EDIT: Not being tremendously familiar with this spat, it took me a while to figure out what Milo got banned for. Best I can figure out, it was for calling a Ghostbusters actress "barely literate". Since that's a bit of a weak-tea insult, I imagine the real offense was not stopping (how?) his army of followers from tweeting other vile things at the woman. Is that our standard? Should we hold peaceful BLM leaders responsible for tweets from their followers promoting cop-killing?

Then, should we ban people such as Shanley, Randi Harper and their likes when they "unleash" their followers on some guy?

And this is actually different. While Milo did not explicitly call for the attacks, Shanley and Randi routinely do call for a target to be abused, for their companies to be harassed until the target is terminated, etc.

I don't support any side, I'm just trying to show that the first comment regarding consistency is indeed accurate, Twitter has none.

No argument here. Twitter's inconsistent, if not outright apathetic about abuse no matter where it comes from. It's been pointed out there's no shortage of harassment and abuse from people on the left on Twitter. Maybe not at the rate and volume of the "alt-right" types, but it doesn't matter. Twitter needs to clean house.

Absolutely. If the goal for Twitter is to be a place free from this sort of abuse, then anyone using a position of prominence to call for harassment and abuse should not be allowed to do so.

I don't actually know who these people are/that they've done what you're saying, but if it's true, then I don't think it's a hard question at all.

(looking for the tweet)

Actually, I do think we should hold "peaceful" BLM leaders morally (not legally) responsible for tweets from their followers. How can a movement of justice accept the silence or ineffectiveness of BLM leaders with regards to inculcating a non-vile culture and calling out hate speech? Isn't tolerating that sort of thing from a movement's followers for the sake of internal politics and membership basically the same thing as tolerating a number of bad cops for the sake of "thin blue line" solidarity and internal police politics? It's not viable without becoming hypocritical. The only difference is in direct connection and legal consequence, not in the overall morality.

I think we can tolerate vileness as a culture and society, but we should not welcome it -- especially if it starts to abrogate what participants would consent to. We can't tolerate hate speech that incites to violence, period. We should not laud internet vileness as some kind of magical problem-solving "pure" expression, which is what we seem to be doing now. There is an important difference between a freedom and a virtue. Movements of social justice need to be teaching virtue. Otherwise, history shows us that such things will tend to devolve into demagoguery and mob behavior.

http://fusion.net/story/327103/leslie-jones-twitter-racism/

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2016/07/20/whos-in-and-whos-out-tha...

(And this is from a socialist)

Whatever you think of COCs, they might be hard to take seriously if it's "be considerate or respectful, unless you have both a large following and were kicked off Twitter for what largely amounts to abusive and hate-speech like behavior, then we'll actively court you to come to our network!"

https://twitter.com/MikaelThalen/status/757505701711405056

Left is a tweet by Leslie Jones, right is one by Kassie Dillon. The former is 'left wing', the latter is 'right wing'.

Only the latter got suspended.

Which brings me to a point about commmunity management I'd like to make:

Don't even get into this field if you want people to always like you. Or if you're obsessed with your 'reputation'.

Running a community site means making difficult decisions. It means losing friends over the community's rules and principles. It means you will get a very bad reputation from at least some part of society as a bully or dictator.

This is what a community manager is perceived as by a banned member:

http://www.managingcommunities.com/2012/12/03/community-mana...

Unfortunately, it seems Twitter (and a lot of such companies nowadays) seem more interested in keeping their friends in the media than they do running a decent community.

I agree with this. Reddit as a community is a little like Los Angeles is a city. It's really a community of communities. Some are incredibly well run, others are not.

If Twitter gets consistent with moderation, any profits that they could ever have will go puff! It takes real people to do consistent moderation.

Because at the end of the day, numbers mattered to them more than a decent community. It's kind of like why the media is so polarised and broken now. Because getting your readers to flame you and each other to a crisp gets page views and ad clicks. It's easy to sell junk that preconfirms your followers personal biases.

Not to mention the false equivalences that others have already pointed out. Par for the course I suppose. "Ethics!"

Yes, I'm involved in gaming journalism and have some interest in the drama going on surrounding controversies like GamerGate, Brexit, various political elections, etc. Does this affect anything? Maybe, but I wouldn't say that makes it disingenuous.

I've seen people smear others with accusations of crimes to try and get them fired. I've seen people sic their followers on those they don't like. There have been various obvious threats left up that should have been removed in a decently moderated community.

And these issues come from all sides. They're not acceptable on either side, but from my experience, a conservative will seemingly get the rules enforced on them more harshly.

I wouldn't say those comparisons are false equivalences. I'm not comparing someone calling someone else a scumbag with a terrorist threat. Someone who claims they want to physically attack people should be banned much more quickly than someone who merely calls a few names.

But that's not happening at Twitter.

Nothing was more predictable than the feigned incredulousness, as if you haven't been harping on these exact talking points for months on this site while rationalizing GamerGate [1] and trying to convince us we've been deceived and it's not what we think.

Some gems from that query:

> So you believe what the media tells you about GamerGate? Because there's pretty clear evidence that regardless of your side in this debate, there was a decent chance you'd be trolled, bullied or doxed because of it.

> [GamerGate is] basically a revolt against what some see as a broken media, political correctness being forced on a community that didn't want it and favouritism among the gaming press.

There's no changing you, obviously, but for the sake of the "ethics" you're always talking about, your past efforts should certainly be disclosed when you hijack a top-level comment to make the unsupported claims you're making.

1. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cm30%20gamergate&sort=byDate&p...

That is the same. Both are absolutely terrible at consistency. They both have very clear and obvious "protected" groups who can violate the rules with impunity.

And a few other subs seem like doxxing people they disagree with, usually with the depressing common assumption that there's 'no bad actions, only targets'.

Doxxing is a similar issue. However, were you banned by a mod or shadowbanned by an admin? Because mods can mod their sub as they want. Consistency goes out the window, which is good and bad. If you were shadowbanned though, that's a whole different story.

As for doxxing - both, actually. I had to create at least 5 different reddit accounts in the span of less than two years, always getting banned for petty stuff like stating someone's real name when it was actually used on twitter. Reddit is a waste of time and it's not because of cat memes, it's because of the attitudes of admins who doesn't give a shit about quality or their userbase.