Twitter, like any social network that allows a degree of anonymity, has its problems with trolls and people who spout hateful rhetoric. However, there have also been a number of incidents that have led users to suspect Twitter is lumping mainstream conservative voices in with those who are disseminating hate. Further, Twitter has been confounded by what to do about online movements such as #GamerGate, which are politically incorrect enough that they’re decried by online feminists and the like, but are (mostly) within the bounds of acceptable discourse.
Well, it seems that Twitter is going to double down on their desire to appease progressive montagnards at the expense of having a platform that actually facilitates robust debate. A press release today announced they were partnering with various activist groups to form the “Twitter Trust & Safety Council“:
If you scan the list of organizations that Twitter has partnered with, you will see that this supposedly diverse group of voices runs the gamut from liberal identity politics stalwarts such as GLAAD to edgier axe-grinders such as Feminist Frequency. It’s a fair bet that none of these groups have a particularly expansive notion of free speech. Take the “Dangerous Speech Project,” which proposes limits on speech to prevent violence. In the Dangerous Speech Project’s reckoning, dangerous speech is defined by five different factors:
Blogger Clark Bianco, who formerly wrote for the popular free speech blog Popehat.com and recently launched status451.com, notes that these criteria are so vague that “we start this game with a 5 point checklist, and four of the boxes are pre-checked for every single libertarian/right meme.” Basically, the only one of these five points that doesn’t already fit into erroneous preexisting liberal conceptions about angry and violent right wingers is the discernment involved in identifying “a speech act that is clearly understood as a call to violence.”
But that might be the most chilling part of all. Recent history shows us that what the left clearly understands as a call to violence is far from literal and often borders on willful, delusional misinterpretation. By the same token, when the left is explicitly violent, their rhetoric gets rationalized away.
To be clear, the fact that Twitter censors people is not exactly a First Amendment crisis. It’s a private company, so it’s free to tend its walled garden as it sees fit (or at least do whatever the company thinks it needs to do to keep its stock price from plummeting more than it already has).
Then again, I suspect the San Francisco-based Twitter suffers from Pauline Kael-syndrome and doesn’t understand that embracing such a narrow political perspective on speech issues is pretty off-putting to much of its user base.
For now, Twitter insists that there’s no cause for alarm. “Seriously people,” as one top Twitter developer said over the weekend, “We aren’t idiots. Quit speculating about how we’re going to ‘ruin Twitter.'” And why would we indulge in such speculation? It’s not as if there’s precedent for idiots running a huge social network into the ground.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go update my Friendster and MySpace pages.
