Twitter Bullying Their Users is not OK (2)
Public-interest exceptions are not in the public interest
I wrote previously about being banned from twitter:
After doing some research, I come to find out that Twitter has a perfectly good mechanism of limiting tweets that they feel are offensive without banning accounts. They have decided to only use it for “world leaders.” So if you are not a world leader you get a ban, but if you are a world leader your tweet gets a “public-interest exception.”
It looks like this:
This makes no sense, why are we allowing Twitter to discriminate between their users and apply their terms of service in an uneven way on a class basis? Twitter is stating that it’s ToS is partial to one class of people deemed as valuable (accounts that have more than 100,000 followers). It then states that it is impartial to another class of people deemed as trivial (accounts that have less than 100,000 followers).
Legally, Twitter can discriminate between it’s users in this way, there is no law that is being violated here. But the question is, “do we want to live in a society where our social media companies apply partial justice to their users on the basis of class?” The Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibits discrimination by privately owned places of public accommodation on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin. None of that applies to the class issue.
Furthermore the law says that you can refuse to serve someone even if they’re in a protected group, but the refusal can’t be arbitrary and you can’t apply it to just one group of people. But we know that Twitter’s bans are arbitrary and that it is applied to one group of people who are of a lower class. The law however doesn’t prevent discrimination against accounts with less than 100,000 followers as a protected class of people.
So this is clearly a class issue, not a race issue. Not all classes of users are equal on Twitter’s platform. Perhaps Sean Edgett or Vijaya Gadde or Jack Dorsey can explain to the public why Twitter is discriminating between different types of users. Some users must follow the terms of service, which they accepted when they signed up for an account, and other users are exempt from Twitter’s terms of service. You may not like this type of class discrimination, but it is perfectly legal. Twitter has a legal right to discriminate against some of their users on the basis of class. I’m not high class enough for my tweet’s to receive a “public interest exception,” this was why my account was banned.
What I wish they would do
Just give everyone this exception. Everyone no matter who they are should be entitled to their tweets being placed behind a “public-interest exception” instead of being outright banned. This would make these types of warnings more commonplace and less controversial. This would be good for everyone, especially the accounts that are receiving outright bans.
