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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday February 21 2017, @03:35AM   Printer-friendly
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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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday February 21 2017, @06:48AM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Tuesday February 21 2017, @06:48AM (#469603) Journal

    That user was not banned, but was limited.

    True, though without understanding dialectical meanings and context, one could easily see an escalation of such a policy that could result in outright banning.

    For example, taking the word "fag," it's perfectly acceptable for a Brit to say "I could really murder a fag" or even "I could murder an Indian right now." Every Brit who is reading this post knows what those sentences mean, but in the U.S. those sentences would not only be offensive, but would likely be construed as hate speech (which Twitter has been known to outright ban).

    Starting Score:    1  point
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    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday February 21 2017, @07:14AM

    by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday February 21 2017, @07:14AM (#469609) Journal

    "A fag smoking a fag" was what was actually written.

    https://twitter.com/faggotfriday/status/831813645462097921/photo/1 [twitter.com]

    The article says it's an instance of "using fag in the British sense, meaning cigarette" but, taking the accompanying photo into account, it also appears to be an instance of using the word in the American sense.

    • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday February 21 2017, @07:28AM

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Tuesday February 21 2017, @07:28AM (#469613) Journal

      My bad. I actually did RTFA, but took TFA at its word and didn't click through all the links. Now that we've found an apparent error, should we now have a debate over whether TFA is "fake news"?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 21 2017, @12:26PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 21 2017, @12:26PM (#469659)

        Anyone remembers the Seven Dirty Words? George Carlin was 'every thing wrong with this world' apparently.