Well, the “authoritarian” part of “authoritarian” comes into play when someone who is a leader says something. If Adam Baldwin said to give to a charity supporting gay rights in Uganda, 95% of the people who agree with him on Twitter would immediately adopt that new position and not see it as at all contradictory to their existing positions and beliefs.
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If this is about Twitter in particular, that article that Randi Lee Harper and Charlie Stross cited about concrete, simple technical steps that Twitter could take to reduce abuse (like more sensible limits on new egg accounts) was quite good. If I was in charge at Twitter I would have built at least half the stuff in their list years ago.
Often these talks boil down to “Twitter kind of sucks at building product” which is really, uh, true. They remain the worst company in Silicon Valley at building product, borderline incompetency.
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On the plus side, Baldwin huffed away from Twitter a couple days ago claiming he won’t return because a vocal pro date-rape, anti-miscengationist with a history of doxxing feminists/enemies (who were subsequently harassed) had their account closed.
Twitter’s leadership blows, their product is frustrating, and their approach to dealing with abuse has been ineffective/counter-productive at best, but I like to see them accused of their actual wrongdoings. The link above about the great political witch hunt against conservative free speech on Twitter was omitting a few important details about the banned party with a history of doxxing feminists.
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One of the “problem behaviors” that is reportable to Twitter is “disagreement with my opinion”.
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The choice you are talking about is clearly to report offensive and disrespectful comments, and you are complaining about their bad grammar in phrasing the choice, not about their actual policies.
You can check that box, but if you actually click the link next to that box to find out what they will and will not remove, the criteria are based on Content Boundaries (copyright violation, etc.), Spam and Abusive Behaviour, and the abusive behaviour categories are:
- Violent Threats
- Hateful Content
- Multiple Account Abuse
- Private Information
- Impersonation
- Self Harm
- Harassment
The criteria used to evaluate harassment are detailed as:
- if a primary purpose of the reported account is to harass or send abusive messages to others;
- if the reported behavior is one-sided or includes threats;
- if the reported account is inciting others to harass another account; and
- if the reported account is sending harassing messages to an account from multiple accounts.
The form requires you to submit the specific tweets that were problematic so they can be evaluated. That is, they don’t simply ban or suspend anyone who is reported.
There is lots of detail given about how they evaluate these things, and nowhere does it suggest that they would take any action against someone merely for disagreeing with someone else’s opinion.
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If it’s behavior, not opinions, then it would be a reasonable courtesy for Twitter to tell anyone who is banned, unchecked, or suspended exactly which tweets crossed the line, so we could all see them.
And of course as I have already said upthread, as a private company they are under no obligation whatever to do this, nor is anyone entitled to whine about “censorship” if they don’t.
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Feel free to write them a letter. I get the sense that with the long and storied history of GamerGaters/other harassment brigades exploiting Twitter’s attempts to block them they might not want to be too open. The guy who was turned into a martyr in that federalist article you linked to who was banned had previously tweeted to his followers ways to work around blocking users so the GamerGate trollies could carry on their harassment campaign against Sarkeesian, so perhaps they might think information could help exploit loopholes (maybe). I think it would be helpful if only to prevent the paranoids from inventing conspiracy theories.
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That I disagree with, it’s not a reasonable courtesy to act as Kindergarten teacher to grownups. The only purpose of telling people what they did to get themselves banned would be to give them quotable sentence fragments to “prove” to themselves that Twitter has turned into some kind of echo chamber of progressive politics.
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But doesn’t “Liberal” cover a very wide range of beliefs, with the middle ground between them and conservatives having moved dramatically to the right in the last 40 year? Some liberals seem very right wing to me (Hillary Clinton for example).
Then there’s the thing with a lot of libertarian-socialists not identifying as liberal as they view their politics as revolutionary while liberals are reformists.
I’ll admit to toning down what I say here, as I’m giving Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders a chance to move politics back to the left, and effectively giving representative democracy a last chance too.
But know that’s not what what @lolipop_jones is saying, It’s just my view from the libertarian-far-left.
Again, from my perspective BoingBoing covers quite a wide political range of views, just not those of Republicans or Libertarian-Capitalists (or Stalinists, as a left wing example).
I also avoid reading conservative sites, because they would often trigger PTSD episodes when covering LGBT issues.
Not fun 
Yes, read things that oppose your preconceptions, but recognise that it isn’t always healthy to do so. If the Daily Mail’s views makes you suicidal you probably don’t want to look at anything to the right of it (Or the left of it if you are right wing, although I doubt that you would be able to function in society if that were the case.)
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Yes, that’s why I put the word in quotation marks. When I described this place as generally “liberal,” I mean the American sense of the term (which may not be a fair use of the “liberal” descriptor for bbs). Are you in the U.S.? The range of labels across the spectrum here is is very small compared to other places, perhaps in part because Republican and Democrat are so widely seen as the only two viable operative political parties. The “socialist” label for Sanders, for example, is a big smear for many Americans, even for many “liberals.”
Yeah, me too, which is why I describe the general tenor here as “liberal” (in the American sense), that is, further to the right that myself.
Really? Can you point to any particular posts that make you say so?
There may be a post or two on Corbyn, but I don’t remember it. Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman (unless she’s interviewing someone else), Cornel West and such figures on the American further-left also seem pretty much ignored here.
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Personally I have always tried to live by the words of Lady Jessica Atreides: “I can think of nothing more poisonous than to rot in the stink of your own reflections.”
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Why hasn’t someone hacked his account and done this?
Not that I’d condone it, of course.
No, I’m in the UK, but there are some people here who use it in the American sense, like my parents. At one point liberals were seen as being in between the socialists and conservatives, but that was before Tony Blair and Nick Clegg moved their parties to the right.
Some things, although not a lot. I clearly remember this from a few years ago
I cant see comments there anymore but I remember it got criticised by people who assumed it had something to do with Objectivism. Mutual Aid must have been one of Ayn Rands favourite books. </sarcasm>
Other than that, I can’t think of examples. I think that when it does happen it’s most likely to be something from Cory Doctorow, and I think Mark Frauenfelder has written about Reason articles while also saying he doesn’t agree with their economic views.
But am I doing that? The American definition of liberal is so broad it stops just short of meaning “someone who has a political view”. Let’s look at that Political Compass chart of the Republicans and Democrats who are after presidential nominations again.
For reference, when I do the test I consistently come in the four squares in the bottom left
corner. Who’s stink am I rotting in? Bernie’s? Hillary’s? The Guardian? The Morning Star? Almost none of the national press (Morning Star excepted) here in the UK stray outside of the comfort zone of Labour/LibDem/Tory/Ukip, who are all in the top Right quadrant (Jeremy Corbyn might be moving out of it but there is a lot of inertia from the New Labour types). I actually used to have an online subscription to the Financial Times, but I can’t afford it anymore and I don’t expect that to change unless Jeremy Corbyn wins the next UK General Election, or Scotland leaves the United Kingdom and I move back North.
My political views are something like this. I don’t know about the Democrats, but expressing those views would be a rather fast way to get yourself kicked out of the Labour Party here in the UK.
I do read a lot which is far to the right from my perspective. Just because I don’t read some of the more extreme views, because of a likelihood of them causing mental health problems, it doesn’t mean that I am rotting in the stink of my own reflections
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Thank you. I keep saying that we don’t need some massive new legal framework. We need to deterring bad behavior.
Thanks for the link. Here’s how I scored, totally not a surprise to me:
Interesting test indeed, with results about my beliefs that don’t surprise me either (I ended up in the far lower left corner, which is more or less where I imagine @anon73430903 ended up?).
Anyone interpreting the results in the US would need to understand the very different meaning there of “libertarian.”
Fun thing. Got this myself:
Interesting that I’m closer to Bernie Sanders than anyone else.
If he could only convince me that his Social Security and healthcare plans are actuarily sound in the long run, I might vote for him.
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Less left than I expected.
https://www.politicalcompass.org/yourpoliticalcompass?ec=-7.5&soc=-8.56
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