Anonymous Claims Twitter Is Suspending 'OpISIS' Member Accounts (thestack.com) 75
An anonymous reader writes: Anonymous has claimed that Twitter mistakenly shut down several of its activist accounts in a widespread cull of pages belonging to terrorist supporters. In an effort to rid the site of an extremist presence, Twitter has recently suspended over 125,000 accounts for 'threatening or promoting terrorist acts, primarily related to ISIS.' However, the international activist group Anonymous is now reporting that among this number were multiple member accounts, which were actively supporting the fight against the Islamic State and helping to seek out terrorist supporters and recruiters online. Twitter has typically re-opened the Anonymous accounts within a matter of hours, bombarded with requests by hacktivists and the wider online community.
And? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And? (Score:5, Funny)
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Well I for one I identify as an anonymous and this has triggered my outrage.
But you're a Coward!
Re:And? (Score:5, Funny)
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You need to work on your reading comprehension.
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Re: Anonymous, ISIS of the Internet (Score:1)
Big difference is that ISIS members do not crap their pants when they see a mall cop.
Maybe they disagreed with Anita Sarkeesian (Score:5, Informative)
Judging from the suspension of the account of journalist Robert Stacy McCain [battleswarmblog.com], disagreeing with Anita Sarkeesian seems a far more serious offense to Twitter's "Trust and Safety Council" than openly supporting Islamic terrorists.
They also refuse to restore his account or even detail why it was suspended [theothermccain.com].
Re:Maybe they disagreed with Anita Sarkeesian (Score:4, Insightful)
If twitter is going to ban people for free speech, then its not an open platform and shouldn't be endorsed by any government agency. Maybe we should ban all government agencies from using facebook and twitter pages since they are not open platforms. The public should not endorse censorship or promoting companies that censor.
Or you could go the other way, and force them not to censor by law. Since they are beyond a typical company and moved into areas of speech and representation. We do want open access for all protected speech, including sexual, religious and ethnic. Its a corporation, and corporations are not people, so they shouldn't get the free speech protections, just like we dont want them to vote with political money.
Re:protected speech (Score:4, Insightful)
Speech intended to incite crime (whether violent, like terrorism, or virtual, like unauthorized access to computers and information) is not protected.
Yes it is.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
ANY federal law that abridges freedom of speech is unconstitutional. Further, any law at a state or local level is also unconstitutional as the first amendment describes a right reserved for the people.
If you can conclusively prove that someone's speech directly resulted in violence you can prosecute them for their role in that violence.
However you cannot legally prosecute them for their speech, nor can you legally restrict their speech. The fact that people are prosecuted for their speech and do have their speech restricted is not evidence that speech isn't protected, it's evidence that judges who restrict speech are fucking idiots or tyrants (or both).
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speech is not protected by the First Amendment if the speaker intends to incite a violation of the law that is both imminent and likely
[...] But actually trying to incite hacking into systems right now, or actually trying to incite murder right now, are outside the boundaries of protection.
FTFY.
If I say, "Someday I'm gonna murder the mayor," I'm okay. If I say, "C'mon, everybody, grab your guns! We're gonna march on city hall and kill the mayor!" and people start doing it, the cops can come in and arrest me for my speech. But I would also assume that if I said that and everybody laughed and kept playing parcheesi, I'm okay.
As I understand it, you can say whatever you want. However, the first amendment does not protect you from the consequences of your speech. If you incite people to do s
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I'd like to see (and I'm willing to help fund) similar platforms being run by the government. For cost and security reasons, it should be an option for just the one service.
Note: That does not mean that the government should be taking over private services nor does it mean that they should be exclusively provisioned by them - one might say they'd be exclusively for government usage and not for public use except as a method of having information disseminated to them. Obviously, varied levels of interaction a
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Interesting articles. Both try to somehow link this to Sarkeesian, without any evidence or even any idea which tweets got him banned. It's highly dubious because we don't know if he was breaking the rules or not, since the tweets have been deleted, and because Sarkeesian isn't involved day-to-day with Twitter at all.
It's sad that this kind of pure, unfounded speculation (what we sometimes call paranoia) is considered "journalism" by some sites.
Your statement doesn't make any sense either, how is his banning
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Tweets arent deleted. His account is suspended. You cant see his tweets because of that. The whole point is he criticized Anita and he was banned. They wont tell him why, they wont unban him. This behavior goes against their banning and appeals process. The only way they skip appeals is if the person was permanently banned and was ban evading.
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>racist
Yawn. Every time someone accuses someone of being racist without presenting evidence I automatically assume they are lying.
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This is what people get for supporting closed platforms as Mr McCain did (by tweeting, thus adding to the amount of traffic that Twitter publishes).
If anyone expects free speech on a closed platform, then I have a bridge to sell you.
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RFC 3514 (Score:2)
Sounds like Twitter forgot to take advantage of RFC 3514 [ietf.org]. More generally, I'd like to see this implemented more generally. It would make things a LOT easier!
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I guess if you are a billionaire it's ok to attempt to force the world into your narrow view?
Oh wow, so you must really hate Rupert Murdoch then, right?
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Yeah, I don't know about that. Everybody in that list is trying to make an ever-increasing profit via a company or investment they control. Only some of the people in that list have a secondary goal to reshape the world in their narrow view (which coincidentally often involves them making more money). I don't think you can lump FB and Twitter in that second list, and the reason is very simple: their profits are directly and tangibly related in near real-time to the user's ongoing satisfaction and participa
Word based ban lists (Score:5, Interesting)
Facebook started word based ban lists few weeks back, and old posts are removed if they have such a word. Tranny is on the list, which for many mechanics wonder wtf facebook was going on about their posts being against decency rules. Also Milo's "Dangerous Faggot Tour" posts are removed due to Faggot being banned. I wonder if there are any smokers who got their posts removed too. There there is the whole Twitter going after Milo, so social media censorship is getting out of hand.
I remember back when Microsoft banned usernames with Gay, and a bunch of people couldnt register if they had Gay in their names.
Its like 1990's internet all over again, banned words everywhere.
Re:Word based ban lists (Score:4, Interesting)
Its like 1990's internet all over again, banned words everywhere.
Except this time, there's plenty of compute resources to match word closeness and plenty of world-relationship mapping databases that it ought to be fairly straightforward to semantically map (tranny,chrysler,failed) into a different bucket than hate-speech, automatically. Pure stop-lists are just lazy.
Maybe the information-retrieval people aren't on this team.
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The only problem is that hate-speech, as such, is a fabrication of the weak minds of soft liberals. I see much of their rhetoric as hate-speech as well, the only difference being I am strong enough of mind to be able to handle having my views challenged without resorting to censorship.
Banning words IS just lazy, just not technologically. It's intellectually lazy to not be able to handle criticism of your ideals.
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I remember one site that replaced offensive words with asterisks, even if it was part of another word. So I couldn't mention the ra**** in my yard, or say anything about my wris****ch. I couldn't even talk about our VP (**** Cheny)!
A sledge hammer for a nail, freedom of speech (Score:1)
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I've been pondering a rebuttal for Franklin's quote for a while. I see it misquoted, mistaken, misused. I'm not saying that's the case with your usage. I'm also in full agreement with his expressed sentiment.
But...
What happens when the majority is no longer convinced of the need for liberty and what does that mean for the rest of us?
It's disheartening. One minute, the same person will rant about how encryption is necessary and that we shouldn't legislate based on fear and the next minute they're arguing tha
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I view it as logic and not fear. I'd like to keep access to as many liberties as possible because I want to be able to use my freedom as much as possible. I'd not classify that as fear but you can ascribe it to such, if you want. I consider it well reasoned. I am not a religious person but I'd like to keep that liberty around as well. Even if it means that some religious folks will cause harm to otherwise good people. It doesn't seem fearful to me but I can see (I think) why one might think so.
The Fog of War (Score:2)
Friendly fire.
Anonymous should just be grateful that it's nothing like the real thing.