Curious what (unacceptable) lines has Twitter crossed as of now

[Pallid Planetoid]

So Twitter has "crossed too many lines" at this point "for [us] to continue using it..." even just for "notification" purposes.... hmm....

... Just a bit curious what are these forbidden "lines" that have reached the level of unacceptability?

If these "lines" that have been crossed have to do with perceived freedom of speech then I have to say, personally, it would seem to me Twitter has more recently become a much better platform for the expression of free speech than at it obviously has in the past (assuming these are the unacceptable "lines" we speak of) as contrasted by the frequency of all types of member banning that has previously occurred. Of course, it is clear that the one end of the political spectrum that would have a preference for the practice of banning those that do not fit their agenda will presumably not agree on what we might define as "real" freedom of speech. That said, on thing is abundantly clear, the suppression of the freedom of expression is not a good thing for any truly "free" society (which appears to me has been the intended goal for Twitter more recently as opposed to the past).

Adults should be able to handle virtually all expressions of thought that others may or may not totally agree with as opposed to relegating the method of handling "uncomfortable" speech via simply banning it. Personally, I will would never support the suppression of ideas on any side regardless of whether I might agree or disagree.... The banning of expression should be held to the lowest minimum possible regardless of where the discussion resides to ensure we are able to reach the highest level of free speech possible in all cases because it is otherwise very dangerous for any free society to allow one side or the other to become the arbiters of what speech gets shut-down just because "it" might personally "feel" uncomfortable. It is not for us to ensure that everyone must not feel "uncomfortable" - for after all that is obviously an impossible task involving any level of the free discussion of ideas, that is, if we remain candid as to what common sense is in this regard. Sustaining a needed "comfort" level involving any sincere expression of ideas on both sides of the spectrum is generally not possible (that is, in the event an honest and full spectrum of opinions are freely allowed). We need to get off this self absorbed obsession about what "triggers" us and instead strive to reach a goal where these illusive emotional "triggers" are controlled by each of us with the goal of looking for "common sense" solutions - a goal that appears to have been lost by so many of us these days. Let's consider what the "banning" of expression really means - in my mind, when a society turns to "banning" thought it is tantamount to admitting we as a whole tend to allow our emotions to override perspective and/or reason hence we as a whole are allegedly incapable of rational thought therefore the "freedom of expression" in essence must be controlled - is that really the case? -- if so very sad. That all said, I very rarely use any social platforms myself (not that interested...) - just wondering about the details of this new path that now excludes Twitter is all.

[Nigaikaze]

Just a bit curious what are these forbidden "lines" that have reached the level of unacceptability?

Your answer is in this thread: viewtopic.php?p=240248

[Pallid Planetoid]

^ thanks for the link - I would actually characterize the linked topic as a "non-answer" to my question actually in as much as "elaboration" will not be forthcoming (which of course is OK too) - I have no problem leaving it at that as well, actually kind of expected it in order to avoid "inflaming" comments which to a large extent was my point as to how we all need to get off these self-absorbed concepts as to avoiding what may be "uncomfortable" to any one of us. That is get over yourselves - deal with being "uncomfortable" that is what may or may not "inflame" us is something we should all as adults be able to rationally deal with - speaking of what may or may not be "uncomfortable" for any one of us --- the fact is, it is after all in many respects an inherently very "uncomfortable" world we live in in general, isn't it? really - just look around us concerning "nature" that exists on this planet is enough to know this to be true). We need to stop obsessing as to what "offends" us and instead stop with this self-centered obsession of being so overly "sensitive" about every expression or behavior or whatever we might hear or see around us. Put simply, we all need to get-over-ourselves to a large extent - it's all so very subjective anyway, an objective approach to stuff is far more healthy than allowing our subjectivism control us..... Think about it, if this were actually possible - then there wouldn't be any fear of "inflaming" anyone but rather rational discourse is what would occur - what a nice concept.... but then, there is the very concerning possibility that "rational" discourse is not possible for some (based to a large extent where we presently find ourselves socially) - I certainly hope this not to be the case (in any case, "banning" is never a good answer - it essentially represents the giving up of any possibility of "rational" thought)...

[Sajadi]

Just saying, i always would prefer a platform with reasonable free speech over a platform which is applying mass censorship towards political opponents.

Actually the only valid reason to censor something in my opinion is if another person's life is going to be threatened of if someone mass insults others resulting that this behavior is crossing a certain morally unacceptable red flag - or spam and abuse because it is for the "lulz" or done with criminal intentions.

And even if i do not use Twitter, i have to say, i rather prefer the one under Elon Musk in comparison with the one before, because before Musk took over - there was indeed a bias against Conservative/Libertarian/Centrist point of views. And if the "political left" has the ultimate right to post their opinion without being banned, then by all means, the "political right" has the same rights to do that. Bias is wrong, no matter how you turn it around.

In the end, an opinion is an opinion, and if someone for example says "there are only 2 genders" or someone says "there are 2000 genders" - no matter at which side one is standing, if one can't accept a plain and simple opinion and demands to have that one censored and the other side banned... that shows a clear lack of understanding what Democracy, Freedom of speech and freedom of expression in general means.

And if i seriously can not swallow the opinion of my opponent, i still have the ability to block them. Case resolved. People should stop beings so hyper-offended these days.

And additionally.... i rather would have Tucker Carlson and Trump post on Twitter - because if one only allow a "morally acceptable clique with certain political ideology" to use social media... then this is just an one sided echo chamber. And the more people post, the more one can make their own decisions if one person is right or just a shady malicious actor which just should be ignored.

[moonbat]

I used to be a free speech fundamentalist until I realized that Karl Popper's paradox of intolerance is very much applicable, and the reason Western society is where it is today. Allowing free speech for ideologies that are fundamentally opposed to the very idea of freedom and free thought only strengthens them and lets them spread their influence, while in societies that they dominate, you would never get the chance to talk about liberty. Think about how there was/is a Communist party of the USA while there was no question of any other party let alone one supporting individual rights, behind the Iron Curtain. So no, I would absolutely not tolerate the advocacy of Marxism and its offshoots for this reason; it is how today people still shill for it while abhorring Nazism even though both of them are just different heads of the authoritarian collective hydra.
This meme sums it up:

meme - Calvin weaker marxism islam.jpg

[Sajadi]

I used to be a free speech fundamentalist until I realized that Karl Popper's paradox of intolerance is very much applicable, and the reason Western society is where it is today.

But on the other side... if we suspend the right of others to speak out their opinion, we are becoming the very same what the other side is deep in their core... It is up to ourselves to find the truth behind ideologies and words, either everyone has freedom, or nobody has.

"He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[moonbat]

if we suspend the right of others to speak out their opinion

Only when their opinion happens to be that free speech itself is bad or dangerous. The test here is what would the other person do when the roles are reversed and they are in power.

It is up to ourselves to find the truth behind ideologies and words, either everyone has freedom, or nobody has.

That unfortunately has never happened. Anti free speech ideologies have been propagated unchallenged to the youth for the last 3 generations and the results are everywhere to see. Surveys of young people show that they are ok with censoring 'hate' speech without having the brains to ask who gets to watch the watchers, or who are the amazing unbiased intellectuals who can be trusted to define 'hate' without increasing its scope and to protect us from so called bad speech. There is a reason why ideas of liberty never caught on in the communist states during the cold war, while America had its own home grown commies openly calling for its destruction and decrying its own values of liberty and freedom.

Japan and Singapore successfully repelled a communist takeover by ruthlessly censoring and capturing communist sympathizers everywhere be they businessmen, politicians, journalists or educators, the result is those countries still are prosperous and value their own culture instead of breeding a generation of youth that hate it and fall for economic illiterate ideas of property seizure and redistribution.

Meanwhile Western conservatives hamstring themselves with the moronic idea that 'we will be as bad as them' because apparently winning a moral victory is better than saving your own civilization and family values from going down the drain. The progressive/lefty solution to any problems rising out of conservatism is to throw away everything that built up civilization, or draw false equivalences with Christian faith or church pedophiles, or glorify every other race and civilization other than the west. Speaking as a non white person who is appalled at the level of white guilt and self loathing that has gone mainstream everywhere in the western world.

[Cassette]

I think that the best answer to bad ideologies is better arguments from better ideologies. If your answer to a bad ideology is to ban it, then your ideology must not be that great, either. That's not me arguing that you can't censor anything, but the reason has to be stronger than the other person is advocating for things that counter what I believe. Twitter's censorship policy now is merely different than it was before, but it isn't better.

[moonbat]

I think that the best answer to bad ideologies is better arguments from better ideologies. If your answer to a bad ideology is to ban it, then your ideology must not be that great, either.

How has that worked out since the 70s, with communist sponsored infiltration of academia everywhere, so that even long after the collapse of the communist bloc there were university and school professors still advocating for it with a fervor that no one would reserve for Nazism, despite the total misery and body count of Marxism far outnumbering it? Today we are at the stage where forcible redistribution of private property in the name of 'inequality' and reparations for long dead victims of slavery from living people who had nothing to do with it are both seen as legitimate, for example. Or the heavy leftist censorship happy bias in every institution - media, entertainment, education, corporate HR, advertising, journalism, government organizations, even the military. All because of the piecemeal dismantling of any sort of critical thinking in the education system for the last 3 generations. It would be unthinkable to showcase such thought provoking videos today for example.

And it isn't as though the flaws of zero sum collectivist thinking haven't been debunked time and again for decades since the end of WWII, so don't go thinking that merely lack of loud enough opposition to these ideologies implies there's nothing wrong with them or they're even legitimate. Only the most illiterate of economic theory & history and totally clueless about human nature could ever think that Marxism derivatives have any place in the real world with real human beings. But don't worry folks, we'll get it right this time after the USSR, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea and several others, because those were not rEaL mArXiSm!

[Pallid Planetoid]

.... Only the most illiterate of economic theory & history and totally clueless about human nature could ever think that Marxism derivatives have any place in the real world with real human beings. But don't worry folks, we'll get it right this time after the USSR, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea and several others, because those were not rEaL mArXiSm!

Yep, that IS exactly the mantra we hear far too much of the time from our younger folks --- those who in most cases fail to make a point of paying attention to both history and human nature. This lack of historical insight results in none other than believing the false premise that previous failures of Marxism are simply because it had not previously been done correctly and that THIS time around it will be done correctly as it was intended. This unhinged conclusion ignores the simple reality that this inherently specious ideology actually fails to recognize the very critical importance of human merit as well as fails to understand that the placing of the "state" as preeminent ends up suppressing innate human ingenuity that when otherwise left unencumbered will invariably lead to great accomplishments). The Marxist ideology will forever be destined to fundamentally fail to succeed due its intrinsic precepts that result in the critical failure to reward human ingenuity. We must always keep in mind with the absence of ingenuity (that which requires a form of reward to flourish) invariably comes failure in the long term. This absence of historical reference by our youth of today can potentially lead to dangerous consequences unless we strive to make a point of doing a better job of accurately educating our youth on this topic.

[moonbat]

Yep, that IS exactly the mantra we hear far too much of the time from our younger folks

And my point is youth wouldn't be indoctrinated and brainwashed with Marxism for the last 3 generations if its advocates and sympathizers had been rooted out from all positions of power and influence, the way it was quietly done in Japan & Singapore in the 60s. Turns out Joseph McCarthy was right after all.

[Pallid Planetoid]

The practice of "deductive logic" predicated on what we know to be true purely based on "objective science and historical facts" (as we know it) along with simple good old fashion "common sense" and the preservation of the ability to rationally "connect dots" grounded on this very "common sense logic" I speak of --- should be all we need to focus on to overcome so much of the totally inane attitudes, beliefs and behaviors we increasingly observe occurring all around us that is so often become mindbogglingly diametrically opposed to simple down-to-earth reality. For those who might for purposes of sustaining the status quo they have gained in society threaten those who strive in this fair-minded direction - it must be made clear to such people that we who strive for "rational truth" will not succumb to such threats of reprisal and to equally make clear that objective "rational truth" will, by its very nature, indeed be expected to win the day. We should also make it clear that we who would strive for a down-to-earth fair-minded rational dialog will not be "cancelled" just as we would not want to "cancel" any opposition in as much as the freedom to be irrational should be equally protected as well (as difficult as that may be) - ideally our goal of fair-mindedness should be to hopefully win our opposition over by using a common sense approach to logically accomplish this as opposed to the use of any level of undesirable oppressive behavior.

[Moonchild]

While I don't mind discussions about these things please understand that you're making some pretty big assumptions here on the reason why I decided to be done with Twitter.
For the record, it's not directly related to their change in direction; I was already considering leaving it when it was still under previous management. Some of the reasons have changed but ultimately it's just been about imbalance of the platform. A large portion of the decision has also been Twitter's business model now pushing ads for junk harder than ever, effectively failing as a social media platform as a result.

As stated in my other thread I will not be elaborating in detail, because there are just too many factors involved that can each be twisted into some drama that I'd prefer to avoid, but I wanted to make sure people do not think it's been a free speech thing or some political alignment (heck, I don't care much about US politics, not living there after all...) or specific singular recent event that made me decide to cut it loose. If you do think that, then rest assured you're incorrect.

[Mæstro]

So no, I would absolutely not tolerate the advocacy of Marxism and its offshoots for this reason; it is how today people still shill for it while abhorring Nazism even though both of them are just different heads of the authoritarian collective hydra.

In Germany, we have an office to protect the parliamentary order which monitors all varieties of extremists. Right (fascist) and left (Marxist and anarchist) extremists are each watched under their own header. The threshold is whether the group is open to violence to overthrow the present order or seeks to quash human rights observed in the Basic Law. Many of our neighbours to the east likewise restrict advocacy for either faction.

youth wouldn't be indoctrinated and brainwashed with Marxism for the last 3 generations if its advocates and sympathizers had been rooted out from all positions of power and influence, the way it was quietly done in Japan & Singapore in the 60s. Turns out Joseph McCarthy was right after all.

Postmodernism and other doctrines popular in the universities today are not Marxist. Its origins are in continental philosophy (in which Marx is just one current: orthodox Marxists denounce the direct influences, such as the Frankfurt School, as revisionists) and the collapse of neopositivism, the dominant Anglo-Saxon (analytic) philosophy until about 1970. If you want a flavour of genuine Marxist education, I suggest consulting articles in the English translation of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, available through The Free Dictionary (linked). Marxist sociology is modernist, not postmodernist. (The Collins Dictionary of Sociology, available on the same site, has entries on this also.)

The (surviving) Japanese Communist Party, like many communists in western Europe, have distanced themselves from Moscow and Peking. They seek to oversee the move to socialism within, not to overthrow the parliamentary system. This has also been the traditional goal of social democrats (the SDP in Germany, Labour in Britain…), though many have since declared their loyalty to mitigated capitalism (as Labour since 1994) and have become positively obsessed with equality of opportunity. In Japan, Marxian economics continues to thrive as a heterodox school beside the orthodox (neoclassical); Okishio’s textbook had got an English translation in 2021.
※Marxian economics accepts Marx’s description of the capitalist economy, such as the labour theory of value, as accurate factually, but rejects Marx’s allied philosophy (dialectical materialism) and political programme (violent uprising).

Nothing is even socialist about postmodernism. Themes such as worker’s representation, trade unions and co-operatives or nationalisation and economic planning never appear in postmodernist thought, while analytic luminaries like Bertrand Russell were avowed socialists. (His Proposed Roads to Freedom on this theme is a wonderful read whether one agrees with him or not, as is true of much of what he has written.) Postmodernist interests are cultural, not economic: in this or that subculture in the USA (they always seem to be Yankees or under their direct influence), not the workman. Indeed, it seems hard for them to conceive of anything outside the capitalist order; they are much more like Thatcher than they think.

[moonbat]

Postmodernism and other doctrines popular in the universities today are not Marxist

Doesn't matter, modern Marxism has mutated from the original and theory doesn't matter here. It used to focus on dividing society by classes and talking of class struggle, now those are replaced by immutable traits like race, gender and sexual orientation. The rest of the trappings are the same - define an oppressor and and oppressed class with no possible reconciliation, and demand reparations and affirmative action in the name of enforced equality. With post modernism - just the idea that all truth is relative and therefore all cultures and values are the same has had its destructive effects on society. At least with the original idea of classes, there was mobility - people could aspire to become middle class or affluent and even the wealthy could go bankrupt; now traits like race/gender etc act like original sin if you're a single white male, and make you socially and in some cases even legally immune to accountability and personal responsibility if you're not.
What we have today in most of the Western world is a strange combination of elements, and one that is popular with wealthy elites and the college educated rather than the actual working class (who are now denounced as backward, conservative and racist).

[Mæstro]

Doesn't matter, modern Marxism has mutated from the original and theory doesn't matter here.

As there are distinct, living schools of economics, sociology and so on (to say nothing of political parties) which use Marx’s ideas directly to different degrees, and reject relativism, the name fails to capture this monster’s true identity and can mislead. You are already aware of the differences between genuine Marxian theory and its misbegotten step-cousin:

At least with the original idea of classes, there was mobility - people could aspire to become middle class or affluent and even the wealthy could go bankrupt

You identify it for what it is here:

With post modernism - just the idea that all truth is relative

And here:

What we have today in most of the Western world is a strange combination of elements, and one that is popular with wealthy elites[…]rather than the actual working class

As many owners of capital actively favour this drivel, lumping it in with an ideology which seeks their overthrow only muddles things. My point, beside sharing matters of historical fact, is to contrast Germany’s measured approach against violent agitators on one side and moves to extinguish labour movements and rally support for those same owners of capital on the other. Relativism, Marxism and socialism are distinct concepts. Two are false; only one menaces domestic order.

[moonbat]

It's a great way to keep the population divided, else people will divide along rich and poor fault-lines. Notice that the modern progressive shitfest started after the Occupy Wall Street movement, which actually united people against corporate + government corruption.

[Sajadi]

Does not matter how far ideologies have split away from Marxism/Communism - They still have in common that free speech is not welcome - in all of that spin-off ideologies.

Sadly that affects also the United States these days - While disguising itself as "democracy" and the leading party calls themselves "Democrats" - they have since the last president elections moved very far away from fairness and free speech - even worse, while "Progressives" are the only one now who are allowed to speak their "truth" - the opposition is going to be silenced and persecuted - and once the leading party in charge is trying to shut down the opposition, it is game over for freedom and fairness.

[jobbautista9]

I think I'm going to drop my Twitter account as well and focus fully on my Mastodon for my microblogging needs. Login now being required to view profiles and tweets, as well as the rate limiting fiasco... This is no longer a viable platform.

[Moonchild]

I'm pretty sure Elon Musk shot himself in the foot yesterday.

Note: data caps include Twitter's plethora of ad tweets in data streams. So you'll hit that easily. Blocking guests (not mentioned here) is even worse.
"Temporarily" doing this will just make people find alternative channels, and once those alternative channels are found, they will not be coming back.