Re:Updating our rules against hateful conduct
by rubidium on Tuesday July 09, 2019 @04:07PM
(#20396034)
No. It's only if it dehumanizes the other. Criticism of the thoughts, ideas, practices are perfectly fine. Dehumanizing the practicers of any particular religion is what's not fine.
You're over-reacting to what the linked post from twitter actually says.
Re:Updating our rules against hateful conduct
by rsj_hn on Tuesday July 09, 2019 @04:18PM
(#20396152)
Define "de-humanizing". If you look at how previous twitter anti-dehumanizing policies were enforced, this was used to
ban NPC memes -- which were not memes against a person but against ideas. It was used to ban people who said things like "men can't get pregnant" -- which is an idea/belief.
Re:Updating our rules against hateful conduct
by jbattle on Tuesday July 09, 2019 @05:13PM
(#20396665)
I really can't follow you. I spent a few minutes googling and it looks like
1) Twitter punishes 'dehumanizing tweets'
2) One author on kotaku argued that the NPC meme could be considered 'dehumanizing'
3 ???
Re:Updating our rules against hateful conduct
by rsj_hn on Tuesday July 09, 2019 @08:09PM
(#20398066)
The ban on 'dehumanization' was in response to NPC memes. It was introduced in mid October 2018 after the NPC memes became popular. They banned over 1500 accounts -- for a while they were banning every account with a NPC face in the avatar. Recall that the NPC meme originates from the (joke) that some people are robotic in their thinking, and the NPC memes are faces running a program. As this was not a violation of any twitter rules, twitter made up a rule as an excuse to block these memes.
But if you think about it, the NPC memes were not arguing that some specific individual was not human, but rather than certain types of reasoning was robotic -- e.g. atavistic, primitive, and automatic. So this was an idea that was being blocked.
Going back to religion, the whole point of religious arguments is that they offend people and challenge the core of their identity. So of course this is going to be used as a weapon against religious views. Especially if your religion includes beliefs that some people are followers of false prophets, children of the devil, etc. Religion is used in many ways as a dividing line over who is favored and who is not.
Which is the whole point.
These issues of free speech have been around for a very long time, especially with regards to religious speech, which is at the bedrock of free speech, and the Western liberal tradition espouses free speech principles not because it didn't realize someone might get offended, but because it's better than the option of having powerful people/institutions pick winners and losers and decide what is acceptable to say.
Under current rules, if enforced across the board, a modern Martin Luther's 95 tweet stream would be banned because it hurt someone's feelings or criticized their religion. Exposes of Jehovah's Witnesses would be banned. Atheist tracts would be banned. The whole system is unworkable, which is why it wont work -- it wont be enforced across the board. What will happen is that Twitter will adopt de-facto 'protected religions' that cannot be criticized -- say Islam -- and then it will pick the losers -- say Christianity.