Ok, sure. Then what should we call providing a platform for racist fascist hate speech which goes against your own terms of service and the better judgement of the people who have been hired to make that call? Is that not supporting Nazis?
Providing material aid and support to racists, white supremacists, and the alt-right at the very least makes one a sympathizer of racists, white supremacists, and the alt-right but why beat around the bush?
So you follow up a your straw man with whataboutism?
Of course you do. You are bending over backwards to defend a man who is behaving like a sympathizer to toxic ideology so it’s only natural that you would push your straw man which pretends aiding and providing a voice to racists is just a matter of “disagreeing” and not the support it actually is.
Let me ask you, do you know Jack? Do you have some evidence to back up your claim he is not a racist or white supremacist? I ask becuase many have called him out for his support of racists against the judgement of his company and the TOS that it uses and here you are, joining the voices of the alt-right to defend him. Yet I see no evidence being presented that he is not a white supremacist and lots being presented that he is. So, the question is, do you have anything to offer us which might counter the evidence of sympathy and support for racist, fascist, and toxic people?
Because those platforms represent the vast majority of eyeballs to generate revenue. For Boing Boing to leave them would literally be the end of Boing Boing. Same with ads. We hate dealing with adtech. But without it, Boing Boing would not exist.
So, instead, the Authors blog, raise awareness. and when inertia swings away towards alternative platforms, Boing Boing will be there.
Speaking of which, Mastodon is looking pretty tempting:
Keeping known liars isn’t exactly neutral though. We can say that some people Believe Alex Jones and therefore honestly believe he should be heard, but can we really say that if we know that he is just making stuff up in order to be provocative then giving him a voice is the same as being neutral?
Ultimately, speculating about what Dorsey believes just obfuscates the fact that Jones is a professional liar.
Talking specifically about Twitter, that sounds very hyperbolic to me. For any news/comment worthy item, shouldn’t there be published articles by legit news sources, even if they are quoting the relevant Tweets? Trump puts his foot in his mouth? Link to an article about it. Rosanne calls someone a name, same thing. Never mind that Twitter is HORRIBLE to convey anything besides a short quip, meaning it lacks any REAL substance.
In some instances I suppose I can understand quoting tweets or even screen caps. But why would you ever have direct links to tweets? That is driving traffic TO twitter when those tweets are parsed in the body copy.
Finally, at least one BBer has threatened to delete Twitter at a specific date. That doesn’t sound like an entity that will literally END BB as we know it.
Now, I am talking about going from BB to Twitter. As I am typing this I also can understand there may be flow from Twitter to BB. Is that a substantial amount? If so, I suppose I can understand that a a necessary evil. But even so, one can do a lot to make it a one way relationship (Twitter to BB, not BB to Twitter.)
Ads are a necessary evil, though I wish there were less IoT features in the BB store.
I am just asking for some consistency, though I also understand there isn’t really a consensus among the editors on most things.
There’s no hyperbole in those statements. Removing Boing Boing from Twitter or Facebook would result in a traffic drop extreme enough to result in an extinction level event. And oftentimes the tweet is the primary source. It’s simply good journalism to quote the primary source when we can and transcends our personal views on where that source appears.
Multiple folks have discussed this repeatedly every time it comes up. Independent publishers do not have the power to change these realities alone, but we do try to play our part and inform, and are prepared to foster alternatives when they arise.
That’s really all there is to say on this, for the umpteenth time.
OK, I did try to acknowledge this later down in the post. I can understand needing to stay on Twitter to move traffic to BB. But what about the idea of limiting the reverse traffic? I can understand needing to cite a source or quote, but what about a screen cap vs parsing the actual Tweet?
I can understand feeling like Twitter is the beast you have to live with, but can’t one avoid feeding it?
Which is a very valid source of criticism. But I still don’t think that qualifies as “supporting Nazis”.
I think they have a different understanding of what their terms of service allow.
Empirically wrong, Jack Dorsey is a perfect example.
Even if it were true that Twitter “supported Nazis” by allowing them on the service claiming they’re a “sympathizer” implies a specific state of mind that we have no evidence of.
How is that whataboutism? It is literally the thing I’ve been trying to discuss.
I already posted a story talking about how he’s a progressive (at least on social issues) who stopped talking politics because he wanted to be more politically neutral.
You’re ascribing a motive of white supremacy to actions where there are much better explanations.
I’m in full agreement, Jones is a professional liar and worse.
I’m just objecting to branding Dorsey Alt-Right because he didn’t ban Jones, people are allowed to be wrong for non-villainous reasons.
So what is you limit before a company is supporting Nazis? What steps would meet the burden of proof that you have left everyone to guess instead of revealing?
Twitter admits they give preferential treatment to “newsworthy” (aka controversial) accounts, give white suprememcist group leaders verification for the sole reason of being well-known white suprememcists, call the symbols of the confederacy hateful symbols but never actually police it, and because GOP congressional seats are willing to apply pressure to social media groups they have famously catered to extremists because they are afraid they would be perceived as biased against them. What else is needed before you would consider Twitter’s policies as supporting Nazism (as in a justifiable shorthand for ethno-nationalist political movements).
Evidence that they give preferential treatment to Nazis. Or that Nazis make up a disproportionate proportion of their users.
I think this is one of the binds that Twitter is in, there’s an uncomfortable intersection between the alt-right and mainstream Republicans. It’s hard to remain neutral when half the country jumps on board the crazy train.
I think the line they’re trying to draw is people inciting specific violence, or supporting groups that commit violence. But newsworthiness counts as well. Spencer is someone who presumably gets interviewed in Newspapers, if Twitter also sees itself as a source of News then how do you ban someone whose same words are deliberately selected for publication?
But again, I’m not really trying to defend Twitter’s position. I’m just pushing back against the false assertion that Dorsey is alt-right and/or an Alex Jones fan.
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
-Desmond Tutu
He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
-Dr Martin Luther King
Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer
.
…but that’s all besides the point, anyway. Twitter is not just neutral; they actively favour the far right.
I’ve tried to make the some of the same points here not quite as eloquently as you and was shouted down. hell even the Aclu is saying wait a minute. All I’ll say is good luck I’m with you in spirit. I think Jones is an idiot and an asshole, but how better to let everyone know that than to let him continue to speak. There is also the issue of if these “platforms” continue to exercise editorial control over their content at what point do they become publishers and then end up legally liable for the content that remains? It isn’t unrealistic their safe Harbor is explicitly based on not controlling content in this way.
All websites already exert editorial control on their platforms. Even before any of this drama, twitter banned users for posting spam. It’s just we all agree that if they did not do that, then the spam would overwhelm us and make the site’s user experience hellish.
All that’s happening now is that people who are unlike you are asking you to consider why some forms of widespread user-experience ruining messages are neutrally understood by all as undesirable, but others are sacrosanct. Who’s experience matters, and who’s experience can be safely thrown under the bus? Who’s concerns are political and who’s concerns are simply “running a better service”?
Also - You can also be banned for attacking other users and wishing them violence, so even if you want to argue that twitter is not in the business of stopping unique individual expressions from humans, they absolutely are and already do that and have done that for years. So you are extremely late to close that particular barn door, the horses have been gone for years.
Although twitter seems to have a tendency to tell users who receive racist/antisemitic/transphobic/misogynistic attacks “this does not violate our policy” while responding to those attacks with “fuck you!” can get you a time-out (this appears to be because of coordinated reporting on the part of the attackers, but it still sucks). Seeing other users deal with this double standard makes it reeeeeally hard for me to feel for your point of “boohoo if we don’t have the right to be assholes on twitter then what shall happen to freedom?” - the freedom to do what? Who’s freedom? Why is it so much more important to preserve this freedom, these people’s freedom, than anyone else’s? Why is some other people’s freedom invisible to you as a concern?
You don’t gotta answer all those questions, it’s rhetorical, but these are all important things to think about.
Let’s imagine this being discussed about another platform - a soap box in my front lawn. I have few rules but one of them is ‘no hurting people’. Let’s say I gave a Nazi time on my soap box. I don’t give him more time than anyone else but I do bend the ‘no hurting people’ rule a bit because people talk about the Nazi on my lawn and I’v found a way to profit from it.
Now I’m the guy making money with Nazi’s on his lawn. That Nazi may only be up on my soap box for 10% of the day. The other 90% has very good people on the soap box. Yet, I’m still the guy making money with Nazi’s on my lawn. In fact, I’m the guy giving Nazi’s a platform to speak which means I am providing material aid and support to the Nazi cause. Now I’m not just the guy making money with a Nazi on his lawn, I’ve become a Nazi enabler. I insist I’m just being fair but even my children tell me the Nazi has to go. I insist I’m being neutral and people point out that my profiting from the traffic the Nazi brings to my sidewalk means I can’t be neutral. I’m now profiting off hate speech. Is it any wonder that people would call me a Nazi sympathizer?
Well your own link you used to show Jack wasn’t a Nazi is a link talking about the favoritism given to the extreme right on Twitter, and we know that they bend the rules for newsworthiness (which you seem to understand) - so it’s not a question of if they show favoritism because they certainly have. So what is the limit? Because you seem to be saying Twitter hasn’t shown enough favoritism to be justifiably accused of supporting the Nazis in their platform, but they have shown significantly more than zero.
You learn, if you study