[MichaelCollins]

Being realistic: if your life hangs by the thread of twitter moderation, you should either run and hide, or get your affairs in order. If they really want you dead, even the best possible twitter moderation won't keep you safe. This whole circumstance of people wanting you dead is not twitters fault and there is very little twitter could do to protect you even if their moderation was perfect.

[DoreenMichele]

He's not asking Twitter to protect him from murder. He's asking them to do their damn job so the platform cannot be used to facilitate a smear campaign that makes it easy to get away with murder.

It's a very reasonable request.

[karaterobot]

What should Twitter do in this case? You say "their damn job", but their job is to apply their content policies, which they say they are doing. Given only the tweets linked in the article, I can see how a moderator would look at them and not find that they are obviously breaking any rules. They may be false accusations, but Twitter has not agreed to do independent investigations of every report by a user, or take on the responsibility of trying to guess hidden motives of the accused. Twitter moderation is not a sanctuary, or a refuge, or a crusader for justice, it's a pro forma box-checking policy and never claimed to be more than that.

[DoreenMichele]

I've been a moderator. Decisions are made contextually.

One of his complaints is they clearly don't know what the hell is going on in Pakistan and this is a root cause of their mishandling of things.

It is a completely reasonable criticism.

[dnissley]

Is it really reasonable? Twitter fails regularly to take such context into consideration when making moderation decisions in their home country. How could it be reasonable to expect them to get it right when it comes to the context of a foreign country?

[satellite2]

Assuming Twitter is serving the Pakistani market, making revenue and paying taxes there, it seems reasonable to ask for the same quality controls as elsewhere. In particular hiring Pakistanis for moderation shouldn't be economically devastating for their operations in this country. So on top of being a very reasonable request it should be a minimum requirement of their operating model.

[tsimionescu]

And why do you think Pakistani Twitter moderators would feel empowered to take down tweets by government officials willing to torture and murder?

The request for Twitter to help in this case only makes sense if it assumed it will be taken by moderators living outside of Pakistan, who don't have to fear government reprisal for their actions.

[Nasrudith]

In practice that would mean the third world would get cut off as not worth it and many complaints about information apartheid or similar condemning terms.

[ljw1001]

That they fail regularly is not much of a defense. If they want to make money in Pakistan they should understand the place well enough to avoid facilitating crime.

[dnissley]

I doubt they make very much money off of Pakistani users. It might even be a small net loss. I don't think twitter publishes ARPU per country though, so this is speculation to some degree.

[majormajor]

I think it would be perfectly reasonable to simply choose not to operate in countries where the environment is such that your platform is likely to get people killed.

[blooalien]

That would require caring about the welfare of other humans more than caring about money/political "power", which most huge corporate entities these days (and the governments they own) have already proven time and again that they do not.

[tsimionescu]

Would you also expect Google Search to take down links to local media outlets publishing similar stories?

I don't personally think Twitter should be expected to go against the official government narrative of any country they operate in, for what it shows inside that country. Not that it would be immoral to do so, but I find it an entirely unrealistic expectation - Twitter is not the BBC.

[umrashrf]

As far as I know Facebook is actively taking measures to delete fake news and bring awareness about it. Also watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFLv9ozEZeM

[micromacrofoot]

they need to understand the politics of the places they operate in, if they can’t then they shouldn’t operate there - we already saw what happened with facebook in myanmar

[MichaelCollins]

I have a very low opinion of twitter and certainly wish they'd do a better job. But the premise of twitter as a shield against state-sponsored kidnapping or murder seems flimsy at best.

[DoreenMichele]

That's not the premise. This kind of bullshit is exactly how disempowered groups get painted into a corner.

Sexual assault doesn't typically begin with violent rape. It ends there.

It begins with a million small forms of disrespect.

Political crap follows the same pattern.

If you think it doesn't fucking matter, what the hell do you care how this goes? It matters to him. If you don't care, what's wrong with saying "Twitter should simply do its job, man!"

[Bakary]

The premise is that the guy lacks power. Twitter has very little incentive to help him, and a strong disincentive to piss off the Pakistani government.

Wallowing in outrage is pointless as they have to cynically maneuver until they have results. Part of that strategy might involve stirring up people emotionally towards action, but internalizing the martyrdom doesn't achieve anything on its own.

Ironically, this is precisely the type of martyrdom that helps these tech companies strategically in the long term. From their POV, all they have to do is throw a performative bone once in a while and wait for people's outrage rush to ebb away.

[notch656a]

Lol, disrespect is the beginning of rape? By that logic, twitter should censor anyone who says anything someone could interpret anything as disrespectful. Criticizing a bad government could be considered disrespectful by the government officials, would you call that starting a rape? And by that same logic, if someone just grabs someone and goes for it, previously being respectful in every way, somehow it isn't rape because it didn't begin with these lesser acts of disrespect.

[bakugo]

> Sexual assault doesn't typically begin with violent rape. It ends there.

> It begins with a million small forms of disrespect.

And? Are you suggesting that "small forms of disrespect" should be treated like violent rape because there's a very vague chance that it might lead there?

[dcow]

I think you're applying too much nuance to this. Reading all the comments, I think everyone generally wants good for the author. There are just a few different ways to communicating that. Roughly they seem to be:

1. epmathy and twitter do better

2. empathy and this is what you get with twitter

3. empath and practical advice

You seem to be railing against (2). Personally I find the bone you're picking to really be besides the point. Most everyone is empathizing with the author's struggle. Nobody here is telling the author to go fuck themselves. Nobody is condoning what Twitter is doing. And certainly nobody is disrespecting the author or supporting the misinformation. So your comment really feels like a non sequitur.

[didibus]

The premise seems more about how easily Twitter can be used to support a coup, suppress journalistic voice, oppress people, and push propaganda.

I don't know if without Twitter all this would be just as easy, through state controlled media, but what I do know is that Twitter could actually be a tool against this, but is failing to be.

Having a popular media outlet that cannot be coopted for propaganda and used for oppression or harm would be a great thing. Twitter clearly failed to be this, and maybe fails really bad at it where it seems like it could easily be a bit better at it.

[fluoridation]

I dispute that Twitter could be a tool against those things, because that implies that it's within Twitter's capabilities to know everything that is going on in the world in order to distinguish between true and untrue tweets.

Given that limitation, I would argue that the ideal communication medium simply conveys the messages it's given without regard for their contents. What people do with those messages is something that the medium has no power over.

[didibus]

I don't think Twitter needs to assess what is true or not, but it can try to find ways to know the source and make sure they're not bad actors, paid agents, state sponsors, etc.

For example, OP mentions how they never allowed him to have a verified badge even though he tried. This very much seems like something Twitter could have done. Now to anyone else, his account seems just as fake as any other impersonating him.

It could also put more effort behind investigating reports like the OP did. And it could also have detection and review processes for any kind of tweet that could be defaming. Accusation of criminal acts, labeling of people, mention of violence, arrest, etc.

Finally, this is the Web 3 era, who knows what mechanism it could find to innovate on that front.

The issue I have with what you say is the ideal communication medium ignores the issues with Twitter, such that it doesn't just simply convey content without regard. It selectively prioritizes, automatically suggests, and promotes certain tweets over others. It also gives very little recourse to people receiving the content to do their own due diligence, or to people who are targeted by the tweets to have a means to provide their counterpoint to the same audience, unless they themselves are just as powerful an actor.

You could imagine a relatively simple feature, any Tweet that mentions someone else by name or Twitter alias, that person should be able to attach a response to them that is shown under those tweets automatically. Twitter wouldn't need to choose the truth, but it gives recourse and mechanisms for the process of truth seeking to take place and for the people being shown the tweet more context and therefore better means to make up their own mind.

[fluoridation]

>it can try to find ways to know the source and make sure they're not bad actors, paid agents, state sponsors, etc.

Why would that be relevant? The truth and importance of a message can't be entirely determined by its source.

>OP mentions how they never allowed him to have a verified badge even though he tried. This very much seems like something Twitter could have done. Now to anyone else, his account seems just as fake as any other impersonating him.

I fail to see how that would help. OP says they're accusing him of being an agent. That's something that could be done even without a parody account.

>It could also put more effort behind investigating reports like the OP did. Accusation of criminal acts, labeling of people, mention of violence, arrest, etc.

So, no more news on Twitter? No more whistle-blowing? I mean, what if OP actually is an Israeli agent? Or perhaps you would like Twitter to actually investigate whether he is an agent, in which case you're agreeing with me, that Twitter would need to know everything that's going on in the world.

>The issue I have with what you say is the ideal communication medium ignores the issues with Twitter, such that it doesn't just simply convey content without regard. It selectively prioritizes, automatically suggests, and promotes certain tweets over others.

I agree, Twitter is already not the ideal communication medium. I'm saying that adding censoring to the problems you've already listed takes it farther from the ideal, not closer. It's also unreasonable, because it asks Twitter to be the arbiter of truth.

>You could imagine a relatively simple feature, any Tweet that mentions someone else by name or Twitter alias, that person should be able to attach a response to them that is shown under those tweets automatically.

I don't think it's a bad idea per se, but it seems like it would be easy to thwart it. And I doubt it would have helped OP if it already existed. He's not complaining that he can't reply to those tweets, he's complaining that the tweets exist at all.

[hackerlight]

> I dispute that Twitter could be a tool against those things, because that implies that it's within Twitter's capabilities to know everything that is going on in the world in order to distinguish between true and untrue tweets.

You're saying that omniscience is a necessary condition before Twitter can start doing good in the world, instead of bad? This is a non-sequitur.

> Given that limitation, I would argue that the ideal communication medium simply conveys the messages it's given without regard for their contents. What people do with those messages is something that the medium has no power over.

I would argue that this is ignorant of social psychology. Sunlight isn't the best disinfectant, and people aren't rational non-tribal agents who will all hold hands and sing Kumbaya only if they could have totally unmoderated discourse. Twitter will become an 8chan sewer if your ideology is adopted by them.

[fluoridation]

>You're saying that omniscience is a necessary condition before Twitter can start doing good in the world, instead of bad?

No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying perfect knowledge and perfect filtering are necessary for Twitter to avoid being used to oppress and propagandize.

>Twitter will become an 8chan sewer if your ideology is adopted by them.

The way you're saying it assumes that this is obviously a bad thing, while in fact it's a matter of opinion. I personally think the optimal level of moderation in any discussion forum is that which only prevents disruption of the forum's functioning.

[QuantumGood]

Isn't there a word for the fallacy that something can improve a situation and should, but because it can't solve it we should ignore that it's improvement is important ethically?

[thewebcount]

The nirvana fallacy [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

[QuantumGood]

Right. "The perfect is the enemy of the good".

[MichaelCollins]

> we should ignore that [twitters] improvement is important ethically

I have not said this, and I do not think it. What I actually said is that I wish twitter would do a better job, you've managed to somehow invert that.

[hackerlight]

Total strawman. Nobody is saying Twitter should act as a shield. They're saying Twitter shouldn't actively facilitate that outcome by providing a platform for targeted harassment and lies.

Nobody wanted Facebook to stop a genocide in Myanmar. They just wanted Facebook to not serve the role of actively encourage that outcome.

[yibg]

Problem is who determines if it’s a smear campaign? The author claims it was, and I tend to believe him but I haven’t investigated. Have you? And then, how determines if it’s extreme enough to warrant some action? In the ideal world sure there would be an army of people investigating every case in detail. But then 1) Twitter becomes the arbiter of truth and 2) definitely can’t scale.

[Uehreka]

Oh come the fuck on. People on HN need to get over this: At a certain point people and organizations need to stop pretending that “both sides could in theory have a point” and actually take a stand.

“But what if the stand they take is opposite the one you think they should take? How would you like that?”

I wouldn’t, I’d badger them to take my position. Hopefully I’d succeed, and if I didn’t, I’d join a long line of people who were right but unsuccessful. So it goes, life sucks sometimes.

[dcow]

I don’t want communication platform organizations taking any stands anywhere ever. That sounds dystopian and horrible. Deleting these Tweets won’t change a damn thing and might even be more harmful (what if the author didn't know they were being targeted because Twitter deleted everything, then they hopped back home because Twitter made them feel safe and fuzzy, and the got detained and tortured, for instance). What will change things is people getting off their keyboards and taking stands. You cannot pwn the responsibility off on Twitter moderators. Only the truth can hide the lies.

[DoreenMichele]

138 journalists killed in Pakistan since 1990

https://www.dawn.com/news/1595257

At least 39 journalists killed in US due to their work...since 1937

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_i...

These risk levels are not alike.

[bell-cot]

Morally? Yes, a very reasonable request.

OTOH - is there any large real-world corporation which has ever gotten itself into a sustained info-war conflict with a well-armed and angry nation state, for the purpose of protecting one "ordinary" person from that nation state? I'm guessing "no".

[DoreenMichele]

He says he's a journalist. That used to mean something.

So it's rather dismissive and disrespectful to characterize him as an ordinary person with scare quotes no less.

If these platforms feel unable to moderate fairly due to fear of foreign governments, perhaps they should tuck tail and keep their pussy selves out of the conflict entirely.

I'm not impressed with an argument of "We want the money involved but we can't make any meaningful effort to actually enforce the rules we claim we have. Your country is too tough for my sissy self to man up in. I still want the money though."

[bell-cot]

Okay - replace '"ordinary" person' with some polite phrase of your choice, which still makes it clear that the victim is not a head of state, ambassador, top military officer, Speaker of the House, Fortune 50 CEO, etc., etc.

No, I am not arguing that your idealism is morally wrong. I am arguing that the real world very often functions in ways which bear little resemblance to your ideals. No amount of idealism about "the gutter should have been stronger, and the ladder more stable, and..." will change the fact that my brother fell off a roof when young. Nor erase the injuries which he sustained. When I or people I care about are interacting with gutters and ladders, I stay very alert, and strive for "zero idealistic thoughts".

And - this sad state of affairs is nothing new. Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, The Brass Check, and other works (about the deep and systematic moral failings of corporations, journalists, etc.) over a century ago.

[DoreenMichele]

Idealism?

I'm not an idealist. I'm a pragmatist.

But the internet allows businesses to operate virtually in de facto war zones. This is getting people killed when the business tries to act like they don't need to account for that fact.

If they physically went into a war zone to sell products and it was getting people killed, would that merit a "Too bad, so sad. Gotta make money, doncha know. Can't be worried about niggling details like not getting our customers cavalierly killed."

[fluoridation]

How could a business possibly account for that in a way that doesn't make doing business over the Internet logistically impossible?

[PoignardAzur]

> He says he's a journalist. That used to mean something.

That's a broad and unsupported claim. I'm not aware of any evidence being a journalist previously gave you some sort of immunity / corporate protection against totalitarian states that has now gone away.

[kbelder]

Nor should it.

[xwdv]

No, this is not Twitter’s problem, and if they fulfill this request it just goes down a rabbit hole that eventually creates more liability for the company than what they want to take on.

Twitter has taken the correct action here.

[jona-f]

Wow, you're morally bankrupt. It's nice to see a well written article like that on the frontpage of this site, but unfortunately the venture capital fueled business model proposed by ycombinator is at the heart of the problem. Liability my ass. This is some disgusting dystopian bullshit. Also if you talk about liability, heard about the Streisand effect? Public opinion about these corporations is low and i think twitter itself isn't doing so well lately. Good riddance.

[sroussey]

There is a long history of liability in the USA when you take on editorializing roles. This was broken by the Communication Decency Act (CDA section 230) but case law has is slowly moving back. It is a valid concern.

If CDA 230 were taken away, I wouldn’t be surprised if common carrier laws fell as well. The telephone companies can listen to all phone calls, so they may need to editorialize (mute, disconnect, report to police) on various illegal calls.

[jona-f]

Twitter's response was so soulless, it's unclear if it's a bot. This is what i find most unacceptable. Others have expanded on the censorship problem in this thread.

[xwdv]

A response should be delivered quickly and efficiently, and in no uncertain terms. Filling it with heart and soul just gives false hope that some kind of appeal to emotion can be achieved. But it cannot.

[CoastalCoder]

> Being realistic: if your life hangs by the thread of twitter moderation, you should either run and hide, or get your affairs in order.

Perhaps a 3rd option is to go on the attack, and find some angle from which to sue Twitter?

[pseudo0]

The focus on Twitter seems a bit strange. Per the author's post, the government of Pakistan is arresting journalists and activists, manufacturing a pretext after the fact:

> In Pakistan, activists and journalists are routinely picked up (abducted) and tortured by the country's police and secret services. Same happened this time, some of the top journalists and anchors were picked up - some without warrants with fake cases filed post-arrest.

Twitter removing the fake claims won't stop the ISI or whoever from kicking his door in, if/when he returns to Pakistan.

[notch656a]

This article reads like an asylum claim. Hopefully they already have permanent legal permanent residence somewhere else, if not they will likely by applying for asylum. It could be the whole thing was written expressly for the purpose of asylum.

Going back to Pakistan at this point would mean basically picking how you want to go out. Either by defending your life in one last moment before a corrupt government takes your down, or letting them beat you in prison and slowly watch your soul and fighting spirit wither away in prison until you die. I presume if that's how they wanted to go, they would have been doing this journalism inside Pakistan right now.

[frank_nitti]

The US government may be complicit in the dynamics of Pakistan’s government, so I’m not sure they are working under any directives to help asylum seeking muckrakers:

https://youtu.be/3jFNJtjm-wI

[waqasx]

i am not. i find this accusation disgusting. i do not have a problem, legally, in staying here. my problem is exactly because i WANT to go back and not face any violence.

[a1369209993]

> i WANT to go back and not face any violence.

In that case you need to arrange for the violent overthrow of the current (ie since ~5 months ago) Pakistani government. The absence/removal of malicious libel from twitter, even if twitter were non-evil enough to bother doing that, will not prevent you from being kidnapped and tortured.

[lstodd]

What bullshit, man. Where were you living last 15 years?

You want to go back to your country and not be killed on the spot, you organize a coup there, not whine on Twitter or to it. Whines don't do shit, it's that simple.

[notch656a]

I don't understand, you don't want to be here. You want to go back. But an American technology company is what's stopping you? Once twitter does what you say you can safely go back home?

[NavinF]

> go back and not face any violence

Seems kinda unrealistic after the gov’t accused you of inciting violence.

[toast0]

> Perhaps a 3rd option is to go on the attack, and find some angle from which to sue Twitter?

Sueing twitter isn't likely to go far. Twitter doesn't have responsibility for their users' speech (with some very specific exceptions that don't include libel or defamation), and doesn't have a legal obligation to operate its moderation system. I don't think there's much to pursue there, unless there's something very unusual in the TOS.

You'd need to sue the people making the claims, but there's jurisdiction issues; if the alleged corruption of the government of Pakistan is the case, suing in Pakistan would seem to be unlikely to result in the desired outcome. On the other hand, a court in the US, where the OP resides, may not be willing to assert jurisdiction over speech by someone in another country, and the speaker is unlikely to participate in a US case.

In any event, such a case is likely to take years, which doesn't address the immediate nature of this issue. But I don't know how Twitter could really evaluate truthfulness of claims like these.

[MichaelCollins]

That won't solve the problem of people wanting him dead.

[notch656a]

Yeah. Change my mind: if people want you dead violently, police are likely to be 15 minutes to an hour too late, and the courts a couple years late behind that. Unfortunately violence is often either solved by running away, hiding, or meeting violence with direct self defense.

Maybe after you're lucky, you can win a suit against twitter, after their massive legal team drags it out for years with N number of hurdles. You'd be lucky to sue a nobody in podunk small claims court in time to effect meaningful change for something that needed done in days to weeks.

[zionic]

This is why I prefer “protocols over platforms”.

This entire thing isn’t twitters fault any more than it is WiFi’s, DNS, or TCP’s.

[kelseyfrog]

What's the fallacy for "X is value neutral so all products of X are also value neutral?" We saw the same pattern in the ethics in science thread or any ethics in technogy thread.

[pbasista]

> This entire thing isn’t twitters fault any more than it is WiFi’s, DNS, or TCP’s.

I respectfully disagree. TCP or DNS or WiFi or other technologies are merely means to achieve some result. A tool.

Twitter, like most services, is also built using various technologies and tools. But its main distinguishing property is that it has a large number of users who, for various reasons, are interested in what some other users have to say. Creating such social connections is its main goal.

Now, one might use e.g TCP to spread hate speech all over the internet. But apart from computers dropping these packets, almost no real person will be listening.

Contrast that with a Twitter account that has ~10k followers. If the hate speech is spread from there, it can get a lot of audience very quickly.

Twitter is one of many enablers and hosts of large online communities of people. As such, it should have, in my opinion, some responsibility regarding what goes on within these communities. At a minimum, it should disallow the dissemination of hate speech, actively seek and remove it and block the users who repeatedly spread it.

That being said, it might be difficult to precisely define what constitutes a hate speech and what not. But Twitter should at least be trying.

[dvdkon]

What would happen if Twitter was a peer-to-peer FLOSS network? In our current world Twitter is a centralised product backed by a large company, but very little of its user-facing functionality could change and that would no longer be true. Such hypothetical P2P network would definitely have some kind of filtering, but it would likely not be network-wide and might not even be backed by a central entity (think more email anti-spam than moderation).

[pbasista]

In such a situation, the expectation about the content moderation would remain the same. Specifically, such a network should still disallow hate speech, actively seek it, remove it and ban users who repeatedly spread it.

[dvdkon]

Thing is, P2P networks are usually built to make this kind of blanket blocking/banning impossible. Mastodon is more distributed than P2P, but even then moderation only applies to one server. In this case, the operators of popular Pakistani servers could very well side against the author. In a more "pure P2P" setup, I could see users choosing which moderation authorities to follow, so there would be no way to do what you ask. (Most users still wouldn't see it, because who wants to see hate speech, but the choice would be on the users, and again the kind of people this smear campaign is aimed at might not have it hidden.)

[remram]

That would be true if Twitter was a protocol, or even wanted to be a protocol. It's a platform though, that's its entire business model.

[pbasista]

> whole circumstance of people wanting you dead is not twitters fault

The hate speech itself is of course the sole responsibility of whoever created it.

Twitter is, however, fully responsible for allowing it to be spread.

Without a major communication channel which enables this hate speech to reach massive audiences, it would most likely remain isolated to a small number of people. And it probably would not evolve into a hate _action_.

The people behind this hate speech could of course reach to some dodgy places and hire professional mercenaries who might do the dirty jobs for them. But that is risky for them because their true identity might be revealed to the authorities or they might be betrayed or worse.

So what they do instead is they use a public channel, as big as they could find, like Twitter, to reach out to everyone who might be interested to answer their calling. They are counting on the possibility that maybe some psychopath with the will and abilities to do whatever they ask for will just go and do it.

The important part is that Twitter is used here as a communication medium without which the hate speech spreaders would have no major audience to pass their hate onto. The fact that they are allowed to do so absolutely is Twitter's responsibility.