alt-left Twitter purges many alt-right accounts

Ben Tasker ben at bentasker.co.uk
Fri Nov 18 16:01:34 PST 2016


On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 11:30 PM, juan <juan.g71 at gmail.com> wrote:

>         'Their' service exists only thanks to the users and the fascist
>         government they work for.
>
>
Twitter is entirely dependant on it's userbase, yes. If they feel that
allowing that kind of speech is going to lead to users not feeling
comfortable using the service (leading to a reduction of the userbase) the
only sane commercial decision is to remove the problematic speech, no?

Working for the government or not, they're hardly likely to stand and
defend harassment when that'll cost them users. Especially given that it
sounds like they do a terrible job of making money out of those users anyway



>         What kind of sane 'cypherpunk' 'activist' would defend fascist
>         corporations like twitter? Rhetorical question of course....
>

It's not intended as a defence of Twitter per se.

I'm not a fan of corporations by any stretch of the imagination, and
certainly not of the American capitalism rules all mindset.

But you know what, I believe in individual rights, and that includes the
right not to be party to something like harassment. If you're being made to
carry things you staunchly disagree with, in a world where people will
associate them with you, that's - in effect- compelling speech which is
just as bad (if not worse) than suppressing speech.

A corporation actually take a stance to try and prevent some of the
targeted abuse that flows online is a good thing. It might not (nay,
doesn't) offset the myriad faults with the system, but it's a lean towards
benefiting the userbase (even if driven primarily by self-interest). The
world isn't black and white, even the truly evil can perform good acts from
time to time.


Don't forget these guys weren't banned for being right-wing, or for
expressing "alt-right" views. Most (if not all) had a habit of directly
harassing people for race, gender, whatever.

They're still free to continue running websites promoting their views. I'd
have a bigger issue with a hosting company refusing to host what amounts to
a political (if extreme) opinion or news site.


The line seems to be drawn at launching direct attacks, which doesn't seem
unreasonable, especially given the reality is we live in a world where
capitalism currently exists, and most of society doesn't want to have to
deal with that type of bullshit.

Course, there is the question of how direct attacks should be defined too,
and there's no good way to do that definitively. I think encouraging
hundreds, if not thousands, of followers to hurl abuse at one user is
probably well over it though.



>
>         The 'terms of service' of the corporate mafia are null and
>         void, in case you never noticed.
>
>
>
Not if you plan to use a service provided and controlled by that mafia. The
(non-corporate) mafia, in fact, tend to be quite insistent that you abide
by their terms


I know you'll probably disagree with huge chunks of that, if not all of it,
and it's probably a bit muddled where it's been rattled out.

The TL:DR is, there isn't a good answer that works in the world we
currently live in. Those that were banned (or at least those I've bothered
to look up) were assholes. Not because of their speech, but of their
actions.


-- 
Ben Tasker
https://www.bentasker.co.uk
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