its platform from trolls,” said Charlie
Warzel in BuzzFeed.com. The social network
unexpectedly suspended accounts belonging
to prominent white nationalist and
alt-right users last week as part of a large
effort to rein in hate speech and harassment
on the site. The decision came just hours
after the company unveiled long-awaited
tools for combating online abuse, including
an expanded “mute” feature allowing
users to block specific words and offensive
phrases. The move was met with howls of
outrage from banned users. In a YouTube video, Richard Spencer,
the head of an alt-right think tank called the National Policy
Institute, declared that was he “alive physically, but digitally
speaking, there has been execution squads across the alt-right.”
Twitter’s crackdown comes amid a rising tide of online hate
speech, said Jessica Guynn in USA Today. An October report
from the Anti-Defamation League found that more than
2.6 million tweets with anti-Semitic language were sent between
August 2015 and July 2016, many directed against journalists
covering Donald Trump. The neo-Nazi website The Daily
Stormer recently published a list of more than 50 Twitter users
who expressed fear about a Trump presidency, “urging its readers
to ‘punish’ them with a barrage of tweets that would drive
them to suicide.”
Plenty of folks within the alt-right community
are loudly complaining that Twitter’s
actions are “blatant censorship,” said Cale
Guthrie Weissman in FastCompany.com.
Many of the banned users appear to have
taken up residence on Gab, a new alt-right
social network that works like a combination
of Twitter and Reddit. Some are even
using it to coordinate anonymous harassment
campaigns on Twitter in retribution
for the company’s actions. Gab’s Trumpsupporting
founder, Andrew Torba, who
was kicked out of a Silicon Valley startup
incubator for violating its anti-harassment policy, says companies
have no right to decide what’s harassment and what isn’t. “Hateful
and harassment are subjective terms,” he says.
“Twitter is acting wholly within its rights,” said David Frum
in TheAtlantic.com. But I still think it’s making a mistake. The
perception of “arbitrary and one-sided speech policing” is exactly
what drives so many young men toward radical, alt-right beliefs
in the first place. Let’s not turn “loudmouths and thugs” into free
speech martyrs. That’s why Twitter needs to be transparent about
what kind of behavior merits a ban, said Will Oremus in Slate
.com. Right now, the company doesn’t discuss specific tweets,
even with the user being suspended. More transparency won’t
insulate Twitter from criticism, “but it would at least give the
company a stronger claim to the high ground.”