You sued an anonymous troll for a mild bit of criticism on Twitter.
#JAMES WOODS MEMES LIBERAS FREE#
?Free speech is free speech ? it?s not Jack Dorsey?s version of free speech,? Woods said, referring to Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey.ĭude. In the meantime, Woods is ridiculously trying to turn himself into a free speech martyr over this.
If Twitter changes the ruling on this, then people will claim that it’s not following its own rules… and (yup) a bunch of people will get angry again. That’s not to say that someone at Twitter shouldn’t fix it. There will be lots of “mistakes” like these, because there’s no other way. This is why we keep trying to point out that moderating content at scale on these platforms is a case where it’s impossible to do it well. And, applied literally, that tweet violates that rule - even if that leads to a totally ridiculous outcome. So you can only expect these low wage content moderators to follow the rules as written, no matter how silly the potential results. And there is similarly zero chance that anyone reading Woods’ feed would look at this meme and say “oh, right, sure, I’m not going to vote now.” But, as professor Kate Klonick discussed in our recent podcast, you can’t write “understand the context” into the rules. Of course, this is entirely lacking in context - and even as Woods is too silly to recognize that there’s zero chance that this is real. And thus, they created a rule against images that have “the potential to be misleading in a way that could impact an election.” Then, that rule is handed off to one of the hundreds or thousands of content moderators working for Twitter, and they have basically a few seconds to review the tweet and say “does this break the rule?” If you look at the rule and the tweet… and nothing else… it’s not hard to see why you’d choose the option that says “yup, he violated the rule.” The various social media players, including Twitter, have been under great pressure (including from Congress) to try to avoid a repeat of such things in 2018. During the 2016 election, there were a bunch of memes - some of which appear to have been placed deliberately by state actors seeking to influence our election - that were actual attempts to suppress the vote. The meme is completely nonsensical no matter what your views on these issues are.īut, for this tweet, Twitter has suspended Woods, arguing that the meme violates its terms of service because it: “has the potential to be misleading in a way that could impact an election.” It is, of course, fairly obvious how we got here.
Second of all… none of it makes any sense. Woods admitted that it was “not likely” to be real, but still noted “that there is a distinct possibility this could be real.” First of all, there was no such distinct possibility. It was what appeared to be a fairly obvious satirical fake meme urging men to stay home on election day to let women’s vote have more weight. It seems that Twitter suspended his access to his account because of a meme he had tweeted. Now Woods is in another situation, where - somewhat incredibly - he’s trying to make himself out as a free speech warrior. We noted, instead, that we hoped he won the case - and he did. That said, when Woods’ own free speech is attacked via a similarly bogus defamation lawsuit over his own tweets, we didn’t support the plaintiff just because it was against Woods. Gloating over their death takes you up a few notches to being a horrible human being. Suing someone for being mildly critical of you is bad. Suffice it to say, Woods is - in our opinion - a terrible human being. In the middle of that lawsuit, the (still) anonymous tweeter died, leading Woods to gloat about “winning” the case and about the guy’s death. After all, he’s the guy who sued an anonymous Twitter user for a somewhat mild comeback that referenced cocaine usage (leaving aside that Woods himself had tweeted very similar hyperbolic tweets suggesting people he was arguing with were on crack). I think we’ve made our general feelings about James Woods perfectly clear.
Fri, Sep 28th 2018 09:38am - Mike Masnick
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