Freedom From Hate
My family will tell you that I have a very long fuse. It takes a lot to make me visibly angry, but when I do blow, I can silence the house. So it shouldn’t be taken lightly when I tell you that I’m spittin’ mad about a situation on Twitter.
Twitter is a service that I use on a daily basis. I use it to capture my thoughts and to network with my online friends and business associates. It’s normally an enjoyable experience. Two weeks ago that changed.
Almost ten days ago today, a racist, Nazi, White-Power bastard initiated contact with me on Twitter by following my updates. When someone subscribes to my updates, I receive a notification and I usually go checkout his or her profile and read some posts. If I’m interested in what he or she has to say, I’ll follow their updates too. When I checked out the Aryan’s profile, I felt like I’d been punched in the face. His posts were full of racial slurs, and some of the posts contained specific words that I find overwhelmingly offensive. I was angry because this contact was completely unwanted and it resulted in me having to read his filth. I tried to learn more about this person so that I might report him to Twitter. His profile says that he’s from Estonia and he supports Eugenics (Hitler’s method to achieve the ‘Master Race’). I clicked on a link in the user’s profile and I was taken to a website devoted to hate-filled videos which include attacks on blacks and Jews.
Yes, I’ve seen sites like this before, and I’ve been able to avoid them on the Internet. I suppose I should have seen it coming, but I wasn’t expecting this on Twitter. The closed nature of the Twitter system means that someone has to actively contact you before you would see their posts or anything in their profile. That’s exactly what happened here.
The first thing I did after being exposed to the Nazi, was to read the Twitter Terms of Service. I wanted to know my rights as a user, and more importantly, I wanted to know if he had violated any of the terms. There are several items in the terms of service which I believe he violated.
Take Item #4, for instance, I find the hate speech that this person uses to be threatening and intimidating:
4. You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users.
However, everyone’s definition of intimidation and harassment might be different. In fact, some of my friends felt that, while they don’t agree with the Aryan, that he does have a right to share his views on Twitter. Voltaire was even quoted: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Someone else cited Constitutional Law, pointing out that hate speech was not illegal.
So this brings up the age old debate of Freedom of Speech vs. Hate Speech. I’m not an attorney, but I’m pretty sure that I have a right to protect myself against hate speech, and Twitter has the ability to ban someone for using hate speech. Freedom of Speech means you cannot be jailed for speaking your thoughts. You cannot be restrained from expressing yourself. However, I am not suggesting that this person be silenced, but because of his actions, he should be banned from Twitter. Twitter is a membership-based service. It has the right to ban users. In fact, as I’ll point out next, they have a duty to ban this user.
5. You may not use the Twitter.com service for any illegal or unauthorized purpose. International users agree to comply with all local laws regarding online conduct and acceptable content.
The person’s profile says that he resides in Estonia. One of the videos on the website is supposed to be shot in Estonia. If this user’s location is correct, then he is in violation of Estonia’s Penal Code:
§ 151. Incitement to social hatred
Activities which publicly incite to hatred or violence on the basis of nationality, race, colour, sex, language, origin, religion, political opinion, financial or social status are punishable by a pecuniary punishment or up to 3 years’ imprisonment.
Clearly, hate speech is illegal in Estonia, punishable by up to 3 years’ imprisonment. This user is guilty of this crime and at the very least has violated the Twitter TOS. His user account should be deleted immediately.
Customer Service
I reported the offensive user to Twitter. It took a few days, but I received a response. The user’s posts had been reviewed and Twitter agreed that they were offensive. The user was removed from the public timeline and notifications would not be generated if the user follows anyone else. I was very pleased that Twitter took action and removed the person from public view, but I was not satisfied completely by that action. The user deserves to be removed completely.
I pointed out the violations of Twitter’s TOS. The representative insisted that the Nazi had “rights” and that Twitter would not delete the account.
Rant
When you engage in hate speech, when you denigrate another human being for no other reason than his or her race, you are harassing not one person, but entire nations of people. Supporting the subjugation of one race by another is heinous and in my opinion results in a forfeiture of some of your own rights. You do not have the right to attack me or my family in this manner. You exist to harass and you live to intimidate. You are not welcome in my society, and you a certainly not welcome on Twitter.
All of you ignorant, White Power, racist scum out there, crawl back into your holes and look at your face in the mirror. The problems that you have, the issues that exist in your life, they weren’t caused by black people. They didn’t come from the Jews. Stop blaming everyone else for your screwed up life. Take some responsibility for yourself. A truly proud white man doesn’t ever need to blame another race of people for anything. A strong white man makes his own way in this world. You racist filth are cowards who can’t figure out how to improve your own lives, so you’ll just blame someone else.
To Be Continued…
At this point, Twitter won’t do anything else about this user. Although I think Twitter is being too lenient, I am not upset with them. However, I do not intend to allow this issue to drop. This person contacted me. He drew first blood, and now I won’t rest until he is gone from Twitter.
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As he who referenced Voltaire, I’ll certainly concede that you have a good point.
I was truly pleased (and even a little surprised) to learn of Twitter’s response. I understand your desire to seek complete removal from Twitter, but I think Twitter’s response is fairly good.
I’d imagine the terms of service say something such as “Failure to comply with these terms *may* result in termination of your account…” But if this racist bastard is removed from the public timeline and generates no new “Racist is now following you” messages, that’s close to mission accomplished.
Of course, that’s a practical outlook. On the principle of the matter, I understand your desire to complete removal, and I agree that Twitter would be well within its rights (and perhaps even responsibility) to do so.
And yet I feel like I have I heard of cases where people who were squatting on a brand’s Twitter profile were promptly removed and the profile name/url handed over to the brand.
“The closed nature of the Twitter system means that someone has to actively contact you before you would see their posts or anything in their profile.”
I see lots of tweets without the person contacting me. While I rarely look at the public timeline, it does happen. Mostly I see the tweets of people I don’t follow when I click through a link in a tweet of someone I do follow.
Granted, the people I follow tend to follow people similar to them, so I typically don’t run into others who are much different from the nice people I follow.
Sometimes I use a Twitter search tool to look for people using terms (e.g., HCI, user experience, usability, Wichita) that interest me. Many of the people I now follow were discovered in that manner.
Maybe this “closed nature” of Twitter is an illusion?
Also, I’ve set my account to *not* send me notifications when someone starts following me. Now and again I go through my followers to see who is new. I can also use another trick to find new followers. The best way to get my attention is to send me an @ reply.
Thanks for the comments.
Mike, yes, I am happy that my request resulted in a change. Thanks for always providing balance to our debates! Oh, and in looking up the Voltaire quote, I found that it wasn’t an actual quote. Friends of Voltaire attributed it later as more of a summary of his ideas. Great quote, nonetheless.
Jackie, I’m sure they’d respond much quicker to a letter from Coca-Cola’s lawyers about squatting. Other social networks have much tougher policies. I do understand, however, how difficult it might be to manage all of this with a small staff.
Cindy, you’re right that it is more open than I want to think. The good thing about Twitter vs. the Internet is that Twitter does have the power to ban someone if they so choose.
Wow, that makes me angry too. I’m glad that Twitter agreed and removed him from the public timeline (and hopefully more). I would think that free speech also means the right to speak out against, and not support hate speech. That’s why we have laws against it.
The whole concept of free speech is to protect speech that people find highly disagreeable or “hate” speech. Why would you need laws to protect agreeable speech? Free speech is a concept created to protect those who were hated, scorned and often killed by society for simple words.
What do you mean by “I have a right to protect myself against hate speech” ? Are you trying to say that you have a right to prevent someone from using words that you don’t like? Or that you have a right not listen? The former is absurd (in a free society at least) and the latter goes without saying. A simple Twitter follow however, does not constitute a invasion of your right not to listen, or in this case read, “hate” speech. It would not even be considered harassment because all you had to do was simply not read his profile.
I do agree that he should be banned for using racials slurs or even for what Twitter sees as “Hate Speech”. Twitter should have the right to deny service to whoever they see fit to do so. If they determine that a user has violated their TOS then that user should be removed from the site.
The so called “racist scum” you refer to have never blamed their societal problems on that of “invading” races. They blame their national problems on those who have subverted the original laws of their government. American “racist scum” simply want the government operated as defined before it was subverted (beginning in 1913)by a rogue group of a men. These group of men have and always will have a disproportionate number of Jews. Whether due to their greater intelligence or simply because of culture; Jews have been involved in nearly every major over haul of a White government in the past 300 years. Look at their role in the communist revolution, while Jews where only between 1.5 and 3% of the population, they made up over 70% of the first communist government. That is not propaganda, that is a historical fact. In America the media is controlled to a great deal(I don’t know what the exact percentage is, but together they probably make up between 25-30% of the American media) by two Jewish controlled media empires, that of Disney and News Corp. I probably don’t have to tell you who owns and runs Disney but look up news corp, Rupert Murdoch himself is a quarter Jewish.
As far as personal problems there are few very politically active (who aren’t FBI or Jewish) that have personal problems. White Nationalists, White Separatists, and those who are against multiculturalism etc are usually very educated individual’s. Don’t believe what you hear/read in the media about them, most aren’t violent ignorant rednecks. Some of them are in fact the most educated men in the world. Jared Taylor is a graduate of Yale and Sciences Po who has lectured at Yale, Harvard, and MIT. Michael Levin(yes a Jew) has a PHD from Columbia University.
I don’t want to hijack a tech blog with a political discussion any more than I already have, so if your interested in a polite and civil discussion of the subject then your welcome to e-mail me at bookworm.productions at gmail dot com. I’ll be happy to discuss the subject with and share my opinions.
I knew it wasn’t actually Voltaire (but I cheated/Wikipedia’d). It’s a good line, though, and I lazily perpetuated the misunderstanding.
Boo, me!
Hi Bookworm,
Thanks for the comment, but I think it just takes the conversation too far away from the original point. The definition of hate speech is pretty clear. It is NOT simply disagreeable speech. I don’t want to hear or read hate speech. I can’t and wouldn’t throw you in jail for using hate speech, but I will attempt to do what I can to limit my exposure to it.
Hi! Thanks for bringing this up. We at @OddFollow had listed the Aryan weeks ago, in hopes that word would spread to block the offensive account. Twitter has banished offensive accounts, seeming to base the decision mostly on the sheer number of times the account was blocked by other users (ask @FoulBastard). This purely numerical ‘denial of service’ decision-making and resultant banning is common in chatrooms and similar websites. It’s a flawed way of determining who should stay and who should go, but I would expect Twitter to take repeated BLOCKS from users as an invitation to investigate, at the very least.
Twitter does seem to take action in certain cases. Their inconsistency in enforcement of their TOS is confusing and frustrating.
When I saw the Aryan, I thought for sure that Germans on Twitter (and Estonians, apparently!) would recognize the account immediately as being outside their federal law, and would report it to their country’s authorities. In international law, would Twitter be brought to court for doing nothing to contain the account? In the end, I think Twitter didn’t delete the account (but should have) and instead chose to do what you describe, which is severely limit the Aryan’s access to others.
Twitter is probably heading down a slippery slope, in the court of international law and the court of public opinion. I’m amazed that they still generate VC funding.
Thanks for the comment PurpleCar. I agree. It may be time to start talking to the people who hold the purse strings.
Shannon,
This is so complicated. I hate people who approach me like that. In truth I automatically block them. And I feel dirty and I feel rage.
But then I post about abortion rights and I guess the anti-abortionist might say – well, she’s anti humanity, anti-life. She doesn’t respect what it is to be a human being. Can’t Twitter shut her up. And I post about Gay Rights and Gay Marriage and folks tell me I am not (here’s twisted thinking) Christian and they tell me being Gay is a choice and hence not ‘protected’ and not suitable for equal rights protections. (Can’t change the color of your skin but can change your sexual preference)
In truth I find all of these issues as important as the Aryan stuff. In a better world there would be no discussion. Really, how can one DISCUSS the validity of human rights? So, given that all that STUFF is out there
in my opinion it’s better I know people like this are all around me. Makes it so important that I stand up for what I believe is right. That I fight back. That they look like the creeps they are. And that others hear what they have to see and see what we do how how we react.
Not much help here. But I sure do understand. – Barb