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Harassment is breaking Twitter's free speech experiment - Video học tiếng Anh
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Harassment is breaking Twitter's free speech experiment
Harassment is breaking Twitter's free speech experiment
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0:00
You guys are not going to believe
0:01
what Trump just tweeted.
0:03
He–
0:03
Uh oh.
0:06
Sorry.
0:07
Try it again.
0:08
You guys are not going to believe what Trump—
0:11
Jesus.
0:11
What's wrong?
0:12
Um.
0:14
Nothing.
0:14
One more time.
0:15
You guys are not going to—
0:17
You know what?
0:17
Never mind.
0:18
Twitter's harassment problem is out of control
0:20
and it's changing the way we talk about
0:21
free speech on the internet.
0:27
Before we talk about what Twitter is,
0:29
we should talk about what Twitter was supposed to be.
0:32
In the preamble to its original rules, Twitter stated:
0:41
except in limited circumstances.”
0:42
In other words,
0:43
Twitter was supposed to be a neutral platform
0:45
where you could say anything to anyone
0:47
with very few rules.
0:48
Twitter, and Blogger before it, were very interested in
0:51
kind of committing to that principle of free speech.
0:54
If you get the barriers out of the way, speech will happen,
0:57
rich discussion will happen, the best ideas will bubble forth.
1:00
That's Tarleton Gillespie, who's been studying speech
1:03
on the internet since Napster was around.
1:05
What's Napster?
1:07
Am I old?
1:07
Twitter prided itself on being an anti-censorship platform,
1:11
especially after it played a role in the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011.
1:14
That was a very compelling idea for what Twitter could be,
1:17
what citizen journalism could be.
1:19
For a while, Twitter talked about themselves as
1:20
the free speech wing of the free speech party.
1:23
Twitter's commitment to free speech was
1:24
baked into its design and structure.
1:26
You can tweet anonymously,
1:27
meaning you won't be punished for your opinions.
1:29
You can tweet at whoever you want,
1:31
meaning you don't need permission to talk to
1:32
politicians and celebrities.
1:33
And maybe most importantly,
1:35
beyond copyright infringement and impersonation,
1:37
Twitter was not interested in monitoring what you tweeted.
1:40
That was a very powerful commitment for them
1:43
and made them design their tool in really compelling ways.
1:46
Sorry, one second.
1:51
Jesus, someone tweeted that?
1:52
No, it's a text from my mom.
1:53
Twitter began as a radical experiment in free speech.
1:56
But over time that experiment started to fall apart
1:59
because the same features that made Twitter
2:01
so attractive to citizen journalists and political dissidents
2:04
also made it a perfect environment for trolls:
2:07
neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and misogynists.
2:09
These users realized they could use Twitter's anonymity
2:12
and structure to target and harass people they didn't agree with.
2:15
And before long,
2:16
Twitter had a massive PR problem on their hands.
2:19
Every few weeks, another story about Twitter
2:21
being overrun by abuse —
2:23
high-profile users like journalists, celebrities, and authors
2:26
leaving the platform because of Twitter's inability
2:28
to deal with harassment.
2:30
One of those users was Lindy West.
2:32
I am a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times.
2:34
I wrote a book called Shrill that came out in 2016.
2:37
I'm just a general sort of internet feminist.
2:40
West loved Twitter at first.
2:42
But over time,
2:43
her work made her the target of brutal harassment campaigns.
2:46
Very quickly, my experience on Twitter became
2:48
one of endless constant harassment.
2:50
I'll just read them.
2:51
"No need for you to worry about rape, uggo."
2:54
"That big bitch is bitter that no one wants to rape her."
2:57
"What a fucking cunt."
2:59
"Kill yourself you dumb bitch."
3:00
Is that enough?
3:01
Oh, there's so many more.
3:03
West recognized early on that that harassment
3:05
wasn't just mean.
3:06
It had a purpose.
3:12
They want you removed from the national conversation
3:15
and removed from whatever little shred of power
3:18
you've managed to achieve.
3:20
And Twitter realized it too.
3:21
In 2015, former CEO Dick Costolo told employees,
3:34
Twitter's radical free speech experiment had failed.
3:37
If you have a commitment to free speech
3:38
and some of your users are being shouted down,
3:40
threatened, and driven off the platform,
3:43
something's happening to their speech.
3:44
The idea that you can be neutral without any moderation
3:47
is an illusion, and it's a very lazy, self-serving illusion.
3:57
Sorry, sorry.
4:03
Twitter again?
4:06
So this is where things start to get really dicey,
4:08
because Twitter has to answer this basic
4:10
but messy question:
4:12
Is Twitter really a neutral service provider,
4:14
like Verizon or Comcast, offering a semi-public platform
4:17
without caring about what happens on it?
4:19
Or had Twitter become something else,
4:21
a community moderator that cares about
4:23
the content and behavior of its users?
4:25
So far Twitter's answer has been:
4:27
Eeeeeh.
4:28
On one hand, the company is clearly moving away
4:31
from its radical free speech roots.
4:33
Twitter has slowly introduced tougher
4:34
and tougher rules for dealing with harassment,
4:36
prohibiting things like violent threats
4:38
and incitements to harass.
4:39
And in October, Twitter announced new rules
4:41
to deal with violent groups and hateful images.
4:44
Those are positive developments for victims of abuse,
4:46
but enforcing those rules is making Twitter answer
4:48
tougher and tougher questions about users’ content.
4:51
Is this harassment?
4:53
What about this?
4:54
What about now?
4:56
Is this harassment?
4:58
What about now?
5:00
Is this an example of hate speech?
5:03
What about this?
5:05
Is this a violent threat?
5:08
How about now?
5:09
What about now?
5:12
Is this a hate image?
5:14
What about this?
5:16
How about now?
5:17
Is this a dangerous group?
5:20
What about this?
5:23
There's no neutral way to answer these questions.
5:28
The amount of accounts they're looking at,
5:29
the kind of range they're looking at,
5:31
how they judge what someone's doing,
5:33
what their intent is, whether they're reading
5:35
the situation correctly, those are immensely difficult things to do.
5:38
Twitter won't say how it's going to make these calls.
5:39
It's just asking us to trust them.
5:42
And West worries those decisions might
5:44
end up making the problem worse.
5:45
The waters really get muddied.
5:46
I know black activists whose accounts
5:48
have been shut down for criticizing white people
5:51
because it's "racist."
5:55
At the same time, Twitter still wants to be treated
5:58
like a neutral speech platform.
5:59
In July, a month before the white supremacist rally
6:02
in Charlottesville, Twitter rolled out
6:04
a "see every side" ad campaign,
6:06
celebrating its "everything's cool" approach to politics.
6:09
Yep, that's a frat bro,
6:11
Chadwick I'm assuming,
6:12
tweeting about climate change being fake.
6:14
Sweet Chadwick.
6:15
When current Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was asked
6:17
what kind of tool Twitter is, Dorsey responded
6:21
To what?
6:24
What does that mean?
6:26
Closer to neo-Nazis?
6:27
Closer to the targets of our harassment?
6:29
Twitter is stuck between these competing visions
6:31
of its responsibility to its users.
6:33
Which is how we end up with a website that bans
6:35
white supremacist content but verifies
6:37
actual white supremacists.
6:39
I don't envy Twitter.
6:40
You know, it's a huge problem.
6:42
It's very, very complicated.
6:43
I don't know how to fix it.
6:49
Did you tweet this at me?
6:50
Wrap it up!
6:51
Fine, look.
6:52
Any platform with rules has to have
6:53
a reason for those rules,
6:55
a goal those rules are trying to advance.
6:57
Twitter doesn't right now.
6:58
But by starting to crack down on abuse,
7:00
Twitter is kind of opening Pandora's box,
7:03
opening itself up to more and more responsibility
7:05
for what happens on its platform.
7:07
If you take the other view of free speech that says,
7:10
"You have to make a venue where speech works,"
7:13
that requires having an aspiration.
7:17
It's not just, "Be more open and connected."
7:19
It's not just, "Talk to anyone you want to."
7:21
It's actually, "We're trying to build a conversation here,
7:23
and if you don't look like you're building a conversation
7:25
then you don't belong here."
7:26
That's a very hard kind of mental shift.
7:29
That's not necessarily a bad thing,
7:30
but if we're giving that much power to a private company,
7:33
we better hope it knows what it's doing.
