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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday October 14 2017, @07:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the jumping-to-conclusions dept.

The actress, who has emerged as a Hollywood voice in the Harvey Weinstein sexual-assault scandal, revealed that Twitter had locked her account on Wednesday night.

Rose McGowan had a hold placed on her Twitter account Wednesday night, an act that quickly sparked outrage among the many users who have been following her posts ever since news first broke of the allegations against Harvey Weinstein.

The actress, who has emerged as a Hollywood voice after finding herself thrust into the center of the developing story of sexual misconduct, harassment and assault allegations against the movie mogul, took to her Instagram and Facebook accounts to relay the news of her temporary suspension, writing cryptically that "TWITTER HAS SUSPENDED ME. THERE ARE POWERFUL FORCES AT WORK. BE MY VOICE. #ROSEARMY."

She added a screenshot (below) from a message from Twitter telling her that she had violated their terms of service and that she would be locked out for 12 hours once she deleted certain tweets. She posted the message late Wednesday night.

As of 7:20 a.m. PT on Thursday, Twitter had unlocked McGowan's account, telling THR the temporary lock was due to the actress tweeting out a private number, which falls under the private information violation under Twitter Rules. McGowan deleted the post to regain access.

Are social media platforms common carriers, or not?


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  • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday October 14 2017, @04:36PM

    by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Saturday October 14 2017, @04:36PM (#582322) Homepage Journal

    Words have meanings and the term "common carrier" has a specific meaning in Federal law/regulations.

    It's also inappropriate in this case. While on a much smaller scale, SoylentNews does much the same thing as Twitter. SN needn't worry about "common carrier" regulations (and, it seems, the actual common carriers won't need to worry about them much longer -- thanks Ajit Pai, you scumbag industry shill), nor does Twitter. However both SN and Twitter need to concern themselves with user backlash if and when they censor their users (see how well that's worked for Aristarchus).

    Private (meaning non-governmental, not necessarily privately-held) organizations are not bound by the strictures of the First Amendment, that only applies to the Federal government and inferior jurisdictions in the several states.

    The real issue is (as has been pointed out several times) is centralization. Peer to peer and federated publishing systems are inherently superior, as they (think Usenet) route around censorship as damage.

    You can rage at Twitter (or SN) all you want, but they can censor with impunity. Fortunately for us, the folks at SN are pretty firmly on the side of free speech, even if they aren't *required* to allow it (the major exception being maintaining DMCA safe harbor status to avoid lawsuits by MAFIAA types).

    The centralization issue is a complex one, as most folks do not have the bandwidth to host their own content. This allowed companies like TwitsRUs, FaceFuck and, for different reasons, Googber to take advantage of the upload speed restrictions imposed (WRT to cable/DOCSIS, initially throttled because of engineering issues, then jealously guarded by most ISPs) on end users to create centralized platforms. Now that they are entrenched, they want to stay that way.

    The solution for freedom in this respect is more freedom -- synchronous upload/download speeds, simple tools to allow peer-to-peer communications, coherent federation strategies and healthy competition between those who are actually common carriers.

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
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