A friend of mine got a warning from Twitter for promoting self-harming last week after he gave someone a link to some documents and said "There you go. Knock yourself out."

I got a similar one for just replying in a joking manner about cutting off a limb (in context this was very clearly a joke). I appealed it, but nope, denied.

Yeah. Twitter's enforcement systems have a) an inability to handle clear sarcasm and b) a corresponding inability to handle coded language that's a clear violation of TOS to a human reviewer.

To be fair, humans (at least those commenting on HN) appear to be terrible at handling sarcasm. Almost every sarcastic comment I’ve written has gotten an angry reply by a literalist.

Assume you are right, the way it is being implemented is by threatening doctors to pull the trigger. Humans are too stupid to implement this without horrifying consequences.

In the Netherlands a ‘hilarious’ scene occurred when a doctor showed up and killed a patient who was screaming not wanting to die in front of their family. Apparently the patient was not in a mental state to decide not to die after previously being in the state wanting to. Ha

I was interested as well so went looking. He is probably referencing this. It was the first article I could find on it. You have to read below the fold to get a decent sense of what happened. A key paragraph is included below. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49660525

"After being diagnosed with Alzheimer's four years before she died, the patient wrote a statement saying that she wanted to be euthanized before entering a care home - but that she wanted to decide when the time was right.

Before she was taken into care, a doctor decided that assisted suicide should be administered based on her prior statement. This was confirmed by two separate doctors independently and a date was set.

When the day came to end the woman's life, a sedative was put in her coffee and she lost consciousness.

But the woman then woke up and had to be held down by her daughter and husband while the process was finished."

I spent about 10 seconds googling for you: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49660525

The simplest answer is that a bot at twitter initiated the ban, the the low-paid worker who managed the appeal didn't have enough of a grasp of academic English and/or catholic theology to understand that the tweet in question was actually against assisted suicide.

That's plausible, but he was also turned down on appeal, which was probably by a different pair of eyes.

Yeah: the first set of eyes. Before then, it's pure automation (afaik).

Good point, the appeal may have been the first time a human reviewed the case, I was assuming otherwise.

Of course it was against euthanasia, why would anyone get banned for being pro euthanasia?

> why would anyone get banned for being pro euthanasia?

Because it's explicitly against the rules.

"You may not promote or encourage suicide or self-harm." https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/glorifying-se...

Euthanasia is an official, assisted(!) suicide. We could technically label it as a plain suicide, but that's not what it is.

It's an official procedure, assisted by doctors, and not allowed spontaneously for everyone.

That would be like saying a limb amputation is illegal to talk about on Twitter, because amputating a limb equals to self-harm.

I am in agreement that there's a distinction. (I am also an advocate of legalizing euthanasia in a variety of scenarios.)

In my experience, social media moderation doesn't make much room for this sort of nuance.

I agree with everything you've said, but the policy for this needs to be thought out very carefully.

Because of suicide contagion, it's not exactly analogous to discussion of limb amputations. Even though discussion of assisted dying/euthanasia isn't the same thing as discussion of specific suicides (as per suicide contagion), the policy still needs to be well considered.

Euthanasia is killing somebody out of "mercy." It does not require the agreement or desire of the person being killed.

It is definitely a step beyond physician-assisted suicide, and the two should not be confused or used interchangeably, though both are morally repugnant.

Either your country is handling assisted suicides in a terrible way, or you don't really know what you're talking about, as rude as that makes me sound.

Especially "It does not require the agreement or desire of the person being killed" is absolutely, 100% false.

I'm not talking about laws. I'm talking about the meaning of words. What is it called if a doctor kills somebody out of "mercy," but without explicit consent? An increasing morphine drip that suppresses vital function allowing them to "go peacefully in their sleep" just a bit sooner than would have happened otherwise. This happens all the time.

That's called euthanasia, not physician-assisted suicide. And if we can't acknowledge the difference, we are opening ourselves up to allowing what I described because we already allowed "euthanasia," when in fact what we really allowed was PA-suicide. The fact that both are murder in a moral sense doesn't change the necessity of distinguishing between them.

> What is it called if a doctor kills somebody out of "mercy," but without explicit consent?

That's murder.

Euthanasia is not self-harm, quite the contrary.

It is suicide, though, and therefore seems to be against the rules as they're stated

It could be argued that performing a surgical procedure is harm - after all it destroys various tissues using a knife. But there’s a difference, and it’s the same difference as between euthanasia and suicide.

It could be argued that Twitter put "self" in front of "harm" for a reason.

"or"

I feel like the words of the bishop could be perceive as encouraging suicide when framed in that context. As it was framed by the algorithm.

The human reviewers just took that same context not knowing the politics of assisted suicide.