending the concept of "censorship" outside of the political realm.)
To be certain, the examples where a company acted due to concerns about political consequences are censorship. But that's the "normal" government censorship, simply mediated through private organizations.
I completely agree that free association is NOT an absolute right for companies! There is a tension with the rights of others, as with US civil rights laws that prohibit companies that do business with the public from discriminating on the basis of race, religion, etc.
But, what's the tension here?
If Twitter doesn't want to be associated with Greene, well, there's a long history of publishing companies, broadcast stations, newspapers, and more, who have decided to not be associated with someone. After all, that's the essence of free association.
> absolutely no recourse
Exaggeration like that seems a bit of a trite diversion/straw man. Very few of us plebians have "absolutely no recourse". You can hold a sign and protest on the street corner, or print out fliers and pass them out, or go door-to-door.
Those aren't as effective as being Robert Murdoch, but we can't all be media moguls.
What would be OK to you, and also not be unconstitutional? (Or, what amendment would you want?)
Followup question: If I don't agree to Twitter's Terms of Service, and no other service can provide any where to the same recourse as Twitter, can those terms I disagree to be nullified?
Censorship is censorship even when it is not done by the government. I am not sure what point you’re making here. Leaving that aside, I would say this is actually also, in part, an action by the government. Glenn Greenwald has written extensively about this (https://greenwald.substack.com/p/democrats-and-media-do-not-...) but the summary is that private companies seeking favor with the current administration are incentivized to take actions that grant the sitting government power, in order to avoid undesired scrutiny or legislative action.
> This is not the poster case for trying to prove tech has too much power.
It absolutely is. There is no reason to take an action like this unless there is power in that action. There’s no negative harm to Twitter in terms of user retention or advertiser attractiveness from having Rep Greene stay on their platform. The reason Twitter’s biased employees and leaders are taking such actions is because they know it will meaningfully impact Rep Greene’s ability to be heard, which favors their politics and ideology. They have that power because Twitter, like most of big tech, is too big and is too shielded from competition due to network effects. Twitter is a telecom utility service, nothing more. It needs to be regulated just like we regulate power utilities or telecom companies.
> There's a long list of marginalized people suspended for no good reason who don't get to whine about it on C-SPAN or through their press office.
Ah yes, everyone who is unjustly censored by a private cabal of hyper-powerful tech companies is “whining”. You know full well that alternate channels don’t have the same visibility or reach, so this is a facile argument, even leaving aside your pejorative framing of those who are against censorship.
A cursory look at the raw VAERS data from the CDC[1] shows:
Reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem. (...) During this time, VAERS received 10,688 reports of death (0.0022%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine. CDC and FDA clinicians review reports of death to VAERS including death certificates, autopsy, and medical records.
In contrast, the CDC[2] estimates that 817k people have died of Covid-19 in the US which puts the mortality at 248 deaths per 100k individuals. Currently, an unvaccinated individual has 20x the risk of dying from Covid-19 than someone with a booster.
I am no first amendment scholar, but spreading lies that increase people rate of mortality by 20x seems pretty close to the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" exception to protected speech. That puts aside the fact that Twitter is a private platform, thus first amendment laws do not apply.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/mortality-overview.htm
https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...
* Advocacy of force or criminal activity does not receive First Amendment protections if (1) the advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action, and (2) is likely to incite or produce such action. *
From that quote, I think it is pretty clear that the posts from Marjorie Greene would not pass the test and are thus eligible for first amendment protection (if Twitter was a government entity).
Caveat: Not an American, just a curious neighbour to the north.
[1] https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/970/incitement-to-i... [2] https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/189/brandenburg-v-o...
Banning her or anyone like her who spreads lies is perfectly within Twitter's terms of service. The issues is doing it consistently.
I can't tell you how many times I have reported lies about elections and Covid on twitter and almost always it's "We found nothing wrong with this".
- Censorship bad, the state should regulate social media to not censor
- It's a private company, they can do whatever they want
Used however it fits by either political side.
Are we better than this?
Society banned private companies denying services in law to promote a better and acceptable society.
Sadly, just to re-implement it again under the same old tired argument, it's a private company...
It's not fooling anyone who is being honest, this is just banning people you don't like.
Political group is the new religious group, banning the groups you don't like shouldn't be acceptable in modern society.
Political groups are not a protected class in the United States, and for good reason. Political affiliation is not an inherent quality of a person. People's political affiliation can, and does, change.
Marjorie Taylor Green had her Twitter account terminated for breaching a written contract between her and Twitter. Her Twitter account was not terminated because she is a Republican, or because she's a woman, or because she's white, or because she's over 40, or because she's heterosexual.
During the civil rights movement, people were denied service because of the color of their skin. This didn't happen to Marjorie Taylor Green.
Also, Lets not pretend politics isn't the reason companies are banning and denying service to people.
They clearly banned her for her right leaning politics, and used terms like "misinformation". Its clearly forcing their politics onto the public by not allowing counter views, the politics that do include race, religion, and other aspects of life.
Civil rights like openly protesting for the opposite political party is indeed being squashed.
This is the same excuse thats used to silence preachers/priests who talk politics, as if the 2 are not the same.
Civil rights is politics. California knew this when they added political association to protected classes.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jun/05/naomi-wolf-ban...
< Its clearly forcing their politics onto the public by not allowing counter views, the politics that do include race, religion, and other aspects of life.
Marjorie Taylor Green posted provably false misinformation about vaccines, in clear violation of Twitters terms of service. She entered into a binding contract when she signed up for her Twitter account, and Twitter found a suitable remedy. She breached the contract and they terminated her account.
But never mind private companies. Society does not have to accommodate toxic, antisocial "counter views" in the interest of "fair and balanced". There is nothing "fair and balanced" about lies, and there aren't two sides to every debate. It's very convenient to cry censorship, but where is your call for personal responsibility on the part of Ms. Green?
< They clearly banned her for her right leaning politics, and used terms like "misinformation".
I would be interested in proof that her account was terminated for her right leaning politics.
But to say her view is toxic, would be picking sides. Her posting CDC links is pretty far from toxic.
That seems pretty much targeted for her politics.
They banned her because she was spreading information that they deemed harmful.
She’s not meaningfully censored, just like Trump wasn’t: every press release he sends gets coverage, he still sends out emails to his millions of followers just fine.
I absolutely agree that termination of her Twitter account is not meaningful censorship. I'm sure it won't be long before all the networks want to interview her about it. The invitations have probably already been sent.
If you find yourself reacting to this news with too neat and tidy of a response, that is a good sign that you may need to spend some time trying to understand and empathize with alternative perspectives and that you may need to spend some time trying to understand why this is such a complicated (and consequential) issue for the United States government and Twitter to navigate.
We have open standards (W3C recommendations) even, and these protocols can be adopted by the content management system used by House.Gov. Congress Critters need to become part of the Fedi.
They (being the House of Representatives) absolutely should own their namespace and operate under 'house.gov'.
Facebook and Twitter could even provide this service, as a commercially managed hosted endeavor (look at how Gmail is white-labeled as "Google Workspace" and sold as a service on a portable domain name).