I say “new policy”, but actually it’s the secret policy that always existed. Twitter just spent time running it past a bunch of lawyers to transform their existing policy to allow their political allies to doxx people while suppressing everyone else into something that looks legal.
Twitter’s policy had previously been even-handed on paper, but completely uneven in real-world enforcement.
Post a video of a BLM riot and it might be taken down. But BLMers and their media allies were freely allowed to post out-of-context videos randomly terrorizing and harassing some random person over alleged racism, karenism, or some other assault on social justice, before proceeding to doxx them and destroy their lives.
Not only was this sort of behavior not banned, but Twitter typically turned it into trending topics indicating corporate support for it.
Now Twitter has rolled out its new policy to transform its political double standard into pseudo-legalese.
Under our existing policy, publishing other people’s private information, such as phone numbers, addresses, and IDs, is already not allowed on Twitter. This includes threatening to expose private information or incentivizing others to do so.
See above.
It’s Twitter’s policy. It just hasn’t enforced that policy on its leftist political allies who were allowed to run pictures of people’s license plates and to openly incite social media lynch mobs to ruin people’s lives and get them fired.
Since that was already Twitter’s policy, the additions aren’t adding to it, but detracting from it.
The misuse of private media can affect everyone, but can have a disproportionate effect on women, activists, dissidents, and members of minority communities.
In short, it can affect Twitter’s “political allies” more which is why they should be protected from doxxing while they’re allowed to engage in it.
This is a part of our ongoing work to align our safety policies with human rights standards, and it will be enforced globally starting today.
Human rights standards references are part of the ongoing Big Tech move to enforce UN laws rather than US laws. That’s not surprising from a new CEO who rejects the First Amendment.
When we are notified by individuals depicted, or by an authorized representative, that they did not consent to having their private image or video shared, we will remove it. This policy is not applicable to media featuring public figures or individuals when media and accompanying Tweet text are shared in the public interest or add value to public discourse.
How do you define public interest or public discourse? Who gets to define them?
Much like human rights, these are vague concepts that can be politically tilted any which way. Are pictures of Hunter Biden or BLM rioters in the public interest? Do they add value to public discourse?
You can guess the answer.
What about pictures of some random lady being accused of racism in a department store? Surely newsworthy and in the public interest.
We will always try to assess the context in which the content is shared and, in such cases, we may allow the images or videos to remain on the service. For instance, we would take into consideration whether the image is publicly available and/or is being covered by mainstream/traditional media (newspapers, TV channels, online news sites), or if a particular image and the accompanying tweet text adds value to the public discourse, is being shared in public interest, or is relevant to the community.
The mainstream media (Twitter literally says this) is going to define what sort of personal information can be shared on Twitter.
This is how a speech cartel works with one member turning to the other member to ratify their abuses.
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