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TWITTER IS NOT THE FIRST AMENDMENT
Jul. 22nd, 2016 11:56 pmITEM: Breitbart technology editor Milo Yiannopoulos has been banned from Twitter for tweeting racist abuse at Leslie Jones, who is currently starring in the Ghostbusters reboot, which has angered people like Yiannopoulos because they ruined a perfectly good movie by putting a bunch of girls in it to kowtow to the liberal Feminazi agenda or something.
So yeah, a few things here:
1. For the record, I haven’t seen the movie yet, and while I don’t think we needed a Ghostbusters reboot, I have no problem with the casting.
2. As usual John Scalzi saves me a lot of typing here regarding Yiannopoulos’ cries of censorship and liberal bias at Twitter. Basically, no and no.
3. Scalzi also raises a point that Leslie Jones has also mentioned – that Twitter needs to do more about this kind of thing, and not just when it happens to celebrities with lots of followers.
It’s true that trolls are a perennial problem anywhere on the internet, and yes, shutting them down doesn’t make them or their racist/sexist attitudes go away. But there’s a big difference between free speech and bullying – especially when it’s the kind of professional organized bullying that trolls like Yiannopoulos engage in. (For more on this, I recommend this piece by Laurie Penny, who has known Yiannopoulos for some time and attended his pro-Trump rally at the RNC Convention this week – poor woman.)
Social media has become so poisonous that companies like Twitter (and Facebook and all of them, really) do need to be more proactive in protecting users from abuse. It’s difficult for them to do that because their business model relies on keeping users, not kicking them off permanently. But it’s either that or people like Leslie Jones quitting. They can’t have it both ways for much longer – especially now that one of the biggest trolls in the country just accepted the GOP nomination for President.
Not with the banned,
This is dF
So yeah, a few things here:
1. For the record, I haven’t seen the movie yet, and while I don’t think we needed a Ghostbusters reboot, I have no problem with the casting.
2. As usual John Scalzi saves me a lot of typing here regarding Yiannopoulos’ cries of censorship and liberal bias at Twitter. Basically, no and no.
3. Scalzi also raises a point that Leslie Jones has also mentioned – that Twitter needs to do more about this kind of thing, and not just when it happens to celebrities with lots of followers.
It’s true that trolls are a perennial problem anywhere on the internet, and yes, shutting them down doesn’t make them or their racist/sexist attitudes go away. But there’s a big difference between free speech and bullying – especially when it’s the kind of professional organized bullying that trolls like Yiannopoulos engage in. (For more on this, I recommend this piece by Laurie Penny, who has known Yiannopoulos for some time and attended his pro-Trump rally at the RNC Convention this week – poor woman.)
Social media has become so poisonous that companies like Twitter (and Facebook and all of them, really) do need to be more proactive in protecting users from abuse. It’s difficult for them to do that because their business model relies on keeping users, not kicking them off permanently. But it’s either that or people like Leslie Jones quitting. They can’t have it both ways for much longer – especially now that one of the biggest trolls in the country just accepted the GOP nomination for President.
Not with the banned,
This is dF
