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by teh_klev 2175 days ago
I ultimately got booted off twitter for a tweet that said:

"Dear @AmazonUK AI, please kill yourself now".

This clearly wasn't aimed at a human but their Artificial Intelligence.

Attached to the tweet (to provide the tweet with some context) was a screenshot of it recommending a whole bunch of those Hello and Chat type B-list celeb trash gossip mags. Items I swear I have never browsed for on Amazon, let alone a newspaper.

I was reported, possibly by @AmazonUK, or detected by Twitter's own idiot AI for "promoting or encouraging suicide or self-harm". FFS.

Despite my attempts to appeal I gave up. It counted towards my three strikes (one was a Frankie Boyle kinda joke about why no-one had had a pop at trump with a gun, buggered if I can remember the other, I think I may have used the "c" word).

Turns out I need to tailor things I say, that wouldn't be considered offensive in a Scottish pub, to Twitter's puritanical view of the world. But it's their shitshow and @jack can go fuck himself.

Edit: just to be clear, I've never encouraged anyone to kill themselves or "die in a fire". The Trump tweet was clearly a bad joke and in no way could be construed as encouraging anyone to try and assassinate the US President, nor anyone else. The "c" word was not aimed at anyone in particular other than the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party, who're pretty much considered fair game in Scotland.

4 comments

It might have been less self-harm promoting and more conceptually correct to tell the AI to delete itself, instead.
I was with you every step of the way until you lamented the puritanical rules. Your original example was indeed a dumb misunderstanding on their part. However, if you had addressed a real person that way, the reaction would not be puritanical. The other two cases sound potentially reasonable too.
to be fair, unless you're proletizing coe, there's not much considered offensive in a scottish pub
So you told a support representative from Amazon (you should realize there are humans behind these accounts) to kill themselves, suggested someone should kill the US president, and "possibly used the 'c' word", and you're wondering why a US-based company might be offended by that?

That's basically a list of the three most offensive things you could possibly say in America. Of course you were banned for it.

Unsure if /s or a smiley needs to be appended to your comment ;) I hereby invoke Poe's Law.
No. No Poe's Law, no /s, no smiley. Maybe things are different in Scotland but in the US if you tell someone to kill themselves and say the US president should be killed, that's about as serious an offense as I can imagine. It doesn't even matter how you feel about the US president, you could be the most anti-Trump person in the world but you still shouldn't expect to say someone should kill the US president and expect that you'll have zero repercussions for it.
Then I think you should read my post again. It's pretty clear none of what I said was to be taken literally. If that's the case then you're suggesting that the average US citizen's ability to perform reading comprehension is even worse than I thought and I simply do not cannot believe that.
It doesn't matter how you intended for it to be taken. If you jokingly told someone to kill themselves and they did actually kill themselves, would you hide behind "they should have known I was joking"?

I read your post three times before I first commented to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding. What you claim to have said is horribly offensive and I can't believe you're trying to shrug it off as no big deal. Maybe it's a cultural difference, but hopefully what you're learning is that it may be okay to tell a human being to kill themselves in Scotland but that is not considered acceptable in the US.

> If you jokingly told someone to kill themselves

I jokingly told an inanimate piece of software to kill itself, AI's are not people, they're machines running lines of code. But I see no point continuing to justify my "cultural" differences in the use of speech other than to say that I've known enough US folks to know that your reaction is something of an outlier. If this is truly how you feel, then I'd be curious to know how the US managed to survive having George Carlin or Bill Hicks on their tellies.