The article in the url below demonstrates the scale of the challenges facing Twitter (and Facebook and YouTube) in trying to balance their natural inclination toward free speech with the regulatory pressure to promote social justice:
"In the first half of [2017], Twitter said it suspended nearly 300,000 accounts globally linked to terrorism. Of those, roughly 95 percent were identified by the company's spam-fighting automation tools."
"[Twitter] provided authorities with data on roughly 3,900 accounts from January to June."
"Twitter said about 75 percent of the blocked accounts this year were spotted before a single tweet was sent, and that 935,897 accounts had been suspended since August 2015."
"American authorities made 2,111 requests from Twitter from January to June, the most of the 83 countries tracked by the company. Twitter supplied information on users in 77 percent of the inquiries."
"Japan made 1,384 requests and the U.K. issued 606 requests. Turkish authorities continued a trend of aggressively policing Twitter, making 554 requests for account data and issuing court orders to remove 715 pieces of content."
"Other governments made only 38 total content-removal requests."
The article in the second url below reveals the true extent of the problem when you scale-up from Twitter to Facebook, and how ill-equipped these tech companies are to deal with it:
"Facebook was simply not built to handle problems of this magnitude. It's a technology company, not an intelligence agency or an international diplomatic corps. Its engineers are in the business of building apps and selling advertising, not determining what constitutes hate speech in Myanmar. And with two billion users, including 1.3 billion who use it every day, moving ever greater amounts of their social and political activity onto Facebook, it's possible that the company is simply too big to understand all of the harmful ways people might use its products."
To quantify this problem at Facebook's scale:
"Alex Stamos, Facebook's security chief, said last month that the company shut down more than a million user accounts every day for violating Facebook's community standards. Even if only 1 percent of Facebook's daily active users misbehaved, it would still mean 13 million rule breakers, about the number of people in Pennsylvania."
Take care
David
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Twitter Suspends 300,000 Accounts Tied to Terrorism in 2017
By Adam Satariano
September 19, 2017
Bloomberg Businessweek
Facebook's Frankenstein Moment
By Kevin Roose
September 22, 2017
The New York Times
Late Edition – Final
