[staticassertion]

You can say and think whatever you like. Companies giving platforms to hate is not something that democracy requires.

It's less "that idea is popular" and more "these people are inciting hatred against other people".

I'm baffled that people still repeat this "free speech is important" thing when we're talking about a private service giving an audience to white supremacists.

[chmod775]

Yes. They are not legally required to provide service to anyone.

But indiscriminately providing services to everyone (within the laws of your country), without booting people based on a personal agenda, is the ABC of gaining the trust of your users.

[gfzfwizp]

But people aren't leaving twitter because they perceive it as favoring one side. People are leaving because they are being flooded with hateful, abusive comments from trolls and their bots. So it seems the key to gaining trust is creating a place where users don't experience rampant abuse.

[GVIrish]

It depends on what you mean by 'personal agenda'. If someone is directing hate speech at other users, would it be pursuing a personal agenda to ban or otherwise sanction that user?

It's not always easy to draw a line on conduct, but I think there is plenty of behavior on Twitter that 99% of people could easily identify as toxic.

[mozumder]

Wrong. A respected editorial standard allows for even more trust.

Example: Do you trust Washington Post or Twitter more?

[rayiner]

Twitter and it’s not even close. A journalists synthesis of what he thinks the evidence is carries no weight. Twitter is like a mini trial. You hear the testimony from the horse’s mouth, people cite documentary evidence, and you weigh credibility to reach a conclusion.

[mozumder]

So you trust the Russian troll bots on Twitter?

[eitland]

That's absolutely not what rayiner wrote.

[mozumder]

Trial witnesses need to have their identity confirmed. You can't do that on twitter.

[SomeStupidPoint]

Comparing a centralized, unified group like a newspaper writing team with a diffuse, decentralized mob like Twitter makes me question your sincerity.

[mozumder]

Twitter is a single corporation. It can choose to limit the scope of its published tweets if it wishes, via stronger editorial rules.

[SomeStupidPoint]

It could also choose to open a steel factory and produce I beams -- why are we not criticizing its low steel output?

Twitter would immediately lose all utility to me if it transitioned out of the business of being a forum/socialization platform to a poorly sourced algorothmic newspaper. (They're flirting with it -- and frankly, it doesn't seem to be going well, because that's not what people want.)

It seems outright disingenuous to suggest that Twitter and the NYT are in the same business, and seems to be based entirely around a false equivalence about "publish". There are multiple kinds of businesses that publish things, and the solution to problems in one domain aren't just to be a differemt type of business.

[Amezarak]

I believe democratically elected governments should have more power than corporations. Right now, corporations have complete and utter control over the most common and important communications method of our time.

Think about what you're saying: corporations have the power to prevent you from saying anything online. Twitter and Facebook can ban you for your political opinions. Fine, you say: get your own website. Well, we've seen that your registrar, CDN, and hosting providers will also kick you off if they find your speech sufficiently offensive (or if enough pressure comes down on them to do so.) In the end, your ISP can do the same thing. Corporations own the commons we all use. Yes, the FA only protects you from government censorship, but the societal principle of free speech is not so limited. If you cannot speak because every commons is owned by a private corporation, or where any speech can be banned because a mob is threatening to protest you, you do not have free speech in any meaningful sense.

I don't believe the solution to our problems is to blithely conclude that corporations can do whatever they want, it's their platforms, and that anyway, it's about "hate" (who gets to define that?) We need to look very seriously about how communication has evolved since the 18th century and what "freedom of speech" means now, and how to settle it in a way that at least leads to democratically elected institutions having the power to restrict it, rather than corporate overlords.

I would also argue that repression of speech is a contributing factor to the rise of violence. As long as all speech is legitimized, there's a relief valve for despicable beliefs. The Nazi Party was born in an environment where political violence was already commonplace, and where nationalist rhetoric resulted in the nationalists being severely beaten. Consequently, only the most violent and committed people remained, who then organized their own violent mobs. Ultimately, the perception of being "repressed" by both mob violence and the state (the Nazi party was later banned) only lent support by people who felt for the "underdog" and radicalized supporters who felt that legitimate, nonviolent means would never be enough.

[eitland]

I hate nazism as much as everyone else.

Problem is they and other media companies (and often the users as well) has ridiculous problems to understand the diffence between racism (judging and treating people different depending on who their parents where etc) and scepticism towards a recent immigration wave (do we want to relocate all these humans right here, right now? Can we help more people by doing it differently?)

[staticassertion]

OK, but there are definitely plenty of clear cut cases and Twitter has historically had issues dealing even with these. This isn't an issue of media in general, we're talking about Twitter, that's what the article is about.

[rimliu]

Because free speech is important. That includes speech you do not like.

[staticassertion]

This is it - this is what baffles me, thank you for posting this.

[dominotw]

hate cannot be precisely defined though. Thats the crux of the argument.

[latch]

Plenty of countries have legal definitions which are well enforced (1) and which often rely on internationally agreed upon standards (2).

Slippery slopes is usually a fallacious argument, decidedly so in this case where plenty of successful examples exists.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Keegstra

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Covenant_on_Civi...

[croon]

Sure it can.

It means "intense dislike". If that is directed at an intrinsic property of a group of people, that's hate speech.

Example: black people as opposed to smokers.

[nileshtrivedi]

Very soon that leads to any speech criticizing, say, the capitalists or the politicians in power.

[croon]

> Very soon that leads to any speech criticizing, say, the capitalists or the politicians in power.

No, because that's not an intrinsic property.

Hating people who take too long at the register isn't the same as viewing all redheads as inferior.

[changchuming]

What is intrinsic? Is being poor intrinsic? Can I spew hate against the poor and the homeless then? The problem is these definitions are unclear, and policing hate against black people obliges you to police hate against the homeless, and pretty soon everything else. I have seen far more examples of slippery slopes happening than not, so forgive me if I'm skeptical.

[nileshtrivedi]

The whole point is that lines are not easy to draw. Religion is a belief system and is not an intrinsic property either. Are you going to allow speech like "Kill all muslims" which is not very different from "Kill all capitalists".

Free speech is so critical to a functioning free society that I'd rather err on the side of allowing bad speech rather than banning not-bad speech by mistake.

[SomeStupidPoint]

I'm terrified of people who use phrases like "inciting hatred" as an excuse for why we should start ostracizing entire swatches of people from social discourse. Hilariously, I'd say that if anyone is "inciting hatred", it's probably you at your strawmen.

In my experience, they're much more dangerous to the well-being of society than the people they're trying to silence, as they're generally authoritarians of the worst sort without a shred of remorse because they're doing it for The Right Reasons(TM) and are sure of it.

But if I tolerate you speaking, someone I view as an immediate and visceral threat to my society, I suppose I can tolerate just about anyone using words.

It's a shame we'll likely come to violence because you can't show the same tolerance, and use words not force on people you disagree with.