[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.

[DoreenMichele]

Hiring locals instead of operating from afar is potentially a means to establish a de facto negotiating position.

"I'm sorry, Pakistan, if you can't behave better, we will have no choice but to evacuate our local offices full of relatively well paid jobs and take our toys and go home. Feel free to explain that to your people however you so wish."

Money talks.

[tsimionescu]

Twitter is nowhere near big enough to hire enough people in a country like Pakistan to matter as much as control of public media does - especially to a fascist government. Not to mention, knowing how such agencies operate, I would bet anything that a good few of any such moderators would be Pakistani secret services agents.

[DoreenMichele]

No, but they could roll out a pilot program for establishing local moderating offices and as part of that program establish a list of qualifying criteria for where they are willing to place such.

They could do something akin to what McDonald's did for the beef industry. It adopted Temple Grandin's list of best practices as its standard and this got adopted by the beef industry because McDonald's buys so much beef.

Currently, these big companies typically have a predatory relationship to such countries, so such countries have no motivation to cooperate. Make them trade partners and things begin to change.

[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