Twitter is also a hugely valuable networking tool for activists and academics, particularly those from marginalised communities. It ain’t all clickbait and vanity.
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All the more reason to enforce policies to keep the platform from being overrun by fascists. The lack of moderation (or at least selective enforcement of the rules) has allowed Twitter’s usefulness as a tool for evil grow far faster than its usefulness as a tool for good.
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Thank you for this video, it makes me think and that is the best thing…
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The general left consensus, supported by this story, is that Twitter’s management are not merely incompetent but are instead actively malicious.
It’s a useful thing owned by bad people.
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Maybe so. In any case it’s currently enabling lots of bad people to do lots of bad things and is therefore a thing we can no longer afford to ignore.
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I might disagree about the “useful” part given its wretched design and the endumbening (cromulent word, that) character limit but I grok your larger point.
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Yup.
Some others need watching, as well. A lot of the street-level neofascist organising these days is on Gab or Discord rather than Twitter.
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Nicely put. Thanks. Saves me the trouble of figuring out how to put it succinctly.
+1 … I personally had many accounts banned for “automated or bot-like behaviour” despite every single one of those accounts being real, non-automated and all of their tweets being original compositions.
Their “rules” are a joke and their CEO has demonstrated himself to be a poor businessman and morally bankrupt… How are those daily active user numbers jack? Too shit to regularly report lest all the advertisers will flee to Facebook/Instagram? Your Monthly Active Users plateaued 3+ years ago… you know… kinda around the time you returned to ‘save twitter’
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You’re confusing the issue again. If you believe Alex Jones wouldn’t be voted off Twitter if a vote was held, then the CEO is in fact enforcing his ideals over that of the commons in What can only be described as the simplistic view that ”equal” = everyone gets an equal say, when in fact equal = everyone’s opinion matters, especially when the majority opinion is you are spewing bigoted hate and therefore do not belong here.
The voice of the people is relevant, and is often voiced through group action, including boycotts and social pressure. That IS democracy, dear reader, majority opinion rules. And the majority (thankfully!) is still very anti-Nazi.
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i like cheese
What is it OK to do to someone who is a fascist and what is the definition of a fascist person? Also, as an American, I would like to know what percentage of my fellow citizens you consider fascists. A lot seems to hinge on the answers to these questions.
Woah, woah.
You can argue passionately that Jack Dorsey isn’t a Nazi himself, but your own initial Vanity Fair link is about how Dorsey absolutely supports Nazis. It even talks about how he personally apologized to an extremely far-right personality for being called the offensive title of “far-right.” Outside of being one of the people unwilling to call the white nationalists that protested in Charlottesville Nazis (in which case you would simply be wrong), there isn’t a world in which Twitter isn’t supporting Nazis - and especially supporting Nazis disproportionately if they were going for “political balance.”
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Not really.
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I think the solution here is to replace the word Nazi with “person sympathetic and supportive of racial cleansing, nationalistic xenophobia, white supremacy, hate and fear profiteering, and regressivism.” That way these “you can’t call me/him a Nazi” arguments become more difficult to type though no less/more accurate.
Bit of a straw man don’t you think. We aren’t calling anyone who disagrees with us Nazis. We are calling anyone who supports the Nazi/fascist agenda Nazis. So, I suppose you may not have a straw man argument if we are talking about the Nazi/fascist/white supremacist movement in the U.S. which I am against. Anyone who disagrees with my hatred for these movements, I’ll definitely call a Nazi… because… well… if you support the Nazi/fascist/white supremacist movement in the U.S. or the people involved in it… that pretty much makes you a “person sympathetic and supportive of racial cleansing, nationalistic xenophobia, white supremacy, hate and fear profiteering, and regressivism.” aka Nazi.
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I’m sure you didn’t mean this as an absolute stance, so this is rather directed at the general readership: majorities aren’t everything in a democracy. Checks an balances, the protection of minorities and societies’ weakest, and the protection of inalienable rights are what makes a democracy in our modern sense a democracy. Democracy by representation is, in large part, about compromise. Some issues, however, are not open for debate, as has been said over and over again on this and other threads. Fascism, and populism in general, tries to undermine this citing a majority - the so-called will of the people.
If you’ve followed international news, you might have registered that Germany, of all places, currently has a problem with the neo-nazi mob taking to the street and claiming to be the majority.
Twitter, and anti-social branches of social media in general, do play a role in this, I am sure.
De-platforming of hate-speech is a fiddly thing to do, especially if you’ve got different cultures of free speech issues clashing. There’s plenty of stuff on Twitter and FB violating not only German law, but basic consensus in German society about what is acceptable to say.
You can’t explain to a German person why a company like FB does not allow pics of female nipples, but does allow Holocaust denial.
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We can say that Twitter isn’t hard enough on Nazis, but if you think Twitter is “supporting Nazis” then you’re living in the Third Reich.
Racist, white supremacist, alt-right, there’s plenty of other terms available, and none of them apply to Jack Dorsey.
Straw man? The original comment I replied to literally accused Twitter of being run by Nazis. Now that probably had some hyperbole, but the comment and the article both incorrectly accused Jack Dorsey of being alt-right.
Hence I stand by my comment of people getting called Nazi just for disagreeing.
Fascism is pretty well defined already:
You may also wish to consult Hannah Arendt, who wrote extensively on totalitarian states in general:
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Twitter verified Jason Kessler because he was the one to organize Unite the Right after Charlottesville and a month after Twitter publicly claiming they would be enforcing their policies on hate groups. I’m sorry that these basic facts elude you, but Twitter has bent over backwards defending hate groups - and particularly white nationalist groups.
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Hey @orenwolf, semi-serious question:
If Twitter is a cesspool “run” by Nazis (or at least enabling them), does BB plan to institute an editorial policy to no longer use Twitter links in posts?
