April 25, 2019

As if we needed further confirmation that (a) Twitter is racist, and (b) Republican politicians are white supremacists, along comes an investigation by Motherboard that ties that all up neatly with a bow.

Twitter users have cried, screamed, begged Jack Dorsey to ban neo-nazis and white supremacists from Twitter for years. After all, the platform has virtually eliminated any trace of ISIS from its site. It used AI (artificial intelligence) to sweep its site of any and all ISIS content. Why can it not do the same for white supremacists? Well, kids, here's your answer:

In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.

The employee argued that, on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda, he argued.

That should tell us all something about Republican politicians.

So...in other words, if Twitter content filter bots swept the sites eliminating the accounts of white supremacists, and the accounts who retweet that content, some Republican politicians would find that they have their own accounts shut down.

Take our dear leader, for example. The Orange Twatwaffle-In-Chief just yesterday hauled Jack Dorsey into a closed-door Oval Office meeting to complain that Twitter was being mean to him by taking away some of his followers, and he retweets white supremacists from time to time.

Is the lesson here that AI is not the be-all and end-all of monitoring hate speech on social media platforms, like Ben Collins is arguing on Velshi & Ruhle? Well, yes, we do need actual people to help deal with problems that occur with the product. After all, humans are the ones the platform is designed to serve.

But truly, the biggest lesson is the one we already knew, and Twitterbots are proving it. The line between Republican politicians and white supremacists is virtually non-existent.

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