I’m not sure I agree with the article.
The article says that any algorithm designed to ban domestic terrorists would end up banning too many Republican politicians. I’m not buyin’ that. It’s easy enough to build robotic filters with artificial intelligence systems which would ban some accounts (let’s say for using the “n” word as an example) but only screen other accounts, leaving the final decision up to human review. That process, if created properly, would allow the artificial intelligence to improve its own algorithms based upon which of its original screening selections were overridden, thus gradually reducing the human role in the process as the “bots” learn what the humans want.
As I see it, the real reason is this:
Twitter is a for-profit enterprise which bases its decisions on the health of its business model. They don’t want to ban anyone unless one of two things is true: (1) the user commits or conspires to commit a crime for which Twitter could be held responsible; (2) Twitter would make more profit by banning the user than by allowing him or her to stay.
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They don’t want to ban people for expressing opinions that other people disagree with, even when many people consider those opinions to be stupid and hateful. Twitter is based in the United States where the first amendment permits hateful and stupid opinions, and the political climate actually encourages them. I suppose if enough individuals would boycott Twitter until they cleaned up their act, then they might clean it up, but “enough” would have to be a very large number of people, and I don’t see that in the cards. Let’s imagine for a moment that Twitter banned some white nationalists based on a boycott by a sizeable group of lefty protestors. Enacting such a ban might lose Twitter more business from the white nationalists than the company would lose from the boycotters.
Back in my days as the strategic planning guru for a retail chain, I came to the conclusion that almost all retail boycotts are ineffectual. Not all, but almost all. The Venn diagram almost always seems to show minimal intersection between the people who boycott your products and the people who actually buy them. In fact, boycotts occasionally help your business by drawing more attention to it, and/or by earning sympathetic purchases from your real customers. (Ask Nike and Chick-fil-A!) In all my years with that chain I can only recall one costly boycott and that was an unusual one in that it had nothing at all to do with retailing practices. Without revealing the details, I can tell you that: (1) it was a regional protest rather than a national one, and the protestors were right; (2) the boycotters were opposing our hiring policies and had no problem with our retail offering, which meant that many of the protestors in that case really were our own customers. That’s the kind of boycott that hurts!
So the question is this: do the people whining about Twitter’s practices contribute to their bottom line? My guess is “no,” and I think Twitter must have reached the same conclusion. That being the case, those protests are going nowhere.
As I see it, individuals in the United States are unlikely to have much impact. The best way to get Twitter to respond is for several major countries outside the United States to block Twitter based on their “hate speech” laws. So don’t write your Congressman. Get your cousin in Canada to write HIS congressman. OK, they probably don’t call them congressmen in Soviet Canada. They’re probably commissars or deputies or some such commie thing.
(Kidding. Love Canada. How can you dislike a country where the national police are gaily festooned in red coats?)