[gfosco]

Twitter has been extremely heavy on censorship this year. Dozens of high-profile users banned, hundreds 'shadow-banned', and unbelievable levels of hashtag manipulation. Twitter is not in favor of free speech, on top of being a terrible business.

[hyperpape]

Which users were banned for expression of opinions? I initially wrote "high profile", following your comment, but I don't actually care. High profile or not, that would make me worry.

I know Milo was banned based on the accusations that he'd orchestrated harassment of Leslie Jones, but I haven't heard of anyone being banned simply for expressing a political position.

As far as hashtag manipulation goes, I'm not sure what you mean. If you just mean they don't put some hashtags on trending, that may or may not be a bad approach to promoting healthy debate, but it's not a free speech issue.

[Torgo]

Look into why Charles Johnson was banned. They took a statement he made that obviously meant "I am going to write a news story about this person that will be very bad for them" and tortured it into a death threat, and banned him for life.

There is literally no defense of this because it was so obviously a bad-faith interpretation, and yet other people have very obviously put people in actual danger, like Spike Jones tweeting George Zimmerman's parents home address, and nothing happened to them. Johnson, whatever you might think of him personally, was banned forever for something he obviously did not even do when you look at the tweet. If they like you, you can say almost anything. If they don't almost anything can get you suspended.

The hashtag trending thing is another case of this, if they basically like your message then they'll let it trend, if they don't then they'll suppress it. You can only really derive that this is happening from observing in very specific ways, no one actually tells you they do this. They have other tricks too, if an undesirable hashtag gains popularity, out of nowhere a misspelled hashtag autocompletes, to "nudge" you to a dead end hastag that nobody is listening to. It's fairly obvious once you become aware of it, because popular hashtags autocomplete, unpopular or not-trending ones don't, but "roach motel" hashtags somehow bypass this. Nobody knows globally what this single corporation decides to let be widely heard and what it invisibly suppresses. It is a free speech issue because private or not, as the Arab Spring stuff demonstrated how much influence Twitter has on society, which makes it one. This is the bog-standard, not-full-of-shit liberal position. It's even Chomsky-endorsed.

[hyperpape]

1) Interesting that you mention doxxing in the context of Chuck Johnson, since when he was banned for his tweet about Deray, he had already posted home addresses of two NYTimes reporters. That both a) indicates that he was a bad actor, and b) colors how you might interpret comments about "taking out" someone. It doesn't turn it into a threat of violence, but it does make it look a lot more like using Twitter to organize harassment.

The other thing is that this is just a tough way to argue. There's massive amounts of harassment on twitter, and enforcement is incredibly haphazard. Did Spike Lee get a pass because he's a liberal? Or because in 2012, Twitter was completely clueless about any kind of response to harassment?

2) Hashtags: as it stands, everything you've said is your own personal observation and too vague for me to even try and confirm. Rather than repeat myself, let me just reference my other comment about doing the work to prove your accusations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12936414

3) I will however, repeat my question from before: is there any political opinion that I can utter as an American citizen that will get me banned from Twitter?

[Torgo]

McKesson chose to interpret it as an open death threat, it obviously wasn't but nobody was going to call him on it, and it got Johnson booted off Twitter. I see your point, but that wasn't how McKesson and his fans used it.

Regarding the Spike Lee thing, I'd say he got a pass because he's a celebrity, but who knows. This is kind of my point. You have to piece together pattern out of Johnson's activity on and off Twitter to decide that maybe he was trying to get deray killed by paying people for his home address. On the other hand spike lee directly tweeted "here's george zimmerman's address, share this as much as you can" and nothing happened to him at all. Twitter was aware of it, because many, many people made them aware of it, and they pay special attention to their celebrity accounts. it didn't happen off twitter, it happened on twitter. and it wasn't tangential to some other threat, it was a direct threat. on twitter. tons of people reported it. I just can't hurdle this one. they let it happen and they didn't care.

the commonality across these is that in the best circumstances you're probably a scummy person if you do that, Johnson or Lee, but it's extra terrible when people just tweet addressed with death exhortations and they didn't even know or care if it was correct info. johnson was pretty scummy but his point was made, if you're the new york times nobody seriously is going to hold you to that. if you're spike lee, nobody is seriously going to hold you to that. if you're charles johnson, you're booted off twitter, lose your internet hosting and two dozen newspapers write stories about you.

2. it's not actually that vague, you could take what I said and watch and see if you can observe it. I gave you enough information if you were truly interested. You're not obligated to believe me or do it, of course, I was just sharing my experience. I kind of have a problem proving this is intentional, because I don't run twitter. i used to live close by what I suspected was a crack house once, people were always coming and going, and doing crack outside. Maybe the police could prove it, I can't. but I can tell you what I saw.

You are very correct that it's hard to tell what is intentional and what is not on the part of twitter. I see a lot of bogus claims of shadowbanning where it's really just that twitter is eventually-consistent, and sometimes you try to look at data from one location and its there, someone in another country can see it, though. Roach-motel hashtags, some are more obvious than others, and some are just legitimate misspellings that catch on because that's what everybody types. Example, for a while podestaleaks was autocompleting as podestraleaks. On the other hand, SpiritCooking trended for almost 24 hours before it stopped autocompleting and was replaced with spiritualcooking, which roach-moteled you into ancient sparse tweets about cooking. I can't prove anything, but come on. As far as straight up suppressing trending tweets, it's not even arguable. things trend, then abruptly stop autocompleting and drop off the site globally. they already do this to prevent spam, and it's obvious they do it to shut up some hashtags.

3. Have we not yet gotten to the point where that odious xkcd cartoon has been thoroughly debunked? Freedom of speech goes far beyond being a simple ban on things you can or cannot say or else you will be punished by some authority.

I am sorry if this is long and rambling, I wanted to say what I've been seeing because I am not the only one who has made these observations, and this is a particularly good place I could say it and people with more ability than me to investigate this might see it.

[rdl]

The oddest part is, IIRC, it wasn't even Zimmerman's address, but some uninvolved person.

[Torgo]

This is a big reason why nobody should do it, regardless of how "righteous" their outrage is. It ends up hurting uninvolved people.

[gfosco]

Recently? I'll give you one: Clint Eastwood.

Yes, they control hashtags. It is a censorship issue. They lie about what's trending, every, single, day.

There's a global problem with Twitter censorship, to the point it has a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Twitter

[hyperpape]

1) The Clint Eastwood case seems to be a fake account: http://nypost.com/2016/11/10/clint-eastwoods-twitter-account..., which doesn't entirely answer the question of why it was banned, but definitely muddies the waters. Do you have an example of someone not potentially impersonating a celebrity?

2) The Wikipedia page primarily concerns cases where Twitter is ordered to engage in censorship by other countries, not Twitter choosing to censor opinions on its own . I wish they would tell Ergodan where to stick it, but that's not the same as them posing a threat to your speech or mine (assuming you're not from Turkey).

Let me ask you an unambiguous question. I am a citizen of the United States of America, a country with a strong tradition of freedom of speech. Can you offer me any reason to fear that I am going to be censored by Twitter for expressing an opinion (liberal, conservative, fascist, even)? To be perfectly clear, and avoid confusing matters with the issue of harassment, say that I do not @-mention other users.

[predius]

Brittany Pettibone offered evidence that Twitter is shadow-banning her, here:

https://twitter.com/BrittPettibone/status/797186228894322688

[hyperpape]

So that's weird. I looked at her feed, didn't see anything beyond the pale.

On the other hand, I can't quite replicate her search. When I search, I get more results than she does, maybe not as many as I'd expect, but importantly, not the same as her. I can't say "obviously there's nothing here" but I also don't think there's a smoking gun.

If you're concerned about this, you really should not be pointing me to one tweet by one user. You should have reams of evidence, documented, with a timeline, with comparisons to what other users see, etc, etc. If you don't care about convincing people who haven't already bought in, that's ok, but if you do want to persuade, you're going to have to provide something better than this one tweet. (Case in point, downthread, we have a person who's convinced they were shadowbanned, then all of a sudden they check, and they aren't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12935624).

[VaChildAbuse]

And some incendiaries are left alone. Look at @rabite aka weev.

[Torgo]

These days he seems to actually be pretty careful about not crossing the line. But one day someone will be annoyed enough to suspend him anyway.