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/
(Score: 3, Informative) by bradley13 on Tuesday February 21 2017, @10:45AM
I bet the alt-right will repel and repulse the alt-left or moderates from going there.
I don't see why, since you can follow whoever you want. For any particular group, you just need critical mass, and maybe a couple of prominent people to follow.
Twitter seems determined to become a padded room, and people are leaving accordingly. While the reported number of accounts is stable, the number of tweets per day has dropped to around half of its peak value in 2014 [businessinsider.com]. Likely, many of the accounts Twitter claims have become inactive.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.