TechTheDay

Basically, Twitter has gone nuts.

Twitter, who has censored lots of politically right-leaning users and still got accused of helping alleged troll Russian accounts that are thought to have been instrumental in putting Donald Trump in the White House, has finally gone haywire. The fact that it continues to try and save its failing brand by pandering to one side of the US political spectrum just shows their desperation. The recent event in which Twitter was summoned to a hearing where they got ranted on by angry politicians is probably what pushed them to the brink.

This time, though, Twitter has had far enough and plans to turn their public platform into an exclusive one. Twitter, if you can believe it, now plans to ban “hate speech” off their platform by monitoring users’ behavior as well. Their Support article regarding Violence reads:

“You may not make specific threats of violence or wish for the serious physical harm, death, or disease of an individual or group of people. This includes, but is not limited to, threatening or promoting terrorism. 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.” What this means is that Twitter is going to try to monitor user behavior on and off Twitter. But how are they going to do that?”

What this means is that Twitter is going to try to monitor user behavior on and off Twitter. But how are they going to do that?

Big Brother

The popular reality TV series Big Brother brought back the use of the term “Big Brother”, which came from the novel “1984” by George Orwell. It is used to denote oppressive surveillance and Twitter’s new policy will be something just like that. Of course, they cannot monitor what people do off the internet, that would eat up a lot of resources that only a government like China’s can afford. So to do this twitter will just monitor what users do on it.

This means that Twitter will be monitoring your Internet activities: which sites you go to, who you chat with, what you click, save, or download from the other websites. Twitter has not elaborated yet on the method they’ll use to achieve this but it’s most likely they’ll be using cookies for that and scan the cookies of the user’s browser to check who he or she is affiliated with. The problem with this method though is that it assumes the user automatically aligns with the website’s ideas and opinions.

For example, news journalist would want to use a website with X political leanings as the source for their article. He visits this site and the browser stores the cookies. But he doesn’t agree with the website or its owner’s political opinions. So he comes to Twitter and the website reads the cookies and discovers that he’s visited the website. By the logic of this method, the user is going to get flagged even though he doesn’t agree with that website’s political ideas. Another problem with this is that what if the user uses a different browser to browse Twitter rather than use the browser they use to surf to other websites. The method will be rendered useless because it can’t detect any of the cookies they want to find.

Of course, the method stated above is purely hypothetical. There’s no way to make sure what they’ll do come December 18, which is when the policy is supposed to take effect. There are other ways to monitor the users, such as colluding with Google, who’s been in the business of monitoring their users’ activity for a very long time already.

There’s literally hundreds, if not thousands of Twitter users that politically lean to the opposite direction of Twitter. And as we’ve seen for a couple of years already the big tech companies are biased against them, calling even the most innocent a hateful bigoted Nazi. Banning these people from Twitter is definitely the aim of this policy. Whether or not Twitter will be able to afford to cut off a significant chunk of their userbase is, at this time, unknown.