Twitter Suspends YouTube Phenom PewDiePie For Making A Stupid ISIS Joke
from the giant-circle-of-stupidity dept
Most of the time, you can say pretty much whatever you'd like on Twitter without the company actually bothering to enforce its harassment and online abuse policies. Think it's funny to threaten to rape somebody? Twitter this week informed Medium software engineer Kelly Ellis this was perfectly ok. Want to hurl racist threats like a lobotomized halfwit? Cool! Is flinging anti-semitic insults more your cup of tea? No problem! Over the last year, you'd be hard pressed to find somebody not talking about how inconsistent and arbitrary Twitter's ban hammer is.Swedish YouTube phenom PewDiePie found this out the hard way this week after his account -- followed by 47 million Twitter users -- suddenly up and disappeared briefly from the social networking service without explanation:
Pewdiepie has been suspended and unverified on Twitter for making a joke about joining ISIS pic.twitter.com/06QQcbmc7H
— Ned Donovan (@Ned_Donovan) August 31, 2016
Popular YouTuber @pewdiepie unverified due to suspected relations with ISIS https://t.co/iElCWtBzpU pic.twitter.com/x2L0INKVU5
— Sky News (@SkyNeiws) August 30, 2016
Me and @Jack_Septic_Eye have joined isis. Which is why we both got unverified.
— Felix Kjellberg đ (@pewdiepie) August 30, 2016
Twitter refuses to comment on this or any of its other seemingly-drunk enforcement behaviors, but the company's inconsistency on this front has been on proud display for some time, and the message being sent is anything but clear. Something about how it's ok to threaten to rape and kill women and people of color, but don't joke about ISIS, and whatever you do -- don't post animated gifs of the Olympics:
If you want Twitter to do something about a guy repeatedly threatening to rape you, your best bet is to get him to embed an Olympic clip.
— Julie DiCaro (@JulieDiCaro) August 25, 2016
In the interim, to be safe, you may just want to avoid humor entirely.
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Filed Under: abuse, arbitrary, jokes, pewdiepie, suspensions, terrorism
Companies: twitter
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Yea... yea...
While there is no such thing as a free market anymore, YOU can still choose what you spend your money on.
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Re: Yea... yea...
Shut up
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But yea... makes sense to cry and whine like a baby when you can't have you way right?
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The real problem is that these whiners will vote in politicians that will remove more liberty as part of their solution and then turn around and blame something that does not exist as the cause of the problem. The ignorant sheeple buy this shit all the time.
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.. Please ..
Have you not been paying attention to the primaries?
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"Sheeple" though... Classic internet narcissist.
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If you donât like it, move to another platform.
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OK, I want you to imagine you're asking the people at Twitter a question. It's a simple question, it goes like this: "When users of your platform - including huge ones like PewDiePie - are unhappy about something, would you prefer they talk about it and lodge complaints when necessary, or would you prefer them to immediately bail on the platform entirely because they 'can't do jack shit'?"
Which do you think Twitter would choose?
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Just make sure they know why you are moving. Businesses only understand lessons that hit them in the pocket book. Now, if people were really able to stick to their guns everyone would move off the platform can destroy the business. Once that happens a couple of time businesses with fucking take note. It's called making an example, but hell... Like I said in a different post, good luck with that. People are too lazy for fight, they just want someone else to take care of them and to give them things.
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Then we still have the option of going somewhere else, but if we just silently move to other systems we rob them of the chance to know why we left and fix it.
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Good luck getting the American People to participate in a boycott though... we hate the concept of free market controls in America. All we care to do is cry like babies and expect someone in authority to fix the problem.
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1. what was formerly the province of public commons is now becoming privatized; what to do when there is NO public space left and it is all effectively controlled by the korporatocracy ?
2. i know it is a joke that tells itself, but we *should* expect our korporate overlords to adhere to basic morality and fairness, REGARDLESS of what the law allows; like i said, what a joke, right ?
3. i am HIGHLY skeptical of bright-line rules: they ALWAYS end up not covering enough of whatever 'bad' stuff crazy nekkid apes are trying to stop, and then end up being extended far beyond their usefulness... how about we just use simple good judgement ? is there any of that left any more ?
4. again, a quaint concept, but SUPPOSEDLY korporations -besides a LIMITED, time-specific charter- ALSO had to perform some public good in the actual production of their bidness, NOT just make widgets at a profit... why can't we have an expectation they will do so -and, for example, protect everyone's free speech rights- with such a widely used medium, REGARDLESS of whether it is 'private' ? it is OUR public charter which gave them the korporate super-powers they enjoy, why DON'T we get some benefit ?
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Of course, the joke is on the government in the one existing example of that, since the rising cost of 'affordable' insurance has actually made the 'tax' the cheaper option for many people.
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It's right there in the name
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And that misunderstanding gets to the core of why Twitter has fallen so far behind in dealing with harassment. The top brass think the âspeechâ espoused by trolls and racists and harassers must be forced upon those who donât wish to see itâand if they donât explicitly think that way, the lack of tools necessary for end users to prevent that speech from reaching them proves it is an implicit principle at the core of Twitter.
Wordfilters would help, and Iâm amazed they havenât come into play before now. (Theyâd certainly help with the spambots.) Controls for whose notifications you see, who can see your tweets (with or without an account), and time-based controls for who can follow, reply to, and message you (e.g., you can block notifications from accounts less than a month old) would do wonders for helping users curate their timelines and notifications. And none of those controls would deny Twitter users their voiceâit would just deny them the ability to force everyone else into listening.
I get that the scale of Twitter means such controls would take some time to develop and ultimately deploy. My question is this: Why did it take Twitter until over a year ago to even consider wordfilters, and why has it taken over a year for them to develop a wordfilter system?
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I am for ZERO censorship. Whining is in the eye of the beholder, what I think is whining is not what you think is whining.
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There's a critical difference between stopping someone from speaking and being able to opt out of listening.
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If you think a potential audience choosing to ignore you is tantamount to censorship, you have made a grave error in judgment.
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https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/10/30/0126246
The tools to block trolls already exist. There is the block button. If someone continues harassment, there is the police department.
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I suggest we start calling Military Order of Mohamed. And start telling 'your mom' jokes to each other till they send someone to blow us up. For the lulz.
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Re: Great Idea for terrorist names
REPUBLICAN is obviously an acronym for Really Evil People United By Logic, Intelligence, Charisma, and Narcisism
DEMOCRAT is Decidedly Evil Men Overreacting Creating Really Atrocious Tratiors
Just imagine a world without republican/democratic advertising....
Why didn't anyone think of this before?
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Re: Re: Great Idea for terrorist names
George Washington said it best.
I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.
This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.
Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
So very few people even know how great our First President ever was!
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No, really. Too much laughs.
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Right:
"Lord have mercyâŚwhite people shit"
"ok you white girls are starting to look alike like a mutherfucka."
"Yo them dudes with the curls on the side of they head does that make them more Jewish? For real I need to know"
didn't get Leslie Jones banned. Awesome!
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The idea of taking something down because it hurts someone's feeling is about the worst possible excuse for removing something.
Sometimes there is just no way to tell someone they are fucking nuts without indirectly or just directly insulting them. People just need to understand... life is a bitch, and all the people around you are bitches too! And that mug you see in the mirror? Yep... bitch as well.
We absolutely must have discourse to survive as a society and that includes the pain that goes with it. Suppressing people speech because it is hurtful is the same as asking married couples to never have a problem because you can never talk about them!
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It's the same reason why trash-talking recording artists who sign multi-year/multi-million dollar contracts also get a free ride on Twitter.
Don't expect any kind of "fairness" -- money talks on Twitter.
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Isis is a hot button, so boom ban first figure it out later.
Racist content, well if they offend a big enough star we can do something.
Rape threats, they are just idle threats... unless you are important enough.
I remember looking at some of the 'experts' Twitter wanted to use to help them sort this out and it was a long list of people who were upset at everything... unless they were the one making the comments.
Twitter isn't even sure what their platform is for. They are so focused on keeping stars & power players happy while ignoring the other 99.99% of their user base.
We built stars a special client that lets them filter out junk tweets.
We add a mark so you know they are the real person (or their staff).
You managed to piss off the right block of people, and are getting 1000 tweets every 10 minutes... nothing we can do. Someone keeps making up new accounts & sending you the same threats over and over after you complain for the 40th time and we finally suspend them... oh well.
But hey, we killed a feature most of you liked so we can all share moments...
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AAAAAAAA
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There has been a tremendous crackdown on ANYONE who says anything even remotely critical of the religion of pieces, while scumbags who proselytize openly for the glories of the holy profit (pig's blood upon him) are allowed to proliferate with impunity. Twitter won't do anything about ISIS because Twitter itself is an ISIS propaganda outlet.
All in the name of oil and Bronze Age fairy tales. Would that we left both toxic influences upon humanity behind a long time ago.
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