A Purge's Progress

"If you are reading this I'm already dead..." 

Nick Monroe on being banned from Twitter for the Orwellian offense of "ban evasion":

You’re reading this because I’m gone now. Twitter permanently banned me for a “ban evasion” lasting three-and-a-half years.

 They say my account – which amassed almost 50,000 followers and has appeared on numerous news websites – is a “ban evader”. This means I had an old account which was banned, so they banned my new account, too.

Twitter: "If you attempt to evade a permanent suspension by creating new accounts, we will suspend your new accounts."

I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record.

Banning people from the platform is inconsistent with allowing fictional personas in the first place. Whatever the case, Twitter doesn't believe in redemption.
Monroe is apologetic about the old account

Being banned on Twitter is a lot like participating in both the court of public opinion and a funeral at the same time. Both my followers and detractors are judging my body of work and all my actions in the wake of the ban. I wasn’t always the person I am today, but who I am was best described in my interview with Michael Malice.
Roughly five years ago, I was ‘PressFartToContinue’ (PFTC).

It's all somber tones and puerile names in the Current Year. Future man won't know what to make of it.

I made a YouTube account by that name when I was 17-years-old. It was meant to be a fan channel of ‘PressHeartToContinue’.

I had no idea what I was doing, or how my actions would come to impact me years later. I, like just about everyone else in the world, have grown since I was 17. And I know who I am today. I’m the independent Twitter journalist who spoke out against online censorship before I too was banned.

And that last part is what this is really all about. Twitter is not scandalized by the thought of enemy of humanity PressFartToContinue evading justice. Ironically, it's the good behavior of Monroe's later account, and its effectiveness as a critique that inspires this action. The ruse is laughable.

Monroe was actually quite disciplined and broke no pc rules--the very model of how to get past the censors, if they were even faking an unbiased stance.

A little too on that adorable nose.
Twitter earlier banned an AOC parody account for being "misleading" despite the author including the word "parody" in the title and bio. The author was then perma-suspended for having a personal account as well, which isn't actually forbidden.

"No, really, Mr. Hanson, my intention was just to bring shame upon her and her family..."
Meanwhile Dateline NBC still hasn't come around for Gawker's Josh Bernstein for stalking a 14 year-old girl. One thing I didn't know about the Soph saga is the police were actually called in after his hit-piece:

According to the local Kron4 new station, they published a piece on May 17th, 2019 indicating that police are investigating Soph based on complaints made by those at her school, who have begun shunning the teenager and claiming that what she stated in her “Be Not Afraid” video was “disgusting”. The video was taken down by YouTube shortly after the Buzzfeed article was published...

The Daily Beast punches up at a barely-employed sports blogger:

On May 22, a Donald Trump superfan and occasional sports blogger from the Bronx named Shawn Brooks posted a video clip of Nancy Pelosi on his personal Facebook page. The clip showed Pelosi at her most excitable, stammering during a press conference as she voiced frustration over an abortive infrastructure meeting with the president. Brooks’ commentary on the video was succinct: “Is Pelosi drunk?” 

Thirteen minutes later, a Facebook official told The Daily Beast, Brooks posted a very different Pelosi video to a Facebook page called Politics WatchDog—one of a series of hyperpartisan news operations Brooks runs (with help, he claims). This clip had been altered to slow Pelosi down without lowering the pitch of her voice. The effect was to make it sound as though the Speaker of the House was slurring her words drunkenly while criticizing Donald Trump. 

Fifteen minutes after that, the same doctored video appeared on a second Facebook page Brooks manages, AllNews 24/7. This clip was identical to the Politics WatchDog video on every way, except that it didn’t carry the Politics WatchDog branding that was superimposed over the earlier video. Whoever posted it had access to the director’s cut. On both pages the clip was accompanied by the exact same dispassionate, newsy prose: “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on President Trump walking out infrastructure meeting: ‘It was very, very, very strange.’”

At the same time, doctoring that video was wrong. I'll chalk it up to the fact Brooks is a black guy. His defenders sure seem fixated on that.

Again this is all about trying to prevent a Trump victory in 2020. But it's also a global trend. Angela Merkel's chosen successor has proposed censoring dissidents ahead of elections:

Merkel's successor sparks freedom of speech uproarPicture: Die WeltSofia. German Chancellor Angela Merkel's favoured successor Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer sparked outrage on social media on Tuesday with an apparent call for limits to free speech around elections, AFP reported. 

The CDU chief's comment came after her party and its centre-left coalition partner SPD suffered their worst scores in Sunday's European election -- a result partly blamed on the fact that some 70 YouTube stars had urged Germans not to vote for either party.

Addressing the issue on Monday night, Kramp-Karrenbauer said if 70 newspaper editors had called to boycott parties ahead of an election, that would be classed "clearly as propaganda". 

"The question is... what are rules from the analogue realm and which rules should apply to the digital realm?

"I'll tackle this discussion quite aggressively," said Kramp-Karrenbauer, or AKK as she is dubbed in Germany.

The pace quickens.

Media v Media

Google's Perspective algorithm is a tool for censoring "toxic" speech based on word combinations that isn't effective enough for censorship proponents. (Who come mostly from media. Oliver Darcy's efforts on CNN were crucial to the campaign to ban Alex Jones. They should just give him the Pulitzer. Come on, msm, you know you want to.) Cable news, formerly more prestigious outlets such as the Atlantic, and of course the Huffpo-sphere all contribute to the campaign prodding the social media companies toward ever more de-platforming and censorship. Tech media provides creative technical advise.

The near future of censorship will focus on individuals and their ability to associate. Taking out Jones isn't just about silencing him, but also about taking out a node of transmission, by which the curious find their way to more serious and ultimately, to the Narrative, damaging content. From the severely progressive site Rantt

Google’s new Perspective algorithm is a good start, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle we can’t solve with the data points from a single comment, even with the most well trained recurrent neural networks. Ultimately, we need to teach computers to follow a conversation and make an informed opinion of a person’s character, something that can’t be done by a single neural net heavily reliant on parsing language.

It's not the character of the content but the content of your character

Understanding how to do it may be one of the most important technical issues we tackle, or lose the web to armies of trolls, bots, and people really into goose-stepping to a strongman’s tune.

Social media executives, down with the cause but retaining sympathy for the bottom line, are pressured from within as well. Their ranks are rotten with progressives clamoring for more censorship, like cops who resent not being able to bust heads:

Tech companies succeed or fail based on the talent of their developers, which gives those workers the leverage to shape the company culture. So when your engineers tell you there's a problem, you listen. That was clear again this week when Twitter engineers took to the site to push back against CEO Jack Dorsey's comments about why notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is still on the platform when other tech companies have banished him. 

Dorsey responded to his engineers publicly, thanking them for their thoughts and pledging to do better... 

The pressure on Twitter to ban Jones from its platform grew exponentially this week, though, after other major companies like Apple, Facebook, and YouTube started taking action against him for violating their terms of service. On Tuesday, Dorsey tweeted, “We didn’t suspend Alex Jones or Infowars yesterday. We know that’s hard for many but the reason is simple: he hasn’t violated our rules. We’ll enforce if he does. And we’ll continue to promote a healthy conversational environment by ensuring tweets aren’t artificially amplified.” 

Dorsey further explained that Twitter couldn’t ban Jones based on “succumbing to outside pressure,” and he called on journalists to continue to fact-check him. This didn’t go over well with journalists—many pointed out that we spend a lot of time fact-checking nonsense, but that it’s not our job to keep a viral disinformation incubator healthy;

spit take 

it’s our job to report facts. The defense also fell flat with some current and former Twitter employees. “There is no honor in resisting ‘outside pressure’ just to pat ourselves on the back for being ‘impartial,’" 

Jack, the call is coming from inside the house...! 

Twitter engineer Marina Zhao tweeted. "I agree with @ekp that Twitter does not exist in a vacuum, and it is wrong to ignore the serious real-world harm, and to equate that with political viewpoints.” @ekp is Ellen Pao, formerly of Twitter and Reddit, who had earlier replied to Dorsey, “We tried treating @reddit as a silo, and it was a huge mistake. People got harassed cross-platform. Also if your site is the only one that allows this hate and harassment, it will get overrun and collapse.”

In the end taking Jones out might be the best thing for the right. The left is defusing a bomb that's already gone off, and if Jones disappears entirely, he takes with him a reputation for crazy that is no longer applied to the right. And in all likelihood the deplatforming of Jones will work as intended.

Here's Motherboard:

“We’ve been running a research project over last year, and when someone relatively famous gets no platformed by Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, there's an initial flashpoint, where some of their audience will move with them” Joan Donovan, Data and Society’s platform accountability research lead, told me on the phone, “but generally the falloff is pretty significant and they don’t gain the same amplification power they had prior to the moment they were taken off these bigger platforms.”

The sad fact is someone like Jones has nothing other than his platform--his voice. Emphasis added:

Deplatforming works “best” when the people being deplatformed don’t have any power to begin with. Nor are we talking about people from marginalized communities who have self-censored or left social media because of far right harassment and hate campaigns (and could, in theory, come back with more proactive moderation by large platforms.)

I say the author's self conscious, he'd say thorough, but following "we're crushing the powerless" with "but not the real powerless" is comic gold. Thank you, social justice man. Who, whom all the way down.

Once they've purged the net to the extent possible, expect to be hounded right into the dark web weeds:

Nonetheless, the concern among academics is that, as hate moves to the darker corners of the internet, that some of their old followers may move with them and become further radicalized. “The good that comes with deplatforming is, their main goal was to redpill or get people within mainstream communities more in line with their beliefs, so we need to get them off those platforms,” Robyn Caplan, a PhD student at Rutgers University and Data and Society affiliate, told me on the phone. “But now we’ve put them down into their holes where they were before, and they could strengthen their beliefs and become more extreme.” The question is whether it’s more harmful to society to have many millions of people exposed to kinda hateful content or to have a much smaller number of ultra-radicalized true believers.

The work of social justice never ends, or, it ends at the barrel of a gun.

Hate in Context

An opinion piece in the NYT:

Manal al-Sharif, co-founder and leader of the #Women2Drive movement and founder and CEO of Women2Hack Academy, is author of the memoir “Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman’s Awakening.”

As a Saudi Arabian woman who has lived most of her life under one of the last surviving absolute monarchies in the world, the closest I have come to experiencing democracy has been in challenging the status quo through my tweets.  

In 2016 a lot of Americans felt that way. Donald Trump's victory was more Arab Spring maybe than the Arab Spring--way less foreign intervention, I'll bet.

For activists and citizen journalists in the Arab world, social media has become a powerful way to express dissent, to disrupt and to organize. Digital activism, however, comes at a high price: The very tools we use for our cause can be — and have been — used to undermine us. While social media platforms were designed as a way to connect people online, activists used them as technological tools of liberation, devising creative hacks to defy state censorship, connect with like-minded people, mobilize the masses, influence public opinion, push for social change and ignite revolutions. With these opportunities came risks: The more we posted and engaged, the more vulnerable we became, as our aggregated data was weaponized against us.  

Likewise, after the catastrophe of Trump, the socials and old media rally to shut  down dissent by classifying our arguments Hate--by weaponizing our words against us. Regardless of truth, or genuine "hate" for that matter.

Over time, such data can be used to build an accurate picture not only of users’ preferences, likes and behaviors, but also of their beliefs, political views and intimate personal details; things that even their family and friends may not know about them. 

It strikes me that "build[ing] an accurate picture" of "beliefs, political views" is precisely one of the things those combating Hate Online are trying to do to right wingers.
Attempts to censor right wing speech online look increasingly to focusing on individuals' histories and associations, likes and links, as systems focusing on word combinations to flag actual speech transgressions can always be dodged with creative speech as this article laments:

To try and answer that, we need to step way, way back and first talk about bigotry not as an algorithm, but as social entity. Who exactly are bigots and what makes them tick, not by dictionary definition one would expect to find in a heavily padded college essay, but by practical, real world manifestations that quickly make them stand out. They don’t just use slurs, or bash liberal or egalitarian ideas by calling them something vile or comparing them to some horrible disease, which means the bigots in question will quickly catch on to how they’re being filtered out and switch to more subtle or confusing terms, maybe even treating it like a game.

White supremacists keep behaving in un-hateful fashion, unfortunately. But when did "hate" become forbidden? We lapsed in a fit of absentmindedness from robust freedom of speech into a bizarre system ostensibly censoring the emotion "hate".

Just note how Google’s algorithm goes astray when given quotes light on invective but heavy on the bigoted subtext and what’s known in journalist circles as dog whistles. Sarcasm adds another problem. How could you know on the basis of one comment that the person isn’t just mocking a bigot by pretending to be them, or conversely, mocking those calling out his bigoted statements? Well, the obvious answer is that we need context every time we evaluate a comment because two of the core features of bigotry are sincerity and a self-defensive attitude. Simply put, bigots say bigoted things because they truly believe them, and they hate being called bigots for it.

Google's "harassment tool" did not impress. Richard Spencer's "at the end of the day, America belongs to white men" somehow only scored 29 percent toxic on their meter rating speech from "healthy" to "toxic" (why not "unhealthy"? is this the difference between hate and Hate?). The disappointment with which censorship proponents in the media greet these programs and how they go about testing them (plugging in crimespeak quotes to see if they pass) reveals comically that it's content, and not hate they're after.

If they have their way, perhaps after Trump (or, counter-intuitively, maybe they'll let up, no longer in panic because of him) we can expect internet censorship to focus on individuals and their associations to just choke off the "hate" at the source.

I fear we'll view this already repressive time as when free speech cops thought they could get away with writing tickets on the street, instead of kicking down your door.