[ebilgenius]

Milo didn't tell his fans to attack her. In fact she had been tweeting with various other people long beforehand and drawing a lot of ire through her comments.

It sets a terrible precedent as far as what Twitter is willing to take a hard stance on.

[auganov]

I don't think it's a terrible precedent. I only wish they were more uniform and systematic in banning similar kind of people. If anything it shows that you have to be very notorious until action is taken. There's plenty of accounts that incite hate without technically doing that directly in their content. For example there's this Shehab News Agency https://web.facebook.com/ShehabAgency.MainPage that will often report on terrorist attacks technically without clearly endorsing them but just by looking at the comments that praise the attacks and the overall style of reporting there's absolutely no doubt they're supportive.

As the general public becomes more online-hate-speech-savvy we're bound to see more and more people adopting that strategy.

[onion2k]

This is a straightforward business decision from Twitter's perspective. People seeing someone banned get annoyed but they don't leave. People seeing abuse stop using the platform. Consequently it's better for business to ban people than to let abuse happen. Plus, really, it's better for society. Twitter is run by people after all. They (hopefully) don't want to build a tool people use for abusing others.

[intoverflow2]

>They (hopefully) don't want to build a tool people use for abusing others.

Bit late for that, they already did.

[jonathankoren]

I fail to see how banning a repeated harasser is a terrible precedent.

[nailer]

Can you link to any tweet where he harassed someone? He did mockingly say a friend of his deserved to be harassed, that's about it as far as I can tell.

[jaredklewis]

Of course no one wants to see people harassed, but it's just that Twitter until recently was both censorship free and well known by the general population.

Personally I think it would be great if these things could be settled in courts with due process. Harassment is a crime and nothing would please me more than to see some of these harassers serve time.

But what's the other way? Twitter becomes non-neutral arbiter of what is right and wrong? One person's rebel is another's terrorist. One person's mob is another's protest. If Twitter starts to get involved in some censorship, it raises the obvious question from members of why that one thing they don't like wasn't censored. The only viable way for a free platform is all or nothing. Can't half way free speech.

[richmarr]

> Can't half way free speech.

Twitter isn't your town square. They have legally set out T&Cs that specify what you are and aren't allowed to do using their service.

Abuse damages Twitter's reputation so it's totally fair for them to shut it down.

[VLM]

> Twitter isn't your town square.

Its a mall full of insane rentacops and the teens they hunt. The kids, good and bad, just want to hang out, almost no one goes there other than to hang out, but the mall owners are solely interested in selling $300 jeans to your mom.

[jaredklewis]

Yes, I am well aware Twitter has no obligation to maintain a censorship free platform, and indeed doing so may not make good business sense.

I was simply pointing out that for a brief time, Twitter was a unique Internet platform: both well known (celebrities and politicians use it) and free of censorship. Plenty of sites are censorship free but they are esoteric and laregly unknown to the general population. I admired that Twitter was a popular platform with unrestricted free speech.

[Nullabillity]

> Twitter isn't your town square.

And yet, that's what they want to seem like they are. Until something like this happens...

[richmarr]

> And yet, that's what they want to seem like they are. Until something like this happens...

They want to be as close to being a town square as it's possible for a commercial service to be... but there'll always be differences in behaviour caused by anonymity, and scale.

Perhaps more importantly, if the town square turns into a huge argument, and all the reasonable people go home, the town square doesn't have to explain what happened to its shareholders.

[Nullabillity]

As close as possible and as close as profitable are vastly different goals. As a user, the latter is not particularly interesting, even though most platforms (including this one, of course) take that approach, sadly.

[jonathankoren]

You can't say "harassment is a crime" and then cry that you can't have "censorship" in some sort of misguided idea of free expression absolutism.

There has never been a successful platform without moderation. Even 4chan moderates. Even 8chan. Without it, you quickly get a cesspool of trolls. And then you have nothing but a cesspool.

[Nullabillity]

> You can't say "harassment is a crime" and then cry that you can't have "censorship" in some sort of misguided idea of free expression absolutism.

If it's bad enough that it's illegal then there are legal procedures to be followed. As little as I generally trust judges, there's at least far more oversight than having some random PR rep make the call in secret.

[csydas]

But twitter isn't a public service; at the end of the day, you're still playing by their rules and it is your choice to play with twitter or to play somewhere else. The difference in userbase between twitter and other services doesn't mean you don't have to follow twitter's house rules.

There's no reason a judge would need to get in on something like this, especially since Milo likely would be culpable by association under the US justice system, the result ultimately being the same. Personally, I don't like the idea of having to get the government involved in all online transactions - I'd like a place to say what I want where the worst that can happen is I get banned - it's not that I plan to say horrible things, it's that I don't trust when automated systems merge with state/federal law. (see: DMCA and youtube). Systems, even non-computer ones, can be gamed.

The US justice system has pretty much been gamed by this point, and it's a pretty expensive game to play. For someone like Milo, if Breitbart wanted to, they could bankroll him so he could play. For an individual like me? I can't afford to play the game. I don't want it to come to this, where you have to be able to afford participating in discussions online. You don't even have to say anything particularly egregious (or anything at all) to be the target of someone just fucking around with the systems.

I'd rather that the ramification for stuff like this was kept to accounts on websites instead of going to the courts.

[Nullabillity]

> I'd rather that the ramification for stuff like this was kept to accounts on websites instead of going to the courts.

I agree with that in a sense, but that's not currently the case. The question isn't public court or private company "court", it's whether there should be a private company "court" in addition to the public ones (which, mind you, can already get involved).

At least there is some degree of transparency and public influence on the public ones.

[jonathankoren]

Well the consequences, are a lot more than not being able to play with someone else's web page.

My point is, no one really believes in absolutism.