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Twitter's New Tool to Crack Down on Politically Incorrect Language

posted by CoolHand on Tuesday February 21 2017, @03:35AM   
from the will-they-crack-down-on-el-presidente dept.

MrPlow writes:

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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Original Submission

• Re:censorship Re:censorship (Score: 1) by dry on Wednesday February 22 2017, @06:22AM

  by dry (223) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @06:22AM (#470027) Journal

  Seems Americans forget their history or, more likely, have so much propaganda shoved down their throats from birth that even a decent person such as Louis Brandeis makes fundamental mistakes.
  The American Revolution depended heavily on silencing opposition. Popular means of silencing included tar and feathering, something likely to kill, letters of attainment from various colonial/State governments targeting those whose viewpoints were unpopular due to being anti-revolution to the extreme of some guy named Lynch hanging those that voiced opposition.
  Once opposition has been silenced, it is easy to push free speech though in truth, all the Founding Fathers did was ban the Federal Legislature from banning speech. States were allowed. The Judiciary, in a time when the common law was much more important, were, and as Lincoln showed, the President wasn't denied the freedom to silence people, especially during insurrections such as the American revolution.
  There has always been common law restrictions on the common law freedom of speech. Slander, libel, incitement are the obvious examples.

  Parent

• Re:censorship (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:58AM

  by NotSanguine (285) <{NotSanguine} {at} {SoylentNews.Org}> on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:58AM (#470046) Homepage Journal

  Seems Americans forget their history or, more likely, have so much propaganda shoved down their throats from birth that even a decent person such as Louis Brandeis makes fundamental mistakes.
  The American Revolution depended heavily on silencing opposition. Popular means of silencing included tar and feathering, something likely to kill, letters of attainment from various colonial/State governments targeting those whose viewpoints were unpopular due to being anti-revolution to the extreme of some guy named Lynch hanging those that voiced opposition.
  Once opposition has been silenced, it is easy to push free speech though in truth, all the Founding Fathers did was ban the Federal Legislature from banning speech. States were allowed. The Judiciary, in a time when the common law was much more important, were, and as Lincoln showed, the President wasn't denied the freedom to silence people, especially during insurrections such as the American revolution.
  There has always been common law restrictions on the common law freedom of speech. Slander, libel, incitement are the obvious examples.

  Your thought process seems rather mangled, so I'll try to make some sense of it. The discussion at hand is about a *private* entity limiting speech. This is neither illegal nor uncommon in the United States. I used the Brandeis quote, as it makes clear why censorship is bad, and discussed how we might appropriately address speech that is hateful or nasty.

  You're correct to say that the First Amendment restricts the Federal Government from restricting free expression. Making that work has been a centuries long odyssey, and we're still working on it. What's more, the Fourteenth Amendment [wikipedia.org] and the Incorporation Doctrine [wikipedia.org] ensure that it does, in fact, apply to the several states.

  While there are slander, libel and incitement laws in the US, proving such claims is quite difficult here. As I mentioned, wartime restrictions on civil liberties have been common everywhere, throughout history, and the US (to our shame) is no exception.

  Throughout history (both in the United States and pretty much everywhere else) a variety of civil liberties have been curtailed, often quite significantly, usually with violence and often deadly force.

  We do remember the vitriol, anger and violence against loyalists during and after the Revolutionary War. In British occupied areas, there were similar occurrences. What's more, the war broke families and turned father against son and brother against brother. Even after the war, those that were on the side of revolution were at each other's throats even before the war ended.

  I'm not sure where you come from, but some of us do know our history. And it's filled with genocide (how many native americans are left?), mass enslavement and other atrocities. Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus [wikipedia.org] during the Civil War. The Espionage Act of 1917 is still on the books.

  It didn't stop there either, but you get the idea. As time has gone by, we strengthened civil liberties for everyone, although there have been disturbing signs of backsliding of late.

  Brandeis was quite clear in his reasoning (and in my view, quite wrong) when it came to wartime censorship (cf.
  Schenck v. United States [wikipedia.org]).

  Brandeis' thinking matured as he did and famously expressed that in Whitney v. California [wikipedia.org] (where the quote in my initial post came from. Here's more, putting it in context):

  Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. [n2] They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are subject. But they knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies, and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones. Believing in the power of reason as applied through public discussion, they eschewed silence [p376] coerced by law -- the argument of force in its worst form. Recognizing the occasional tyrannies of governing majorities, they amended the Constitution so that free speech and assembly should be guaranteed.

  Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears. To justify suppression of free speech, there must be reasonable ground to fear that serious evil will result if free speech is practiced. There must be reasonable ground to believe that the danger apprehended is imminent. There must be reasonable ground to believe that the evil to be prevented is a serious one. Every denunciation of existing law tends in some measure to increase the probability that there will be violation of it. [n3] Condonation of a breach enhances the probability. Expressions of approval add to the probability. Propagation of the criminal state of mind by teaching syndicalism increases it. Advocacy of law-breaking heightens it still further. But even advocacy of violation, however reprehensible morally, is not a justification for denying free speech where the advocacy falls short of incitement and there is nothing to indicate that the advocacy would be immediately acted on. The wide difference between advocacy and incitement, between preparation and attempt, between assembling and conspiracy, must be borne in mind. In order to support a finding of clear and present danger, it must be shown either that immediate serious violence was to be expected or was advocated, or that the past conduct furnished reason to believe that such advocacy was then contemplated. [p377]

  Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty. To courageous, self-reliant men, with confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning applied through the processes of popular government, no danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency can justify repression. Such must be the rule if authority is to be reconciled with freedom. [n4] Such, in my opinion, is the command of the Constitution. It is therefore always open to Americans to challenge a law abridging free speech and assembly by showing that there was no emergency justifying it.

  Moreover, even imminent danger cannot justify resort to prohibition of these functions essential to effective democracy unless the evil apprehended is relatively serious. Prohibition of free speech and assembly is a measure so stringent that it would be inappropriate as the means for averting a relatively trivial harm to society. A police measure may be unconstitutional merely because the remedy, although effective as means of protection, is unduly harsh or oppressive. Thus, a State might, in the exercise of its police power, make any trespass upon the [p378] land of another a crime, regardless of the results or of the intent or purpose of the trespasser. It might, also, punish an attempt, a conspiracy, or an incitement to commit the trespass. But it is hardly conceivable that this Court would hold constitutional a statute which punished as a felony the mere voluntary assembly with a society formed to teach that pedestrians had the moral right to cross unenclosed, unposted, wastelands and to advocate their doing so, even if there was imminent danger that advocacy would lead to a trespass. The fact that speech is likely to result in some violence or in destruction of property is not enough to justify its suppression. There must be the probability of serious injury to the State. Among free men, the deterrents ordinarily to be applied to prevent crime are education and punishment for violations of the law, not abridgment of the rights of free speech and assembly.

  Later courts have further strengthened the right to free expression.

  All that said, the US Constitution does not apply to private entities. However, the ideals (however poorly implemented historically) ensconced in that document have created a tradton of free expression that's one of the nice things about this country. Don't like it? Just get 2/3 of congress and 3/4 of states to modify the constitution to be more to your liking.

  As for your claim that Americans don't know their history, you're talking out of your ass and it smells that way too. I'm sure there are many (if not most) in whatever shithole^W country you hail from that are staggeringly ignorant of *your* history. Oh, and fuck you!

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