If you loved social media censorship, you’ll really love social media pre-censorship.
Twitter Inc will test sending users a prompt when they reply to a tweet using “offensive or hurtful language,” in an effort to clean up conversations on the social media platform, the company said in a tweet on Tuesday.
When users hit “send” on their reply, they will be told if the words in their tweet are similar to those in posts that have been reported, and asked if they would like to revise it or not.
Considering how intelligently algorithms function, this will end up harassing a whole bunch of random people.
Pre-censorship is particularly creepy because of its invisible aspect. Like most totalitarian systems, its goal is intimidation, getting the user to self-censor.
But of course the media loads the dice, as usual, by…
1. Citing “pressure on Twitter” to clean up. The pressure in question comes from the media. And its idea of cleaning up is censoring conservatives.
2. Not actually quoting anyone who might disagree.
“We’re trying to encourage people to rethink their behavior and rethink their language before posting because they often are in the heat of the moment and they might say something they regret,” Sunita Saligram, Twitter’s global head of site policy for trust and safety, said in an interview with Reuters.
Having too much of a think, are we?
Big Tech does a brilliant job of combining creepy surveillance and condescension into what it thinks is brilliant psychological manipulation, but is actually infuriating.
And inevitably backfires.
Leave a Reply