The author doesn't really propose a solution other than Twitter essentially siding with him and take (what appears to me to be) a political stance. Of course moderating political topics isn’t outside Twitter’s wheelhouse, but this is what you get as a society when you let arbitrary entities arbitrate speech: ambiguity and unclear expectations.
On the one hand, it’s reasonable for the author to expect that Twitter removes clear misinformation from their platform since that’s what they purportedly claim to do. On the other hand doing so would go against a national narrative and piss off lots of Pakistanis. Uh oh.
Maybe Twitter was never about being arbiters of facts and instead just pandering to the popular political narrative of the time? Or maybe they are objective and they’re just trying their best and we’re all human and we’ll do better next time? Regardless, this is the reason people get so frustrated with censorship: it cannot be applied objectively and fairly in every case.
Twitter and social commentary aside: sounds like the author needs political asylum or at least real protection. Twitter is not the right entity to depend on to handle this situation, I fear.
It's a narrative that could get one side kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned for years and potentially killed.
I've seen previous incidents where Facebook and other platforms were nightmare fuel for locals and the platform didn't even have moderators who spoke the local language for purposes of reviewing the issue.
These platforms are thrilled to get millions of new users in various countries then wash their hands of the consequences to those users and their real lives. I don't think criticism of this fact is unreasonable. Locals just want a fair shake similar to what Westerners get in such cases.
I get why this guy wants more, and I can understand the perspective that Twitter has to take into account the context of local countries and which kinds of speech might be dangerous. But can Twitter really adopt an explicit corporate policy that Pakistan isn't allowed to have as much free speech as the rest of the world because it's too violent?
I agree the author’s criticism is fair. My point was a reminder that the expectations here may not live up to reality and it might be best to seek other help. Even if Twitter removes this misinformation, the author will not be safe and will likely, if the story is to be believed, be detained and tortured the minute they step onto Pakistani soil, sadly. I think the reminder that “Twitter can’t make you safe” is a fair and practical one too, despite whether it should have to be that way or not.
To some extent they do see themselves as arbiters of truth, you can get auto-banned if you make a tweet and their AI thinks you're spreading falsehoods about COVID or the 2020 US presidential election. It actually happened to me last year over a completely benign joke and i had to wait about six weeks for a mod to get around to reviewing my appeal before i was allowed back on.
If they really cared about protecting middle-eastern activists they could add "israeli spy" to their list of phrases that get you auto-banned.
Unless you recognize this, and accept that you don’t always get everything you want, then you may be living in a dangerous delusion.
You don’t want to leave Pakistan, and you also presumably don’t want to compromise your principles, and you also want to not be killed for your journalism… perhaps it is wise to consider whether you can realistically have all of these things you want, when the truth is you probably can’t.
All that being said, I don’t fault you for wanting Twitter to do more. But for your own well being you should not consider that the only angle you need to work on here.
1) You claim these are verifiable lies. From your perspective that is the case as (unless you're a programmed sleeper agent) you're in position to know the truth about whether you're an agent of some foreign government or not. However, from a neutral or 3rd party perspective, this seems a bit like a he-said/she-said kind of case. And from your perspective, disproving this would be hard as you'd seem to have to prove a negative "I'm not an agent" claim, which is kind of hard to do.
2) A personal opinion, but it would probably be very helpful to your case if you can make a clear, bullet-point list of the alleged verifiable lies, who told them and their position in the Pakistani government, and your rebuttal to their claim. I read your piece and checked out your links, but these are all buried under a wall of text that many people won't have the attention span to process given the format.
3) One of the problems with Twitter is that they try and involve themselves in really tough subjective cases of truthiness. I'm not sure that Twitter trying to fact-check and remove what you believe are lies would be the best outcome here. If I were to give a suggestion to Twitter on how to handle this, the best thing Twitter could probably do would be to either temporarily verify him, or create some kind of temporary "At Risk" badge given to a limited number of people in dicy situations like this to bring attention to their cause so they can't be summarily disappeared without a trial.
4) To any journalists reading this, I hope Waqas' story gives you a renewed appreciation for not trusting government claims at face value. Whether his story is true or not, many journalists seem to too often rush to print government claims about anything and everything as gospel. A journalists' job isn't to be a tape recorder for government officials and merely print their quotes, you've got to dive into the background of their claims and consider the other side. If government officials claim X is a foreign agent, you should consider every angle and claim.
It sounds like you believe you're in real danger. If so, you have bigger problems.
You mention the comedian and the journalist, and you try to paint this as a giant conspiracy. But what you've laid out in the article seems like it could easily just be people being morons and taking the government's word for everything.
You also don't even mention what you want Twitter to actually do.
Are they supposed to ban those accounts? Are they supposed to label those Tweets as untrue?
While this sounds like an improvement - and probably what they should do - I don't see how this actually helps with your larger problem of potential life and death...
Your life is still in danger. You haven't changed that situation. You still need to either flee or make plans for your sudden passing.
If I may, it might help for you to clearly lead with the factually incorrect things being said about you and then dive into supporting evidence to back the misinformation claim.
Still, part of my comment was a serious reminder that Twitter is not a a real authority even if they pretend to be one in fair-weather and if your life is credibly in danger you should seek people and organizations who can actually help you protect it. I truly hope this site can help you find the needed connections.
The platform allows speech amplification. It used to be that lies could run around the world before the truth could get its boots on. Social apps now make this orders of magniture worse...
Rather than moderating content, Twitter could add systems that automatically tame virality (hide a post for n minutes after x retweets/impressions), with bias against new accounts.
I will say that your framing is one that most Westerners will have trouble taking seriously.
It might go over better to document known cases where this pattern occurred and show the similarities. Walk people through it like they are five, so to speak.
I know it's hard to do that kind of objective writing when you are feeling so threatened due to genuine threats, but in my experience that approach works better.
I know you didn't ask for advice. I apologize for my bad habit of trying to be helpful in the only way I know how.
I hope something improves soon.
I don't mean this as an insult against the author, because of course Americans don't have to fear being kidnapped or tortured over it! But I don't think it's right to see this as some kind of hypocrisy.
Sometimes it's different people making the complaints, but weirdly, sometimes I'm not sure it is...
Not really, given that I can see the billions in cash on hand of these social media companies, which they could use to hire real people instead of intentionally neglecting customer service because it isn't a driver of profits, and instead choosing to dump these costs on the taxpayer of the countries that have to clean up the mess via the legal system. Negligence or even incompetence is not a valid excuse for actively facilitating a spectrum of behaviors ranging from harassment (this case) to fomenting populism (US elections) to outright murder (Myanmar).
Many would argue they don't even understand the local dynamics of the U.S. It's impossible for twitter to be an arbiter of the truth around the world, and you shouldn't expect them to be. However, I understand that's cold comfort for someone facing the threat of torture, death, or exile from their home, and I think your decision to call out twitter using your own platform to act with respect to your specific circumstances is the right thing to do and really the only way to handle this kind of thing.
Good luck, I hope you stay safe and that the government doesn't succeed in silencing you.
Twitter only seems interested in this job in the countries and on the side of the factions who are politically helpful to Twitter. Twitter wouldn't care about Pakistan unless the State Department told them to care about Pakistan, and they could just as easily enter the fray by labeling the OPs tweets as deceptive and connected to foreign misinformation as they could enter it on the side of preventing his harassment.
So what? This is true of every media gatekeeper and always will be. Again, it's impossible for twitter to keep up with every change in the wind across the entire planet; they can't even do a satisfactory job of it in their own country.
> they could just as easily enter the fray by labeling the OPs tweets as deceptive and connected to foreign misinformation as they could enter it on the side of preventing his harassment.
If this story continues to get exposure this will probably happen, meanwhile there are thousands of other stories of threats and abuse that will go unabated and unheard because it's happening to someone that wasn't lucky enough to go viral. Twitter can only do so much, especially while opposing factions fight them every time they do anything.
Corporations are very clearly none of those things, and generally have lots of disincentive against attempting to fake being any of those things.
The types of "faking it" that very quickly separate the real governments from the corporations & pretenders are "make the laws", "collect the taxes", "run the courts", and "back it with force". If the FBI slaps handcuffs on a Twitter CxO and hauls him off to jail, do not expect Twitter to send in their Marine Corps.
It's just the stated goal - minimising alcohol consumption - is phony and misleading.
If they are supposed to be a public square, a company that is simply meant to offer a technical means of broadcasting your opinions, then we can't also expect them to fight government propaganda, any more than we would expect that of, say, Google Search.
On the other hand, if we want Twitter to be a kind of new media company, than we should indeed hold them to journalistic standards and expect them to cut through government lies wherever they decide to have a presence.
Is your assumption that corrupt governments must be omnipotent, and don't have to make excuses for their behavior in order to maintain support, or at least to prevent riots?
It's a very reasonable request.
OTOH - is there any large real-world corporation which has ever gotten itself into a sustained info-war conflict with a well-armed and angry nation state, for the purpose of protecting one "ordinary" person from that nation state? I'm guessing "no".
Twitter has taken the correct action here.
Perhaps a 3rd option is to go on the attack, and find some angle from which to sue Twitter?
> In Pakistan, activists and journalists are routinely picked up (abducted) and tortured by the country's police and secret services. Same happened this time, some of the top journalists and anchors were picked up - some without warrants with fake cases filed post-arrest.
Twitter removing the fake claims won't stop the ISI or whoever from kicking his door in, if/when he returns to Pakistan.
Sueing twitter isn't likely to go far. Twitter doesn't have responsibility for their users' speech (with some very specific exceptions that don't include libel or defamation), and doesn't have a legal obligation to operate its moderation system. I don't think there's much to pursue there, unless there's something very unusual in the TOS.
You'd need to sue the people making the claims, but there's jurisdiction issues; if the alleged corruption of the government of Pakistan is the case, suing in Pakistan would seem to be unlikely to result in the desired outcome. On the other hand, a court in the US, where the OP resides, may not be willing to assert jurisdiction over speech by someone in another country, and the speaker is unlikely to participate in a US case.
In any event, such a case is likely to take years, which doesn't address the immediate nature of this issue. But I don't know how Twitter could really evaluate truthfulness of claims like these.
This entire thing isn’t twitters fault any more than it is WiFi’s, DNS, or TCP’s.
I respectfully disagree. TCP or DNS or WiFi or other technologies are merely means to achieve some result. A tool.
Twitter, like most services, is also built using various technologies and tools. But its main distinguishing property is that it has a large number of users who, for various reasons, are interested in what some other users have to say. Creating such social connections is its main goal.
Now, one might use e.g TCP to spread hate speech all over the internet. But apart from computers dropping these packets, almost no real person will be listening.
Contrast that with a Twitter account that has ~10k followers. If the hate speech is spread from there, it can get a lot of audience very quickly.
Twitter is one of many enablers and hosts of large online communities of people. As such, it should have, in my opinion, some responsibility regarding what goes on within these communities. At a minimum, it should disallow the dissemination of hate speech, actively seek and remove it and block the users who repeatedly spread it.
That being said, it might be difficult to precisely define what constitutes a hate speech and what not. But Twitter should at least be trying.
The hate speech itself is of course the sole responsibility of whoever created it.
Twitter is, however, fully responsible for allowing it to be spread.
Without a major communication channel which enables this hate speech to reach massive audiences, it would most likely remain isolated to a small number of people. And it probably would not evolve into a hate _action_.
The people behind this hate speech could of course reach to some dodgy places and hire professional mercenaries who might do the dirty jobs for them. But that is risky for them because their true identity might be revealed to the authorities or they might be betrayed or worse.
So what they do instead is they use a public channel, as big as they could find, like Twitter, to reach out to everyone who might be interested to answer their calling. They are counting on the possibility that maybe some psychopath with the will and abilities to do whatever they ask for will just go and do it.
The important part is that Twitter is used here as a communication medium without which the hate speech spreaders would have no major audience to pass their hate onto. The fact that they are allowed to do so absolutely is Twitter's responsibility.
From the article: the author is asking to have false, defamatory content removed.
> That’s the police or justice system’s job.
That is not an available option to the author of this article. The author is alleging that false posts are being made to lay the groundwork for the author being detained and tortured by the local justice system.
The author is asking to have content that he says is false removed.
>The author is alleging that false posts are being made to lay the groundwork for the author being detained and tortured by the local justice system.
Since the tweets may be used as an excuse to have him detained, removing them will do nothing, because the government could just as easily use a different medium for the same purpose. Twitter can't prevent someone who can and wants to kidnap you from kidnapping you.
They should immediately act on takedown notices, for example in the case of revenge porn, but are not a private replacement for law enforcement.
How could Twitter verify that claim? Who should they trust? If someone was indeed hired by another foreign agency, they might as well deny it for that persons own safety.
The same information war could be playing out on WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook or other networks, TV, radio, newspapers.
It would be good to be more clear on both sides. Did they appoint you or did you associate in any form? Are they an independent org or a government agency? Maybe there were multiple accusations you are rolling into one?
One cannot reasonably expect them to act as a fact checker & censor for the entire world, nor would that be desirable from a private corporation. What we need is better, regulated moderation systems, and a justice system that can keep up with the pace of social media.
For those who do not know, PTI owned and operated largest bots and trolls network who habitually abused people who ever would disagree with them. Consider them TRUMP supporters like mentality people in Pakistan
It is clearly wrong that people should be subjected to any abuse/torture/coordinated campaigns regardless of party associations. But forgive me for not being completely empathetic when anyone claims to have become a victim of these campaigns starting around the time of "the coup a few months ago".
I've reported many open bigots calling for violence against the group(s) and/or people they hate. Twitter used to ban people for promoting violence. They don't anymore. Not a single one of the posts or accounts I've reported in the past few months has been banned unless they reached a threshold of other reports that triggers an automatic ban.
Moderators either aren't doing their job or don't exist anymore.
Interesting that this person's conception of free speech allows him to call a parliamentary no-confidence vote a "coup", but doesn't allow government-aligned forces to say he is inciting violence.
Being anti-israel against an illegal Apartheid occupation has nothing to do with being antisemitic.
It's far more likely that they'll start labeling tweets with "This tweet was posted by a probable agent of a foreign government for the purpose of sowing discord."
That said I know this can be abused just like dmca take down notices. It’s truly arduous to balance and context matters which in turn requires godly number of man hours.
But no, I would not expect Twitter to be responsible in the same way I wouldn't blame a brand of honey for my murder if that's what my murderer had had for breakfast. There are two parties in this: this dude and the Pakistani Gov, Twitter is just a communications channel - it could just as easy be WhatsApp or TikTok or Facebook or HN.
I suspect that the balance is negative for most countries and that is why we cannot expect better moderation.
Might be right, and it's absolutely awful if these folks are being unjustly detained and tortured.
Yet, I think it's more complicated than the author would lead us to believe. It's also fascinating how this kind of unrest is unfolding all around the world.
> blah blah blah there are insane people in my country who will kill people based on tweets
This is a problem of people and not Twitter. Those are in the west too and growing especially in America. The problem is dumbed down people who believe stuff on the internet. And idiots who react to things, like a white/black shooting a black/white. There is a solution to this: going to jail for murder. Even boomers in the 90s knew not to believe anything online. Twitter has about a million problems with it and lack of moderation certainly is not one of them.
You cannot reasonably ask Twitter to moderate for your locale's social and violent reactionary issues. That implies they need to hire a huge amount of people for every locale in every country and just gives Twitter more monopoly as another company would have to invest a billion dollars to do that before they can even get off the ground. You have just created this idea that storing 100 bytes of text on a server is now a thing that requires billions of dollars of up front investment to do. This is another issue: People are fucking stupid and expect companies to have some "responsibility" now (despite the fact that product quality is at an all time low and they somehow have no issue with that). This is also just conceding that companies are some kind of god (they really aren't. Twitter is a dog shit website that can't go more than one second without showing the text "undefined" in an important field on the page).
Ironically, the people who demand so called justice by moderating more and more shit online (Unreal Engine now has voice analytics to report you to the police or whatever the fuck built right in), are just as bad as the people who foster misinformation against people. We are heading into an era of micro justice which just means the amount of malpolicing will grow in proportion. The end result of constantly trying to solve micro injustices is AI making sure humans don't do anything "bad" and you will literally be unable to involuntarily move your arm a certain way without being punished. There is not even a philosophically correct definition of justice in law. It's literally a bunch of dudes amending a global ruleset to solve the latest problem, based on wildly varying rationales from people each with entirely different value systems.
It's actually hilarious how short sighted and oblivious statements like "it should be illegal to post misinformation online" are. You aren't a mature responsible adult or whatever you think you are. You are just reacting to something in the most straight forward way with no thought about the consequences. It's doubly hilarious for insinuating that posting things online is a big issue that we should focus law on. It's actually pretty fucking obnoxious actually, I'm sick of every thing I do online for the last 20 years being policed by hall monitors tunnel visioned on whatever social injustice issue of the day.
Couldn't we find a solution that doesn't require the violent death of a person?
This reminds me of HN. You get banned if you say a bad word. You get banned eventually no matter what unless you're a white collar self censored silicon valley drone with ultra-safe opinions like "the C language should be deprecated after a mere 70 years". You get rate limited if you get too many downvotes in the given time slot. Random IPs are blocked for no reason and the login screen is just a blank page. You get shadowbanned so you don't even know you're banned. All for basically nothing, as HN is basically like 2000s forums but with slightly better discourse and consistency of moderation (and worse in other ways).
This idea that we should have some sort of epidemiologically correct moderation policy on the internet is also bullshit. Moderation on the internet started off as, annoying, childish, 40 year old sysadmins who ban anyone they don't like, SJWs who ban anyone who is "the enemy", right wing equivalent of SJWs who do the same thing, rule fetishists (people in the UK who think insulting the queen or showing the middle finger should be illegal), etc. The idea started off with these selfish / idiotic reasons. Once questioned, they are forced into a corner where they can only rationalize moderation as an epidemiological tool. "Yeah, if we just delete these 1 million posts it's a net gain".
The only reason lack of moderation on big copmany's websites even come up is because they're big companies and they have egg on their face for any slight mishap (or what public perceives as a mishap). It's the most stupid fucking shit.
Leave Twitter. Try one of the mastodon instances, instead. Be anonymous.
To me, both the effects of and responses to Mr. Ahmed's tweets seem to show that Twitter can be used to promote change and get your voice to the masses. It just doesn't distinguish between "good" change/voices and "bad" change/voices.
