Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Twitter the Hate Site

Twitter is a service many people have come to rely on to communicate with their friends, make new friends and participate in discourse in the safety that the internet has to offer. As of late, Twitter has decided to remove two of those aspects.

Technically they do have the right to censor how their service is used, but this is not what they are actually doing. Instead when a generic threat or general insult is meade they ignore it, however if you direct it at a specific person they lock you out of the discussion completely. Is this simply a move to protect themselves, or are they attempting to become the world's first platform for hatemongering?

I believe someone in the company thinks it's to protect themselves, but the reality is that this creates actual bigotry and hatred. A generalized insult is bigotry, it's hatred for a group of people rather than just ire at a specific person.

Ultimately this move will backfire on them if they continue to follow the course they have chosen. When in a discussion, people will call each other names, that's how humans have always and will always behave when they are faced with opposition to which they can only respond in short comments rather than a formal debate.

If Twitter actually thinks formal debates can even happen on their platform, they are as deluded as the religious people who talk to themselves. The bigger problem is that they are discouraging interraction with other people, which is what social media is.

Soon they will be left with nothing but hatemongering and news feeds, and when that happens everyone else will find a new platform. The only reason people used social media was to find some interraction, someone to challenge their ideas or verious personal aspects.

This latest trend to suspend accounts which engage in social discourse will remove that completely, making Twitter die out like all the other social media who remove the social aspect of their service. Google is coming in strong in this regard, rather than suspend people for engaging with others, they tell those who don't like what they read to just not read it.

Sooner or later a group like Anonymous will declare Twitter a hate site and remove them from the internet completely. As is the reason such groups exist, this is what the support team at Twitter can expect if they leave the racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. and remove those who insult specific people they are actually talking to.

Recently I got suspended for calling someone a nut, that was all I called them because they were just trolling, and that got my account removed from the discourse completely. I didn't say "all this type of person is a nut", I called that one person a nut.

This is the environment that Social Justice Warriors are creating, a society in which it's better to hate a group of people for something than to insult a single person for their own behavior. They do it by calling it bullying, but bullying is (by definition) a situation in which the person cannot remove themselves from.

Online you have many options to remove yourself from the situation, which is why it is perfect for even the most heated discussions. I have been bullied in the past, this is something I am all too familiar with, and right now Twitter support are being the bullies.

Thanks for reading, please add your opinions on the matter for discussion.