Social Media Has Problems Of Its Own
May 11, 2019 at 1:12 a.m.
By Gary [email protected]
I didn’t really expect the folks online to relent in their torrent of attacks against Warsaw Mayor Joe Thallemer, so it was fun to watch the reaction after he won the election over city councilman Ron Shoemaker.
Comments under the story about the mayor’s race on the Times-Union Facebook page were instructional:
• "Good job holding on to the corruption Warsaw! Congratulations!”
• "Another 4 years of corruption and cronyism for Warsaw.”
• “There goes the fairgrounds.” (This requires explanation. The mayor, they say, is behind the lawsuit against the race track, is going to close down the entire fairgrounds, turn all that land into a residential development and pocket the proceeds. This, of course, is abject nonsense.)
• “Voter fraud. Recount.”
• “That is because Joe rigged the election.”
These commenters all are motivated by social media.
A couple of years ago, some people in town put up “news” sites on Facebook dedicated to trumpeting how awful the mayor is. These pages ignore facts and reality.
What’s interesting here is how this tiny little microcosm of social media in Warsaw is the perfect example of what’s wrong with these platforms on the grand scale.
People can say anything they want with no fear of reprisal. There’s no need for it to be accurate or factual.
Well, that’s not exactly true. Seems if you pick on the wrong person, you can get shut down.
Just this past week Twitter suspended an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez parody account, even thought Twitter’s rules allow parody accounts as long as they are cleary identified as parodies.
AOC, as she is called, is the freshman U.S. rep. from a House district in New York.
She’s quite the far-left firebrand and was making waves in the Democratic Party with extreme pronouncements regarding her “Green New Deal.”
Along the way, she made some pretty dumb statements, like, the world is going to “end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”
Most recently, she regaled her Instagram followers with a video after she discovered the garbage disposal in her apartment.
She says:
“I am told this is a garbage disposal. I’ve never seen a garbage disposal. I never had one in any place I’ve ever lived. It is terrifying. I don’t know what it’s for, or what its purpose is. Like, food scraps? Like, is this environmentally sound?”
I don’t know, like, I guess grinding up leftovers and sending them down the drain, would be like, environmentally OK.
What a hoot.
Anyway, this guy named Michael Morrison created an @AOCPress (parody) account.
It actually was pretty funny as it poked fun at the congresswoman.
Twitter not only suspended the parody account, they suspended Morrison’s account, too. The liberal-minded powers that be at Twitter claimed that while users are free to create parody accounts, they can’t use "misleading account information in order to engage in spamming, abusive, or disruptive behavior including attempts to manipulate the conversations on Twitter."
Ah, I see. Well wait, actually, I don’t. That makes no sense. Isn’t manipulating conversations precisely the intent of a parody account?
Morrison, interviewed by Human Events, said he believed Twitter suspended the account because it grew pretty quickly. “In the past month and a half alone, the account grew by roughly 50,000 followers. We’ve had tweets with over 30,000 likes on them, so I think Twitter decided it was time for it to go," he said.
This is rich.
Any idea how many Donald Trump parody sites there are on Twitter?
Me either, but it has to be in the hundreds. Any of those poke fun at Trump, do you suppose?
Any of them “engage in spamming, abusive, or disruptive behavior including attempts to manipulate the conversations on Twitter?”
Of course they do.
Reporting at reason.com attempted to shed a little more light on the suspension of Morrison’s accounts. They reported it appeared several other accounts were pushing information from @AOCPress (parody), which is a violation of Twitter’s policy regarding spamming.
Twitter does prohibit “posting duplicate or very similar content across multiple accounts" and "creating duplicate or very similar accounts; or creating fake accounts, impressions or account interactions (such as followers, Retweets, likes, etc.)."
OK, fine. But don’t people retweet all those other parody sites, too? Of course they do.
Clearly, somebody at Twitter just got miffed because they didn’t like this guy picking on AOC.
(All of this makes me wonder if our local mayor haters have run afoul of any Facebook policies.)
Let’s be clear.
Twitter is a private company. You check your First Amendment free-speech rights at their front door when you open your account. They can ban you for anything they want.
But I think they should tread carefully.
I’m pretty sure they could find lots of parody accounts making fun of conservatives and ban them, too.
They just don’t.
There already are rumblings of breaking up “big tech” in Congress.
If social media companies don’t try to be fair about the application of their policies they might find themselves targets of legislation to regulate them into being fair.
But frankly, that’s probably likely anyway. Even one of Facebook’s founders, Chris Hughes, just this week penned an expansive opinion piece in the New York Times calling for the company to be broken up. He thinks it’s too big and too intrusive in people’s everyday lives.
And there are all manner of studies coming out that show too much screen time is a bad thing for kids and for society at large.
Time will determine the fate of social media platforms, and it will be fascinating to watch it play out.
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I didn’t really expect the folks online to relent in their torrent of attacks against Warsaw Mayor Joe Thallemer, so it was fun to watch the reaction after he won the election over city councilman Ron Shoemaker.
Comments under the story about the mayor’s race on the Times-Union Facebook page were instructional:
• "Good job holding on to the corruption Warsaw! Congratulations!”
• "Another 4 years of corruption and cronyism for Warsaw.”
• “There goes the fairgrounds.” (This requires explanation. The mayor, they say, is behind the lawsuit against the race track, is going to close down the entire fairgrounds, turn all that land into a residential development and pocket the proceeds. This, of course, is abject nonsense.)
• “Voter fraud. Recount.”
• “That is because Joe rigged the election.”
These commenters all are motivated by social media.
A couple of years ago, some people in town put up “news” sites on Facebook dedicated to trumpeting how awful the mayor is. These pages ignore facts and reality.
What’s interesting here is how this tiny little microcosm of social media in Warsaw is the perfect example of what’s wrong with these platforms on the grand scale.
People can say anything they want with no fear of reprisal. There’s no need for it to be accurate or factual.
Well, that’s not exactly true. Seems if you pick on the wrong person, you can get shut down.
Just this past week Twitter suspended an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez parody account, even thought Twitter’s rules allow parody accounts as long as they are cleary identified as parodies.
AOC, as she is called, is the freshman U.S. rep. from a House district in New York.
She’s quite the far-left firebrand and was making waves in the Democratic Party with extreme pronouncements regarding her “Green New Deal.”
Along the way, she made some pretty dumb statements, like, the world is going to “end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”
Most recently, she regaled her Instagram followers with a video after she discovered the garbage disposal in her apartment.
She says:
“I am told this is a garbage disposal. I’ve never seen a garbage disposal. I never had one in any place I’ve ever lived. It is terrifying. I don’t know what it’s for, or what its purpose is. Like, food scraps? Like, is this environmentally sound?”
I don’t know, like, I guess grinding up leftovers and sending them down the drain, would be like, environmentally OK.
What a hoot.
Anyway, this guy named Michael Morrison created an @AOCPress (parody) account.
It actually was pretty funny as it poked fun at the congresswoman.
Twitter not only suspended the parody account, they suspended Morrison’s account, too. The liberal-minded powers that be at Twitter claimed that while users are free to create parody accounts, they can’t use "misleading account information in order to engage in spamming, abusive, or disruptive behavior including attempts to manipulate the conversations on Twitter."
Ah, I see. Well wait, actually, I don’t. That makes no sense. Isn’t manipulating conversations precisely the intent of a parody account?
Morrison, interviewed by Human Events, said he believed Twitter suspended the account because it grew pretty quickly. “In the past month and a half alone, the account grew by roughly 50,000 followers. We’ve had tweets with over 30,000 likes on them, so I think Twitter decided it was time for it to go," he said.
This is rich.
Any idea how many Donald Trump parody sites there are on Twitter?
Me either, but it has to be in the hundreds. Any of those poke fun at Trump, do you suppose?
Any of them “engage in spamming, abusive, or disruptive behavior including attempts to manipulate the conversations on Twitter?”
Of course they do.
Reporting at reason.com attempted to shed a little more light on the suspension of Morrison’s accounts. They reported it appeared several other accounts were pushing information from @AOCPress (parody), which is a violation of Twitter’s policy regarding spamming.
Twitter does prohibit “posting duplicate or very similar content across multiple accounts" and "creating duplicate or very similar accounts; or creating fake accounts, impressions or account interactions (such as followers, Retweets, likes, etc.)."
OK, fine. But don’t people retweet all those other parody sites, too? Of course they do.
Clearly, somebody at Twitter just got miffed because they didn’t like this guy picking on AOC.
(All of this makes me wonder if our local mayor haters have run afoul of any Facebook policies.)
Let’s be clear.
Twitter is a private company. You check your First Amendment free-speech rights at their front door when you open your account. They can ban you for anything they want.
But I think they should tread carefully.
I’m pretty sure they could find lots of parody accounts making fun of conservatives and ban them, too.
They just don’t.
There already are rumblings of breaking up “big tech” in Congress.
If social media companies don’t try to be fair about the application of their policies they might find themselves targets of legislation to regulate them into being fair.
But frankly, that’s probably likely anyway. Even one of Facebook’s founders, Chris Hughes, just this week penned an expansive opinion piece in the New York Times calling for the company to be broken up. He thinks it’s too big and too intrusive in people’s everyday lives.
And there are all manner of studies coming out that show too much screen time is a bad thing for kids and for society at large.
Time will determine the fate of social media platforms, and it will be fascinating to watch it play out.
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