[HN Gopher] They're trying to get me kidnapped and tortured, but...
___________________________________________________________________
They're trying to get me kidnapped and tortured, but Twitter
doesn't care
Author : waqasx
Score : 234 points
Date : 2022-08-28 09:41 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (waqas.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (waqas.xyz)
| jongjong wrote:
| In the new (increasingly lawless) world order, not having any
| enemies is going to be a big advantage. It's a good time to make
| amends and disassociate from extremist or nationalist groups.
| tsol wrote:
| You'd better also drop race, ideologies, and beliefs as well.
| People will always find something to make you their enemy
| gumby wrote:
| Site seems unresponsive but was archived:
| https://archive.ph/KSAjk
| bckr wrote:
| Interesting that he believes the regime change is a coup. Khan,
| the now-ousted former prime minister, appears to be a Trump-style
| strong man who is whipping up his supporters with claims that the
| vote of no confidence which removed him is actually a U.S.-led
| conspiratorial regime change.
|
| Might be right, and it's absolutely awful if these folks are
| being unjustly detained and tortured.
|
| Yet, I think it's more complicated than the author would lead us
| to believe. It's also fascinating how this kind of unrest is
| unfolding all around the world.
| twirlock wrote:
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I think this is one case that goes to the heart of what we expect
| Twitter to be.
|
| If they are supposed to be a public square, a company that is
| simply meant to offer a technical means of broadcasting your
| opinions, then we can't also expect them to fight government
| propaganda, any more than we would expect that of, say, Google
| Search.
|
| On the other hand, if we want Twitter to be a kind of new media
| company, than we should indeed hold them to journalistic
| standards and expect them to cut through government lies wherever
| they decide to have a presence.
| jacooper wrote:
| > against israel = antisemitism
|
| Being anti-israel against an illegal Apartheid occupation has
| nothing to do with being antisemitic.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| I can see where he's coming from, but Twitter is a media company.
| They are not directly responsible for anyone's safety and have no
| reason to take down content that isn't a direct threat or clear
| defamation. That's the police or justice system's job. An
| unfortunate situation but he is barking at the wrong tree it
| seems.
| hackerlight wrote:
| Nope, it isn't the police or justice system's job. That's a
| corporation externalizing the cost of their customer service
| division onto the taxpayer. Australia for example spends
| millions of dollars on online safety enforcement because these
| tech companies refuse to hire real people to remove revenge
| porn, impersonation, and so on.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| That's not right. The corporation's job is to follow the law
| and abide to court orders. Identifying and prosecuting
| harassers is not "customer service". If you take customer's
| claims at face value what you get is people misusing the
| system to harass or silence even more people.
|
| They should immediately act on takedown notices, for example
| in the case of revenge porn, but are not a private
| replacement for law enforcement.
| waqasx wrote:
| there is clear defamation. they are claiming that i work for
| intel agencies of foreign countries, which is not true.
| nwienert wrote:
| One thing that's not clear. The tweet you show claims you are
| "appointed" to a position by a human rights org in India. But
| your denials all say you aren't "working" for India, and you
| claim here for "intel agencies".
|
| It would be good to be more clear on both sides. Did they
| appoint you or did you associate in any form? Are they an
| independent org or a government agency? Maybe there were
| multiple accusations you are rolling into one?
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| The International Human Rights Foundation (IHRF) seems to
| be an NGO based in New York, perhaps with offices in India
| as well, but they don't seem to be an organ of the Indian
| government. The author of this article quotes a tweet
| trying discredit the IHRF by claiming they are "registered
| in India" (might be true, but so what?)
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Pakistan and India aren't exactly on great terms.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| I sympathize with your situation but it doesn't look that
| simple.
|
| How could Twitter verify that claim? Who should they trust?
| If someone was indeed hired by another foreign agency, they
| might as well deny it for that persons own safety.
|
| The same information war could be playing out on WhatsApp,
| Telegram, Facebook or other networks, TV, radio, newspapers.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Defamation is a civil matter and harassment is civil or
| criminal depending where you live. You'd have better luck
| going through the police or courts. People deal with similar
| harassment or misinformation campaigns all the time. It isn't
| Twitter's job to step in unless you can point to some clear
| violation of their ToS.
| Asooka wrote:
| Twitter has already booted former president of the USA Donald
| Trump due to similar conduct. As they say, with great power,
| comes great responsibility. Twitter have shown themselves
| willing to wield their power for the good of the USA, thus they
| should also accept their responsibility for the good of all
| mankind.
| tsol wrote:
| Exactly. People are acting like the conversation here for the
| past year+ hasn't revolved around social media companies
| taking responsibility for the negative effects of their
| products
| fluoridation wrote:
| It could be argued that since the latter is impossible, they
| should abstain from the former.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Trump was inciting civil unrest often, but I believe they set
| a terrible precedent by banning his account for the "I'm not
| attending the inauguration" tweet, based on a ton of very
| subtle inferences.
|
| One cannot reasonably expect them to act as a fact checker &
| censor for the entire world, nor would that be desirable from
| a private corporation. What we need is better, regulated
| moderation systems, and a justice system that can keep up
| with the pace of social media.
| [deleted]
| mypalmike wrote:
| The pace of social media is insurmountable. More
| information is generated per second on social media than
| any justice system could process in a year.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| What is the alternative?
| pessimizer wrote:
| More information is generated _in the material world_ per
| second than is generated on social media per year, but we
| haven 't seen that as a reason to dismantle the justice
| system.
| mypalmike wrote:
| Nobody was advocating for dismantling the justice system.
|
| Social media specifically lends itself to widespread and
| high frequency libel, fraud, threats, and other illegal
| acts. What "material world" information manages to do so
| at a similar rate?
| indymike wrote:
| >They are not directly responsible for anyone's safety and have
| no reason to take down content that isn't a direct threat or
| clear defamation.
|
| From the article: the author is asking to have false,
| defamatory content removed.
|
| > That's the police or justice system's job.
|
| That is not an available option to the author of this article.
| The author is alleging that false posts are being made to lay
| the groundwork for the author being detained and tortured by
| the local justice system.
| fluoridation wrote:
| >the author is asking to have false, defamatory content
| removed.
|
| The author is asking to have content that he says is false
| removed.
|
| >The author is alleging that false posts are being made to
| lay the groundwork for the author being detained and tortured
| by the local justice system.
|
| Since the tweets may be used as an excuse to have him
| detained, removing them will do nothing, because the
| government could just as easily use a different medium for
| the same purpose. Twitter can't prevent someone who can and
| wants to kidnap you from kidnapping you.
| chucksmash wrote:
| This is a good point and I think pretty well captures the
| "and what is Twitter supposed to do about it" angle.
|
| To say "well, thus and such comedian is connected to the
| regime, that's why he has tweeted about me," well, what
| level of investigation is Twitter supposed to do that they
| a) disprove the allegations lobbed at OP (working for RAW
| provocateurs) and b) are able to support the allegation
| against the comedian's intent, and thus prove that the
| whole interaction is as the OP says it is?
|
| Doing so goes beyond moderation, it goes beyond fact
| checking, it's nearly at the level of a personal background
| check or a trial.
|
| What is being asked of Twitter seems totally outside the
| realm of what a social media company should be doing. It
| seems like OP wanted to do the right thing, to speak truth
| to power, but is now realizing that power was listening.
|
| An account that publicly exposes your identity is not the
| right place to antagonize people with machine guns if you
| are not willing to take on personal risk, and that has
| nothing to do with moderation policies.
| indymike wrote:
| So basically meh, they'll torture him anyway?
| fluoridation wrote:
| If we're starting from the assumption that the government
| is posting false tweets that it'll use as excuses to
| kidnap and torture people, then I don't see what effect
| removing those tweets would have. A person under a real
| threat of violence needs real, physical protection.
| Anything that can be done over the Internet is
| insufficient.
| indymike wrote:
| It removes pretext used for justification of seizure and
| torture. Doing nothing enables the oppressor in this
| case.
| fluoridation wrote:
| >because the government could just as easily use a
| different medium for the same purpose
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Since the tweets may be used as an excuse to have him
| detained, removing them will do nothing, because the
| government could just as easily use a different medium for
| the same purpose.
|
| This is nonsense. That's like letting someone use your gun
| to shoot someone because _they 'd be able to find a gun
| somewhere._
| fluoridation wrote:
| You're right, Twitter is a gun and tweets are bullets
| that kill. It's a perfectly apt analogy. /s
| joemazerino wrote:
| Twitter didn't have a problem banning Trump. Not so easy to pick
| sides when you're in another country's politics.
| LiberationUnion wrote:
| ubukhary wrote:
| its interesting to see supporter of the previous govt who
| silenced most of the journalists and activists from twitter with
| heavy handed law enforcement tactics, now claiming to be a
| freedom of speech proponent
|
| For those who do not know, PTI owned and operated largest bots
| and trolls network who habitually abused people who ever would
| disagree with them. Consider them TRUMP supporters like mentality
| people in Pakistan
| oa335 wrote:
| I don't think thats a fair characterization of PTI supporters.
| PML-N and PPP have literally created cults of personality
| around their families, in many ways their followers can be
| described as cult-like also.
| ubukhary wrote:
| question is who misused the twitter the most, its not who is
| the cult or not.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| I'm not saying Twitter is in the right here, but I'm not
| convinced by the article that Twitter is meaningfully increasing
| the danger to the OP. Is a corrupt government really going to
| avoid kidnapping/torturing someone because they're popular on
| Twitter?
| waqasx wrote:
| it becomes far easier for the government to kidnap someone
| after these allegations are circulated. we have seen this
| countless times, to pave the path of illegal kidnappings
| detention and torture, they spread this negative propaganda and
| fake news first.
| Manfred wrote:
| I believe their point is that Twitter should delete or flag the
| accounts that are spreading false information about him (the
| journalist).
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Is a corrupt government really going to avoid
| kidnapping/torturing someone because they're popular on
| Twitter?
|
| Is your assumption that corrupt governments must be omnipotent,
| and don't have to make excuses for their behavior in order to
| maintain support, or at least to prevent riots?
| chopete3j wrote:
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| This is why Elon backed out of the twitter deal due to fake
| accounts.
| iso1631 wrote:
| He backed out because he overpaid for a company at the height
| of the boom just as we head into a recession that could well be
| deeper than 2008
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's politically impossible for Twitter to start censoring people
| who are declaring without evidence that other people are on the
| payroll of a foreign government or organization and guilty of the
| capital crimes of espionage and treason.
|
| It's far more likely that they'll start labeling tweets with
| "This tweet was posted by a probable agent of a foreign
| government for the purpose of sowing discord."
| 0xedd wrote:
| Extremely sad to hear. I don't think Twitter can be used to
| promote change. Or get your voice to the masses. They only care
| about propagating their own propaganda.
|
| Leave Twitter. Try one of the mastodon instances, instead. Be
| anonymous.
| Canada wrote:
| Wouldn't trying to remain anonymous as a journalist be rather
| ineffective?
| waqasx wrote:
| yes, i would lose my audience too that i have built over ten
| years.
| ebcode wrote:
| As a US Citizen who has had their twitter posts censored, I
| consider myself to be a critic of the US Government who has
| been effectively silenced. At a certain point you have to
| decide whether you are willing to die for your cause, or
| live with your shame.
|
| > I feel Twitter should have protected me, instead of
| protecting the henchmen of a facist regime bent upon
| silencing critics.
|
| The West no longer deserves its reputation for fighting
| fascists. Quite the opposite, in fact.
| CHB0403085482 wrote:
| Sympathies to you, man.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _I don 't think Twitter can be used to promote change. Or get
| your voice to the masses._
|
| To me, both the effects of and responses to Mr. Ahmed's tweets
| seem to show that Twitter can be used to promote change and get
| your voice to the masses. It just doesn't distinguish between
| "good" change/voices and "bad" change/voices.
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| Twitter is such a cacophony, like trying to have a conversation
| in the middle of a rock concert. I get better quality
| information and news from Hacker News.
| [deleted]
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Pakistan in a nutshell - the country is ruled by the military,
| the military is ruled by the ISI. If they have you in their
| crosshair - run. They will get you.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| The military is not ruled by the ISI.
| ondamonda wrote:
| bell-cot wrote:
| Sad to say, but people often [want|need|expect] a corporation to
| act as a [competent|reliable|trustworthy] [government|law-
| enforcement agency|court].
|
| Corporations are very clearly none of those things, and generally
| have lots of disincentive against attempting to fake being any of
| those things.
| politelemon wrote:
| They have plenty of incentive to fake being those things, and
| regularly do so, unless there are repercussions for doing that
| thing.
| bell-cot wrote:
| True, but that's nothing special. If my next door neighbor is
| a jerk, he may try to pretend that the legal property
| boundary is 3' into my yard from where it really is, and that
| his say-so is what determines that boundary.
|
| The types of "faking it" that very quickly separate the real
| governments from the corporations & pretenders are "make the
| laws", "collect the taxes", "run the courts", and "back it
| with force". If the FBI slaps handcuffs on a Twitter CxO and
| hauls him off to jail, do not expect Twitter to send in their
| Marine Corps.
| Manfred wrote:
| So a liquor store should not be responsible for age
| restrictions and sell alcohol to minors? I think there is
| always a sliding point between where the government or
| companies police the rules. It's an interesting conversation
| where that point should be.
| lstodd wrote:
| Of course they absolutely should be. It's how I learned to
| build rectification columns from cookware after all.
| Education is a responsibility of the entire society after
| all.
|
| It's just the stated goal - minimising alcohol consumption -
| is phony and misleading.
| dcow wrote:
| Abiding by laws is different from creating and/or enforcing
| them. You can bet a snowballs chance in hell liquor stores
| wouldn't sell to 16+ year olds in the US if the law changed
| to allow it.
| wseqyrku wrote:
| Looks like HN doesn't either, sorry.
| powera wrote:
| Poke the bear, and the bear might poke back.
|
| Interesting that this person's conception of free speech allows
| him to call a parliamentary no-confidence vote a "coup", but
| doesn't allow government-aligned forces to say he is inciting
| violence.
| truthwhisperer wrote:
| pkrotich wrote:
| Should twitter censor such tweets? I don't think so unless it
| violates their terms - but if the target disputes it then they
| should label it as disputed - with link to dispute report if it
| passes basic checks.
|
| That said I know this can be abused just like dmca take down
| notices. It's truly arduous to balance and context matters which
| in turn requires godly number of man hours.
| root_axis wrote:
| > _Twitter, despite millions of Pakistani users, it seems has no
| moderation system that understands local dynamics._
|
| Many would argue they don't even understand the local dynamics of
| the U.S. It's impossible for twitter to be an arbiter of the
| truth around the world, and you shouldn't expect them to be.
| However, I understand that's cold comfort for someone facing the
| threat of torture, death, or exile from their home, and I think
| your decision to call out twitter using your own platform to act
| with respect to your specific circumstances is the right thing to
| do and really the only way to handle this kind of thing.
|
| Good luck, I hope you stay safe and that the government doesn't
| succeed in silencing you.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > It's impossible for twitter to be an arbiter of the truth
| around the world
|
| Twitter only seems interested in this job in the countries and
| on the side of the factions who are politically helpful to
| Twitter. Twitter wouldn't care about Pakistan unless the State
| Department told them to care about Pakistan, and they could
| just as easily enter the fray by labeling the OPs tweets as
| deceptive and connected to foreign misinformation as they could
| enter it on the side of preventing his harassment.
| root_axis wrote:
| > _Twitter only seems interested in this job in the countries
| and on the side of the factions who are politically helpful
| to Twitter_
|
| So what? This is true of every media gatekeeper and always
| will be. Again, it's impossible for twitter to keep up with
| every change in the wind across the entire planet; they can't
| even do a satisfactory job of it _in their own country_.
|
| > _they could just as easily enter the fray by labeling the
| OPs tweets as deceptive and connected to foreign
| misinformation as they could enter it on the side of
| preventing his harassment._
|
| If this story continues to get exposure this will probably
| happen, meanwhile there are thousands of other stories of
| threats and abuse that will go unabated and unheard because
| it's happening to someone that wasn't lucky enough to go
| viral. Twitter can only do so much, especially while opposing
| factions fight them every time they do anything.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Being realistic: if your life hangs by the thread of twitter
| moderation, you should either run and hide, or get your affairs
| in order. If they really want you dead, even the best possible
| twitter moderation won't keep you safe. This whole circumstance
| of people wanting you dead is not twitters fault and there is
| very little twitter could do to protect you even if their
| moderation was perfect.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > Being realistic: if your life hangs by the thread of twitter
| moderation, you should either run and hide, or get your affairs
| in order.
|
| Perhaps a 3rd option is to go on the attack, and find some
| angle from which to sue Twitter?
| toast0 wrote:
| > Perhaps a 3rd option is to go on the attack, and find some
| angle from which to sue Twitter?
|
| Sueing twitter isn't likely to go far. Twitter doesn't have
| responsibility for their users' speech (with some very
| specific exceptions that don't include libel or defamation),
| and doesn't have a legal obligation to operate its moderation
| system. I don't think there's much to pursue there, unless
| there's something very unusual in the TOS.
|
| You'd need to sue the people making the claims, but there's
| jurisdiction issues; if the alleged corruption of the
| government of Pakistan is the case, suing in Pakistan would
| seem to be unlikely to result in the desired outcome. On the
| other hand, a court in the US, where the OP resides, may not
| be willing to assert jurisdiction over speech by someone in
| another country, and the speaker is unlikely to participate
| in a US case.
|
| In any event, such a case is likely to take years, which
| doesn't address the immediate nature of this issue. But I
| don't know how Twitter could really evaluate truthfulness of
| claims like these.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| That won't solve the problem of people wanting him dead.
| notch656a wrote:
| Yeah. Change my mind: if people want you dead violently,
| police are likely to be 15 minutes to an hour too late, and
| the courts a couple years late behind that. Unfortunately
| violence is often either solved by running away, hiding, or
| meeting violence with direct self defense.
|
| Maybe after you're lucky, you can win a suit against
| twitter, after their massive legal team drags it out for
| years with N number of hurdles. You'd be lucky to sue a
| nobody in podunk small claims court in time to effect
| meaningful change for something that needed done in days to
| weeks.
| pseudo0 wrote:
| The focus on Twitter seems a bit strange. Per the author's
| post, the government of Pakistan is arresting journalists and
| activists, manufacturing a pretext after the fact:
|
| > In Pakistan, activists and journalists are routinely picked
| up (abducted) and tortured by the country's police and secret
| services. Same happened this time, some of the top
| journalists and anchors were picked up - some without
| warrants with fake cases filed post-arrest.
|
| Twitter removing the fake claims won't stop the ISI or
| whoever from kicking his door in, if/when he returns to
| Pakistan.
| notch656a wrote:
| This article reads like an asylum claim. Hopefully they
| already have permanent legal permanent residence somewhere
| else, if not they will likely by applying for asylum. It
| could be the whole thing was written expressly for the
| purpose of asylum.
|
| Going back to Pakistan at this point would mean basically
| picking how you want to go out. Either by defending your
| life in one last moment before a corrupt government takes
| your down, or letting them beat you in prison and slowly
| watch your soul and fighting spirit wither away in prison
| until you die. I presume if that's how they wanted to go,
| they would have been doing this journalism inside Pakistan
| right now.
| frank_nitti wrote:
| The US government may be complicit in the dynamics of
| Pakistan's government, so I'm not sure they are working
| under any directives to help asylum seeking muckrakers:
|
| https://youtu.be/3jFNJtjm-wI
| waqasx wrote:
| i am not. i find this accusation disgusting. i do not
| have a problem, legally, in staying here. my problem is
| exactly because i WANT to go back and not face any
| violence.
| NavinF wrote:
| > go back and not face any violence
|
| Seems kinda unrealistic after the gov't accused you of
| inciting violence.
| [deleted]
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > i WANT to go back and not face any violence.
|
| In that case you need to arrange for the violent
| overthrow of the current (ie since ~5 months ago)
| Pakistani government. The absence/removal of malicious
| libel from twitter, even if twitter were non-evil enough
| to bother doing that, will not prevent you from being
| kidnapped and tortured.
| notch656a wrote:
| I don't understand, you don't want to be here. You want
| to go back. But an American technology company is what's
| stopping you? Once twitter does what you say you can
| safely go back home?
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| He's not asking Twitter to protect him from murder. He's asking
| them to do their damn job so the platform cannot be used to
| facilitate a smear campaign that makes it easy to get away with
| murder.
|
| It's a very reasonable request.
| xwdv wrote:
| No, this is not Twitter's problem, and if they fulfill this
| request it just goes down a rabbit hole that eventually
| creates more liability for the company than what they want to
| take on.
|
| Twitter has taken the correct action here.
| jona-f wrote:
| Wow, you're morally bankrupt. It's nice to see a well
| written article like that on the frontpage of this site,
| but unfortunately the venture capital fueled business model
| proposed by ycombinator is at the heart of the problem.
| Liability my ass. This is some disgusting dystopian
| bullshit. Also if you talk about liability, heard about the
| Streisand effect? Public opinion about these corporations
| is low and i think twitter itself isn't doing so well
| lately. Good riddance.
| sroussey wrote:
| There is a long history of liability in the USA when you
| take on editorializing roles. This was broken by the
| Communication Decency Act (CDA section 230) but case law
| has is slowly moving back. It is a valid concern.
|
| If CDA 230 were taken away, I wouldn't be surprised if
| common carrier laws fell as well. The telephone companies
| can listen to all phone calls, so they may need to
| editorialize (mute, disconnect, report to police) on
| various illegal calls.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Morally? Yes, a very reasonable request.
|
| OTOH - is there _any_ large real-world corporation which has
| _ever_ gotten itself into a sustained info-war conflict with
| a well-armed and angry nation state, for the purpose of
| protecting one "ordinary" person from that nation state? I'm
| guessing "no".
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| He says he's a _journalist._ That used to mean something.
|
| So it's rather dismissive and disrespectful to characterize
| him as an _ordinary_ person with scare quotes no less.
|
| If these platforms feel unable to moderate fairly due to
| fear of foreign governments, perhaps they should tuck tail
| and keep their pussy selves out of the conflict entirely.
|
| I'm not impressed with an argument of "We want the money
| involved but we can't make any meaningful effort to
| actually enforce the rules we claim we have. Your country
| is too tough for my sissy self to man up in. I still want
| the money though."
| bell-cot wrote:
| Okay - replace '"ordinary" person' with some polite
| phrase of your choice, which still makes it clear that
| the victim is _not_ a head of state, ambassador, top
| military officer, Speaker of the House, Fortune 50 CEO,
| etc., etc.
|
| No, I am not arguing that your idealism is morally wrong.
| I am arguing that the real world very often functions in
| ways which bear little resemblance to your ideals. No
| amount of idealism about "the gutter should have been
| stronger, and the ladder more stable, and..." will change
| the fact that my brother fell off a roof when young. Nor
| erase the injuries which he sustained. When I or people I
| care about are interacting with gutters and ladders, I
| stay very alert, and strive for "zero idealistic
| thoughts".
|
| And - this sad state of affairs is nothing new. Upton
| Sinclair wrote _The Jungle_ , _The Brass Check_ , and
| other works (about the deep and systematic moral failings
| of corporations, journalists, etc.) over a century ago.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Idealism?
|
| I'm not an idealist. I'm a pragmatist.
|
| But the internet allows businesses to operate virtually
| in de facto war zones. This is getting people killed when
| the business tries to act like they don't need to account
| for that fact.
|
| If they physically went into a war zone to sell products
| and it was getting people killed, would that merit a "Too
| bad, so sad. Gotta make money, doncha know. Can't be
| worried about niggling details like not getting our
| customers cavalierly killed."
| fluoridation wrote:
| How could a business possibly account for that in a way
| that doesn't make doing business over the Internet
| logistically impossible?
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| The arguments I'm seeing here boil down to "It's okay to
| go in with your tank full of tchochky souvenirs and run
| over a few powerless locals to protect yourself so you
| can make a few bucks."
|
| The general trend is that, when in doubt, Twitter should
| cover its own ass. I would like to see a standard of
| "When in doubt, don't run over pedestrians with your
| tank."
|
| Surely a company can come up with some best practices
| that err in the right direction here. Or maybe that's
| expecting too much of the best of the best of the best,
| sir!
| fluoridation wrote:
| Sorry, but I'm not seeing an answer to my question.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| > _He says he 's a journalist. That used to mean
| something._
|
| That's a broad and unsupported claim. I'm not aware of
| any evidence being a journalist previously gave you some
| sort of immunity / corporate protection against
| totalitarian states that has now gone away.
| [deleted]
| yibg wrote:
| Problem is who determines if it's a smear campaign? The
| author claims it was, and I tend to believe him but I haven't
| investigated. Have you? And then, how determines if it's
| extreme enough to warrant some action? In the ideal world
| sure there would be an army of people investigating every
| case in detail. But then 1) Twitter becomes the arbiter of
| truth and 2) definitely can't scale.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| 138 journalists killed in Pakistan since 1990
|
| https://www.dawn.com/news/1595257
|
| At least 39 journalists killed in US due to their
| work...since 1937
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_
| i...
|
| These risk levels are not alike.
| Uehreka wrote:
| Oh come the fuck on. People on HN need to get over this: At
| a certain point people and organizations need to stop
| pretending that "both sides could in theory have a point"
| and actually take a stand.
|
| "But what if the stand they take is opposite the one you
| think they should take? How would you like that?"
|
| I wouldn't, I'd badger them to take my position. Hopefully
| I'd succeed, and if I didn't, I'd join a long line of
| people who were right but unsuccessful. So it goes, life
| sucks sometimes.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| I have a very low opinion of twitter and certainly wish
| they'd do a better job. But the premise of twitter as a
| shield against state-sponsored kidnapping or murder seems
| flimsy at best.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| That's not the premise. This kind of bullshit is exactly
| how disempowered groups get painted into a corner.
|
| Sexual assault doesn't typically begin with violent rape.
| It ends there.
|
| It begins with a million small forms of disrespect.
|
| Political crap follows the same pattern.
|
| If you think it doesn't fucking matter, what the hell do
| you care how this goes? It matters to him. If you don't
| care, what's wrong with saying "Twitter should simply do
| its job, man!"
| notch656a wrote:
| Lol, disrespect is the beginning of rape? By that logic,
| twitter should censor anyone who says anything someone
| could interpret anything as disrespectful. Criticizing a
| bad government could be considered disrespectful by the
| government officials, would you call that starting a
| rape? And by that same logic, if someone just grabs
| someone and goes for it, previously being respectful in
| every way, somehow it isn't rape because it didn't begin
| with these lesser acts of disrespect.
| Bakary wrote:
| The premise is that the guy lacks power. Twitter has very
| little incentive to help him, and a strong disincentive
| to piss off the Pakistani government.
|
| Wallowing in outrage is pointless as they have to
| cynically maneuver until they have results. Part of that
| strategy might involve stirring up people emotionally
| towards action, but internalizing the martyrdom doesn't
| achieve anything on its own.
|
| Ironically, this is precisely the type of martyrdom that
| helps these tech companies strategically in the long
| term. From their POV, all they have to do is throw a
| performative bone once in a while and wait for people's
| outrage rush to ebb away.
| bakugo wrote:
| > Sexual assault doesn't typically begin with violent
| rape. It ends there.
|
| > It begins with a million small forms of disrespect.
|
| And? Are you suggesting that "small forms of disrespect"
| should be treated like violent rape because there's a
| very vague chance that it might lead there?
| dcow wrote:
| I think you're applying too much nuance to this. Reading
| all the comments, I think everyone generally wants good
| for the author. There are just a few different ways to
| communicating that. Roughly they seem to be:
|
| 1. epmathy and twitter do better
|
| 2. empathy and this is what you get with twitter
|
| 3. empath and practical advice
|
| You seem to be railing against (2). Personally I find the
| bone you're picking to really be besides the point. Most
| everyone is empathizing with the author's struggle.
| Nobody here is telling the author to go fuck themselves.
| Nobody is condoning what Twitter is doing. And certainly
| nobody is disrespecting the author or supporting the
| misinformation. So your comment really feels like a non
| sequitur.
| didibus wrote:
| The premise seems more about how easily Twitter can be used
| to support a coup, suppress journalistic voice, oppress
| people, and push propaganda.
|
| I don't know if without Twitter all this would be just as
| easy, through state controlled media, but what I do know is
| that Twitter could actually be a tool against this, but is
| failing to be.
|
| Having a popular media outlet that cannot be coopted for
| propaganda and used for oppression or harm would be a great
| thing. Twitter clearly failed to be this, and maybe fails
| really bad at it where it seems like it could easily be a
| bit better at it.
| fluoridation wrote:
| I dispute that Twitter _could_ be a tool against those
| things, because that implies that it 's within Twitter's
| capabilities to know everything that is going on in the
| world in order to distinguish between true and untrue
| tweets.
|
| Given that limitation, I would argue that the ideal
| communication medium simply conveys the messages it's
| given without regard for their contents. What people do
| with those messages is something that the medium has no
| power over.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| Isn't there a word for the fallacy that something can
| improve a situation and should, but because it can't solve
| it we should ignore that it's improvement is important
| ethically?
| thewebcount wrote:
| The nirvana fallacy [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _we should ignore that [twitters] improvement is
| important ethically_
|
| I have not said this, and I do not think it. What I
| _actually_ said is that I wish twitter would do a better
| job, you 've managed to somehow invert that.
| karaterobot wrote:
| What should Twitter do in this case? You say "their damn
| job", but their job is to apply their content policies, which
| they say they are doing. Given only the tweets linked in the
| article, I can see how a moderator would look at them and not
| find that they are obviously breaking any rules. They may be
| false accusations, but Twitter has not agreed to do
| independent investigations of every report by a user, or take
| on the responsibility of trying to guess hidden motives of
| the accused. Twitter moderation is not a sanctuary, or a
| refuge, or a crusader for justice, it's a _pro forma_ box-
| checking policy and never claimed to be more than that.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I've been a moderator. Decisions are made contextually.
|
| One of his complaints is they clearly don't know what the
| hell is going on in Pakistan and this is a root cause of
| their mishandling of things.
|
| It is a completely reasonable criticism.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Would you also expect Google Search to take down links to
| local media outlets publishing similar stories?
|
| I don't personally think Twitter should be expected to go
| against the official government narrative of any country
| they operate in, for what it shows inside that country.
| Not that it would be immoral to do so, but I find it an
| entirely unrealistic expectation - Twitter is not the
| BBC.
| umrashrf wrote:
| As far as I know Facebook is actively taking measures to
| delete fake news and bring awareness about it. Also watch
| this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFLv9ozEZeM
| dnissley wrote:
| Is it really reasonable? Twitter fails regularly to take
| such context into consideration when making moderation
| decisions in their home country. How could it be
| reasonable to expect them to get it right when it comes
| to the context of a foreign country?
| satellite2 wrote:
| Assuming Twitter is serving the Pakistani market, making
| revenue and paying taxes there, it seems reasonable to
| ask for the same quality controls as elsewhere. In
| particular hiring Pakistanis for moderation shouldn't be
| economically devastating for their operations in this
| country. So on top of being a very reasonable request it
| should be a minimum requirement of their operating model.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| In practice that would mean the third world would get cut
| off as not worth it and many complaints about information
| apartheid or similar condemning terms.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| And why do you think Pakistani Twitter moderators would
| feel empowered to take down tweets by government
| officials willing to torture and murder?
|
| The request for Twitter to help in this case _only_ makes
| sense if it assumed it will be taken by moderators living
| outside of Pakistan, who don 't have to fear government
| reprisal for their actions.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Hiring locals instead of operating from afar is
| potentially a means to establish a de facto negotiating
| position.
|
| "I'm sorry, Pakistan, if you can't behave better, we will
| have no choice but to evacuate our local offices full of
| relatively well paid jobs and take our toys and go home.
| Feel free to explain that to your people however you so
| wish."
|
| Money talks.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Twitter is nowhere near big enough to hire enough people
| in a country like Pakistan to matter as much as control
| of public media does - especially to a fascist
| government. Not to mention, knowing how such agencies
| operate, I would bet anything that a good few of any such
| moderators would be Pakistani secret services agents.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| No, but they could roll out a pilot program for
| establishing local moderating offices and as part of that
| program establish a list of qualifying criteria for where
| they are willing to place such.
|
| They could do something akin to what McDonald's did for
| the beef industry. It adopted Temple Grandin's list of
| best practices as its standard and this got adopted by
| the beef industry because McDonald's buys so much beef.
|
| Currently, these big companies typically have a predatory
| relationship to such countries, so such countries have no
| motivation to cooperate. Make them trade partners and
| things begin to change.
| dnissley wrote:
| How is Twitter's relationship with Pakistan predatory?
|
| Also, what is the equivalent to Temple Grandin's list for
| moderation of social media?
| ljw1001 wrote:
| That they fail regularly is not much of a defense. If
| they want to make money in Pakistan they should
| understand the place well enough to avoid facilitating
| crime.
| dnissley wrote:
| I doubt they make very much money off of Pakistani users.
| It might even be a small net loss. I don't think twitter
| publishes ARPU per country though, so this is speculation
| to some degree.
| majormajor wrote:
| I think it would be perfectly reasonable to simply choose
| not to operate in countries where the environment is such
| that your platform is likely to get people killed.
| blooalien wrote:
| That would require caring about the welfare of other
| humans more than caring about money/political "power",
| which most huge corporate entities these days (and the
| governments they own) have already proven time and again
| that they do not.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| they need to understand the politics of the places they
| operate in, if they can't then they shouldn't operate there
| - we already saw what happened with facebook in myanmar
| zionic wrote:
| This is why I prefer "protocols over platforms".
|
| This entire thing isn't twitters fault any more than it is
| WiFi's, DNS, or TCP's.
| pbasista wrote:
| > This entire thing isn't twitters fault any more than it is
| WiFi's, DNS, or TCP's.
|
| I respectfully disagree. TCP or DNS or WiFi or other
| technologies are merely means to achieve some result. A tool.
|
| Twitter, like most services, is also _built_ using various
| technologies and tools. But its main distinguishing property
| is that it has a large number of users who, for various
| reasons, are interested in what some other users have to say.
| Creating such social connections is its main goal.
|
| Now, one might use e.g TCP to spread hate speech all over the
| internet. But apart from computers dropping these packets,
| almost no real person will be listening.
|
| Contrast that with a Twitter account that has ~10k followers.
| If the hate speech is spread from there, it can get a lot of
| audience very quickly.
|
| Twitter is one of many enablers and hosts of large online
| communities of people. As such, it should have, in my
| opinion, some responsibility regarding what goes on within
| these communities. At a minimum, it should disallow the
| dissemination of hate speech, actively seek and remove it and
| block the users who repeatedly spread it.
|
| That being said, it might be difficult to precisely define
| what constitutes a hate speech and what not. But Twitter
| should at least be trying.
| dvdkon wrote:
| What would happen if Twitter was a peer-to-peer FLOSS
| network? In our current world Twitter is a centralised
| product backed by a large company, but very little of its
| user-facing functionality could change and that would no
| longer be true. Such hypothetical P2P network would
| definitely have some kind of filtering, but it would likely
| not be network-wide and might not even be backed by a
| central entity (think more email anti-spam than
| moderation).
| remram wrote:
| That would be true if Twitter was a protocol, or even wanted
| to be a protocol. It's a platform though, that's its entire
| business model.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| What's the fallacy for "X is value neutral so all products of
| X are also value neutral?" We saw the same pattern in the
| ethics in science thread or any ethics in technogy thread.
| pbasista wrote:
| > whole circumstance of people wanting you dead is not twitters
| fault
|
| The hate speech itself is of course the sole responsibility of
| whoever created it.
|
| Twitter is, however, fully responsible for allowing it to be
| spread.
|
| Without a major communication channel which enables this hate
| speech to reach massive audiences, it would most likely remain
| isolated to a small number of people. And it probably would not
| evolve into a hate _action_.
|
| The people behind this hate speech could of course reach to
| some dodgy places and hire professional mercenaries who might
| do the dirty jobs for them. But that is risky for them because
| their true identity might be revealed to the authorities or
| they might be betrayed or worse.
|
| So what they do instead is they use a public channel, as big as
| they could find, like Twitter, to reach out to everyone who
| might be interested to answer their calling. They are counting
| on the possibility that maybe some psychopath with the will and
| abilities to do whatever they ask for will just go and do it.
|
| The important part is that Twitter is used here as a
| communication medium without which the hate speech spreaders
| would have no major audience to pass their hate onto. The fact
| that they are allowed to do so absolutely _is_ Twitter 's
| responsibility.
| twoxproblematic wrote:
| [deleted]
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I am sorry for the responses I am seeing on HN. People with cushy
| lives who've likely never faced similar danger seem to just not
| really get it.
|
| I will say that your framing is one that most Westerners will
| have trouble taking seriously.
|
| It might go over better to document known cases where this
| pattern occurred and show the similarities. Walk people through
| it like they are five, so to speak.
|
| I know it's hard to do that kind of objective writing when you
| are feeling so threatened due to genuine threats, but in my
| experience that approach works better.
|
| I know you didn't ask for advice. I apologize for my bad habit of
| trying to be helpful in the only way I know how.
|
| I hope something improves soon.
| tsol wrote:
| It's strange though, when it involves lgbtq or politics they
| suddenly understand why Twitter may need to police certain
| kinds of conversations. But when the actors involved are
| foreign, suddenly those high minded ideals turn into ambiguity
| and 'Twitter understandably doesn't want to take a side'. Yet
| last month I was hearing on this very forum that inaction is
| indeed pushing a side
| watwut wrote:
| The threats against lgbtq and especially trans run WILD on
| twitter. There are whole accounts dedicated to harassing them
| and outing them to huge amounts of followers. It takes super
| log for twitter to even delete a tweet.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I've never seen even the most censorious Americans argue that
| Twitter should investigate every accusation that person A is
| paid by group B. That scenario has actually been playing out
| over the past few days on American politics twitter, with a
| couple high profile journalists being falsely accused of
| taking out PPP loans, but Twitter didn't moderate those
| accusations and as far as I can tell nobody thinks they
| should have.
|
| I don't mean this as an insult against the author, because of
| course Americans don't have to fear being kidnapped or
| tortured over it! But I don't think it's right to see this as
| some kind of hypocrisy.
| notahacker wrote:
| I tend to see the reverse. People fume over social networks
| allowing people in, say, Myanmar writing about alleged events
| they have no way of verifying with political implications
| they don't understand in a language they don't understand
| because _people are dying_ [mostly at the hands of a military
| that really doesn 't care what social media thinks]. Then
| they get very unhappy if the same social network decides to
| block obviously mendacious nonsense posted by fellow
| Americans
|
| Sometimes it's different people making the complaints, but
| weirdly, sometimes I'm not sure it is...
| root_axis wrote:
| It's not strange. Twitter is a U.S. company, of course it
| takes a deeper interest in matters of U.S. politics than it
| does about every other country on the planet.
| oarabbus_ wrote:
| They said nothing about Twitter's behavior being strange.
| They said the strange part is people applauding Twitter's
| content moderation for certain topics, while justifying
| their inaction on others.
| waqasx wrote:
| thank you so much! your support means a lot.
| deltree7 wrote:
| People with cushy lives, working for some mid-level corp
| writing CRUD apps used by 20 people, also have never faced the
| challenges of moderation at million people scale. So, it kind
| of cuts both ways
| pessimizer wrote:
| Yet somehow they still have the bandwidth to go after people
| for misgendering or for saying that they're happy that
| someone died.
| remram wrote:
| I would understand if the rhetoric was centered around "it's
| very hard for Twitter to do that" but the detraction in the
| comments reads more "Twitter shouldn't do that".
| dcow wrote:
| This really sucks to hear. What's unclear to me is whether
| Twitter is being negligent or abnormal here or whether this is
| just shitty world politics unfolding partly on Twitter. Twitter
| is being used by both sides to fight over a narrative. Nothing
| new in that respect.
|
| The author doesn't really propose a solution other than Twitter
| essentially siding with him and take (what appears to me to be) a
| political stance. Of course moderating political topics isn't
| outside Twitter's wheelhouse, but this is what you get as a
| society when you let arbitrary entities arbitrate speech:
| ambiguity and unclear expectations.
|
| On the one hand, it's reasonable for the author to expect that
| Twitter removes clear misinformation from their platform since
| that's what they purportedly claim to do. On the other hand doing
| so would go against a national narrative and piss off lots of
| Pakistanis. Uh oh.
|
| Maybe Twitter was never about being arbiters of facts and instead
| just pandering to the popular political narrative of the time? Or
| maybe they are objective and they're just trying their best and
| we're all human and we'll do better next time? Regardless, this
| is the reason people get so frustrated with censorship: it cannot
| be applied objectively and fairly in every case.
|
| Twitter and social commentary aside: sounds like the author needs
| political asylum or at least real protection. Twitter is not the
| right entity to depend on to handle this situation, I fear.
| waqasx wrote:
| I dont want political asylum because of many reasons, i have my
| parents and my family back home. I am not asking Twitter to
| side with me, you have read my post, you can clearly see that
| misinfo is being spread about me. These are verifiable lies.
| They are verifiably dangerous after basic scrutiny, i am asking
| Twitter to do their job that they already claim that they do.
| That is provide a space that is safer from harassment and
| targeted attacks like this one.
| natch wrote:
| Making Twitter safe will not make you safe. It would
| absolutely be great if Twitter could do more, but the true
| issue lies elsewhere.
|
| Unless you recognize this, and accept that you don't always
| get everything you want, then you may be living in a
| dangerous delusion.
|
| You don't want to leave Pakistan, and you also presumably
| don't want to compromise your principles, and you also want
| to not be killed for your journalism... perhaps it is wise to
| consider whether you can realistically have all of these
| things you want, when the truth is you probably can't.
|
| All that being said, I don't fault you for wanting Twitter to
| do more. But for your own well being you should not consider
| that the only angle you need to work on here.
| watwut wrote:
| The ask here is not for twitter on itself be some kind of
| safe place. It is for twitter as a company or platform to
| stop enabling this sort of thing. Or at least, enable it
| less.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _You don't want to leave Pakistan_
|
| My read is that he's in New York, but has family still in
| Pakistan.
| natch wrote:
| > I dont want political asylum because of many reasons
|
| Good point but but he apparently does not even want the
| relative safety of being able to stay away from Pakistan.
| We all have family in various places, that's a given. He
| could also try to get them out.
|
| Making Pakistan safe for free speech seems beyond
| optimistic for now.
| [deleted]
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| If not on Twitter, won't these lies be spread elsewhere?
|
| It sounds like you believe you're in _real_ danger. If so,
| you have bigger problems.
|
| You mention the comedian and the journalist, and you try to
| paint this as a giant conspiracy. But what you've laid out in
| the article seems like it could easily just be people being
| morons and taking the government's word for everything.
|
| You also don't even mention what you want Twitter to actually
| do.
|
| Are they supposed to ban those accounts? Are they supposed to
| label those Tweets as untrue?
|
| While this sounds like an improvement - and probably what
| they should do - I don't see how this actually helps with
| your larger problem of potential life and death...
| logicalmonster wrote:
| Like many people here, I don't know enough about Pakistani
| politics to weigh in on the objective truth of this situation
| one way or the other. I would only make 4 small comments.
|
| 1) You claim these are verifiable lies. From your perspective
| that is the case as (unless you're a programmed sleeper
| agent) you're in position to know the truth about whether
| you're an agent of some foreign government or not. However,
| from a neutral or 3rd party perspective, this seems a bit
| like a he-said/she-said kind of case. And from your
| perspective, disproving this would be hard as you'd seem to
| have to prove a negative "I'm not an agent" claim, which is
| kind of hard to do.
|
| 2) A personal opinion, but it would probably be very helpful
| to your case if you can make a clear, bullet-point list of
| the alleged verifiable lies, who told them and their position
| in the Pakistani government, and your rebuttal to their
| claim. I read your piece and checked out your links, but
| these are all buried under a wall of text that many people
| won't have the attention span to process given the format.
|
| 3) One of the problems with Twitter is that they try and
| involve themselves in really tough subjective cases of
| truthiness. I'm not sure that Twitter trying to fact-check
| and remove what you believe are lies would be the best
| outcome here. If I were to give a suggestion to Twitter on
| how to handle this, the best thing Twitter could probably do
| would be to either temporarily verify him, or create some
| kind of temporary "At Risk" badge given to a limited number
| of people in dicy situations like this to bring attention to
| their cause so they can't be summarily disappeared without a
| trial.
|
| 4) To any journalists reading this, I hope Waqas' story gives
| you a renewed appreciation for not trusting government claims
| at face value. Whether his story is true or not, many
| journalists seem to too often rush to print government claims
| about anything and everything as gospel. A journalists' job
| isn't to be a tape recorder for government officials and
| merely print their quotes, you've got to dive into the
| background of their claims and consider the other side. If
| government officials claim X is a foreign agent, you should
| consider every angle and claim.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| So you get your wish, Twitter bans a bunch of tweets.
|
| Your life is still in danger. You haven't changed that
| situation. You still need to either flee or make plans for
| your sudden passing.
| dcow wrote:
| I'll admit it's not clear to me as an outsider to this
| conflict whether there is clear misinformation or whether
| this is a matter of political perspective (not because I'm
| sympathetic to what's happened in Pakistan, rather because of
| they style in which you communicated in the post). It is only
| through discussing this here that I think the tractable
| request to just remove misinformation is becoming clear. The
| whole thing about comedy accounts is distracting since parody
| is allowed, as you know. So I was left confused wether there
| is factual misinformation, or just a gravely damaging
| narrative being painted.
|
| If I may, it might help for you to clearly lead with the
| factually incorrect things being said about you and then dive
| into supporting evidence to back the misinformation claim.
|
| Still, part of my comment was a serious reminder that Twitter
| is not a a real authority even if they pretend to be one in
| fair-weather and if your life is credibly in danger you
| should seek people and organizations who can actually help
| you protect it. I truly hope this site can help you find the
| needed connections.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _Twitter is being used by both sides to fight over a narrative.
| Nothing new in that respect._
|
| It's a narrative that could get one side kidnapped, tortured,
| imprisoned for years and potentially killed.
|
| I've seen previous incidents where Facebook and other platforms
| were nightmare fuel for locals and the platform didn't even
| have moderators who spoke the local language for purposes of
| reviewing the issue.
|
| These platforms are thrilled to get millions of new users in
| various countries then wash their hands of the consequences to
| those users and their real lives. I don't think criticism of
| this fact is unreasonable. Locals just want a fair shake
| similar to what Westerners get in such cases.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| But isn't it more complicated than that? A Western journalist
| falsely accused of being an agent for a foreign power
| wouldn't get much help from Twitter either - I'm familiar
| with a couple who are routinely accused of being Russian
| agents.
|
| I get why this guy wants more, and I can understand the
| perspective that Twitter has to take into account the context
| of local countries and which kinds of speech might be
| dangerous. But can Twitter really adopt an explicit corporate
| policy that Pakistan isn't allowed to have as much free
| speech as the rest of the world because it's too violent?
| dcow wrote:
| Yes I agree 100%. _If_ Twitter is going to arbitrate then
| they better do so fairly and soundly across all peoples. My
| criticism is of the expectation that such fair arbitration
| can happen unilaterally in the first place especially in a
| politically charged environment. Twitter has _not_
| demonstrated an ability to be impartial and fair in the past.
| They are a US company partial to US politics. Specifically,
| they lean rather liberal in their moderation decisions. As
| you say, they want users, not justice (even though at certain
| times they have made small motions towards perceived "social"
| justice). They are simply not equip to replace the judicial
| systems of the world and expecting them to do so is a little
| bit crazy in my opinion. The reality is they have no legal
| authority anywhere.
|
| I agree the author's criticism is fair. My point was a
| reminder that the expectations here may not live up to
| reality and it might be best to seek other help. Even if
| Twitter removes this misinformation, the author will not be
| safe and will likely, if the story is to be believed, be
| detained and tortured the minute they step onto Pakistani
| soil, sadly. I think the reminder that "Twitter can't make
| you safe" is a fair and practical one too, despite whether it
| should have to be that way or not.
| hackerlight wrote:
| Preventing harassment isn't the same as "taking a political
| stance".
| dcow wrote:
| I agree--if only it were that clear and simple.
| Bakary wrote:
| Most people don't think their stance is ever political. But
| it very clearly is here since Twitter would be directly at
| odds with the Pakistani government if they sided with the
| journalist.
| satellite2 wrote:
| From his description, he only suspect the government to be
| behind the troll accounts. So by blocking/fact checking the
| trolls Twitter wouldn't take any risk it seems. It seems
| more likely they are unable to understand or verify the
| messages of the trolls.
| snickerbockers wrote:
| > Maybe Twitter was never about being arbiters of facts and
| instead just pandering to the popular political narrative of
| the time?
|
| To some extent they do see themselves as arbiters of truth, you
| can get auto-banned if you make a tweet and their AI thinks
| you're spreading falsehoods about COVID or the 2020 US
| presidential election. It actually happened to me last year
| over a completely benign joke and i had to wait about six weeks
| for a mod to get around to reviewing my appeal before i was
| allowed back on.
|
| If they really cared about protecting middle-eastern activists
| they could add "israeli spy" to their list of phrases that get
| you auto-banned.
| plankers wrote:
| twitter is interested in making money. there's far more money
| to be made pandering to governments than in pandering to
| dissidents. the content moderation policies are just extra
| steps in justifying that stance.
| gweinberg wrote:
| Twitter is in a bit of a pickle here. One could argue that
| accusing someone of being an agent of a hostile foreign power is
| basically libel and should be banned. But it's hard to say how
| they could have a rule against baselessly accusing a Pakistani of
| being an agent of Israel or India while maintaining the rule that
| it is fine to baselessly accuse an american of being an agent of
| Russia.
| unixbane wrote:
| Yes yes, we're all gonna die because people are allowed to post
| on the internet. Decentralized messaging platforms should be
| illegal because they can't be moderated. You should only be able
| to host an internet service with a license and yearly federal
| inspections to make sure you're properly storing and backing up
| accountability logs of all users.
|
| > blah blah blah there are insane people in my country who will
| kill people based on tweets
|
| This is a problem of people and not Twitter. Those are in the
| west too and growing especially in America. The problem is dumbed
| down people who believe stuff on the internet. And idiots who
| react to things, like a white/black shooting a black/white. There
| is a solution to this: going to jail for murder. Even boomers in
| the 90s knew not to believe anything online. Twitter has about a
| million problems with it and lack of moderation certainly is not
| one of them.
|
| You cannot reasonably ask Twitter to moderate for your locale's
| social and violent reactionary issues. That implies they need to
| hire a huge amount of people for every locale in every country
| and just gives Twitter more monopoly as another company would
| have to invest a billion dollars to do that before they can even
| get off the ground. You have just created this idea that storing
| 100 bytes of text on a server is now a thing that requires
| billions of dollars of up front investment to do. This is another
| issue: People are fucking stupid and expect companies to have
| some "responsibility" now (despite the fact that product quality
| is at an all time low and they somehow have no issue with that).
| This is also just conceding that companies are some kind of god
| (they really aren't. Twitter is a dog shit website that can't go
| more than one second without showing the text "undefined" in an
| important field on the page).
|
| Ironically, the people who demand so called justice by moderating
| more and more shit online (Unreal Engine now has voice analytics
| to report you to the police or whatever the fuck built right in),
| are just as bad as the people who foster misinformation against
| people. We are heading into an era of micro justice which just
| means the amount of malpolicing will grow in proportion. The end
| result of constantly trying to solve micro injustices is AI
| making sure humans don't do anything "bad" and you will literally
| be unable to involuntarily move your arm a certain way without
| being punished. There is not even a philosophically correct
| definition of justice in law. It's literally a bunch of dudes
| amending a global ruleset to solve the latest problem, based on
| wildly varying rationales from people each with entirely
| different value systems.
|
| It's actually hilarious how short sighted and oblivious
| statements like "it should be illegal to post misinformation
| online" are. You aren't a mature responsible adult or whatever
| you think you are. You are just reacting to something in the most
| straight forward way with no thought about the consequences. It's
| doubly hilarious for insinuating that posting things online is a
| big issue that we should focus law on. It's actually pretty
| fucking obnoxious actually, I'm sick of every thing I do online
| for the last 20 years being policed by hall monitors tunnel
| visioned on whatever social injustice issue of the day.
| powerhour wrote:
| > There is a solution to this: going to jail for murder.
|
| Couldn't we find a solution that doesn't require the violent
| death of a person?
| unixbane wrote:
| Yes and requiring moderation on internet forums is not one of
| them. It will stop 0.00001% of cases, while growing
| malpolicing (especially non useful police who demand more
| mircrojustice to keep their comfy pay coming in)
| proportionally with it.
|
| This reminds me of HN. You get banned if you say a bad word.
| You get banned eventually no matter what unless you're a
| white collar self censored silicon valley drone with ultra-
| safe opinions like "the C language should be deprecated after
| a mere 70 years". You get rate limited if you get too many
| downvotes in the given time slot. Random IPs are blocked for
| no reason and the login screen is just a blank page. You get
| shadowbanned so you don't even know you're banned. All for
| basically nothing, as HN is basically like 2000s forums but
| with slightly better discourse and consistency of moderation
| (and worse in other ways).
|
| This idea that we should have some sort of epidemiologically
| correct moderation policy on the internet is also bullshit.
| Moderation on the internet started off as, annoying,
| childish, 40 year old sysadmins who ban anyone they don't
| like, SJWs who ban anyone who is "the enemy", right wing
| equivalent of SJWs who do the same thing, rule fetishists
| (people in the UK who think insulting the queen or showing
| the middle finger should be illegal), etc. The idea started
| off with these selfish / idiotic reasons. Once questioned,
| they are forced into a corner where they can only rationalize
| moderation as an epidemiological tool. "Yeah, if we just
| delete these 1 million posts it's a net gain".
|
| The only reason lack of moderation on big copmany's websites
| even come up is because they're big companies and they have
| egg on their face for any slight mishap (or what public
| perceives as a mishap). It's the most stupid fucking shit.
| unixbane wrote:
| Also, this title is the most hyperbolic "wah company bad"
| bullshit ever written.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Since the title of the OP is the literal truth written
| plainly, that means that you must think Twitter is bad.
| driverdan wrote:
| Something happened this year with Twitter's internal moderation
| policies. They seemed to have completely stopped enforcing the
| rules.
|
| I've reported many open bigots calling for violence against the
| group(s) and/or people they hate. Twitter used to ban people for
| promoting violence. They don't anymore. Not a single one of the
| posts or accounts I've reported in the past few months has been
| banned unless they reached a threshold of other reports that
| triggers an automatic ban.
|
| Moderators either aren't doing their job or don't exist anymore.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Surprised they didn't call him a Qadiani or Gustakh-e-rasul, that
| might have been actionable.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| He complains that Twitter doesn't know local Pakistani politics,
| but what would be the answer in this case? Set up national
| moderation offices? In this very case, they would just say yeah
| he's a spy... Unless you want random unaccountable expats making
| judgment calls about your government
| computerfriend wrote:
| Moderation is already localised by language. It's not such a
| stretch to extend this to some basic regional knowledge.
| PeterisP wrote:
| What the parent post seems to be saying is that it's quite
| plausible that localised moderation might follow the 'new
| regime' and instead of the current ignorance, they would
| strongly side _against_ the OP - there 's no reason to
| presume that 'some basic regional knowledge' would lead
| moderators to support the OPs political position instead of
| the position according to which he should be silenced and
| arrested - it might swing the one way, it might swing the
| other.
| computerfriend wrote:
| OP claims that synthetic commentators are making claims
| about them that are demonstrably untrue. This can be (and
| in other locales is) moderated in a politically neutral
| way.
| PeterisP wrote:
| I'm fairly sure that in other locales it is moderated in
| a politically neutral way that does not even attempt to
| evaluate whether the claims are untrue - the moderators
| verify if the claims are directly threatening or crude
| insults, but otherwise moderators don't attempt to
| determine what is true or not and correct people who say
| something untrue either intentionally or accidentally.
| waqasx wrote:
| least Twitter can do is sensitize their moderators, or at least
| a subset of them, about local issues, maybe not to the level of
| making them regional experts, but enough so that they can tell
| a truth from a lie, a dangerous maligning campaign vs a fair
| critique. I dont think that is a hard problem.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| How can you tell a truth from a lie in politics? You can
| certainly find the position you agree with and hire those
| guys and claim its always the truth, I guess. Unless you
| actually somehow know who the Indian secret services are
| paying. I certainly don't, even if I don't believe that this
| author is guilty of being a spy. This is judgment calls that
| a low paid Twitter moderator cannot make with any confidence.
| [deleted]
| mypalmike wrote:
| It's not just a hard problem. It's an intractable problem.
| brightball wrote:
| I have no idea how to help you in this situation, but you may
| want to reach out to Citizen Lab in Toronto. My understanding is
| that protecting people like you is their mission.
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