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posted by
CoolHand
on Tuesday February 21 2017, @03:35AM
from the will-they-crack-down-on-el-presidente dept.
from the will-they-crack-down-on-el-presidente dept.
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Twitter has launched a new way to punish users for bad behavior, temporarily "limiting" their account.
Some users are receiving notices their accounts are limited for 12 hours, meaning only people who follow them can see their tweets or receive notifications. When they are retweeted, people outside their network can't see those retweets.
Some speculate these limitations are automatic based on keywords, but there is no hard evidence.
This would be fine if this was used uniformly to clamp down on harassment, but it appears to be used on people, simply for using politically incorrect language.
Source: http://heatst.com/tech/twitters-new-tool-to-crack-down-on-politically-incorrect-language/
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Twitter's New Tool to Crack Down on Politically Incorrect Language
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Hacking's just another word for nothing left to kludge.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday February 21 2017, @03:49AM
At least offenders are notified. I can't think of a censorship tactic more chickenshit than true shadowbanning, like what Reddit got caught doing. The worst part about that was that of all the community nobody would be smart or vocal enough to figure it out and bring attention to it. At least with Twitter's rules, you can know what they consider offensive, and that in itself is important in studying your enemy.
Twitter serves a useful niche but will keep painting itself into a corner such that even the government and public intelligence agencies will cease their funding. One can only hope that an alternative will take its place, one with a sane censorship policy. It should be up to the people, not the system, to decide what they don't want to see; and a system of granular filters set by the individuals should be enough.
There was a situation I encountered frequently on Yahoo chat, which was that even if you ignored the assholes (okay, ignored me) you often don't want to ignore the people conversing with the assholes. To those I say, get a fucking spine. You can't see my slurs and other affronts to everything for which you stand, so perhaps you should adjust your worldview to accept that some people find the dark side of humanity to be enjoyable. You're an animal forced to live amongst other animals, and it is better for you to understand and work within this system rather than run from it.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Bill Dimm on Tuesday February 21 2017, @04:34AM
There are some that claim that twitter throttles [youtube.com], which is similar to shadow banning but harder to detect.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 21 2017, @10:11AM
From the summary, emphasis by me:
So no, they don't tell you what they consider offensive. You are only told that your account is "limited" (unlike a true shadowban, where you don't even know what's going on), but not based on which criteria.
(Score: 2) by https on Wednesday February 22 2017, @01:51AM
My spine is awesome. But my patience with assholes flying the false flag of "but free speech" is terribly thin - twitter ain't the government. I can't think of anything more chickenshit than refusing to man up and add something of value - viz, that doesn't merit censorship - to a discussion. Spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam rape small children spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam kill small doggies spam spam spam spam
See how much fun that is? Can you imagine how illuminating we could make the discussions on twitter where you don't have threshold filters like SN or /. does? Can you imagine the mongolian clusterfuckness of adding slashcode to twitter?
Shadowbanning is a nifty trick to shut down mombasement mouthbreathers who wouldn't have been let out in public fifty years ago.
Offended and laughing about it.