I’ve been trying to format this long reader-submitted PDF most of the day, but here’s an update from the Twittersphere. It looks like the censorship of GamerGate might have come even earlier than we all expected. First, let me explain a couple things about how this has come about. Twitter recently implemented some new filters, and it’s worth discussing how it works.
Actually, Allum Bokhari explained it pretty well over at Breitbart, so I’ll let him explain instead:
Twitter has come under fire from its users after installing mandatory content filters that cannot be switched off. The new system censors the newsfeeds of users without their consent, causing messages from followers and strangers alike to be automatically hidden from view if they fall foul of the filters. Many users have discovered that they are unable to see messages from long-time friends and followers, and are calling on Twitter to allow them to opt out of the new system.
This filter sounded like trouble from Day One, and now it looks like we were right to be apprehensive. Keep in mind, this has only been found in this one instance so far, but it’s still a troubling sign for the future of the Twitter service.
Hey @Twitter @Safety @Support,
why's this mild @DrEvilGamer #GamerGate tweet censored?!
cc:@lizzyf620 pic.twitter.com/t96QjfjyVa
— wow a red ghost 🍟 (@wetsprocket) May 25, 2015
https://twitter.com/atlasnodded/status/602907857588232194
I’m not sure if this was an accident on behalf of Twitter, but the tweet itself was totally inoffensive. There’s no cursing in it, or any type of foul language. It’s not threatening. The only thing there is an admonition and the GamerGate tag. It makes you wonder about Twitter procedures, and if they’re prepping a wide-scale effort. Also, even if they aren’t, it just proves how shitty systems like this are in the first place, especially when people have no choice but to opt-in. Hopefully the idiots in charge will get it together, assuming this is all just a mistake in the first place.
UPDATE: Longtime GamerGate member says he’s seen this happen more than once…
@TheRalphRetort I've caught this happening *at least* several times when @b00nes and @EscapeVelo tweeted to me. #GamerGate @Support @twitter
— Chríss (@Chriss_m) May 25, 2015
https://twitter.com/Norse_Gamer/status/602969176270045185
68 comments
Either twitter is anti-free speech or one of their teams is in the clique with Harper and the rest.
Cue all the idiots claiming “it’s not censorship unless the government does it durp durp”… clearly ignoring the actual definition of “censorship”. :/
Actual definitions are a sign of the patriarchy. Check your privilege shit lord!
What about when they pull up the dictionary definition of Feminism?
Does it saw brave warrior women that fight the patriarchy? If not it must burn!
That’s hypocrisy and Double Think at work for them.
The problem is mainly that they have no nuance. This is technologically solvable, but they won’t do so.
I stopped following a few twitters that (between interesting tweets) posted pornographic images. I would prefer to have Twitter redact R and X rated stuff (with click-to-see if it had something beyond). But they have no rating, “offensive” or other categories that I can filter, but see that they are filtered.
They won’t stop porn, but if something has a trivially (if not false positive) offensive words, they shadow-delete it. No one can see it, or see that it was removed.
At least when someone is blocked, it shows it clearly.
A common tactic of the extreme left wing is to redefine words they deem “problematic” (aka inconvenient for their narrative). That or label them misogynistic/transphobic… because that’s how language works.
You’ve just described Orwellian Newspeak sir.
Orwell would be incredibly outspoken about how fucked up the world is today and antithetical it is to the very notion of liberty.
Don’t know if you’ve ever seen any of Thunderf00t’s videos on youtube but on quite a number of occasions he’s noted the remarkable similarities between the religious right and the feminist left, particularly where games are concerned.
I’ve watched most of them. It’s the “horse shoe” effect, people with such extremely polarizing ideological views that even though they believe fundamentally different things, their means and motive are almost indistinguishable.
Twitter and Reddit and other services have essentially adopted the policy that anything that even promotes or condones any type of “violence” or even any statements that “one may feel unsafe from” is in violation.
That isn’t to say that comments have to be threatening, or inciting violence, or be intimidating or scary. They just have to make someone FEEL that way. If you post about Snorks and somehow Snorks make me FEEL triggered, then that is sufficient enough. It isn’t about what you say or your intent. It’s about what *I* infer from it. Period.
Welcome to the new SJW-led internet. They’ve taken a terrific tool for free expression and communication planet-wide (and further) that people like myself spent the last several decades developing and popularizing and turned it into a fucking hugbox.
Then isn’t the best idea to create an alternative solution?
I mean when this occurred on 4chan, 8chan was born. If this is going to occur on twitter, it’s time for a real competitor to emerge.
Well, Twitter will collapse when the dotcom bubble bursts again. There’s no way it’s worth ~$18-30 billion dollars, it’s like Uber being valued at $41 billion, it’s so insane that I can’t believe that 1999-2001 is happening all over again and no a single one of these numbskulls that are praising this crap realize what’s happening.
These are companies that do not produce a physical product having almost the same value as Intel at $54 billion, and the have their chips inside just about everything.
what is this dotcom bubble bursts, if i may ask?
This covers the dotcom bubble in that period: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
You should also read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_market_bubble
Since those two will explain it in better detail.
But to boil it down, it was a speculative bubble where people though all the new ‘e companies’ were going to print money out of nothing. Venture capitalists dumped money in, people bought stock in companies that produced no physical goods, the companies themselves had no actual solvency and so on. So, when quarterly reports came out and people realized that they were losing money so fast, and had no plans on how to become profitable — people pulled money out of the market. That led to a share crash which pulled other companies down with it.
A good example in the modern era is Groupon, which hemorrhages money hand over fist every quarter. You might consider Amazon in the same boat, except it earns money–and does things with it instead of creating a war chest to weather a storm.
Anyway, what happened was there was mass valuation of the companies, the stocks, they became over valued, and when the bubble popped there was no where to go but down–hugely. Ex: broadcast.com was bought by yahoo.com for $5.9B in stock options. The actual value was around $30m. Or Infospace which is also defunct had a price of $1,000/share. When the market collapsed it dropped to $22.
Probably missing a few things since I’ve been up for 30 something hours at this point.
thanks!
AMD is rapidly sucking up Intels market share, so intel is going to try to focus on mobile. I guess supporting Anita and company wasn’t the smartest idea for their bottom line.
Twitter’s been losing money ever since its inception. They’re gaining fewer and fewer new subscribers and they’ve never really come up with an effective way to monetize their product. It really reminds me a lot of some of the late ’90s dot-coms right before the bubble burst.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the pussification we were warned about.
These people who confused disagreement with violence make me actually relate to fictional character like Bane. I know “the fire rises” is something we see tossed around a lot, but I’m actually beginning to resonate with a “you need to be reminded what genuine fear and violence actually is” message.
Only the movie bane is like that. The comic book one is just a punching bag
Come now, Twitter, now’s not the time for fear.
That comes later.
doesn’t that also mean we can flag for triggering?
Except free speech suppression is NOT vs perceived “violence” or harassment or in defenses of everyone’s fragile feels. It’s purely a method of installing new-leftists ideology.
As you can see in case of serial harassment from SJWs. #killallmen and anti-white racism the safe zone is a lie and ‘inclusive’ means the exact opposite. It’s a glaring hypocrisy of Orwells new-speak proportions. As long as you adhere to the correct ideology you can be abusive and offensive as much as you want.
I cant say for official twitters company policy, but I can say for sure that they employ many SJW/radical-left/”progressive” kinds, – many examples of twitter support actions show it.
Offensive actions are fine as long as they come from the “correct” ideology camp. Try to fight back? Get ready to be suspended.
Reddit is a land of powertripping mods and with a fraud Pao at the head I cant expect ANYTHING good of it.
You really think if totalitarianism comes to the US it’s going to be of the leftist variety? Funny guy.
That’s what’s so amusing about the gun nuts. In the US they’ll invariably side with the fascists.
not really sure how gun nuts enter the equation as he did not state a preference to guns or not. methinks this is a simplification with self projected prejudice.
This might Get past teh Censors #G_A_M_E_R_G_A_T_E
I’m not surprised at all. C’mon, when we heard Twitter was partnering with WAM and CON, you had to know this shit was coming. That’s one of the ways to silence people, get nice and close to the people in power, even create an organization claiming to be against harassment…Help your friends with this organization to appear legitimate. Use your new found power and friends to silence those you disagree with. They couldn’t stop #GamerGate by slandering us as a whole, they lose real debates, their own allies are turning against them.
Never stop, never surrender. We’re kicking ass and they’re getting more desperate to stop us. The longer this goes on the better, the more irrational they act, the more credibility they lose and we gain.
WHAT THE ABSOLUTE HELL?! I just looked on that, and guess what?
I’M SHADOWBANNED or whatever it’s called, censored is a more apt term.
View of that tweet from being logged in: http://i.imgur.com/p1FN676.png
View of that tweet from incognito mode: http://i.imgur.com/bP8plZK.png
Thanks for the reply on twitter. I’m asking if anyone else is experiencing this.
as of late I’ve been feeling like the hashtag is slowing down dramatically but then I check topsy and it appears like always. So, I’m thinking that this might be the reason….
Twitter, I don’t think you need more rope to hang yourself. You have plenty already.
Wikipedia and twitter: helping allies promote their versions of the Truth by promoting their story and vaporising anything that is evidence that runs counter to the Truth.
Ladies and gentleman, here is your Orwellian Ministry of Truth.
The thing about wikipedia is that it can still be a useful tool when you’re looking up strictly factual information. I’d never use it as a reference tool for a particuarly contentious political topic.
Agreed. I use it from time to time to give me an idea about scientific terms I’m not familiar with.
When signing up for an account, just ask “Are you an intellectual and/or emotional cripple?”
If someone answers yes, then put them in the babysitting category with all the filters. If someone answers no, then allow them to control their own news feed.
I’m sick and tired of this hand holding mentality being perpetrated by the Social Justice Inquisition. Just because you mental midgets get “triggered” over everything under the fucking Sun doesn’t mean the rest of us are like that.
I neither want nor need your help determining what I can and cannot handle. I’m a grown adult who is perfectly capable of taking care of myself online.
A virtual reality “safe space”.
Fyi, Christina Hoff Summers is an intellectual; there’s nothing wrong with being an intellectual. There is a fundamental difference between a GENUINE intellectual and a pseudo intellectual, college-know-it-all hippy. All of gamergate’s detractors are either ignorant/barely educated or liberal arts educated douche bags with a strong intellectual bias. I don’t care if someone is in a STEM field either – if they buy into mainstream media bullshit and lack the very basic critical thinking skills to recognize the anti-gamergate narrative as patently false from the beginning, they’re nothing but garbage.
it should be read “intellectual and/or emotional – cripple not “intellectual” :p
intellectually and/or emotionally crippled*
Would make for an easier read.
I believe CHS’ doctorate is in philosophy, which is very much a liberal arts field. 😉
That was in the 70s, it’s got downhill a lot since then.
I graduated in ’96 with a pretty strong liberal arts education but it helped that I had some pretty stiff graduation requirements. And that I like taking difficult subjects, including ones outside my areas of expertise.
Eh, well no one’s perfect. LOL. Philosophy is useful, if it’s being applied as intended. And I wasn’t saying that all liberal arts is bad as there are “liberal arts” (humanities) fields which should, in theory, operate under strict guidelines. History and Philosophy, for starters. History requires an enormous amount of discipline and a firm grasp of logic to participate in. Philosophy also requires a firm grasp of logic (razors) to participate in and when used for what it’s supposed to be used – deducing “good and evil” and ways in which to improve the quality of life then it’s fine. What you wind up with however are usually ideologues who use it as a way to strengthen their confirmation bias which is why I don’t care for Philosophy.
I started out as a philosophy major. Then I got tired of arguing about free will and determinism. Epistemology was much more interesting. 😉
http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/880932-trigger
And this is one of the many reasons i don’t have a twitter…
I sent out a tweet asking if anyone was censored. Maybe we’ll get an idea of just how big this is getting.
Perhaps we need to add a serial number to the tweets so censorship can be detected.
The greatest evil is they silently remove the tweets. If they were reasonable they would say “This Tweet has been removed by the bigotbot” so it would be obvious they were censoring.
They are like the Soviet Union, removing people from pictures (badly since it was pre-photoshop).
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Voroshilov%2C_Molotov%2C_Stalin%2C_with_Nikolai_Yezhov.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/The_Commissar_Vanishes_2.jpg
That’s Stalin in the middle, yeah? Who is the stooped, diabolical looking fellow? That’s not Trotsky, is it? And Stalin is hiding his hand shriveled up, yeah?
No it’s not Trotsky. It’s Molotov
Please tell me he invented the molotov cocktail, or did he just have the fortune of having a badass last name? Prior to him presumably being erased that is.
The guy who was erased was Nikolai Yezhov:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov
The guy directly left of Stalin that looks kind of like Trotsky was Vyacheslav Molotov:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyacheslav_Molotov
The Molotov Cocktail was named after him as an insult by the Finns who used them against the Soviets during the Winter War.
Oh lmao! Too funny.
Yeah, in addition to producing people like Simo Häyhä (most badass sniper ever, with over 500 confirmed kills; known as the “White Death” by the Soviets who were so scared of him they’d call down artillery barrages where they thought he might be) the Finns also have a rather delightfully bent sense of humor at times.
The cocktails were said by the Finns to be used for washing down Molotov Bread Baskets (Molotov claimed that the bombs being dropped were humanitarian food packages for starving Finns).
(And yeah, late to the party, I know. I don’t read TRR on a regular basis.)
Or they were better than I thought. I was thinking of a large group picture that developed strange “gaps” where someone in the middle was airbrushed out.
BTW:
Simple way to get around this (in terms of concept, a bit annoying to implement unless someone writes a script):
1) OPEN NOTEPAD or equivalent.
2) Type out test message of any length with any kind of content.
3) Screenshot it.
4) Paste in Paint or equivalent.
5) Save as .jpeg
6) Post message with picture in it, and recipients’ designation in tweet.
7) Suck on it, word filter!
That is actually brilliant. The problem is that when you search Gamergate it won’t show up. : / Unless we’re going to come up with an especially offensive and/or hilarious pseudonym to pair with the #Gamergate .jpegs?
Just include the hashtag in the text of the photo tweet.
That wouldn’t show up on Twitter’s search function.
That’s the purpose of hashtags.
I think he means that you include the hashtag in the text of the tweet which also has the photo in it. Not that you include the hashtag in the text that you photograph then tweet.
This is both disgusting and disappointing, yet entirely par for the course for Twitter. Not that I hold “social media” in high regards (it’s nothing more than a confirmation bias fueled rumor mill imho), especially something as inherently flawed and frankly degenerate as Twitter; 140 character? Really? So meaningful.
I went on twitter from 4chan right after (Moot) the coward started to censor gamergate discussions, on the behest of anti-gamers, moot and the ideological demagogues can go and fuck themselves, I never went back to 4chan again ever, even when links were provided by gamergate supporters on twitter, were trying to point out the emptied forums as a result of idiotic biased censoring & us leaving, I left twitter around med-December I believe, due to ( WAM ) censorship tactics, I never rejoined that shithole called twitter again either, although I visited the (meninist) acount on several occasions as a support to it’s anti-hypocrisy & feminazi double-standard being attacked by the usual SJW scum bags crowd.
Just a cleaner repackaging of the evidence.
It sort of feels like all of social media in the last few weeks all just decided to say fuck it with free speech. I am usually a progressive but I can’t stand the way this censorship has crept into so many supposedly open and free platforms.