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According to Ars Technica
A number of "alt-right," pro-Trump, and self-described conservative social media personalities awoke this morning to find that they had a lot fewer followers on Twitter than they had the night before. The apparent cause was the latest culling by Twitter of accounts that in some way violated the company's terms of service, a Twitter spokesperson told Ars, including "behaviors that indicate automated activity or violations of our policies around having multiple accounts, or abuse." The sweep has some on the right accusing Twitter of politically motivated censorship.
"Twitter's tools are apolitical, and we enforce our rules without political bias," a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement emailed to Ars. The accounts were targeted as part of "our ongoing work in safety," the spokesperson said. "We also take action on any accounts we find that violate our terms of service, including asking account owners to confirm a phone number so we can confirm a human is behind it. That's why some people may be experiencing suspensions or locks. This is part of our ongoing, comprehensive efforts to make Twitter safer and healthier for everyone."
And at Vanity Fair:
Renewed fears of censorship have once again led some users to talk about leaving to join Gab, the so-called free-speech social network that cropped up in 2016 as an alternative to Twitter. And Gab couldn't be more pleased. Utsav Sanduja, the company's chief operating officer, told me on Wednesday that the company had seen "a surge of donations, Gab memberships, [and] user sign-ups" since Tuesday night.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Friday February 23 2018, @03:23PM (3 children)
Nobody commented on the situation from twitter's point of view.
I don't watch boomer TV but they have it on at the gym. Supposedly "good media" is heat, where you have two idiots yelling at each other, so you can get the equivalent of schoolboys standing around a fight watching (and watching advertisements BTW). So legacy media for boomers like ESPN or the news/propaganda channels are mostly people yelling at each other to get trainwreck viewers.
The point of mentioning that, is can twitter survive as a left wing (or any wing...) echo chamber? Can they sell enough ads to survive with "I'm gayer than you are, I'm more minority than you, I'm more persecuted than you" type of arguments? I mean, didn't anyone from ad sales have input on the new policy such that "huh, twitter is pretty boring now a days, I know we'll get more readers therefore sell more ads if we make it even MORE boring"
For analogy purposes, imagine a written clickbait site declaring they would memory-hole any article talking about right wing politics for pure 1984 censorship purposes. Now this makes sense if you're first and foremost an authoritarian political activist, aka the American Tech Left. But this is corporate suicide if your business is essentially clickbait.
So from twitter's point of view, how do they intend to survive this as a business, not as a dedicated Democrat party activism platform? Or is this signalling a long term shift in strategy and as a corporation is the plan for Soros to donate to the DNC and the DNC can purchase twitter and run it as a single political party internal intranet sorta, kinda thing? Its interesting to think about. If they're flushing the company down the toilet for good boy points, I should sell twitter short. If they're posturing to be bought out by the Communist Party USA Inc or whatever, then I should buy long for the usual merger/purchase boost in price. Should I be investing in a legacy technology anyway thats already well past its "coolness" peak? Decisions decisions...
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @04:14PM
Go bury your head in the sand some more. How much have you spent on infowars products? Do trumps tiny hands just really do the trick for your tiny prick?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by urza9814 on Friday February 23 2018, @04:53PM (1 child)
Soo...they're doomed to failure because they aren't doing their best to copy the model of legacy media? How are CNNs ratings doing today compared to twenty years ago? How's cable TV in general doing?
Suppose kids these days all think they're perfect special little snowflakes. They don't *want* to sit there watching someone screaming about how wrong and stupid they are. They don't think that's entertaining, they think it's offensive. And I don't mean left- or right- wing in particular, they've both got that part of their audience -- from the leftists who want their safe spaces free from negative vibes, to the conservative Christians who can't tolerate being wished "happy holidays" without claiming it's a goddamn genocide.
[People on Twitter] and [people who can tolerate rational discussion and debate] are two groups without much overlap. You can't fit a rational argument into 140 characters -- so it's mostly short jokes about the "other team" or congratulations to "your team". There's no room for a back-and-forth between the two sides, and nobody wants to sit there and read the other team congratulating themselves. Twitter by design cannot resolve or diffuse conflict, it only fuels them and sharpens the divide. It was only a matter of time before Twitter itself got sucked in too. The more neutral they try to be, the more they're going to be accused of favoritism by BOTH sides.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday February 25 2018, @02:03PM
I'd be willing to concede the point with the following commentary:
1) I owned a $500 20 meg hard disk card in the 80s; disk space isn't costly anymore. Changing the limit from 140 to infinite isn't a big deal compared to changing the sociology of your customer base or whatever.
2) Likewise your argument is analogous to a terminal only had 80 columns in the old days (and some people still live in 80 column land; I gave up less than a decade ago) and nobody can fit a political argument on IRC, for example, into 80 columns, yet via multiple lines and back and forth conversation it seems to work. I recognize that culturally twitter is a broadcasting service and that means 1 to many and many hecklers to 1 rather than conversational.