December 1, 2021 - 10:17am
Barely a day after Twitter’s Jack Dorsey announced he was stepping down as CEO, handing the reins to former chief technology officer Parag Agrawal, the social media company made the first major policy change of the post-Dorsey era. In a blog posted yesterday morning, Twitter announced that it was updating its “private information policy” — which bans users from posting other users’ home addresses, ID documents, and financial account records, among other things — to prohibit the sharing of “media of private individuals,” meaning photos and video, “without the permission of the person(s) depicted.”
On its face, this might seem like a healthy development. We’ve all seen how photos and videos can derail the lives of random citizens — take the “Central Park Karen” of last summer, who lost her job and dog, and was prosecuted by the Manhattan DA, after a video of her calling the police on a black birdwatcher went viral. (The real story was, unsurprisingly, more complicated than it first appeared.) And while the ubiquity of cell-phone cameras has allowed for important citizen journalism, it has also made everyday life into a virtual panopticon in which one is in danger of having their life ruined over a fleeting moment of anger.
But there is good reason to be sceptical of how Twitter will apply its new rule. In the blog post announcing the change, the company explained:
But of course, what is in “the public interest” or “add[s] value to public discourse” is itself a political question. Over the weekend, conservative Twitter users zeroed in on the strange history of Holly Zoller, the Left-wing activist attempting to raise bail money for the accused Waukesha killer Darrell Brooks. Whether such information is citizen journalism or harassment is in the eye of the beholder.
Twitter has a history of selectively enforcing its terms of service. In the run-up to the 2020 election, it censored the New York Posts’s reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, citing a hitherto-obscure prohibition on the sharing of “hacked materials.” It used its policy against the “glorification of violence” to crack down on vocal support for Kyle Rittenhouse and to ban Donald Trump from Twitter after the Capitol Riot, while leaving Left-wing celebrations of rioting or black bloc tactics unmolested. And it did nothing when progressive darling Nikole Hannah-Jones violated its private information policy by tweeting out the phone number of a conservative reporter who asked her for comment.
“The misuse of private media can affect everyone, but can have a disproportionate effect on women, activists, dissidents, and members of minority communities,” Twitter explained in announcing the policy change. This could be dismissed as standard progressive boilerplate. But we have already seen such “disparate-impact” logic, combined with pressure from woke employees on the inside and activist NGOs on the outside, force Facebook to abandon its race-blind hate speech policy in favour of one that cracks down forcefully on offensive speech targeting women and minorities while allowing vitriol against white people, Americans, and men.
In a country polarised by race, gender, and ideology, this amounts to a ban on hate speech targeting one party but not the other. Will Twitter follow Facebook’s example? I hope not, but I won’t be holding my breath.
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SubscribeTwitter should take the bold and courageous step of censoring itself completely…by ceasing to exist.
I’ve been Twitter-free for 2 months and my mental health is already much better. Good riddance.
Why would they do that? Does the flea chose to cease to exist because it lives by sucking the dogs blood?
So another tweak to Twitter’s “terms of service” box of tricks, which they’ve always applied selectively; and often with political bias. However, as bad as it may appear when you start digging, these publicly communicated niceties conceal the much more unpleasant side of Twitter: namely their core business model, which involves making loads of money out of you, the user, by stealing your private data, tracking you and censoring you (often without your being aware of it). Twitter build profiles on each and every user like a national spy agency and then make loads of money selling this data to advertisers (no shame about sharing the details of private individuals here!). It’s a disgraceful, unscrupulous business, but apparently legal. So there is no point complaining about Twitter. If you use this platform you are a sucker! It’s simple: DO NOT USE TWITTER. There are other far less intrusive and censorious platforms. By exercising your choice not to be a sucker and closing your Twitter account you will also be contributing to their downfall. For as powerful as this platform may seem its Achilles heel is adoption (i.e. users). Without users Twitter is toast!
Ironically, the link about Holly Zoller is already dead.
priceless
Deplatforming Trump and thousands of conservatives, then cancelling Parler with 3 days notice, are high tech virtual lynchings by oligarchs catering to internet mobs. Democrats flout the Constitution and the law under flimsy excuses, counting on years of trial delays, and bogus rulings by Obama judges, to get away with it. Consider the morality of saying private companies can curtail free speech anytime they want? How is that any different than saying lunch counters can refuse to serve anybody they want?
When these revolutionaries have knocked the Constitution and the rule of law flat, and the Devil turns on them, what will they hide behind?
Please note Amazon signed a multi year contract to provide serevers for Twitter at just about the same time they cancelled Twitter competitor Parler. Coincident or conspiracy in restraint of trade?