Twitter crackdown sparks free speech concerns
Twitter crackdown sparks free speech concerns
BY ALI BRELAND - 11/17/17 06:04 AM EST
Twitter's verification program put the company at the
center of another political headache this week, with the social media giant
stuck between liberals who demand stricter rules about hate speech and
misinformation and conservatives who fear the site will target them for their
political views.
Twitter's "blue checkmark" verification program
is meant to authenticate the identities of high-profile users. But it's also
come to be seen as an endorsement or mark of approval from Twitter, sparking
outrage when the checkmarks were bestowed on white nationalists like Richard
Spencer or Charlottesville, Va., "Unite the Right" rally organizer
Jason Kessler.
The social media site responded to the criticism
Wednesday by taking checkmarks away from several users affiliated with the far
right or white nationalism, as well as kicking one prominent Charlottesville
marcher off the platform permanently.
Further changes are expected next week, when Twitter says
it will implement more rules. Twitter declined to comment on the changes.
While liberals cheered the crackdown, conservatives
worried that they'll be punished next. Describing the crackdown, a Breitbart
headline declared that “conservative figures” had been “purged.”
One user who lost her verification, Laura Loomer, charged
that Twitter was trying to “annihilate conservatives from the internet.”
“They’re absolutely targeting people on the right,” said
Tim Gionet, an internet troll better known as Baked Alaska who attended the
Charlottesville march with white supremacists and has made anti-Semitic
statements on Twitter. “Can you name one liberal that was deverified?”
While several far-right and white nationalist figures
affected by Twitter’s policy change on Wednesday lost their verified
checkmarks, Gionet appears to be the only one who was outright banned from the
platform.
While the punishments focused on Twitter’s fringe right,
some more mainstream conservatives raised concerns about taking away
verifications.
"If they want to ban people, ban them. But
verification is to prevent fraud, not to endorse viewpoints," tweeted
conservative pundit Ben Shapiro in response to the changes.
Others took issue with a specific provision in the
company’s new rules, which states that Twitter can deverify users based on
behavior that occurs off Twitter.
“It's worth noting that Twitter can remove your verified
badge for behaviors made /off/ the platform,” tweeted Ian Miles Cheong, a
contributor to Tucker Carlson’s The Daily Caller. “Just as well, the company
can take action against your account for supporting any group or individual
that it claims promote certain behaviors.”
“You know what this means for #MAGA,” he warned,
referring to President Trump’s campaign promise to “make America great again.”
Cheong told The Hill that he doesn’t support the views of
white nationalists like Spencer and Kessler, but argues that it’s damaging for
Twitter to censor speech.
“The reason why is: if you drive them underground ...
they’re going to radicalize further,” Cheong argued. “The best way to counter
arguments is to provide good arguments.”
The Twitter crackdown comes amid concerns that other
Silicon Valley firms are discriminating against the right.
Internet conservatives similarly fumed after YouTube
began to strip their videos of ads, cutting into the revenue right-wing
internet pundits receive from them. Some of the community’s most extreme
members were also incensed when Reddit moved to purge Nazi subreddits from its
site.
New decisions from tech companies are frustrating members
of the fringe-right, whose communities had blossomed on sites like Reddit,
Twitter and YouTube in recent years.
Twitter once declared itself “the free speech wing of the
free speech party.” While the company still prides itself on being a forum for
open discussions, it’s now less comfortable with that characterization.
“I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange
information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place,”
Twitter co-founder Evan Williams told The New York Times in May. “I was wrong
about that.”
Gab — a Twitter rival with laxer content rules that
British provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and other fringe right figures have taken
to after being banned from Twitter — agreed with calls from some right-wing
figures for Twitter to be regulated as a utility.
“Twitter essentially is like a telephone,” Gab’s Chief
Operating Officer Utsav Sanduja told The Hill. “It is a public utility and it
needs to be regulated one.”
Spencer made a similar argument, calling on “Washington
to regulate Silicon Valley” on Twitter.
Their sentiments echo former White House chief strategist
Stephen Bannon’s push to regulate massive Silicon Valley tech firms like
Google, Facebook and Amazon.
Such arguments have been made more typically by Democrats
like Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), who has advocated for net neutrality-styled
regulations of major internet firms.
Despite increasing calls for tighter oversight of
internet firms, such policies are still unlikely in the short term. In the
meantime, some high-profile members of the online right see Gab as their next
best bet — albeit one with far less reach than Twitter.
Gab says that Twitter’s stricter verification rules have
benefited it. Sanduja said over email on Wednesday night that the platform saw
a spike of 2,000 new user sign ups on Thursday, the day the new Twitter rules
went into effect.
Gab platform has 310,000 users in total, according to
Sanduja.
“These unforced errors from Twitter have been fantastic
for Gab,” the company said in a statement.
Comments
Post a Comment