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Atheist vlogger Thunderf00t reports that Jordan Owen, Slade Villena, and Mykeru were "all suspended from twitter for no reason." Jordan Owen is the co-producer of the documentary The Sarkeesian Effect, a critique of the methods of controversial vlogger Anita Sarkeesian. Mykeru is the producer of The Block Bot and the Dumbification of the Beeb, a critique of the BBC Newsnight segment "Talking to the Twitter Trolls and those Who Study them". Slade Villena is a former writer for Gamasutra and the founder of indie game developer Rogue Star Games.
Thunderf00t himself was suspended from Twitter for two weeks in September for unclear reasons. At that time Twitter had also banned the account of "The Camera Lady", the researcher for a video series accusing award-winning developer Phil Fish and the Independent Games Festival of racketeering.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Sir Finkus on Monday November 10 2014, @09:45AM
Twitter's public image wouldn't look so good
Oh? Do telephone companies suffer image issues because they don't scan conversations and ban people from them using their service if people trip filters? What about the postal service? Gmail? SMTP servers? Twitter a medium for communication, and give its users tools to remove or block any users they find objectionable. They have every right to ban anyone they want from their service, but I think they lose much more image banning people with "offensive" opinions.
As far as death threats go, I don't think I've seen any evidence that any of the people involved in the story have made any, so that point is rather irrelevant.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 10 2014, @10:31AM
The difference is that all the services you mentioned are sending supposedly private messages to selected persons, while Twitter messages are public.
It's like an event host will likely not get problems if he doesn't stop you from telling your explicit sexual fantasies in private to a friend on the event in a way no one not involved can hear it, but there will be a huge outcry if he doesn't stop you from doing the same publicly on stage.
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Monday November 10 2014, @11:29AM
Actually, in the UK (where Thunderf00t is based) the phone companies are required by law to take action if they get complaints about abuse and harassment. More over they are generally quite eager to shut down scams and criminal enterprises using their networks, and are under no obligation to provide service to everyone.
Thunderf00t probably had a lot of complaints registered against him, not without merit I might add. Twitter did the right thing, acting to stop his on-going actions while they did further investigation and presumably contacted him to ask him to tone it down a bit. They have no obligation to prove him with a platform, and have shut down many other troll accounts in the past.
Ironic that the "cookie" on this page reads "You can never trust a woman; she may be true to you."
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Sir Finkus on Monday November 10 2014, @11:22PM
Thunderf00t probably had a lot of complaints registered against him, not without merit I might add.
I'll admit I haven't been following this gamergate bullshit, but reading this guy's history I don't see anything that qualifies as harassment.
The comparison of twitter to broadcast television also doesn't really work. Over the air broadcasts are regulated by the FCC, and similar entities in other countries. Cable and satellite channels can choose their own standards as to what they want to broadcast. On channels like HBO, virtually anything goes.
It is very easy on twitter to block or unfollow people whose messages you don't want to read. If you're using twitter as a platform to try and advance a political agenda, it's natural to expect that people with differing opinions are going to try and pick your statements apart, and even insult you. That's something that comes with the territory.
The attitude of "ban first, figure it out" also has problems. Twitter is a very real-time medium. Banning someone at a critical time can silence them when their arguments might be most relevant. It's far to easy for people that just don't like someone to bandwagon report someone. There are similar problems on sites (such as this one) with user moderation. Posts that don't follow the hivemind tend to get downvoted and effectively silenced. Dissenting opinions are often the most important ones to hear.
Really, I think the only reasons twitter should ban someone are threats, fraud, and network abuse (spamming other users, hacking accounts etc). In most cases these should be evaluated by a human, not an algorithm. Obviously things like links to phishing sites can be checked for automatically.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 11 2014, @08:04PM
Correction
Thunderf00t is English but lives and works in the US
It is obvious you know nothing more of the man than wild speculation and rumour, do some research, read some of his allegedly offensive tweets, watch some of his youtube videos then try telling me he is guilty of harrassment.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Monday November 10 2014, @05:41PM
Oh? Do telephone companies suffer image issues because they don't scan conversations and ban people from them using their service if people trip filters?
The difference is one-to-one communication vs. one-to-many. A more appropriate analogy would be a broadcast company. Most broadcast companies do in fact censor their content.