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Free speech on Twitter?

Started by Swordsman18, February 19, 2016, 04:10:02 PM

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Swordsman18

How do you all feel about the Trust and Safety Council now present on Twitter to monitor offensive and harmful speech?

https://blog.twitter.com/2016/announcing-the-twitter-trust-safety-council

Lustful Bride

I think it will last for like maybe half a year and then stop working. Itl be as broken as youtube's copyright policies.

I feel that Mr. Enter describes it better.


Yukina

Quote from: Lustful Bride on February 19, 2016, 04:32:25 PM
I think it will last for like maybe half a year and then stop working. Itl be as broken as youtube's copyright policies.

I feel that Mr. Enter describes it better.


*high-fives* Nice to see a fellow Mr. Enter fan. :)


Lustful Bride

Quote from: Yugishogun on February 19, 2016, 04:55:38 PM
*high-fives* Nice to see a fellow Mr. Enter fan. :)

*high fives back* ^_^ The cycle of high fiving is complete!

Yeah I like listening to people who give more slow, and thought out stuff like he does instead of screaming overreactions and he swears less than most people do. :P Which I also like.

Far eyes

#4
Trust and safety... you know what that sounds like, it sounds like one of those Slogans old Communist use to pull out of there asses to hide some crushing of unpopular opinions. So Da Druze Stalin approves.



They should use a nice fitting picture to, you know somthing like think of the children... lets see a nice combo.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/23/e4/a4/23e4a44a07c4759c851eb3127f8036ec.jpg
(image linked since it contains a kidlet in image) - Staff

Hey there we go. Photoshop a twitter mark on the flag, more effort then i am willing to give it but yah lets go with that one.

On a less snarky note...  no no i dont think i can manage a less snarky note.

Oh i know so will the new accepted greeting on Twitter be "Mellow greetings. What seems to be your boggle?"

What a man says: "Through roleplaying, I want to explore the reality of the female experience and gain a better understanding of what it means to be a woman."

What he means: "I like lesbians".
A/A
https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=180557.0

Lustful Bride

Quote from: Far eyes on February 19, 2016, 08:56:24 PM

On a less snarky note...  no no i dont think i can manage a less snarky note.

Oh i know so will the new accepted greeting on Twitter be "Mellow greetings. What seems to be your boggle?"
It makes sad that our culture seems to be pulling hard to that direction of everyone having the softest skin and expecting that everytime they walk into a room and sigh that everyone should just stop what they are doing and ugh.

Id rather stick with Edgar Friendly's crew and eat rat burgers :P

Arsha

The system will undoubtedly flop.
What they're essentially trying to do through censoring people is change social attitudes... and while Twitter has made quite the impact upon many lives, I think the Trust and Safety thing is being a bit too ambitious.

The issue probably resides more in the real world though where we have this conflict between people who value honesty and directness, and others who prioritize passive acceptance; avoiding conflict at all costs (Cause conflict is bad). Society has taken a turn towards the latter, and people are starting to interpret disagreement as offensive, insulting, and unacceptable...

I may or may not have been influenced by the Stalinist images above with that one.
But regardless, the Twitter thing is probably just going to be something that Twitter can point at years from now and say "Hey, we tried"

Sain

Sounds honestly like dumb decision to let this happen. Twitter could potentially lose a lot of users if they let this council exercise their power freely. If people can't use twitter like they used to someone is just going to make a similar site that allows actual free speech and will eventually replace Twitter for people who are being censored and eventually Twitter starts losing money. Kind of strange that whoever owns the company would want to take that kind of risk when it seems to serve no actual benefit, I mean it definitely isn't going to garner them any new users.
PM box is open. So is my discord: Sain#5301

TheGlyphstone

...Where are the censoring abilities of this 'council' actually laid out? I looked over the page linked, and the page it linked to, and all I see are the usual feel-good platitudes about how Twitter doesn't tolerate bad things, and these partner-groups who also don't tolerate bad things are now here to show solidarity with Twitter as regards to their mutual rejection of bad things.

Far eyes

Quote from: TheGlyphstone on February 20, 2016, 07:02:36 PM
...Where are the censoring abilities

Ahh.. i think you just found the thing i find the most idiotic. See if you never lay out there power, you just say things like "A case by case basis" and some other vague sort of feel right shit like "Personal attention" and "everybody a safe space" and never actually address the power issue then you can just pretend its not a bunch of people with questionable political and moral agendas making decisions based on what they feel like today.
What a man says: "Through roleplaying, I want to explore the reality of the female experience and gain a better understanding of what it means to be a woman."

What he means: "I like lesbians".
A/A
https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=180557.0

TheGlyphstone

Quote from: Far eyes on February 20, 2016, 07:55:08 PM
Ahh.. i think you just found the thing i find the most idiotic. See if you never lay out there power, you just say things like "A case by case basis" and some other vague sort of feel right shit like "Personal attention" and "everybody a safe space" and never actually address the power issue then you can just pretend its not a bunch of people with questionable political and moral agendas making decisions based on what they feel like today.

That's my point. Unless they actually have ability, they're utterly irrelevant and this 'council' might as well not exist. If Twitter is going to censor its content, that is Twitter doing the censoring, and the 'partners' do nothing and mean nothing. It's just a Kumbaya 'we all agree that these things are naughty and are joining forces to speak more loudly about how naughty they are', I see absolutely nothing anywhere that Twitter is actually going to start censoring outside its pre-existing terms of service.

Far eyes

Yah but there terms of service is vague shit, and this "council" is vague. My main concern is not that it will do noting it is that it will use the vague non rules space to enforce what ever they feel like they want to on any particular day of the week. 
What a man says: "Through roleplaying, I want to explore the reality of the female experience and gain a better understanding of what it means to be a woman."

What he means: "I like lesbians".
A/A
https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=180557.0

TheGlyphstone

So exactly what they already do, but on a larger scale/volume. Nothing newsworthy then, except Twitter can make a press release about a 'Health and Safety Council', where they couldn't make a press release about 'adding additional staff to investigate reports/ToS violations'. It's panic for panic's sake, at least until anyone can point to some sort of actual concrete censorship to complain about.

Kythia

A lot of the complaints seem to be vaguely hypocritical as well.  " Why am I constantly being treated like a child.  How dare this thing happen. The people who support this are bad people and must be stopped"

It seems like that attitude is within spitting distance of the one they claim to oppose?  You know, if people don't like it when others are offended, seeing it as somehow self-entitled, then, I dunno, maybe lead by example?  Bu meh.
242037

ReijiTabibito

I'll link at the bottom, but there's actually a TED talk from a couple of months ago by Jon Ronson (the Welsh journalist) called 'How One Tweet Can Destroy Your Life' about the Justine Sacco debacle.

For those of you unawares, Sacco was the unfortunate woman traveling to Africa who, as a joke, tweeted JUST BEFORE she got onto a plane 'Going to Africa.  Hope I don't get AIDS.  Just kidding, I'm white!'  When she landed, almost a dozen hours later, she discovered she had lost her job and was the NUMBER ONE TOPIC trending on Twitter.  Mostly from these SJW types who took her words at face value.

It's worth pointing out the following.  1: Sacco is from South Africa, herself.  She knows quite well that AIDS is not a racial disease.  2: Her tweet was intended as a mockery of egotistical culture, primarily the US, where a lot of the attitude seems to be 'if it's not happening here, it's not important.'  3: the journalist who broke the story later admitted he did it mainly as a way to gain traffic on his blog.

Ronson basically went on to explain that in the early days of Twitter, it was a simple way to communicate parts of one's life that were normally not visible to the online world.  Whereas today, it's basically become a gigantic club which social regressives use on anyone who disagrees with their point of view - a tool for online shaming, which Ronson notes is quite the opposite of what it was when it first started.

I was watching the Rubin Report this week, and his guest talked about the fact that the fact that we actually have this as a problem is both good and bad.

Good, in that it shows just how far we have come as a society.

Bad, because that problem actually threatens our society MORE than the problems we had to conquer in order to GET here.


Kythia

That seems like a pretty solid argument in favour of the council but I get the impression you didn't mean it as such? Not sure what your position is here.
242037

Lustful Bride

Quote from: Kythia on February 21, 2016, 10:06:42 PM
That seems like a pretty solid argument in favour of the council but I get the impression you didn't mean it as such? Not sure what your position is here.

It the basic problem of what is appropriate or just a joke to one person is worth banning to another person. :/

How do you make a council be fair and yet having to instruct measures over a community that is multinational, multiculturarl, etc etc etc. It just snt going to work.

If there was a Deadpool on this id be placing my bet for it to last a month at most.

ReijiTabibito

Yeah, if it came off that way, I didn't mean it to.  Let's see if I can clear up what I'm saying.

This whole Council thing on Twitter is just the latest symptom of the Social Justice Warrior culture, which insists that the right to free speech is subordinate to someone's right not to be offended, or their right not to have their experience invalidated.  In short, people are sexist bigot homophobes and must be shamed into behaving appropriately, IE, whatever is in line with what the Social Justice Warriors are espousing today.

Other recent events that are also symptoms of this toxic culture include:

Symptom A:
The events last Halloween at Yale, where a professor who merely tried to stick up for freedom of expression and saying 'it's not our business what the kids wear on October 31st' had an incredibly SJW-based response.  There's a video quite well-known by now of the professor's husband - who is a master at one of Yale's colleges - being screamed at by a black girl about how college is not about creating an 'intellectual space,' it's about 'creating a home.'  I will note with some irony that the one doing the yelling, culminating in the 'why the fuck did you accept the position' - the position being master of the college - was one of the people on the committee involved with his appointment.

(Note to you, kiddies.  If you want a home, you can live in your parent's basement.  There's no debt after 4 years spent there.)

Symptom B:
The not one but TWO incidents at Missouri University where it was made clear that the press - the guardians of free speech and thus liberal principles - were not welcome in their safe spaces.  The more famous one involved Melissa Click, a communications professor whose main published articles included, I shit you not, a pair of writings on the depth of the Twilight books.  She's the infamous one who yelled 'I need some muscle over here!' to remove a journalist.  The other involves a photojournalist - who, by his general appearance, I would probably say is East Asian in ethnicity - basically being muscled out by a group of students who refuse, Spartacus-like but WAY less heroically, to identify themselves as anything other than 'Concerned Student 1950.'

(I don't live in Missouri, but if I ever move there, FUCK if I'm sending any of my kids to that school.)

Symptom C:
The simple fact that nobody in this movement seems to see the fact that their actions are taking us backward, not forward.  At Missouri, they insisted on having safe spaces for students.  Of course, being the equal-minded people that they are, they insisted that everyone get an equal amount of space.  And of COURSE, being the racially-sensitive persons that they are, they insisted that each race get its own space.  In short:

They argued for separate but equal safe spaces.

(If you hooked up the men and women who DIED in the Civil Rights Movement to electrical dynamos, you could power NY, LA, and DC with the spinning they're doing 6 feet under.)

Twitter is also rapidly going down the tubes - Stephen Fry, who is definitely someone I would call a liberal, closed down his Twitter account over outrage over a joke he made about Jenny Beavan (a great costume designer in cinema, as the Brits put it) coming to BAFTA ceremony dressed as a 'bag lady.'  (Nevermind the fact that she was onstage to be made a joke of in the first place is because she won an award for Mad Max: Fury Road.  Nevermind the fact that Beavan herself has publicly stated she was 'absolutely not upset' by his joke.)  Twitter's stock is plummeting, because people are starting to recognize it for what it is - an online club the SJWs avail themselves of for the purpose of shutting up anyone that doesn't fall in line with the narrative.


What we are seeing, quite simply, is v2.0 of China's Cultural Revolution - where students and children were turned against their teachers and their parents, called to denounce them in public, as agents of capitalism.  Millions of people suffered at this time, historical artifacts and sites - pieces of China's rich history - were destroyed, and Mao basically created a cult of personality surrounding himself.

Deng Xiaopeng, who was one of the great reformers and architects of modern-day China, was one of the major people who took over after Mao's death and the abandonment of the Cultural Revolution.  He was forcibly retired during the Revolution because Mao feared his stances on primarily economic policies.  He and his family were targeted, repeatedly, by the Red Guards, including throwing his eldest son in prison.  (Said son became a paraplegic because of said action.)

By 1981, the CCP basically said that the Cultural Revolution was "responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the party, the country, and the people since the founding of the PRC."  Keep in mind, they also had the Great Leap Forward (IE, the Great Face Plant), which caused a famine that caused the deaths of tens of millions of people.  And they thought the Cultural Revolution damaged China more.


In short: I hope that Twitter implodes if it's going to trade free speech away for protection from the Social Justice Warriors.

Kythia

I'm sorry I'm still not with you. Those three symptoms are people expressing their opinions.That's...That's what you want to happen. They think opinions other than their's are wrong, you think opinions other than yours are wrong. What do you see as the difference here? Why do you feel the people in those "symptoms" shouldn't have the right to express their opinion? I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be argumentative, you just seem to be trying to draw some line in the sand that I don't see. It's easy to characterise your position as "people with opinions different to mine are trying to undermine something important to me therefore they should be forced to stop talking somehow" and I'm sure it's not that, I just don't see how.
242037

Lustful Bride

#19
This makes me think of something I heard once. What is the difference between a Social Activist and a Social Justice Warrior?

The Social Activist will see a disabled person in a wheelchair unable to work because his workplace has stairs and no way for them to properly climb them. So they will march, protest, work, and get donations, whatever is necessary to ensure that the person in the wheelchair is able to have a ramp or whatever, to get to work properly and have the same chances as anyone else.

A Social Justice warrior will insult the company the man works for, and have the stairs smashed so that those who don't need a wheelchair will be unable to get to work. And then will claim that they acted in the best interests of the person in the wheelchair, causing their co-workers to hate them.

SJWs are antithetical to their causes. :P

Edit:I don't think Reiji is properly explaining his position....

Kythia

Sorry, forgot to mention. The reason it sounded like you were pro council is that you spend a lot of time focusing on what you clearly see as community overreaction. Would it not be better to have a group of experts rather than the great unwashed? As I say, your position seems to be a strong support of the council except for the part where you say it isn't.

Lustful: that's...That's never actually happened though has it. I mean, it's a good example of a meaningless slur used to condemn a group without bring weighed down with like evidence and facts and truth and stuff, sure, but it's not yanno important.
242037

Lustful Bride

Quote from: Kythia on February 21, 2016, 11:40:58 PM
Lustful: that's...That's never actually happened though has it. I mean, it's a good example of a meaningless slur used to condemn a group without bring weighed down with like evidence and facts and truth and stuff, sure, but it's not yanno important.

*Shrug* meh. I don't know what to tell you then :P


ReijiTabibito

#22
Quote from: Kythia on February 21, 2016, 11:32:40 PM
I'm sorry I'm still not with you. Those three symptoms are people expressing their opinions.That's...That's what you want to happen. They think opinions other than their's are wrong, you think opinions other than yours are wrong. What do you see as the difference here?

Okay. Let me see if this will help guide.

The difference is simple - I might think your opinion is wrong, but if it's REALLY important to me that you think the same way I do, I'm going to try and convince you, rationally and logically, into why my opinion is better.  If you don't agree with me after I've made my argument, okay, no problem, it's no skin off my nose if you and I don't believe the same things.

A Social Justice Warrior - the people taking over Twitter - will say, "No, you MUST AGREE WITH ME.  You have to believe everything that I do."  And if you don't, they'll call you a racist, a bigot, a sexist, they will shame you into compliance.  There is no tactic too low for them.  I want to note this very strongly.  It's not enough to an SJW if you just stop opposing their ideology.  It's 1984: you will agree with me, and you will say so.

Quote from: Kythia on February 21, 2016, 11:32:40 PM
Why do you feel the people in those "symptoms" shouldn't have the right to express their opinion? I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be argumentative, you just seem to be trying to draw some line in the sand that I don't see. It's easy to characterise your position as "people with opinions different to mine are trying to undermine something important to me therefore they should be forced to stop talking somehow" and I'm sure it's not that, I just don't see how.

They should have the right to express their opinions.

But their opinion is that everyone should have the same opinion they do.  That there is only one correct way of seeing things.  Thinking like that is anathema to what is supposed to be a freethinking and tolerant society, capable of handling intellectual discourse in an adult manner.  SJWs are reducing what should be intellectual discussions to nothing but character assassination.

EDIT: Moved last segment to next post.

Kythia

That made me chuckle,  I think you've got yourself a little off track. You attacked a professor earlier for writing about twilight - because the thought of a person who studies the media writing about an incredibly successful media franchise is apparently hilarious to you - and then attack social justice warriors for shaming and personal attacks.

I'm really sorry but I do kind of think you're explaining this badly. But I've got to go to work and my curiosity has been somewhat sated. Nice talking to you.
242037

ReijiTabibito

#24
Quote from: Kythia on February 21, 2016, 11:40:58 PM
Sorry, forgot to mention. The reason it sounded like you were pro council is that you spend a lot of time focusing on what you clearly see as community overreaction. Would it not be better to have a group of experts rather than the great unwashed? As I say, your position seems to be a strong support of the council except for the part where you say it isn't.

Not if the group of experts are going to quash free speech.  Which is basically what this council's job is.  Free speech means FREE SPEECH.  It's the old Voltaire saw: "I might disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Can speech be hurtful?  Of course.  Welcome to EarthLife is hurtful, unless you're one of those fortunate silver-spooned scions that never has to worry about anything.  But I would rather accept the possibility of people using hurtful hate speech against me, and knowing I can say whatever I want, rather than have censors everywhere making sure that nobody says anything bad.

They're like the guys from the 80s and 90s who tried to get music labeled because they were worried it might corrupt the poor little kiddies.





First.  The fact that the phrase 'incredibly successful media franchise' can be applied to drivel like Twilight is simultaneously depressing and horrifying, because it's shown just how far we've fallen as a culture.  I should also note that Click's work includes such sterling hallmarks like 50 Shades of Grey and My Big Redneck Wedding.

Second.  My objection to this is threefold.  One: that this is allowed to pass for legitimate academic work.  Two: actual taxpayer money was spent on this - Click received a grant in 2009 to attend a convention in Dallas.  About Twilight.  To study attendees.  Not the work itself, the people who read it.  Three: Click has received awards for this work.  Strictly at the local level (thank God), but someone thinks that this is actually worth awarding.  Why?  How exactly does better understanding something that's going to be forgotten fifty years from now advance the course of human civilization?

Click has no business being looked up to, being seen as someone to emulate, being a role model at the collegiate level.  If she'd like to take a few steps down to middle school, then I wouldn't have much issue with it.  But you have to actually work at middle school, you can't justify your continued existence by writing about what is bottom-barrel culture.

Third.  Yes, I may have made a personal attack on Melissa Click, deriding her for her choice of 'work' in the academic field.  But the difference between the SJWs and me is that I don't expect Melissa Click to come up to me and say 'Gosh, Reiji, you're totally right about everything you say' just because I said it.  I expect it to accomplish nothing other than to let me speak my own views.  The SJWs expect their personal attacks to silence any dissension.

Final.

Yes.  I may be explaining this badly.  That is one possible explanation for how my position has remained unclear thus far.

So, if I may, let me try and explain my position in the most direct manner possible.

The Council is a concession of Twitter to the SJWs, who will use it to suppress free speech in the name of social justice and 'correct' speech.

This is BAD.

EDIT: A couple of spotted grammar errors, unplaced spaces, and a word change for clarity.  Plus one moved quote/response.