Twitter is days away from finally banning the Nazis. Yes, really. – By Aja Romano (vox.com) / Dec 15 2017
Twitter has had a messy 2017, and it certainly isn’t enjoying the greatest public relations phase of its history, so I’m inclined to forgive the social media platform for fumbling what should have been the most triumphant moment of its long year: the site’s November 17 announcement that it will effectively ban neo-Nazis come December 18.
Yes, you read that right: Twitter has stated that beginning Monday, it will finally deliver what many of its users have been demanding for months, by closing its doors to people affiliated with hate groups — thereby heeding the call that many people have long been shorthanding as simply, “Ban the Nazis.”
The announcement, which seems to have largely flown under the radar of both the media and Twitter’s user base, came as part of a November update to Twitter’s safety policies, when the site added a crucial clause to its terms of service:
You also may not affiliate with organizations that — whether by their own statements or activity both on and off the platform — use or promote violence against civilians to further their causes.
We will begin enforcing this rule around affiliation with such organizations on December 18, 2017.
Of course, we won’t know until next week how effective this rule will be. The optimists among us might be hoping for a holiday miracle in which we’ll awaken to discover that helpful Twitter elves came in the night and kicked all the white supremacists off the platform while we slept.
But with just a few days left until the Great Forthcoming Twitter Nazi Purge, hardly any of the site’s users seem to be aware that the ban is on the way. Which is to say, there’s been no major discussion of the change among users, no jubilant countdown to pass the time until the Nazis are gone. In fact, things have been surprisingly quiet in this regard, considering how central the theme of Nazi banning has been to the narrative surrounding Twitter in 2017.
When feminist writer Lindy West made her high-profile departure from Twitter in January, she left explicitly because of Twitter’s refusal to deal with the “the white supremacist, anti-feminist, isolationist, transphobic ‘alt-right’ movement [that] has been beta-testing its propaganda and intimidation machine on marginalised Twitter communities for years.”
And every time Twitter suspended a popular progressive user like Anthony Oliveira or Rose McGowan — no matter the reason — while allowing former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke or white nationalist Richard Spencer to continue using the site to spread hateful ideologies, people reliably responded with increasing frustration and outrage over the fact that Twitter has failed to prevent such imbalances from occurring.
In the process, the refrain of “Ban the Nazis” has become such a prominent catchphrase on the site that in early November, when Twitter unexpectedly expanded the character limit for users’ profile names, a new “Ban the Nazis” meme emerged almost instantly:
https://twitter.com/megalohdon/status/928832860735320064
A month later, “Ban the Nazis” profile names are still all over the place. What seems to be less present, however, is an awareness that Twitter has announced plans to actually do so, by way of the aforementioned update to its terms of service.
Since Twitter first made its announcement, whenever I’ve mentioned it, I’ve generally been met with the cynical response of “I’ll believe it when I see it.” And given Twitter’s shaky track record on enforcing the policies it implements — just last month, it was verifying white supremacists, not banning them — that attitude is wholly justified.
Still, it’s kinda nice to keep the faith and hope for the best, especially as we come to the end of a tense and exhausting year. “Banning the Nazis” in 3, 2, 1 days won’t make them any less pernicious or toxic offline. But if Twitter indeed follows through, its actions will hopefully, finally, be a sign that the site — a platform to which many of us have probably entrusted too much of our lives and friendship networks — has at long last established a clear, firm line when it comes to hate speech.
https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/12/15/16782428/twitter-ban-nazis
PB/TK – It’s rather hard to police the entire interweb but hate groups (Left and Right) need to be extinguished. Yet I can see the legal bills piling up as people fight that their speech is being silenced
