The Real Reason Twitter Can’t Be Honest About The Intentions Of Their Privacy Policy – Opinion

Sometimes I toss and turn late at night, wracked with worry and anxiety, thinking about what my life would be like if it weren’t for Twitter’s safety team making sure my innocent, virgin eyes are safe from the horrors of honest opinion and disagreement. It makes me wonder about the lives of my grandparents and parents, who didn’t grow up in an environment dominated by paternalistic social media giants. Did they just…say things? And just…hear things? Without any explanation of context They didn’t know the difference between misinformation and crazy right-wing loon talk points.

It makes me shiver to think of the chaos their childhood was.

Naturally, I have a lot of fun. Twitter’s safety regulations are far from helpful these days, and frankly, far from being about safety at all.

Twitter announced Tuesday morning that it would implement new privacy and safety rules.

Starting today, the public is not allowed to share private media such as videos or images of private people without their permission. Publishing people’s private info is also prohibited under the policy, as is threatening or incentivizing others to do so.https://t.co/7EXvXdwegG

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) November 30, 2021

How does that translate? How can images be shared with others? What are the rules for sharing photos taken at parades? Do you allow me to share the picture of an FBI suspect in hiding? Would you mind sharing a photo of Karen disciplining a young black girl who sold water on the street in front her home?

My guesses are as valid as yours. For the most part, what you see is exactly what you will get. This is what they do: somewhat in their blog post. I suggest you read the entire thing (it’s not very long) so you have the full picture of what they’re talking about. It isn’t exactly all bad. For instance, Twitter intends to crack down on doxxing, which should be good news for conservatives who are consistently harassed by progressive journalists who have the singular career goal of “punching nazis.”

• threatening to publicly expose someone’s private information;

• sharing information that would enable individuals to hack or gain access to someone’s private information without their consent,e.g., sharing sign-in credentials for online banking services;

• asking for or offering a bounty or financial reward in exchange for posting someone’s private information;

• asking for a bounty or financial reward in exchange for not posting someone’s private information, sometimes referred to as blackmail.

However, the rest of the new policy is absurdly vague, a sort of “will they/won’t they” strategy that seems to raise more questions than answers.

This is intentional, as most regular readers will have concluded. The real goal here – of course – is to become the arbiters of “misinformation” and to squash “misinformation” which naturally means squashing conservative content and opinion because that is the only type of “misinformation” the progressive robots at Twitter recognize. Many conservatives would appreciate Twitter being honest about its intentions to moderate and censor conservative conversations on their site. We would be able to end the absurd theater of objectivism if we all knew where we stand.

But of course, they can’t do that. Twitter is not honest with conservatives.

That’s because Twitter needs conservatives.

Daily, I get messages from conservative friends criticizing me for keeping on Twitter. They encourage me to move to Telegram, Gab, or Parler to escape the censorship of Liberal social media platforms such as Twitter. Some of these sites have my accounts. Call it “saving up for a rainy day” if you will. If I have to use another method of communication with friends and readers, I love having alternatives. However, I don’t interact regularly on those sites. I don’t find them interesting. There is no dissent, no arguing, no discussion. Everyone is just echoing each other because we’re all on the same side; and that’s fine, it really is. Necessary, even. We all need a soft place to land, a place to go where you know you’ll be accepted for your beliefs and who you are.

But it’s boring. It’s possible to create any number of alternate Twitter accounts. They won’t ever beat Twitter in the market because there are no liberals there. It means no back and forth, dissent or ridicule, nor is there any calling people out for their bizarre wokeism. It’s impossible to find anything like this. This is truly the heartbeat of Twitter.

Contrary to legacy media’s belief, approximately half of the population is conservative. This means that there is a lot of us. Millions. It’s still a substantial amount for a conservative platform but not enough to be competitive with companies like Twitter. Of course, no.

Twitter understands this. They don’t want to remove conservatives from their platform. They could easily have made that happen long ago, and they would still be in their right to do so. It is possible to become an open-source platform and be extremely profitable, but it would not be their dominant position. They are aware that they must have diverse customers in order to grow and remain relevant.

The conundrum is that they’re also staffed by a bunch of spoiled, ideological, alt-left progressives who hate anyone who even shows a hint of counter-culture leanings. So what’s a budding Mussolini to do when you need opposing viewpoints for success but you also think opposing viewpoints are the spawn of satan?

It’s easy to make vague rules and apply them inconsistently. You hope conservatives who use your social media platform will feel the same about ridicule and debate being the basis of a great site. You give them just enough leeway to feel okay about being on there, but you also do your damndest to make sure their ideas don’t see too much light. So you shadow-ban, “congest” sharing, “accidentally” delete tweets…you do all of the things that don’t necessarily have a digital trail, then you call the people who complain about such tactics “conspiracy theorists.”

Twitter does not intend to ban conservatives from its site, regardless of all the wailing and catharsis. We are their only hope.

We’d all do well to remember that.