As noted earlier, Twitter caused a stir overnight among the political commentariat when late yesterday it reported that it had permanently banned conservative commentator Milo Yiannopoulos from using its service.
Twitter said in a statement Tuesday that it had seen an “uptick” in the number of accounts violating its abuse and harassment policies over the past 48 hours, noting it had enforced its policies either by issuing warnings or permanently suspending users. “We know many people believe we have not done enough to curb this type of behavior on Twitter. We agree,” Twitter said in the statement. “We are continuing to invest heavily in improving our tools and enforcement systems to better allow us to identify and take faster action on abuse as it’s happening and prevent repeat offenders.”
Twitter continued: “People should be able to express diverse opinions and beliefs on Twitter. But no one deserves to be subjected to targeted abuse online, and our rules prohibit inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others. We have been in the process of reviewing our hateful conduct policy to prohibit additional types of abusive behavior and allow more types of reporting, with the goal of reducing the burden on the person being targeted,” the official said. “We’ll provide more details on those changes in the coming weeks.”
Moments ago, in his first official interview since the ban, Milo spoke to CNBC’s Michelle Caruso-Cabrera to give his take on what happened.
“The company is entitled to do what it likes. The problem is it’s lying to users. Jack Dorsey says that twitter is the place you go if you want to express yourself. That’s a lie. There is a systematic campaign against conservative and liberatrian points of view on Twitter.
Twitter is perfectly happy to host ISIS, to host death threats against Donald Trump supporters and they do nothing in any of these cases. But if you make a joke about a feminist, or if you dislike the new Ghostbusters movie, or if you have the audacity to dislike the work in Hollywood of someone who happens to be black, or happens to be a woman and you get suspended, that’s absurd.”
Whether there is any profound significance to this latest fiasco, remains to be determined. The truth is that those who want to use twitter, are free to use it, and likewise are free to decide who to follow and block – one can argue that it is strange that a platform that prides itself in its “free speech” should decide when and in what cases it should intervene and censor or block users. Alternatively, there are those who may chose simply to avoid twitter altogether, something which TWTR’s shareholders are quite concerned about, and should more incidents such as this one occur, it is probably safe to say that twitter will further alienate a substantial portion of the US population; hardly an attaractive IRR from a shareholder’s perspective.
The full exchange is below:
Milo Yiannopoulos: Twitter is “lying to users…Twitter is perfectly happy to host ISIS…”, its rules are “absurd” pic.twitter.com/53KSGifzvi
— CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) July 20, 2016
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